The Middle of the Dark

Trying to be optimistic on Brexit but it's hard. The fallout from this should send shivers down the spine of anyone contemplating the day after a Trump presidential win. The shock from two of the world's most influential forces voting to flee back to isolationism clearly pays no benefits, and as Brits are discovering this morning, some of the promises the Leave campaign made were false (more money for health care). So hopefully here at least we wake up a bit. A lot of people said Trump would never be the nominee. A lot of people said the UK would never vote itself out. Well. One possible benefit is the prospect of a united Irleand as the North has voted resolutely to stay in the EU. Scotland and Northern Ireland have made rumblings about leaving the UK in the take of this, which I think have to be taken seriously. David Cameron didn't take the first Scottish referendum seriously and nearly pissed away the empire then; apparently he learned nothing from it. On the dow...

What do you say? Everything you can say about the routine mass murder of innocent people seems rote. Empty. You lose the will to even say it when you realize how little comfort it gives and how little weight it carries in a country where this is normal. The outpouring of grief and support for Orlando is remarkable, but it was with San Bernadino. It was with Sandy Hook. It was with Columbine. It was with the dozens of other mass shootings that have occurred in this country. I was 6 or 7 when 'going postal' was how we described this. One post office shooting after another. I was watching the local news one night at home and they played a 911 recording of a woman, a post office worker, barricaded in some room as a shooter stalked through the building murdering her co-workers. I don't remember all of the tape, which seemed to go on forever, but I remember the last thing she said. 'I think I'm going to die.' And she did. Liz Mathis told me so, and then she moved o...

After digesting what is probably the geek-news of the decade, I’ve accepted the fact that there will be new Star Wars movies – in perpetuity, probably – and that these will be further and further removed from the film that made such an impression on me as a child. George Lucas decided to retire, secure his brain child with a corporation that will mint money off of it until it’s public domain - or they spend enough money lobbying in Washingtonto prevent that   - and let go of the reins once and for all. There are inherent pros and cons with this. I’ve found myself growing more and more excited about the idea of a new Star Wars movie, especially one set in the aftermath of Return of the Jedi, that could potentially feature so many of the characters and elements that people felt missing in the prequels. So here’s some free advice from a life long fan to Disney on how they can not just make money, but believers out of a willing but skeptical fan base (if it goes bad - we know i...

Turns out modern sci-fi owes nearly everything to a bastard . The surprise here isn't that most of the most famous tropes in science fiction owe themselves to a single work - hello, Star Wars - but that they originated from a book that was essentially fan fiction. Garret P. Serviss somehow avoided the legal apocalypse that would surely visit him today after publishing an unauthorized sequel to H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds - Edison's Conquest of Mars. The book was apparently written on commission from The Boston Post - I guess things were looser back then - and featured Thomas Edison leading the fight back to Mars. The article at Cracked labels Serviss a 'hack.' I won't make accusations as to the man's ability (capsule review: Serviss never met a comma he didn't like. Also, brownie points for 'puissance') but I don't think it's fair to dismiss him so easily. According to Wikipedia, 'the book contains some notable "...

The question for the last four years has been, is there any way they can top The Dark Knight? The answer is obvious, and became beside the point in the early morning of July 20th. The question unfortunately for this series of Batman films by Christopher Nolan is why such grand cinema must be forever associated with tragedy. At the end of the day, this is just a movie. It means nothing in the light of the loss of so many lives in Colorado , just as The Dark Knight meant nothing in the wake of Heath Ledger’s unexpected passing in 2008. What TDK did become was a tribute to a spectacular actor. The Dark Knight Rises was not intended to be any tribute to what happened last week, and it cannot be. What TDKR becomes is a tribute to a feat very rarely accomplished on film – the successful trilogy. The bad third movie in a trilogy is a bit of a running joke in cinema. Say when: X-Men 3, Spider-Man 3, Superman III (yes, they did it in Roman Numerals once) The Godfather 3 (this actu...

A writer offering rules on writing is always a fun exercise to - if nothing else - argue about the rules of writing. Colson Whitehead provided his own  the other day in the NY Times that you should definitely read if you write or have any interest in writing. All of the rules resonate, but for me, #1 and #10 do the most: Rule No. 1: Show and Tell. Most people say, “Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they’re like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do. “And what do you have for us today, Marcy?” “A penetrating psychological study of a young med student who receives disturbing news from a former lover.” “How marvelous! Timmy, what are you holding there?” “It’s a Calvinoesque romp through an unnamed metropolis much like New York, narrated by an armadillo.” “Such imagination!” Show and Tell, followed by a good...

aMAZEme Book Maze In London Imagine you wake up in the middle of one of those huge hedge garden mazes. The scary Shining kind. You start wandering around, looking for a way out. Time after time, you hit a dead end. Some paths hold promise only to come to nothing. You ultimately test each possible path, because you don’t know where you are. You know where you’re going – out – but how to get there? Eventually you find your way, but only after you have spent a lot of time, effort and frustration. Fear, even. This is writing a novel for me.