Category Archives: Stuff I Recommend

And … and … Serenity!
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Wow. Just … wow.

Spoilers would be criminal, so you won’t find them here. If you haven’t watched Firefly, Serenity will be a good, exciting, and comprehensible movie. If, however, you’ve seen the series, it becomes breathtaking.

So … what you do is, you buy or rent or talk a good friend into renting the whole series, you sit up one night and watch it from front to back (this can be done — I’ve done it), and then you go see the movie. Because it is too damned good a movie for you not to know how very, very, transcendentally good it is.

And Serenity
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I’m a huge fan of Joss Whedon’s work, and above all, of Firefly, the one show that, if it returned to television, would actually lure me back to sitting through advertisements to watch it. (In the last ten years, the only other two shows I actually made time to watch when they were being broadcast were Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Angel, which my two older kids and I showed up for faithfully during their entire runs.) There are other shows on television that I like: Alias, Rescue Me, The Shield. But I don’t like them enough to tolerate television shills and endless advertising to see them. I just wait until the DVD sets come out, and watch them that way.

Whedon is different. I’ve found in his television work the same touch of grace that I’ve found in some of my favorite authors — Theodore Sturgeon, Clifford Simak, Lawrence Block when he’s writing Matt Scudder. Whedon isn’t just there for the story. He’s in there for something deeper, searching for transcendence and transformation, and you walk away from his stories with more than you took into them. Whedon’s storytelling has grown and gotten deeper; the arc from Buffy through Angel to Firefly demonstrates a writer who keeps pushing himself to be better, who keeps digging deeper for characters and themes and stories, and who keeps daring to take chances.

Today, Serenity, the first movie that originated from the Firefly series, debuts in our area. We’re going to be there. I’m excited.

Oh, God, Oh, God, The Sky Is Falling
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Since the early 1980s, the civilized world has been crushed beneath sheets of onrushing glacial ice. We’ve watched in horror as the world’s great cities have fallen beneath those relentless, grinding masses, as the lights have gone out in heartbreaking, poignant flickers, overrun by darkness that will not retreat for thousands of years, if ever.

Here we sit, in our caves, the few survivors of a once-populous world, and … What? The world isn’t covered in sheets of ice, cities aren’t ground to rubble beneath the onrushing glaciers, we aren’t all dead? Sonuvabitch. If only that had happened, we could have been spared Wham! and glam-rock.

But the world did end on January 1, 2000. Here we are, our civilization crushed by our foolish dependence on computers, living in caves and starting fires by banging rocks together and …. and … Dammit. We missed that one, too?

For those of you who missed the Ice Age that glaciated the populated world in the early 1980s, or the devastation of Y2K, be sure to catch the exciting hysteria and fun panic of your very own chance to die horribly in ten years.

Fascinatingly enough, the end of the world is always ten years from now. Or at least on a Number Ending In Zero. In the early seventies, we were ten years from the ice age. Y2K — many zeroes. Now we’re ten years from a melt-down. If you’re getting a bit suspicious of the magic sky-is-falling God Hates Decimals doom mark (and yeah, you should be), take the time to read Michael Crichton’s The State of Fear. I’d already figured out global warming was hype before I read the book. (I was about thirteen when I read that in ten years everything and everyone I loved was going to be living in perpetual snow. And I was one of those jackasses who thought the carefully documented disaster scenario of Y2K was plausible.) Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me. Burn me three times … I don’t think so, pals. I started doing my own research.

But if the end of the world is new territory for you — and with it, the people who make a whole lot of money and gain a whole lot of power when you buy into their scenarios — you’ll appreciate a novel that is massively and comprehensively researched, footnoted, appendixed, and intelligent. And a writer who doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but who is very, very good at pointing out the lies told by those who do claim to.

Productive Day Off
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Finished reading POMPEII, by Robert Harris. Highly, highly recommend it. There was one paragraph at the end that made me laugh, and nearly made me cry, simply because it is so true. Not a spoiler of any sort, so I’ll quote:

Men mistook measurement for understanding. And they always had to put themselves at the center of everything. That was their greatest conceit. The earth is becoming warmer — it must be our fault! The mountain is destroying us — we have not propitiated the gods! It rains too much, it rains too little — a comfort to think that these things are somehow connected to our behavior, that if only we lived a little better, a little more frugally, our virtue would be rewarded. But here was nature, sweeping toward him — unknowable, all-conquering, indifferent — and he saw in her fires all the futility of human pretensions.

Listened to Art Bell (Coast to Coast Weekend Edition) last night, and as usual of late, he started by discussing global warming/cooling, freakish weather events, and scientific reports that all the planets in the solar system are warming. Ice caps on Mars melting, etc.. And then he said, “Whether these changes are caused by human activity or are simply a cyclical occurence, we should be DOING something.”

Right. What? I’m not buying that American industry (what little is left of it) is melting the icecaps on Earth, much less Mars. Or that kicking SUVs off the road and bankrupting the country by becoming a signatory of the Kyoto Accords is going to do anything but, well, bankrupt the country. Nature has been kicking our asses for as long as we’ve had asses to kick. Ice ages, warming cycles, earthquakes, volcanoes, wildfires, typhoons, magnetic reversals in the crust. Earth’s AND Mars’s ice caps are melting, the solar system is heating up. Our planet is changing. Okay, fine, what if it is? Aside from moving to higher ground and stocking up on food, what precisely are we supposed to do?

I can’t complain too much about Art’s current weather rant, though. Brian L. Weiss was his guest, and talking about past and future lives, the space in between, and other goodies. I got the germ of a book out of it; now I just need to let it perk for a while to see if it’s something I could work up for Claire.

Plans for the Day
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I want another three thousand new words today. Will accept two thousand as a bare minimum.

Am set up again with the Clapton Gambit for stuck moments.

And will just note that, in an effort to understand better where my Onyx editor is coming from and translate the place that I’m coming from into something that will work for both of us, I picked up a copy of The Romance Writer’s Handbook two days ago.

Also snagged a copy of the Writing The Breakout Novel Workbook. Reading Writing the Breakout Novel while I was working on THE SECRET TEXTS trilogy, then spot-checking from time to time while doing Talyn and Midnight Rain, helped me focus on what I needed to be doing. I’m not sure the workbook will add to the value I got from the book, but I figured it was worth a look.

Weird Fun
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Well, the writing is going pretty well, though 20,000 words of it have been going well in the negative sense, since those were the words I ripped out to put in new and better words. There’s nothing like tossing a hundred problem pages to make a novel fly. Weird fun.

Nor is that the only weird fun I’ve been having. I discovered a new writer — (new to me, that is) — Ann Coulter, through her irresistibly-titled book Treason. It’s researched to the teeth, has things I sure as hell never got in history class (and I went to school when schools still actually taught history), and in the hands of a less-talented writer I would simply be furious at what I’m discovering. Instead, there have been places where I’ve had to stop reading because I was laughing so hard. Don’t get me wrong — I’m still pissed off about the fifty-plus year-long war of treachery and deceit detailed in the book. But even villainy can be hilarious when handled by a good enough writer. And Coulter is that good. Give Treason a try; it will be worth your time.

24 (the TV show)
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Yesterday I took a day off. My older son and I sat on the couch and watched episodes of 24 from the DVD set he got from his grandparents. I’m enthralled. It isn’t television — the creators and actors have managed — by devoting twenty-four hours (minus ad breaks) to a single day of story — to give the series the depth that television lacks. They also apparently had a good budget, because the production quality is superb. Acting is also excellent — all of the major cast so far has been brilliant. Some of the extras have been laughably bad, to the degree that Stephen King was bad in the television version of The Stand, and I find myself wondering who they’re related to, or what strings they pulled to get parts. Nevertheless, extras don’t last long in this series. If you hate them, they’ll get shot soon.

Although my son assures me that many of the storylines get painfully contrived at around episode 3:00 pm and don’t pull themselves together for a while, they aren’t contrived yet, and, eight hours into the thing, all I can say is, if you haven’t seen this yet, you should. It’s amazing.

And with that note, I’ll get to back to work on Gods Old and Dark, where today Molly and Seolar deal with Molly’s peculiar curse, and their future.

Got Sheila’s edits
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Am revising this morning. Going to be revising for quite a bit. She caught more than I did.

And a blanket author recommendation: Jennifer Crusie. If she’s written it, it’s good. Grown-up, funny, sexy, slightly kinkly romances with mayhem, the occasional dead body, and some very nice suspense.

2448 words, posted a bit late
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2448 words, posted a bit late

Thanks to the folks in chat who jumped into the word war — got my 1500 there, to add to the words I’d already done for the day. Ended up with a nice number, an afternoon to just play around with research and maybe some revision plans, and a nice, tense scene.

This is posted late since the site was down earlier — actually finished up around 1:20 PM.

And two additional romantic-suspense recommendations. Jennifer Crusie’s Fast Women, which is both suspenseful and funny as hell, and Linda Howard’s Dying to Please, which has superb characters and a solid suspense story.

Another “recommend” from my research list
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Linda Howard’s Now You See Her — very well done; this one much more a traditional romance, and thus less likely to appeal to men, but it did a great job of blending psychic and suspense elements, and the ending was … er … killer.

What this means, by the way, is that Sheila Viehl has really good taste in the books she recommends, since she’s the one who shipped them over. Every one so far has been great. I now have two Iris Johansens — not sure which of the two will be my next read. But I haven’t had this much fun tearing through a pile of books in ages.