An interview with who? An interview with me. Go read it here.
The New York Times‘ review of HBO’s A Game of Thrones has stirred up a minor geeky shitstorm over Ginia Bellafante’s statements, among them the ironically patronizing claim that it’s “boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.” She believes, apparently, that women have little to no interest in Tolkienish epic fantasy, and that HBO amped up the sex in A Game of Thrones just to draw in the ladies.
This is pretty dumb, of course, or simply ignorant. A nice refutation can be found on Geek with Curves. The main point is this: tons of women read fantasy in all forms. If you still picture fantasy as a fandom of sweaty male shut-ins, your stereotypes are at least a generation behind the fact.
Frustratingly, I think Bellafante does reach some highly relevant conclusions about A Game of Thrones itself, criticizing it for “serv[ing] up a lot of confusion in the name of no larger or really relevant idea beyond sketchily fleshed-out notions that war is ugly, families are insidious and power is hot.”
My god! It sounds as if HBO’s version is actually an incredibly faithful adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s well-written but manipulative and mentally bankrupt book series! A series I threw down in disgust midway through the fourth novel when I just couldn’t take it anymore.
The fact I’d read to the fourth novel proves Martin’s series is highly readable and initially engaging. But after a while, I started to get impatient for the long, long, looooong setups to pay off (give me the fucking ice-monsters already!); for his enraging habit of ending every chapter on a cliffhanger and then, when we return to the cliffhung character 50-80 pages later, we’ve found all the action has already passed; for his Saharan lack of ideas besides “people with power should be good, but they usually aren’t”; for the utter inability for the good guys to come out with a single victory (I like grit as much as the next guy, but throw me some hope now and then); for his creepy sex scenes of old men and teenage girls; for his ever-expanding roster of side characters that draw us further and further from the reasons we were reading in the first place…
So for Bellafante to nail down one of the most valid criticisms of A Song of Ice and Fire, only to have her observation lost beneath her hilariously bygone stereotypes? Man, that’s frustrating. For all it insults women, it manages to insult another subset of fantasy fans: those of us who should be inclined to love Martin’s work, but instead find it manipulative, foolish, and overrated.
Blah blah available here.
With Arthur, I had the fairly rare experience of laughing a lot more than the rest of the audience. As a professional snootyman who gets paid to tell you what you like is stupid, I will, in most cases, spend significantly less time laughing during a comedy than my hooting, armpit-scratching fellow theater-goers. Either that or there are lots more not-me people in the crowd than people who are me, so, taken as a whole, it sounds like they’re laughing more, but that theory suffers from the fatal flaw that it’s not making fun of anyone.
Whatever. This time, I was laughing the hardest. Basically every line out of Russell Brand’s mouth is a joke of some kind. I’m not sure about Arthur‘s rewatchability factor, and pretty much the entire Brand-Greta Gerwig romance storyline was the movie’s weakest part, but I had a pretty great time.
That’s right: I’ve been uploading my books to Barnes & Noble.
The Zombies of Hobbiton: A Martian Love Story
Turns out B&N takes HTML-formatted books just like Amazon, so it’s not that tricky to list your books at both. The only problem is each of them has their own peculiar quirks about what code they like to mangle or ignore–and the documentation is terrible. I’ve had to do a lot of trial-and-error to figure out what works, but on the upside, I’ve learned a lot of new CSS.
Available here.
Source Code is the second movie from director Duncan Jones, he of the awesome Moon. As a followup, I found Source Code neither as potent or as weird as his debut, but you know what? It was pretty close to great. I would watch it again right now. It’s a well-crafted, well-paced thriller. Jones has a natural instinct for quietly revealing something horribly disturbing without pushing things too far into manipulative or ridiculous territory. He seems to be a natural storyteller, too: he knows right when it’s time to reveal a new plot detail, and never indulges in “I know something you don’t!”-type shenanigans.
I’m really excited to see where his career goes from here. He’s off to a hell of a start.
First, the news: My novel The White Tree is currently featured at Spalding’s Racket.
Next, a digression: Over the last six weeks, I’ve added a new dimension to my writing career: indie publishing. Self-publishing, if you want to be more direct. Some talented but behind-the-times authors are still calling it “vanity publishing,” which.. well, I liked Hyperion an awful lot, Mr. Simmons. You write great AI. Let’s leave it at that.
Back on course: When you’re going it by yourself, you don’t have anyone advertising your work for you. Unless you’re one of those “guys with money” who can “hire publicists” and “eat dinner inside the restaurants instead of behind them.” But most of us, if we want people to know about our books, we have to tell them ourselves.
There are numerous ways to approach this, which I should probably explore in another post re: their relative shame index. For instance, I find interviews to be pretty painless: I’m not talking about why readers should buy a specific book, so the chance of sounding like a deluded used-car salesman is dramatically decreased. But in cases like this, where you’re basically saying “Hey, here’s my book, here’s why you might like to buy it”? I’m simultaneously excited by the opportunity and ashamed that I took it. I don’t think you have to feel that way. But I do.
Self-promotion has a definite learning curve. Here’s what I’ve learned so far: focus on the types of promotion you’re comfortable doing, be it interviews, tweets, forum involvement, guest blogs, describing your book on blogs that provide space for such things, etc. And even if you think your book is especially funny, poignant, action-packed, whatever, maybe you, as the author, are not the one to be promoting it as such. It’s one thing to reply to an interview question with “I try to write funny because funny things are funny.” It’s another to blurb your book somewhere with “A hilarious, can’t-put-downable read, My Immortal Masterpiece That Will Outlast Mankind Itself will touch your heart in ways that are illegal in 72 countries.”
I think I could have approached some of my blurb appearances a little better. But I’m sure my first agent queries were far from perfect, too, and I know my earlier stories would make me implode with shame. If there’s one thing about the process of becoming a writer, it’s that it teaches you to shrug it off, move forward, and vow to do better next time. To less failure ahoy!
That’s right. Available in just about every electronic format under the big yellow sun, The Zombies of Hobbiton: A Martian Love Story is currently free at Smashwords.
It’s a fast-paced horror-comedy novella of about 85 pages, and it won’t be free forever. So go forth! Download! Tell your buddies! Leave reviews! Be fruitful and multiply! Etc.!
The White Tree
In Mallon, the dark magic of the nether has been banned for centuries. Its users have been driven out or killed. Its secrets lost. But the holy book of...
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