Oh my god, I just found Ruby's deconstruction of "Escape from Hell" and now my sides hurt from laughing so hard. I've never heard of this movie before, but I wouldn't be a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan if I let little things like that stop me. This is super late, but if you haven't seen it and you enjoy snarking at old movies you may like this thing. I certainly did.
RECOMMENDS! What have you been reading/writing/thinking about this week?
60 comments:
Actually, I'm asking for a specific recommendation myself: what books would people recommend for information on self-publishing, both print and electronic, for someone who
a. doesn't own a Kindle and
b. has rather less than no money, but
c. would like to get started?
Heathen Critique is amazing; I particularly enjoy and recommend her decon of 'Soon', which I actually liked a bit more than Left Behind. If we're using 'like' in the MST sense.
I wish I could help, Makabit, but I honestly don't have a clue about that. :< I still would advise e-publishing yourself even if you don't have a kindle or anything, just from how I imagine physical publishing will be a pain.
So I saw there was a Persona post a bit back. Aww yeah. Today I finally got inspired to start writing some Persona 3 fic, specifically, the thing I always end up doing, titantic-project-to-go-through-an-entire-RPG-that-i-will-never-finish (already done it with Skies of Arcadia and Agarest War, so why not one more?) where it's like 3 FES but both the male and female protagonists are there and they're siblings and they fight crime and shadows and stuff. (Okay, not so much crime.)
It'll be fun adapting the plot to fit there being two Chosen Ones, two Wild Cards, two Messianic Heroes, etc, etc. MaleMC is going to be more or less like fanon and the manga portrayed him; perpetually sleepy, lethargic, laid-back, even-tempered, casual, sword-using, and FemMC (FeMC? Hamuko?] is going to be a bit more outgoing, maybe a little older-sisterish, bright personality, etc. And, of course, she'll use a polearm, because polearms are awesome. They're my favorite weapon type that doesn't involve shooting bullets or laser beams.
Idea for own novel; laser polearm. Yes. Ahem.
So I've only got a few paragraphs so far but the spirit's movin through me, oh lord. Or maybe it's already gone. Muses are rough.
Like I said before, I'm replaying Twilight Princess. And speaking of Twilight, I'm also re-reading Carpe Juggulem, which has a dynamic with a rich, powerfull and self-important new-style vampire who is very interested in a human girl who's mind he can't properly read, but who the story actually acknowledges as a psychopathic control freak, that makes it so hillarious when you realize it was actually written before Twilight.
Muses are rough.
I've been wrestling with uncooperative muses the whole week, bogged down in dialogue that's going nowhere at what's supposed to be a dramatic emotional moment! Arg, I'm supposed to be good at this writing thing!
Read Blood Red Road, found it a superior example of the post-apocalyptic YA boom. Very action packed, great heroine, book pulls no punches. Recommended since your library is sure to have it.
Started watching Castle, the detective show starring Nathan Fillion. He is a fun, fun actor, but other than enjoying his smile there doesn't seem to be much to make the show extraordinary so far. Still, I'm looking forward to future episodes. Fun side note: at work I found a book by "Richard Castle" with, you guessed it, Fillion's face on the back cover as the author. Reality and TVland had merged! I stood there in a state of confusion looking at this book. I suppose it's just a tie-in but for a moment there I was utterly flumoxed.
And I invented a new cookie: Take your favorite oatmeal cookie recipe, use white instead of brown sugar, and instead of cinnamon add zest of a lemon or two and a few drops lemon extract.
And +1 love for Heathen Critique.
Sir Terry Pratchett's already on record as having used a time machine to copy the idea of a wizarding school from Harry Potter, so he probably copied Twilight while he was there.
----
I recently finished reading The Wind in the Keyhole, a new Dark Tower midquel. Roland and company have to wait out a killer storm, and he passes the time by telling them about a mission he had as a young gunslinger trying to find a skinchanger (basically a werewolf with a lot more variety in its animal shapes). Part of the way through the story, young Roland tells a child witness a story about a boy going on a quest to save his mother from his abusive father. It's the first story-within-a-story-within-a-story that I've seen since The Sandman.
Another +1 for Heathen Critique.
Well, there was the House MD finale. Still processing that.
(And missing it already. NO MORE HOUSE.)
I'm working my way through Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon trilogy. I fell in love with her as a blogger (her journal is the funniest set of booklit posts you have ever read) and I was actually afraid to start reading her fiction in case I didn't like it as much as I liked her journalling. But I'm enjoying the trilogy....
I finally posted a thing about the 'friend zone' and why I JUDGE HARSHLY anyone who uses the phrase, as well as providing useful rules for those people who are just really hoping life can be boiled down to simple rules (like me! although my hopes are really thoroughly dashed by now).
I've taken an interest in magic realism in literature - if anyone has a favourite story or eight in that kind of garciamarquian style where everything is totally normal and realistic and then there are inexplicably talking spider people and no one thinks it's odd or rolls for SAN, I would welcome suggestions.
I'm also getting a run-up on Camp NaNoWriMo, which will not be the not-Jedi after all but will instead be about superheroes and acceptance and ableism and whether it's better to try to fix the broken system from within or tear it down from the outside and start over. So if anyone's got a superhero they would want to suggest, those are welcome too; I need to fill out my pantheon.
I *love* magical realism.
If you like Atwood, you may enjoy "Edible Woman" and "Surfacing", although those are some of the borderline cases where it may be all the protagonist.
Have you read Rushdie's "Satanic Verses"? I love love love that book and that DEFINITELY has the no rolls for SAN quality.
Alice Hoffman plays with magical realism a bit, I think. I love her "Green Angel" and "Green Witch" books, but that's not necessarily what you asked for.
I haven't read Satanic Verses, which is funny because it's the sort of thing one would think I'd be drawn to. I've only seen Edible Woman in stageplay format, which I'm guessing edited a lot out since I don't recall anything seeming particularly supernatural (but it was more than a decade ago).
To the bookstore posthaste post-work!
I hope you enjoy Satanic Verses; it's literally one of my favorite books of all time.
Edible Woman in stageplay format?? Huh! I would think that would be very difficult to write; it's a very... headspace novel.
I thought of maybe another one: Ellison's Invisible Man? I don't know if that's magical realism per se, but it's got that quality (for me) of feeling like there's this whole other world superimposed on the one I thought I knew.
@Makabit -
How's your code-fu? The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) publishes and maintains the ePUB standard for e-books. If you're okay with converting your work into valid XHTML and adding on the necessary navigation and metadata XML files as required by the standard, plus a mimetype file (which you can steal from any other ePUB), then you can roll your own electronic version of your book. That will make it easier to set foot inside several e-publishing locations, some of which may handle the conversion to other formats, lie Kindle. Maybe when Ana recovers fully from surgery, you can ask her about Pulchritude.
As for print publishing, well... there's a Print-On-Demand solution like Lulu that will make and bind the bok for you, but you'll have to price it higher to make a profit from them. It might be a good short-term solution until you can amass enough savings to send your book and a cover to a printer and make a few hundred copies. The no-frills options that will basically print what you send them will still cost a bit, but a lot less that the full-package services that include editing, cover design, and the rest.
So that's by far the cheapest solution - but it requires a lot of work on your part to do everything.
As for what I've been reading - it's mostly here, my blogroll, and the varied professional publications I need to keep up with for work. I'm working my way through a book called Dying To Meet You, which takes the Cyrano de Bergerac story and makes it about a young man finding himself while trying woo a literary girlfriend through the help of an aging writer who hasn't put pen to paper since his wife died.
I've got this post book-marked to respond to when I get back from surgery, because I have SO MANY THOUGHTS, but real quick: what do you mean by "doesn't own a Kindle"? Because *I* don't own a Kindle, but I'm not sure what you mean by that? Because I can see 3 different possible interpretations:
1. I want to self-publish an e-book but I don't want Kindle books on the subject because I won't be able to read them.
2. I want to self-publish an e-book but I don't have a Kindle to test it on.
3. I want to self-publish a book that isn't an e-book.
I can help with all those things, but they're different things with different answers if that makes sense. :)
I am SO OLD that I read "Satanic Verses" before it was famous.
Seriously, I found it on the New Books shelf at the library and thought it looked interesting, right in that brief moment between publication and fury. By the time I took it back, it was already a cause célèbre.
That being more than twenty years ago, I don't remember too much about it. I should re-read it, but the list of Things I Haven't Read Yet is alarmingly long.
We'll be thinking of you during your surgery and convalescence. Best wishes that everything goes smoothly, and don't worry about us.
I am rereading Wolf Hall so I can really effectively get Bring Up the Bodies (Hilary Mantel, who writes in an odd but not unpleasant style). Ana, you will probably enjoy these books if you are into the Tudors. (Note: I have always disliked More, so I like books where he is an antagonist. You might also enjoy Margaret George's Autobiography of Henry VIII.)
I am also reading some more of Carl Zimmer's books, and waiting for the newish Mary Robinette Kowal at the library.
Magical realism: Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, and also other books by Gina Nahai. It's different than Marquez, because she's Jewish Iranian, but I enjoyed it a lot. The Time Traveler's Wife might count, Murakami, some Jeanette Winterson.
Best wishes for your surgery, Ana.
I will have to check that out. I've no problems with More as an antagonist. :)
Seconding this. I want to like X2 so badly, and I enjoy the class changes and even some of the designs, but it irks me how deeply girly-slash-stripperiffic the outfits all are. I mean, there's absolutely nothing WRONG with girly and/or revealing outfits, but there doesn't seem to be a variety available and all the flesh on display makes me less than fully comfortable at times. Mixed feelings to the max.
I've got this post book-marked to respond to when I get back from surgery, because I have SO MANY THOUGHTS, but real quick: what do you mean by "doesn't own a Kindle"? Because *I* don't own a Kindle, but I'm not sure what you mean by that? Because I can see 3 different possible interpretations:
1. I want to self-publish an e-book but I don't want Kindle books on the subject because I won't be able to read them.
2. I want to self-publish an e-book but I don't have a Kindle to test it on.
3. I want to self-publish a book that isn't an e-book.
I can help with all those things, but they're different things with different answers if that makes sense. :)
Um...
1, unless I can download Kindle books onto my computer, which would be fine (can you? No idea.)
2, also true, but assume there are ways around that too.
3, I'd love to do print, but definitely want to do e-publishing as well.
I guess I mainly mean 4, I am very vague about e-publishing as I contemplate getting involved in it.
@Ana, You won't see this until later, but I thought about you a lot Monday, knowing your surgery would be later today (Tuesday, very early
@Will, I have recommendations for magical realism, a new favorite thing of mine to read.
I absolutely loved Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, but it is very weird. So ymmv. Also really liked Nalo Hopkinson's The New Moon's Arms; 2 by Sarah Addison Allen - The Girl Who Chased the Moon, and Garden Spells. Liked Alice Hoffman's The Probable Future. Kinda detested Steve Earle's I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive - but it was interesting. (Yay, LibraryThing! where I track everything I read these days...)
@Ana, that is, I'm thinking about you Tuesday, hoping things go well. Worry less, if you can. We'll still be here, whenever you've recovered enough to come back.
You can use Kindle books on your computer. Amazon has a program you can download to have kindle for your computer. The program is free, the program works.
http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/spring-2012/fiction-sic-him-hellhound-kill-kill-by-hal-duncan/
This made me so happy I can't even.
Ahmigad, that is art.
That's brilliant.
Makabit, have you been over to the Wishful Writers forums?
http://www.wishfulwriters.com/forums/
We've got a lot of starting out indie authors and there's some knowledge pooling. (I myself am in the middle of writing a self-publishing guide to post eventually, but I'm nowhere near done.)
If you don't mind reading on the computer, the Kindle app will let you read on the computer and there's a really good book on self-pubbing called "Let's Get Digital" by David Gaughran ($2.99, I think). I also strongly recommend doing your book-writing in Scrivener ($30, I think) since it has an epub export function that is pretty clean.
Send me an email or drop a note in the WW forums and I'll see if I can't help you get started. I know a lot, but I'm not sure where you want to start. :)
I met the game Mirror's Edge which I originally thought was amazing and wanted to recommend to everyone, but soon the lack of ability to manually save (it has a checkpoint system) made me wish harm upon the developers. Moreso when I realized that the engine has not just saving but also quicksaving by default and they had to actually disable that. They had to put in effort to make the game frustrating - not hard (which is something people look for in games), frustrating.
Initially I was going to try to solve the problem with cheating, which has some of the same utility as saving though it's much more inefficient in getting the job done, only to discover that the cheats, like the ability to save, were there but disabled. You could find the command, you could bind a key to it, but it would do nothing.
Having downloaded a third party program that implements its own cheats (two of them actually), I've managed to get back to liking the game, but damn would it have been better if they'd just let you save.
-
I returned to .hack//Sign after a month and a half of absence with a post starting on the third episode, Folklore, which touches on the internal politics of the Crimson Knights, the folklore mentioned in the title, and how random things remind me of Tim Curry playing Cardinal Richelieu.
I migrated over a few posts that originally appeared here. My discussion of the canon of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. My thoughts and some dialog related to the Star Trek: Voyager episode that, by consensus, doesn't exist. The Snarky Twilight version of what happens to Bella on the Streets of Port Angeles.
I wrote a long, rambling, possibly incoherent, post about the movie Godzilla versus the Sea Monster. I haven't gone back to look at that while fully awake so I honestly don't know what's in there. I know that some commentary on the idea that the monsters in the Godzilla series represent countries, with Godzilla originally representing America* but shifting to represent Japan as time went on, made it into a massive footnote. Also a Babylon 5 reference and how I would change the movie.
And I made an index of what I posted in March.
-
* Watch an early Godzilla movie, it Godzilla destroying Japanese cities? Probably still in the Godzilla represented America stage. So the theory goes. Actually, it's a lot more complex, but that gives you some idea.
I'm not sure it qualifies as magical realism (the weirdness isn't taken entirely in stride), but I'll recommend Vapor by Amanda Filipacchi. Part Pygmalion story, part skewering of rom-com conventions, it is dark and funny and very strange:
Vapor is the story of Anna Graham, an aspiring actress who one night saves the life of a stranger being attacked in the subway. The stranger, Damon Wetly, an unconventional scientist, decides that he will repay Anna’s selfless act by making her dream of becoming a great actress come true. In a twisted reworking of the Pygmalion myth, Damon abducts Anna, imprisons her in a house filled with experimental clouds, and spends months putting her through a grueling training regimen which allows her acting skills to reach unprecedented heights and Anna to achieve her Hollywood ambitions.
BUT WORRY IS WHAT I *DO*!!! Ha.
I can't remember why I picked up SV; I think I knew it was controversial and I wanted to read it. No, wait, I do remember -- it was recommended to me by a friend. Good call on his part, since I loved it immediately and immensely. I carried it around with me constantly for a year, marking and re-marking up the margins. That will get you some odd looks at a conservative Christian college, let me tell you. (The title is provocative.)
I've been replaying Final Fantasy X-2. I have... mixed feelings about this game: I like being able to change my class at will, but I'm not too thrilled about the fact that it comes across as "Final Fantasy dress-up" (ostensibly because the three PCs are female, and therefore the game needed to be as hyper-feminine as possible). The dialogue is pretty bad in parts, and the story moves pretty slowly in the first half of the game, but I like the world-building with the Den of Woe/Crimson Squad and the Via Infinito.
This is one of the few times where I care more about the side characters than the main characters. I already know Yuna and Rikku, and Paine is cool but her story is tied in with the main plot so I'm going to find out more about her whether I like it or not. I just really like seeing all the side characters from the last game getting little stories of their own.
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