Movie Review: Resident Evil: After Life

Posted on September 11, 2010 by C.A. Jacobs

I haven’t been to the movies in a really long time. Most of my time these days is spent on the insane revision process that’s eating up all my time and energy. I decided I needed a break, so last night I went and saw Resident Evil: After Life.

I have to say, this was the perfect break for me to take. I’m not really sure if the Resident Evil movies are considered horror, but there was definitely a phobia for everyone. Phobias for dark, enclosed spaces; drowning and water related issues; fear of heights and flying; fear of being eaten by zombies. You know, the usual. It kept me balanced between thinking about how they could possibly end the movie and being on the edge of my seat for what was happening. It also made me really look at what makes horror so … well, horrifying.

The beginning was a little confusing, as it starts out on the streets of a fully populated Tokyo. This was weird because Resident Evil: Extinction took place after the T-virus had destroyed the world’s entire population. There seemed to be a bit of time jumping in the first thirty minutes or so of the movie, and that motivated me to come home and watch the entire series again and see if I could put together their timeline. Because of my intensely needed, all-consuming revisions, I didn’t do that, but I suspect that as soon as I get some breathing room, I will in fact watch the entire Resident Evil series and determine whether or not their timeline makes sense.

The clean-cut bad guy in the movie was a little too Matrix-ish for my tastes. It almost felt like a copy of Agent Smith with the way he spoke and acted. Maybe it’s just the tone of voice and the choice of words. Somehow, I think they could have done that better without being so similar.

The fun part about movies like this is by now, you pretty much know who will live and who is there to be an extra meal to one of the nasty beasties. I was impressed with the realism of the different characters, but any characters that weren’t meant to survive past a certain point were clearly cannon fodder material.

This movie was also linked pretty closely to the games in a few ways. I know some of the more recent games changed the way the T-virus was infecting people and how the zombies behaved, giving some of them more of an ability to think and act in partial human ways. The tentacle thing was also a part of some of the newer games.

Overall, I would say that I enjoyed the movie, but it leaves me with just one really consuming question: If everyone on the planet has pretty much been wiped out or turned into a zombie, where exactly do they keep finding all these armies of bad guys?

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Book Review: The Literary Werewolf edited by Charlotte F. Otten

Posted on September 4, 2010 by C.A. Jacobs

I have not quite finished reading the Literary Werewolf (Horror 295 pages) edited by Charlotte F. Otten yet, but it’s due to the library tomorrow and I doubt I’ll have a chance to bring it back then so I must return it today.

I think of all the stories and mythologies I have read for this program, this book has been by far the most useful. The anthology contains 22 werewolf stories and are broken into nine different sections, each section demonstrating a different aspect of the mythology and lore that shadows all werewolf stories.

The first section is the Erotic Werewolf, with stories by Stephen King, Manly Banister, and Clemence Housman. As implied by the section’s title, all three of these stories deal with werewolves in love with man or man in love with werewolves. I think my favorite story out of this section was Clemence Housman‘s The Were-Wolf. In this story, a twin brother risks everything to save his brother from the clutches of a female werewolf who attempts to lure their family one by one to their deaths. The story is copyrighted from 1896 and it shocked me as to how well-written and rich the story was. I picked up a couple parts of mythology that might help me with my own story.

The second section is the Rapacious Werewolf. The two stories in this section dealt more with the idea that werewolves are cannibals. I wasn’t really fond of either story and didn’t really learn much from either.

The third section is where I found what I’ve been looking for to help fix one of the main issues with my own story. I’ve been lacking in mythology and the texture of deep lore and age with the creatures that carry the weight of death. In the section of the Diabolical Werewolf, the story by Seabury Quinn titled The Thing in the Fog, I found exactly the trace of mythology I’ve been searching for. In this story, the main character talks about Vrykolakas, which is Greek for “the restless dead.” In those times, it was used to refer either to a vampire or a werewolf and I think it will suit my purposes just perfectly. I was also turned to this term by my second reader for my final thesis project and now I have a lot more research to do on this subject to include the depth my story was lacking before.

When I check this book back out from the library again sometime next week, I’m certain I will finish the rest of my review. Until then, happy researching!

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Stress and deadlines

Posted on September 1, 2010 by C.A. Jacobs

Last night was the last SHU online chat that I’ll have to do in order to receive my MA in Writing Popular Fiction. There were four topics offered and I chose the one about writing while dealing with stress in your personal life. It was a really good chat and a lot of people came up with good ways to deal with stress.

I think stress can be positive or negative. I definitely don’t believe that stress itself is neutral. A lot of people have more issues when the people close to them or the people they work with are dealing with stress. This tends to cause more stress on the individual. It amuses me that so many people in our society let things that don’t really matter in the long run stress them out in the short term.

One of the big keys for dealing with stress is to only actually worry about the things that directly affect you. Instead of letting your boss at work’s crappy attitude affect you, think about how you’re reacting to it. Is it really important enough for you to waste your time on? Here’s an example. Say you have an office job, it doesn’t really matter where or what kind. Your immediate supervisor is dealing with a messy divorce and often tends to take out bad days on you and the rest of your coworkers. With your supervisor being so unstable, everyone is walking on eggshells and it’s making everyone uncomfortable. This adds more stress to your life because you worry about losing your job and that causes all sorts of other stress, but most of it can be traced back to that one supervisor at work who isn’t dealing with their own stress well. What can you do?

Well, you can’t fix the divorce. That’s happening outside of work. But you can show some understanding. Divorces are hard for most people, so all you really can do is continue doing your job to the best of your ability and possibly work ahead if you can. If you can accomplish tasks without being told and never let your own emotional state affect your position at work, you won’t be nearly as obvious of a target for your boss to take out their frustrations on. Think about what you say before you say it and work on controlling your own actions, reactions, and emotions. It’s not anywhere near a good solution, but it is a place to start.

One of the ways I deal with stress is to take the stress I’m feeling and pawn it off on my characters. It really puts things into perspective when I see how much worse things could be. See, I’m not one of those nice writers who love their characters. I write horror. So I take the stress that I have in my own personal life and I make it a lot worse for my characters. I force them to deal with situations 100 times more intense than the stress I’m dealing with. Plus, it’s always easier to see the solution to problems when you’re observing it from the outside. It helps me deal with the stress caused by my life, which really is a bit different from the things I see most people deal with.

But there are some issues of stress that I can’t just pawn off on my characters. The upcoming deadline for my final thesis project is due 27 September and I’m feeling terribly unprepared. My second reader is someone who knows the horror genre inside and out and I’m slightly worried that my writing is just as amateur as I feel. I’m also painfully behind on the revision process and things are not going well in that aspect. Work and life keeps interfering in my writing. I’m hoping to be able to take three or four days straight to just write this weekend. If I can get through most of the revisions this weekend, that should help a lot, but I’m fairly certain that the best I’ll be able to do is to get halfway through the book. My current mentor seems to think that my writing gets a lot better as the story progresses. I certainly hope so.

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Chapter 3

Posted on August 30, 2010 by C.A. Jacobs

I did manage to finish the revisions for chapter 3 and turn them in on the deadline, which was 27 August. Chapter 3 wound up being a little shorter than the chapters previous, and chapter 4 might be just as short. I think once I finish the revisions for chapter 4 that things will move much smoother, as that’s when the action really starts kicking in and the main character starts getting beaten to a bloody pulp. That kind of stuff tends to me more interesting to write and it tends to move the story along a lot faster.

I’m still thinking about whether or not I can revise Accept Fire and Blood to be solely from Ryn’s point of view. There are a couple really good scenes with Jobe, but I think it will increase the mystery to not show so much from his side. Unfortunately, he has most of the main plot points while she is just trying to survive.

I think I’m doing a better job now with developing Ryn as a character. Having dialogue in every chapter is helping that out, I think. I’m torn between adding her actual thoughts on things and not. It still feels like there might be too much distance between her and the reader and I’m not quite sure how I intend to fix it. Maybe this week, I’ll reread the first three revised chapters again and see if I, as a reader and not the writer, actually care about what’s happening to her. That’s proven to be a pretty solid way so far for me to figure out if this story is actually going to be able to hold water. The story itself is good, I just need to keep working to get readers more invested in it.

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More revisions

Posted on August 22, 2010 by C.A. Jacobs

As the deadline for this month approaches, I’m both ahead and behind. I’ve already submitted 35 pages last month, and according to my contract, I only have to submit 20-25 pages every month. The flip side of that, however, is that my entire revised thesis is due 27 September, not 27 October like I originally believed. In order to meet that goal, I needed to revise a chapter a week for 15 weeks, and I haven’t done that these last two weeks. I’m unbelievably far behind and it’s rather frightening. The theory is that as my chapters progress in the novel, my writing also improves which means that I should have less to do in the later chapters.

But I have to make it to those chapters first. I’m still stuck in the early beginning, when my writing was still quite poor and my characters extremely flat. There’s so much work that needs to be done in the beginning to liven things up that I’m not sure I have the energy for that and everything that’s going on outside my life as a writer.

The other part is that I found out today that I’m not really going to have anything due during the month of October, but if my mentor and my second reader decide that my manuscript are not quite worthy, I’ll only have about three weeks to fix everything to their satisfaction. So I guess my October will be spent busy with other things and then the first couple weeks of November have the potential to be amazingly unpleasant. If my second reader is who I think it is, it’s a person who is very good at their craft and I’m slightly intimidated by as a writer. Someone who knows horror and knows it well, as well as being completely immersed in mythology. There might be a lot of holes in my story that will shine out as blatantly obvious and I’m worried.

It’s a lot easier for me to rewrite the entire beginning chapters than it is for me to keep sorting through and attempting to find sections that are even remotely salvageable. The first versions of these chapters really were quite bad and I’m so annoyed with them and my whole story that I sometimes just wish I could be an amazing writer like the authors I can’t ever seem to read enough of. I do know that anything worth doing takes hard work and effort and that’s why I continue to plug away at all of this, even though I don’t feel like I’m a very good writer sometimes.

I still have a couple hours before I need to head off to bed and I’m strongly hoping that I can at least finish this new draft of Chapter 3 before I go to bed tonight. That would help me out a lot. Or maybe I could just stay up all night and keep writing, since I think I’ve found my flow for the moment. Lots and lots of words being typed very quickly in all types of medium – here, emails, the revisions. There appear to be a great many words in my head that are desperate for any escape they can manage.

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Revision Insanity

Posted on August 15, 2010 by C.A. Jacobs

Things have been extra busy lately. I’ve managed to make it through the first two chapters of my revision process for Accept Fire and Blood and I’m running out of both motivation and time to get the whole thing done.

You would think the revisions would be the easy part, but the first half of the book needs to be entirely rewritten. I’ve managed to fix a good amount of Point Of View issues which have plagued me for as long as I’ve been writing this story, and I think it’s a lot easier to care about what happens to Ryn, but I still feel like it’s not moving fast enough and that it’s not a very quick read. I don’t think it’s the kind of brain candy that if I were reading it, I would be able to finish it in a couple hours.

My critique partners have been doing rather well with sending back my weekly chapters and I’m getting a lot of good stuff out of their comments. I’ve also been taking drafts of the story to my Wednesday night local writer’s group and they’ve been providing some much needed “average reader” thoughts and comments.

It looks a lot as though I’ll be able to attend the World Fantasy Convention 2010 in Columbus, Ohio. I’m still working on finalizing the details for that, but it should be a pretty good time.

I have five different people’s comments on how to fix the current chapter three, but I have to say that it’s honestly not going very well. This chapter and the next chapter are probably the most boring chapters in the entire book, but they’re necessary in order to move the plot along. I dislike writing boring chapters because … well … they’re boring. And the worst part is that if I, the author, am bored, that means it’s quite likely that readers will be bored as well. So my goal for the next two chapters is to get them to be much less boring and more focused on moving things along at a quicker pace.

I’ve found that I actually pay more attention to my sentence structure now that I’m knee-deep in revisions. I’m trying to vary things a bit more and not starting every sentence with the same words. I think it’s going fairly well, though it feels like I’m still being a bit long winded. I guess only time will tell how solidly my revisions and rewrites actually are.

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Websites

Posted on August 6, 2010 by C.A. Jacobs

As I get closer and closer to becoming a real, published author, the professionalism and overall style of my internet activities become more important and prevalent. With that in mind, I think I am willing to attempt moving my domain to a different provider.

I don’t know much about how this whole process works. I’m doing a bit of research right now, but I get the distinct feeling that I’ll probably miss a step somewhere and find that my site has disappeared completely. I’m hoping this is not what actually happens.

I know there aren’t many people who actually visit my website, but if you do and you notice things going wonky for the weekend, just be patient. I’m sure I’ll get it fixed eventually.

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Conventions

Posted on August 5, 2010 by C.A. Jacobs

So looking at my schedule, it looks like I might be able to go to a singular convention sometime in the next six months or so. I went to the World Fantasy Convention 2009 in San Jose, California last Halloween and had a great time. Of course, I was also within driving distance of that convention. This time, I contemplating either the Mile High Convention 42 in Denver, Colorado from 22-24 October or the World Fantasy Convention 2010 in Columbus, Ohio from 28-31 October. I thought about attempting to go to the World Science Fiction Convention 2010 in Melbourne, Australia from 02-06 September, but realized that I simply did not have enough time to properly plan that.

I really enjoyed my time at the World Fantasy Convention last year. I met a lot of amazing people, sat in on some very informative panels, and learned quite a bit about marketing and publishing. There are a lot of people in the Seton Hill University’s MFA in Writing Popular Fiction that will also be there and it has the potential to be kind of like a mini-residency. It would also be a prime time for me to start pitching Accept Fire and Blood for real, because my full and completed thesis is due 27 October. That means I would have a finished novel, ready for publication in hand and waiting for the right person to swoop down and pick it up.

I also enjoy visiting Denver, even though I’ve already been there once this year. The Mile High Convention looks like it will be more like a cross between the World Fantasy Convention and the San Diego Comic Convention. There is even a costume contest, though I’m not sure how that works out. There are also a lot of local Colorado authors that I would get a chance to meet, and that could be a very rewarding experience.

There are pros and cons to both sides, of course, but at this point, I think I’m leaning more towards the World Fantasy Convention 2010, simply because I know a lot of people who will be there, I know it’s a great place to network, I could conceivably be picked up by an agent / editor / publisher, and there are tons of free books.

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Book Review: Carrie by Stephen King

Posted on August 2, 2010 by C.A. Jacobs

I read Carrie (Horror 253 pages) by Stephen King today. This is the second of my five required books for this term that I have completed.

I’m not really quite sure what to say about this book, other than it was remarkably sad. I must be one of the few people on the planet who had not read this book, nor seen the movie until I finished it less than an hour ago. I still kind of knew the gist of it before reading it, and I knew how it would end. I mean, how can you not know how this book is going to end?

In a lot of ways, I felt that the end demonstrated a complete and total sense of justice. I honestly felt like the absolute disaster that happened for the last half of the book was the way things should go. Everyone died except for the few people who saw the misery and tried to make amends.

Even though this book was written back in the 60s, King did an amazing job of not dating the story at all. There wasn’t anything in the story that indicated that this isn’t a story that could have happened at any time, anywhere in American history. I suppose there were clues that it was written in the 60s, especially when the excerpts from the “Dictionary of Psychic Phenomena” and those others instances like it, define telekinesis. I think that’s one of those things that we as a society today are more likely to just know and understand. Or maybe that’s just my view, having grown up with comic books and all sorts of fantasy / science fiction stuff.

I think this story did a great job of capturing the actual human spirit. Not all of us are good and not all of us are bad and most of us really will just do whatever everyone else is doing, though we feel guilty or upset about it in our own heads. I think the main idea of this story is to show the consequences of our actions.

You take high school, for instance. I don’t know of too many people who actually enjoyed high school, but we all know that it’s something we have to get through. And I remember that I knew about the school athletic teams and how they seemed to have a higher instance of people who thought drinking and smoking and partying were the “cool” things to do. I also knew that those people probably weren’t really worth my time or effort. And I also knew that there were those people who would go out of their way to make life miserable for other people. Which just goes to show that Carrie easily could have been any school at any time since there were cars on the roads.

The horror element in this story isn’t even Carrie’s telekinesis. The horror element is the lengths that these kids go through to psychically abuse one of their fellow students, one of their fellow human beings.

I guess one of the things that really stands out for this book is that it shows that a writer can produce popular fiction that still withstands the test of time and can be picked up forty years after it was written and the reader can still get the exact same reaction as a reader who read this back in the 60s. It’s a pretty impressive feat and one that I think is a good goal to aspire to, especially as I continue my own writing with hopes of someday making a living from my writing.

Overall, and interesting book.

Works cited: King, Stephen. Carrie. New York: Pocket Books, 1999. Original print 1974.

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Book Review: Mission of Honor by David Weber

Posted on July 30, 2010 by C.A. Jacobs

I started Mission of Honor (Science Fiction 584 pages) by David Weber the day before yesterday and finished it last night.

Overall, another good installment to the series. The action was good, the characters were good, and the plot was very in-depth. It was a lot easier keeping track of which characters took what action in this book rather than then one I just finished the other day. I’m not sure if that’s because this book focused on Honor or because there weren’t nearly as many characters to focus on.

I think overall that I liked this book a lot better than Shadow of Saganami and I was pretty impressed with this book.

Works cited: Weber, David. Mission of Honor. New York: Baen Publishing Enterprises, 2011. Original print 2010.

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