Great review on Deadspin here.
In case you missed it, the in-cinemas-now Battleship is a sci-fi naval action movie bafflingly based on the license for the Hasbro board game. And by ‘based on’, I mean they have the same name. That’s it.
Author: Dan Harris
Writer of stories that haven't happened yet. 10% Sci, 90% Fi. Author of The Unity Sequence: ASCENSION POINT (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009TCE6G4) & VENUS RISING (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C9PF35G)
I know I’ve been abusing the reblog button in the last few days, but this is a very well-thought out piece on how authors really need to consider all of their options.
I asked Sarah if I could have the blog today because, frankly, I’ve been sitting on my hands and biting my tongue most of the week. What started as a simple and heart-felt response on Sarah’s part to a non-fiction author’s blog post turned into a war between fiction and non-fiction with a troll to-boot. The non-fiction author couldn’t understand why Sarah had seen fit to post about what she’d said on her own blog. All she’d done, you see, was lament the state of publishing and how those of us who are predicting the end of the industry just don’t understand what that will mean to non-fiction authors or readers. Okay, I can understand the fear. It’s the same fear many authors on the fiction side of the equation have been feeling. But what this author didn’t get — or wouldn’t get — is that in the process of…
View original post 1,415 more words
THE AVENGERS IS A JOSS WHEDON MOVIE
I love The Avengers. And Film Crit Hulk. And Joss Whedon. This article ticks all of the boxes.
SO HULK REALLY LIKES JOSS WHEDON. HE MADE A LITTLE MOVIE RECENTLY. IT’S CALLED THE AVENGERS.
HERE’S WHY IT’S GREAT AND ALSO WHY IT TOTALLY FITS IN WITH EVERYTHING HE’S EVER DONE:
http://badassdigest.com/2012/05/18/film-crit-hulk-smash-the-avengers-is-a-joss-whedon-movie/
Trends in SF Futures
Great, if very nerdy, article at io9 here. They ‘worked with intrepid researchers Ben Vrignon and Gordon Jackson, who helped track down when “the future” was in a random sampling of over 250 works of science fiction (books, movies, TV, and some comics) created between 1880 and 2010’.
That’s less than twenty per decade, so it’s not going to be completely accurate, but still really interesting how trends changed.
Me? I’m not sure I could ever write anything pre-‘Far Future’. And my immediate reaction was actually ‘501 years? That’s not far, that’s near!’
Just me, maybe.
Understanding Amazon’s New Algorithms Is As Easy As ABC
Guest post from Edward W. Robertson via David Gaughran. I’m barely coming to grips with the idea of a Popularity List vs. a Bestseller List, and now there are three?!
Headache.
My New Obsession – Cover Art
My new inclination toward self-publishing has brought with it an unhealthy obsession with book covers. I must have spent over an hour today just flicking through designer’s websites listed on the Writers Café Yellow Pages. There’s also a great cover art category on A Dribble of Ink, which has inspired me.
My novel is (at the moment, at least) called ASCENSION POINT. It’s far-future space opera, fitting neatly alongside Iain M. Banks, Neil Asher, Alastair Reynolds, and the like. As such, when it comes time to publish I’m going to want a proper, space opera cover that fits the genre. Something like these…
More on Self-Publishing versus Legacy Publishing
I’ve been reading a lot about the pros and cons of self-pub versus traditional (legacy) publishing in the last couple of days. I finished David Gaughran‘s excellent Let’s Get Digital, then ploughed through a couple of hundred articles, trying to find a balance.
And it’s looking like self-publishing might well be the winner for me, folks. But why?
Let’s Get Digital? Quite Possibly…
I just downloaded Let’s Get Digital by David Gaughran. This week David has made it available for free on both Amazon UK and US, so there’s no excuse not to pick it up. You can also get the PDF version for free on David’s marvellous site here (and in my blogroll on the right).
I’ve just finished reading the first part of the book, which deals with why authors should self-publish. David makes a very compelling case for doing so, and I’m surprised to say that I’ve quickly gone from planning to go the agent-legacy publisher route once my novel is ready to pitch, with self-publishing as a backup if that didn’t work out, to being (almost) completely decided that self-pub is the best primary option.
A Quick Edit Update
I’m now four chapters into the first-pass edit of my novel, the goal of which is cutting out any obviously unnecessary text and just getting an initial feel for if the plot and character arcs hang together and make sense. I’ve been a bit surprised by how familiar these first few chapters are, and how little I’ve actually managed to cut – I can only guess that I reworked them quite a lot last year, before I moved to my later approach of just hammering out the scenes and not even reading them afterwards.
I’m expecting that’ll change soon: I’ve got my eye on chapter seven, which I think is about 3,000 words of nothing relevant to the plot happening, just some slow-burn character development. Pretty sure I’ll be able to tighten that up to about 1,500 and merge it with chapter six.
Editing’s fun!
The Avengers, and Shared Fictional Universes
Saw The Avengers over the weekend. I was a little worried it wouldn’t live up to the massive amount of hype, but happily it did.
BEST. MOVIE. EVER.
For anyone who hasn’t been following what Marvel did to build up to The Avengers there’s a great summary of the Marvel Cinematic Universe on Wikipedia. This kind of cross-pollination of characters across multiple storylines to place them in the same universe hadn’t been done in cinema before, despite being very common in SF and fantasy. (That I’m aware of at least. Correct me in the comments!)
DAN HARRIS: 10% SCI, 90% FI 