Fiction

Worst Movie Gadgets

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There was an awards show the other day, wasn’t there? I must have been making another mediocre omelet again. I tell you, ever since I watched videos of Julia Childs and Jacques Pepin making omelettes, I have tried to make my omelettes better than ever. I’ve succeeded in part, but I usually make only a decent one, sometimes a flavorless one. My egg and cheese bagel this morning was pretty good, despite the smoky scent all over the bagel. I know. You hate it for me.

Anyway, lists like this on worst gadgets ever used in movies strangely appeal to me. Here’s their take on the main character of The Terminator movies, the robot itself: “Now we know what you’re thinking. That the Terminator is actually an incredibly cool ‘gadget.’ But look: he shouldn’t even be in his own films. Kyle Reese clearly says that ‘things with moving parts’ cannot be sent back through time, in order to explain why he doesn’t have a ray gun, and why the robots don’t just send a big bomb back through time to kill John Connor. So how did the Terminator get back to the present day? ‘He’s covered in human skin.’ So why not just cover a ray gun in human skin? Do these people/cyborgs take us for fools?”

Fiction

“The source of these outrages is known…”

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Nothing in my head tonight, so I’ll just share one of my favorite snarky passages from the Sherlock Holmes stories. This is the opening of The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger:

When one considers that Mr. Sherlock Holmes was in active practice for twenty-three years, and that during seventeen of these I was allowed to cooperate with him and to keep notes of his doings, it will be clear that I have a mass of material at my command. The problem has always been not to find but to choose. There is the long row of year-books which fill a shelf, and there are the dispatch-cases filled with documents, a perfect quarry for the student not only of crime but of the social and official scandals of the late Victorian era. Concerning these latter, I may say that the writers of agonized letters, who beg that the honour of their families or the reputation of famous forebears may not be touched, have nothing to fear. The discretion and high sense of professional honour which have always distinguished my friend are still at work in the choice of these memoirs, and no confidence will be abused. I deprecate, however, in the strongest way the attempts which have been made lately to get at and to destroy these papers. The source of these outrages is known, and if they are repeated I have Mr. Holmes’s authority for saying that the whole story concerning the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant will be given to the public. There is at least one reader who will understand.

Fiction, Writing

Opening strong

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Picture credit: Bidgee.



I’m going to write this very carefully. Because it involves a real book, written by a real human being, with feelings, and I don’t want to cause that person any kind of embarrassment. I’m going to use the neutral but awkward pronoun “them” when referring to them, so that not even the gender of the writer will be apparent. You will not, I hope, be able to identify them by what I write.

A little while back, this person contacted me about a novel they’d e-published. It was a Christian novel (I won’t say what genre), and the author seemed to know their business, having been published in the non-fiction field. So I started the book with some hope.

Alas.

Although this person knows how to spell and cast a sentence, they don’t know the craft of fiction, which is a different thing from the craft of non-fiction. Their approach to the story was wrong. It was static. It lacked life and drama.

What this person doesn’t understand is that in fiction, you don’t just tell a story. You stage a story. You dramatize a story.

I’m going to show what this person did wrong, and then show how it could be done better. The first little narrative nugget below is not what that person wrote. The characters are different, the situation is different, the genre is different. Only the technique is (more or less) the same. Then I’ll fix it, to demonstrate how to make it work. Continue reading Opening strong →

Fiction, Reviews

Bullet for a Star, by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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The good news—almost wonderful news, except for the One Problem that I’ll detail at the end of this review– is that the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s delightful Toby Peters novels are being released for Kindle by Mysterious Press. I downloaded the very first book of the series, Bullet for a Star, and read it with pleasure.

The Toby Peters novels, if you’re not familiar with them, are light mysteries set in Hollywood. Toby is a very small-time P.I. who nevertheless keeps getting hired for cases involving famous movie stars (and a few other notables) of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

In this story, an executive at Warner Brothers (which fired Toby as a security man some time earlier) asks him to look into a blackmail scheme. Someone has sent them a print of a photo of Errol Flynn in a compromising position with a very young girl. Flynn admits the accusation isn’t out of the question, but in this case he’s never met the girl. The studio wants Toby to make arrangements to pay the blackmail anyway.

But instead of a simple exchange, there’s a fight, and Toby gets knocked out, and somebody gets dead, and then the action takes off. Continue reading Bullet for a Star, by Stuart M. Kaminsky →

Writing

It’s All Derivative to Some Degree

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Poet Eric Weinstein writes about things he wished he had always known. One point opposes originality as often defined: “All writing is collage. The more and wider ranging influences you have, the more connections and juxtapositions you can create in your own work.”

Fiction, Reviews

Angel in Black, by Max Allan Collins

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The bright lights of Hollywood Boulevard took on a shimmering radiance, neon burning in the coolness of dusk, the hard, unpleasant edges of an ugly one-industry town blurred into blemish-free beauty. Like an aging screen queen with a great makeup artist, a gauze-draped key light, and a Vaseline-smeared camera lens, Hollywood didn’t look half bad.

Continuing my random-order reading of the novels in Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller historical mystery series, I came to Angel in Black, his treatment of the Black Dahlia murder.

1947 finds Nate Heller newly married and honeymooning in Los Angeles. He’s riding along with a newspaper reporter when they follow a police radio call and become the first two people (after the murderer) to see the naked, bisected female corpse that will soon become a national sensation.

Heller, a former cop and well-known private eye, is invited by the chief investigator to help out. He agrees, for reasons he keeps secret. Continue reading Angel in Black, by Max Allan Collins →

Uncategorized

Web Salmagundi

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1. John takes a gorgeous photo of a sunset over the Pacific ocean and pays $6,612 for it.

2. An app for iPad of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is barely more than an ebook of the same. … “[t]o have turned a profit so quickly, however, may say as much about The Waste Land app’s production budget as its undisclosed sales figures.”

3. Dining After ‘Downton Abbey’: Why British Food Was So Bad For So Long

4. More Republicans (8x more) than Democrats are impressed (or positively influenced) when a political candidate expresses his religious convictions. (via Trevin Wax)

5. Venerable literary magazine, The Paris Review, is on Pinterest. In other news, Google has announced an official retroactive alliance with the once-and-future Soviet Union.

Reading

“It didn’t seem natural, nohow…”

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When I was a boy, every school child knew about this, but I suspect they don’t teach it in schools anymore. In honor of Presidents Day, a snippet from Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years:

Having learned to read Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on. Dennis [Hanks], years later, tried to remember his cousin’s reading habits. “I never seen Abe after he was twelve ‘at he didn’t have a book some’ers ’round. He’d put a book inside his shirt an’ fill his pants pockets with corn dodgers, an’ go off to plow or hoe. When noon come he’d set down under a tree, an’ read an’ eat. In the house at night, he’d tilt a cheer by the chimbly, an’ set on his backbone an’ read. I’ve seen a feller come in an’ look at him, Abe not knowin’ anybody was round, an’ sneak out agin like a cat, an’ say, ‘Well, I’ll be darned.’ It didn’t seem natural, nohow, to see a feller read like that. Aunt Sairy’s never let the children pester him. She always said Abe was goin’ to be a great man some day. An’ she wasn’t goin’ to have him hendered.”

They heard Abe saying, “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll git me a book I ain’t read.”