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December 4, 2008
12:32 pm
Dang it. For those of you following my misadventures with my The Winter Children project, book two was originally supposed to be called Wolfmother instead of Children of Winter, Children of Wolves, but I scrapped that when someone pointed out the Wikipedia page of a certain Australian hard rock band. Now my plans for Book III being called The Wild Hunt are probably going to be scuttled because, lo and behold, that’s also the name of the new Hellboy arc that just kicked off this week.
What’s annoying about this is that I knew that – as a big Mignola fan, I must have read about that new title months ago, and just filed it away in the back of my head, tagging it as something cool, and then when I was brainstorming for Children of Winter, Children of Wolves it popped in there. As Hellboy himself would say, “Crap.”
Still, it’s not the end of the world. I like Children of Winter, Children of Wolves better as a title than Wolfmother anyway, so I’ll probably come up with something better than The Wild Hunt eventually. Right now we’ll just consider that the working title, shall we?
Yes, it’s an old blog tradition in which I like to participate. When I remember. Which, admittedly, isn’t often.
November 28, 2008
5:05 pm
Woo-hoo!
I have no illusions about the quality of those 50,000+ words, but just being able to bang out a first draft of the follow-up to Bones of the Angel feels great. The new book feels very much like the Empire Strikes Back of the series so far because this is the book where everything we thought we knew at the end of the first book is turned on its head, things go absolutely crazy for pretty much the whole book and then it ends on, if not a cliffhanger, then in a sort of “in transit” moment. Not everyone makes it out alive, some of the characters might wish they weren’t alive, and things are very much now up in the air with a number of my characters – because they’re growing and changing, which is what is supposed to be happening with characters as these books continue. I have a nasty feeling that some people who read my stuff aren’t going to be terribly thrilled with what’s happened to a couple of people, but that’s okay: I already have an idea about how the third book, The Wild Hunt, will begin. I might hold off on starting in on that one until I can get some professional interest on these first two, but man does it feel good to just be writing again, to find out that I haven’t lost my touch.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Woo-hoo!
November 26, 2008
9:31 am
Now I’m a big fan of the gray lady, and I’m also a big fan of long, complicated sentences, but Manohla Dargis should be taken aside and given a strict talking-to for this doozy in today’s review of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia:
Though “Australia” is narrated by a young boy of mixed race, Nullah (the newcomer Brandon Walters), the illegitimate son of an Aboriginal mother and a white father, who is trying to escape the authorities, and while it opens in 1939, shortly before World War II blasted Australian shores, the film isn’t a bummer.
My mother always taught me that, while complexity can be a good thing, the most critical aspect of writing is to not jar the reader out of their flow and make them back up to reread a sentence. I was quite happily zipping along this review until I hit that number, and though I can parse it quite clearly now, I had to reread it twice to figure it out. Yeesh.
November 26, 2008
12:39 am
After a hu-u-u-u-uge push tonight, I’ve managed to get my NaNoWriMo novel more or less back on track. Still a ways to go yet in too little time, and good Lord why won’t the NaNo system update its tracker already, but I’m now at 41,355 words where I was at 36,764 when I woke up this morning. For the mathematically challenged, that’s a gain of 4,591 words. As a great cyborg detective once said, wowsers!
Can’t quit yet, though – I still have 8,645 words to go, but I’m feeling much more confident now that it might be doable after all. Woo-hoo!
Also, on a side note, old SXSW friends should be sure to wish our not-old friend Molly a very happy birthday today. She’s just dinged 37 (insert inappropriate Kevin Smith joke here) and is still showing us how to rock academia in your thirties. This is especially appreciated in my own personal camp, as I also spent a small chunk of time today revisiting the Ph.D. problem. Long story short, when I do get to be Dr. Long, I may very well be about the same age. So you go girl – thanks for being so awesome!
November 25, 2008
8:24 am
Here’s a tip: if one is considering doing NaNoWriMo, there are a number of dumb things you can do. The first is attempting to do DrawMo at the same time, although that’s really not that big a deal at all, especially for those of us who think in pictures as well as in words. No, the really dumb thing to do is to attend a conference near the end of the month, especially one as awesome as Futures of Entertainment, because that will suck up not only your time, but also your brain cells. Placing any remaining neurons in the service of a journal for which you are doing some guest editor-type of work is also a bad idea, and following that combo up with another dose of intellectual awesome in the form of a lecture/workshop on transmedia and adaptation from 7-10 on the Monday night immediately afterwards means that your Tuesday morning writing time is completely blown out with fatigued bleary blinking at the monitors and saying blirf? Blorg? Bleeeahhhh.
So, yes. Blirf. Blorg. And most definitely bleeeahhhh.
November 21, 2008
5:58 pm
“Here we are,” Michael said in a low voice as we filed out of the tunnel and gathered around him, all of our necks craning as we stared up, up and further up. The tunnel must have led us into the mountains, all right – because right then and there we sure seemed to be inside of one. The chamber we were in was massive, easily ten times the size of the cavern outside of the catacombs, but that wasn’t the most impressive part. What really took my breath away, what was so completely unreal, was what was set into the stone. Spread out above us, branching through the cavern and running through the solid rock were roots, huge towering root structures the size of redwood trunks, easily thirty feet across. They spiraled through the chamber as it stretched up into darkness overhead, leapt across the space like footbridges, and crisscrossed back and forth to a main, towering taproot that stretched up from the center of the chamber like nothing so much as Rapunzel’s tower. And the icing on the cake? The bit that really sent my mind over the edge? Carved into the roots were windows, tiny little portholes rimmed with wood and stone edgings and composed of intricate quilts of stained glass panes – and the windows were lit. The result was a beautiful patchwork rainbow of color that bathed the chamber with a warm, beautiful light.
“It’s the root of the world,” Simon said quietly. “Michael. You found the root of the world.”
(from my NaNoWriMo novel, Children of Winter, Children of Wolves)
November 21, 2008
10:04 am
A quick note: people interested in following C3’s Futures of Entertainment 3 conference in real time should hop on Twitter and follow http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23foe3. There’s a whole mess of current students, alums, consulting researchers, partners and interesting folks twittering away over there.
Those of you who are physically camped out here in the Bartos Theater at MIT with us, be sure to check out our Backchan.nl setup for realtime feedback and questions at http://foe3.backchan.nl.
November 21, 2008
9:44 am
November 19, 2008
9:40 pm
Adding further fuel to the tempestuous insanity that has been this week, I’ve had two somewhat interconnected papers accepted to two more conferences coming up this spring! First is the 2009 American Comparative Literature Association Conference, which takes place at Harvard March 26-29. This overlaps a bit with the tail end of the 2009 Game Developers Conference, so I’ll take off from that a little early to make it back for ACLA.
Second is the Fairy Tale After Angela Carter conference at the University of East Anglia in England, which is going on April 22-25. The eagle-eyed among you will notice that this also has an overlap, with MIT6 (April 24-26), so I’m planning on taking off from the Fairy Tale conference early so I can catch the latter half of MIT6. Good grief – literally!
What’s fun about these is that the first paper, for ACLA, is titled “From Horrorism to Terrorism: the New Weird, the New Horror and the War on Terror”, and the second one is titled “Fairy Tales in the New Weird, the New Horror and the War on Terror”. If anyone out there is concerned about self-plagiarism, don’t be – they’re two separate papers with a shared core body of reference research, where the first one will describe how the New Weird and the New Horror have emerged out of a post-9/11 cultural mentality, and the second will sketch out the basics from the first paper and then drill down into how new fairy tales like Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth fit specifically into that framework. Now I’m wondering what I could do to shift the titles around a bit before final publication to show that they’re linked, but separate. Hmmm…
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