Read the trials and tribulations as full-time freelance non-fiction writer Joe DeRouen attempts to build a career doing what he loves - writing fiction.
Friday, January 08, 2010
Avatar
Just got back from seeing Avatar and was blown away. It was a phenomenal movie, emotionally triumphant, and anyone who says otherwise... well, I just don't get it. What more could you want from a movie?
I've heard people say it was thin on plot, and, aside from not explaining just what in the hell made Unobtainium (silly name!) so valuable, I disagree. Sure, the plot was fairly straightforward - humans stealing land from the seemingly-primitive aliens - and yes, it's an allegory for what we did to the American Indians, but so what? It was a beautiful story told beautifully. It was amazing, both in the scope of the completely alien world and, yes, in the special effects.
I may be going out on a limb here, but in ten or twenty years I think people will revere it much the same way we revere Star Wars today: as an amazing, landmark movie that changed the face of film as we know it.
It's alright. This was actually the first full-length novel I read on my new Kindle. WWW: Wake is the story of a blind girl named Caitlin who undergoes an experimental surgery that could give her sight. Scientists implant a device behind one of her eyes that is supposed to let her see. Soon enough, though, she discovers that, instead of reality, she is perceiving the World Wide Web. What at first she takes to be simple noise turns out to be a sentient entity that has risen from the Internet. Interesting but predictable. WWW: Wake is the first in a series, so maybe subsequent books will be better.
Ghost Road Blues, Dead Man's Song, and Bad Moon Rising by Jonathan Maberry An excellent dark urban fantasy/horror trilogy! Thirty years after the death of a serial killer known as the Reaper, the citizens of Pine Deep, a small tourist town in Pennsylvania (nicknamed "the most haunted town in America") must come to grips with more strange murders, a crop blight that threatens to wipe out the town's farmers, and some really, really evil folks hell bent on bringing about the end of the world as we know it.
ex-cop, martial arts expert, comic book store owner, and near-victim of the original Reaper, Malcolm Crow finds himself thrust into the role of hero, responsible for not only protecting childhood sweetheart Val (Maberry falls into the Dean Koontz trap here, of making Val The Most Perfect Woman in the World) but the whole town. I won't get into the plot too much here, but if you like folklore, vampires, and werewolves, you'll love this trilogy. And there aren't vamps and wolves from popular culture either; they're straight from the legends of old. Be warned: crosses and stakes through the heart may not work on real vampires...
What if you could live your life over again? REPLAY takes that age-old wish one step beyond. Jeff Winston, a not-very-successful radio journalist in his forties, begins the greatest journey anyone could ever know.
He awakens from his death in the past, in his college dorm room. It's 1963, exactly 25 years earlier. At first thinking that he's in a dream or a coma-induced hallucination, Jeff eventually accepts his situation as reality. Forced to live the last 25 years of his life over again, Jeff swears not to make the same mistakes again.
Jeff uses his knowledge of the future to build a financial empire, but true happiness manages to elude him. Eventually marrying a wealthy heiress, the loveless union produces the one thing that his previous life could never give him; a child.
Always alone, Jeff accepts his fate as time marches on, enjoying the company of his daughter Gretchen. On October 18th 1988, at exactly 1:06 pm, he dies again..
..Only to awaken again in 1963, a little further along in his original timeline.
REPLAY follows the lives of Jeff Winston with angst, sadness, intrigue, and just a touch of humor, and is my all-time favorite novel. I've read the book probably a 14 or 15 times in the years since I first found it (in 1987) and I never tire of it. It's as close to perfect as a novel can get.
I purchased a Kindle 2 from Amazon.com a little over a month ago, and I love it. I wasn't sure I would. I mean, I love books - I like how they feel in your hand, I enjoy the smell, delight in turning the pages. Guess what? Other than the smell, the Kindle duplicates these things just about perfectly. So much, in fact, that I often forget I'm reading it, and scan the room for my bookmark when I want to put my book down.
In the month that I've had my Kindle, I've used it to read five novels, a novella, and countless blogs and newsletters. And if you stop in the middle of a newsletter, say, and decide to start reading a novel, and then go back to the newsletter later, you pick up exactly where you left off. Multiple bookmarks, just like with "real" books!
And, yes, you quickly get used to turning pages via a button. I know it's hard to believe now, but by halfway through Stephen King's novella UR, it had become almost second nature to press that "next page" button. And one of the nicer things about the Kindle is that, if you want to find a piece of information you remember reading earlier in the book, it's only a text search away!
The Kindle 2 runs $299 and the Kindle DX, it's larger cousin, (10.4" x 7.2" x 0.38" vs. 8" x 5.3" x 0.36") costs $489. I almost bought the DX. but in the end couldn't really justify the cost difference, especially when you consider that the price difference ($190) can buy a lot of eBooks! And though I occasionally wish I'd sprung for the bigger Kindle - magazines and graphic novels, while readable on the K2, would certainly be much more readable on the DX - I'm overall happy with my decision. If nothing else, when they eventually come out with the Kindle Color (or maybe Kindle Kolor - geez, I hope not!) I'll only be replacing a $300 device, and not a $500 one.
For those who don't know, the K2 holds approximately 1,500 eBooks. That's a lot of reading material, and at this point I don't think I've even used 5% of that space. And even if I do, I can archive material on my PC or simply let Amazon do it for me. They keep a listing of everything you've purchased through them or had them convert, (they have a service that will convert .txt, .doc, and a whole bunch of other file formats to the Kindle format, via attaching the file to an email and sending it to your special Kindle address, for $.15) so if you want to physically delete something from your Kindle, you still have it in your Kindle page on Amazon.com.
And, of course, everything is delivered to your device wirelessly, via WhisperNet, Amazon's 3G network. There are no monthly or start-up fees. You buy the Kindle, you have access to WhisperNet, simple as that. And, really, you never have to spend a dime after the initial purchase of the Kindle. Go to Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) and download all the free classic eBooks you want. You can even forgo Amazon's $.15 translation into Kindle format fee by sending the file to a special address that, instead of then sending the converted file to your Kindle, sends it back to you. Then you're only a USB cable away from uploading it to your Kindle yourself. (There are also independent utilities out there that you can use to convert files to the Kindle format without Amazon's involvement.)
I could write a lot more about the K2 features - text-to-speech, for instance, or the ability to play MP3's - but really, the proof is in the pudding. If you have a friend or a relative with a Kindle 2, DX, or even the first generation Kindle, ask them if you can give it a spin. For me, it was actually holding and using my brother-in-law's first-gen Kindle that sold me on the concept. Before that, I was one of the "I'll never give up real books" people. Afterward, I couldn't wait to own my very own Kindle 2.
Another nice thing about the Kindle format is the price of books. Most new hard cover novels are anywhere from $24.95 to $27.95. In Kindle format, most are $9.99. (There are some as high as $14.95.) That's a huge savings, not to mention the benefit of not having to sandwich yet another beefy novel into your already-overcrowded bookshelf. If, like me, you read a lot, both the money and the space saved, over the long term, will more than make up for the initial $300 cash outlay.
So, have I sold you yet? If you want to check out the Kindle 2 or Kindle DX for yourself, head on over to Amazon and give it a whirl!
On January 3rd, 2006, I queried the agent of one of my favorite authors. She said she really liked my query letter, but was up to her eyeballs in work. She asked, if I didn't have an agent in three months time, to e-mail her again. I did, and she said she wanted to look as the manuscript, but to wait another three months to send it off. I agreed, and sent it off three months later. And I waited.
Was I put off by waiting? Well, sure. Of course. But she was upfront and honest with me, and it was my choice to wait. She didn't put a gun to my head. So I waited. This was around August of 2006. I wrote her again in December of that same year, and she said she hadn't yet been able to read it. Her assistant, a junior agent, wrote me and said she'd like to read it. I agreed, and the first agent passed it off to the second agent.
And that's when the fun began. This was around the first of January, 2007, just about a year since I'd originally sent off the manuscript. The junior agent gave me the three month time frame, and when I wrote in three months, gave me another three month time frame. I am patient, but my patience was starting to wear thin. I wrote said junior agent, and she didn't respond. I waited a month and wrote again, with the same results. Eventually I wrote the original agent, who spoke to her junior associate, who apparently said, "I think I rejected it."
I wrote junior agent yet again, to confirm this, and got no response. Finally, she returned on e-mail in July of 2008. " I have been excessively tardy in replying to you, for which I profusely apologize," she said. " I am writing to see if you are still interested in having me read the material you sent me, in regards to potential representation. If you would like to withdraw it from consideration, I will not be offended in the least. Please let me know how you would like to proceed."
I wrote her back and said, yes, I'm still interested, but how long will it take?
A month later, she wrote me back, stating: "Probably within three months, which is my standard response time frame now. "
She hadn't had time to read my novel, but yet had time to post almost daily updates to her blog.
This was in August of 2008, mind you, two and a half years since I'd queried the original agent, and over a year and a half since the junior agent had agreed to read the ms. Flabbergasted, I put it out of my mind and set a reminder to e-mail her again in three months. No response, though I did get a mass e-mail telling me that she had left the employ of the original agent to start her own agency.
Finally, in February of 2009 - over three years from the date of my initial query - she finally returned my e-mail, and said that she had decided against representing the novel, because she had decided to "no longer represent horror."
I deleted the e-mail. My novel wasn't horror. It's an urban fantasy. After all that time, she still hadn't actually read the thing but had apparently gotten tired of my increasingly-annoyed e-mails and finally decided to blow me off.
To this day, I have absolutely no problem with the first agent. She was polite, informed me of the long wait, and when she still couldn't get to it she passed it off to someone she thought could. That's professional and courteous, and I really appreciated her efforts.
The second agent, however, I will always have problems with. She not only repeatedly lied to me, but she also lied to her boss when she told me she had rejected my ms. I can only imagine that she's treated others the same way. It was my choice to keep waiting for her (which in retrospect I much regret) but, by her chosen career, she's put herself in a position between the publisher and the author, a potential gateway if you will, and she has a responsibility to treat both ends of that equation fairly. In my case, at least, she failed tremendously.
It was demoralizing and depressing, to say the least. I'm not naming names because of my respect for the original agent, but I will say that if the junior agent came to me with a publishing contract in hand and an offer to represent me, I would not think twice about walking away. I certainly bear some responsibility for being silly enough to wait that long, during which time I stopped querying other agents, but I never would have done that had this junior agent not kept stringing me along. I'll certainly never make that mistake again.
Okay, so I'm still working on my third novel. 90,000 words and counting. But there's a problem. Without giving too much of the plot away, there are these two bad... guys, we'll call them. They've stolen a body from the morgue, a body they need to resurrect, but for plot purposes I need them to wait a night before attempting to perform the ritual needed to resurrect it.
I need a reason - a logical (within the framework of the supernatural, of course) reason that they have to delay 24 hours. I've come up with a couple of reasons - the ritual needs to happen at midnight and it's 12:30 by the time they escape with the body, it has to happen under a full moon and tomorrow just so happens to be a full moon - but none of them feel right.
That's the word of the day. Well, one of several words of the day, actually. I subscribe to at least three different WotD e-mail lists: Wordsmith.org, Dictionary.com, and Visual Thesaurus. I saw "at least three" because I think there are more, but that's all I can find at the moment. Simpaticio, my favorite of the three words for today, is from Wordsmith.
I save these. I have WotD's stored in various e-mail archives, going back to 2001. Why do I save them? I guess I'm convinced that, some day, when I really need the perfect word, I'll be able to search through my e-mail and find it. Hasn't happened yet, but all it would take is just once to make all that archiving worthwhile. Right?
Or maybe I save them just because I love words. Simpatico, oblation, stultify, incongruous, euphoric, luau, azimuth, frangible, foundling, ragamuffin, attendee, tarradiddle and Kafkaesque. That's just a small sampling of the words sitting in my inbox, and reading them now makes me happy. Even if I never actually use them in one of my novels or articles.
It was stultifyingly hot at the luau, thought the ragamuffin, her long pants and thick wool sweater incongruous with the short skirts and loud Hawaiian shirts worn by the other attendees around her.
I guess I'm just feeling simpatico with my words. And now I'm off to search out more WotD lists. Because, you know, three really isn't enough. And who knows? Maybe I'll find inspiration to finally complete that third novel. That would leave me feeling euphoric indeed. And that's no tarradiddle!
I really don't get why certain people begrudge health care for others. "Well, sure, I think everyone should be able to go to the doctor... but not if it raises my taxes!" Since when did the American people become so selfish, so single-minded?
My wife and our son and I went to a democratic rally over the weekend, and the number of people outside the gates holding anti-health care signs were amazing. They somehow equate health care reform with Communism, trojan horses (whatever the hell that even means,) and Socialism. Personally, I'm all for Socialism, but what the dems are considering is so far from Socialism it's ridiculous. The idea of universal health care has been watered down to a public option, and now we probably won't even get that.
And speaking of which, I just love the argument that "the USA is bigger than (Canada, the UK, France, Germany, whatever) so we can't afford universal health care." There's a hole in that argument so huge that you could drive a fleet of Haliburton trucks through it. Yes, we ARE bigger - but so is our GNP. We'd have to spend more money to make universal health care happen, but, not so ironically, we also have more money to spend. If the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and France can make universal health care work - and, yes, despite that the Republicans might want you to believe, it DOES indeed work - then why can't we?
At this point, I'm not going to be satisfied with anything less than a public option. I have no clue whether it's going to happen or not, but it needs to happen. It would be the first step toward true universal health care, which should be everyone's ultimate goal.
Except, of course, for the conservatives, who would prefer the massive insurance companies just keep on making money hand over fist and denying sick people and people who can't afford health insurance health care, their supposed Christian values be damned.
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