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It seemed a good day to revisit these videos:

Way more fun than any academic discussion of the Catcher in the Rye I’ve ever had.

2009 is totally going down as the year that I rediscovered how much I enjoy reading for pleasure. It’s one of those habits that eluded me a while back, which was kind of unfortunate given that my book-buying habit didn’t exactly die off at the same rate. And it’s not that I stopped reading, exactly; I just fell into the trap of rereading old favourites with the occasional new work creeping in. By the end of June I’d made the decision that this should be rectified and promptly started ploughing my way through the seemingly endless array of novels and non-fiction that fill my too-read bookcase.

Since then I’ve managed a fairly steady pace of two books a week. I’ve barely made a dent on the unread book read pile of doom, but it’s still exposed me to a lot of kick-ass fiction. To whit, I give you the fourth and fifth instalment of Awesome Things about 2009:

 The City and the City, China Mieville (4/15)

‘Tis probably not to everyone’s tastes, but for my money The City and the City was a phenomenal novel that utterly blew my minds and reminded me why I enjoy reading fiction in the first place. There’s a part of me that’s a little bit in awe of this book, even as the other half of me is busy rereading chunks and trying tofigure out how Mieville pulled of the neat trick of taking such an absurd idea and making it seem totally fricken’ natural within the context of the novel. It’s the kind of book that makes me wish I still taught undergraduate writing theory classes, because it’d be fricken awesome to spend a semester watching other people process the book and respond to the narrative.

To put it simply: I heart this book. The Spokesbear hearts this book too. It’s one of those things that’s going to plague me for years as I try to figure out how it works, why it works, and whether I can eventually pull of something that’s equally as awesome as a writer (odds are, I can’t, but it’ll be fun to try). And awesome fiction is awesome.

 A Whole Stack of Books by Cherie Priest (5/15)

One of the things that brings me considerable joy as a reader is that rush of reading someone for the first time and realising they’re still at the point in their career where you can both catch up (thus ensuring the immediate gratification of more books *now*) and follow their progression while new work gets released.

2006, for example, is always going to be the year where I picked up Elizabeth Bear’s short story collection and rushed through her first SF trilogy in the aftermath; 2007 is the year where I started picking up anthologies purely on the basis that they contained Kelly Link’s work; 2008 saw me rush through the noir novels of Christa Faust (with Hoodtown immediately earning its spot as one of my favourite novels ever)*.

I’m not entirely sure what separates these writers from other new writers I came across in the same years, but I suspect it’ll come down to some combination of: an interesting web presence where the writer talks about process, having new releases on the horizon just as I finished their first few books, and the release of smaller projects via Indie Presses (I speak here, primarily, of Subterranean; oh, how that company taunts me with the shiny hardcovers and special editions from writer after writer I enjoy reading).

2009 quickly became the year where I read a lot of Cherie Priest. Sure the entire process may have started in 2008 when Tor gave away free copies of Four and Twenty Blackbirds at Conflux, but 2009 was the year that I finally got around to reading the other two books, RSSed Priest’s blog so I wouldn’t miss any new books when they came out, and preordered Boneshakerso there’d be minimal delay between the end of the trilogy and the start of the next fix (because nothing says “fan for life” like the promise of steampunk zombies).

*Intriguingly, I have to retrace my steps back to 2004 (aka the year I read Etgar Keret for the first time) before there’s any testosterone in the list. And 2005 was a bust for fiction, although I followed a bunch of game designers that year instead. It made sense at the time.

The October edition of Apex Magazine went online this week, with my story To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament among the table of contents and available for free online or via print or PDF for a reasonable cover price.

I should probably mention that of all the stories I’ve written, Horn included, this one is probably the weirdest and the squickiest. And since the working title was “John Flamsteed has sex with aliens to save the world” you should probably get fair warning that it’s a little on the smutty side,  so it’s probably not safe for work unless your co-workers are particularly forgiving of alien-sex. Not that it’s all squicky sex, or even that it’s the focus, but…well, you know…it’s there.

I’m currently preparing to head off to the Gold Coast, primarily to spend a few days catching up with my parents who I haven’t seen for longer than a dinner since they came back from their trip OS a month ago (and, it must be said, to languish in the peaceful surrounds of their home and get some writing done while I’m away from the internets). With that in mind I’m going to forgo today’s entry and make mention of an anthology due to hit shelves in December. Of course, you don’t want to wait for December to organise your copy, because *all the really cool kids are preordering now*. You want to be one of the cool kids, don’t you?*

Descended from Darkness: Apex Magazine Volume 1
Scheduled Released December 1st, 20009

Man, I’m excited about this one. Descended from Darkness collects a lot of the work that appeared on the Apex Magazinewebsite during the first half of 2009 (and maybe a little 2008) into an attractive anthology that has the dual benefit of letting you read these great stories offline *and* contributing a few dollars to keeping a pretty damn awesome online magazine running (with the added benefit that if you order using that link on the top, you may also be contributing beer money to your not so humble author).

So why get Descended from Darkness? Well, for starters, it’s one of those ultra-rare anthologies that’s going to feature me and my most excellent peep Jason Fischer(recent Writers of the Future Winner, Clarion Mate, and all-around dude) on the same table of contents. Plus the genre that Apex promotes (Horror-SF) is one of my favourites and I suspect it doesn’t get enough love. Plus there’s a bunch of other writers on the TOC that make for an assemblage of awesomeness - Mary Robinette Kowall, Lavie Tidhar, Ruth Nestvold, Ekaterina Sedia, and Theodora Goss among them. And the best thing is that it’s a total try-before-you-buy thing if you want it to be – just go check out the magazine archives to see what Apex has been doing.

*All suggestions of peer pressure should be attributed to my own tendency towards awkward cheesyness  when engaging in self promotion, not a reflection of said anthology. Which will be very cool. And has an awesome cover, which I haven’t been able to convince my website to upload and display. And this makes me sad.

Over the years I’ve gradually noticed that the people whose creative output fascinates me the least are often the most interesting to listen to when they discuss their creative process. Today I found myself losing twenty-minutes listening to JJ Abrams talk about the role of mystery in narrative and the process.

Of course, by my earlier logic, one of these days we’re going to discover that Ewe Boll is a genius.

The Speed Racer movie fascinates me. Not because it’s a good movie – it’s not – but because it’s made by people just smart enough to do interesting things and just dumb enough to make some very simple mistakes. As a writer, this is a combination that keeps me looking at something, wondering what the hell happened and why it all falls apart.

I’ll be honest for a second – Speed Racer should be the kind of glorious failure in the style of films like Southland Tales. The Watchowski Brothers remake has a lot going for it in terms of a really strong aesthetic, a willingness to be stylized rather than naturalistic, and a moderately strong cast. It was never going to be a successful film because the choices they were making ran up against the basic demand for pseudo-realism in cinema, but at the very least it was ambitious and willing to take chances.

Sadly, this is coupled with the kind of bone-headed narrative decisions that make it a fairly mundane failure rather than failed attempt at genius. Which is why I’d probably recommend people who are interested in writing should watch it, if only to see why certain things don’t work, narratively speaking. Things to pay attention to, when watching Speed Racer as a learning experience:

1) They Haven’t Decided what the films about.
Not entirely true, since on one level they’ve got this down – Speed Racer is about futuristic cars and remaking a cartoon. But underneath that, on the thematic level, this film is overburdened with themes and it handles none of them particularly well. On one hand it’s a personal story about Speed living up to his brother’s legacy, on another it’s a story about the individual against big business, and on another hand its the thematic equivalent of Star Wars where man conquers the machine through the all-knowing power of the force (or, in this case, listening to the car and driving on instinct). There’s no problem with a story being these things, but it’s never all of these things at the same time – each theme gets set up seperately and independently, taking far to long to integrate.

2) Flashback Mania
In the opening ten minutes of the film, we have about six flashbacks. All these flashbacks undercut the speed and action of the opening race, but most of them add very little to tension. In SF we call this info-dumping and it’s something to be used with caution, but in the film it’s the very literal equivalent of stopping a story to insert “as you know, Bob, Speed’s older brother was once a great racer himself, but he came to a bad end…” over and over again. This would probably be bearable – not good, but bearable – if it was setting something up, but at the end of the race and the flashback sequence we’re given a new problem…

3) The Film has Two First Acts
There’s a structure to the first act of a story – the world is established, something threatens the status-quo, the hero walks away from it, things get worse and people keep saying “fix it”, and finally the protagonist is forced to address the issue. The act basically ends at the moment the decision is made to go and deal with the problem.

Speed Racer does this twice, and really  this is where a lot of the problems mentioned above become unforgivable  – the combination of opening race and story sets up one set of narrative expectations (two, actually, since they cram the background on Trixi and Speed’s relationship in there, rather unnecessarily). The conflict is all established – Speed wants to live up to his older brother’s memory, but also needs to understand why Rex Racer walked out. He relived Rex’s departer, sees the effect it has on his family, gets told not to listen to the gossip that follows. He makes a decision – not to break his brother’s record in the race, to limit himself from surpassing his brother’s memory. We get to a nice point where things are ready to move forward, and….

Then the movie starts all over again. We literally get up the following day and a whole new set of conflicts are introduced -  Speed is being courted by big business sponsors, the big business vs individual is set up, and although there’s some real tangential links to the first story it feels like the start of something else entirely (although this, too, is cut short when the seemingly-nice-big-businessmen reveals himself to be corporate-scum-who-hates-individuals at the end of this sequence).

There’s a notable shift in the way the whole film works after you get past the first half-hour or so – basically, as soon as they hit the rally race everything gets wound together, and things don’t start falling apart again until the very end when they have to end the film three or four times to get everything wrapped up. This is basically one of those signs that you’re layering in too many metaphors and themes at once, and they really could have done something extraordinary if only they’d focused things on one story and hooked everything else in as a sub-theme instead.

4) They didn’t adapt the style to the medium
The Speed Racer cartoon is layered in goofiness and weird stylistic choices – some parts are serious, some parts are cartoony to the extreme. Largely, the difference comes down the presence of Chim Chim and Spritle in the scene. In making the film they’ve tried to keep this stylistic approach, but what works okay in a half-hour television cartoon is death in a film, particularly when those choices are predicated on the comedic talents of a young actor and a chimpanzee in live-action sequences.

I can see the argument for keeping the goofy Spritle/Chim Chim scenes as a means of connecting this film to kids, but on the whole that was probably the wrong choice given how heavily stylized everything is. This is far from a realist film, but it’s also a long way from the kind of stylization that would appeal to anyone who isn’t plugging into the camp nostalgia of their approach. There are times when this leads to some really entertaining irony – the ninja, for example, or the major fight scene – but when that’s pushed to far it becomes inane rather than clever.

5) It Telegraphs Its Punches
Bless it’s heart, it tries not to – but the fact that Matthew Fox is Rex Racer despite the fact that another character plays him early on isn’t exactly a surprise. It’s not just a hold-over from the cartoon series either – Matthew Fox appears at exactly the right point, narratively speaking, to be the missing Rex Racer/Mentor figure and they don’t work hard enough to throw off that suspicion. Much like everything else, thematically speaking, it’s heavy-handed and overstated. It’s even forshadowed in terms of motif, where people are not what they appear throughout the film (the big-bad-businessman in the first act, the man Speed and Racer X work with in the second act). What should be clever narrative decisions are let down by the flaws in the structure and become far to noticable.

The reason I say watch this film isn’t necessarily because it’s irredeemably bad, although it looks like it is on the surface. Rather, it’s interesting because there’s enough good points to it that the really obvious failures are killers – or, at the very least, they put Speed Racer on the wrong side of the line between mundane and glorious failure. It’s such a great example of getting things wrong, structurally, that I kind of sat there wondering how they’d missed it (although this is probably a cautionary tale to writers in that respect – it’s easy to think you’ve linked things well enough in a narrative to justify having them there). There’s a part of me that pines for the film this could have been and keeps going back to it in the hopes it can be redrafted and fixed.

So as a result of my request for female authors one of my off-line friends decided it would be a lark to say “you know, you really *should* read Stephanie Meyers.” And after the requisite laughter that follows such a suggestion, I said “yeah, right-o” and promptly organised to borrow a copy of Twilight from my sister (who had, in turn, borrowed it from a friend, and wishes it to be quite clear that this is not her book I am borrowing; she was lured into reading it by its popularity among non-reader friends, and her response to the novel are probably even more negative than most).

To be honest, the book wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. I mean, it didn’t touch me anywhere inappropriate or threaten to eat my children or anything like that. It just kinda ambled along telling an familiar-if-unpretentious story for the first half in which Bella and Edward stay away from each other, then turned into overblown teenage angst which made me want to slap the characters as they referred to one another as heroin addictions and such, then had an inexplicable vampire-attack-chase-scene-watchamie to come to its unlikely conclusion without any real meaning ’cause, yo, the bad guy was just there to make for an ending, yeah?

Then there was prom.

I could gripe, because this is a very easy book to gripe about, but I figure there’s enough of that. And, honestly, after years of reading some of the more florid ends of the gothic romance I can even understand the appeal, especially if I were part of the target demographic. Lets just say it’s not my thing, and that I’d probably need some kind of bribery to convince me to continue with the series. Instead I’m just going to wander off and quietly contemplate how much more awesome this book could have been if it was written from the POV of, say, Billy or Tyler-who-cannot-drive-on-ice, becoming the friend and confidant of his neighbour Edward Cullen, who is in the process of going all Jay Gatsby for the new girl. ‘Cause I think Twilight by way of the Great Gatsby would have been awesome, and it would have spared me the interminable angst that made up the middle portion of the book. Plus, then, the stalkery stuff would actually be a literary homage rather than just plain creepy.

There’s always something a bit oogly-boogly about blogging your responses to fiction written by people you know (especially if you don’t necessarily know well them well), but today I’m going to bite the bullet and recommend Karen Miller’s The Innocent Mage as one of those books that folks interested in writing fantasy should really pick up and take a look at in order to understand its narrative tricks.

I’m kind of envious of writers who can write big, doorstopper-sized fantasy novels at the best of times but this one manages to go somewhere interesting in its avoidance of standard genre tropes. I mean, The Innocent Mage feels like a traditional fantasy novel – you can run through the check-list of elements needed for a big doorstopper fantasy and they’re all there: Ancient enemy from the distant past? A young lad of simple beginnings heading out into the wised world? A prophecy ordaining a great battle between good and evil? The deeds of kings, sorcerers and princes brought to the fore? Check, check, check, and check. This kind of stuff is the baseline of the doorstopper fantasy genre, and their presence no doubt contributes to The Innocent Mage’s ability to satisfy as a big doorstopper fantasy experience. And it does satisfy, very well, on that front. I’m still recovering from the sleep debt I accumulated by staying up until six in the morning reading the book.

What surprised me wasn’t what was in the book, but rather what wasn’t. Things like, say, sword-fights. Or the start of the war we’re teased with via prophecy. Or big epic overland quests to pick up macguffins and plot coupons. Hell, by the end of the first book titular Innocent Mage is not yet a mage, nor has he even had an inkling that magic and great deeds are in his future. His heroic journey, as presented in book one, is essentially one of rising from fisherman to becoming the highest rank Bureaucrat of his race within the tense, bi-racial government system set up within the country. Even the evil sorcerer and his demonic army are safely segregated from the story for about three hundred and seventy pages, making a last-minute appearance to set up for the second book in the duology (where, I suspect, the inevitable war will finally kick off).

The revelation of the evil sorcerer is actually something of a let-down when it comes, because the real antagonist of the story is actually the protagonists best friend who creates conflict by continually asking the everyman analogue to become more than he is. In essence it’s Doorstopper Fantasy by way of a buddy movie, with the threads weaving together and getting you good and involved in their lives. While the background is epic, the foreground is all small-scale conflicts – interpersonal, political, and rarely physical except as a means of underpinning the former. Last week I suggested that the City and the City is one of those books worth pulling apart to figure out how it does what it does. I’m inclined to say the same thing aboutThe Innocent Mage– in terms of taking an established genre and fulfilling the expected tropes in an unexpected way it’s a brilliant read, but its ability to do that without calling attention to the fact is one of those subtle narrative tricks that I gaze upon in unabashed envy.

While there’s lots of everyman-journey stories out there in the genre (see the works of Eddings, Jordan, Tolkein and Tad Williams for starters), it’s a telling point that the stuff that usually make up the formative experiences of their champions (the journey from the familiar territory, the exposure to violence, the learning to become a hero) are neatly sidestepped or glossed over here without feeling like we’re missing something.

Let me put today in context for you: I’m laughing at puns. Otter puns. And Jason Fischer  is nowhere nearby, which is kind of strange given that about 90% of the punnery that takes place in my world can be traced back to him in some form or another. And I *never* laugh at the puns. Well, hardly ever. I just thought I should mention that, given that a few people have signed up for the blog feed following some fairly serious discussion of feminism and such in other venues last week and they should probably warned. *Sometimes* I bust out the heavy duty cultural theory that tends to burble along in the background of my consciousness, but most of the time it’s all otter jokes and pro-wrestling references. I tend to think both mindsets equally valid and interconnected, really.

On the otter hand (hee!) I’m also spending my morning thinking about the moment that came when Girliejones first announced Female Appreciation Month and I suddenly realised that I couldn’t actually pull together a months worth of books by women that I remembered well enough to point to and say “there, right there, that’s awesome.” I could get to five pretty easily, ten without breaking a sweat, but by the time I started getting into the twenties I was basically scouring my bookshelves and pulling down any of the books written by those of the female persuasion that I’d at least, basically, read. This caught me kinda off-guard, because if you’d asked me I would have said I read a lot of female writers. Instead, what I actually do is read a lot of the same women over-and-over again – I could probably fill a list of thirty books just by pulling the works of about seven different writers from my shelves and only one wouldn’t see a repeat. Sure, many of those works would be on my list of the thirty best books of all time (in fact, given one of them wrote a noir novel about Mexican masked wrestlers, they’re just an otter joke away from being the best author of all time), but that’s still a pretty limited selection of writers to choose from. Of course, this is just a microcosm of the problems with my reading habits in general over the last few years – there’s been lots of book accumulating, but comparatively little reading of stuff that seems too unfamiliar. So over the weekend I built a pile of unread books by women to go through. It’s pretty big, and about 80% of the authors are by women I haven’t read yet, but at the same time it’ll last me about two months at the rate I’m currently reading.

‘Course, at the end of that two month period, I’ll have a to-be-read bookshelf containing about 700 books written entirely by men (which is, more or less, the standard state of my to-be-read shelf these days). That’ll need some rectifying, so I figured I’d ask for recommendations - give me five books (fiction or non-fiction) written by women, and I’ll do my damndest to make it happen. Since the point of this is to diversify my reading tastes, go with whatever comes to mind – regardless of genre or whether you’d ordinarily be wary of recommending it to a guy (I’m open, for example, to reading the romance genre if a recommendation comes in).

The only short-list of names I’d avoid largely come down to the following, since I’m already pretty well read up on these writers: Kelly Link, Karen Joy Fowler, Poppy Brite, Caitlin Kiernan, Elizabeth Bear, Marianne De Pierres, and Margo Lanagan. And lets assume that the collected works of Jane Austen, Karen Miller, and the Brontes are taken care of as well, since there’s a pile of them on my bedside table at present (Late addendum to the list: Holly Black. Got a lot of her work on the to-read pile as well). Apart from that, go crazy – I’m officially removing the word “no” and “not my thing” from my responses when it comes to recommendation, so if it shows up in the comments it goes on my reading list.

I’ve been all words, words, words this week, resulting in big long posts both here and elsewhere, so today I’m aiming for short and brief. Lots of getting in, doing the pimpery, and getting out. And this time it’s not *all* about me, just like, two thirds about me. You know how it is.

Cool Stuff: The Outlandish Voices Podcast
A project set up by Laura E. Goodin, a friend from Clarion and fellow believer in the power of the middle initial, to deliver readings by Illawarra’s established and emerging science fiction, horror, and fantasy authors. Laura is one of those folks whose not content to be contained as far as her creative ambitions, so she’s managing this while simultaneously picking up momentum as a short story writer and playwright (with, I suspect, a host of novels getting written as well). I get tired just reading her blog and trying to keep up with her various projects, especially given her propensity for making them all work.  The first three installments of Outlandish Voices (featuring readings by the Rob Hood, Cat Sparks, and Richard Harland, a trio of writers with some pretty damn impressive credentials) are online now and there’s more to come.

The Stuff of Glee: Horn Reviews
Two reviews hit the world in recent weeks. One from Genrereviews, which (quite-rightly) says some awesome things about the cover art before kicking on to the discuss the story. My favorite bits, excerpted:

In a lot of ways, Horn sticks pretty close to what have become the standards of urban fantasy. … On the other hand… dude, the underaged victim has been raped to death by a unicorn in a nasty snuff film.

I spent awhile trying to figure out how to review this one, because the dark elements are so unexpected it spun my head around. It’s not the sort of thing I could recommend to anyone, but odds are good if you read “unicorn” and “rape” in the same sentence and instead of having your brain explode, you thought “wow, that sounds really interesting and original,” this is probably something you should be looking deeper into, because a premise like this one isn’t something you’re going to come across again.

The other review was in the Courier Mail courtesy of Jason Nahrung two weeks ago (I was slow on the uptake that weekend) and doesn’t seem to have migrated online yet, but there’s a good selection of excerpts over on Girliejones’ blog. And to borrow a phrase from my redoubtable publisher: Copies of Horn are available from Twelfth Planet Press, Pulp Fiction in Brisbane,  and Fantastic Planet in Perth.

Updates: Awesome

So here’s the thing about my plans to awesomeifymy year – I’m kinda hesitant to blog about it, in specifics or in general, because I’m assuming it’s very uninteresting to watch from the outside and lots of it will come off like bad self-help book cliches when I try to pin the process down and put it into words. And none of it is big, life-changing stuff – I’m not trying to reach Kathmandu or walk around Australia for charity. I’m just trying to put together the life I want to live as best I can, and that largely comes down to pretty basic stuff (write more, read more, spend more time with friends). The list is mostly about reconfiguring mental processes, reminding me to compartmentalise bad stuff until I can do something about it, and prompting me to *do more* rather than endlessly fritter away time on the internet. It’s about doing things that scare me a little, which is why the Spokesbear finally made it onto the site (if you look at the bio, you’ll notice I’ve been threatening to post pictures of the bear since I started petermball.com – it just took nine months or so to work myself up to it).

This week I’ve read a lot. And I’ve danced around the house a lot too. This, by me, is awesome. I got interested in stuff again – discussions, books, music, ideas – rather than falling back on the stuff I already know. Somewhere along the line, probably during the PhD and the “comfort food” binging after my life went kablooie (twice) over the last few years, I fell into a heavy groove of repetition – the same bands, the same books, the same jobs. New stuff went in, but slowl, and often it’d just become part of the groove again. I’d see new films, for example, but only if they seemed like they’d produce a similar *feel* to something I’ve already seen.

So this week I read new books. I listened to albums I haven’t heard in over five years. If I hadn’t signed up for a media fast over August (no TV or film), I would have gone and rented a bunch of films that looked like they weren’t my cup of tea. I tried to be interested in stuff again, even if it wasn’t my thing. And here’s the interesting side-effect of that: I think, for the first time in ages, I can actually look at my week and say “yeah, I did *enough*.” For someone who never feels like I’m doing enough to be productive, that’s fairly huge.