Friend and fellow Writer’s Inker Sandra has a new story out over at Rose and Thorn. Check it out! She needs to write more.
Also her name looks like a court case! There’s got to be some sort of metaphor there ripe for fictionalizing.
A Thousand Faces is having a sale for today only – everything is 25% off with the coupon code CYBERBOOKS. If you have any interest in superhero fiction you should check it out. Issue 4, featuring my story “Shades of Red” (as well as some great stories by Erin and Jens), is only $8.97, before the discount! These are great deals, people.
What also may be of interest is that the latest issue is out, featuring a story by Erin and holy cats now I see one by KC Ball as well.
Man alive. I’m the superhero guy and you’ve all left me in the dust. I need to get back on that.
(Evidently, Smallpox Blanket-Giving Day was taken already? I dunno.)
Hope everyone is (or will be) having a good Thanksgiving weekend. Ours should be fun – the wife and I will be hosting her family this year, and visiting my family (including a cousin who’s on leave from Afghanistan) on Saturday, then probably hanging out with some friends on Sunday. These friends have recently produced offspring which I’m told is “cute” and “life altering and/or affirming.” I shall put the new heir to the test! If she doesn’t bring me my food fast enough or change the television channel properly it won’t speak well of the reproductive process. And I don’t want to hear some “she’s only a few months old” nonsense!
Anyway, since you are just laying around in a turkey coma, you should go read this story by KC. It is excellent!
And also this one, by JR Hume, because it’s probably the best piece of flash I’ve read in a while.
I also found this article to be interesting. I have my own thoughts on sexism in genre fiction (which I think is often unfairly singled out for being sexist despite it simply being a reflection of our society as a whole). I may gather them up over this long weekend and post about it next week.
I’ll be at the Texas Blood Bath Film Festival this weekend. A friend was DP on Brain Dead, which is being featured on Saturday. Should be fun! If you’re in the Waco area you should check it out.
I’ll be taking my laptop along, in the hopes of getting a little writing done, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope. It appears that the work load at my day job is finally lightening somewhat, so maybe I’ll have a chance to get writing again soon. Of course they just laid another person off, so that could go either way I suppose.
Speaking of despair, a Twitter account is getting its own television series. In other news, I give up.
I have a ba-billion (which, I believe, is slightly more than a gajillion) things to do, so I’ll make this fast!
Stephanie has a new story up over at Every Day Fiction. It is fun!
My new story, “With the Band,” will be up Friday!
Congrats to Erin, who yesterday rather unexpectedly gave birth to her daughter, Summerlyn. It comes rather early, but both mother and baby are fine.
Tomorrow I’ll be at the Serenity charity screening in Dallas. If you’re in the Dallas area this weekend, you should swing by.
Just wanted to drop a note that editor/writer extraordinaire Jordan Lapp is chronicling some of his experiences (as he has time) at the (in?)famous Clarion West Writer’s Workshop.
Similarly, KC is heading to James Gunn’s SF Writer’s Workshop. It’s that time of year I guess?
I look forward to their accounts of the experience. The closest I have had to that sort of thing is my creative writing classes at UNT, but those weren’t nearly as intense. I’m generally a slow writer, so reading about the first couple days of Clarion terrifies me. Having to churn out stories so quickly to a mixed audience? Scary stuff. To me, anyway.
I wish both of them the best of luck!
I hate it when people use onomonopea in titles. Oh well.
It was a good weekend for librarians here at Meanwhile…not one but two stories accepted. You may or may not recall that some time back I wrote a story about a robot librarian, “The Overdue Protocols.” I’ve received word that it’s been accepted over at The Future Fire. It should be out in their August issue.
It may seem like it was planned, but I actually wrote “The Overdue Protocols” last year sometime. Complete coincidence!
Sadly, neither of my librarians is a hot librarian with the glasses or the pinned-up hair. My apologies. I’ll get on that one next.
Oh, also, a huge huge huge grats to KC, who nabbed third place over at no less prestigious a contest than The Writers of the Motherfucking Future (that’s their new title, just so you know).
I almost missed it, since it went up over the weekend, but Frank has an excellent new story up over at Every Day Fiction – check it out.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine was about as disappointing as expected. They crammed a lot of unnecassary characters in, and to do so they condensed and butchered the portions of Logan’s origin story that are actually interesting.
Part of the problem is the taming of Wolverine for a mass audience, which is strange because the untamed Wolverine has about as mass an audience (in comic book terms) as you can get. The film completely passes over the years he spent feral and savage in the Yukon, living with wolves. His time with the Weapon X program is chopped down to like one mission. They don’t cover any of his time in Japan (though there is a hint at it after the credits). I’m not being fanboyish here – I certainly don’t expect the film to be slavishly devoted to the source material. It’s just frustrating when they ignore so much great material in favor of some 30-second fan wank appearance of Emma Frost or Gambit or other characters who have nothing to do with Wolverine’s origins.
Oddly enough, Wolverine is kind of a Mary Sue. For a character that has had tragedy after tragedy heaped upon his comic book incarnation, nothing bad really happens to him here. He has help at every turn. When he needs more power, someone comes along and gives it to him. When it looks like he meets someone who can defeat him, people who hated his guts five minutes before show up to save the day. This is motherfrakkin’ Wolverine, people. If anyone is custom made to have horror after horror perpetrated on him, just so that he can stand back up on his own and slice the shit out of whoever did it, it’s him.
There are other things to not recommend the movie as well – the last third of the film is fairly predictable and chock full of cliche. The filmmakers also underestimate the audience and feel like they have to explain things that are obvious.
It’s not all bad. There are some fun action scenes. There are some great performances from most of the cast (though I can’t imagine who thought it was a good idea to put Will.I.Am in there). If you want to completely shut off your brain and enjoy a fun action flick, you’ll find something there to enjoy.
