This is me rambling about me, mostly. Current stuff: home, family, my head’s on fire… that kind of thing. This also includes everything imported from LiveJournal.
I’m back from the Caribbean.
This was the first cruise Sandra and I have taken. We had a great time, and will be taking more of these in the future. For now, I have a huge pile of work to get back to. Except it’s Tuesday, so I’m seeing a matinee of Everest in IMAX 3D, for $5.00.
Nothing encourages bargain hunting quite like spending a week on a cruise ship.
This Saturday Sandra and I fly to Florida, and from there embark upon a Caribbean cruise with our friends from Writing Excuses, and about a hundred fellow writers.
The event is the 2015 Out of Excuses Writing Workshop and Retreat. We’ve done this twice before, but this is our first time taking it to the seas with a larger crowd. I’m excited, and a little anxious.
I need to finish scripting, penciling, and inking a week of comics before I depart, and I must also read some things that require critiquing, and front-load myself with materials for Planet Mercenary so I can get some work done.
I’ve been led to understand that internet connectivity aboard ship is something that is paid for in dollars-per-byte, in much the same way that my 1977 Buick Electra 225 (link: a photo of one that was not mine) measured its fuel economy in dollars-per-mile. For this reason I’m going to be disconnected most of the time.
(Note: I got rid of the Buick in 1986, long before its value as a “classic car” could be cited as a justification to offset the incredible expense of driving something that seemed to be about as long as a cruise ship. Parallel parking that thing required two tug boats and a call to the USCG.)
Which brings me to the title of the article. Whatever it is that you might be asking, my stock answer is “I’m sorry. That will have to wait until I’m back from the Caribbean.”
I’ll be getting as much mileage from that line in the next five days as I got from the Buick for the entire time it was mine.
(UPDATE: No, I will NOT be present at Salt Lake Comic Con. Given the choice between setting up a table and camping in a giant concrete box full of 100,000 people, or a Caribbean cruise, I opted for the cruise.)
Hitman: Agent 47 does nothing to set itself apart from other action movies, and is kind of predictable from start to finish. Still, it didn’t actually disappoint me, so it enters my list at #17, safely above the Threshold of Disappointment.
Rupert Friend’s performance as the titular 47 is pretty good, but he wasn’t given much to work with. Zachary Quinto was great, but under-utilized. Hannah Ware was awesome, and kept the movie fun and interesting. I enjoyed the way the story was told through her eyes, and I suspect that this same story with a less skillful actor in her place would have been unwatchably dull.
There are far too many things wrong with this film for me to catalog them. I had fun in spite of them. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.
UPDATED TO ADD: Armed with a pair of coupons, I saw this movie Monday morning, soda in one hand, and popcorn in the other, for $2.50. At that price it would have been difficult to disappoint me. Had I burnt $20 and a Friday night on it, this review might have had a completely different tone.
I haven’t attended a WorldCon without exhibiting since 2009 in Montreal. Sasquan, held in Spokane, Washington, would have been a fine show at which to exhibit, but I didn’t really want to spend the whole weekend working. That’s really haaaard.
So I only spent part of the weekend working. I wrote about 3600 Planet Mercenary words, and inked a week of comics. I recorded three episodes of Writing Excuses with Brandon and Dan, and I “networked” with dozens of peers in the genre fiction community.
That last bit doesn’t really feel like work. All I was really doing was talking to people about stuff I would have talked about anyway, and introducing friends, new and old, to each other.
The greatest unpleasantness was the smoke from the disastrous forest fires in western and central Washington. I inhaled enough smoke on Friday that I got sick and had to lie down, and the newfound shallow-ness of my lungs stayed with me even after the air cleared a bit on Saturday and Sunday. Walking and talking at the same time usually left me short of breath, sometimes to the point that my head would hurt and my vision would begin to narrow.
And then there was the Hugo Award thing.
The Hugo Awards, whose concomitant controversy was something I was pleased to not be sitting on stage for, have been better discussed by other writers. I watched the awards from the lobby of the Davenport Grand with friends new and old, former Hugo winners among us. I was pleased with the results, but like every year it was bittersweet.
My heart goes out to those who did not win awards this year, especially those whose work missed being on the ballot because of the hijacked slate. Their work will stand independently of this, however, and needs neither my pity nor the validation of the short-list. As a former Hugo loser, I know that it stings, but I also know that you’ve got to keep making stuff regardless of what happens with awards. I kept making Schlock Mercenary for five years after it started not winning Hugo awards. It still hasn’t won, and I’m still making it today.
Just as awards shouldn’t validate your decision to create art, they shouldn’t have any bearing on how you feel about the art you consume. Reading in particular is a deeply personal, intimate act. An award on a book is like a sticker on a banana: it might help you pick the banana, but if you eat the sticker you’re doing it wrong.
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