Thanks And The Sofa

Hey, you guys, It's time once again to nominate your favorite contributors to StarShipSofa's wonderful Aural Delights show for The Sofanaut Awards. These are nominations so you can pick as many favorites as you like. I'm eligible in three categories. Just sayin'.

Best Main Fiction: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Diplomat
Best Flash/Short Fiction: A Hard Rain and Brothers and Sisters All
Best Fact Article Contributor: Fiction Crawler, Movie Talk Special - Watchmen

Thanks a bunch for listening! You can vote here:

http://sofanauts2010.questionpro.com/

Next, I want to wish all you Americans and ex-pats out there a wonderful Thanksgiving tomorrow and you know, I've had a shit year (debt, divorce and death, among other plagues), but I still have a lot to be thankful for. Family and friends like you guys, chief among them. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Lastly, I have totally sucked at plugging the Sofa lately, so let's remedy that right now:

Aural Delights No 110 Cory Doctorow

Editorial: by StarShipSofa Stories by Sean Keough

Fact Article: The Sofanaut Awards by Mark Bormann

Fact Article: With A Little Help by Cory Doctorow

Main Fiction: To Go Boldly by Cory Doctorow

Fact: Film Talk by Rod Barnett

New Titles by Tony C Smith

Narrators: JJ Campanella, Paul Caggige

Art Cover by Skeet

The Sofanauts Awards 2010 VOTE NOW!

Say Nothing (Or, Dan Gets Lucky)

I just read some stuff on Watchmen and Alan Moore on Tor.com and io9 and I had some problems with some of the comments. But I decided not to get involved, even thought I read some facts that I think are incorrect. For one, I don't care that much. For another, one of the commenters went all youtube and said some unnecessarily harsh stuff that didn't really contribute to the conversation and I don't want to throw down because it only causes more chaos and unpleasant feelings.

But let me say something here, not about that, but about the movie. Lots of reviews are talking about how long the sex scene is and how awkward it makes them feel. In fact, when I saw the movie, I almost wondered if the sex scene had been trimmed because it didn't seem as unbearably long as people said it was. My former wife and I had no problem with the scene. I don't imagine it's a question of maturity, but just being comfortable watching people have sex. When I was a teenager watching a sex scene on HBO with my parents in the room made me want to smash the TV so it would stop. It was hideously uncomfortable. Maybe they felt the same way or maybe they didn't care. Watchmen was totally different. My parents weren't in the room, I was a middle-aged man, I had actually had sex with someone by that point and I was sitting next to that person. And we'd both watched plenty of porn.

The scene was fine. It wasn't nasty or overdone. It was two people who really needed each other and wanted each other sharing something wonderful and life-affirming and normal. And I didn't mind the Hallelujuh song either. If I was Über-geek Dan at that point, making it for the first time in who knows how long, making it with this very hot lady and getting it up when I hadn't before, in my head I'd be singing Hallelujuh too. Which brings me to another point. If you haven't read the book, but you've seen the movie you wouldn't know that the reason for Dan's impotence was the lack of costumes. The costumes get him hot. I wish they would have mentioned that as well as a lot of other things. Ah, well.

Just finished my rewrite of Three Kingdoms. Now I'm going to read it through out loud and see how I like it. I did add a couple of cool little things with this draft that I really liked. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Something New

Well, back to work tomorrow. The writing week started off gangbusters, but there must have been a leak, because the pressure dropped as the week went on. I wondered why my house was so steamy. Ah, well. Onward and upward.

I've been working on too much mundane stuff lately, Maisy's Many Souls, Process Five, TIWOTAM, and Fiction Crawler. I want to loosen up a bit and write some crazy stuff. I got very close to what I wanted last year with a short thing called Dritty Does. I like it a lot, I liked the writing, but I did want more story underneath it. The writing for something like that gets far out and the problem has been that the more I try to bring it down to something that appears to be a story, the more pedestrian the writing gets. I want both. I want acid-laced lunatic beat prose with a real conflict-laden story beneath it and I want some length to it as well. Dritty was only about twelve-hundred words. I want something in the neighborhood of four-thousand. Anyway that's what I want to do next. I'll let you guys know how it turns out.

I saw Watchmen. You guys can hear what I thought about it on the next StarShipSofa. I won't be recommending it to people who aren't comics fans. I don't think they'll care for it at all. But hardcore geeks will wet themselves.

Do any of you guys do songza? I abandoned it for a while because it didn't seem to play nice with my Mac, but things seem to be better now. The thing I like about it that I can't get from Pandora or Jango is that I can listen to the song I want when I want to. Anyway, see if you like it.

I figured out what was wrong with this blog. Not enough Nerf Herder. Although the lyrics don't address my particular feelings about Van Halen, I love the song.

V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N!

I'm on vacation this week and it will be like the song says except for all the fun stuff. It's a writing vacation. Wheeee! But seriously, this is the type of vacation I've wanted to take for years and haven't. I've taken a week off while everyone is in school and I plan to do a lot of writing. I'm shooting for about forty-five hours and that's probably more than I've ever done in a week, even including NaNoWriMo. It's not all actual writing, there's going to be an awful lot of revision, really. And I like revising a hell of a lot more than Mur Lafferty or Paolo Bacigalupi, I can tell you that. I'm finally going to have a draft of Process Five that I can show to first readers in a day or two. I'll probably take care of Fiction Crawler 6, do some work on my novel and who knows what else? It'll be a big nerdy good time. I'll celebrate on Saturday by seeing Watchmen with the former wife.

In Twitter news, I'm starting a question of the day. If you're on there and feel like answering, have at it. If you're not on there, get on there. You can find me on Twitter as upwithgravity. No, I am not disheartened by the fact that nobody answered my first question today. I posted it at an odd time and maybe it wasn't a very good question. These things take time to catch on.

That's What Geeks Are For

The great thing about all the Watchmen trailers and 'making of' videos is that I can be disappointed by the movie before I actually see it. I'd been planning to avoid the movie altogether because it just can't be the comic no matter what goes into it. When I saw the first trailer last year, I was impressed enough that I changed my mind. I thought, "Well, it's not going to be the comic, but we'll see how close it can get." And up to tonight I've been relatively okay with what I've seen. But tonight I realized that the attention to detail isn't as attentive as I thought.

The cars are wrong.

Much of the story takes place in 1985 and if you look at the streets in the movie, you see a bunch of real mid-eighties models of cars. And that's wrong. Watchmen isn't just a superhero movie, it's an alternate reality movie. Two people in particular have made a huge difference in the world of Watchmen as it compares to our world: Dr. Manhattan and Adrian Veidt. Because of Dr. Manhattan, Nixon is still president in '85, Vietnam is the 51st state and everyone drives electric cars. And they're funky looking cars, not to be mistaken for what we had on our roads back in the day. Here's a little glimpse:

Not a great glimpse but I think you can see these things don't exactly look like the Ford LTD. Besides that, I have yet to see those funky ball pipes everyone smokes in the comic, or the goofy space cadet hats or any topknots. Here's a hat:

All of these things help make Watchmen uniquely Watchmen. But, hey, maybe they're in there. I just doubt it. I know this is all just petty bitching. I'll give you that. But that's what geeks are for.

Comic Bookery

I twittered about some of this stuff earlier, so maybe this won't be new for you. I'm going to reread Watchmen before the movie comes out. I read it every few years anyway, since it first came out. I've been poking around it at the store, rereading my favorite line in all the works of man - Rorschach (To an entire prison population): "None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with me." You have to read the book to really appreciate it, but fuck, that is bad ass. If you haven't read it yet, what the hell are you waiting for? You have less than two weeks to swallow it down so you and I and the rest of geekdom can be sufficiently disappointed with the movie. Hurry up!

Process Five, some of you may remember, began as a comic book script. I had an encouraging half a bite on it too, before a certain line of a certain publisher bit the certain dust. Because it was a comic script, I wrote Process Five's lines in first person present tense, a mainstay of gritty story-telling throughout the past thirty years of four-color heroism. I tried it that way in the story I'm working on now, with other parts being third person past tense. Then I decided to can the other points of view, so it was all going to be first person present. Then I thought I should put those other parts back in and entire thing should be third person past tense. The other day I realized Process Five's parts should again be first person, but in past tense, while the other parts should remain third person past, save for Process Five's dream/memories which should be first person present. Are you following me? What all of this means is that I keep going through this goddamned story, changing piles of pronouns and verbs again and again and this isn't the first time I've gone through this with a story. Gaaa!

With this post I realize I don't talk nearly enough about comic books here. They were practically my life for fifteen years or so, and now I hardly ever pick one up. For much the same reason I don't watch much TV or see many movies or even read much. I'm too tied up with work, householdery, writing and wasting time online. But man I have some happy comic book memories. I want to tell you about Watchmen. I want to tell you about Andy Helfer's brilliant nineteen issue run of The Shadow and Kyle Baker's magnificent art on that book, the excitement of an honest to goodness comic book space opera near the end of The Omega Men with the wonderful round-bodied cartoony artistry of Shawn McManus, Gaiman and McKean's Black Orchid, Englehart and Rogers' magnificent Batman stint. Ah well. Some other time then. I need to catch my breath.

Who Watches This Blog Post?

Even if the movie sucks, they made one fantastic trailer. I can't stop watching it. They truly brought those memorable comic book frames to life. If I ever doubted that I'd sit through this thing, those doubts are behind me now.