A Spork in the Road

And this is a fabulous one, described by Campfire NYC’s Michael Monello:

…the b-movie producer William Castle is a hero of mine. Those of you who lack the appreciation for kitsch that I have might know him as the producer of the Roman Polanski film ROSEMARY’S BABY, but in his day he was known as the “King of Gimmicks.”

Gimmick is an unfortunate word, however, as much of what he did was bridge the gap between the safety of the silver screen and the audiences lives. His most famous invention was PERCEPTO for his Vincent Price film THE TINGLER. The Tingler was a worm that burrowed into your spine and would kill you. The only way to kill the worm was to scream as loud as you can.

During the film, the Tingler crawls into a movie theater and then the screen goes dark. An announcer is heard:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the Tingler has entered this theater! SCREAM, SCREAM FOR YOUR LIVES!”

The seats were wired with PERCEPTO, which administered small electric shocks to your bottom. He didn’t just break the third wall, but turned his movie into a physically immersive experience.

— Michael Monello

(This reminds me of the Alien Encounter attraction at Disney’s Magic Kingdom, a ride which has since been replaced. I’ve heard friends pan Alien Encounter, but I loved it.)

A good piece in Wired about Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games.

This is, of course, of more than average interest to me for several reasons, including this one.

Another pseudo-post, this time cribbing a fabulous excerpt of an interview with Kelly Link. I hope to someday be bored again…

Boredom is useful for writers. I need a certain amount of boredom to get work done. But I also need to do other things besides sit at a desk and write. If I weren’t involved in various editing projects, I would have to find something else to do. You need other kinds of work, and you also need significant periods of stillness in order to have time to think. Boredom allows time for thinking. Even in writing, boredom serves a useful function — if I’m boring myself when I write, it means I need to stretch myself, try something I haven’t done before. I can only keep at one kind of work for so long and then I need a change. For the past couple of years it’s been kind of nice to have months in which I am writing, then to move from that to editing the books, thinking about design, print runs, fonts, et cetera. — Kelly Link in Locus Magazine

I know that the STC’s Technical Communication: Journal of the Society for Technical Communication sounds dry; and frankly, it sometimes is, although in a useful and interesting way. But the August issue features a delicious article by Russel Hirst called “Virtues and Vices of Omission” (is it somehow Freudian that I often try to spell the word with an extra “m”: ommission?).

…what I’m pondering in this article is the idea that all effective communication, even an amplification, is inseparable from the art of omission.

Most delightful to me is that Hirst links the principle of omission, or brevitas, through diverse fields including technical writing, creative writing, visual art, data graphics, and software development. Read the rest of this entry »

Optimism afflicts me in both my worlds, web development and fiction writing. The flip side of optimism is, of course, despair: when I realize it’s impossible to reach the dizzying heights to which I so casually aspired at the beginning of a project, my brain siphons away every happy chemical and erases my buzz, leaving me with a creative hangover and a depressive unwillingness to finish the project and thus prove my incompetence.

Maureen McHugh charts this emotional course, from “This is the greatest idea I’ve EVER had” down to the Dark Night of the Soul, and then back out.

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Stephen King is a hack, a good hack, but a hack. That’s not what I’m talking about. Commercial success is independent of the need to want to write - or should be. Again, to reiterate: if it happens, it happens. But, who would you rather be: Stephen King or Franz Kafka? I’d rather be Kafka. Again - and I’m very different from a lot of writers and other artists - but I don’t think about the money, success, or potential fame. I just don’t. Don’t get me wrong. King is a very good writer and a very competent story-teller, but what he writes is utterly ephemeral.
-Rex Pickett in an interview with Screenplayers.net

I finished Sideways by Rex Pickett over the weekend — the novel on which the award-winning film was based.

This prompted me to do some Internet scouring. I always like to know a bit about authors after I’ve read their books, so I looked up Pickett. He has no author website that I could find, but I did find several interviews with him, and one of them included the excerpt quoted above. This comment prompted me to think a little about the struggle between Genre and Literary; the commercial preeminence of the first and the critical preeminence of the second; and authorial hubris in general.

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It has arrived. The package with two gorgeous glossy contributor’s copies of the Spring 2007 Fantasy Magazine and a lovely check made out to me.

“Fish Girl” is a story I wrote in 2000 or 2001, almost sold (to Rick Wilber during his stint as editor of Galaxy magazine during one of its shorter incarnations), then got a series of encouraging rejections for it (notably from Ellen Datlow who actually liked the story but had no place to put it at that time — my non-writer friends were perplexed by my ecstasy at that rejection letter), then set aside for several years. I finally revised the story last year, having finally seen and understood how to repair the story’s fatal flaw, and sold it first time out to Sean Wallace.

The story has already been reviewed on Tangent Online.

Celebration!

Over the weekend we saw a disappointing BBC adaptation of I Capture the Castle, which is a delightful novel by Dodie Smith (who wrote the original story 101 Dalmations).

The direction was uneven, matched by a now-too-fast, now-too-slow screenplay adaptation of the novel. The acting ranged all over, from Bill Nighy’s endearingly explosive portrayal of the family’s father to Henry Thomas’ stiff version of Simon. (Henry Thomas, in case the name doesn’t ring a bell, played Elliott in Spielberg’s E.T.)

Strangest of all was the film’s “R” rating. We puzzled over this before starting the film, and then someone said, “Ah! In the book, Topaz is a nudist!” Sure enough, near the beginning of the film is a short scene in which wildly romantic Topaz disrobes in a field. I cannot think of a more innocent instance of nudity in any film I’ve ever seen, but apparently this ribald mammary display sent the MPAA into paroxysms of Puritanical rage, and thus a YA novel adaptation came to our shores with a big “For Mature Audiences Only” label stamped on it.

It just boggles the mind to live in a place where I Capture the Castle and Live Free or Die Hard are given the same film rating.

I’m reading Anna Karenina — today I’m on page 506 of 817 pages. I bought a lovely Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation, a trade paperback that is nicely typeset with a strong font, good line spacing, and good binding.

I particularly like the use of upper- and lower-case letters of the same height for the book’s title on the cover; I think it evokes the Cyrillic alphabet nicely while still being entirely readable.

The jacket is filled with praise not of the book itself — anyone who needs blurbs to attract them to this novel probably isn’t going to read it anyway — but of the translation, which is indeed vivid and elegant.
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If the title of this post does not make you either chuckle or weep, you may not understand the post. However, if you are reading this blog, you are obviously on a computer, and are probably interested in writing and/or web development, and therefore if you say you have not fallen victim to FreeCell Addiction, then I say you are lying.

Let’s face it. We probably need our own 12 Step Program. FreeCell Anonymous: dry-eyed attendees with twitchy mouse fingers and a tendency to huddle around the refreshments table and methodically sort the napkins by color and shape.

However, I am discovering that FreeCell may not be as pernicious as I thought. Or rather, it is pernicious in a useful way.
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