Jun. 13
3:30 PM
Beastly Odds and Ends on a Dreary Sunday
I've recently come to the slow and sigh-summoning conclusion that what I've been doing with one of the main characters in my new project is wrong, wrong, wrong, and so I'm trashing the last few chapters I wrote. Better I figured it out now rather than another ten thousand words down the line, and I'm frankly relieved that I got her character wrong as the tone of the book was becoming downright bleak and now things are looking up again, both tonally and in terms of my own enjoyment in writing the damn thing. Before I suit up to salvage any good language scrap from the last five thousand words I thought I should mention a few things of note around here, as I'm liable to be down for some time.
First, Jeremy L. C. Jones interviewed me, along with my fellow contributors Molly Tanzer, Marie Brennan, Karen Everson, Geoffery H. Goodwin, and Carrie Vaughn to celebrate the publication of Ekaterina Sedia's new anthology Running with the Pack. It's a round table sort of interview, and while my confederates come off as far more articulate and thoughtful than I you can still glimpse the fumblings of something resembling coherence in my answers. Huge thanks to Jeremy, and a big middle digit to everyone else for making me come off so poorly by comparison.
Second, I also contributed to the Shared Worlds Writing Camp Bestiary that Jeremy put together some time ago that I utterly failed to mention around here. It's a really neat bestiary, and in retrospect I regret trimming some of the details I'd originally included in my entry but so it goes--the idea is for the participants in the camp to take these beasties and run with them, so the more creative gaps they have to work with the better. Personally, I'm fond of Nnedi Okorafor's entries, especially the Mutatu.
Finally, I've recently watched The Wolfman remake and Drag Me to Hell, both of which have pretty hilarious representations of Roma but only one of which is really worth the price of admission, and that's the more offensive of the two so there you go. I also read and loved Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munro, Laird Barron's Occultation, and Amanda Downum's The Drowning City, reviews of which I've posted togoodreads. I also tried reading a book that I wound up despising, but the more I write the less inclined I am to badmouth other authors on the internet, even if I do think they're grossly overrated hacks--and I'm a grossly overrated hack, so you know this unnamed author must really stink the biscuit, no?
Right, I better get to stripping these chapters but if anyone out there has a book or film to recommend I'd love to hear it.