Frances K R – Page 32

Like pulling teeth. With marshmallow pliers.

I have been picking away at a story. It is currently at four thousand words and change.

I would guess about thirty-eight hundred of them need to be rewritten, and of those, right now, I feel like it would be optimistic to say that only two thousand need to be burnt outright. Burnt. And there’s a subplot or merging course of events or what-have-you that I know how I want to involve but haven’t actually done anything with, and a creeping embarrassment at the prose and the setup, and…

I am torn right now between calling it off, hammering out a final scene so that there’s something to tear apart later, or sketching out a point form list of what I need to have happen next. (I am bravely putting off sinking into a funk of “oh my god I can’t do this”, since it always knocks my schedule for a loop, really.)

Have you been here? What do you do?

Alphas.

Since we’ve finished watching Leverage, I’m looking for a new TV show. A friend recommended Alphas, which I’d heard nothing about. Looked up a very quick summary–it appears to be people with low-level superpowers who are working to stop other people with low-level superpowers from being bad guys.

Having seen the first episode, I have to say I like it. Five of the six Alphas are very well-drawn; a little simple so far (which is fine for the first episode), but distinctive. The sixth is a deliberate cipher, so that’s fine. The moral ambiguity with Red Flag and Rosen’s superiors is the kind of thing I’d expect to come up with this setup, and I’m glad it’s being established so early.

Small spoiler and additional note after the cut:

Continue reading “Alphas.”

A bit of a dull day.

It feels a little like I’ve been wading through molasses. There are things I would like to have done that I am not ready to do, and other ones that I got distracted from and did not get done.

On the other hand, I did get the screens for the living room windows washed. And sorted out the natural gas leak from the meter without freaking out. And I updated someone’s website for them. Finished Black Wings, although I didn’t write a review for it yet. Got up at a reasonable hour. Dressed and left the house. Took out the garbage.

(It’s an “accentuate the positive” kind of day; or at least I am making it be one because I am trying to avoid the doldrums.)

(In relation to this: I will note that a Google image search on kittens noses flowers is occasionally a helpful stopgap. Some of them are so cute.)

Also wrote 500+ words, even if they are in serious need of revision. And I think I just got a twist in a short story, and I don’t know if it’s a good one or a bad one to use.

First book finished of 2013

Johnny Halloween: Tales of the Dark Season by Norman Partridge

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps oddly, I liked the one of the two straight-up non-supernatural stories in this collection the best. The titular “Johnny Halloween” is something I’d expect to run across in a decent noir anthology.

“The Man Who Killed Halloween” was well-done; it didn’t fit with what I was expecting from the book (non-fiction!), but it’s a decent and evocative piece. Together with Partridge’s introduction, it provides a thoughtful basis for the contrast between Ricks and the October Boy.

Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, this may be why “Three Doors” and “Treats” (which I’ve read before, along with “Black Leather Kites”) didn’t stand out for me quite as much, although they’re both good stories and would normally be the kind of thing I’d expect to be my favourites. The trio of Hallowe’en/Jack o’Lantern-titled pieces echo each other on the question of masks, and real monsters, and the deceit that lets the latter go unpunished, and their supporting each other makes them stand out above the rest.

(Please pardon the fact that this is both terse and a bit shaky; I’m trying to practice writing reviews, and I clearly need to practice writing reviews.)

/The Bleeding Edge/

The Bleeding Edge is a 2009 limited-run (500 copies) horror anthology published by Cycatrix Press. Since I’m having trouble writing, and managing to read, I thought I could at least use my reading as grist for some writing:

A solid collection with one weak point and a few very good ones. There was a distinct disunity of style and format (teleplays and scripts) that was actually rather appealing.

Continue reading “/The Bleeding Edge/”

/After Midnight/

The box store near our place is being bought out, so everything is on sale. This means it is possible to do things like buy horror DVDs for somewhat less than $2. Or, perhaps, an eight-movie collection for less than $5.

These are going to be terrible.

I have started with After Midnight, the standalone DVD. The frame story is about a certain Professor Derek teaching a course in the psychology of fear, and I am bravely resisting comparisons to Clive Barker’s “Dread”. We start with Allison (our protagonist) and her friend (you know, the protagonist’s friend… it’s an 80s movie, you can fill her in) going to class, with Allison explaining that she didn’t sleep well, and she has a bad feeling about the class they’re going to take…

Plot summary, spoilers, and brief rating follows the cut.

Continue reading “/After Midnight/”

Monsters and monsters and monsters, oh my.

Dinner out tonight (was lovely), involving a fluffy drink and a wonderful lamb shank (which I think was actually a bit light on the thyme, but then I am very partial to thyme) and much discussion of the Laundry Files series by Charles Stross. It’s British humour/horror, involving a government organization defending the world from eldritch monstrosities which are attracted by complex equations. Like spells. Or mathematics. I’ve read the first book, three of the four short stories, and some notes. The first book is the rockiest, but I think that’s actually pretty common–I can’t think of a series where I recommend the first book written as a good place to start.

Except the Narnia books. (Even with The Lord of the Rings, I would not recommend starting with the first book of the series. I would recommend starting with the prequel–that is, The Hobbit–and just… trying not to think about the jolly elves.)

Stopped at Chapters on the way back. I picked up Dodger and The Killer Inside Me on the same trip and am mildly amused by the contrast.

In case of needing some assistance unwinding for the weekend, I have found that this image (completely work-safe!) is very helpful. May not be suited for ailurophobes, but then again, I don’t think I know any.

Still life, with cats.

Not much to say tonight, but I’m awake and can’t get back to sleep and am trying very hard not to pick up the latest Laundry novel because if I do I’m going to finish it rather than go back to sleep.

I went downstairs for a warm drink, and was cornered in the kitchen by three sadly hungry cats. “Feed us,” their eyes said. “You weren’t doing anything important, so feed us–and then hang around and adjudicate to make sure Newcat doesn’t steal all the food in Mediumcat’s dish, and Oldcat gets hers allllll to herself. You didn’t want to try going back to sleep, did you? Look, we’re cute. Feed us.”

(Given that it’s actually kind of important that we find out ASAP if Oldcat goes off her food again, I actually do need to keep an eye on her when she’s eating to see if she’s eating her food, or if the amount’s just decreasing because one of the other cats dove in when she wandered away for a bit. And given that she’s really too skinny, whenever she indicates that she wants food we give her food, because then she will have more food and hopefully put on some weight. And what this all boils down to is that I spent twenty minutes in the kitchen watching her mumble away at her wet cat food when I would much rather have spent five minutes in the kitchen making myself a hot drink and then ten minutes upstairs poking at the computer before going back to bed.)

(But she’s eating, so I don’t really mind.)

Lucifer Tailypo.

From Nolan, via Stephen King:

Nothing is so frightening as what’s behind the closed door, Nolan[1] said. You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. “A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible,” the audience thinks, “but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall.”

Every time I see this picture of Lucy–

lucy-100feettall

–yeah, that one. 🙂 Every time I see that picture of her, in my mind, I imagine a gleeful scratchy voice, specifically Isme’s voice from The Emperor’s New Groove, cackling out “–and behind the door was a bug A HUNDRED FEET TALL!”

That’s a clever girl, Lucifer. You’ll upgrade to a thousand feet any day now.

Also, I figured out what I really wanted her middle name to be yesterday, when we were bringing her back from the vet’s. It’s Tailypo.

So she is Lucifer Tailypo, and she is settling in beautifully.
—
[1] William F. Nolan, at the 1979 World Fantasy Convention.

Black and white and read all over.

I noticed a certain common colouration in the books I had to hand:

Covers of /Lies and Ugliness/, /Bedlam/, /The Weird/, and /Breed/.

I’m cheating a bit with this picture, since both the hardback cover and the dustjacket of Breed are shown. (I took the dustjacket off because something about the paper just feels subtly repellant–some weird combination of sooty and greasy.) On the flipside, I’m not including The Rivals of Frankenstein, which continues the black-white-red theme, so it all balances if anyone’s keeping score, which I sort of doubt.

Am mildly amused by this, especially since the other books I am reading, or have just finished, or have just started, have a black-and-white thing going for the covers. (Apparently the subtraction of red takes you from horror to crime, who knew? Although Bedlam is an exception to that.)

Not feeling well today; I’m hoping it’s just after-effects of the flu shot, since those should clear up more quickly than anything I might have actually caught. Managed to get a little cleaning done, though, and get out of the house to pick up groceries and return library books. (Mildly annoyed that one of the books I have on hold has been in transit for just over a week, now, and is still not at the local branch. It’s a Lovecraft collection, so I suspect I could find the contents on Gutenberg, but I find I really prefer physical copies of anthologies and collections. Screens and ereaders work best for single works, for me–novels or novellas or standalone short stories, any length is fine, just not several short stories.

Probably turning in early tonight; the nap after the vet’s was nice, but I’m still wiped.