kaleidotrope

Everything is awesome

I had a pretty good day.

I’ll admit, I’ve been ignoring this blog somewhat of late. Since the beginning of June, some twenty days ago now, I’ve only posted here five times. And three of those posts were lyrics quizzes. While those are (relatively speaking) my most popular posts, they’re not exactly personal or content-heavy.

But there just hasn’t, frankly, been a whole lot of content going on in my life right now. There’s lots to do at work, but the mad rush that marked the beginning of the year has slowed down, as I’ve handed books over to production, and I’ve even managed to take a couple of days off this week. (Today, Friday, marks second day of my four-day weekend.) I expect lots of small crises to continue between now and the fall, but I’m hoping it won’t start getting really hectic again until sometime in October. (I’m going to Banff for two weeks at the end of September, so it had better got get hectic then if it knows what’s good for it.)

I’ve been writing some, but struggling with it, knowing where I want to go with a couple of stories but not really sure how to get there, and struggling also with that thing I always do, editing too much as I go along. (This is why I have too few finished first drafts, but it’s a hard part of my brain to turn off.) My weekly free-writing group didn’t happen last week, hence the lack of a sixth post here for June.

But again, today was a pretty good day.

I woke up around six o’clock and took the dog for a walk, then decided instead of going back to sleep, I’d finish reading Caliban’s War by James A. Corey. (The version on my Kindle said I only had about ten percent of the book left.) The Expanse books have really been terrific so far, and I have to thank Heather for recommending them. (I believe she’s already well into the just-published fourth book in the series, so no spoilers please.) I may take a short break, just to re-orient my brain and read something else, but the third book, Abbadon’s Gate is high up on my to-read pile. (Not literally; it’s on my Kindle. The way the second book ends, there was no way I was not going to immediately buy number three.)

I went for lunch this afternoon, indulging in a local sushi and Japanese buffet place I really like. Between the spicy tuna rolls, raw ginger, and wasabi, my sinuses have never been so clear. But I think I settled that I don’t care for raw octopus. The texture is just…no. Still, it was a good meal.

Then I came home to fold laundry and watch The Lego Movie. You know, as one does on his day off. The movie was a lot of fun, pretty clever, and I say that as somebody who’s never really be a Lego kind of guy. (I mean, I played with them, a little, when I was a kid, but Construx were always more my jam.) If you haven’t seen it, it’s where this post’s title comes from. (If you have seen it, sorry for getting that stuck in your head again.)

And I wrote. Of course, it wasn’t any of the short stories I’ve got percolating, but the silly fake advice column I’m revisiting for Kaleidotrope, but it felt good to get my brain working like that again. And though I’ve had no feedback on the two fake advice columns I’ve written so far — last spring and summer — I’m actually strangely proud of them. They, along with the horoscopes — which are surprisingly tough to write — represent the kind of thing I was to do more of with the zine.

Anyway, it was just a really relaxing yet productive day and I enjoyed it. I don’t know that I’ll have a lot more to post here tomorrow, but we’ll see if I can’t get at least a couple more posts in before the end of June.

Sunday’s come round again

Last week was a quiet one at work. I didn’t even realize until Friday afternoon that it marked the beginning of summer hours, largely because I’m not taking part in them this year. I came back from lunch and there were maybe only a dozen people left in the office. It was a little unnerving, but at the same time I kind of like the quiet.

Yesterday was my father’s birthday, so we went out to eat, then had cake and presents. I spent the rest of the day, or at least a part of it, copyediting stories for next month’s new issue of Kaleidotrope. Then that evening, after the cake, I watched The Purge, which I cannot recommend. It felt a little like two very bad movies ganging up on one potentially okay movie. What it lacked in an understanding of basic human nature…it also lacked in basic movie-making technique. I think I knew going in that I wasn’t going to like it, and that I was going to be confused about all the reasons why by the end. And, in that respect, I guess I wasn’t disappointed.

This afternoon, I saw Edge of Tomorrow, which was much better. It’s not brilliant — it’s the military sci-fi video game crossed with Groundhog Day you didn’t know you wanted — but I read the book it’s roughly based on (All You Need Is Kill) last week, and it’s at least as good as that.

I also wrote this with my weekly writing group:

“There you have it, gentlemen. The upside potential is tremendous, but the downside risk is jail.”

“Rich people don’t go to jail,” Manheim said. He laughed, but it was clear he wasn’t joking. “We have plausible deniability if the results of the tests become public.”

“It’s not the results I’m worried about,” said Burke. “It’s the tests themselves. We’ve already run afoul of a dozen regulations just by meeting here, discussing this. You can’t pretend they don’t send people to jail for conspiring like this.”

“Oh please,” said Manheim, “there’s no reason to start throwing around ten-dollar words like conspiracy. The inner planets wouldn’t be able to prove anything — “

“And we’ve already established that the outer worlds don’t care,” said Wilkins, breaking his long silence. “We wouldn’t be presented with this opportunity if they did.”

“Exactly,” said Manheim, even though all three of them knew he’d have agreed with Wilkins on anything.

“We have a rare opportunity to test the good doctor’s theories on Circe,” Wilkins added, “unfettered by any planetary regulation. The population is still small, and so projected losses are only — what was it again, Roderick?”

“Three million,” said Manheim. “Give or take a point-five.”

“Perfectly acceptable losses,” said Wilkins.

“And that’s only if things go belly-up,” said Manheim. “The genetic modifiers in Dr. Breton’s formula have been considerably refined since that fiasco on Ganymede. And you’ll recall,” he added, seeing that Burke was still unconvinced, “no one went to jail there except a few lab techs.”

“It’s still a risk,” said Burke.

“Of course it’s a risk,” said Wilkins. “What new business venture isn’t a risk?”

“Just think what happens if the formula works,” Manheim told Burke. “And if we control that. Even if all we get is a planet of Breton’s super-soldiers? Think what we stand to gain.”

If you’ve read any of James S.A. Corey’s Expanse novel, you can maybe see where I’m ripping them off paying homage to them. Not every free-writing exercise is going to mine gold.

Monster Movie Mayhem (or, Suddenly It’s Sunday)

Yesterday morning, I decided to get a haircut and then catch the very early matinee of the new Godzilla movie. Thanks to time being fleeting and not infinite — seriously, who do I need to talk to about that? — I wound up only doing the second of those two things. Which why right now I’m still in real need of a haircut but I did get to see a giant lizard smash through giant buildings.

And you know, Godzilla is kind of an odd movie. I’d watched the original only a week ago, for the first time, and while I hadn’t loved that movie, it also hadn’t dimmed my interest in seeing the remake. (Interest that was sparked, really, by what I still think is a well done trailer.) But ask me about the movie now I think I can only tell you this: Godzilla’s very good in it. He’s probably the best actor. And that’s not even really a joke.

The giant lizard is definitely the most compelling presence in the film — a very shouty Bryan Cranston and not-even-a-little-shouty Ken Watanabe notwithstanding. But it’s altogether possible that that’s by choice. David Ehrlich of the Dissolve argues that the movie is ”
the first post-human blockbuster,” and I have to say, he makes a fairly convincing argument:

The film’s evocative closing shot serves as a resonant reminder that just because we’re the planet’s predominant storytellers doesn’t mean that the story is necessarily about us.

Then again, even if you don’t buy the argument, or you don’t think it’s enough to account for (or overcome) the blandness of some of the characters, I’m not joking when I saw Godzilla is very good in the movie. If nothing else, it’s some pretty terrific CGI.

I can definitely not say the same for the next couple of movies I watched yesterday.

Heather has already written up yesterday’s “Bad Movie Night,” wherein a bunch of us willingly subjected ourselves to Storage 24 and the improbably named Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark and joked about them both over Twitter. I’m tempted to just direct you to her write-up, as she’s accumulated a lot of the best tweets from last night’s double-header. I’ll say this: neither movie was especially good, but both were wonderful fun to watch and laugh at. And, seriously, this happened. No movie in which that happens can be all bad, however hard it may try.

And besides, it’s less about the movies themselves — which by design are terrible — and more the great fun of watching them with friends.

Today, with my writing group friend Maurice, I saw X-Men: Days of Future Past, which was decent enough summer fare, enjoyable, but not remarkable. I do like the way the AV Club’s review describes it:

It’s a loose adaptation of one of the all-time great Marvel storylines, with Professor X and Magneto using Shadowcat’s powers to send Wolverine’s consciousness back in time to 1973 so that he can help their past selves set aside their differences and avert a dystopian, Sentinel-run future by preventing Mystique from assassinating Bolivar Trask. Readers who are confused by any or all parts of the preceding sentence should take it as a warning.

Honestly, though, there’s not a whole lot more to say about the movie. It does a pretty decent job of marrying the earlier X-Men movies, prequel and all, and is probably the only comic book movie we’re likely to see for awhile set largely in the early 1970s. But it’s not often very distinctive or inventive, even if it is decent enough fun.

In between all this movie watching, I finished reading and responding to all of my Kaleidotrope submissions. Which is a lovely feeling. I still have two issues to edit before the end of this year, but for the next seven months I won’t have to read another story I don’t want to accept. I didn’t run the actual stats for this past reading period, but I’d say out of roughly 250-300 submissions, I accepted maybe ten. Which, actually, seems maybe a little high.

I also wrote this:

They’d made planetfall in winter, the team leader said, which explained the hardiness of the local population but also the scarcity of diverse genetic stock. Only ten dozen of the original settlers had survived that first season, and through the next fifty years, intermarriage had left them fit for the harsh conditions on the planet’s surface but prone to illness, especially when traveling outside the valleys in Icarus’ (relatively) more temperate zones.

“Why Icarus?” one of the geo-engineers, Burke, asked. “In the myth, didn’t Icarus fly too close to the sun?”

“As near as we can tell, that’s local irony,” the team leader said. She glanced again at the planet’s specs and her notes, which were not extensive. “The settler’s original ship was thrown off course after miscalculating the gravitation of the smaller of the system’s binary stars. A joke,” she added, “though obviously not a great one.”

“Isn’t this like the third Icarus we’ve been called in on in as many months?” asked the pilot. Grace Wong didn’t always attend these preliminary meetings, but team leader was glad to see her nevertheless. “Don’t these people have any imagination?”

“In all fairness to this planet, they crashed before either Icarus Prime or Icarus II were colonized.”

“And we’re pulling them out anyway,” said Burke, “right?”

“Right,” the team leader said. “The Ic — the planet has become untenable. The system’s primary sun isn’t dying, exactly, but they’ll be outside a shrinking habitable zone in less than another generation.”

“Wait,” said Wong. “What does ’isn’t dying, exactly,’ mean? Is it going nova or not?”

“Not exactly,” the team leader said. She’d been worried about this, but better to get it out in the open now before they ported to system. “Command has reason to believe that whatever’s happening with the sun is artificial, neither a natural nor man-made process.”

“Command?” said Burke. “Since when did we start taking orders from — wait are you saying Alterians?”

“We have reason to suspect their involvement, yes.”

“And you’re just telling us this now?” said Wong. “You want me to fly us into beastie-controlled territory and you didn’t even tell us til now?”

“It’s a little more complicated that,” the team leader said. “And there’s another reason why we have to evacuate Icarus.”

I can’t say I much like it, but sometimes you just go where the prompt takes you. (Even if, in this case, I didn’t get the prompt itself in at all.)

I plan tomorrow mostly reading, maybe writing some. It’s a three-day weekend, which is nice, and hopefully today’s nice weather will last a little while longer.

Sunday

I watched Godzilla this weekend. Not the new one, which I thought I might go see after my writing group today, but the original. It was…okay, I guess.

I also watched Assault on Precinct 13 — again not the remake. It, too, was pretty much just okay. Not a classic, but pretty decent, and certainly not my least favorite John Carpenter movie ever. (That would probably be In the Mouth of Madness. Favorite would probably be The Thing or Halloween, but Prince of Darkness has really stuck with me in the months since I’ve seen it.)

My writing group ended up not happening, so I spent the afternoon reading Kaleidotrope submissions. I have a total of eight more stories left to read, then several e-mails (mostly rejections, alas) left to send.

What else? A bird tried to land on my shoulder yesterday in the backyard. That was pretty weird.

Sunday

I spent a good part of yesterday sitting out in the backyard reading Kaleidotrope submissions, before it rained. I’m getting closer to being caught up, but I still have somewhere shy of a hundred left to read. Most of those are from March, which doesn’t make me feel quite as bad about not getting to them yet. But I still don’t want to keep people waiting too long, in part because I’m likely to reject most of them.

(That’s just the way it goes. I’d actually be in trouble, or booked solid for the next few decades, if I loved everything I received.)

Last night, after dinner, I watched 12 Years a Slave. I think I’d had all the common worries about the film: that it would be a downer, too brutal, too much. And it is terrible brutal, and often difficult to watch, but it’s also a terribly powerful movie with some wonderful, heartbreaking (and rightly Oscar-nominated) performances. (Lupita Nyong’o is the only performance that won the Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress, and the win is a testament to how affecting she is in the role, given that she’s actually on screen for relatively little of the movie.) The movie is surprisingly beautiful, compelling not just for the violence and cruelty of slavery on display but the spirit of those who endured and survived it.

I’ve now seen six of the nine movies nominated for Best Picture last year, and this is the first time I thought the film wasn’t just really good but actually a Best Picture. (Although Gravity has some terrific technical filmmaking, and arguably the best movie-making of the bunch.) I suppose now I’m compelled to watch the other three (Philomena, Nebraska, and Her). Oh woe is me.

Today, I sent out more Kaleidotrope rejections and watched a bunch of Parks and Recreation episodes. (I’m way behind, in the third season.) I also went to my weekly writing group, and I supplied the free-writing prompt. It was born out of this Twitter exchange last night with Maurice (who’s another third of the writing group):

And this is what I wrote:

[I’ve decided to expand and revise this, so I’m removing it from here]

I like it, and I think I might be able to do something with it — other than let it continue to spiral into just more and more plot — but the ducks will probably have to go.

The best of Stan Rogers, though, that’s staying put in my playlist.