Monthly Archives: July 2010

I’m back

Sorry I have been away a few days, nothing major just busy and enjoying regular sleeping again. I’ve started passing chapters over to my sweetie-wife for final copy-edit. I hope to have a beta-read version of Cawdor finished in about 4 weeks.

I spotted this bit of good news over at Digital Bits. It looks like visionary  Director Guillermo Del Toro, (Hellboy, Hellboy 2, Pan’s Labyrinth, and more.) will be making his dream project, an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s, At The Mountains Of Madness. It is also reported that James Cameron will be producing. That puts real muscle behind the movie. (And if you saw the American version of Solaris you also know that Cameron is willing to let a director be while acting as producer.)

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Glorious Sleep

So today they came and took away the blowers and the heaters (And part of the wall and the ceiling as well.) So hopefully tonight I will be able to sleep properly.

I have had a headache of some kind or another for two days now — perhaps three it is hard to tell — and I hope that a good night’s sleep will put me back in the right.

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No Sunday Night Movie This week

With the condo full of fans and blowers there was simply no way for me to watch a movie in comfort this Sunday night.  I did watch Alien with the audio commentary switched on, but nothing else. Hopefully to blowers and fans will be removed tomorrow. If they are then I will get my first good night’s sleep since Thursday tomorrow night.

Today has been a  day of headaches and irritations. However, I did finish the ink-on-paper edits to the first draft of Cawdor and tomorrow I will start entering those edits and writing the 14 or so missing scenes.

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Engaged in less than fun stuff

We had water damage to our condo, not a lot but real damage. (A leak from teh unit above ours.) For the entire weekend we have heaters and blowers drying out walls.

This has made our home less than it usual inhabitable site. It is loud and hot. Do not expect a lot of posting from me this weekend.

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Amazing CGI

Follow this link to the you tube of the newest Tron Legacy trailer. (Unveiled this week at San Diego Comic-con.) It is astoundingly mind-blowing that digital ‘de-aging’ they have managed to do to Jeff Bridges. I am stunned.

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Hmmm Not as finished as I thought I was

So I was doing more ink-on-paper edits to Cawdor and continued making a mental list scenes required the establish things I used int he payoff at the end of the book. Originally I had figured I needed three or so scenes to plug my narrative holes. (a Narrative hole in my terminology is quite different from a plot hole. A plot hole is a problem that if not resolved destroys the structure of the story. For example is the floating mountains in AVATAR are floating because they are dense with unobtainium, why aren’t the terrans just grabbing these floating mountains and boosting them to orbit? A Narrative hole is a missing scenes that helps fully explain the events or motivations of the characters, but the logic of the story is still sound.)

Anyway I though maybe another 2-3 thousands words to fill in the narrative holes. Today I wrote down my list of scenes and found it was 11 scenes long. (Mainly because a background character stepped up to increase the tension and now she has to be back established to fulfill that function.) Now I figure I may need anywhere from 10 to 15 thousand words to properly full out this story.

I have the room, the manuscript was on the small side and the story will be stronger for it, but *sigh* there are miles to go before I sleep.

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Busy

So I have been hard at work on Cawdor. Putting down the ink-on-paper edits, planning the 1.5 narrative revisions, and I expect it will take me another month to get it ready for my sweetie-wife’s copy-edit pass.

On an older novel front, I got a reply from an agent for the first 10 pages of my previous novel. In all likelyihood he will pass, but hope does spring eternal.

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Sunday Night Movie:Ikarie XB1

This past Sunday was a bit different for my Sunday Night Movie feature in that is was a movie I watched together with my Sweetie-wife.

After writing on Saturday about the late lamented Creature Feature from my youth, I went on line to see if Planet Of The Vampire had been re-released on DVD again. (nope, not yet.) However I found the trailer for the movie at YouTube and of course I had to give it a go. While I was watching the trailer for Planet Of The Vampires, I spotted a clip for something from a ‘soviet-style SF film’ about exploring a derelict spaceship. It fascinated me and I wanted to watch the movie it came out of.

There were 198 comments on that YouTube post and a great deal of them were flame-wars over the fact that the film was Czechoslovakian and not Soviet or Russian. However there were very few posts naming the damned movie. Eventually I did discover the film was called Ikarie XB-1 and was made in 1963.

A quick searched showed that the filme was released on DVD in 2006, was out of print, could not be rented and used copies were going to sum too great for me to buy. (I’ll spend money on movies I know, but its rare that I will buy a movie I have never seen unless I get it dirt cheap.)

By the time Sunday came around I laid my hands on a copy of the film and me and my sweetie-wife watched it.

The film is about the flight of the first inter-stellar craft, Ikarie XB-1, en route to Alpha Centauri. (I am told by my lovely wife that Ikarie is Czech for Icarus.) The navigation must have been off on this trip as the round trip will take the ship fifteen years from earth’s perspective but just 28 months by ship-time. Sounds like the ship is going very nearly the speed of light, but round trip to Alpha C would then be about 9 years, not 15 Earth time.

Anyway the ship is manned by forty people, both men and women, single and married. The film is entirely about the trip and the hazards they face. It was a very serious, though flawed, attempt to do dramatic action and not wild action in an SF environment. There is an attempt at showing a different culture than what was standard in 1963. The crew are dealing with a  number of interpersonal issues and the stresses of the close-quarters living.

The derelict spaceship sequence that tripped me onto this title is from about the middle of the movie and really was quite nicely done. It was something much better than what we are normally used to seeing from SF of the late 50s and early 60s.

That said the film was on the slow side and I think the mountain the writers and film-makers set out to conquer was beyond their skills.

Still, I am glad I got a chance to see it. It is always interesting to see genre films of the period made from a decided non-western viewpoint.

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