Hey, just a quick heads up to let you know that my serial's third part published today! Fallen Part 3 Check it out!
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By Kirstin Steitz More of Kirstin’s writing and rambling can be found at her blog, Oh My Foes . WARNING: SPOILERS, SWEETIE... We’re all grown-ups here (probably?) so I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this entry, you’ve seen the movie or don’t care if I spoil plot points for you. This is your only warning and I will not suffer fools. That said, OMG HAVE YOU SEEN LOGAN??? Y’ALL, OMG. I went to see this movie with my partner and when it was over, I just kind of stared at the screen. It was like they brutally murdered my childhood, but somehow did it in a way that I felt good about? When we are first introduced to Logan, he has aged. Oh my, has he aged. He is broken, healing poorly, and coughing like he has lung cancer. He still has that vicious, animal fight in him, but he’s hanging on to life by a thread. It is not a Logan we are used to seeing. When he murders that gang trying to hijack his limo, it’s immediately heartbreaking because it is so obvious that he is ...
I went to see this film at the Electric Cinema yesterday, and it was good. Let me tell you how good. A lot Marvel's films are quite disappointing because they manage to either feel very repetitive or as if something has been lost in the transition to the screen, or because they dally in meaningless debates about the world's reaction to the sudden introduction of super powered beings (while never really amping up the threat level that we see in the comics universe). Guardians manages to dodge that bullet, however. In part that may be because the sandbox James Gunn has to play in is so much bigger than the conventional MCU, there are so many threats and characters he can play with because space is so big in the Marvel universe. With literally thousands of stories and characters to play with Gunn's most daunting task, I think, is finding what will work on screen and what has actual resonance. The wonderful thing is that you can feel his love for the property, and all ...
It's election time in the UK, even though we only had an election two years ago, and the Fixed Term Parliaments Act is meant to make sure that politicians can't manipulate things to their advantage (so you can't call an election in the middle of an economic boom, for example). I think that the decision, this week, to hold a general election shows exactly how much that particular Act is worth... about as much as a piece of soiled tissue paper. I suppose it is an indication of the continuing crisis that engulfs our politics, highlighting the need not for an election but for someone to be brave enough to state the obvious. The political architecture of our country is no longer relevant, it just doesn't work. It's been outdated for decades and nobody has done anything about it apart from try to move more and more power to the Government and try to find more ways to bypass Parliament. The election results in 2010 were a warning sign of this, one that was ignored by We...
Adrian Tchaikovsky's award winning Science Fiction novel is another brick, and another of his arthropod based tales. Set in the far future it is a story book ended by savagery and civilisation and by the essential question of what intelligent life is, and how helpful technology is. Tchaikovsky starts the story out with a chillingly prescient moment in which a situation very similar to the one we're seeing in the real world occurs, with the rejection of knowledge in favour of 'purity' which destroys everything humans have established away from Earth, plunging the species into a new dark age. This results in an act of sabotage that destroys a science experiment in uplifting and sets the story on its course. The interesting thing here is that he avoids the urge to overly exalt technology, instead preferring to show that time takes its toll on everything. The rest of the book is divided into alternating chapters that split the narrative's perspective between the upl...
Today I want to return to the subject of death, that great spectre that so casts its shadow over society. We seem to be so focused on it as a tragic event that we miss the positive side. I know that seems like a funny thing to say, how could death be positive? But it can and we're going to explore how. 1) A Release from Pain While we all dream of a quick, painless death the reality is that most deaths are long, lingering affairs. Few of us will die at home and the causes of death mean we are more likely to die in pain. Things like dementia cancer and heart attacks are far more likely to be causes of death than simply passing away in our sleep. Most of the time, we will feel pain and death, therefore, is the end of that, a release. 2) Closure One thing I've found is that a death can be a weight off one's shoulders. My Grandmother, as I've said before, suffered from Alzheimer's at the end of her life and the effect on the family was devastating. There is ...
I should say that I approached this film with caution. I love Ghost in the Shell, it's probably my favourite anime both film and series (including Stand Alone complex) and while I was initially excited by the idea of a live action film, I was also very wary. It's not just that Hollywood speaks a different language to the Japanese, it speaks a different language to everyone, but that I was unsure that the soul... ghost, if you will... of the franchise would transfer to a Western interpretation. The concept of the 'ghost whispering to you' seems to be something that's so intrinsic to the Japanese view of the world that I don't think it carries across into a dualistic culture, such as the Christian one that still dominates the West, where flesh and spirit and technology and nature are held to be opposed to each other. Part of my trepidation was also driven by the fact that although the trailer was stunning to watch, it seemed to repeat pieces of the action and to f...
Hello! My serial with Fiction Vortex has launched this week and it's up at the link. The first part is free to view, so check it out! http://www.fictionvortex.com/catalog/free/fallen-ep1/ And there's a playlist to listen to as you read, too! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoQMkZp9vOLX1EOlVsSsKSaZAe8eje4i4 , so check that out and enjoy!
Cities change things, that's just the way it is. Old ways fall away and new ways rise up, usually while the past and the old ways of doing things lose their original meaning and become idolised without a proper context. Urban Fantasy is more or less based on this idea, along with the obvious 'things are not what they seem' angle that's common to the genre. Monsters, which in horror would have single-minded and rather shallow motives (kill humans, possess humans, feed off humans etc, etc) suddenly are part of communities and have to deal with issues like politics, or love... Or paying rent on a space to live, Other issues become prevalent as well, can a werewolf really risk hunting and killing prey inside a city's borders, can vampires rely on nightclubs for their blood when there's a shortage of virgins to go around? They change and new priorities arise as they interact with other communities and with protagonists (who may or may not be monsters themselves, ...
I am an introvert. It's something I've felt growing in importance in who I am and how I define myself. Last year I actually started looking at the Myers-Briggs system, via a website called Personality Hacker which I've found interesting and helpful in coming to understand myself (I'm an INFP, which Personality Hacker label as 'introverted exploring' and for good and ill seems to fit me to a tee). It was particularly interesting to learn that INFPs are heavily focused on authenticity, and also (possibly vexingly) very much devoted to being 'unknowable' as in there's a desire to keep people at arm's length a lot of the time. As a consequence, my MBTI type may have a little more to do with the next statement than I care to admit, but I feel I have to say it. I hate the stuff I see on Facebook about introversion a lot of the time, it seems devoted to making introverts feel their difference even more than many of them do. I see stuff about how ma...
An Urban Fantasy classic, War of the Oaks was first published in 1987 and has now be rereleased by Penguin with a foreword by Naomi Alderman. The novel is set in Minneapolis, in the 1980s and centres on Eddi McCandry, a guitarist and vocalist who at the start of the novel makes a fateful decision and ends up in a situation that's beyond her wildest imaginings. Chosen to be a champion of the Seelie Court, purely to bring death to the battlefield in their war against the Unseelie Court (their opposites). Burdened with a phouka bodyguard and without a practical way to make money, Eddi is forced to start another band and the novel focuses on the development of that as well as her involvement in the war. Her relationships also fall under the novel's scrutiny, as she becomes more a part of Faerie and her involvement in their conflict spreads out to include her bandmates. The book is very much about passion and growth, Bull takes pains to reflect the messy, but growing, nature ...
Okay, I've been meaning to write this for a couple of weeks, ever since the White House revealed that 'hostile' press agencies would no longer be able to attend White House press briefings, but life got in the way. It was a move quite unprecedented, as far as I'm aware there has never been a moment in American history where the President exiled the press. Indeed the majority of commentary has always pointed towards the relationship between the first and fourth estates being too cosy in the USA. From a British perspective where the press is often too happy to collect politicians' scalps to keep the stories interesting, or honest, the marriage of President and Media has often seemed as if there's too much mutual backwashing going on. This, then, indicates a change in tone, a sea change that will have further ramifications. The most important thing is to realise that this gambit is actually a freeing one. Without access to the White House, the newspapers and TV...
Skyrim, how I love thee. The only game I've never grown entirely tired of playing (apart from Fire Emblem), Skyrim is still on my PS3, and this time Eve and I have undertaken a slightly different tack. At the moment our character (a female Imperial called Helena Justina*) is level 63, she is relearning the One-Handed skill, and has maxed out Smithing, Two-Handed, Heavy Armour and only has Pickpocket below level 30. She's completed the Companions and Mages College quests and could become Thegn of Falkreath, Dawnstar, Winterhold, and Solitude if she chose to (she is the Thegn of Riften, but only because we wanted a house, Eve is passionate about loot and enjoys Alchemy much more than I). There's a large bounty on her head because I got a bit sword happy in Marketh, and went to town on the guards there in the stupid big quest - you may have gathered we don't like that particular plotline). We have raided tombs and barrows, defeated Dragon Priests, Draugr Deathlor...
By K. Steitz When I was an awkward, bookish teenager, my favorite novels were The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. Those books are still in my collection; their pages are dog-eared, yellowed, the spines are broken. I loved them deeply and visited them regularly. The main characters in both books were these incredible young women who never quite fit in, but cared desperately for their chosen family and fought tooth-and-nail to protect them. At the time, I didn’t think very hard about why I loved them, or how I had found some of the few books in the genre that had female protagonists- I just loved them. As I grew, as we all must, I learned that fantasy is a genre for boys. It is about strapping young men who come from modest backgrounds and save their homes/countries/etc, or save their lovers whose names never quite matter. I learned that these are stories of wish fulfillment. These stories, and women, and the world, were almost always told thro...