A recent comment by Leticia prompted me to investigate this rapidly expanding urban legend. According to many websites and news wires, there is talk that the brilliant Batman movie The Dark Knight is one of those cursed flicks that crop up every once in a while. Remember Poltergeist? What about the Superman curse? Well, now it’s the turn of the Bat.

The obvious start of all this was Heath Ledger’s tragic death after his fantastic turn as the Joker. Subsequently, Christian bale was arrested following an argument with his family (hardly tragic and a fairly weak effort by “the curse” there) and now, to really fuel the flames of conspiracy, Morgan Freeman has had a terrible car accident. Less newsworthy, as he wasn’t famous, was the death of Conway Wickliffe, a New Zealand-born special effects technician who died while working on the film. (The movie was dedicated to both Ledger and Wickliffe).

So, is there a curse? Or is it just like spotting giraffes in the clouds if you look long enough. Or Jesus on a toasted cheese sandwich? As with all these things, there’s as much evidence against a curse as for one, but no curse is not nearly as much fun. There’s even been talk of terrible things befalling people that go to see the movie. So how does that explain all the people that saw the movie and then had something really cool happen to them?

For a really deep look at the subject, check out this Cryptomundo article, that even looks closely at the Joker’s business card used only in the trailers. (Insert X-Files whistling theme tune here.)

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Apparently Will Smith and others are dreaming up a prequel to the awful movie version of I Am Legend.

The 1954 book by Richard Matheson is one of my all-time favourites. It’s a great mix of horror and sci-fi in the old school style and it’s a truly great story. The reason for the title of I Am Legend is inspired. Will Smith’s movie version crapped all over that.

The movie wasn’t that bad to begin with, a reasonably updated version of Matheson’s book, but the last third of the film or so became a horrible steaming pile of American god-loving bollocks, completely desecrating the original point of the story. And the CG vampires were bloody terrible. As you can tell, I wasn’t very impressed with it.

And now Smith wants to make a prequel? Even after the flashbacks in the first film that told us the story of what happened? Even if we know that basically everyone will die and vamp out and Dr Richard Neville (Smith) will be left alone in the world, supposedly. Even though we know that the story ends atrociously because Smith et al couldn’t bring themselves to stick to Matheson’s story and make a truly great film?

Way to go, Will - you’re about to make one of the worst movie adaptations ever even worse.

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I know I was pretty slack about this last time. Harper Collins, way back in the mists of earlier this year (or was it last year? I can’t be bothered to check) released Gaiman’s novel American Gods for free online for a limited time. I happened to mention it here when it had about a week to go. Better than nothing, but no help to the slow readers among you.

Well, this time I’m on the case like a rash on a mangy dog. Gaiman has just announced on his Live Journal that his novel Neverwhere is now available to read for free. This time you can read it online like before or download it. It’s a time bomb download and will only last thirty days before it self-destructs, but, as Gaiman says, free is free. In fact, what he said was:

For those people who grumbled about reading American Gods online, here’s Neverwhere. You can read it online, and it’s also downloadable. That’s the good news.

The bad news is you don’t get to keep it forever. It’s yours for thirty days from download, and then the pdf file returns to its electrons. But if you’ve ever wondered about Neverwhere or wanted to read it for free, now is your chance. And free is free…

You can get the free book here. Bear in mind that when I tried it, the Read Online link worked, but the Download link needs fixing. Apparently they’re on the case. According to Gaiman’s people:

If, when you try to download it, it gives you an “ebx.edt” file then you may either (A) save the file as “neverwear.txt”, open it, find the “bookfileurl” line, paste that URL into your browser, and save that file as “Neverwear.pdf” OR (B) wait for HarperCollins to fix the problem.

I must say, I found the typo in that above quote quite amusing. Gaiman, not happy with being the most popular author on the planet, has started his own clothing line, perhaps? Enjoy.

EDIT - Check the comments for a very kind correction from Mr Gaiman’s Web Goblin (and also to see that I’m not nearly as funny as I think I am.) I’ve corrected the link above too, so that should work for everyone now.

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It’s been a while since I shared some non-sensical use of the English language here. My good pal Monika, currently resident of Brisbane, sent me this and I had to share it. Have a look:

Queensland Homicide Victims’ Support Group

Anything strike you as strange about that? It comes from the Brisbane “Inner and Southern Suburbs” Yellow Pages. And let’s be honest, how much support does a homicide victim really need? Talk about locking the barn after the horse has bolted. I bet they would have really liked some support right before they became a homicide victim. Some serious backup right about then would have been fantastic.

Obviously, they do a completely different service. According to their website:

24 hr emotional support, personal advocacy and information to all people affected by homicide throughout Queensland.

But that’s not what they actually say in their name now, is it.

And on the subject of erroneous use of the language, here are a couple of guys that deserve medals. Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson couldn’t help themselves and had to correct the grammar on a sign at the Grand Canyon National Park. “Authorities” (and let’s use that word cautiously) said that Deck kept a diary and in it he had written that he and Herson used a marker to cover an erroneous apostrophe, put the apostrophe in its proper place with correction fluid and added a comma.

There was also a misspelled word (”emense”) that was not corrected by these linguistic vigilantes because, “I was reluctant to disfigure the sign any further. … Still, I think I shall be haunted by that perversity, emense, in my train-whistle-blighted dreams tonight.”

The sign that needed correction

These poor bastards pleaded guilty to conspiracy to vandalise government property and were sentenced to a year’s probation, during which they cannot enter any national park or modify any public signs. (I like the implication that they can modify public signs again once the year is up.) They were also ordered to pay $3,035 to repair the sign. Repair it? Three grand! For a sign that was hand written in the first place? They should have been paid three grand each for their vigilance.

Full story here.

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Word abuse that is. I was going to try to avoid posting anything about this mass gathering of Catholics (pun very much intended) but I can’t help it. Hundreds of thousands of “pilgrims” from all over the world coming to Sydney to block our roads and cost our small businesses at least a weeks takings. Not to mention the massive amount of our supposedly secular tax dollars that got donated into the event. An event held by the wealthiest religious institution in the world, incidentally.

But I’ll avoid all the obvious rantings that are so easy with something like this. Let’s keep the whole thing on topic for the blog. Well, as much on topic as this blog ever is.

You can always rely on religious institutions to have very little respect for words and their meanings. They’ll bleat on about the literal word of god or the sacred word of scripture and so on, and then they come out with a selection of words like World Youth Day. The only word among those three that is vaguely accurate is World. It is an event that is televised all over the world and people from all over the world descend upon it. But Youth? Day? The bloody thing went on for a week and had very little to do with youth.

Sure, old Pope Benedict the Ratzinger prattled on about how the young people should pay heed if they feel that their god is calling them into the service of the church. After all, most church leaders of all ranks are getting old or being hidden away in distant parishes to help them avoid accusations of child abuse and, no matter how much they big themselves up, the church is slowly dying. It’s one small mercy, I suppose. Calling the event World Catholic Indoctrination Week would have been far more accurate. But the church, any church, never has much of a track record when it comes to accuracy.

Pope Benedict the Creepily Smug Looking

Which brings us to another piece of word abuse associated with this event. Their slogan – The Time Of Your Eternal Life. Really? It says very little for heaven if a few days freezing your arse off camped at Randwick Racecourse is as good as it’s ever going to get. Who wants resurrection and eternal life if it’s not even as good as Sydney in the winter. Don’t get me wrong, I like Sydney (without the Catholics), but it’s not my idea of the pinnacle of human existence. At least, not in July.

And one final gem from Ratzinger himself. On Friday he gave an apology to the victims of clerical sexual abuse. He made no mention of what they were going to do to prevent it happening in the future, and even had the audacity to suggest that he felt their pain. But the apology was made, however insincerely. Then the very next day, during his mass, he spoke of the need to embrace the church to beware the dangers of a secular existence. Apparently the irony was utterly lost on him.

Ah well, at least it’s all over for now. I pity Madrid in three years time.

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No one believes for an instant that George Lucas had all the episodes of Star Wars planned out from the very beginning. In the same way that no one believes the Wachowski brothers when they try to convince people that the original Matrix movie was intentionally an exploration of Buddhist and Taoist philosophy, mixed with a variety of western existentialist’s thoughts. Do they? Come on, seriously. The Wachowski’s came up with a great story and were then happy to agree to all the nerds that analysed it after it was made. Shame they shafted it up the exhaust pipe with two awful sequels, but there you go.

In the same way, George Lucas made a great movie in Star Wars, borrowing heavily from Akira Kurosawa’s movies and drawing extensively on his unversity knowledge of hero mythology. He made a ground-breaking film that was life changing for millions, myself included. On the success of it he slowly became the sequel and merchandising king of the universe.

Ewoks aside, he made two pretty brilliant sequels, with some people even suggesting that The Empire Strikes Back is a better film than Star Wars. (I will not call it A New Hope, so don’t even start - yes, I’m old school.)

Subsequently his life changed dramatically, he became obsessed with the idea of symbiosis and by the time he came to making the prequels, he was a different man. A much worse man. A really annoying man, with hints of the racist about him and a way of making entire movies based on a video game that he has yet to release. A really bad game, therefore a bloody awful movie.

But I digress.

The point is, if you can remember back that far and have even bothered to stick around this long, no one believes that he had all the films planned out in advance. But it seems that Lucas is incapable of uttering the words, “I’ve changed my mind.” Back in the early eighties there was talk of there actually being nine films in the series, with the original Star Wars being the first of these nine. And this isn’t idle schoolyard gossip. My family was personal friends with one of the primary cast members of the Star Wars movies and it came from him. (No, I won’t drop names.) Even so, Lucas has recently said that there was only ever going to be six films and he has now made the very films he planned to make all along. Bollocks has he. He changed his mind numerous times along the way. Which is fine, if he could only admit it.

I mean, seriously, midichlorians? Where the hell did they pop up from and then disappear to if he had them planned all along? They absolutely should have disappeared. They should never have even occurred to Lucas, if he had any desire to see the credibility of his myths maintained, but there you go.

Anyway, wonder no more. With thanks to The Word reader and good friend of mine, James Frost, who passed on the news from slashdot, all can now be unofficially revealed. You can read all about this whole subject in a free e-book. From slashdot:

“How exactly did George Lucas develop the script for the first Star Wars? Why were the prequels so uneven when the originals were so good? Did he really have a masterplan for six, nine, or even twelve episodes, and why did the official Lucasfilm position keep changing? And just how big an influence were the films of Akira Kurosawa on the whole saga? Michael Kaminski’s The Secret History of Star Wars, Third Edition is a free, thoroughly unauthorized, e-book that brings together a huge amount of literary detective work to sort fact from legend and reveal how the story really evolved. Download it or have your nerd credentials revoked.”

Bloody marvellous. You can download the free e-book in question here. I’m off to get my copy now.

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A couple of items have surfaced recently that make for interesting reading. Firstly, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have announced the Nebula Award winners for 2007.

The winners are a diverse bunch.

Winning novel is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

I read this book on holiday last year and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s not often that something totally different comes along but this book was unlike anything I’d read before. A surprise winner for me, but utterly deserving. The other nominees in the category were:

Odyssey by Jack McDevitt
The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman
The New Moon’s Arms by Nalo Hopkinson
Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell

Other Nebula winners for 2007 were:

NOVELLA: “Fountain of Age” by Nancy Kress
NOVELETTE: “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang
SHORT STORY: “Always” by Karen Joy Fowler
SCRIPT: Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro

Pan’s Labyrinth was one of my favourite films of 2007 and I’m really glad to see it score a Nebula.

The Andre Norton Award (for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy) went to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

One of my all time favourite authors, Michael Moorcock, was named recipient of The Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. Read the full article about that award here.

On the subject of great books (excuse the tenuous segue), Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper has released a list of the fifty best cult books of all time. Interestingly, they can’t even define what a cult book is, and freely admit as much, but simply claim that “you know [one] when you see one”.

See just how cultish your reading habits are by checking out their list. It is a pretty interesting collection. See the online article here.

And finally for now, firstshowing.net have revealed a poster for the new Batman movie that was released as part of the viral marketing campaign. Seriously, how awesome is this:

Now I’ll readily admit to being a completely hopeless Batman tragic - he’s my favourite hero in any form of fiction. Harder than Riddick, cooler than Han Solo, more tortured than Rick Deckard, darker than Lobo. You have to put the hours in to truly understand the Dark Knight. For this reason, I have been appalled year after year by the utter tripe that gets vomited out purporting to be a Batman movie. Even Tim Burton, master of the dark and macabre, cast Michael Keaton as the Bat and killed the Joker on his first outing. What should have been cinemas highest moment was a steaming turd of epic proportions. Then along came Chris Nolan with Batman Begins. It had some flaws and took some liberties with the story, but was, on the whole, awesome. Now he’s made another one and by the look of this poster, he’s going to pull out a masterpiece again. Here’s hoping.

I’ll stop gushing now.

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I have some bad news that’s been circulating for a while and it’s not getting any better.

Firstly, an explanation. Hundreds of small press and independent authors like myself use Print On Demand (POD) technology to get quality work out to the public without the massive overheads of huge print runs. The cover price, sadly, reflects this and makes sales difficult. However, it’s the way of the future and the more the technology is used, the better deals we’ll all get and the wider choice everyone will have.

It’s like the indie music business. There was a time when bands and musicians said, “Fuck the labels!” and started producing and distributing their own material. At first it was laughed off, but now indie music is often considered to be the stuff with the most integrity, innovation and talent. The big labels mainly cover the manufactured pop stars these days. (That’s a massive and not entirely correct generalisation, but you get my point). So it will be with indie publishers before too long.

However, Amazon, under the guise of supporting the POD revolution, are actually wrangling a way to make even greater profits and hold even greater control over online booksales. The “other half” of POD publishing is online bookstores. The brick and mortar stores will rarely carry POD titles. Independent stores often will if you visit them individually, but there’s only so much of this that one indie press can manage. So, we rely on online sales and Amazon is by far the primary shop that people go to for their books.

So, now the bad news - Amazon have recently announced a deal with Booksurge to greatly enhance the profile of POD titles on Amazon. This seems initially like great news. But it’s not. Booksurge is a POD printer wholly owned by Amazon and Amazon are insisting that all publishers use Booksurge for all POD titles. They are even going so far as to suggest that they will switch off the buy buttons of POD books not produced by Booksurge and eventually even refuse to carry them.

As if we’re not struggling enough!

Check out this slashdot post and this Publishers Weekly article. Especially note the bullshit where Amazon states it “is not requiring that pod titles be printed exclusively through BookSurge” even though they make using any other POD printer a financial and logistical nightmare for publishers like us.

I’ll stop ranting now, but please get on board with this. The more we all discuss, debate and blog about this the more likely Amazon are to take notice. No one believes for a second that it’s all about a better service for their customers, as they are trying to claim. It’s all about a better profit margin for them. Support independent press, support indie writing and flip Amazon the bird in any way that you can so they hear the voice of the people they’re screwing.

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Or is it? I’m always pleased to see advertising that at least attempts to be honest. The truth is that advertising rarely comes absolutely clean about its subject, but that tends to be the nature of the beast. But when you see something rather more honest than usual, it’s always refreshing.

I was in Melbourne over the weekend and saw this poster on Brunswick Street.

The Birmingham Hotel
“It’s not shit anymore!”

It’s a shame that they turn two words into one unneccessarily, but it is only a pub ad after all. It’s also a shame that they put the meat of their argument in quotation marks, subtly implying that it is still shit.

However, at least they admit that it was shit and now they’re doing something about it. To see if the advertisement really is true then I suppose a visit to the Birmingham Hotel is required to ensure that it is, in fact, no longer shit. Any patrons of the Birmingham are welcome to offer an opinion.

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All right. I’m going to admit right off the bat that this is a terribly poorly veiled attempt to put myself and Neil Gaiman on the same page.

Let’s start at the beginning. As a teenager I was a huge fan of comics and graphic novels. Among my favourites were Neil Gaiman’s Sandman stories. They opened my eyes to a whole new style of storytelling and a whole new level of imagination. It certainly wasn’t a conscious decision, but I suppose it was inevitable that these stories would have an influence on my own writing.

Sandman.

I never actually read any of Gaiman’s novels, however. I don’t know why - it was just something that I never got around to. Actually, I lie. I’d read one. He wrote a fantastic book with Terry Pratchett called Good Omens. If you haven’t read this, then stop right now and go and read it. I’m serious.

Good Omens (image from Harper Collins).

Then people started saying how reading my first novel, Realmshift, reminded them of Gaiman’s work, particularly American Gods. Of course, I was flushed with pride to be compared to a master of the craft like Neil Gaiman. In fact, one mad soul was even kind enough to title a review of RealmShift on Amazon.co.uk “Possibly about to steal Neil Gaiman’s crown“. I say, old chap, steady on there!

So I went and read American Gods and I could understand the comparisons. I’ve since also read Anansi Boys, which I think is actually better.So, am I really just rattling on about all this in an attempt to crowbar some kind of shared credibility with a living legend? No. Not entirely. Publishing fiction online for free is something that I’m a fan of and something that I think can greatly expand a person’s readership. I’m on the same side of the fence with music. I think that sharing MP3s is a good thing. I’ve been out and bought albums based on a download before and I think people will buy books based on a free read. The first three chapters of RealmShift are available for free on the RealmShift page of this very website, and my Serial Novella is an entire short novel being published in weekly chapters entirely for free, also right here.

And Neil Gaiman is also an advocate of free fiction. See, I told you there was more than shameless self-aggrandisement going on here. That great novel American Gods is available to read for free on the Harper Collins website right now. I apologise for not drawing your attention to this sooner, but it somehow slipped by me and I’ve only just realised myself. I apologise as there are only six days left to read it. But it’s free. You can find it here at Harper Collins.

And now everyone has gone off to read American Gods and I bet not a soul is looking at A ‘Verse Full of Scum or RealmShift.

Sigh.

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