Found this via a friend's flist, where it was also being mocked: the album released by Peter Andre and Katie Price (aka Jordan). Complete with wanktastic reviews!
Check out these comedy gold lines:
"When you hear Jordan and Peter together, you understand immediately what they're about. This isn't about the money, this isnt about the mass of press and media attention that will be lavished upon them, this isn't a cash in on their, supposedly, fading star capabilities. Anyone who believes that is clearly a paedophile."
My God. I want to have sex with small children. Thank you, oh wonderful reviewer, for explaining what is wrong with my life!
"this album must surely be preserved by the nation as being of huge cultural significance."
No! Get out of my nation! And stop trying to speak for it!
And then there's the person who seems to think he/she's reviewing a book.
*backs away slowly*
At Rhi's prompt I finally got around to uploading the backlog of Bunia's journal entries, including the one I finished off today which contains a sex scene. :S Because I usually fade to black pretty early on in such scenes, I'm always nervous about writing them out in full, and this is the longest one I've ever written. While I do know to avoid daft euphanisms, and my own sexual experience means that I won't make stupid mistakes about the basic mechanics of the act, I nonetheless don't know if my writing will be good enough. I want it to be a little hot, but don't want it to look like I was trying too much to make it hot - natural, then; a natural representation of what the viewpoint character (first-person narrator in this instance) was feeling.
In this case, it's one of the moments where I think I stretch the realism of this being someone's journal entries. Back when I wrote a journal of my own I never felt inclined to detail the sex I was having (instead I was angsting about my woeful life, along with a million other teenagers with equally woeful lives... as Bunia is 24, she doesn't angst all that much), but maybe some people do. I intend to slip a comment into one of the earlier entries, saying she has a very good memory that allows her to remember the details of conversations (again, another moment where I stretch the realism of the journal format), but would she remember the details of sex? I don't know.
This whole issue of the journal realism is one reason I'm considering self-publishing the entries when they're done. For one, they're likely to be too long for almost all magazines, but too short for novel publishers - currently 16k and counting. And this dubious realism of the journal entries means I think it'd be a tough sell. While I could convert it to basic first person, or even third person, I like the journal format as something different from everything else I write, and would have to rewrite some bits so they felt less like summaries of recent events. I'll see what I feel like when it's done, and I do think it will be done in the near future. There's another brief entry to upload, and then we get back to some non-sex plot. *snerk*
My Nano count is up to 37328, so it looks like I'll be able to push it
over 40k before the end of the month. I still don't think it will
make it up to 50k, if only due to time constraints. Still feeling
a bit ill today, but tomorrow I really need to start writing an essay
and start revising for my floor manager exam. Grr.
Earlier today I found a potential market for THE BEAUTIFUL COLLECTION - Crimson Highway - and submitted the story just now. They want dark romance-supernatural stuff, and considering TBC is about obsession with a flavour of magic I think/hope this mag will bite. They're a webzine and very new, but they've got a nice layout. Too many webzines look really shoddy, whereas these guys look really smart. While their publication of the crazy comma story was a bit of a turn-off, I otherwise quite like the look of them. What? You mean the story wasn't about the commas? Wow. That totally slipped by me. Could be something to do with the massive brain bleed caused by his comma-splicing-from-hell. "Using an impressionistic style of his own making" does not excuse it.
My Nano count has been totally killed by my cold, which turned out to be more vicious than I expected. Night before last I got about 2 hours' sleep, in 20 minute segments, and the whole of yesterday I felt like I'd just crawled out of my grave on a *really* bad day. I slept better last night, though not perfectly, and today I've been getting better though I've got a sore throat now and am otherwise not quite better. I severely doubt I will hit 50k, but if I can get over 40k I'll be happy because I'll still have been more productive than in previous months.
My floor manager test is scheduled for 8th Dec, which is another reason 50k won't happen. Tomorrow I need to start revising all that shitty knowledge I learnt back in August/September. I also need to write some essays, apply for a job, do more dissertation reading.... *hates the real world*
Also, House needs to be aired more than once a week.
And
the torrents need to be sorted out faster. *twitches*
What's he going to do? He's totally fucking up Wilson's life and
please, please let him finally realise he's being a complete shit to
his only friend, who is sticking by him despite being given no
thanks at all. Seriously, this most recent episode I barely
noticed the patient and the diagnosis and all that jazz. C'mon,
House, you wanker, do something! *angsts* This is why I
usually watch TV shows in box sets, not as they air. *angsts some
more*
I didn't even have time to enter it on my spreadsheet or write a post about it.
I submitted A SHADE OF YELLOW to the RLD Anthology early this afternoon, then went out to see the new James Bond movie (which is a lot of awesome), and came back to find a rejection from the RLD Anthology.
Also, my cold has kicked in for some late-night frolicks.
Oh, and I'm going to have to write 4k tomorrow to catch up to my Nano target. For some funny reason I don't feel like writing now. .... Actually it's more to do with the headache, but yeah. Urrrgghhh. Sidenote of greater urrgghh: saw the Eragon movie trailer. Wanted to die. Got a funny look from the lady sat next to me for saying "Oh god kill me now."
So I'm going to watch some House on the sofa, curled up under a duvet, and not think. Then I will sleep.
Woke up this morning a cold. Only a mild one, mind, the kind I'll be getting over in a day or two, but nonetheless it's annoying. But then, lo and behold, I get a little package through the mail from my darling American friend Lauren! It contained a CD (How It Ends by Devotchka) and a funny card, and totally brightened up my morning.
Yay!
Shame she's all the way across the pond, otherwise I'd give her a huge BUTT GROPE in thanks (she went to my school for a year and we had this butt groping thing. The guys loved it.) I did send her a funny keyring a week or so ago, so hopefully she'll be getting that soon.
Yay!
*bounces away to do some uni reading*
Once again I have been double-teamed by rejections: Interzone rejected A SHADE OF YELLOW and GrendelSong rejected THE BEAUTIFUL COLLECTION, both form rejections. Poo on them both, and some other childish curses. I think I'm going to finally send ASOY to the Red Light District anthology (the thing I wrote it for), but I don't know where I'll send TBC next.
Partially counter-balancing the bad news, I finally got word back from
one of my managers at work that I passed my mock floor manager
test. She'll be sending me some dates for the real thing
soon. Hopefully I'll be able to get it done before I go back at
Christmas. If, that is, I can even remember anything I learnt way
back in August/September.
(67.4%)
A few days ago I rewrote the rejected 99-word story, SNOWDROPS, expanding it into a 1,300-word story that I submitted to Electric Velocipede earlier this evening (after some crits from Rhi, Jon and the Lady of Glorious Buns, for which I am muchly appreciative). Looks like I won't hear back from that magazine for quite a while - could be up to half a year - but it's worth the wait because it's a fairly reputable little zine. The lady who rejected the 99-word version was definitely right to do so: it is *much* better as an expanded piece.
I'm just about on my Nano target, with Bunia almost exclusively providing me with the words. However, I reached about half past 11 and didn't feel like writing any more of her journal, so I decided to head on over to the 15minuteficlets community that Buneater has been enjoying and wrote a little piece in response to this week's prompt. It's.... it's a weird piece, with incest, gore, lesbians and magic. I will probably expand it some time, because I like the ideas I threw in there. You can find it - HERE!
I had hoped to be further ahead of my Nano target, but at least I'm not
behind. With any luck, I'll be reaching the target by the end of
the month. *hopes she hasn't jinxed herself by saying that*
This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you've read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished, put an asterisk beside the ones you loved and put a '#' next to the ones you intend to read some time.
1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert **
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson ##
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M Miller Jr
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey **
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card **
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien ##
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson ##
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer
I think this says something about what I read. In my life I have not read the greatest amount of scifi/fantasy; until this summer, I was reading a lot of other stuff. This means I haven't had time to read a lot of these 'classics'. Frankly, though, I don't intend to read more than a handful of them. My tastes tend towards the modern. I like the styles being played around with at the moment; and, hell, I like the partial abandonment of the Moral Element to speculative fiction, with writers missing out the Over-riding Moral Statement about humanity and skipping to the great plot, world-building and characterisation.
I think most writers today can create more interesting worlds than 30 or so years ago, simply because the more technological developments we make, the more writers' eyes are opened to the next possible steps. Also, some ideas of older science fiction (Are androids human? or, OMG Dystopia!) bore me, because I've already seen and contemplated them, and now I want something new; revisiting these ideas several times in old fiction really doesn't appeal to me. And as for fantasy, more writers in the past half decade or so have been more overtly abandoning the Tolkein-framework in favour of something uniquely their own, something that I am abosolutely loving.
There are some older books that I love. Anne McCaffrey's older books are better than her newer ones (and I haven't even touched the ones co-written with or written solely by her son); recently I read and loved Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Time (1972-6) and Joan D Vinge's The Snow Queen (1980). But on the whole, I like stuff that's coming out right now, or has come out in the past decade or so.
(50.3%)
I'm back on target! *dances*
This is thanks to my wonderful muse Bunia, who has been spilling her story to me like floor-length hair falling free from a clasp. When I started her journal at the beginning of the month, I never intended to write so much so quickly. Now I have written 6 entries (one of which was 3 parts long) and I think there is still at least as much to go, in terms of word count, before I reach its end.
The other day I considered self-publishing the entries when they're done, simply because I felt they don't have a strong enough plot to get professionally published but I'd like to get them out there. Now, further in, I think maybe they will have a strong enough plot for me to at least attempt submitting them to the few magazines that take longer short-stories. Right now the entries total a bit over 6k, which already makes them too long for most mags. If they fail professionally, then I'll still consider self-publishing them. Could be fun.
In other news:
Went to see my friend Hajar sing at The Blag Club in Notting Hill this evening. She has a wonderful voice, in a very classical style (rather than a rock-voice, or punk-voice). Annoyingly a lot of people in the bar/club were talking through her set, but I loved her anyway.
Speaking of music, I'm hooked on this song at the moment:
Hell, speaking of awesome songs, here's another one:
Set the Fire to the Third Bar by Snow Patrol, featuring a lady with a wonderful voice whose name has temporarily slipped my mind. Anyway, listen and love.
And now, back to Bunia. The next entry will be a long 'un, because a lot of stuff happens between her more recent entry and when she could get her hands on some writing materials again. Dun dun DUN.
What's the worst pickup line you've ever heard?
Submitted by ShellEy.
Mr. Lame: "Are you a good kisser?"
Me: "Yeah."
Mr. Lame: "Prove it."
Me: "Uh.... no. I have a boyfriend." *is too shocked by lameness to think of something witty to say*
Mr. Lame: "I bet your boyfriend's doing exactly what I'm doing now."
Me: *looks at watch* "Actually, he's cleaning out the milkshake
machine at McDonald's in Arundel right now." *starts laughing at
lame-ness*
