My God, It's Raining

So, before we get cracking I’ll direct you now to Robert Berg’s review of Iron Man 3 which is a) great, b) touches on most of the points I wanted to cover (essentially making most of what I was going to write redundant), and c) isn’t technically spoiler free but is sufficiently subtle about it that you’d have to be wound up really tight to feel as if it spoils the movie for you.

I, dear reader, suck at dancing around spoilers so I’ll just put the tl;dr version here. Go see Iron Man 3. It is mostly excellent. Enjoyable and in some respects (but not others) sufficiently challenging to rise above the base level of popcorn-munching explosion porn that is the de facto standard (*cough* Michael Bay *cough*). A lot of effort has gone into it, and there are a lot of lovely little moments for the keen-eyed that you can list to your other half on the way to the car.

I repeat: spoiler alert.

So. Iron Man 3. It gets a lot of things right, and first among them is Tony Stark. What could easily have been a one-note character (he is snarky and rich, lol!) is written and performed with depth and nuance. Underneath the layers of acerbic, exasperated curtness, Tony is all heart, and it is a credit to the film and RDJ that this is shown not as an epiphany, but as something that shows through the cracks all the way through.

And those cracks aren’t just in his armour. There’s a reason Tony leaves himself out of the roll call when he faces Loki in the Avengers, and it’s not simple cinematic bravado. He feels small – he feels weak – and at the beginning of Iron Man 3 he’s not trying to come to terms with this: he’s trying to beat it. The armour is up to Mark 42 (and there are some great cameos by other variants during the film) but even more than that he is training. Stark has never been out of shape but he’s visibly broader, more muscular, and we see him both working out, but also feinting attacks at a Wing Chun dummy. Tony’s first response to his imagined inadequacy is to defeat it, and the effort is destroying him.

Needless to say, things get worse before they get better, but throughout it Tony doesn’t really change - it’s more that he remembers there is value in the qualities he has. Eternally crushed by the shadow of his own doubt, Iron Man 3 is about how he learns to come out from under all that weight.

Where the movie falters, though, is in the challenge he faces.

There’s a bit in Night at the Museum 2 where Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria) meets Darth Vader:

This is how I feel about the antagonists in Iron Man 3. They’re just too busy, and by the end of the movie you’re left wondering what the hell they actually ever wanted. There are four or five really great villain concepts in there, but rather than just pick one and really going for it, they have them ALL and it starts to feel like a bit of a mess. The Extremis treatment starts off quite scary – the idea of a literally unkillable soldier (but they are really, really hard to make and keep stable – although there are other applications for the failures) is terrifying, but then it gets ruined by that not being enough.

Unkillable with impossible strength and agility? Okay. Right. Even more than simply being unstoppable, the Extremis soldier is one-on-one capable of immediately overcoming any normal human foe and can fight an Iron Man suit. That’s fine.

Wait, no. There’s more. They can create human torch levels of heat. And spit fire.

Oh, and there’s a fucking army of them.

I can appreciate the desire for a big multi-player set piece, but I switched off for five minutes while the battle played out. The Extremis soldiers had stopped being scary and were just background pyrotechnics. Instead of being thrilled I sat there feeling the same kind of awkwardness I felt while watching the last episode of Sherlock – how could the conspiracy operate with so many people involved? Moriarity manipulates/bribes/threatens a LOT of people and the idea that in an age of widespread instant communication not one would give the game away beggars belief. Likewise with the AIM thinktank – how are they able to maintain such an absolute blanket of secrecy?

Given that there are several shots in the film of henchmen doubting their purpose – including one of the chief henchdude looking very uncomfortable when the time comes to attack Air Force One – I can’t help but suspect this was something that they toyed with during shooting, but it never made it out the door. In fact, there are several scenes and ideas that are left to dangle endlessly unfulfilled – most wisely, perhaps, the scene where Tony Stark buys fertiliser from a hardware store and makes a set of kitchen table bombs, clear glass jars filled with Hollywood’s favourite visual device, the binary explosive.

Anyway. Scrappy editing and baddies that become dramatically less threatening by the endgame aside, Iron Man 3 is a good movie, and worth going to see.

So I was talking to a workmate today and she was asking a lot of questions about writing – about research and editing and so on and so forth – which prompted me to ask if she was writing anything. She wasn’t. Her twelve-year-old daughter, though…it turns out that she writes virtually non-stop, and when she’s not writing she’s reading or talking to anyone within earshot that will listen about it.

That’s the spirit, I thought.

I was kind of at a loss when she asked me if I could recommend resources or events that would be suitable for encouraging her, though. They had been to an Anthony Horowitz event and really enjoyed that, but author events in the North East tend to be notable for their scarcity. She asked if there were any workshops or groups that would be suitable, but all I could think was, at twelve? Needless to say there weren’t many things I could think of off the top of my head that would be age appropriate or successful in helping her interest along. The local theatre does a young playwright’s workshop but that was it as far as I could recall. If anyone has any suggestions, they would be gratefully received.

Anyway. So I’ve been thinking about ways to a) up my writing tempo and b) get better at it. I’ve been sitting in a kind of limbo state tinkering with Gunslinger… since I finished editing the Fantasy novel and other than that just jotting down the odd idea as they come to me I’m not doing that much else. I’ve been reading where I can, but it feels like I’m not pushing myself forward. I need to do more things, and challenging things at that if I want to improve.

On the news front, I’ve got a story coming out soon in Dark Fiction Magazine, and another in Fox Spirit’s Tales of Eve anthology. I’ve been thinking of doing some more short fiction and my notebook is slowly filling with scribbles as I toss ideas around. I’m still toying with the idea of trying to hunt out a local writing group, if only to keep myself from spamming my Twitter friends every time I have a neurotic outburst, but it’s still the case of finding one. I would have liked to have kept up with the York Nanowrimo group, but it clashes with my other half’s knitting group and it’s a bit of a trek.

So, um, yeah. Things. Stuff. Less procrastination required. More words. Better words.

But first, tea.

So, Christmas has come and gone. I am still recovering from the two (TWO) Christmas dinners and drinking far too much coffee for it to be strictly healthy.

It’s been an okay year. Financially a very hard one, but we’ve struggled through it with some help from our families and a canny eye on buying veg from the markets. There have been ups and downs, as there always are, but on balance I think the ups count for more.

I’ve made more friends online and in real life, meeting more and more awesome people through primarily Twitter and – when I could afford it – conventions. I feel ridiculously lucky in that respect as I’ve had enough online friendships go sour over the years (damn you, World of Warcraft) and while I can attribute it partially to a shift in how I present myself online, it’s also largely due to the very open, forgiving, and good-humoured people I meet.

I haven’t read nearly as many books as I want to, but that never changes. I could read all day every day and never catch up, it seems.

Health-wise, things are pretty good. Last year was awful for hospital trips and constant vigilance over my blood results, so it’s been nice to get that onto an even keel. I am so unfit, though, and I need to get on that in the New Year.

Writing is going well. I got my first short story in print, with three more coming in 2013 – the last of which is possibly the most personal and difficult thing I’ve written. I wrote the first novel in a epic fantasy series which is currently out on submission because I think any more edits will just be second-guessing myself at this point. I wrote the first draft of an alt-history adventure that started humble and got progressively more insane.

Next year I will be editing a collection of recipes (all desserts) and short stories for Fox Spirit books, which I am both dreading and looking forward to. It’s a lot of responsibility so I’m pretty desperate to get it right. I’m sure Adele will keep me on the straight and narrow.

I’m also planning to write another two novels in 2013. I was tempted to start a whole new Fantasy world, but I can’t leave the other one unfinished. I’ll crack on with the second volume and see how it goes. The other novel is kind of linked to Gunslinger Symphony but isn’t. It’s another alt-history novel, set in roughly the same time period, but with a different fantastical twist driving the narrative: this time about pocket watches, and a fashionable obsession with the dead. The idea is to create a trio of stories that link thematically but are not set in the same versions of the world.

And that’s my plan. Not quite a resolution, but better than nothing.

What have you got planned for next year?

So, 25 days into NaNoWriMo. I’m a little behind due to two days off during it, but unless something terrible happens between now and the end of the month, I should sail across the line.

One thing I’ve noticed from Twitter is that a small number of people really hate NaNoWriMo. There have been quite a few tweets RT’d into my timeline, especially at the start of the month, that have all had the same flavour to them. “Hey NaNoWriMo peeps! I do what you’re doing every day of the year!” “Oh, look! It’s NaNoWriMo! When everyone decides they can write a novel and then gives up in the third week!”

These tweets seem to raise a chuckle among the genre set, but I find myself at a loss to see why. They are suggesting that by taking part in NaNoWriMo that I am labouring under the misapprehension that writing a novel is easy. I’m not. They are suggesting that the idea that I can use the time to motivate myself to reach a target by a set date – that I can get my arse in the chair and work to a self-imposed deadline – makes me some sort of an idiot. Again, I’m not.

While everyone is entitled to an opinion, these kind of tweets feel like less than that. They feel like a cheap crack, a shot of self-validation at the expense of someone else’s endeavour.

Hey loser, they say, I am published. You are not. Why not just stop kidding yourself? You will never be greater than I.

Here’s my response: whatever. You’ve just lost a customer.

I started getting involved in the genre scene because I was interested in finding books to read – new voices, exciting voices – and even though I am constantly trying to improve my own writing, the fact that I love reading books will never go away. Ever. That said, I don’t care how good a book is, how flat-out brilliant it is – if the author can’t keep from slapping people down in order to validate themselves, I’m not even going to pick it up off the shelf.

And that’s the long and short of it. I could justify at length why I participate in NaNoWriMo and I reckon I could make a very convincing case for the value of the exercise. However, in this case I don’t need to. When someone drops a condescending tweet about another person’s hobby in order to make themselves feel better, then there’s only one thing to say:

Why bother with a tweet when what you really want is a wank? Your hand is right there.

Last year, I went to Thought Bubble for the first time. I’m not a massive comics person, really. I think the most regular comic event in my childhood was the Oor Wullie and The Broons annuals and in spite of the regular endorsement of my friends I could never quite settle into the serial format. In fact, there’s only one comic book arc that I have read in its entirety, and that is Mr Hero, The Newmatic Man. 

Still, Leeds was close by, and as the number and quality of webcomics has increased over the years, I’ve found myself making more time for comics and cool art. Plus, genre is a small place and you never quite know who you are going to run into. I met the rather excellent Alasdair Stuart in the flesh at the last Thought Bubble, which by itself made the trip to Leeds worth it. I also picked up some lovely prints, some of which I still haven’t found frames for, and generally had a very good time.

Fast forward to 2012, and when Thought Bubble rolled round I decided that it would be worth going. That decided, I discovered that work (or lack thereof) had left me fairly skint, so I shelved the idea. In the end, my brother and his wife stepped in and sent me the money for a ticket and rail costs, and I was able to go again.

The first thing you notice about the con is how young it is. Their enthusiastic embrace of the cosplay community means that the average age is a lot lower than I’ve seen at the other UK cons I attend. I don’t know how this translates into business for the stalls around the show, but I did see a lot of the cosplayers clutching bags of stuff, and there seemed to be a much swifter trade in things like badges and accessories than I would have expected. The upshot is, though, that they were welcome, and they were having a great time. Granted, I did roll my eyes when someone started putting a Gangnam Style parody video together, but that was about as cynical as I managed to get.

Jennie Gyllblad. Please note, these are not actually her feathers. It’s just a fascinator. Again – not a bird-person

I spent a lot of time with the Clockwork Watch gang. I’ve known Jennie Gyllblad for a while from a SFF forum and Twitter, and had her do a commission for me earlier in the year. She’s really lovely and enthusiastic, terrifyingly energetic, and always fun to talk to. Also she makes great art! Buy her stuff. She introduced me to Serena Obhrai, who is collaborating with her on a comic that should be coming out in 2013, Elysia, and Yomi, the relentlessly charming collaborator on the Clockwork Watch who was sporting the waistcoat of the event. It was also good catching up with Corey “Every Molecule in the Universe will Meet Eventually” Brotherson, who I would have talked to longer but he seemed to vanished without trace around two, and meeting Peter Thompson, who seemed to have the same idea as me (hanging around the Clockwork Watch stand stealing chocolates).

I met Kate Ashwin and Robin Pierce, who write Widdershins and Curia Regis respectively (see links), and they were lovely to meet and talk to. Both write historical adventure stories set in the 19th (Widdershins) and 18th (Curia Regis) centuries and I’ll be catching up on their stories so far online.

I also saw Emma Vieceli, who I met at Alt.Fiction earlier in the year, and picked up a copy of Dragon Heir: Reborn (buy stuff). I didn’t have much money this year, but I thought it was a good investment. Her art is amazing – I was watching her draw as she was talking to people, selling books, etc; considering she was being constantly interrupted it was mind-bogglingly clean and precise – and the Dragon Heir book looks great. Lisa doesn’t read as much manga as she used to, but she seemed pleased with it as well.

Another thing I bought was Forgotten Muse, by Tanya Roberts. She’s worked on the Star Wars comics and has a lovely art style. I also commissioned a sketch from her, a slightly cheeky request for a sketch of the main character from my own work-in-progress – I’ve been using a folder full of art from the Gunslinger Born as inspiration while I write, but it’s proving to be a bit darker than what I’m writing. I thought it’d be interesting to give a very vague description of Symphony and then see what an artist would come up with. Thankfully she didn’t think it was cheeky in the slightest.

Sadly, I couldn’t stick around for the evening do or today’s events (including the launch of Adam Christopher’s first comic), but I thoroughly enjoyed what I did see. It’s a really fun event, with lots of things to see, an insane number of pretty shinies to buy, and everyone seems to be having a great time. One to mark in the calendar for next year.

Kingdom’s Fall is getting very close to submission now. And no, I haven’t thought of another title yet.

I’ve had some responses from beta readers so far, and they’ve been positive and constructive. This doesn’t quite work and that needs more clarification and overall it has added up to what I’d call more tweaks and fixes than outright revision. I’m pleased with how the book is turning out post-revision (with a month spent not looking at the manuscript at all, the beta comments were like a spotlight on the problems) and now I’m thinking that by the time we’re back from Sweden in mid-to-late September, this bad boy should be ready for submission.

Or, to sum it up in a word, eep.

I have no strategy for this, as such. At some point I am going to have to write the synopsis. At some point I am going to have to write a cover letter. At some point I am going to need to crack the spine on the Writer’s & Artist’s Yearbook (wait, I bought that in 2010?) and make a list of people to submit it to.

At some point, it’s going to have to go out the door.

Eep.

I have a special place in my heart for Alt.Fiction. It was the first con I ever went to when I decided that I was a) sick to the back teeth of simply walking into bookshops and trying to psychically divine what books I should buy and b) sorely confused about what the hell I was doing with regards to the desire to write things and have people other than my brother read them.

It was very hard going, that first con. I don’t think I talked to a single soul for the first three hours after arrival until I finally recognised someone from an internet forum and then trailed in her very understanding wake for the rest of the event.* I did, as hard as it was to get started, enjoy myself immensely and resolved to keep coming along to events like it.

My con experience had changed somewhat in the two years since.

I think Alt.Fiction has been the first con I’ve been to where I have managed to miss every single panel. I did make a determined effort to attend the New Writer’s panel, but due to space issues it was not to be. Other than that, almost every single moment of my weekend was spent talking to people and having a great time doing it. This is not a criticism of the con and the content of the programme; it just turns out that’s the kind of person I am. I perpetually found myself either catching up with people I knew, getting to know better people I had kind of met before, and meeting entirely new people altogether. Since it’s a fairly small convention and a fairly small space, the event and the venue were perfect for doing just that.

I made a resolution a while back to deliberately not talk about my own writing at cons, if only to avoid the “please don’t pitch at me” look that crosses the faces of other con-goers (particularly industry professionals), although I’m now beginning to think that it may need some revision. One of the high points of my convention was being introduced to Ken MacLeod, who I am an enormous fan of and was struggling to think of things to say to for fear of going “you know what, I read Learning the World so many times that the book fell to bits and I had to buy another copy”. Having overheard me talking to Anne Lyle about writing, he asked what I was working on. Lacking anyone else nearby to high five about this, I found myself blathering through the world concept for Gunslinger Symphony without ever getting to the point of the story. Way to go, I thought, but no damage seemed done.  I think there’s something exciting enough about the words “frontier scientist” that it can survive two minutes of ill-thought blather.

I would like to say I improved after that, but really I didn’t. Anyone who asked about my writing rode out the ensuing blast of interesting but not entirely necessary guff about science communications on a wave of their own patience and goodwill towards me. It occurred to me later I should really take a leaf out of Tom Pollock’s book – not literally, of course – as he was able to talk in a very engaging, passionate, and direct way about his book (and the one after) that made me a) want to read it immediately and b) grind my teeth into dust out of sheer envy. Ironically, he did go on to talk about the Long Price Quartet, and asked if I knew the feeling you get when you read or talk to another author and their ideas just make you feel insanely inadequate and jealous at the same time. “It’s not just you,” I said.

I took part in a lunchtime flash fiction reading, which I thought went rather well. I came up with the title back at the SFX Weekender, where I suggested to Lou Morgan that three minutes is not enough time to tell a full story, and that the build of tension could be faked by frontloading a scene with a squick-inducing title that doesn’t pay off until the very, very end. Thus, Mister Ipkiss and the monkey who poops pomegranates, was born – a tale in which everyone is waiting with bated breath for the moment when a primate shits fruit. It worked, kind of, and I was glad I chose it over the other, more meta effort that was a bank robbery told in real time called, unsurprisingly, Three-minute bank job blues.**

Adele and the rest of the team behind the convention deserve massive congratulations for the event. I think they pulled off pretty much exactly the right mixture of space to event to attendance that meant as an attendee I always felt busy and never felt as though I was missing out. I spent the weekend with some incredibly enthusiastic and interesting people, and have come away from it feeling charged up and even more excited about the world of SF/F than ever before.***

I would love to mention people specifically, but I just can’t. I’d be at this keyboard until Wednesday. Please, go to my twitter feed @mygoditsraining, go into my “following” tab and just start following people. They are all there, they are all genuine, excellent people, they are all worth talking to and getting to know and if you ever find yourself at a table with one or more of them you will never be disappointed in the conversation.

*There is a Swedish phrase for people like this. It translates to “goldfish poop”. Apt, if you’ve ever seen a goldfish poop.

**I blame Cowboy Bebop for the repeated occurrence of (NOUN) (MUSICAL TERM) titles.

***Although after two late, late nights on the trot I now have a sinus headache that has put me on the couch with a duvet and the curtains drawn. Enthusiasm has its limits.

For Lisa’s birthday, I bought her – amongst other things – a half day’s owl handling at the Falconry Centre near Thirsk. Lisa likes owls, which means that every birthday or Christmas she gets at least one owl-themed thing from someone in her immediate family. Obviously I had to get in on the action.

Warning: extremely picture-heavy post follows. Mobile internet users beware!

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I begin with a caveat. Should I forget at some point to mention someone who I met, or indeed had a long conversation with and have temporarily forgotten, I apologise. I did toy with the brief notion of agonising over a list before I started writing this but decided against it. Let the chips fall where they may and if I do miss someone they are welcome to snub me at a future event by way of reparation.

So. The SFX Weekender was held in Prestatyn, in North Wales. I was labouring under the false misapprehension that I had never been to Wales before, which got me all excited until I remembered that Llanberis isn’t an especially English name and I’ve been there climbing and walking quite a few times in my misspent youth.

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Around April last year, I kind of lost my mojo for doing anything other than work.  I didn’t burn out exactly, but I was feeling the pressure quite badly with all my spare time devoted to writing things up so that I would be prepared for the next working day.

As a result, a lot of things suffered.  My fitness nose-dived precipitously, and my writing ground to a sputtering halt.  The novel I was working on at the time still sits unfinished, partially because every time I go back to it I remember the experience of sitting looking at it and just not wanting to write anything.

Towards the latter half of 2011, I changed tack and started writing shorts, which worked a bit better for me…and was paradoxically worse because my short stories don’t turn out quite as strong as I hope.  Quit e a lot of attempts get binned off because they are chapters of much longer pieces than self-contained stories when I go back to them and look.  Still, I was getting stuff done again which was a step up from nothing at all.

it took NaNoWriMo to get me back onto the novel path.  My NaNo novel was, sadly, absolute guff after the first ten thousand words, an almost stream-of-consciousness mash of conflicts that went from back-street stabbings in one chapter to a bake-off challenge in the next. It was fun – I was actually quite proud of the bake-off –  but also very very hard going because every shred of common sense wanted to bin off the larger part of it and start again.  Only the goal of buying Scrivener for Windows (with the winner’s discount) kept me going.*

Now, I’m working on a new novel. I’ve got a couple of stories in the works, but mostly I’m focussing on the big project, chosen from a conflicting list of four similar-stage projects simply because I like the title (working) the best.

We’ll see how it goes. Lisa has noted that sometimes my writing is like her knitting – she gets new-project-itis and has no corresponding cases of get-it-finished-itis.  Hopefully in 2012 I can buck that trend.

*I’m not that much of a cheapskate, by the way.  I made a reasonable donation to the Office of Letters and Light to redress the balance