Just published – The Dame Don’t Whimper

The sixth novelette from my String City Mysteries series has just been published by 40k Books. Any publication day is exciting, but this one’s particularly special. The first five stories in the series are reprints, having originally been published in Realms of Fantasy magazine. This one’s brand new.

The Dame Don’t Whimper starts, as all good gumshoe yarns should, with a hail of bullets and a little green man. Hot on the trail of a missing person, our down-at-heel detective leaves behind the dubious comfort of String City and crosses the River Styx to Little Carthage, where the rabid bankers eat you alive.

But it isn’t the bankers he’s worried about. Between meeting old flame Rosie (who’s got cute pointy ears and more curves than a geometry textbook) and fending off Martha du Chasse (the most intimidating client he’s ever had), the private investigator with the fancy coat soon realises this whole case hinges on something far more terrifying.

Dames.

Click here to read an extract from the brand new String City Mystery, The Dame Don’t Whimper. Or throw caution to the wind and go straight to the store:

• Download The Dame Don’t Whimper for Kindle (Apple and Nook versions coming soon)

 

Revisiting Cinefex (19): Gremlins, Buckaroo Banzai, Dreamscape

It’s okay to read Cinefex in the bath. The worst that can happen is the pages go crinkly. But you’d better take care with this one because if you drop it in the water there’s no telling what might come out. As if you needed any more clues, the giant close-up of Gizmo on the front cover will confirm that the big film covered in issue #19 is Joe Dante’s 1984 hit Gremlins. Those cute Mogwai eyes are there again on the back cover, peering out from inside a cage in the school science lab. Inside are articles on three movies, covering the regular 72 pages.

• Gremlins – Never Feed Them After Midnight (article by Paul M Sammon)
• Across The Eighth Dimension With Buckaroo Banzai (article by Nora Lee)
• Dreamscape – What Dreams Are Made Of (article by Adam Eisenberg)

Cinefex is all about straight reporting. Its devotion to objectivity allows it to treat all films – regardless of budget, box office success or artistic merit – with the same non-judgemental attitude. In the land of Cinefex, the playing field is always level.

All the same, you’ll often find that the essential character of both a movie and its VFX artists infiltrates the text. For example, Don Shay’s Blade Runner article is meticulous and multi-layered, while Adam Eisenberg’s piece on The Day After hums with nuclear tension. Likewise, Paul M Sammon’s discussion of Gremlins is packed to the rafters with anecdotes about the inventive craziness that abounded on the set of this landmark creature feature. I dare you to read this one without cracking a smile.

 

And … relax

This morning I finally drew a line under the first draft edit of The Frozen King. At just a smidge under 65,000 words the MS is now a little longer than it was, and closer to where I thought it was going to be when I started. I still don’t want to tell you too much about it, except that it’s a murder mystery.

Editing went fairly smoothly. Several chapters in the middle were badly broken (well, malformed from the start if I’m honest) but the fixes weren’t hard. There was a lot of connecting the dots: making sure all the clues and misdirections work as they’re supposed to and most of all ensuring the final solution is fair and theoretically guessable … but not too guessable. Whodunnits demand a tricky balance of conjury and clarity, and the only way I’ll know if I’ve got that balance right is when someone actually reads the damn thing and tells me if all the plot machinery. Which is what happens next.

One final note: as I’ve mentioned before, this is the first novel I’ve written using Scrivener. I’m pleased to report the software is unobstrusive and intuitive, and does a great job of simply letting you get on with the task at hand. Highly recommended for all writers, both fiction and non-fiction, in any genre or capacity.

 

Writing a novel is like this

Writing a novel is like all these things:

• Weaving a carpet
• Hacking out a sculpture from solid marble
• Juggling scimitars whose blades have been honed to razor-shapr perfection
• Getting jiggy with someone you love
• Embarking on a long journey in a foreign land without map or compass
• Bringing up a child
• Building a replica of the entire city of New York out of matchsticks
• Exposing yourself in public

Editing that same novel resembles the following:

• Scrubbing furiously at the carpet in the vain hope of getting rid of the stains
• Wondering what kind of glue you need to stick broken pieces of marble together
• Counting your fingers and finding you don’t have as many as you used to
• Going again
• Retracing your steps through what turned out to be a minefield
• Doing a DNA test to make it’s really yours
• Discovering matchsticks are flammable
• Covering yourself up in embarrassment and hastily running for cover

Any of these sound familiar to you? And which ones have I missed?

 

Revisiting Cinefex (18): Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Star Trek III

The front cover of Cinefex #18 is a real sizzler, showing as it does one of the hapless victims of the ruthless Thuggee cult descending into a lake of fiery lava. The image is one of the many impressive models created by Dennis Muren’s team at Industrial Light and Magic for Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. A second ILM crew, supervised by Ken Ralston, was responsible for the image on the back cover: a glorious shot of the USS Enterprise approaching Earth’s orbital spacedock from Leonard Nimoy’s Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Both of these 1984 films are discussed in depth over this issue’s 68 pages.

• Hell and High Water (article by Robert P Everett)
• The Final Voyage of the Starship ‘Enterprise’ (article by Brad Munson)

Where do you go after Star Wars? That was the question being asked by the staff at Industrial Light and Magic after they’d finished running the marathon that was Return of the Jedi. According to ILM production supervisor Warren Franklin, ‘Everybody was real down after [Jedi], wondering, “What will we do next to top that?”‘ The answer was to pull off the remarkable feat of handling two major blockbusters simultaneously.

The first of these was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the less acclaimed but still phenomenally successful sequel to Spielberg’s runaway 1981 hit Raiders of the Lost Ark. In Franklin’s view, Temple of Doom was ‘a real step forward for [ILM]. It was not as much work [as Jedi] … but there was more diversity.’

After a brief overview of the film’s development, Everett’s article gets into the meat of how ILM tackled its opening sequences including Indy’s Trimotor flight over Asia and the high speed road chase through Shanghai. The road chase is interesting in that it was shot with the principals in a car on the ILM stage – no high-tech effects, just an old-school live action shoot using what Dennis Muren describes as ‘lots of smoke and flashing lights.’

 

Hollywood’s magic sweatshops

I’d intended this morning to post the next of my Revisiting Cinefex articles, but it doesn’t seem quite right to be waxing lyrical about the good old days of visual effects when the current industry is in such turmoil. I might live a long way from Hollywood, but even I’ve sensed the shockwaves radiating out from the epicentre of the latest earthquake to hit the west coast. I’m talking about exploitation.

Put simply, many visual effects workers are working impossible hours for low pay and no access to health schemes or pensions. The problem’s not industry-wide – this article in the LA Times suggests that some of the big players like ILM and Sony Imageworks are pretty responsible employers, although recently Digital Domain have come under fire for a scheme under which interns desperate for that all-important first screen credit actually pay to work for the company.

Now, there are people far more involved than me tracking the situation far more effectively than I ever could, not least VFX Soldier and Scott Squires. And I daresay there are plenty of folk who’d argue that VFX providers aren’t the only businesses struggling, say, to compete with cheaper international suppliers. I just think it’s sad that an industry which thirty years ago was soaring on a wave of innovation and artistry is turning into a consortium of sweatshops.

 

Crime, fantasy or both?

My wife tells me I’ve been in a funny mood this week. Slow as I am on the uptake, I’ve only just realised why. I’m in that strange writer’s limbo called floundering between manuscripts. As a result, my small human brain has been slowly shedding the last project and trying on the next (a process similar to trying on new clothes before you buy).

My most recent project, as I mentioned only last week, is a crime novel called The Frozen King. I’ve put the first draft aside so I can gain a little perspective on it before editing. I think I forgot to mention that it’s the first novel I’ve written with Scrivener, which was a joy to use by the way.

To distract myself from the annoying voice of that MS calling ‘Edit me, edit me,’ every few minutes, I’ve been dipping fingers into my favourite bubbling-under projects. Some are hotter than others, and each one tastes different. Here’s the list:

• The Haunted Tree is the follow-up to The Frozen King. A big part of me wants to launch straight into it, but I’m fairly sure it would be a bad idea to even consider that before the first MS is in a more polished state.
• String City Apocalypse is a full-length MS I finished recently, a novel developed from a set of weird fantasy detective stories known collectively as The String City Mysteries. It’s in good shape but the first chapter’s broken and needs fixing.
• Black Dog is, I think, a novella. You’d probably classify it as horror or dark fantasy. Either way, it’s one of those stories I’ve been circling for years, trying to find the key to unlock it. I have a reasonably coherent story in my head, and an opening I quite like. Here’s the latter:

Later, I learned that was a term used by Winston Churchill to describe depression. That made such pictures in my head: the stalwart bulldog stat black dog esman prowling the English countryside while German planes threw down bombs on his head, all the time tracked by a silent, night-dark hound with eyes like red coals.
The thought comforted me, because I had a black dog too.

Black dog is older than Churchill, as I subsequently found out. Samuel Johnson wrote to James Boswell about him way back in the eighteenth century. ‘What will you do to keep away the black dog that worries you at home?’ he said. I’ve no idea what tricks Boswell had up his sleeve to combat the beast. The same as the rest of us, I suppose: hide when you can, run when you must.

You can keep going back through history and folklore. Look deep enough into the dark times and you’ll see black dog there. He was friend to witches, the faithful companion of Old Splitfoot. He was Cerberus, howling at the brink of Hades. He was the Hound of the Baskervilles. Black dog roamed then as he roams now, more than a wolf and so much bigger than anything man can endure.

So strange, then, that when I first met black dog for myself, I knew none of this. I was fifteen years old, and my friends Max and Paulie were too. Of the three of us, Max and I made it through that summer and got to be sixteen. Paulie stayed behind. It was a summer full of ocean storms, the summer we found the undertow.

The summer I created black dog.

• Finally there’s The Music of the Spheres, a colossal fantasy series that’s been threatening to kill me for some time now. As with Black Dog, I think I may just have found the way in.

I haven’t been entirely idle during this week of indecision and procrastination. There is the day job after all. I’ve also managed to write half a review of Cinefex #18. So if you remember that summer when you went to see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom before crossing the road for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, come back soon to get the skinny on all those juicy visual effects.

Meanwhile, I think I have actually decided which of the five projects listed above is going to get my full attention for a while. I just haven’t decided if I’m going to tell anyone yet.

 

The whodunnit learning curve

In the past, I’ve been known to blog about manuscripts as I’ve been writing them. If you’re a regular subscriber, you’ll know that I’ve been keeping my current project more or less under wraps.

I still don’t want to say too much about it, but I am here to record the fact that at 17:19 GMT I wrote the final word in the final chapter of the first draft of the novel I’ve been working on since just before Christmas.

That last word (in case you’re interested) is out.

As I think I’ve observed here before, finishing a first draft is a funny old business. There’s elation, yes. Relief too. Exhaustion. A strong desire to drink red wine in large quantities. All sorts of other urges I should perhaps keep to myself. There’s also a nagging suspicion that all those words you just strung together may not quite add up to the coherent narrative you had in mind when you wrote that first word all those months ago.

And, lurking underneath all those feelings, is the sure knowledge that, when you return to the manuscript after the essential cooling-off process known in the trade as Putting The Bloody Thing Aside For As Long As You Can Stand To, the hard work of editing will really begin.

I’ve already let slip this new book’s working title, which is The Frozen King, so I can safely blab that out again. I’m happy to tell you it’s a short novel (first draft just under 62,000 words) and that the story is essentially a murder mystery – not something I’ve written before. One of the great pleasures of getting it to this stage has been slowly crawling my way up the whodunnit learning curve, which proved to be rather steeper than I’d anticipated.

That’s all for now. Before I get too deeply into the red wine, however, I will tell you that the first word of the book (in case you’re interested) is Screams.

 

The Croning by Laird Barron

In this debut novel by award-winning short fiction author Laird Barron, nothing is quite what it seems. A Lovecraftian mélange of passion and hidden powers, the story of The Croning is told through the eyes of septuagenarian geologist Donald Miller who, given his advanced age and frequent memory lapses, makes for a pleasingly unreliable narrator.

After a series of unsettling and occasionally horrific set pieces, the narrative flits backwards and forwards through time as Donald recalls various expeditions to far-flung corners of the world, where strange encounters may – or may not – have happened. Donald’s memories reveal the secrets of his curious life one patient step at a time. At their heart is a series of strange truths about his wife Michelle and their twin children. Once completed, the jigsaw puzzle of their intertwined lives proves to be one of cosmic proportions.

The great strength of this novel is Barron’s ability to spend many pages building a detailed real world for his complex characters to inhabit, then to skew it deftly sideways with sudden flashes of macabre invention that show an altogether inhuman otherworld skulking scratch-deep beneath its surface. For this reason, to read The Croning is to experience a slow burn, but it’s one worth succumbing to as all those apparently untrustworthy threads weave themselves into coherence.

Barron’s considerable success with short fiction to some extent informs the novel’s structure. The prologue – an irreverent retelling of Rumpelstiltskin that manages to be simultaneously witty and chilling – might almost stand alone, as might some of the later vignettes. Everything here is ultimately relevant, however, from the meticulously interlocked narrative to the well-developed characters (in particular the extraordinarily sensual eighty-something Michelle) and the vivid prose, all of which combine to create a novel which is more than the sum of its parts … and which promises to linger long after reading.

Laird Barron is the Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Imago Sequence and Occultation. His first novel, The Croning, will be published by Nightshade Books on 8th May 2012.

• Laird Barron’s blog
• The Croning – Nightshade Books

 

Revisiting Cinefex (17): Ghostbusters, The Last Starfighter

Clear your mind! Try not to think of anything! Uh oh, it’s too late – look what popped in there … it’s the Stay-Puft Marshmallow man from Ivan Reitman’s 1984 blockbuster Ghostbusters. It’s a fine image of one of the unlikeliest bad guys in movie history, and it’s on the front cover of issue #17 of the visual effects journal Cinefex. Gracing the back cover is a still from The Last Starfighter, Nick Castle’s sci-fi adventure from the same year. The picture shows the film’s Gun Star spaceship in all its computer-generated glory. Inside we find two articles spanning 72 pages.

• Ghostbusters (article by Adam Eisenberg)
• The Last Starfighter – Imagery Wrought in the Total Forge (article by Peter Sørensen)

When I first saw Ghostbusters in the cinema, back in 1984, I didn’t ‘get’ it. There’s a particular flavour of American SNL humour that doesn’t always survive the journey across the pond to the UK. Plus, the movie had been so hyped, with that infectious Ray Parker Jr song playing endlessly over the radio, that maybe anything was going to be a disappointment.

Or perhaps it was just me because, second time round, I loved Ghostbusters unreservedly, and I’ve loved it ever since. How deliciously spine-chilling, then, to read up afresh on the miracles wrought by visual effects maestro Richard Edlund and his team during the making of this classic supernatural comedy.