Chris Todd

I won't bore you with the whys, but I'm back and here's what's been entertaining me lately.

• Richard Morgan is one of the best sci-fi writers working today and his latest is definitely the shit: Thirteen is a mad mix of social satire, action, gender commentary, culture jamming, and future tech. I'm personally lobbying for Mos Def in the role of the protagonist.
• Despite its reputation as a hotspot of international filmmaking, I hadn't found a South Korean film that grabbed me until recently ("The Host" left me indifferent) -- but both "City of Violence" and "Shadowless Sword" are some of the most fun I've had at the movies this year (not to mention that hunting down the DVDs while I was in Seoul on business was an adventure).
• No, I did not eat live octopus or "invigorating soup" while in Seoul. I did have excellent bulgogi, though, and some raw liver.
• The Best Scripts I've Read Recently That You Won't Find On A "Best Script" List: "Escape From LA" (early Carpenter draft), "Alien ^ 3" (William Gibson draft), "Diamond Dead," and "Avatar" (scriptment).
• I've been a fan of director Patrice Leconte ever since "Ridicule", so I was pleased that his film "Girl on the Bridge" is equally as enjoyable -- it manages to be whimsical and strange and even erotic, often at the same time, a combination that is most likely peculiar to the French. And it's in black and white, which I imagine either seals the deal or sends you running in the opposite direction.
• True story: I went to see "Brotherhood of the Wolf" with some friends when it first hit theaters in the States a few years back; there was a giant hand-lettered sign in the ticket window which read "WARNING: THIS FILM HAS SUBTITLES."
• I've never been a fan of Shinya Tsukamoto's infamous "Tetsuo" or its sequel, but "Nightmare Detective" is an almost brilliant thriller that strikes me as a Japanese take on other occult detectives such as John Constantine.
• And have I mentioned that "Hellblazer" is one of the few comic series where I bothered to hunt down all the individual issues? Or that DC is finally getting around to collecting some portion of writer Jamie Delano's run? While the character was created by Alan Moore in "Swamp Thing," Delano was the original writer on "Hellblazer" and long my favorite. His writing style is somewhere between Beat poet and splatterpunk (eye-opening stuff even now), not to mention that a politically-aware Constantine wandering an England blighted by Thatcherism gave the character a dimension that I've always missed in later incarnations (I wonder what Delano's Constantine would make of ASBOs?). If you want to see Delano's take on future England with an elderly but still pissed Constantine, I highly recommend finding a copy of his "Bad Blood" miniseries.
• Having worked in and around the computer game industry for many years, I can tell you with some authority that "Bioshock" absolutely lives up to the hype -- it's the first game that's engaged me on the same level as a good movie or book. As a first-person shooter, it's certainly polished but not necessarily remarkable; however, the attention to detail in terms of the setting and story is nothing short of incredible. It's probably the first (non-RPG) game I've played where the plot wasn't just a gloss of paint over a tech demo. Making videogames is a messy, stressful, compromising business that is brutal towards everyone involved, so I have to give my honest thanks to all those people who obviously put in some long hours to create an amazing experience. And yeah, I know the PC version has all sorts of issues with DRM, but it's still worth the hassle if you can't go the console route.
• No, I do not walk around my house saying "Don't be a slowpoke, Mister B. Angels don't wait for slowpokes."
• Okay, maybe.
• Nothing much on television at the moment, but if you haven't caught up with "Dexter" or the final season of "Rome" then you are obviously Very Busy with Important Things.

Otherwise, I've just completed the first draft of my zombie screenplay and it's something of a sprawling mess. The funny thing is that, as a writer, this is not necessarily a bad thing; it's frustrating that a first draft is seldom the last, but until you have that first draft it's difficult to see the path that will lead you to the final version. Given that I'm operating under some time constraints, I decided to show the first draft to a few close friends so I could gather their feedback as early as possible in the process, but as Joss Whedon has remarked, showing other people your early drafts is akin to them seeing you in your underwear.

After feedback from friends and a couple more drafts, I've polished up my novella "Box, A Nightmare" to the point where I'm happy with it. Trying to place the story, however, has been more difficult than I expected. I know that short fiction in print (particularly genre fiction) is an exceedingly rare breed nowdays and novellas are published about as often as a unicorn-sighting turns up, but I'd expected that online would be a different story -- apparently the joke is on me. It seems that most online publications have word limits. I'm not sure why -- the cost of publishing a 30K word story in print might be prohibitive, but online those costs shouldn't apply -- but most of the places I've looked have roughly the same submission guidelines as a print magazine. Maybe it's an issue of editorial bandwidth? Now that I've got a draft of the screenplay done, I'll investigate further.

I also received extensive feedback on the novel from an editor at a major publisher; we've since exchanged a couple rounds of e-mail, and I'm now waiting to hear back from him concerning the next step. Regardless of how things work out, his feedback was extremely useful and will most likely result in another draft of the book.

Yes, that's a lot of drafts still to be done on various things. Sigh. Writing is fun!