Wandering

Nearly a week into the new design and I’ve put up a single post. Tch—typical.

I’ve decided once I’m done with the editing, I’ll post The Wanderer here on the website. There are a few good reasons for this. One, it’s a novella, which is a notoriously difficult genre to sell. Second, it’s a fairly straightforward zombie story, making it a niche market of a niche market of a niche market (novella–>horror–>zombie).

Finally, authors such as John Scalzi have found that putting some of their books online has helped increase their visibility among readers. Of course, having basically no readers at all, I suppose posting the story can only help, or at least, can’t hurt.

Here’s my question, though. Would people prefer getting the story in sections, or would you like to have just one long post? Any preferences?

Slogging through the mud

Melancholia I by Albrecht Dürer.

I’m currently stalled out on a story. I’m writing a scene where two soldiers—well, space marines—are knowingly walking into the lion’s den.

Sometimes in the course of writing a story you just get stopped cold. It’s not writer’s block per se; in this case, I just don’t want to describe their actual trip into the lion’s den—the ABCs of how they go down the corridors and so forth. This often happens to me in my writing; a sequence feels forced or, worse, boring.
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Spider-Man 3

Twenty things I learned while watching Spider-man 3 (spoilers!):
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Gwoemul (The Host)

Until recently, the last movie I’d seen in the theater was Pan’s Labyrinth; before that, Casino Royale, and before that, I think it was Pirates of the Caribbean 2. I don’t get out to the theaters much, so it was a bit of a coup when I managed to see two movies in the theater last weekend. One was 300; the other was the South Korean monster movie Gwoemul (“The Host”).

Ever since I was a wee tyke, watching Creature Double Feature on Boston’s WLVI 56 on Saturdays afternoons, I’ve been a fan of monster movies. Godzilla was always my favorite, but I had a soft spot for King Kong, Frankenstein, Dracula—all the movie monsters detailed in those old Crestwood orange hardcover books you used to be able to find in your local library. I also enjoyed films such as the original black-and-white The Thing and, when I was older, John Carpenter’s 1980s remake.
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300

In a deleted scene of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Faramir (played by David Wenham) looks at a dead Easterling (Eastern mercenaries hired by the villain Sauron) and muses to a fellow warrior, “The enemy? His sense of duty was no less than yours. Do you wonder what his name is? Where he came from? If he was really evil at heart? What lies or threats led him on this long march from home, if he would not rather have stayed there, in peace?”

In 300, David Wenham plays a badass Spartan who suffers from no such crises of conscience. In the world of 300, the only good Easterner is a dead Easterner.

300 can be best described as a mixture of Braveheart and Gladiator. The essence of 300 seems to be contained in a statement by King Leonidas (Gerard Butler): “The world will know that few stood against many.” And that’s pretty much the long and short of it—a small number of troops fights a larger number of troops. Curtain.
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Action!

My life, as of late, has consisted primarily of working, playing videogames, and…well, reading on occasion, though I just had to give up the book I was reading because the writing wasn’t very good. It was the second time I’d tried this writer. The first time it was one of his early novels, so I thought I’d give him another shot, but no joy; again, the awkward, stilted writing confounded me. I won’t name the author in the incredibly unlikely event that I ever make it in the industry, but I doubt I’ll be trying him again anytime soon.

I did recently read a novel that I enjoyed immensely: Armor by John Steakley. It’s loosely based on Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, with the same set-up (humanity is in an intergalactic war with a race of spacefaring giant insects, and the plot battles are fought with soldiers wearing powered armor).
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Gears of War

Like many gamers, I first encountered the first-person shooter genre with Doom. As an adolescent who grew up playing Predator in the backyard, I was immediately mesmerized by its blend of science fiction, monsters, and blowing the crap out of stuff with badass weaponry.

I followed up Doom with many of the other great FPS games?Quake, Quake II, and Star Wars: Dark Forces. And of course, the big shooter during my college years was Goldeneye, and my roommate and I played a lot of Perfect Dark.


A skirmish between security and the paparazzi at TomKat’s wedding.

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Veronica Mars – “Spit and Eggs”

I’m only about a week behind on this, but the first story arc of the third season of Veronica Mars wrapped up last week, ending the story of the Hearst College rapist in a twist was a bit too much like Scream.

For those who have never heard of Veronica Mars, it’s probably my favorite show on television right now (yes, even more than Battlestar Galactica, which is a better show but not quite as fun). The show stars Kristen Bell as the eponymous hero, who in the first season of the show is a junior in college attempting to solve the murder of her best friend while dealing with her new status as a social outcast among the rich jerks of her southern California high school. Her gumshoe tendencies come from her private investigator father, Keith, played to perfection by Enrico Colantoni (Elliot the photographer from Just Shoot Me).

It’s now the third season and Veronica is a freshman at the fictional Hearst College, meaning we’ve got a at least four seasons before Veronica Mars becomes just another show about a private investigator. The writers have taken the intriguing approach of skipping one major story arc in favour of three smaller arcs over the course of the season. I suspect this was at least partially to make the show more accessible to new viewers, with three separate jumping-on points at the beginning of each arc. The show’s on break right now and returns in January, so if you’re one of those people who’s able to watch a show without going back and watching the earlier seasons on DVD (sadly, I’m not), then this would be a great time to hop on the Veronica bandwagon.
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Block Writer

I’d intended to work on Vengeance Upon the Dust today (incidentally, I’ve come to dislike that title and will probably change it), but as usual, I found myself too distracted to get anything done. After watching the second half of Hitch, going to the convenience store, and spending some time with DG, I sat down at my computer, ready to let the creative juices flow.

Soon I was surfing Wikipedia and playing Doom 3. Such is the plight of the aspiring writer in the twenty-first century.
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Dawn of the Dead (2004)

So I finally watched Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. It was interesting to watch Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead after having recently watched all of Romero’s films, as well as Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later…. I enjoyed the latter, though I admit it didn’t really feel like a zombie film, and the same could be said for Dawn of the Dead ’04. Other than the fact that the “Infected” of 28 Days Later… can be killed like any human while the zombies of Dawn have to have their brain destroyed, there’s hardly any difference between the portrayal of the monsters—they’re fast-moving, violent, cannibalistic savages.
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