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Triple 9

This was an interesting heist film. The director, John Hillcoat, is probably best known for Lawless and The Proposition, which I liked. Hillcoat also directed The Road, which bored the hell out of me. The cast (Chiwetel Elijofor, Aaron Paul, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, that guy from Walking Dead) was stellar. I thought Kate Winslet was an especially interesting choice for Russian mafia boss. There were a couple of good Heat-esque heist scenes.

I feel like I got my rental’s worth, but it didn’t quite come together well enough for me to give it an unreserved recommendation.

 

The Witch

Oh hell yes. Now I want an evil goat.

In fairness, opinions are divided on this one for a reason. The pacing is deliberate, but you can get away with that in a 90 minute movie. It’s also more of an atmosphere-y horror than a stuff-jumping-out-at-you horror. If you go in expecting The Craft or a puritan-era Friday the 13^th you will walk out disappointed.

Probably not for everyone, but I quite liked it.

 

The Boy

This was a good 90 minute movie. Unfortunately, as released it ran 110 minutes. It had a nice payoff, but I thought it took too long to get there. Rainn Wilson was good, and David Morse is good in everything. Most of the movie showcased the kid, and he did a fine job as well.

There was a tad too much roadkill for my taste, and I thought it crossed the line from “deliberate and atmospheric” into “get to the point already.”

 

 

X-Men Apocalypse

Slight spoilers: I think it was Last Action Hero (or maybe McBain?) where the hero got all vengeful because they’d killed his third cousin. X-Men Apocalypse has a similar scene. There’s only so many times you can go to that particular well, guys.

There was absolutely nothing new or interesting about this movie. Normally I’m a sucker for this stuff, but I’d say skip this one altogether.

 

The Wind Rises

Even by Studio Ghibli standards, this is an absolutely magnificent film. It’s anime, yes, but not the sort of thing where people fight robots or shoot each other with rays (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

It’s a kinda-sorta biopic about the lead engineer for Japan’s main fighter in WWII, the Zero. That’s less dry than it sounds. There’s a fantasy element and a romance subplot. I don’t want to say too much about the fantasy bits for fear of spoilers, but I thought that part in particular was absolutely brilliant.

I’m not a huge anime fan myself, but I absolutely loved this one.

Robert Burrows (a.k.a. NoCuddleTime), is an L.A. artist who did the epic portrait of David back in December that I used as the angel on top of our Christmas tree. He sent me another in the series this week. Margaret (!!!). This would be in her bedroom. As with the David, it is absolutely perfect. I especially love the little tiny hint of light from the lighter—really nice touch, Rob.

It also turns out that Mr. Burrows is himself an author, creator of the surrealist comic Riot District. I’ve read it over a couple times now, and loved it. There’s sort of a Cronenberg / Phillip K Dick vibe to the story, and the art is phenomenal.

www.riotdistrict.com

 

1 MARGARET – All That’s Really Left Is the Smell

I think I already put the David pic up on Facebook, but I don’t remember if I blogged it. I’ll include it here as well, possibly for a second time.

2 DAVID – The Slave of Murder

A couple weeks ago I had a nice email chat with the Ilana Myer, herself a 2016 debut novelist (the excellent
Last Song Before Night, which everyone should read immediately). We talked about influences, the process of developing Mount Char, and my idiot dogs.

The interview is up now at Huffington Post if you’re interested. It’s kinda spoiler-y, but if you’re reading my FB posts that probably isn’t a huge problem.

As a reminder, I’ll be doing a Q & A (AMA, in reddit-speak) tomorrow, January 29, starting at around noon EST. Hope to see you there!

I’ve been promising a short story followup to Library at Mount Char pretty much since the book got published. Every so often someone will politely ask me where it is. This is a reasonable question. It came up during a reddit AMA earlier this week. I love Halloween and the story is kind of a Halloween-y so, in what turned out to be an excess of zeal, I promised to have it ready by 10/31/2015.

It turns out that’s not going to happen. But I should have it ready in a couple days.

If you care, here’s what happened: I took a couple weeks back in August (-ish?) to write the thing. I ended up with 11,000 words, which is a good chunk of text. The problem was, it wasn’t great—honestly, it wasn’t even very good–and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. So I figured I’d let it sit for a week or so. Fast-forward to October 28 (last Wednesday). By that time I did indeed have an idea how to fix it, and I spent a couple of days doing surgery. I ended up pretty satisfied. I thought it was a subtle, carefully observed piece about emotional growth, with a nice understated ending that was sure to wring a tear from the eye of even the most jaded reader. I showed it to my wife (Heather) for the first time on, I think, Wednesday. At that point, the troubles began.

Heather thought it was “boring as hell.” She asked “what is the point of this crap, exactly?” and “are you trying to piss people off?”

A word here about Heather’s editorial skills—they are formidable. I’ve mentioned in a couple of interviews that the first draft of The Library at Mount Char had a much different ending. When I wrote it, I thought it was pretty good. Heather rolled up the last hundred pages and hit me with it. This led more or less directly to a complete rewrite, and the ending of the book as that you guys have seen. I went back and looked over the original ending the other day, and she’s right. It was wrong for the book. She’d been my first reader for other stuff before that, and she’s yet to steer me wrong. I’ve learned to trust her advice. Also, God love her, she’s figured out that I do not respond well to subtlety. I’m one of those people who, if you say something like “this is good, but ___” I don’t hear anything after the but.

The upshot is that I did a fairly major rewrite of the story on Thursday and Friday morning. I showed it to her on Friday afternoon. I’m pleased to report that as of Friday evening, the verdict has been improved to “it’s not godawful anymore, now it’s just boring. No one wants to read this crap.”

In the grand scheme of things, that’s relatively minor. We’ve discussed the remaining issue, and I’m fairly sure I know how to address it. It’s about a 1500 word addition, and some tinkering with the ending that’s there now. I hope to get it ready tomorrow.

Sorry guys. I really wanted to give everyone a Halloween present, but I think it’s better to be even yet later still than turn in something substandard.

 

I’ll be doing a Q&A on reddit on Tuesday September 1, probably starting at around noon. If you’ve got any questions about The Library at Mount Char, what I’m working on now, or anything else that would be as good a time as any!

For those of you not familiar with reddit, it’s a collection of a zillion smaller interest groups called “subreddits.” Anyone can set one up without help from an administrator, so there’s (at least) one subreddit for every conceivable topic. So, if you just go to “reddit.com” you’re not going to see anything that looks right. The link where I’m going to be doing the Q&A in is “/r/books”.

https://www.reddit.com/r/books

Anyone can browse the Q&A, but you’ll need to have a reddit account to post questions. If you don’t have an account already, they’re painless to set up—I think it’s just username and mmmaybe an email? No one will spam you or anything like that.

So, Tuesday at around noon I’ll go to the link above and create a thread titled something like “Hi I’m Scott Hawkins, AMA!” (“AMA” stands for Ask Me Anything.) That’s where you’d post questions. Nominally, at least, I’ll start answering questions at around 6:00 p.m. EST, but I spend waaaaaaaaaaay too much time on reddit anyway, so I might start early.

You may also be interested to know that Ernest Cline (author of Armada and Ready Player One) will be doing his AMA the day before, and Emily St. John Mandel (author of Station Eleven) will be doing hers the following day.

Hope to see you there!