While the narrator speaks of dollars, rock stars and penthouses, the setting seems more to be some timeless European castle in a valley isolated from the mundane world, where wealthy gnomes guard vast fortunes in their vaults beneath the mountains. This author is one I always look forward to; his offerings are fine and well-crafted.

And really, there are worse ways to begin the day than reading that, aren’t there? You can read the entire review for EV 21/22 and a few other fine magazines over at the Locus website.

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Yesterday I stopped off to buy some groceries on the way home from work and the guy manning the register asked I’d taken off early for Valentine’s Day. Probably not an unreasonable question given that I was there at 1:40 in the afternoon, but it perplexed me none-the-less.

“Er, no,” I said, “I’m always done with work around this time.”

“Oh,” the check-out guy said. “Do you at least have to start early? Otherwise I’ll have to hate you.”

“Sure,” I said, lying through my teeth ’cause it’s easier than explaining why I only work part-time, “early starts. That’s the trade-off, of course.”

Then I paid for my groceries and went home to make a delicious ham-and-salad sandwich for lunch. And then I wrote things. Poorly, initially, and a little better as the day wore on, because that’s how writing things tends to go.

After dinner I read Death: The Time of Your Life, because it’s a book about love that doesn’t make me feel bad about not being in love, and I watched Stranger than Fiction, mostly ’cause I love the line “I brought you flours,” and then I thought about writing a post about Valentine’s Day that seemed like an increasingly bad idea as I went along.

If I had written the post, it probably would have gone something like this:

I’m down with the idea of Valentine’s Day, but like Christmas it’s one of those things I’d like more if it were divorced from social convention and inherited rituals. Thus it becomes a day where I read certain things and watch certain things and engage in my own rituals, largely because I’m an inherently single person who likes the idea of building a relationship with a whole bunch of people (lets call them readers) rather than a singular entity. Relationships, by and large, required compromises on the writing front that I largely chose not to make.

Valentines doesn’t really make me feel bad about being single, but very few things do. These days I usually reserve my more maudlin “oh god, I’m single” moments for the weeks where I mainline episodes of How I Met Your Mother and fail to write anything at all, but that show also makes me feel bad for how little time I spend in bars and the fact that I don’t live in New York, so I largely write it off as a testament to the creator’s ability to sell me a lifestyle rather than any deficiency on my part. Given time, the feeling passes. And I go write another story, and hope it finds a new reader, and that reminds me why I like my life the way it is.

One day this may change, and then again, it might not.

In any case, I came across the following video by poet Tanya Davis and filmmaker Andrea Dorfman on the Coilhouse blog yesterday. It was attached to a piece about those I’m-okay-with-being-single movements, which always leave me as uncomfortable as things built around become-a-couple narrative, ’cause the answer always seems to be somewhere in between.

In any case, I liked it, and I thought it better shared on a day not quite so laden with meaning as February 14th.

Happy day that is not Valentine’s Day, and thanks for being a reader.

Don’t get me wrong, I really wanted to like this movie. I mean, it has a bounty hunter who can speak to the dead and horse-mounted gatling guns in the first ten minutes, and that kind of absurdity is the kind of wrongness that I’m willing to roll with. And for the first first half-hour or so, things were looking pretty good – it wasn’t a great movie, but it was zany and weird and it had undead fucking cowboys and that kind of shit is awesome.

Then Megan Fox showed up.

A few years ago I had a friend who worked off the theory that Kate Beckinsale was the kiss of death for a film. As soon as she appeared on screen you were pretty much doomed to a cinematic experience that sucked. At best you’d get a film that achieved a kind of stylized aesthetic to try and cover for the lack of plot and continuity (see Underworld, and Van Halen), and at worst you got the kind of film that made you wish you could beat someone with a cluestick until they admitted their failings and gave you your two hours back (see Pearl Harbor).

Now Megan Fox seems to be performing the same function, ’cause I swear to god that every scene after her first appearance, even the ones she wasn’t actually in, the film made less sense and tried to cover it by shoehorning metaphors for terrorism and the atomic bomb into what was essentially an occult western. Plus evil confederate general John Malkovich did some crazy evil with a tattooed Irishman while beer leaked out the side of one-of-those-Quaid-chap’s mouth.

To my considerable dissapointment, they didn’t bring back the horse-mounted gatling guns.

They almost managed a stylized aesthetic that made me want to like the movie more than I did, but I got distracted by trying to figure out exactly how the not-really-an-atomic-bomb McGuffin worked. ‘Cause, seriously, I’m all about ignoring science in favour of awesome, even I thought that shit made no sense. I spent the last half hour of the film drinking scotch and screaming “seriously, what the fuck?” at the screen.

- sigh -

I wanted to like that film. I really did. If only they hadn’t made it so damn hard to like.

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a blog post-reviewy thing about Whip It for about two weeks now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not going to happen. Not because I think it’s a bad film – it’s utterly charming in its ability to recognise that something can be simultaneously camp as hell and the most important thing in the whole damn world – but because it fits into the same space as contemporary art where I find my critical vocabulary isn’t really up to the task of expressing what I’m thinking about after seeing the film.

 My short, haphazard take on the film goes something like this: it’s endearing. Specifically, the kind of awkward-coming-of-age endearing you find in Taylor Swift film-clip, only Whip Itcome without the puritanical undercurrent that usually causes me to froth at the mouth when encountering Swift’s oeuvre (and thus, Whip It comes closer to having actual substance). The film actually reminds me, very strongly, of Bring It On (another film that didn’t seem like something I’d like that somehow turned out to be highly entertaining) and I kinda wish it existed in a world where Bring It On didn’t because there’s far to many parallels there. The sound-track is phenomenal in its eclecticism, but gets bonus points for including both the Ramones and Yens Leckman.  The most irritating thing about the film is Drew Barrymore’s characters, but only because it’s exactly the same character she played in the Charlie’s Angel’s films with a tendency to act stoned on top. Plus it has Ari Graynor in a minor role (Graynor seems to have become the new incarnation of the cinematic past-time once dubbed “Breckin-Meyer-Spotting”)

It’s also a goddamn spectacular film to watch from a writing point of view because there’s not a damn subplot in the whole thing that doesn’t get a resolution in the end. Admittedly this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but there’s something powerful about knowing that if a film introduces conflict it will provide resolution to it, even if said conflict is just a five-second scene between the protagonist and a minor character in the opening minutes of the story. While Whip It telegraphs a lot of punches on the macro-level (I doubt anyone can’t pick the father’s final scene in the film a full hour before it happens), it gets a pass on this because the resolution of the really minor conflicts are also dragged back into the main plot and made meaningful.  It’s a neat trick, and one I’m gleefully lifting given that I’m in the midst of writing the second draft of Black Candy and dealing with a dozen or so minor characters who walk onstage and do very little after their first appearance.

Seriously, though, you can probably ignore all that and go with this instead: my friend Chris and I are the kind of snarky, mid-to-late-thirties blokes who are continiously dissapointed by films and prone to venting our dissapointment in Waldorf-and-Statler type critiques. As a general rule, it’s a bad idea to go and see film you think you’ll like when either of us are around.

Both of us hit the end of Whip It and said “Yeah, I need to own a copy of this.”

 2) Minimally Acceptable Levels of Productivity

 So I set myself the goal or writing 14,000 words words last week. I didn’t succeed. In fact, I struck a point significantly below success:

On the plus side, it means I’ve hit the minimum accepted levels of productivity for seven straight days now (aka if Peter doesn’t write a thousand words a day he ceases to feel like a human being and makes life miserable for everyone) and actually started to live like a real human being again. There are even parts of my house that are clean, and food that isn’t ordered from the Domino’s website.

That largely means the weekly goal achieved what it needed to achieve, right in time for the rewrites of Cold Cases to land in my inbox.

2) To be fair, there were some good bits. Many of them recycled from Aliens, the last film James Cameron made that I actually liked. I liked Giovanni Ribbisi’s evil corporate guy far more than I liked Paul Reiser’s evil corporate guy. And Michelle Rodriguez in an ornithopter makes up for a variety of ills.

3) At the end of the first hour, I hoped that this might not be an utter disappointment. The opening is solid, the characters get onstage pretty quickly, the set-up is full of bad naming conventions but otherwise okay. Conflict is established: the marine among the field researchers; the humans against the world; Ripley versus Paul Rieser; that second Avatar pilot getting jealous of Jake’s success with the Navi. Sure, most of that conflict disappears once Sully is inside the Avatar, but maybe it’ll come back.

4) At the end of the second hour, I decided there really should be some Disney song about A Whole New World playing over the top of the long sequences where we learn that the world is magical and interconnected for the ninth or tenth time. Said sequences do a great job of showing of the technology and creating spectacle, but also eliminates every character arc but one. Most of the more interesting arcs are blatantly written out via voice-over.

4b) I’ll be honest here – Avatar is primarily about spectacle. I don’t do spectacle. My first response to the Grand Canyon was “It’s a hole in the ground; lets go do something else.” Couple this with being an SF fan from way back and most of Avatar is really just well-rendered vistas of standard SF/Fantasy landscapes. If they wanted to do that, they should have just made a computer game.

5) At the end of the third hour, the movie had tried to perk me up by saying “Dragon’s versus Ornithopter’s, dude. Come on, this is cool.” For the most part, it was too late – I was bored and irritable and just wanted the fucking film over. Still, it was a cool fight scene. It lured me in. Then things got really stupid. Deus ex Machina stupid. And it tacked on a hand-to-hand fight scene it didn’t need, and tried to play out the character arc I would have been interested in if they’d actually bothered to build it at some point.

5b) The worst line in this film – and there are some contenders among the rather generic dialogue – comes in the finale twenty minutes when the hard-arsed marine captain squares off against our hero Sully and asks “how does it feel to betray your own race?” and you’re left thinking “you know what, it’d be nice if someone actually put some thought into that before this point in the script.”

6) Okay, the turning off my brain thing mentioned in point one? I can do it. Honestly, I can. I own copies of The Chronicles of Riddick. And Desperado. Heck, I own a copy of the Core. And I really, really liked Aliens. The thing is, most films where I turn off my brain basically say “look, if we have subtext it’s primarily accidental. We’re just chasing after the next cool thing.” They know that Subtext is a two-way street – you can’t promise it and walk away just because you have pretty visuals and nice action sequences. Avatar promised subtext and meaning. I paid attention. It decided I wasn’t getting it, despite the fact that the subtext is relatively shallow, and proceeded to beat me around the head with said subtext for the final hour of the film.

7) Seriously, the best thing in this film is Michelle Rodriguez flying a gunship.

Pandora? Sully? Grace? UNOB-FRICKEN-TANIUM? Worst naming conventions since the Chronicles of Riddick. And at least the Chronicles of Riddick knew it was an unrelenting sequence of cheese and action-sequences with all the depth of a wading pool.

9) 3D movies give me a headache.

10) Good things about this movie: Michelle Rodriguez; Sam Worthington; Paul Reiser Giovanni Ribisi; Ripley; the ability to endlessly snark about its failings; ornithopters. If someone would just take these elements and, say, remake Dune or put out a new Alien movie (without Predators), I’d be a happy man. ‘Cause there’s potential there for something awesome, especially now that Avatar’s gotten the obligatory “new film technology’s endlessly wanky film that’s really about how awesome said new film technology is” out of the way.

End Note: All of this leaves off the original objection to the film I posted on facebook a while back – that it’s going to be the same tired replay of white post-colonial guilt we’ve seen in shit like the The Power of One and Dances with Wolves and every other story where a white block from the conquering nation saves the tribe by becoming one of them. Needless to say, that objection remains, but I’m saddened to discover that there’s really no attempt to complicate the the narrative beyond that. Here’s one of those hints to take home – you can write a gritty story about the evils of corporations, or you can write a fairy tale. It’s fucking hard to do both in the same story, and Avatar falls apart about the point that it tries.

Horn is a memorable, unique, and highly polished work.  Spanning noir, horror, fantasy and several other sub-genres, it has widespread potential appeal.  The novella is an excellent showcase of Ball’s ability as an author, and also a fine example of Twelfth Planet Press’s intriguing novella range. 

The other came out in the September issue of Locus magazine courtesy of their short-fiction reviewer Rich Horton:

New from Australia’s Twelfth Planet Press is a first rate novella chapbook, Horn, by Peter M. Ball. Miriam Aster is a freelance detective, having blown her police career with some unprofessional behavior, but she’s still called back for certain cases as a consultant. Cases, apparently, involving visitors from Faerie. This story starts with a teenager found raped and killed, evidently by a unicorn’s horn. To her regret, the case requires Aster to deal again with her former lover, an exiled Queen of Faerie, and of course Aster still loves the other woman, but knows she can’t get back with her.

But there’s a rogue unicorn loose, and maybe worse in the form of people willing to use a rogue unicorn for very nasty purposes indeed … All the traditional hardboiled attitude, mixed effectively with adark look a Faerie. Strong stuff indeed.

Should probably go do some work on the second novella now, so I return you to your regularly scheduled bloggery…

I went to Clarion South with Chris two and a half years ago. He’s a smart man, very interested in things, and on something of a roll of late as far as publications and sales go. Over the last week Chris started distilling some of the major lessons we learned during the workshop into a series of very short, controlled blog posts. Given his terse nature, these are short and easy to digest, and they’re basically the high points of the workshop in collected form (and since he doesn’t believing in tagging posts, I’ll send you straight to the first entry and let you follow along from there).

2) Philip Pullman on How to Write a Book

This amuses me in its accuracy.

3) Reviewage andPimpage

- My comrade-in-writing Ben Francisco - and the first man to tell me “this should be a novella” – engages in some Horn Pimpage on my behalf
- The Fix diggs my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens which appeared in Apex Magazine back in May
- The Internet Review of Science Fiction describes On the Destruction of Copenhage… as “mundane surrealism.”

4) Rewriting as an Animated Giff

A very short-but-interesting post from Elizabeth Bear on the re-writing process, showing the evolution of a paragraph through multiple layers of revision.

5) My Projects

Man, the last week has been all about the new projects. I started the new novel draft, started revision of another project, started preparing for the next draft of Claw, agreed to do some work for Gen Con Australia, and tentatively agreed to take on another project I cannot yet talk about. I also ticked another entry off the 80-point-plan of awesome, making my year 3.75% awesome. If you see me looking wild-eyed this week, it’s not because I’m stressed – I’m just learning to cope with an opportunity-rich environment again

6) Oh, hell, let’s cap it off with a youtube clip

Because I’m far to fascinated by this film-clip at the moment.

I’m officially locking myself away and doing minimalist blog posts until I’m done with the current Black Candy draft and the various trips to the hopital (and at the risk of being inappropriate I really hope the later resolves itself first – given the absence of euthanasia legislation in Australia we’re basically watching a family member dehydrate and starve to death, and frankly that’s bullshit).

Peter M. Ball has got it right. This book is smart, funny, nasty, and wicked as hell. He gets the noir-ish tone spot on, delivers with action a-plenty, kick-ass characters, intelligent plotting, and good, clean evocative writing. Best of all, he takes a turgidly overused fantasy trope out behind the backyard toilet and puts a dum-dum bullet through its brain, after which he whips out his tackle and pisses all over the steaming corpse.

Meanwhile I’m peeling myself off the couch after three straight days of Veronica Mars DVDs and trying to figure out how to get back to work. My current to-do list: Black Candy draft, Clawredraft, third Miriam Aster novella draft (since I now have a plot for it), short story redrafting, marking of student assignments. I suspect what I really need to do is the latter, since it’s going to have the most psychic drag associated with it, but I do so hate the marking process…