Nano…

is seriously interfering with my blogging time.

So before I start this evening’s tranche of wordsmithery, here’s a post. So you know I’m “still alive, thanks God” (and thank you to the wonderful Mohammed for the phrase that will never die, at least among Irish archaelogy-types).
I’m typing this with a kitten wedged between my back and the chair (don’t ask me why, he likes to lie there), and another moggy eyeing my mouse like it’s the real flesh and blood type, and not a piece of computer hardware (geeky aside, when did microsoft start calling them “human interface devices”? It sounds like something out of a Cronenberg flick).
Ah, kitten has just climbed over my shoulder and is now attempting to eat my fingers while I type. This does not bode well for an evening’s nanoing.

To business. Those following my confusion in an earlier post re: the new Alex Barclay book, here’s some of the answer – the book will be out in March 2010 and the title is not as yet finalised. Okey dokey? When the title is finalised I’ll post it, if I remember.

Appearances to the contrary, I have been reading.

I just finished (and I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to it) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, and I absolutely loved it. It’s hip, smart, laugh out loud funny and genuinely affecting. It also makes geekery seem kinda cool. The prose is a mix of geeky slang, sci-fi/fantasy/RPG references and Dominican Spanish slang. Somehow it all comes together in a voice (or, well, voices) that is utterly compelling and wholly originial. It’s not often I use the phrase “original” so you should know I mean it. Because I am a nerd, I wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing anything in the Spanish slang that I couldn’t figure out, so I found the following link invaluable (also helps with Dominican history, “nerdy” references (*blush* I needed no help with those) and some other things that may cause “huh?” moments while reading. If you plan to read the book, bookmark this and it’ll see you right. It’s not for nothing that people win the Pulitzer for fiction, and this book is a prime example of a deserving win.

The story is about three generations of a family that become part of the Dominican diaspora to the U.S. as a result of the reign of Trujillo (“the dictatingest dictator”) and never manages to feel like a family saga, despite being one. In terms of magical realism (there’s an argument to be used for this book kind of fitting that category) it knocks Allende’s early stuff (which I loved at the time: Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna especially), into a cocked hat. The titular Oscar (the Wao is a corruption of “Wilde” his college roomates inflict on him) and his sister Lola represent one generation, their mother Belicia another, and her parents (a doctor and a nurse) the earliest. The narration of the book is shared between Yunior (a friend of sorts to Oscar, and Lola) and Lola herself. Their voices manage to be completely different while sharing a common inflection – thanks to Oscar. The whole book is a feat of story-telling verve and narrative nun-chuckery. I defy anyone not to enjoy it. If you don’t, you lose 8 charisma points in my book. And if you don’t understand what that means, read the book to find out.

I’m currently reading Betrayals, the second in Lili St. Crow’s (otherwise known as Lilith Saintcrow) Strange Angels series. I’m enjoying this as much as I did the first one, and will write more on it when I’ve finished it. I will note that it doesn’t hurt to read the book while listening to the Kristin Hersh album Strange Angels, not sure if that’s where the series title came from, but it’s an association I like.

Okay, that’s your lot as far as book-nerdage for today goes, I will away now and write some new words.

Phew!

Sleeping on it worked, I’m on course to break 30k today.
POV has flipped back to third person (slightly snarkily) omniscient. Words flowing again.
I has a happy.

In other, unrelated news, I seem to have misplaced my Bejeweled Blitz mojo, which is a VERY GOOD THING since it means I won’t be tempted to install it on my iPhone no matter how many big blaring ads they throw at me on facebook.
I SHALL RESIST oh you wonderful PopCap games app designers.

And yes, thank you all for noticing, I do need to get out more.

Just after November and Nano are finished.

Besides, it’s raining out there!

: )

So, it’s nearly November….

…and so it’s nearly Nanowrimo time again.

This means two things:

One: apart from going to work and suchlike obligations, I turn into a bit of a hermit for the month. A word-count obsessed, plot finagling, 200 more words before bed-time, feverishly scribbling word-nerd of titanic proportions (I see I’ve already gotten a head-start on hyperbole. Yay me!). I surface occasionally (as work permits) at the Nano meet-ups in Dublin, and then might wander round to say hi to friends in the vicinity, but apart from that, I score a big fat zero on the sociability scale. In fact for the whole month I’m generally absent even while present. For this I apologise, in advance.

Two: The last few days of October see me furiously trying to come up with an idea, ANY idea for a story, while rooting around in dusty piles of books to find my Nanowrimo stuff (viz. Chris Baty’s No plot, no Problem! and the novel-writing kit I bought last year to go with it. There is also the ceremonial dusting off of my trusty won-every-year-since-I-started-using-it notebook, and the adding on of the current year to the cover in Sharpie. Then there is the sourcing of a plot notebook, and the assemblage of a stockpile of functioning pens for when I’m not at a computer….all of which serve as ample procrastinatory tools to distract me from the fact that I’m still without a plot and the clock starts ticking very very soon.

I was planning to write another story about my post-apocalyptic posse, but given that I’ve spent the last week playing a MMO set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where people ride around on ATVs and struggle to survive (the game is Fallen Earth, by the way, (website here) and it is rather good. I started playing because I’d read about it on the web and there was so much about it that was like my nano-novels I couldn’t resist trying it out. I like it so much I’m quitting Aion for it. I made a character called Camille and pretty soon she’ll have her own ATV just like Cam in my stories does. Lawdy but I’m a nerd!)) I’m starting to have qualms about the world I created, the kind of “Damn, there’s not a lot I’ve got that’s really new in my stories” qualms that make you second-guess everything. I was also toying with the idea of trying a crime book, for the heck of it. Then I realised that I could do that by filling in the back-story of the fun-to-write criminal mastermind Joy from the previous two – and use her story as a way to explain how the world came to be the world it is in a way that I never could do in the other stories without being all expositionally clunky and telling rather than showing (a big no-no that!).

So far so good, except now I have to actually figure out the nuts’n'bolts of how the world became a wasteland, and that thought alone is giving me a worse headache than accidentally head-butting a table while foraging under it for a notebook (yes, I did do that…I know, I’m a clod). Still, it is something that had to be figured out eventually, so better now than never.

So, I still have no plot. But I have some nuggets that could grow into one. Which is better than nothing.

Tonight I’ll be doing my best to finish The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, so the only thing I have hanging over me to read will be a refresher skim of Rebecca for a book group on Thursday. The only thing I’ll say about Millennium III for now is that the translation is rather clunky, I wonder whether it wasn’t a bit of a rush job? I’ll fit in a post on it somewhere when I’ve finished it.

On November 1st, I’ll be creating a Nanowrimo 2009 page here (there’ll be a tab under the header on the front page, beside the other nano ones) where there will be bits from the novel-in-progress available for reading, giggling and/or eye-rolling at, and also the all-important word-count widgets so that anyone who is so inclined can keep track of how I’m doing.

(Kindly note Ms. E. and Ms. K that word-count targets on my onerosity coupons must be reasonable, as I’m not handing you both a free pass to cackling wildly over the sight of me handling Veritas books for hours on end without Hazmat gear….)

There will also be semi-frequent posts from me on the main page, these are usually hyper-caffeinated rants about my own idiocy in attempting this madness yet again, but there may be some lucidity there too.

Possibly.

I can’t promise anything.

For now I’m off to find out what happens to Lisbeth Salander, and then to get some sleep.

(p.s. If anyone knows of an iPhone app that I could use to write with that’d save me having to transcribe hand-written stuff, please let me know. I’ve considered emailing stuff to myself and/or using the iPhone WordPress app to create a hidden page for writing, but they both seem a bit unnecessarily clunky as ideas. A word-processing type thingy would be perfect. Is there such a thing?)

Ooops, it’s been a long time…

And it’s not like I had nothing to post about. There’ll be a lot of posts over the next few days about books and the people that want to buy one but aren’t quite sure which one…

For now here’s a what’s going on post:

Sadly (and possibly due to my evisceration of The Girl Who Played with Fire) I did not get a proof copy of the new Steig Larsson. This made me sad because it means I won’t have a lovely set of three blue-covered books to sit snuggled together on the shelf. In all likelihood what happened was that the people at our head office cottoned on to the popularity of the books and snarfed all proofs of the third installment for themselves. Bit late now people. I do have a copy of it, and started reading it on the bus last week, but I was having trouble getting started (mainly because a world specialist brain surgeon just happened to be in the vicinity when Lisbeth was admitted to hospital with that pesky bullet in her brain which made me sigh, and grumble). So I decided the best way to gird myself for more would be to remind myself of how good the first book was. And how best to do that?

Well, there’s a movie! And it was made in Sweden so it’s actually pretty faithful to the book. It goes by the original title (well, obviously) Män Som Hatar Kvinnor, and it’s actually really good. Salander and Blomkvist (played by Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist respectively) are both perfectly represented. It occurred to me while watching that there’s no way the book can successfully be made into a movie by the Hollywood types, since there is way too much nudity and violence required. The rape scene is horrific and followed by an equally nasty Ms 45-style retribution. All shown on-screen, unflinchingly. Pretty hard to watch, but essential to the story, and not just of this one, but of the sequel (which is apparently already out in Sweden, and they’ve finished shooting the final part). The casting and acting is pretty much impeccable and the movie really does justice to the source material – it’s not often you can say that. They even have scenes with Plague in his den of computers, and he’s just right too (yeah, I’m fond of Plague). Attention to detail is stunning, down to the name of the program Salander uses to access Blomkvist’s hard drive, it’s the same name as was used in the book – and you won’t see that unless you’re looking for it. Everything that matters from the book is covered, I couldn’t think of anything that got left out, and they handle the nuts and bolts of hacking very well, and in a very low-key style – which puts it head and shoulders above most Hollywood representations of same (see, variously Hackers, The Net etc.). Yeah, I’m a nerd and these things matter to me, but here it just goes to show how much they wanted to make the definitive movie of the book. And how well they did.

Plea for the day (and a pointless one, I know), let this one stand as the movie of the book. No Hollywood remake, no sanitising, no casting of Tom Hanks and Megan Fox (gawd, the horror). I for one will be more than happy to read the subtitles and enjoy the original Swedish movies.

And all of that said, I’m going to knuckle down and finally read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and I’ll post in a few days with my verdict, which won’t matter a whit as the book is currently outselling Dan Brown by 5 to 1. For that reason alone, I already love it.

This is your brain while reading Infinite Jest…

Whee… the re-read is going swimmingly. Am now on page 188 and slowly but surely catching up to where I should be on the Infinite Summer reading schedule.

For those of you who have never picked up Infinite Jest (perhaps because it looks like a “tendon-strainer” in terms of sheer heft, perhaps because you’ve heard about the forest of end-notes and the nested-yet-sprawling structure, perhaps because the mere idea of so many words, and so many characters, crammed between two covers gives you a case of the “howling fantods”) you’re not alone.

There’s not much I can say to persuade anyone to pick up the book that hasn’t been said more eloquently elsewhere, but I’m going to make a stab at it anyhow. There’s much mentioning of “synapses firing” in and around the book, y’know, the little mental spark that goes off when you hit an association, or a reference, or a clue (if you want to see it that way), and the joy of reading Infinite Jest (to me at least) is not just the sheer (and humbling and beautiful) humanity of the book but the collective energy of those little pings of association. To put it simply:

This is your brain:

This is your brain while reading Infinite Jest:

See what I mean?

What a wonderful idea….

Been doing a lot of what I’d call “comfort reading” of late, fun, entertaining, undemanding stuff that makes it easier to be stuck at home with a bad back, and whiles away the hours between pain meds doses agreeably. Nothing wrong with that, nothing at all.

Trouble is, I have time on my hands, and I promised myself last year (yes, in September, after hearing the sad news, and probably like many others) that when I next had time on my hands I’d use it to re-read Infinite Jest.

I went so far as to order myself a new copy (my old one being loaned to someone, oh a decade back, who never gave it back, possibly since they haven’t finished it yet, possibly because they didn’t want to give it back), bought it, and then it got lost under an avalanche of DVDs, computer games, and proofs. Every so often I’d see a speck of the sky-blue cover winking at me from under the debris and would tell myself “Not now, no time”. Because it is a book that demands, and rewards time. Because I remember struggling with it back when I was younger and more adept at book-mark juggling (I wasn’t long out of college when it was published) and because there were times when I was completely lost, and unsure whether to persevere or not. It is a hefty tome – my new copy rolls (thuds?) in at 1079 pages (including the wonderland that is the endnotes). But persevere I did, and I was glad of it.

I know I’ll be just as glad to have re-read it, and to be truthful, I don’t know why I kept putting it off.

Serendipitously, while wandering the archive of Books posts over at Salon, I came across an article about a world-wide online project to read Infinite Jest over the course of this summer. It’s called Infinite Summer and if you click on the name you’ll be whisked away to the front page. It’s set up more for those who never read the book, or who gave up part-way through, but the mere existence of the site, and the project (78 pages a week from June to September – ack, I am behind!) was enough to make me dive into the pile of debris, rescue my pristine copy (won’t be that way for long if memory serves), drag together a flotilla of book-marks and the all-important notebook, and resolve to start re-reading today.

I’m posting about it because (a) I won’t be reading anything else for quite some time and (b) if you’ve never read Infinite Jest this is the ideal way to do it, with a bunch of other people reading it for the first time, so you may like to get your mitts on a copy and join in. Trust me, it’ll be worth it.

(in case any of you thought I was kidding about the preparations – here’s a photo of my “ready to start” copy and accessories….when I finish the re-read I’ll post an “after” photo)

Makin’ sense of Sarah

I couldn’t make head or tail of most of Sarah Palin’s speech, but this helps make it a bit more interesting at least….

more about "Makin’ sense of Sarah", posted with vodpod

This one’s for Joss…

Ok, over on the blog of my favourite Southern writer today, there was a meme-thing… knowing how I love memes (even though I hate the word itself) I was going to find it difficult to resist.

I also thought it’d be a good chance to give people a bit of a giggle at my expense, and let you all in on the secret of my least favourite family nickname. Before I do, you should probably go here and check out the original.

So without further ado.
This is me:

And this is the source of the aforementioned nickname, for which I have my sister to thank:

Yes, it’s Irish comedian Ed Byrne. The likeness would work better if my hair was longer in the pic of me. Grudgingly, I will have to admit that there is something there. Although I still do not enjoy being called “Ed the head” because I’m not a boy….

And for the likeness-only-seen-by-people-smoking-crack, there’s Melanie Lynskey:

My response to this one tends to be….maybe in “Heavenly Creatures” but never since…. I’m not that pretty. She’s a damn fine actress though, so any comparison is rather flattering.

I’m pretty much your average schmoette, so it surprises me not at all that so few famous peeps look like me.

Google it….

There is, on every blog I have ever come across, a post that focuses on the weird and wonderful search terms people have used to land on that particular blog. This is my contribution.

On the stats page for this blog, there’s a list of search terms people have used to come across the site.
Here are some of the more frequent slightly odd ones:

Fermat Salander – this one is very popular at the moment. Seems people are reading The Girl Who Played with Fire and want to know what Salander’s take on Fermat’s last theorem is. I don’t know if my post on the book will be particularly edifying in that respect, since as I point out, I’m no genius. What I came up with is a possibility though.

Who is Alex Barclay: Bit existential this one, no? I don’t think I claim to have the answer to that anywhere on here. For those seeking my opinion on the matter, Alex Barclay is a lovely woman who writes kick-ass crime books. That is all.

dikshunary: Uhhhhh, you wouldn’t believe how many times that spelling of “dictionary” shows up. I used it in one post to highlight the bad proof reading standards at the Irish Times. No they never printed the word like that, but they’d probably get away with it if they did, considering I get at least one hit per day for the mispelled version.

retail interior design: No idea. Really. The gods of google, they are capricious. Retail I do have as a tag, but interior design? Nope.

umbrella porn: Eep?! I never knew such a thing existed. Am at a loss as to why people looking for it would be sent here. Do I even mention umbrellas anywhere? I think in one post a customer brandishes one, but iirc it wasn’t in a sexual way…then again, who knows what works for devotees of umbrella pr0n….

Those are just some of the recent terms used to land here – I’ll add to this as more weirdness comes up, and believe me, weirdness shall arise.

“Jennifer’s Body” (official movie trailer) [HQ]

Ok, I’m a little bit overwhelmed by the amount of bile pouring out the fingers of t’internet peeps at the trailer for the new movie written by Diablo Cody. In case you have been living under a rock with no clear broadband signal (or just don’t give a fig about pop culture) the movie is called Jennifer’s Body and it’s due for release in September.

Here be the trailer:

more about ""Jennifer’s Body" (official movie tra…", posted with vodpod

Okay… my thoughts, it looks a bit like Heathers crossed with the original Buffy movie. Could be awesome, could be painful. I’m thinking it’s probably going to be best approached with an open mind.

Reading around a few message boards (and braving the you tube comments), there’s a heck of a lot of hate going on out there…and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

I did mention, in an earlier post how there appeared to be some sort of backlash in progress after the script for Jennifer’s Body was leaked on the web (early draft…). Today there’s nothing but razzing on Diablo Cody’s use of language (“Nobody talks like that!11eleventy!!”) and screeds about “Not going to pay $12 to look at Megan Fox’s bewbs” (I censor) etc. etc.

Um, folks, it’s a damn trailer. Get over yourselves.

On the “nobody talks like that” front, I’d advise people to go look at Heathers, nobody talks like that either, but that didn’t stop it becoming a cult classic. The same way, like it or not, Juno is likely to (if it hasn’t already attained that status). As a linguist, I freaking love movies like Heathers and Juno, because they have the power to affect the way people talk. Seriously, I did my final year thesis on phrases being imported into Hiberno-English (English as it is spoken in Ireland) from US movies. It was around the time of Wayne’s World and the original Buffy movie (oh shut up, I know I’m old), and I had a wealth of catchphrases to choose from. People start off quoting from the movie, often in a US accent, and as the phrases gain traction, the accent is dropped and bingo! the phrase is in the lexicon. Mightn’t stay there very long, but it has made it off the screen and onto the streets.

Saw the same thing happen with Juno. Expect to see it again with Jennifer’s Body, and I thank Diablo Cody for it. I can futz around with the Urban Dictionary and learn all the new phrases as they materialize, but I won’t be half as entertained as I would be watching a movie filled with phrases that make my head spin, and render my inner word-geek dizzy with joy.

On the Megan Fox thing, can I just say, I prefer it when she’s saying stuff other people have written for her than when she is speaking for herself. She is a very pretty girl, but I’d go see this movie whether her bewbs were in it or not. A blackly comic horror movie with an excellent soundtrack (Ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry BOMB!) is always something to look forward to, at least for me. And I’ve already seen Drag me to Hell (it’s pretty darn good ), so this one’s on my must see-list.

Shouldn’t people wait til they actually see the movie before they rant and rave about how crap it is? I mean, they don’t actually know yet, right?

Trolls fail at pre-emptive criticism. That’s the issue right there, in a nutshell.