Face the facts. Then act on them. It’s the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it’s harder than you’d think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Fact the facts. Don’t pray, don’t wish, don’t buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don’t give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of . . . whatever. Face the facts. Then act.
~Quellcrist Falconer, Speech before the assault on Millsport (RKM, Broken Angels)
A week ago, I wandered over to the the movie theater down the block from me to see Prometheus, a film I’ve been pumped about for at least a year now. Like any self-respecting science-fiction geek, I’m a huge fan of Ridley Scott’s Alien. His return to the genre that kicked off his career, well, it was like a wild dream come true.
Unfortunately, Prometheus failed to live up to expectations. I suppose few things do, nowadays. Perhaps I’m getting old and tired. Or perhaps Hollywood is getting old and tired. Whatever the case may be, I left the theater rather unimpressed. Now, don’t get me wrong–it was an enjoyable film. Beggars can’t be choosers, especially sci-fi fans, and Prometheus did manage to deliver a solid space adventure complete with mystery, exploration, and alien dangers. I would happily watch it again. But it won’t be making my top ten list anytime soon. Continue Reading…
Obligatory update time. Been too long since I’ve posted anything here. I wish I had some interesting news, or something of substance to show, but nothing yet. I’ve submitted a short story to, oh, every science fiction & fantasy magazine imaginable, so if that winds up being published I’ll be sure to announce it here. In the meanwhile, I’ve begun work on two new projects: one is another Naphtali story, set before the short story “Nazca City Blues.” Already started writing in prose. Though I aim to make it a self-contained short story, it will eventually serve as the first chapter or two for the full novel, with my writing prompt “Of Hinas and Habits” being expanded into a few chapters to act as a bridge between the new story and “Nazca City Blues,” which will be reworked as the third act in the first (of five) parts of the book. Just to clarify: I am not writing five books. I will never, ever pull a Stephen King/J.K. Rowling/George R.R. Martin. I aim to keep my fiction short and sweet, three hundred and fifty pages give or take. I’m just organizing it in a five-act structure.
I’ve also been working on an outline for an original story, one inspired by and influenced by archaeological adventures like Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, and the Uncharted series. Naturally, I’ll be giving it a bit of a science fiction twist. Here’s what I will tell you: it’ll be futuristic (think the Total Recall remake trailer) and focus on a female archaeologist/adventurer, Alex Capra. That’s all for now–mum’s the word.
Another short story of mine, “The Labor of Objects,” a cyberpunk/transhumanism story, will be running the gauntlet at this years Writer’s Conference at Rutgers, where a handful of published authors and MFA coordinators critique your work and provide advice on how to tighten it up and get it publishable. After the conference, I intend to submit “The Labor of Objects” to a smattering of science fiction & fantasy magazines as well.
So there you have it. I’m keeping busy, keeping productive, and writing regularly. But all this writing has kept me away from reading, so I think I’ll dedicate some time this week to crack open Glen Cook’s The Black Company–partially for entertainment, partially as research for No City for Heroes (the tentative title for Naphtali’s novel). Dark, gritty, pulpy, vicious, and centered around a military team. Sounds like perfect source material. Feel free to leave any comments with suggestions/recommendations of your own. I’m always up for a good recommendation.
Oh, I s’pose I’ll leave you with this. It’s almost a year old now, but it’s a great, insightful interview with Richard K. Morgan, my inspiration and favorite author:
http://www.fantasy-magazine.com/new/new-nonfiction/feature-interview-richard-k-morgan/
Doesn’t matter if you’re living in a colony on Mars or a castle in some mock-Medieval context—people have to make a living, and economics is simply the name we use for how that works out.
~Richard K. Morgan
The Matrix. Inception. Source Code. For a little over the past decade the biggest science fiction films to make a splash are ones that deal with the nature of reality—asking us to question, what is real? And while the exploration of philosophical concepts has always gone hand-in-hand with science fiction, it seems this particular “philosophy of the mind” angle hasn’t lost its appeal, what with a remake of 1990’s Total Recall, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, set to release this summer, now starring Colin Farrel, Jessica Biel, and Kate Beckinsale. Of course, both versions are actually film adaptations of the Philip K. Dick novelette We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. For those of you unfamiliar with Philip K. Dick (perhaps best known, indirectly, for Blade Runner, based off his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or more recently Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report), paranoia and the uncertainty of reality were his domain—what set him apart from other science fiction writers and made him a mainstay in science fiction literary canon.
Total Recall tells the story of Douglass Quaid—at least, a man who thinks he’s Douglass Quaid. Bored with his life as construction worker, Quaid visits the “Rekall” company to have false memories implanted to experience a trip to Mars. Unfortunately, the procedure doesn’t go so smoothly, and it turns out Quaid is a spy collaborating with rebels on Mars. Soon, Quaid finds himself waist-deep in a planet-hopping adventure with the fate of an entire planet resting on his shoulders.
Recently, a trailer dropped on Apple Trailers, giving us the first real glimpse of director Len Wiseman’s remake. Unlike the original story and the 1990 adaptation, the 2012 Total Recall deviates from the interplanetary Earth/Mars backdrop and instead grounds the story on Earth, focusing now on the political tension between Euroamerica (self-explanatory) and New Shanghai (formerly China and South East Asia). The trailer emphasizes action sequences over story beyond giving us the gist of the plot, which isn’t to be unexpected—Len Wiseman’s career thus far has been defined by Underworld and Live Free or Die Hard, neither of which are terribly cerebral flicks. We Can Remember It for You Wholesale is, conversely, defined by its cerebral-ness. Wiseman has to step up his game in order to prove himself a director and not hand us yet another popcorn remake that hardly does the original justice. There’s also the remake factor to consider. Hollywood has consistently proven bereft of original ideas. Total Recall is just another in a long line of examples of this. But for sci-fi enthusiasts, beggars can’t be choosers, so when a big budget science fiction film rolls along that isn’t tenuously “science fiction” like Marvel or DC superhero flicks, well, the pickings are slim.
Does the trailer suggest a promising movie awaits us? Aesthetically, yes. As far as originality? Not so much. Many of the cuts are one-to-one parallels to the 1990 version—embarrassingly so. All we’re really given is Len Wiseman’s penchant for dynamic action sequences, which the two-minute, twenty-five second trailer is jam packed with. That, and the recent trend to churn out movies that are dark and gritty, following the footsteps of Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight (just check out the other upcoming remake, The Amazing Spider-Man—similarly, the trailers suggest a darker spin on the tale of Peter Parker/Spider-Man).
What lies in store for moviegoers this summer is up for grabs. There make has all the potential in the world, both to suck—but with style—or to somehow capture the essence of Philip K. Dick’s original story without the cheese factor of Schwarzenegger’s version (though this is what arguably made it fun). Hopefully, a treat awaits us. But hey, if nothing else, at least there’s a lot of pretty actors to ogle at, no?
Current short fiction story, work in progress. Another MFA piece. Early draft, but feel compelled to post. Well. Something.
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The machine that was once a man sat alone at the corner booth of the bar, nursing a tumbler of whiskey that did very little to ease his concerns. Once, such an indulgence would peel away the layers of inhibition, of doubt and uncertainty, allowing him to meet his missions with a detachment which, these days, now pervaded the inexorable march of daily life. Now, the whiskey was habit—behavior brought on by the ghost that stirred within him.
The bar was a drab, run down establishment, a remnant of South Boston unchanged by the last fifty years—one of the few in the city that didn’t give heavily augmented humans like himself the same look of disdain once reserved for minorities of mere skin tone and gender. But as soon as post-humans, or “once-humans” as they were less than politely dubbed, came into the picture suddenly those differences seemed as superficial as they always were, so Connor Morgan and his kind became the new social outcast class. Work placement? Social acceptance? Forget it. After his tour in the Irish Defense Forces, fighting in the still turbulent North West Frontier—a decision he now fully realized reflected the impulsivity of youth and an ever-growing sense of detachment that raged to the surface after things between Sara and he went tits up—he suffered the wounds responsible for so much of his modification. Upon his return, Connor was left with little else than to sell his services to whomever could afford him, and to whomever’s interests his particular talents most suited.
February 27, 2012 in
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One of my former writing professors, now friend, Daniel Wallace, asked me to write a guest blog post for his website. Took me a little while to get it together, but I decided to write about, well, what I know–sci-fi and fantasy. More specifically, I wrote about the importance of world building, of plotting and planning and prewriting in order to write a tightly woven narrative. So check it out! It’s up on his website, OnPineStreet. It gives me the teacherly tingles. And I likes it.
Daniel was a phenomenal writing instructor, and helped me tremendously getting “Nazca City Blues” where it is today and strengthening me as a writer. He’s always got a book recommendation on deck, and I value him both as an instructor and as a fellow writer/friend. So do yourself a favor and follow his website, too. He has a lot of terrific, informative posts up there.
So, I’ve finally got some interesting news worth posting about. Long story short, I have been hired to write at least one, perhaps two Young Adult book series. I’ve presented rough sketches of two stories to my publisher, both of which she liked very much. I’ve since continued to sketch them out, and if I may admit, am feeling pretty damn good about both ideas. One of them, most likely, will be a duology—a word I’m not sure the OED has canonized yet, but, we sling it around enough that they might as well. The other I’ve been able to break up into a trilogy more easily. Current plan is to spend the rest of this month doing some research (I should, y’know, probably read a YA book, so I’ve ordered The Hunger Games, which has come highly recommended even by established, adult-oriented writers) and getting all the prewriting work doing—scripting out longer, 2-5 page outlines of the narrative arc, creating character biographies, writing up some scene blocks, yadda yadda yadda.
Funny thing is, I never imagined my first major writing project would be a Young Adult book/series. If you’ve read anything by me, or know me at all, you know that I’m a Training Day kind of fella—I like the dark, the gritty, the gray. Most of the writing I’ve posted on this website shows as much, with the notable exception, and the only exception that comes to mind, being “The Lighthouse,” a father/son short story I wrote for my own father. Quite honestly, I’ve always maintained a bitter attitude towards the idea of “Young Adult fiction.” I felt it was insulting, and creating an unnecessary bridge between something like, say, the Goosebumps series or Boxcar Children or what have you and reading Star Wars/Star Trek novels or Lord of the Rings in middle school or high school. Though my mother insists otherwise, I don’t remember such a genre existing when I was young, and so my generation was forced to challenge ourselves as readers. But I’m always interested in tackling new challenges, and this Young Adult series provides me with just that—an opportunity to create the sort of fiction I feel, if Young Adults are going to subscribe to this section of the bookstore, ought to be reading. What I’d want to read if I was in their place. It also gives me the opportunity—and hold back your surprise at my sentimentality—to write something for my little sisters, Emily, Elizabeth, and Abigail. To create fiction I want them to read, that is appropriate for them to read (’cause they sure as hell shouldn’t be reading something like “Nazca City Blues” and what it is growing into).
At this stage, I obviously can’t say much about the stories. I hope to get the first book finished by the end of August. But rest assured, whatever the “Chris Holzworth” style and panache may be, it won’t be absent in these stories. It will very much retain my style, my voice, and my attitude. Just. With a lot less swearing, and perhaps less complex prose, heh.
Still, I’m excited. Friends and family are excited. This is a quirky arrangement, one in which I’m selling the rights to my works, but through negotiation my name will still appear on the cover. Honestly, I’m less interested in making any money from this (though I won’t complain about being paid to write these) and more interested in what it can do to help me get into an MFA program, which by December I will be farming out my writing samples to. Furthermore, I see it as an opportunity to get the hang of writing a longer work, constructing a cohesive narrative that spans 150-200 pages, and really just cutting my teeth as an author. It’s my foot in the door. It’s establishing my name. It’s helping strengthen my writing skills so that when the time comes, I can execute Nazca City Blues the novel more effectively—so that it can live up to the standards I want it to.
Naturally, I’ll keep any of y’all posted (as much as I can, at least). But for now, just know that—holy fuck! I’m writing a book! I’ve been hired to write a book! Craziness.
Student. Geek. Aspiring speculative fiction writer and perhaps even Creative Writing teacher. Sometimes essayist. Frequently opens mouth, inserts foot.