books

April 2015

In April, I again read just two books.

With Terry Pratchett’s passing in March, I decided to finally read all of the Discworld novels, as sort of my project for the year. Sadly, that’s completely do-able, now that it’s a finite number of books, the 41st and last out due out this fall. At the rate I’m reading, though, it’ll likely carry me over into 2016. Thus far, I’ve re-read The Colour of Magic and read for the first time The Light Fantastic. I liked both books, despite all the people say those are his weaker ones, and that you shouldn’t start there. That just means I have the really good ones still to look forward to. I started Equal Rites this morning, but that’s May, and will have to wait for next time.

I watched four movies.

First, the generically titled Animal, which I link to not to encourage you to watch it — don’t — but because it’s so generic a title I need to explain which movie it actually was. This was a terrible 2014 horror movie, only made enjoyable but watching (and mocking) it over Twitter with friends, chosen because it was looked so terrible.

Better movies for the month included the rather appropriately titled Blue Ruin, which starts with a strong, simple premise: what if you took one of those “man uses specialized skills to exact revenge” movies and took away the skills? It also included Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which was odd — the only Martin Scorcese movie that was ever spun-off into a sitcom — and Furious Seven, which, honestly, was one of the most enjoyable movies I’ve ever seen. Pure ridiculousness on every level, but so much fun because of that.

I read thirty-four short stories, not including those I’m reading for Kaleidotrope or for my on-going writing workshop. Favorites include:

  • “All That We Carry, All That We Hold” by Damien Angelica Walters (Fantastic Stories of the Imagination)
  • “I am Graalnak of the Vroon Empire, Destroyer of Galaxies, Supreme Overlord of the Planet Earth. Ask Me Anything” by Laura Pearlman (Flash Fiction Online)
  • “Stay” by Daniel José Older (Fireside Fiction)
  • “When the Circus Lights Down” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny)
  • “Ishq” by Usman Malik (Nightmare)
  • Among the Thorns” by Veronica Schanoes (Tor.com)
  • “Come My Love and I’ll Tell You a Tale” by Sunny Moraine (Shimmer)
  • “Among the Sighs of the Violoncellos” by Daniel Ausema (Strange Horizons)
  • “The Sorcerer’s Unattainable Gardens” by A. Merc Rustad (Daily Science Fiction)
  • “Dr. Polingyouma’s Machine” by Emily Devenport (Uncanny)

And as always I listened to some music:

April was a pretty ordinary month, otherwise. In retrospect, from the tinged-with-sadness place I am right now at the very start of May, it was actually pretty damn good.

March 2015

In March, I read two books. I finished reading Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer, and I started and finished reading Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie.

I watched five movies. The Man Who Would Be King and Star Trek: The Motion Picture — which I’d actually never seen before — weren’t great. But the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was genuinely very creepy, like a ’70s political conspiracy mixed with a ’70s zombie movie. And Zardoz…god, Zardoz will fuck you up. I don’t regret watching it, but…it’s not something you can ever un-see.

The fifth was The Man Who Knew Too Much, which I’d actually forgotten until just now, as I was editing this post, that I’d seen. It’s decent Hitchcock, but not remarkable.

I read thirty-eight short stories in my continuing endeavor to read at least one a day. The best of them, I thought, were:

  • “Jackalope Wives” by Ursula Vernon (Apex)
  • “We Are the Cloud” by Sam J. Miller (Lightspeed)
  • “Sickly Sweet” by Evan Dorman (Lakeside Circus)
  • “Sing Me Your Scars” by Damien Angelica Walters (Apex)
  • “Where Monsters Dance” by Merc Rustad (Inscription)
  • “The House in Winter” by Jessica Sirkin (Apex)
  • “Wild Things Got to Go Free” by Heather Clitheroe (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
  • “The Good Son” by Naomi Kritzer (Lightspeed)

I went to a meet-up of a local sci-fi club, where we watched a bunch of Star Trek in tribute to Leonard Nimoy — you know who was terrific? Leonard Nimoy — and I won a Spock glass. That (and the mint juleps) made me quite happy.

Oh, and I turned thirty-mumble-mumble-mumble. Thirty-eight. It was an okay birthday, far as those go, I guess.

Otherwise, it was a pretty ordinary March. More wintry than I would have liked — a snowstorm on the first day of spring — and a couple of other meetups unceremoniously canceled.

I’m still writing, still reading and editing for Kaleidotrope, still doing the unable-to-find-an-apartment-why-am-I-living-in-New-York thing.

And I listened to some music:

Onward to April, I guess.

January 2015

In January, I read two books: Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo and Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. I read the first one for a book club I never actually attended, and the second one just because it was supposed to be good. It’s an unnerving book, almost certainly by design, but I’m currently reading Authority, the second book in the “Southern Reach Trilogy,” so it’s probably safe to assume that I liked it. (Ghost Bride was okay, too.)

In January, I saw seven movies: The Trouble with Harry, The Apartment, Fiddler on the Roof, The Sunshine Boys, Our Man Flint, That Guy…Who Was in That Thing, and Obvious Child. I think the last was my favorite, although Fiddler has some wonderful moments, thanks largely to the central performance by Tevye, and Shirley MacLaine is a (surprising) radiant delight in both Harry (which isn’t Hitchcock’s best) and Apartment (which is great but takes a weird hard turn near the end). Flint is often fun, but was probably better in the ’60s, when the Bond movies it parodies were new. That Guy…well, it certainly has a lot of those guys in it. It’s not really a documentary, much less a compelling one, but it is overstocked with a lot of recognizable and talented character actors, so you can almost forget its lack of real depth for about ninety minutes. Sunshine Boys was the most surprising, because I though I would enjoy it a lot more than I did. It felt fairly dated, and while Matthau and Burns give very good performances, the gist is often, “Hey, these two guys sure are old, huh?” (Burns weirdly reminded me a little of my own grandfather in a couple of scenes, which is not something that occurred to me when the two of them were both alive.)

In January, I read about forty-two short stories. I say about because one of them I actually listened to at an author reading, and because I’m reading stories for both my ongoing fiction class and my web zine, neither of which I’m tracking. I think these were my favorites of the ones I am:

In January, I went to a number of meet-ups and events, skipped out on a few more, saw The Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder on Broadway, and attended a number of sessions of my online writing course. The course is going well, I think. We unexpectedly skipped last week, so it’s been a little while.

In January, I listened to some music:

In January, I sold another short story, a flash piece, which I’ll link to when it publishes. (This month, I hope!) This marks the third story I’ve sold in about as many months, which is nice. More rejections than that, and more stalled stories than not, but that’s par for the course.

Anyway, that’s more or less be my January.

2014 in review

Two thousand fourteen, I think I can safely say, was not my favorite year on record. This is less because it was a terrible year — though it often was that, at least in the news, in the nation, in the greater scheme of things. It’s just that I finished up the year feeling kind of rudderless, set adrift, not exactly happy with the choices that I’d made (or not been making) over the past few (or maybe even ten) years.

On paper, it wasn’t such a bad year. And while of course man does not live on paper alone, there are a few things I’m glad to have seen and done in 2014.

I got to travel a little: for work, to Texas; for writing, to Canada. Both trips were over much more quickly than I had expected, both leaving me a little melancholy upon my return. (I think you could say I still haven’t quite shaken that yet.)

I sold a couple of short stories, one to Andromeda Inflight Spaceways Inflight Magazine and the other to Mythic Delirium. Both are still forthcoming, though I’m hopeful they’ll both appear sometime in the new year. I saw more rejections than acceptances, but that’s the nature of the things. I know I need to write more, even as I know there will be more rejections ahead.

Meanwhile, I keep plugging away at Kaleidotrope, that little quarterly zine I publish. This year, a poem from 2013 was nominated for a Rhysling Award, and I published twenty-two new stories and ten new poems, all free to read. I’ve received some good feedback on the zine, and while I’m not entirely sure where it’s going, it’s something I still enjoy.

I read considerably fewer books than I have in years past, but there were some good ones in the mix. There’s a full list here, if you’re for some reason interested, but I think James S.A. Corey’s Expanse novels were my favorite.

expanse1 expanse2 expanse3 expanse4

Having read them all this past year kind of gives 2014 a shape it otherwise sort of lacked.

I saw some decent movies. I even saw some bad ones I didn’t mind quite so much. These, below, were probably the best ones, though it’s all really subjective anyway.

movie1 movie2 movie3 movie5 movie4 movie3b

And I put together a mix of my favorite songs from the year. (A few actually from this past year. It starts with Bob Seger and ends with Taylor Swift, so you try figuring out this year’s theme from it, ’cause I’m sure not. Also, if you’re one of the “lucky” few who I sent an actual physical copy of the mix with a Christmas card, know that this online version contains one additional, concluding track I hadn’t heard in time to add to the CDs. So, yeah: bonus!

Ultimately, though, I’m less interested in revisiting, or even reminiscing over, 2014 and more interested in looking ahead to 2015. It’s going to take a lot of hard work to get where I want to go, and it’s work I don’t feel entirely ready for — but which I’ll need to do nevertheless. It’s going to take a lot of luck and perseverance.

I don’t know if I’ll have enough of either in 2015, but I have to try.

Independence Daze

Red, White, and Blue

It was a rainy 4th of July — or at least it was until this evening, when the skies cleared and the over-abundance of fireworks came out. Not that the locals need a particular reason to set off fireworks, of course. It’s hard to judge exactly where they’re exploding from — at a guess, I’d say one block over, across the tracks — but they’re just about a nightly occurrence. Tonight, they might have been a little brighter and louder than usual, a little less timed to goals at the World Cup or wherever, but it’s a little same-old, same-old, if you ask me. (Of course, if you ask the dog, it’s the end of the world, and no, he’s sorry, but there isn’t room for you too under the kitchen table.)

I spent the day inside, thanks to the rain, mostly just happy to have the day off from work. I watched a little television but mostly read, finishing The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, which I really liked.

Then this evening, I re-watched The Godfather, which I haven’t seen since the first time I saw it, many years ago now. It really is a terrific movie, and it looks stunning in Blu-ray. But it’s also something like three hours long, so that kind of took up the rest of my evening.

All in all, it wasn’t an eventful day, but it was a pleasant one.