Archive for the 'Media' Category

“Mongol”

Constance Ash June 24th, 2008

Cross-posted with my LJ.  Mongol, the first installment of a Russian trilogy featuring Genghis Khan is currently playing in a single theater here in Manhattan.  Go here and here to see trailers, stills and more information.  The film is supposed to have a larger release here in the U.S.  It had terrific popular and critical reception in Europe.

The best parts:

–The locations, the vistas, the action, the people — none of them are digital.  This is all location and real people riding real horses.  It does look different, and so much better, I do say.

–The landscape, as one expects, has the leading role in Mongol.   You will not be disappointed.  Vistas of snow, of arid slopes, green rolling spring grass, doesn’t seem foreign to someone who grew up on the Great Plains, though, no we didn’t have mountains where I grew up.  But I did visit the Black Hills, which are really mountains, often on family summer vacations, and the Badlands, in both South Dakota and North Dakota.  The Missouri-Platt system meanders through parts of both these states on their way to the Mississippi, so I saw those too on summer vacations.  These are true vistas and landscapes, from my own life, and the lives of these characters in

Mongol.

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Jumpstart

Madeleine Robins April 29th, 2008

I have an erratic career path.

My first four books were written between 1976 and 1981; book number five took another two years to write (I went to the Clarion SF Writing Workshop; I moved from Boston to New York; I worked part time and then full time, I fell in love, I fell out of love.  Life, right?).  I also started writing SF and fantasy short stories.   When I turned in my last romance (in 1984) I kept writing short stories and started noodling around with a story which grew into a book.  It took me more than ten years to finish that book (worked freelance, picked up my acting career again, fell in love, got married, started working at Tor Books, had a baby, went back to work again, left Tor, left the job after that, edited comics for three years, had another baby).  I sold the book on a partial manuscript while I was still working at Tor, and was more than half-way through it–but it still took what seemed like forever to finish.  After I turned in The Stone War I got a chance to do a work-for-hire novel based on a Marvel Comics superhero–Daredevil.  I wrote that book in about six weeks, from a fiendishly tight outline (remind me sometime and I’ll tell you the hoops you jump through to write tie-in novels) and it was fun.  Then I wrote Point of Honour, and almost immediately afterward, Petty Treason.

Then, two weeks after I turned Petty Treason in in 2002, we moved to California.  My writing path since then has been, um, erratic.  And with the benefit of hindsight and a several-decades-long career, I now realize that my writing history is punctuated by gaps.  Some of them very significant gaps.  I am not, nor do I ever expect to be, one of those 2000-words-a-day-year-in-and-year-out, writers.  But there have been times when I wrote consistently, turning out a book a year or so.  And times when I didn’t, when I felt guilty because I wasn’t writing, or because I wasn’t finishing a book.  Guilt, needless to say, butters no parsnips and is the enemy of the creative process.

But a time has come, at the end of each of these hiatuses, to jumpstart my process and get back to work.  What to do?

Here, in no specific order, are some of the tricks that have worked for me:

  • Retyping the stalled manuscript.  Yes, even at book length.  Maybe especially at book length.  Retyping immerses me in the book in a way that merely re-reading and line-editing doesn’t.  I often find myself adding, branching out, finding the places where I went astray, cutting out wholesale chunks.
  • Writing “cover copy” for the story.  Nothing focuses what you believe are the salient points of a story like trying to convey it in a punchy, convincing two paragraphs.
  • Following The Artist’s Way or some similar program.  The Artist’s Way requires, among other things, that you write three pages, longhand, every morning before you do anything else.  When I was stalled on The Stone War this was one of the things that helped get me moving again.  And you don’t have to follow all the rules the Way suggests: Julia Cameron isn’t going to show up at your house at 6am to make sure that you’re writing before you feed the kids, or that you’re making all your “artist dates.”  The right way to do this is the way that helps you.
  • Participating in a writers’ workshop–one where I have to show up in person (nothing against online crit groups; I just found that having to show up was useful to me) and one in which I focus as much on the critiques I’m giving other people as I do on their critiques of my work.
  • Reading stuff that makes me want to write.  What is that going to be?  Sometimes it’s fiction that, in some way, approaches what I’m trying to do.  When I was working on Point of Honour I was reading The Maltese Falcon, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and The Name of the Rose.  If another writer has pulled off a particular technical trick, I may want to read that work for awe and inspiration.

I am reasonably certain that, however long my writing career continues (until they prise my laptop from my fingers, no doubt) there will be lulls in my creative process.  That means I’m always looking for new ways to jumpstart that process.  Got any you want to share?

Buffy’s New Romance (Season 8)

Constance Ash March 5th, 2008

[ Mr. Whedon has developed their liaison over several issues. In No. 3 Buffy is overcome by a “Sleeping Beauty” spell undone only by a kiss from someone who loves her. In No. 4 Buffy realizes that Satsu saved her. Last month the pair discussed Satsu’s feelings. Buffy, although flattered by Satsu’s attentions, said the risks of involvement were too great. “People who love me tend to ... oh, die,” she said. Or, she added, they leave, because “sooner or later everybody realizes there’s something wrong ... something wrong with me, or around me.”

The matter seemed resolved, but in the newest issue, No. 12 — written by Drew Goddard, the screenwriter of “Cloverfield” — Buffy and Satsu are in bed, naked under the sheets. “It puts the reader in this ‘Oh my God’ moment,” Mr. Whedon said during a telephone interview. “And it puts Buffy in an ‘Oh my God, what did I just do?’ moment.”

But before fans start blogging frantically, they should know that Mr. Whedon is clear where this is headed. “We’re not going to make her gay, nor are we going to take the next 50 issues explaining that she’s not. She’s young and experimenting, and did I mention open-minded?” ]

 More here.

 Love, C.

Wild Cards: American Hero & other interactive web fiction

Kevin Andrew Murphy February 2nd, 2008

Tor’s new Wild Cards website has been spiffed up and updated, with information on the mass signing in Albuquerque today with most of the Inside Straight authors. Moreover, Tor has just launched the American Hero website, the fully in-character blog and promotional website for American Hero, the superhero reality television show taking place in the Wild Cards universe and a central part of the plot of Inside Straight.

There are twenty eight characters on the show and we’ve got illustrations for all of them from the amazing Mike Miller. More, all of the authors have been writing confessionals from the standpoints of their characters. Up now for Week 1 are Joe Twitch (created and written by Walton Simons), Spasm (created and written by Daniel Abraham), Drummer Boy (created and written by S.L. Farrell), and Rosa Loteria (created and written by yours truly).

Rosa Loteria portraitGo over and take a look. Ask the characters questions. Of course, the contestants are all busy with challenges on the show, but who knows, some of them might answer. (Mine are Rosa Loteria and The Maharajah.)

This is also kind of exciting as an author since it’s a new publishing venue. I’ve seen website expansions to the content from movies, most notably the rather amazing Donnie Darko site which had some neat fiction which expanded the movie, and likewise the (now long defunct) website for the Point Pleasant tv show. But this is the first time I’ve seen extra web fiction content being done for a series of novels and anthologies, especially author created and owned.

Anyway, please take a look and see what you think, and also, let’s talk about the web as a venue for new fiction in general.

How to Write a Novel (Part 2)

David Louis Edelman January 21st, 2008

So you decided to write a novel, you committed yourself to the task, and you agonized your way through your first draft — as described in How to Write a Novel (Part 1). Now one of two things will happen:

John Barth writing 1) You’ll print that sucker out and add a title page. You’ll type up a page dedicating the book to your sister Chloë in Venice, whose steadfast support and witty observations helped you get through the tough parts, and who served as the inspiration for the character of Empress Fögelschmëer (the Younger). You’ll add a cover letter, mail the whole package off to Random House, and watch the royalty checks flow in. Or,

2) You’ll look at what you’ve written and realize it ain’t publishable.

Most writers — even the successful ones — fall into that second camp. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Months or even years will have passed since you started, and the world’s not the same place. You’re not the same person. So it’s only natural that the story has wandered onto unforeseen paths. It’s only natural you look back at those early chapters and shake your head and think, How naive that guy was who wrote this stuff.

Don’t despair. Here’s a path (my path) of getting from first draft to final draft. As before, keep in mind that your mileage may vary.

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How to Write a Novel (Part 1)

David Louis Edelman January 15th, 2008

One of the Ten Commandments of Author Blogging is “thou must write a post explaining how thou writest thine novels.” And so, in an effort to save my immortal writerly soul from scribbler’s purgatory, I’m going to explain my process in easy numbered steps that anyone can follow.

Since I’ve only written two novels to date — Infoquake and MultiReal — and am now in the midst of a third, I can’t say that this is always going to be my process. All I can say is that it’s worked for me twice now, and it seems to be doing just dandy the third time around.

More importantly, I can’t say whether this process will work for you. No two writers write the same way, and sometimes what works for one person will only trip up the next person. Life’s like that. You’ll need to adapt to your own unique circumstances as you see fit.

Here goes. How to write a novel:

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Dance The Knife Cutting Through Worlds

Constance Ash January 14th, 2008

Pullman’s His Subtle Knife

Choreographed by Merce Cunningham;

Danced by the Cunningham Company

Alternate Worlds Moving on Two Stages, Performing for One Audience

I’ve been attending the revelatory Merce Cunningham ‘events’ all my adult life — on occasion the spouse has been honored as a composer for an edition of these events, so famous, for so long, in the world of art and dance. These were informal gatherings of audience and company in the Cunningham studio, devised for choreographer, dancers, composer and audience to exchange energies via the matrix of Cunningham at play, with his constant playmates, time and space.

This weekend the Cunningham Company held an ‘event’ at the glorious Dia Art Foundation - museum, which is located outside of Beacon, NY. I can personally testify that the land upon which the beautiful building is sited, provides a canvas of seasonal light and shadow display that is breathtaking, no matter the weather or the time of year. This weekend’s event at Dia included choreography inspired by Pullman’s The Subtle Knife. The NY Times dance critic describes the event thus:

[ To watch his company on Saturday afternoon in the first of two Cunningham Events last weekend at Dia:Beacon was to see a poetically compelling exposition of parallel-universe theory. Before at Dia:Beacon, Mr. Cunningham has staged events on two or more stages at the same time. In 2004, working on three stages at the Tate Modern in London, he employed a barrier that prevented audiences from seeing all three at once unless they looked up to the lofty mirrored ceiling in Turbine Hall (where the full action was visible, though very distant).

On Saturday at Dia:Beacon he placed his two stages adjacent but on either side of a square doorway. Wherever you were sitting, you could see only part, never all, of the stage on the opposite side. That door, leading from one world to a parallel stage, evoked the controlling image of The Subtle Knife, the second novel of Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials. In it the young hero can cut his way "slicing a square aperture in the air" from this Oxford into different worlds, at least one of which contains an alternative Oxford.

As the event began, the stage farthest from me looked breathtakingly like a mirror of the one closer to me. One group of dancers was moving in slow, controlled adagio, stepping, arching and bending with precision, while another, dressed identically, was doing the same but facing the other way.

Then, more than a minute into the dance, the denizens of the through-the-looking-glass world started to move in other steps and in a different tempo, whereupon the dichotomy between these two now dissimilar stages became both frustrating and entrancing. Here the dancers were balancing, fixed, waiting; there they were leaping fast across the space, caught up in some rush of which we could see only a fraction. And, like characters in the Pullman novels, dancers moved from one world, or stage, to another and back again. ]

Watching a Cunningham choreography, whether from early in his career (he’s now 91), or one just recently created, one feels she has left this world and re-entered another that has been lost, a world in which the sacred exists, as both sublime and far beyond any rigid and short-sighted religion, to a world that has existed long before this one, and which will survive hard and passionate once we have departed. It’s a privilege that everyone should be entitled to experience.

So it’s natural that this man would be drawn to a book by a YA author that speaks to slicing open gates into parallel worlds.

Love, C.

New Wild Cards website live

Kevin Andrew Murphy December 16th, 2007

I’ve been mentioning it earlier about the new book coming out, but Tor has just launched the new website for Wild Cards, www.wildcardsbooks.com

There will be more added in the coming weeks, including bio with yours truly, but the preliminary launch is focusing on Inside Straight, which is coming out next month and as with all things publishing, may have early copies in some stores now.

There’s also a newsletter to sign up for and a story from Walter Jon Williams which is sort of the proto-Wild Cards tale.

What’s Wrong with “The Golden Compass”?

Kevin Andrew Murphy December 10th, 2007

I just went to see The Golden Compass, along with a couple other friends, who all decided to see it despite being advised by one friend that the movie made no sense and by another that he didn’t want to see it because he hadn’t liked the book.

I have the book, but on the “I’ll read it when I get around to it” shelf. But it was a nice outing with friends and I wanted to see airships and Nicole Kidman in a series of improbably lovely costumes. And going in with such low expectations, I was not disappointed, except by everything else.

First off, well, my biggest criticism is what I said after the movie was over: “I suppose it will all make more sense after we read the book and watch the expanded version on DVD.” This was after watching a nearly two and a half hour movie, mind you. I’m not certain whether to blame the screenwriter, the film editor or both, but there seemed to be a concentrated effort to shoehorn in every significant scene in the book, regardless of the exposition or transition or set-up for character motivation.

As it stands, the movie has the worst case of “beloved child” syndrome I’ve ever seen. The protagonist, Lyra (and I’m probably wrong on the spelling), wanders around and simply bumps into people who decide to fight and die for her “Just because.” I can understand it with the head witch, since she’s at least got a prophecy to go on, but she’s still canny enough to check out whether the kid can read the Golden Compass. But Sky Captain Wild Bill? I’m blanking on the name of character, but if you took an old American character actor, had him play Wild Bill as conceived of by someone who’d only seen British Wild West shows, gave him a jackrabbit familiar (voiced by Cathy Bates) and then made him an airship captain…well, that’s who we’ve got, who not only immediately takes a liking to this random kid, but offers to take her along in his airship, and also tips her off to the location of an alcoholic talking bear, who is less entertaining than he sounds. The bear decides to follow the kid because she finds his armor, but the only reason they aren’t immediately blown away by the Cossack police is because the sea gypsies keep randomly appearing whenever the cavalry is needed. Even in the middle of the frozen glacial wastes.

Then there’s the Magisterium. I understand it’s supposed to be the unholy spawn of the Catholic church and Big Brother, but if you’re going to spirit away kids to do insane arcane medical experiments on them, there must be a more convenient place than an ice sheet in the middle of the Norway analogue. But more than that, why steal children when you can just buy them? Or get parents to give them to you for free? There must be a few parents who’ve already drunk enough of the Kool-aid that they’d hand over their children no questions asked, rather than steal the child of the well connected sea gypsy matron? Or the kitchen boy from the university where there are loads of nosy people just looking for a mystery to crack?

Of course, the number of brain dead people is pretty amazing. There’s horror movie stupid. Then there’s opera stupid. Then there’s this. One really wonders what the scholars are thinking to let their child of prophecy go running around rooftops with the cast of Oliver at the beginning of the movie. One also sort of wonders whether a world with all sorts of arcane science wouldn’t be able to figure out who poisoned a wine decanter if just by taking fingerprints. And the uspurping Bear King? Does he know that “gullible” is not in the dictionary?

Then there’s the trouble of giving your protagonist an amazingly useful power and forgetting to use it. Lyra gets a Golden Compass, which once she figures it out is basically a deluxe Magic 8 Ball that can answer any question, no problem. So when later in the movie, the wicked Mrs. Coulter says “Lyra, I’m your mother!” wouldn’t it be prudent or least sensible to twiddle with your Golden Compass and ask “Is that psycho really my mommy?” Of course this scene may have been left on the cutting room floor, so it’s not possibly quite at the level of the recent Heroes finale where Peter forgets he can walk through walls if he wants to and instead dramatically uses his telekinesis to rip the door off a bank vault, getting a nosebleed in the process. But still….

I should probably not get into the other troubles but the line “Tell the children to get their warmest coats!” is going to stick with me for a while. You get a bunch of kids who were spirited away to an icy wasteland via airship and you expect them to walk to safety? Of course an electrocuted traumatized child was able to walk all the way to the next valley and hole up in an unheated trapper’s cabin without freezing to death, so I suppose anything is possible, but….

Yargh.

“I Mal,” by Nathan Fillion

Constance Ash November 30th, 2007

A friend on Live Journal, French Teacher, pointed the way to this USA Today article, that includes Fillion’s piece from Serenity Found:

“Excerpted with permission from Serenity Found: More Unauthorized Essays on Joss Whedon’s Firefly Universe edited by Jane Espenson (Benbella, $17.95).

French Teacher suggests checking it quickly as USA Today tends to roll in new material constantly.

Go here.

Dang, I wish the link buttons here would get functioning again! So I didn’t have to manually key in the html (lazy moi). And the image buttons.

Kate and some others wrote about having a job they love, which is writing. Here Fillion writes of having a job he loved with his whole being, being Mal.

Love, C.

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