Dispatches

Yes, I’ve neglected this blog and need to stop doing that, but let’s move on. Here’s a catch-up post with a lot of random stuff I probably could turn into individual blog entries if I wanted to take the time to really develop them … but right now most of my writing time is taken up with noveling and short story-ing, but more on that later.

Some of these thoughts have been inflicted on my facebook/twitter friends, so I apologize for any redunancies for my facebook/twitter friends, who may have read some of these thoughts before. Again, I apologize for the redundancy.

The swine flu is freaking me out, mostly because of my memories of The Stand, much of the first third I read while staying overnight by myself in the apartment of a friend who did not have a television, and lived in one of those run-down, kind-of redneck apocalypse neighborhoods. And I think there was a wind-storm. Add that memory to the mini-series with a cart-pushing Kareem-Abdul Jabbar ringing a bell and shouting “Bring out your Dead!” and you can understand my feelings. And yes, I know it’s all hype and this is really just a regular flu season with some unfortunate early medical reporting, but y’all are going to have to humor me if I take my family and start heading to Boulder, just in case, ok?

The writing is going pretty well right now, despite the fact that I’ve had a for realz day job the last month or so. It looks like it’s winding up now, so I will be forced, once again, to work with no externally imposed structure, which is always a crap shoot.

Right now how I’m writing short stories between chapters of Maps of Perdition, and I have a couple of Beta readers (Hi, Lena and Jennie!) looking at the chapters as I’m going along. A couple of people who are readers but not necessarily major sci-fi fans, and they help me make sure the characters are working and I’m maintaining internal consistency. Just finished chapter three and am now working on a bright-happy retro-future space opera short story, kind of using a doc savage and his team in space concept. The main problem is it’s threatening to turn into a novel, but I keep beating it down.

Well, there’s that problem, and zombie plotcreep, but I’m avoiding that pretty well too.

I’m really looking forward to the release of Footprints this summer. I’ll post the amazon link as soon as it’s up there. But for now, here is the cover:

I am especially excited because this collection is co-edited once again by Eric T. Reynolds, with Jay Lake as co-editor. There are some fantastic writers in here, such as James Van Pelt, and Lawrence Schoen, as as I read the proof and looked at the contents list, it felt a little bit like a game of “one of these things is not like the other…” but there I am. Who’da thunk it? Side note: thinking of changing my pen to “and more …” but my wife said that probably wasn’t a good idea. For a full list of the writers in this collection, go here.

And I would like to thank a good friend who has some connections, and who had my copy of Barren Worlds surreptitiously removed from my bookshelf and returned it with this inscription inside the front cover”

You may have heard my very manly squee a couple of days ago when I first saw this. So, thank you Liz!

anyway … this is getting long, so …

I am now on twitter. you can follow me, if you care to. my userid is chadgrayson. I should actually say “please follow me so I don’t feel like a loser,” but that might be just a little too pathetic, so i probably should say that. Please disregard that previous sentence.

 

My quickie, non-spoilery reaction to the BSG finale

a more reasoned analysis will come later, but for now….

omg! omg! omg!

and I would like to thank io9 for the following image, which pretty much sums up everything.

 

oooooh boy … Watchmen

I first read Watchmen just after the original mini-series finished up its run in 1986. As a country kid, I didn’t live close to a comic shop, so summer vacations to California, and the occasional foray to Indianapolis, were the only places I could get comics that I couldn’t get at our local Haag’s drug store (yes, kids, they used to sell comics in spinner racks at drug stores. That was just after I waved goodbye to my uncle and my cousins when they left for Oregon in a Conestoga wagon).

And Watchmen, being part of DC Comics’ direct-only initiative (which removed Teen Titans and Legion of Super-heroes from my world, but that’s a rant for later) was not available at the Haag’s drug.

This was probably good for many, many reasons.

So when I was in Cali, visiting what is still my favorite store of all time: Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy in Livermore, California, I found all issues of Watchmen in the back issue bin,  and used my saved up money to purchase them all. I think they were $1.25 apiece. Again, this is depressing.

I should mention I was 13 years old at the time. If you’ve read Watchmen, or seen the movie, you will understand a lot more about me now.

Needless to say, I loved every panel. I was young enough that a lot of the deeper meaning went over my head, but have loved it even more as I got older and those other layers revealed themselves.

So when the movie ads started running,  I started annoying my wife about it ( i was not stupid enough to think the kids were going). She probably would have smothered me in my sleep except that my fanboy squeeee was audible only to the dogs.

She was in … it looked interesting. She’s always tolerated my geeky side, and likes a good movie if it’s a good movie, no matter what it’s about.

So we went …

I have been given a probationary period of 365 calendar days before I am allowed to pick the movies again.

It was … well, the core was there. The first ten minutes were some of the most incredible moments of cinema I’ve ever experienced. The last supper pastiche with Sally Jupiter at the center, Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis discreetly off to the side … it was … wow.

And I liked the movie at a very basic, visceral, level. It seemed right. Everything but Malin Ackerman anyway. It worked.

An aside: how awesome would Amy Acker have been as Laurie Jupiter (yes, Juspecyk, but the movie didn’t get into that)?

My wife has a very low tolerance for gore, but if it’s necessary to the story, it’s not a big deal. I used to think I had a high tolerance to that sort of thing. I’ve never said a movie was too gory …

This movie was just too, too gory. Yes, this is a world punctuated with moments of sudden, horrific violence. That’s appropriate to the story, necessary. Everything in Watchmen’s 1985 is kind of hyper-real, ramped up.  But in this movie, it was constant, it dulled you to it, which made it less effective. It was like a super-hero movie made by a thirteen-year-old, all shock, no context. It even made some horrific scenes from the original more gory for no real reason. I’m thinking of Rorschach in the child-killer’s house. That’s not how he killed him in the original, and the original, the fire, the coldness, was much more effective than this hot rage. That cold dropping of the match, the walking away, THAT was Kovacs breaking and Rorschach emerging. Not the raging,  gore-porny, hatchet/skull montage.

This movie really got the story in a lot of ways, but in a lot of ways did not. The one moment of gore from the book, that slow pan of the bodies in Times Square … absent. The one really grim moment we needed to linger on … not there.  I mean, I understand going with nuclear attacks instead of the big giant squid, but the apocalypse was mundane, which it absolutely should not have been.

I wanted to love it. I couldn’t even really like it very much. I probably would have known what to expect if I’d seen 300, which I hadn’t. I don’t want to now. I don’t want to see a Snyder movie ever again.

It’s too bad. It could have been amazing (I need the first ten minutes by themselves).

Zach Snyder doesn’t get it, really. He got most of it. The look and feel, characterizations (one notable expection already mentioned), were all spot-on. But it went waaaay over the top and undercut its own point.

Now, J.J. Abrams …please don’t screw up Star Trek…

 

Turning and Turning on the Widening Gyre

Recently, I’ve noticed that the world seems to be remaking itself into the one that I grew up in (very soon you will see how old I really am).

Russia invades Georgia, threatens Poland, and the Cold War, it is back on, Baby! Complete with the threat of nuclear annihilation (ah, promise of Mutually Assured Destruction, how we’ve missed you).

The Watchmen are in pop culture once again, complete with those awesome ads based on the original comic book ads, way, way, back in the day (which was a Wednesday, as always.)

My son’s favorite cartoos, and the toys that are cluttering up our house …. Transformers. G.I. Joes also seems poised for a comeback.

North and South Korea are once again competing in the Olympics as two different countries.

Indiana Jones is running away from bad guys again (and so is my first movie-crush, Marion Ravenwood). Commies instead of nazis, but we’ll take what we can get.

My pant size is back to where it was when I was a freshman in high school in, oh, …. let’s say say it was before the fall of the Berlin wall and leave it at that.

And now … this:

someone hold me …

 

Invasion Crisis in Infinite Local Comic Shop

After an absence of several years, i finally re-entered the comic shop a couple of weeks ago. I’ve always loved comics, (it’s the old aging hipster geekstory: midwest upbringing, blah, blah, difficult childhood, yadda, yadda, comics made them bearable, whatever) and never really left them. I just switched to getting them in trade paperback collections, which look cooler on my bookshelf and have no real must-buy-or-you-miss-it date, which allows me to purchase them only when I’ve squirrelled away enough dollar bills and quarters in my top dresser drawer. You’re welcome, honey.

You see, when I’m making weekly visits to the comic shop, i have an official problem. I can’t stop adding to my pull list. So, a couple of years ago. I quit. There’s no geeks anonymous group, so I had to go cold turkey on my own. My wife helped by looking at the pile of comics in the clset and grumbling things like “when i think of all the money spent…” The fact that my raw tonnage of comic boxes in the garage crushed all of her old 4h trophies only added to the, shall we say, resentment.

But anyway, two recent things got me back in the shop. Comic geeks, I’m sure already know what they are. Marvel’s Secret Invasion and DC’s Final Crisis.

I’ll start with Secret Invasion. I don’t really have a lot to say about it except that I am a sucker for these types of stories. Everything you know is wrong! I’m a secret alien! You are not who you think your are! (see also: Battlestar Galactica). So far it’s been a lot of fun. I have two things to say to Bendis: West Coast Avengers was the first comic I ever collected regularly. Bendis, you better not be kidding with this Mockingbird thing!!!!

As far as Final Crisis goes. I’m the natural audience for this, but I’ve not caught up with a lot of recent DC product, so a lot of the criticisms (it doesn’t make sense with recent events, it’s a little hard to understand for anyone who’s not an old-school fan, etc) don’t hit me as hard. Plus, it’s Morrison, so there’s a huge gosh-wow factor that compensates for a lot. I’m in. I don’t know, though, if I can forgive him for what he did to J’onn.