Wednesday, April 05, 2006

eXistenZ

Just saw the movie eXistenZ last night. Fabulous film, reminded me strongly of a number of my favorites, like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, or Last Action Hero, movies where the virtual nature of what most people think of as the 'real world' gets brought out into the open. I had hoped that the Matrix movies might go the way indicated by eXistenZ, into a reality underneath Zion and the Matrix itself, however far down the producers wanted to go, but instead it became a (rather Socratic) action movie instead. I don't suppose the ambiguity of the ending could have been avoided in Matrix no matter how it went, but in an action movie format, ambiguity isn't allowed, so the series might have fared better with the critics as a metaphysical fantasy.

Sunday, April 02, 2006

My First Blog

So here I am, my first post on my first blog. Here I am, telling a tale from the middle outwards, rather than from the outside in as I usually do.

As usual, I am writing a story today, at least in part. My publisher, Echelon Press, has run a contest, with me and my talents as one of the prizes, along with those of several others. I am creating a story around a specific person, or rather a character based on her. It's actually a lot of fun--there's no feeling quite like the joy of creation. I barely slept the first night, as the storyline grew in my head, with new elements trying to join, others reluctantly being set aside. The hardest part is where I am now, in the middle segment. I compose from the outside in, with some ideas for the beginning and ending to join together, while the middle is the least structured and hardest to get through. But it's moving along, unlike my novel in progress, Blood Moon, a scifi-paranormal that stubbornly refuses to write itself for me. Most of my stories do that, especially if someone asks for it. I wrote my first short story, Chasing His Own Tale, at the request of my publisher, and it just flew out. I composed the whole thing in the space of an hour and finished it in a week. My other short story, Boys Will Be Boys, was even faster. I wrote it for a contest: write a story featuring the words 'hard port' in any interpretation. I wrote one story using five different uses of the phrase. Didn't win, though. One of these days I have to read the story that did win.