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At about 4:00 in the morning, 118 years ago today, a patrolling constable in Whitechapel discovered the body of Mary Ann Nichols near a slaughterhouse. She was Jack the Ripper’s first victim.
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In his most recent Newsarama column, Marvel Comics’ Editor-in-Chief and artist Joe Quesada said something about the act of creating that got my attention.
When a fan asked him how he stores his comic collection, Joe used the question to seque into another topic: “I have next to nothing of the comics created over my tenure in my collection. I remember an artist once telling me that you will never be able to do your best work until you lose reverence for the work that you do. I found that to be an incredible truth about creation, if you hold it too dear you tend to focus on the tree and not the forest. It’s the same with what I do as EIC. While I love the books that we’re currently producing and feel that we get better with every issue, I don’t hold any of it in reverence or permanence. Spend too much time admiring any accomplishment or holding onto one for too long, don’t be surprised if you never have any more.”
I’ve written some stuff that I’m pretty proud of, but I’m green enough that I haven’t really been tempted to fall in love with my own work yet. It’s an interesting, potential pitfall though that kind of goes along with the concept of “killing your darlings.” I can see how getting emotionally attached to your work could cause you to lose the objectivity you need to know when it needs to be better. Something to keep in mind for later.
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Because I’m writing a comic about giant monsters destroying the world, I’m interested in other stuff going on in the genre. I don’t know if this counts, but Trey Parker and Matt Stone are making a movie called Giant Monsters Attack Japan! Production starts next year.
Because it’s them, expect it to be intentionally corny. Especially since they’ll be using guys in rubber suits to play the monsters.
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I’m so behind on all the Doctor Who news.
Apparently, there’s a Captain Jack spin-off in the works called Torchwood that’ll air on BBC Three this fall. I don’t know how I feel about that. On the one hand, Captain Jack is a cool character and I’m interested in seeing a show about his adventures. On the other, I can see myself not enjoying it because I’d be constantly troubled about the fact that there was no Doctor in it. Best to give it a shot and see, I guess.
Too bad they’ve scuttled the Rose Tyler spin-off. At least it would’ve had Billie Piper in it.
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McFarlane Toys has released images of their line of Lost action figures and playsets. They don’t look like the kind of thing you can really play with, but man are they ever pretty.
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Anthony Stacchi and David Feiss are directing an animated movie called Hotel Transylvania. They describe it as a domestic drama a la The Sopranos, but with classic monster characters. The Bride of Frankenstein is leaving the Monster; Dracula’s Daughter is causing problems for her dad; the Wolf Man and the Mummy have troubles of their own. So far, so good.
What concerns me is the comedic level of the previous work of the two directors (see below), as well as their take on the concept. In an interview with Sci Fi Wire, Stacchi says, “As a kid… I always felt bad for the monsters. I didn’t get the sort of Victorian horror of Frankenstein and Dracula. I was like, ‘Why don’t they leave them alone? Why are they beating them up? Why do they shoot King Kong? Leave them alone.’ And I always wanted to do a movie where you’d get to see that other side of them and see why they were these sort of sad, tortured souls. I mean, Frankenstein didn’t ask to be made. Werewolf didn’t ask to be made a werewolf. Or the rest of them.”
The thing is, King Kong, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man did a pretty darn good job showing that their monsters were both sad and tortured. There’s no need for a cartoon made by the creators of Open Season and ALF: The Animated Series to hammer that idea home. As for “the rest of them,” maybe I didn’t see the same versions of those movies that Stacchi did, but I’m pretty sure that Dracula and the Mummy were just evil and deserved what they got.
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Speaking of Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein books, he’s plotted them, but isn’t writing them by himself. One of his collaborators (on the not-yet-released third book in the series) is crime author Ed Gorman, who I bring up because he’s got a new column at Bookgasm called “What Ed Read.”
In his first article, Gorman recommends The Evidence of the Sword, a collection of mystery stories by swashbuckler writer Rafael Sabatini. So, the author of Captain Blood and Scaramouche also wrote “deductive detective fiction set in various historical times?” Sold!
Thanks, Ed!
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I’ve been on a Frankenstein kick lately and finally got around to seeing the made-for-TV movie that Dean Koontz helped create and then disassociated himself from. Koontz decided to publish his version as a book series instead, which made me really curious about how bad the TV version could be.
Turns out, it wasn’t as bad as I imagined. I like the idea of casting two comedic actors (Parker Posey and Adam Goldberg) as the detectives on the trail of a serial killer. It freshens up the characters who’d have otherwise been cookie-cutter. Nice use of Michael Madsen too, who plays what you think is the exact same character he always plays, but then turns out to be someone completely different. It’s kind of the equivalent of casting Sean Bean in a role where he doesn’t turn out to be a traitorous villain halfway through the movie, or casting Brian Dennehy in a role where he turns out to be a really nice guy.
I don’t know what Koontz’s problems were with the movie (I’ve got — but haven’t yet read — the first book in his series), but one nitpick I have with it is that they don’t have the guts to call the mad scientist Dr. Frankenstein. Instead, they give him the lame name Dr. Helios and claim that he’s the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s novel. I guess that’s probably because Frankenstein dies at the end of the novel, but some retroactive tweaking of Shelley’s version of events could have fixed that. Oh, well.
The doctor’s motivation was pretty cool. He’s been making creatures for the last couple of hundred years and is a perfectionist. He doesn’t think of his creations as human, so he simply discards previous versions on his quest for the perfect model. When one of those previous versions starts a killing spree, that gets Posey and Goldberg involved. Eventually the doctor’s first creation (the inspiration for Frankenstein’s monster) shows up and helps the detectives track down the killer.
As a serial killer movie, it ain’t half bad. As a Frankenstein movie, I’d rather have seen a more direct connection to Shelley’s book, like I said, and the Monster was too good looking (like in the Hallmark adaptation, but with big scars instead of a skin condition), but still… not a bad movie. It’s got me excited to read Koontz’s books to see what he does differently.
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Speaking of world-building, somewhere — in a secret workshop — Barrow, Alaska is being built. Before long it’ll be populated by Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, and a ton of the ugliest, nastiest, scariest bloodsuckers you ever did see.
Pretty cool.
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Romance editor Anna Louise Genoese wrote a cool article on… well, it’s on rejection letters, but that’s not why I’m linking to it. Rejection letters are cool. I collect them. They mean that I’m actually submitting stuff, which means that I need to have a lot more than I do. But like I said: not the reason I’m bringing the article up.
In critiquing a specific rejection letter, Anna Louise talks about writing good, historical fiction; something that I’m interested in doing. She says: “The most common problem that I have noticed in historicals that are submitted to me is [that]… [a]ll the dialogue and narrative is very contemporary, but the setting is 1272 Occitania (or whatever). It’s very hard to find a balance between historical accuracy and the contemporary…”
I know that’s true. I once wrote an historical novella and made the choice to write the dialogue in a contemporary style. I rationalized that if I was going to be historically accurate, the dialogue would be unreadable, but I get now what Anna Louise is saying. In fact, some trusted writer friends at the time tried to tell me the same thing and I refused to listen. You can write dialogue in a narrative voice that sounds historical, even when it’s not completely accurate. But it’s not easy.
It’s the literary equivalent of hiring British actors to star in your period film set in Germany. They won’t be speaking German or even have German accents, but American audiences at least will accept it because it sounds old and European to them.
“Another problem that goes hand in hand with this one is the problem of research. Both published and unpublished historical authors often don’t do enough research, which results in people who know anything about the particular time period cringing. OR! Or authors do too much research and then want to cram in every single thing they know about the time period. Which results in everyone cringing…”
[Transporting the reader back in time] is world building. It’s not about flowery language. It’s about adding in the details that make the world your characters live in real. World building is not just something that sf and fantasy authors have to do — it’s something every author has to do. I have never been to Olathe, Kansas, so if someone writes a book about Olathe, KS, I want there to be details that make the setting come alive in my mind. I want to be able to picture what it looks like and understand the way the characters feel about their location. The same goes for the time period.”
She goes on to list a bunch of details you’d want to include in a story set in Olathe in, say, the ’60s, before saying, “Then the question becomes, how can you convey these things to the readers without boring the crap out of them? There’s no easy answer to that! Read a lot of historical novels and see how those authors do it. Then take their techniques and make those techniques work for you.”
That’s something that I plan to do. I’ve got a lot of historical fiction on my Reading List, so one thing I’ll be paying attention to as I go through the pile is how the authors balance historical and contemporary prose, as well as the amount of detail their research has uncovered.
Anna Louise closes by giving plenty of links to sites that help writers know what kinds of questions they should be asking (and answering) when building a setting, so the whole entry is a very useful, highly recommended read.
