Author Archives: Henry

Flash Fiction: Her Touch

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I haven’t done one of Chuck Wendig’s flash fiction challenges in a while, so I thought I’d do one again and share the results.  But I think I got more than I bargained for.  This week’s challenge was another subgenre mashup (last time gave us Dreams of Drowning); this time I rolled “Grimdark Fantasy” crossed with “BDSM Erotica.”

I hadn’t expected that.

But I think I’ve succeeded at delivering on those things, maybe?  It certainly is BDSM erotica, and I think the trappings are sufficiently grimdark fantasy-esque to qualify.  You’ve been warned.

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More Miska: 1/11/2016 pt.2

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And we’re gonna need a montage.

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More Miska: 1/11/2016

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Continuing our previous scene…

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More Miska: 1/9/2016 pt.2

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Here’s the following scene:

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Why David Weber, Why?

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Reading about flat characters in E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, I have just been reminded of one of the things that routinely frustrates me in David Weber’s work.  Weber likes trying to make characters who should essentially be flat, more or less caricatures intended to draw up conflict or drama or comedy (or maybe they should be comic but he refuses to use them in that way, making them painfully comic instead… more on that later).  But instead of accepting that these characters should be flat, he tries to flesh them out.  He tries to make them round, and make me care about them.  Nine times out of ten, he fails.

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More Miska: 1/9/2016

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Same deal as before.  Very first draft material, following more or less from the previous posts.  Enjoy!

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More Miska: 1/8/2016

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Like last time, this is a first draft.  I’m not sure I want to keep it, but I like where it ends up.

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More Miska: 1/7/2016

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You’d be right to think that the date up there is not today’s date.  But I don’t have a better way of defining what I’ll be sharing with you at the moment.  Since I got home, I’ve been writing about 2000 words a day on my Miska project.  What follows is part of what I wrote on, you guessed it, the 7th.  It is first draft material, which means that I haven’t done more than look at it and think that it needs editing.  Enjoy!

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Sleep Dep and Movies

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Hi folks!  I’ve been traveling, and if you’re familiar with my usual pattern then you know what that means.  Or you read the title of this post.

I’m now working on hour 27, with a red-eye flight as my excuse, and I have seen several more movies to talk with you about.  I don’t think I’ll be able to offer any stellar critique, but a simple yes no maybe why seems within my grasp at this point.

This time I watched Chef, Entourage, and RED 2.  I had a good time watching all of them, but had niggling feelings of doubt throughout most of them.  Chef might have had the fewest of those?  I’m not sure.

Entourage was funny, and felt like a group of totally ridiculous characters living up their ridiculousness in a larger than life fashion.  Now that I’ve looked it up and discovered that it came from a TV show of the same name which I never watched, I’m considerably less surprised.  It was a good stupid movie, and it might have been better than that but I have no idea because I was very tired at the time that I watched it.  On the plus side, it has Constance Zimmer (in a minor role, but Agents of Shield has taught me that Constance Zimmer is great).

RED 2 was basically what I’d expected, if not quite as good as I’d hoped; it’s a slightly different (and maybe not-quite-as-good) version of the original.  It’s funny that I should downplay it, as I quite enjoyed it, but even though I like its developments I’m not sure it measures up to the zest and pep of the first.  It felt like some of the original’s style was missing, though I liked Mary-Louise Parker’s character’s obsession with getting deeper into the world of spies and murder.  That felt fitting, and made a lot of excellent things possible.

And Chef… was way more of a feel-good movie than I’d expected.  I rather liked it.  It was very much a “man and his son” narrative, but it was a charming one.  Plus, I like food.

Okay, and now I’m going to stagger off and try to keep my eyes open until it’s bedtime.  My upcoming posts may be patchy as the holidays approach, but I may have some fun creative stuff to share at some point in there.

Spectre

Posted on by Henry

I don’t feel just one way about Spectre; I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m ambivalent, since I did enjoy it overall, but … well, let me think through this with you.

First, perhaps most superficially, the intro song and credit sequence didn’t do it for me.  It had a hard act to follow given Skyfall’s opening, so I’ll give it that, but it felt pretty meh.

Plot-wise, Spectre builds on all of the little dribs and drabs of plot that were left hanging in the previous three movies (all the Daniel Craig ones: Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall).  This meant that I felt a little lost going into it without having seen the others recently, but when I think back on the events of the previous movies I think the requisite hooks were there.

The Daniel Craig Bond films walk a tightrope that previous Bond films haven’t really walked before.  What I mean is, it’s unusual for a Bond movie to consistently build on what’s come before in any way, so this is a bit strange.  Personally, I think they could have done better.  They laid the groundwork for this film to some extent, but it seems like they sacrificed some continuity and clarity for the sake of trying to make more traditionally individualized Bond films along the way.  Of course, if they’d done less of that, then perhaps I’d be upset about how they undid the Bond movie traditions.

So Spectre is a bit of an odd fish.  It has excellent scenes, moments in which the movie offers up the beautiful set pieces that I’ve come to hope for (and even expect) from good Bond films.  But it also feels like it fumbles itself together at times, tries to make itself one whole thing out of a number of disparate scenes that needed just a little more narrative glue to make it all gel.

I have more thoughts to share, but…

There are *SPOILERS* after this mark.

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