I thought of what I might post today, but nothing compares to the pure creativity that is this short film. It’s three minutes long and combines several techniques to achieve this striking narrative. Edson Ova deserves his first place, because this is beyond magnificent and just validates the truth that a storyteller can tell a story with just about anything.
Oh, Tumblr, you really do have a hipster quote for every occassion.
As part of the recovery process, I shouldn’t really exert myself with unnecessary typing. This lil’ peace of heaven pretty much fills up this category. I have made a promise to provide a content as a means to facilitate my personal and professional growth, yet I’m positive my writing right here will amount to less than expected.
Since January is fueled by professionalism as a concept among writers or the absent thereof (oh, don’t you just love when it burns), a thought crept up on me about the responsibilities associated with running a professional career. Decisions above all else are the alpha and the omega of your career, whether it sinks or swims. Are you a good captain? Do you have a special bond with the waves? Can you steer clear from siren calls?
I may have to quit with the recreational drugs before writing for the blog.*
What I’m getting at is that being a true professional means calling the shots in a way that will get you the bestest prize in the long run. Right now, my decision making skills face a challenge. Do I push on with my crazy blogging schedule and risk damaging my already abused fingers or do I opt for a well-deserved rest? Or will the two concepts meet in the middle for a dirty quickie as I wait for the illegitimate child of compromise?
I can’t say for sure. Time, painkillers and chocolate will tell for certain.
* Dr. Walter Bishop is my role model and he’s a genius, so I’m sure you can look the other way, when I binge on space brownies every now and then. Plus, I break stereotype by being addicted to something else rather than alcohol. Now, where is that bottle of vodka…
It’s been eerily quiet, which is never good once you make a grand promise at being a little chatty brat and talk, talk, talk, but life as usual has been excellent at surprising me in the most intriguing ways. I have been silent (here and on projects) for two predominant reasons, okay, maybe three.
One, exams. Totally legit reason not to give out as much focus to the writing, blogging and the reading bonanza I have envisioned for myself. Operative word here being “envision”, I have to say, when I plan, I plan big, I plan as if I’m the Chuck Wendig of my generation.
Two, fingers. I got the achy-breaky finger syndrome. My faithful orthopedist has yet to confirm the scientific name, but the veracity of the statement withholds. Ouch. I’m getting better though as long as I remember not to physically assault the keyboard.
Three, Buffy. Look, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I go way back and I’ve been on a complete series marathon since December. I’m close to ending the marathon, but yeah, I’ve been bad on the ‘don’t get distracted’ bit.
The good news is that January will see me complete a piece, which I call “The Woman and the Jar of Words” for the Bushy Tails anthology. It’s a slow process as I’m tremendously rusty from a whole year of inactivity.
What have you been up to, guys?
I have been a bit absent as I have been dealing with a rather nasty case of the aching fingers, but I have some self-promotion to do. Today sees the official publication date of the anthology “Arcane II” edited by Nathan Shumate, which features my short story “Hurricane Drunk”. This is my first anthology publication and it took a rather winding road to get where it is. I’m happy. For more of the anthology, here is a the table of contents:
You can find the book on Amazon US, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords.
One of the acts that caught my attention recently is the female pop group Nikita, Ukrainian singers who are heavily into sexual provocation in their music and videos. The song ‘Iskusaiu’ best represents the group’s signature daring performances in front of the camera and hypersexuality. The song’s lyrics speak of a very savage love that will have the man completely devoured with no trace left of him in the morning, which is one hell of a statement. Coupled with the aggressive sensuality in the video, it’s the perfect recipe for a scandal or at least a very passionate discussion.
Are they working against feminism through their self-representation as sex toys or are they actually strong women who are completely in tune with their sexuality and thus in charge of their sex drive?
Welcome to Scribbled Saturdays (I have a thing for alliteration, don’t judge me), where I will be sharing the fantastic art I discover through my wild and intense browsing sessions (you haven’t heard a computer mouse as tortured as mine, when I stumble on a good tumblr blog). While I’ll stick to illustrations and single works, I intend to feature comics, be they traditionally published or otherwise as comics compromise a good deal of my reading.
Ethan Young came to my attention after the recommendation from Carrie Cuinn, who knows her comics, and after a two-hour, middle-of-the-night click-through skirmish, I can count myself as Young’s fan. The current review reflects my impressions from the fifteen chapters that are up for grabs at Tails website, but the comic will appear in a series of graphic novels. The first one has been published by Hermes Press and you can get your copy now on Amazon (you should).
What’s so special about Tails?
What’s not should be the proper question. For starters, the comic blends elements from the super hero genre and the fantastic to add texture to a story that’s autobiographic in nature, thus deeply personal and intense. Tails follows the life of a university dropout, hopeful illustrator with many deficiencies in his relationships with his family, friends and the girls he dates through his life as he tries to find ways to move forward in his personal, creative and professional life.
Every artist goes through the starved and tortured phase and Ethan doesn’t make an exception. His life is rooted in equal parts humor and tragedy. The humor comes from Young’s knack for writing engaging dialogue and forming kinetic relationship between truly spunky New Yorkers that are ready to get in your face. Coincidentally, it’s where the element of the tragic artist’s life finds its fuel as Ethan often fails in his interactions with other people.
He’s not on good terms with his family. His love life is complicated as hell. His friendships are strained and his professional life often leaves him anxious about his integrity and questioning his success. Naturally, the exhaustion and the distress manifest into hallucinations and elaborate day dreaming sessions, where Ethan’s imagination reigns free and often serves as the tools he needs to give his fears a form and understand them.
The fantastical scenes bleed into his daily life with such ease you are left wondering whether the battles with anthropomorphic super-powered animals are just figments of his imagination. Tails builds a solid bridge between fun super hero antics with lots of heart and a clever slice-of-life comedy with enjoyable characters.
What makes the story a standout is the match between the story and the art in terms of quality. Young makes a bold choice to choose black as the main background cover, which certainly has a great effect on the overall style. The black bleeds into the panels and creates a sense of fluidity as there is a lot of shadow play involved. The fluidity in itself lends kinetic energy to the fights in the comics, which never feel confined into rigid panels.
Young’s line are clean and crisp, while at the same time he loads his panels with small details to make every scene pop. Tails might be black and white, but it successfully uses the monochrome color palette to its full advantage to make a lasting visual impression.
This concludes my thoughts on Tails. If you are interested, you can have more of Tails online and the Facebook page and Twitter. Also, next week I have invited Ethan here to talk about the professional aspects of his career as a freelance illustrator. That should be interesting.
So Harry was kind enough to ask me contribute something about writing and professionalism. I’m going to assume you know the three basics:
• The necessity of tweed jackets
• The essential nature of coffee shops
• The need to publicly hang those who hate on Scrivener
(I make fun, but I do in fact on a corduroy jacket that I wear to make myself feel more authorial. But don’t tell anyone because I’ll sound like an idiot).
More seriously – I suspect most people reading this do know how to be professional. Because most people reading this, I suspect, have had a job. And to enjoy any degree of success at a job you have to be professional. And the sad thing is that writing, if you want to make a serious go of it, is a job.
I think that job-like aspect of writing often gets lost. Because it’s what we do outside of work hours. Because it’s what we do to relax, what we do for fun. But it is a job.
It’s just a really fun, awesome job.
Showing up for work every day
The bit of writing advice which gets thrown around the most, is “Just write.” This is also the least satisfying piece of writing advice. Because writing takes a long bloody time. It took me over two years to write one novel that will never sell. Two and a half years. And the book sucks.
But there is a reason we are told to, “Just write.” It’s genuinely important. You have to put the time in. Same as you do at work.
I’ve been working in advertising for about nine years now. Over that time period I have been promoted a few times. My salary has gone up. It’s not terribly unusual, and it’s basic function of getting better of my job, which is a basic function of having done if for nine years.
No one assumes that they’ll show up to work the first day and get the corner office. You show up every day whether you want to or not, you put your time in, you learn when you can, you get better, and you hope to hell that someone notices. Writing is exactly the same way.
Engage in professional training.
While writing every day is the best way to become a better writer, it’s not the only thing you should do. Jobs offer professional training to help. Writing has its equivalents. Instead of training manuals we have writing books. We probably all have slightly too many.
It’s easy to make fun of writing books. They tend to speak in absolutes, and talk of immediate success. How many training manuals have got you a promotion at work? Exactly. But that doesn’t mean writing books are useless.
In another of my trunked novels I obeyed every rule I had ever read in a writing book. It is, and this is possibly being kind to it, excrement. But writing that awful book was also one of the most helpful experiences I’ve had, because it helped me learn those rules. Not just learn what they are, but learn which ones worked for and which ones didn’t, and when and where those things flipped around.
I’m not suggesting everyone spend two years writing a bad novel, but learning what advice in writing books works for you and what is useful. Just like you do with a training manual. In the same vein, writers groups, online blogs – all this can be helpful as long as you come into it with the right attitude. The professional attitude.
Know your market.
When you go to work, people generally assume you know about the industry you work in. Writing is the same. You have to know the environment you’re operating in. You have to know about stories and storytelling. And while writing books do have their place, seeing the practical application of that knowledge is essential. To quote the author James Rollins, “Write every day, but read every night.”
I should mention here—I wrote and sold an urban fantasy novel without ever having really read any urban fantasy novels. I don not mention this to demonstrate what a monumental jackass I am, but to make the point that your market is not your subgenre. Your market is storytelling in all its wide and diverse ways. It is movies, and videogames, and books of all genres.
I had a hard time reading outside my genere. I grew up reading solely fantasy and sci-fi. That’s all I wanted to read. But, I did not sell the aforementioned urban fantasy novel until I started reading thrillers. They let me see the application of frenetic pacing in action. They let me learn new rules and apply them. So I realize it can be tough, but it’s probably worth it.
Don’t be a monumental jackass.
This may sound obvious, but I’ve been on Twitter, so… Think of your coworkers. Think of the ones you like. How many of them spend time screaming about how awesome they are and how much everyone loves their work?
Exactly my point. When it comes to promoting your book, especially on social media, please for the love of all that is good and clean in the world, do not simply yell about your book, and how good you or somebody else thinks it is.
If you are going to engage in social media, do it as a good and decent human being. Do it to share funny pictures, to engage in conversations, to make friends. And then, when once in a while, you do want to link to a review of your writing, or to ask people to check out something you have for sale, then they may actually be inclined to click that link. Because they like you. Because you’re not a jackass who stands around screaming
“look at me.”
Those people don’t get promoted at work (usually) and they don’t get promoted in writing either (usually).
Running screaming for the door when the clock hits 5:00=
So that’s basically it. Treat work like a job. Even before it pays money. Because when it does, it’ll be crap money, and if that’s your whole incentive you’ll realize you’ve wasted your time.
Writing is a job you do for love. If you love it you’ll treat it like a job. And then it will be the best job you’ve ever had.
____
Jonathan Wood is an Englishman in New York. He feels entitled to jabber at you because he sold a few urban fantasy novels. You can’t buy them right now (that’s a longer story than he’s willing to tell) but they’ll be available again in 2014, starting with No Hero. He’s blogs intermittently at cogsandneurons.com and also hangs around on twitter where he masquerades as @thexmedic.
Humor is underplayed in speculative fiction. Most titles I read tend to revolve around grim, dark and drab events, characters are thinned to a tether of resilience and motivation to push through an unforgiving chain of events and the language feeds on grit. So I found it highly surprising that an author could make multiple apocalypses fun. Yes, fun.
Jonathan Wood stood out with his two novels in a series – No Hero and Yesterday’s Hero – the adventures of the less prestigious MI37 agent, Arthur Wallace, an Oxford police officer, who’s got to save the world from all that goes bump in the night. Seriously, the books are fast reads and the writing more than competent. Although I didn’t write a Year’s End book post, Wood’s books have a very special place in my heart as the humor in fantasy drew me in initially as a teen (I’m looking at you, Pratchett).
Wood is clever and plays with words to add flavor to whatever scene he is pushing on the page and both novels move along the tracks with no break. Tuning the story to the right pace is one of the trickier things as you don’t want to feel the story stagnate, while at the same time you don’t want for things to be rushed (“Hero” by Perry Moore is an excellent example, where the author has to tie too many knots without enough rope). To get back to the humor, Wood knows when to best utilize humor to its full potential, when to strip a scene down of it and control the tension.
It’s a rare talent, because being funny on page; design an atmosphere of joy, mirth and cheer, is not something you do with ease. Sustaining the light-heartedness, when bad things happen to the characters you have grown to love, demands deep understanding of the human heart and a way with words to strengthen its authenticity.
Plus, who doesn’t want a panic-stricken, bruised and beaten, secret agent ask “What would Kurt Russell do?” before launching back into the fray for the end of the world? Count me in on that action any day, because that shit’s funny and funny is not something we get very often in fiction.
This puzzles me though. Nothing makes a character’s death more gutting after you have spent hundreds of pages appreciating their little quirks and the shared jokes. Humor is the silent killer, because you don’t expect for things to go horribly wrong in a novel, where a gun-wielding teen chants “awesome” during a fight a zombie T-Rex.
You just don’t. But when they do, oh god, does it hurt. Wood, like a natural sadist, milks both the merriment and the devastation to his full advantage, while deconstructing the familiar “save the world” storyline with an agent in charge with no semblance of traditional competence and the pesky problem with finding funding for the MI37 missions.
Amidst all of this, you have a team with volatile chemistry, Lovecraftian world eaters, entities that control reality, creepy twins, a man made out of books, zombie T-Rex and Robocop Russian magicians. Need I say more?
Now, I have vowed not to share much of the plot, because that’s not what reviews should do all that much, so I am drawing the line here. I think I have whetted your appetite.
But don’t you dare leave me now. Since it’s January, the month when I plan on discussing the act of being professional towards your writing, Jonathan Wood will be here to talk about the usual, My Writing against My Life lifestyle, a great many writers lead at the moment.
See you tomorrow. Please do tell me, is this something you would read? If you read humorous fantasy, recommend something that made you laugh (in public), though I do know of Pratchett, so that recommendation may be unsurprising.
“The Venus Autopsy” by Danil Dan†e Sherekin
As I’ve been too involved with meeting academic deadlines for the past week and a half, I have yet to sit down and write a proper review of what 2012 meant to me. 2013 started with the pop of the pistol and it’s time to sprint – so I run, mentally mostly. My brain has been offered as one of the tributes and now has to deal with The Hunger Games, mental edition, hence I’m writing this with my hair still wet.
What sticks to my mind about 2012 is its intensity. When things looked up, I soared (well, not literally as gravity does like to nuzzle and cuddle), and when things didn’t work out for me, let’s just say that I gave the chocolate industry a great boost through all quarters.
If I’ve to go out of my way to give the last year a colorful description, it would sound something like: “omnipotent deity with violent mood swings and a penchant for sadism”. My habit to resort to anthropomorphism is why I like to imagine past years as corpses (karma and all). Nothing did seem to come easy this year.
Creatively, I hit a stand-still with the lowest number of completed works compared to previous years, but I somehow managed to produce one story that turned out to be my first professional sale (out this year). On the other hand, I took my first editorial position for the ‘Tales to Terrify’ podcast and anthology, which taught me a great deal about the editorial process. Given how I’d have to stretch between a full time job and a very busy academic year, I’m surprised I achieved anything in 2012.
Academically, I completed my bachelor’s degree under a significant amount of stress (pressure from my full time job and editing responsibilities for ‘Tales to Terrify’). Then, I enrolled in what I consider to be the anarchist’s definition of a master’s program – read that as no organization at all. I still carry the academic burden, but the second semester boasts half the number of subjects I had this semester, which to me sounds like heaven right about now.
Amidst all the chaos, my sister and I went on a very tourist-y tour of Europe with stops in France and Austria and Germany, which accounts to why I didn’t attend cons this year, though I really did want to repeat the FantasyCon experience from 2011.
Well, I think I ran out of specific events to list, but I do have to say that friendships were made and strengthened, crises were averted, laughs were had and more than once not a single fuck was given even though circumstances demanded fucks to be given (fucks are a precious currency and damn it if I will spend it lightly).
Compared to 2011, 2012 was a fantastic improvement, but highly indecisive, though I guess any year that’s burdened with an apocalypse prophecy might experience an identity crisis.
What was your 2012 like? Are you relieved to have that thing buried in your backyard?
I’m very happy to see that “The Tracks that Tower over Valleys”, my first ever sold short story, received a good review over at the British Fantasy Society site. Glen Mehn summarized it best here:
“Harry Markov’s “The Tracks that Tower over Valleys” takes us to a future Bulgaria which echoes Dickens’ age of uncertainty for the poor: The entire country has been turned into a theme park and the poor scratch out their living by trying to terrify tourists – until real terrorists step in.”
Mehn goes on to share his overall impression of the short chapbook “Pandemonium: Fire” with the following: “These three stories are short, and at 80 pence won’t break the bank by any means. They show a great breadth of imagination and mastery of the short form. This is an excellent companion to its sister anthology but stands alone as well.”
Not a bad way to greet 2013. I’m happy that this little gem edited by Jared Shurin and Anne C Perry (the wonderful team behind Jurassic London) got coverage.
