I’m starting to feel a little better after spending two days doing nothing but crawling between the bed and the couch. I think I was sick or something, maybe just really tired. So much for getting lots of things accomplished on my days off.
Just so I don’t feel like a douchebag, here check this out. It’s 3:am Magazine, good source of flash fiction. I think I’ll submit something, soon.
I thought that, rather than trying to come up with some kind of a post that makes sense and might be entertaining to read, I’d slap up the first page of script for a few comics that ought to be upcoming.
While it may look like I’ve dropped off the face of the Earth to you mere mortals, I haven’t, I’ve just been writing like mad whilst my day-job becomes increasingly demanding. I think it’s going to start activly robbing me of my precious bodily fluids on Monday.
If that does happen, you will need to entertain yourselves with these comics:
When you get tired of graven images and want to rest your eyes with pages of text, but your comic quotient hasn’t been filled, Sequential Tart’s always a good read.
Yes, I’m well aware that just dumping half of my bookmarks out is a shitty excuse for a post. You can expect it to happen a lot!
Here’s a short story that I wrote a while ago. I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to sell it, so I figured that I might as well post it here. It’s not a terrible story, but it’s not the best thing I’ve written. I don’t think it’s very marketable either (several years of putting it on the market hasn’t turned up roses, anyway).
Forgotten
By Brendan Peveril
It all started some time ago. That night I dreamed of horses; their crashing hooves and the hot pressure of their breath. There was no escaping them. Their barrel chests crushed every barrier and obstacle I could put between myself and what they carried.
The horses brought War. (more…)
Around this time of year people start talking about where scifi is going (Ellis is a good example of someone talking about it, but it’s mostly been through his email list). Maybe not people you talk to but, trust me, people are talking about it. Even if examining things like this closely isn’t all that important to you you’re going to recognise the difference between the world that produced Startrek and the one that produced Bladerunner. Hell, look at the difference between episodes 4-6 and 1-3 of Starwars. Fiction is culture, and thus an important piece of the picture.
So, I find myself wondering, ‘what’s the next step?’ All of the old subgenres are dead and we need something new. I’m not really sure what exactly, but I have a feeling that it’s something in my peripheral vision that I’m not looking at quite closely enough. The of the matter is, though, the moment it’s defined, it’s over. It happened with cyberpunk, with the seventies’ new wave, it’s even the case with the Mundane SF stuff that everyone is so excited about right now. The act of defining a genre establishes the boundaries and kills the fun (and the possibility) of exploration. It’s the same deal with everything, really. Most of the important impressionists did their best work before impressionism was really define. That’s not to say that it can’t be fun to read a new book written in a dead genre, or even profitable to write one, it’s just not doing anything new which is, fundamentally, what sci-fi should be about.
So what does that mean? It means that all of the jerkoffs who sit around talking about genre drift and trends (myself included) should leave that to scholars and define the next genre by writing it. Unless you’re one of the people who wants the next big subgenre to be re-tellings of StarWars, I don’t really recommend writing that.
Anyway, that’s what I say, but who’s going to listen to me?
Nobody.
I originally wrote the following as part of a short story.
And so I found myself back in the land of my birth, that green and red turd floating in the gulf of St. Lawrence. It’s a quiet place, Prince Edward Island, the safe kind of place you want your kids to grow up. It has its own kind of people too, the kind of insulated xenophobes you can only find somewhere like that. When I was a lad, after telling her about how I’d gotten a prestigious scholarship to NYU so I would soon be moving to New York, a friend’s mother actually asked me, “Why would you want to go there, buddy? It’s not here.”
I had no idea how to answer that. Honestly, I still don’t.
I should try selling that to the PEI tourism bureau or something.
Just threw up something I thought of at work this morning. Nothing heavy
ed. It’s been pointed out that this makes no sense if I don’t point out the link to the wants page over on the right there.
So, a while ago I was discussing with a friend how unnecessary it is to have a camera in your cellphone. Here’s a (slightly tainted by memory and lying) transcript of what happened.
“It’s silly,” she proclaimed, “I don’t need a color screen or a camera in my cellphone.”
“Really,” I countered, “have you used the camera? I found at first that I didn’t use it, but then when I realized that I had a camera in my pocket all the time I started using it.”
“I tried using it a few times, but I don’t need it.”
Biting my tongue to keep from chastizing her for stating the conclusion as a premise in an argument, I pressed on. “It’s fine to say, ‘I don’t need it’ now, but what’s next? Are you going to say that about the next gadget? What about the cellphone winky that follows that? Not integrating new technology into your daily life is a slippery slope. You don’t need the phone-cam today, but in a few years you might find that you’re the future equivalent of the crazy guy who’s still watching his 13 inch black and white television. ‘I don’t need colour! I already know what colour everything is.’ You don’t need to be the first person to buy every new widget that hits the market, but be careful when you dismiss anything. You don’t want to be that guy, do you?”
I’m surprised that anyone will talk to me anymore too.
So I haven’t updated in a few days. This is because I’ve encountered someone who has voiced interest in optioning a screenplay by me, and I’ve been wandering around in a fog mumbling things about fairy tales and writing little notes that make no sense (”Who is at the pokergame?”) on bits of paper and loosing those same bits of paper. I’m not good for much, the prospect of getting paid seems to drop my IQ by about 80 points. Have you ever tried to get anything done with an IQ of 13?
Anyway, the main bit I’m posting about: In the past couple of days I’ve heard good songs from both Guster and Cake, two bands I usually hate. What’s up with that? I guess their latest albums are probably worth checking out.
… that had a recurring element that I’d forgotten about. After relationships have ended I’ve had dreams where some guy shows up with a bunch of charts and a big scoreboard showing me the various values of the things that made up the relationship. In the end they were all added together to show my net personal growth. I’d gain points for happiness I’d earned, some points for suffering and pain. I’d loose points for undeserved happiness, unneccessary pain, and major points for being a dumbass. In the end I get a score, kind of like experience points, I guess.
This dream wasn’t about an actual relationship, though, it was about a relationship that only existed in the dream. The theoretical girlfriend seemed kind of familiar, like she might have been based on someone real, but I really don’t know who it was. I was leaving her for no particular reason, to rekindle a past failed relationship.
I was getting negative points on this one.
This probably just stems from my roleplaying days, trying to break things down into scores and numbers so that people will make sense.
Beats the nightmares, anyway.
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