Ahead of the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (which is the best title evar IMHO) the usual luminaries in the press have been talking about the title with anticipatory glee. It was while listening to this commentary I came across the piece of intelligence that Temple of Doom was both, apparently, the darkest of the three and also the one that underperformed at the box office (relatively speaking).

The two factors were then linked and the radio commentators moved on to other topics.

Got that everybody?

Darker tone = box office poison…

I think both points are a little specious to be honest. I think despite its rollicking action clothing Raiders is pretty hardcore ending the way it does. I think what may have been a little more relevant to the lower box office of ToD was that in this episode you had some signs of the bad sequel - Short Round being the key one. Also it was actually a prequel which meant, oh my gosh, no Nazis. Also the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail are recognisable artifacts where as the weird glowing stones of wallamalloo are not.

In short (round) I think if you wanted to see what undermined Indy and the Temple then you might want to go a little further afield than just assuming people turn off when the tone is darker.

It seems everyone and their dog has a podcast these days. I once attempted the practice and it wasn’t too bad but I was miles from regular contributors and the whole enterprise became a little too much like hard work. Personally I listen to Mamo! regularly because I am a movie geek who loves amateur speculation on how a title is going to perform business wise. The podcast is recorded by two Canadians Matthew Price and Matthew Brown and has been going now since the release of Batman Begins… however many years that is.

I have also been known to take a look at RPG podcasts, although people tend to ramble in these quite often and there’s a lot of them.

I’m keen to avoid podcasting like blogging. I’d like to put out, if you like, “seasons” of a particular cast so those involved know what they’re getting into. I’m also not sure what I would like to podcast about. It would seem that there is more of a need for a self-publishing podcast than, say, yet another gaming podcast but I believe I have more of an “angle” on the latter. I also would like it to be project for myself and Mrs. Monkey - although there are quite a few “Mr & Mrs” podcasts out there where rambling seems to be de rigeur. It can be homespun but often it’s just people talking about things that you don’t care about because those things are relevant to them…

Anyway, those are my first thoughts. I’ll see how they shape up.

I continue to read Republic. Look out for that review. Have a good week folks!

Currently in the process of reading Charles Sheehan-Miles’ alternative history “Republic” with review to follow. To say that the volume is controversial in topic is to be mild. The volume details the fictional account of a second American Civil War occasioned by the repressive legislation and economic inequalities occasioned by the War on Terror and globalisation of economy respectively. I don’t want to slip into a review here but the subject is obviously a raw one for any American reading it.

Even with the Atlantic distance I can feel the Western concerns raised by the increasingly paranoid legislation intended to deal with a shadowy indistinct enemy, the terrorist. In Britain we have other economic concerns than globalisation per se, economic migrants are a hot topic in the UK tabloids. I can only imagine what would happen if someone wrote a novel about the collapse of British Society occasioned by resistance to increasingly worrying government actions and increasingly bigoted racist polemic.

But is the mass media’s desperation to please everyone blunting it’s ability to effectively cause controversy? The BBC and Channel 4 like to push product as “controversial” but until I dug into Republic I don’t think I had a full grasp on the concept. Republic is, at some level, rather upsetting but not in a bad way, almost in a necessary way. It is raw and that means that it is at some level manipulative, it’s a button pusher. I think that this is actually one of its strengths…

But I am almost reviewing. I will step back and give a considered view once I have finished the volume.

I just think that it’s important to sometimes come face to face with upsetting thoughts and unpalatable ideas because otherwise how are we to deal with them? If nothing else my latest review volume is providing food for thought.

The Book: Distant Cousin by Al Past

Review Category: E-Submitted requested review.

The Blurb: A girl who speaks an extinct Indo-European language shows up at an observatory in West Texas warning of disaster headed for Earth. She claims to know this because she has been studying Earth from the moon for 60 years. Obviously she’s crazy, and they kick her out. But the government watched her land and chases and captures her. Running for her life, she makes some odd friends who help her devise an outrageous plan to get her message across. If it doesn’t work, she’ll die along with millions of others. If it does, what then? That’s only the beginning…

Preview Available: Yes indeed there are some short cuts of prose on the website.

Would I buy this? It’s SF. I’m not sure I read a whole heap of alien stuff but I did buy K-PAX so shows what I know. Maybe, in other words.

The Product: I received a PDF reviewer’s copy but the PDF typography was indistinguishable from a commercial publication. So I would take that as a guide. The whole product’s pretty darn nifty in a production values way.

The Nitty Gritty: It seems like another age when I started in on Mr. Past’s novel. It was, in fact, the last time I had access to a laptop and I managed to get the whole way through “Book One” in that volume before I found myself preoccupied to too great a degree to carry on. Although I did not feel that the novel was one I was never going to finish it has taken me a while.

So Book One is pretty decent, decent enough to finish and want to read more. It details the arrival on earth of alien girl Darcy to warn the interstellar hicks of impending meteor based doom. Not spectacular and revolutionary, admittedly, but pretty good stuff, especially once the style slowed down.

As usual the book would have benefited from an editor’s steering hand. It starts out in a blaze of mannered thesaurus-bashing prose that is quite sickly. Once it recovers from this start it settles into a perky economic style that keeps its head down and runs for the finish at a fair old pace. Overall Book One comes in as a pretty well crafted novella.

And so, all this time later, on to Books two and three (although from the look of Mr. Past’s website Book three is actually the basis for the beginning of volume two and from there confusion may grow so I’ll go no further). In the short novella Book two the plot takes a heavy slug veering away from juggling Darcy’s personal life and her SF adventure into a pure exposition of her integration into earth society and her budding romance with journalist Matt Mendez.

To say that this is an extended meander is to be kind. Basically Book two could have adequately been summarised in about a paragraph with nothing major being missed.

Here is where the crux of the story’s problem comes in. The main character has no flaws to speak of. I mean there’s a token effort at making her emotionally distant but that’s not really an Achilles Heel per se. Darcy is stronger than us, faster than us, brighter than us, nicer than us she is all things to most people. If she hadn’t decided to slum it with Mr. Mendez then we wouldn’t even have known about her supposed emotional distance.

Even Mr. Past revolts at this in the end, dispatching a party from the homeworld (or technically the ancient earth colony) who present Darcy and Matt with some difficulties. These are quickly resolved as most of the party are just as nice as Darcy and the one who isn’t is both barking and mentally feeble. So despite the fact that he is stronger, faster and meaner than everyone on the planet he is tricked into falling out of a flying vehicle, much to everyone’s relief.

If this is sounding a bit like someone wrote down a daydream then, well, that’s because it is. The dramatic tension in this volume is trace and what exists is shooed out of the door at hyperspeed to stop the pleasant fantasy becoming hard work.

By the end of the book I was about ready for not reading any more ever. It’s not that the book is bad it’s just that it comes right down at the bottom of the giant list of readable books. There is no hook and no incentive to come back for more and that is a crime that is inexcusable.

Buy this if thrilling plot twists and turns make you nauseous and believable characters are something you can do without. Otherwise I can’t really in good conscience recommend this book.

The editing of Starfall is reminding me more and more that writing a novel is like building a bridge over a huge chasm single handed. You start safe on one side of the chasm and able to confidently construct the beginning of the bridge to a high standard. Generally speaking building some kind of pier out over the middle of the chasm is not too much of a problem either. The real test comes in how far your pier goes towards the other side as to whether you’re ever likely to finish.

From about halfway through the process becomes a mad, perilous dash to get to the ground on the other side of your bridge before the whole enterprise takes a header into the chasm. Even if you make it the end of the bridge is likely to be less than satisfactory on a quality level. The most important thing is that when you come to spruce up that hastily thrown together final phase you support your efforts by working on making the pier section even more secure.

Essentially, you might get a feeling that you hit a proper sticky patch round about 40,000 words in but the roots of what’s missing are usually to be found much much earlier. One of my major problems is that I can kind of half feel that I would like to use a particular event in the narrative to talk about something to do with a character but realise I haven’t explained enough of the character’s back story in order to proceed. These are the things that need remedying earlier in the text.

I don’t know of many novelists… make that any… who write a patchwork of scenes and then connect them all together with bits of narrative string. I know people who have tried this, they are, by and large, unsuccessful. Not that I think this approach is totally unsound just that it is difficult in the extreme without superhuman powers of organisation. No, most people just start at the beginning and keep plugging away until they reach the end. Until someone comes up with a better narrative patchworking tool we’re all going to have to keep building those bridges.

On family business.

I had a chance to finally finish reading a review book, the SF novel “Distant Cousin” by Al Past. I will post a review when I can spare the time. So one task down an undisclosed number left to do.

I optimistically brought my Matrix Ultimate Collection with me in the hope of reviewing the series and catching those few bits and pieces of extra that I missed. Chance would be a fine thing. The more level headed Mrs Monkey saw me packing the shiny green box and asked me why I was taking it. I explained that I thought I would have a few spare moments and she just nodded.

Actually I would have had time on the train and then some except that when they say “airline style” seats they really mean it these days. I seriously think that I was in some danger of deep vein thrombosis on that train journey.

So I got this the new laptop last week on Thursday and it’s taken about this long to even get it near to a usable state. I had to disable Norton and put a sensible anti-virus and firewall on the machine. Also I had to get rid of an annoying welcome screen, load up a bunch of software and verious other bits and bobs. All that and have a birthday party, sinusitis and various other things.

But now it’s all starting to come together.

Expect me to be around a bit more regularly.

See you all soon.

So it’s my birthday tomorrow and providence in the shape of the beautiful Mrs. Monkey has delivered unto me a laptop. I know these things are supposed to wait until the day but two factors came in to play. First, do you know how long it takes to make a new laptop useable? Not ten minutes that’s for sure. Second, I think everyone agreed that as the only one to have indepth knowledge of computers I should really select my own and the shopportunity was there to be grabbed.

Anyway, the practical upshot of all this is that:

1) I can start reviewing properly from pdfs again. Being able to slap the PDF on the laptop and sit with it in a quiet corner is a necessity.
2) I will be able to blog more regularly.

The fact is if you can only do this from two locations all the time you’re not in those locations you, well, you can’t do it at all. I didn’t realise what an impact laptop computing would have on my site.

So thanks to anyone who has hung in with me over this lean period. Hopefully I can get some frickin’ serious work done now and then blog about it endlessly.

Go me! *is a stupendously happy monkey who is very lucky to have such a wonderful mrs*

You can’t really say you have not been neglecting something. Because if people have noticed you neglecting it then you probably have been. But you didn’t know you were because you were distracted. That’s how neglect happens.

Although I have been thinking about the site I have not actually ventured into it for a few weeks. It has come to that time of the year for domain and hosting renewal. The domain renewal was a modest £12 ($24 USD approx) and so that’s not a problem: leostableford.com belongs to Leo Stableford. All is well.

The hosting.

Ah, there’s the rub. We’re talking nearly £100 for that and I just don’t have it spare. The hosting is coming due in about three weeks.

I’m wondering, therefore, whether to beg, borrow and steal for it for my birthday or to take something a bit, er, freer and lose the dedicated hosting. That would mean redirecting my domain to a journal elsewhere. It would also mean redirecting my mail somewhere else where I could not guarantee my mail would go out as coming from leo@leostableford.com. This is a pretty hard choice as I use the e-mail for more than egotisitc frivolity. It’s actually my professional e-mail also.

So what to do?

I’m sure you can appreciate the mull time I’m taking.

Back soon.

One of my friends categorised me as a pragmatist at the weekend. This was in response to my assertion that I had played a video game for six hours on Friday afternoon because I had suddenly realised that there was a whole untapped market out there for old style, simple, computer games of a certain quality and reasonably priced.

Whether you agree with any of this or not I think it was entertaining that he thought that a moment’s distraction which turned into a fun time with Mrs. Monkey (for we were playing the game together) and myself could ever be six hours worth of pragmatism. Pragmatism would have been to get the idea and sweep the market place for other concepts. There was more to my survey than pragmatism.

I thinkt he word pragmatist gets used as an insult far too often. I think that many people feel that a pragmatist’s view of compassion and good humour are that they are not pragmatic things to possess. Actually a pragmatic view of the research surrounding the Prisoner’s Dilemma (search for it) reveal that compassion and good humour are the height of pragmatic traits.

I also think that artists who are not pragmatic run the risk of being out of touch with an audience. A pragmatic writer upon realising that he/she uses too many long words and overlong sentences would go back to the schools of technique and think again. I, for example, studied pulp voraciously to pound my sentence structure into some kind of shape. But the freewheeling artist can demand patience of an audience with impunity. There is nothing artistic about quality control, they can say.

As before I beg to differ. I want my creations to be felt by people and if the only way to do that is to be pragmatic and to school myself in simple accessibility and to wonder about the techniques of getting people to listen to you then so be it.

No one without pragmatism can hope to survive in this world for very long.