O'Connell / New Reviews / Not So Continuous / Monday, February 1st, 2010

The SFSite has published their first February update, and with it, two of my reviews. First up, my review of the UFO ‘documentary’, The Billy Meier Story: UFO’s and Prophecies from Outer Space:

“watching this film is like diving headlong into a disorienting, paranoid world of outer space visitors, grainy super-8 footage of floating trash-bins, and gun-toting bearded cultists from Switzerland”

This film is great fun if you are a lover of the occult, the Fortean or the weird like me. I recommend watching it with a few of your friends and perhaps a chemical relaxant of choice. The rest of my review is here.

My review of FlashForward by Robert J. Sawyer is also available. I couldn’t help but compare the book to the TV series, which I watched a bunch of before giving up in frustration:

What I found incredibly frustrating about FlashForward, the television series, was the way it took this fantastic concept and buried it in a slightly futuristic procedural police drama about the brave FBI agents who investigate the crisis. … The deeper metaphysical issues of what it means to see the future were rarely played out to their full potential. Perhaps it’s to be expected, but the two versions of the story have almost diametrically opposed strengths.

It’s interesting to see the contrast between my review and this older SFSite review of the same book. Reviewer Donna McMahon pretty much panned the book back in 2002; she even criticizes some of the things I specifically cite as enjoying. While personal taste obviously plays a big role in any review, I can’t help but wonder if I went a little easy on this book simply because it was so much better than the TV show, and I spent so much time ranting about the TV show’s lost potential while I was watching it.

This may be the first time I’ve actually been reviewed rather than being the reviewer: Paul Graham Raven reviews the 2008 Arse Elektronika anthology, Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep, which features the paper I co-wrote with Reesa Brown, “What is the 21st-Century Novel?” Raven has quite a lot of praise both for my paper and the anthology. Even though I don’t see a penny if you buy it, I really recommend that you check out the anthology for yourselves.  You can also hear a mp3 of my presentation and follow along with a slideshow.

Sadly, the Continuous Coast project, which we discussed extensively in our paper, is quite moribund. Personal issues sank the project in the end, and I doubt it will ever be revived. I hope that people find the ideas we laid out in both the project and the paper useful, and I am curious to see where the 21st-century takes storytelling; I hope to be some small part of that tapestry too. I still mourn the ideas and nifty potential of the project though, and hope that at least some of our notes for it can still be released into the Creative Commons as we always intended them to be, eventually.

I’m feeling slightly discouraged at the moment. A rejection letter combined with a fairly hefty personal setback arrived within a couple days of each other. I’m sitting on the story for another day or two then reevaluating whether to send it out as is. I gotta keep writing anyway. If nothing else, I hope the first meeting of the Houston Art Nerds, which we’ll be scheduling soon, will perk me up again.

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O'Connell / Dead Markets and Other Notes / Friday, January 29th, 2010

It happens in the life of any writer, so it had to happen to me eventually: A market to which I sold a poem has died before I got published or paid by them. Aberrant Dreams, who previously published my poem “a 24th-century reflection on emptiness” in 2008, and later that year accepted my poem “The Green Lady,” appear to have become a dead market. No updates have been posted in over a year and duotrope now lists them as a dead market. Since they haven’t responded to my queries in months I have withdrawn my poem from their publication and sent it on to a new, active market. I suppose this ‘first’ could be seen as a rite of passage. Or just a thing.

I just finished a review of The Billy Meier Story: UFO’s and Prophecies From Outer Space. For some reason, it’s also known as The Silent Revolution of Truth in certain markets. It’s almost exactly what you’d expect from the title, but I still managed to go on for 1,000 words about it. I’ll be sending the review to the SF Site later today and I’ll let you know when they publish it. I also know they will be posting a review of the Arse Elektronika 2008 anthology which features my paper on the future of the novel; I’m excited to share that with you when I am able too.

I didn’t include it in my review, but does anyone else think that the venerable RE/Search ought to be either offended or flattered that their logo was ripped off by Reality Entertainment, distributors of The Billy Meier Story?

Filed in Aberrant Dreams, Reviews, The SF Site, Writing | | Permalink | Comments (1)

O'Connell / Review finished / Houston Art Nerds / Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

I just finished a review of Robert J. Sawyer’s novel FlashForward. Since I found the recent TV series of the same name so maddening, I could not help but bring my thoughts on both interpretations of the FlashForward concept together in the review. I’ll send it in to SFSite later tonight after a bit of polish and be sure to let you know when it is available for your enjoyment.

I’ve decided I need artists around me being creative more often and I’d like to help cultivate some of the creative energies of my social circle at the same time. I’m trying to organize a semi-regular artist gathering in my area, where we could paint, write, compose, craft, or otherwise create in the company of others like us.  If you live in or visit the Houston area and you’re interested but I haven’t invited you to the Facebook group (or you aren’t on Facebook but want to know more), please let me know.

Filed in The SF Site, Writing | | Permalink | Comments (0)

O'Connell / Lifting the Veil / Friday, January 15th, 2010

I just finished the first draft of a new erotic short story:

“Lifting the Veil”

Microsoft Word wordcount: 3,108 words

I’ve sent the short story to a few friends and readers in the hope I get some feedback. After I sleep a bit, I plan to polish it up and send it to an erotic SF anthology, just in time for its January 15th deadline. The writing of this story was made possible by sex, leftovers from !Beba’s/One’s a Meal, and a playlist made up of Juno Reactor, Portishead, Stereolab, and Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV.

This is the first story I have finished in over a year, since my life fell to pieces and had to be rebuilt. It’s a major milestone. At times, it was incredibly tough going but now I’ve finished and the feeling is incredibly good. Regardless of whether I can get it published, or even whether anyone else but me likes it, I’m really thrilled to be back on the horse. Or is the correct term falling off the wagon?

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O'Connell / Kit: Sex Toy Reviewer / Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

I’ve agreed to review sex toys for sextoy.com. I’ll be posting the reviews here on my blog. I won’t be getting paid but I’ll be getting free sex toys and another excuse to write about sex, which will hopefully encourage me to put more time in on my other pr0ntastic writing. In return, the site gets some publicity about its products and some google juice (I think this is actually their larger goal). It seems a fair trade.

So I am NOT actually doing novel in 90, this round. I had some minor setbacks around when it started, and was actually out of town for the first few days of the session. I can jump in later, and am working on increasing my output in other ways. I’m partway into a work of erotic short fiction, but am also unfortunately just a few days from the deadline of the anthology I wish to submit it too. It will be an experiment in turning work around quickly, and I hope I succeed.

Otherwise my life is quite good right now. A few interesting people have come into my life lately, people I may be enlisting to ‘help’ with my reviews. Although the cold weather has been hard on my fibromyalgia, and I have a lot of work to do get my life where I want it to be, I find myself happier so far in 2010.

Filed in Reviews, Sex, Writing | | Permalink | Comments (2)

O'Connell / What’s blocking me? (Writing Spaces) / Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

On a private mailing list for my writers’ group, Amul Kumar recently asked, “What’s been getting in your way?” And it’s an interesting question to contemplate. One thing he writes: “I’ve created all these discrete spaces, online and at home, which were supposed to help me focus on the different kinds of productivity that I wanted to engage in. These spaces are no longer coherent, and therefore no longer functional” rings true to me as well. In 2008 I built, and then had circumstances destroy, various spaces both mental and physical for creativity. I’m working on how to push myself to create again, but more importantly, since the drive is still there, how to cultivate new spaces for creating. Work is going in fits and starts to revive my writers’ group itself, but also to revive my own writing habit in the habitual way that keeps my muse from gnawing angrily at the insides of my brain. Part of this is making sure I have support from other writers, in spaces that cultivate all of us being creative.

Some tasks I’m working on this week are organizing my online life, starting to maintain a to-do list using Astrid, and slowly beginning to organize my physical workspace into one that is more amenable to, well, working. In the New Year, I hope to revisit an old space which was once helpful — Novel in 90, which starts up again on January 1st (thanks to Stephanie Leary for bringing this to my attention). Even if I can’t keep up with the output (I’ll try!) I think it will be good encouragement, and hopefully a positive writing space for me again. I encourage you to check it out and join if it seems good to you, too.

What’s been getting in my way? I plan to keep examining this question till I can answer, ‘nothing!’

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O'Connell / Recipe: Thrice-baked potatoes / Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

With another buddy of mine, I recently took an advanced lesson from a very engineering-minded friend on better cooking with magic. I’d made special butter before, but she gave me valuable lessons in optimal temperatures and techniques. Later that night the three of us threw together the following recipe, which should therefore be considered a joint effort. You could easily leave out the special ingredient and do this with conventional butter that isn’t a federally scheduled substance; you could probably cut back on the butter then since you weren’t using it as a carrier for mind-altering goodness. I’m not going to include instructions on making cannabutter here, but you can find them in many places on the Intertubes. No, these were not full of plant material as we sifted our butter with cheesecloth.

Ingredients:

  • 1 5lb-bag of potatoes
  • Chives
  • Sour Cream
  • Ricotta Cheese
  • 2.5 cups of cannabutter
  • Kosher salt
  • garlic powder (optional)

Bake potatoes in an oven at 350 until done. Cut potatoes in half and carefully remove the insides, leaving thin shells behind. Mash up the potato-guts and mix in the butter and salt. Then add ricotta (we used about a cup, or half one of those larger containers), probably a 1/2 cup of sour cream, and chives. When I do this again I plan to add a little garlic powder, but we didn’t and they tasted delicious. Bake them a second time, just long enough for the cheese to get melty and everything to bind together, probably 10 minutes or less. The goal here is not to brown the potatoes; although cannabis is relatively heat-tolerant there is no sense weakening it by exposing it to more than necessary.

We made these late one night and then served them at a party the next, gently reheated, to rave reviews. With a little alteration, these would also make probably fantastic pierogis.

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