Category Archives: Opinion

I don’t do this much, but where I feel like sharing my opinion on something, this is the category the post will be under.

That WTF Moment

Posted on May 28, 2016 | 6 comments

It’s Saturday night and I am socially maladjusted so, obviously, I’m hunting for something to watch on Netflix and Amazon Prime. I have just reached the desperation point of typing in random keywords in an attempt to find anything new and worth the bother and my latest search was going to be “artificial intelligence.” (Yes, I know what I’m going to get and I refuse to watch that one. No. Not ever.) But this is where the story became weird…

I typed in ‘a’ and ‘r’ and then I was presented with a few possibles. Arrow is number four in the list, but before it Amazon managed to find four videos which fitted the ‘ar’ search term better. Four, two minute videos of young ladies in bikinis shooting an AR-15 rifle. I watched one, because… science. It’s a video. Of a girl. Wearing a bikini. Unloading a semi-automatic rifle into a target. For two minutes. I… was speechless.

I did not really know this was a thing. Girls and guns… sure. I kind of make money out of girls and guns (and swords, and magic). But… yeah.

Anyway, that’s not what bothered me so much as the fact that it’s on Amazon Prime! I’ve seen some pretty weird things turning up there recently, but YouTube videos of girls firing assault weaponry? (Not even on full-auto!)

So, basically… WTF?!

PS. The full search did turn up the Haley Joel Osment movie first… sigh.

PPS. The Ghost in the Doll word count is now 10505!

PPPS. Maybe another Kit picture on Monday.

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Why I Hate John Oliver Right Now

Posted on May 23, 2016 | Leave a comment

Okay, I hate to be mean to a fellow Brit, but…

YouTube has been throwing clips of his Last Week Tonight show on HBO at me for a while now, and I finally decided to watch one. And then it was 3 a.m. I actually learned stuff, but this is not a good way to spend time. No, it’s not John. It’s not. When are you going to cover addiction to your online videos? Huh? Huh?

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The Ghost in the Machina

Posted on May 18, 2016 | 6 comments

I’ve been watching a lot of cyberpunk/AI/etc stuff recently. Well, I’ve been watching a huge amount of The Ghost in the Shell, but I also finally got around to watching Ex Machina too, and going back a bit there’s The Machine and a few giant-robot Anime… I’m soaking up the cyber.

So… here’s the inflammatory question: Can anyone explain to me what’s so good about Ex Machina?

I spent a good couple of hours knowing more or less exactly what was coming. There were no surprises. The special effects were very good, I’ll give it that, but Ex Machina explored nothing, gave no new insights, gave nothing new to the genre… I don’t get all the really amazing reviews, I simply don’t. I checked out Rotten Tomatoes for a round-up and found one critic saying pretty much what I just did; all the rest seemed to think it was some sort of genre classic. I won’t go into the gaping plot hole, because it would spoil the ending if you haven’t seen it.

So, nothing new there. The Machine is in some ways very similar, but I thought it was more visually appealing and more accessible. It didn’t get the exposure Ex Machina did, which is a shame, in my opinion.

And so to GitS. Let just face facts here: I am a big fan of Ghost in the Shell. Not actually of the original movie, but of the Standalone Complex series. I like the movie, though I could have lived without the sequel, but being able to play out and develop storylines across several hours instead of 90 minutes often works better. Even so, GitS:SAC suffers a little from what the movie does (and a lot of Asian movies do, actually): exposition.

If you read a book on wiring, one of the things that you’ll pick up is that you should research your material. “Write what you know” is an over-used axiom, but researching things which can actually be researched is a good thing. There is, however, an addendum: your readers don’t need to know about all that research you did. GitS suffers a lot from long-winded, frankly boring sections of conversation where the writers demonstrate how damn clever they are through their characters. GitS:SAC suffers from it to, generally in the scenes where various characters quote authors at each other (hilariously sent up, maybe not intentionally, at the end of Saints Row IV). Last night a friend of mine summed this up very nicely with regard to the recent battle between Batman v Superman and Civil War by saying that one of the differences was that it took 20 minutes to establish Bruce Wayne’s problem with Superman, and 15 seconds of amazing character acting to set up the same dilemma for Tony Stark. (Thinking about it, it’s a bad example since it took an entire movie, Age of Ultron, to setup for the great character acting, but the point stands.) Movie’s are a visual medium, and they need to be treated as such. Exposition is really bad in movies.

That said, I’ve been through two GitS movies, both series of GitS:SAC plus Solid State Society, and the five new Arise films (and will someone put Pyrophoric Cult out in the UK, please!) and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all of them. They’re all way more thought-provoking than Ex Machina.

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Cliffhangers in the Age of Netflix

Posted on May 3, 2016 | 22 comments

Three posts in a day, I must be on something. I think it’s insomnia and compensatory coffee, but I’m not sure. Sorry for this, I’m ranting again. But at least it’s more genre-related.

Anyway, the cliffhanger. Cliffhanger endings are beloved of comic book fans and the writers of those serials they ran back in the dark ages like Flash Gordon and King of the Rocket Men. Well, beloved of writers and there’s a rather more mixed reaction from fans, but this kind of ‘our hero is about to die, find out what happens next week’ ending is sort of expected. I put the epilogues in the Ultrahuman books as a sort of homage to this. That’s a homage. I tend to prefer not to write actual cliffhanger endings to books because, let’s be frank, it drives me crazy when someone does it to me.

We see this in modern television and some film series. (I can trace this back to my annoyance with the ending of The Empire Strikes Back for sure.) Now, I grew up with Doctor Who which rarely did a single episode story back then. It used to run 25 minutes and a typical story was 4 or 6 episodes, airing at tea time on a Saturday. You’d have cliffhangers all the way through until the last episode, but you only had to wait a week for the next episode. The modern series rarely does a 2-parter, but does usually have a season arc. That’s fairly kind compared to six weeks of biting your nails. What modern Doctor Who does not do, but an enormous number of modern US TV series does, is the season finale cliffhanger.

I want to find the idiot who came up with this idea and make him watch 365 continues days of reality TV. I know why they do it. I understand. You’ve built an audience and you’ve probably watched the figures trailing downward through the season (seems to happen to the best shows), and you want them to come back for season two. So you put a hook at the end to make them come back to find out the resolution and hope that they’re hooked again and you keep them through the season. If I recall US scheduling right, this might even seem reasonable there because there’s a couple of months between seasons. In the UK, we waited at least half a year to find out what happens next. That doesn’t work. We’ve forgotten what the ending was by the time the new season rolls around so the only thing keeping us coming back is that we were fans or there’s nothing else to watch. And the same is true on Netflix.

I have both Amazon Prime and Netflix because there are shows I want to watch exclusive to one or the other. Sleepy Hollow showed up on Amazon and I quite enjoyed the first season, right up until the end. No second season available, I couldn’t find out what happened, even though I’d just binged on the thing. Frustration. The second season has been on Amazon for a while now and I haven’t watched it. Why? Because I stopped caring months ago. I started watching Grimm on live TV and was annoyed at the end of season one. Then 3 or 4 seasons turned up on Netflix and I binge-watched them… right up to the second to last episode. The last was the wedding and I knew there was going to be a cliffhanger I was not going to resolve. Grimm has probably lost my attention now because by the time the next season is available, the episode I didn’t watch will not be.

The season end cliffhanger just doesn’t work in the era on binge-watching and boxed sets. We’ve been shown we can have instant gratification, and then it’s ripped away from us. Netflix themselves seem to have recognised this. Daredevil, the first season anyway, resolves its main storyline at the end and season two brings in a new antagonist. Jessica Jones, which I still haven’t got to the end of, seems to be going the same way. Even their thoroughly amusing Puss in Boots series avoided straining your patience. Netflix realise that their model doesn’t need cliffhangers. If you watched season one, they push season two at you for weeks ahead of the first show and it goes right to the head of your ‘continue watching’ list with a ‘new episodes’ tag. If you were hooked, they’ll probably grab you again.

Last night, I discovered that Netflix had the first two seasons of iZombie. I’d seen trailers for this on DC’s YouTube channel and thought it looked like fun. It is. (If you haven’t tried it, give it a go. It’s got zombies, drama, and my kind of sense of humour. If you tried it and hated it… Can’t please everyone.) Later this evening, probably over dinner, I’ll watch the first season finale and if it’s a cliffhanger I may decide to scream, but at least I can go straight on to season two. But then I don’t know when season three will turn up… Please, please, won’t someone bring an end to the horror of the end of season cliffhanger!

Anyway, that’s why I don’t hang my readers off a cliff at the end of my books, even with my production rate. Lucifer is the only show I’ve seen on Amazon which handles this well. The end of season one was… cliffhangerish, but it was a little more like my Ultrahumans epilogues, a tease for what’s going to come next rather than a real cliffhanger. That’s a start.

Have a great day. Without cliffhangers.

PS. I’d personally recommend Lucifer. Strong start, a little rocky after that, but it rapidly improves again. However, if you’re a fan of the original comics, take my recommendation with a pinch of salt. Comic and series are not the same, and I know how that annoys some people. Hell, Gotham annoys me for all the backstory retcons and I still haven’t figured out why.

PPS. Just watched the iZombie season finale. Bloody cliffhanger. Oh well, it’s amusing enough I’ll probably cope at the end of season two. *sigh*

 

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Tax Rant

Posted on April 27, 2016 | 22 comments

First off, this is not being posted so I can get a lot of sympathetic comments or suggestions that I’d be better off living in the US (or Panama). I know I’d be better off in the US and I don’t need the sympathy, really. I just want to get this off my chest and maybe provide a cautionary note for anyone else who might end up in this position. If you actually know something that might help, please comment.

Second, this might get lengthy. Feel free to ignore my moaning and tldr. Aside from a comment about how it’s affecting my work, this is not about books.

So, with all the glorious fun we’re having with the Panama leaks and all that, tax is something of a hot button topic. Everyone seems to be ranting and raving about rich people avoiding tax payments. Everyone hates all these large companies who avoid paying tax in various countries by exploiting the laws the people we voted for set up. I have to say that I cannot blame them, any of them, even if I think they should be paying their due.

I am not rich and I highly doubt I ever will be. Every time I think I might make some money, someone in a government office seems to decide they need it instead. I quit my day job to write full time because the income from the two jobs was high enough that I ended up paying out about what my day job was giving me in additional taxes. What was the point in working a 16 hour day (8 hours in an office and 8 writing at home) when the end result was that I only really got paid for half my time? Why not quit the job I alternately hated and disliked, and do the one I liked doing full time? So, no more day job and my tax bill for the tax year just gone should be significantly lower. Great.

And then I get a letter telling me that I have to have an interview with a man from the HMRC (that’s the IRS for you guys in America) about Value Added Tax. I had not even considered the possibility of needing VAT registration. I, as an entity, do not sell anything. I provide my books to entities who make them available for retail purchase, and charge VAT (or sales tax, or whatever) appropriately. The EU has made all that increasingly difficult over the last little while, apparently out of a desire to make sure the small business they say they wish to promote fail, but it wasn’t a concern because  retailers handled that. But today I had a telephone interview involving a man asking questions and me becoming increasingly angry and frustrated the more he went on.

It seems that the government wants VAT payments from me, for services which I have not charged VAT for. Probably a fairly large amount of money is involved and, knowing how this works, additional charges for not paying it earlier. (To be fair to the HMRC, if they overcharge you, they actually pay quite a good rate of interest when they give the money back. It’s better than savings rates anyway. But they do like making you pay for your mistakes.) As far as I can see, this leaves the government getting two VAT payments for the sale of the same items (books), and me losing a lot of money. Nice for MPs’ expense accounts, not so great for me.

The only hope I currently have is that Amazon KDP and Smashwords are both US companies, so this may count as an export and be zero-rated for VAT, thus negating the problem. I’m looking into that and getting nowhere with the legalese. Maybe only EU sales apply, then I’d be under the limit for registration and it wouldn’t be an issue (the US is by far my largest market, and thank you guys for that). No decision on all this has been made, and I may be worrying over nothing, but it’s coming on top of a load of other personal crap which I have to worry about and it’s just about the last straw.

It seems like, for all the rhetoric, the last thing anyone in the UK wants is for someone to be successful. We penalise success. I was hoping to get Frostburn wrapped this week and move on to the new Fox book, Emergence (that’s the working title, btw, it could change). Right now I’m not feeling very creative. The thought of jacking it all in has crossed my mind. Don’t worry, I won’t. I doubt I could if I tried. This is going to delay things while I sort it out (in my head as much as all the paperwork I’m being asked to provide).

If you got to this paragraph without giving up: thank you, I actually feel better for writing it down. Hopefully I’ll provide an update to this post giving good news about how it all turned out okay, or not. If you find yourself writing books in the EU and having some success at it, I suggest you consult someone regarding possible VAT issues. If you’ve already met this, I’d love to know what happened.

Once again, thanks for letting me rant at you. Have a much better day than I’m having,

Niall.

PS. The musical accompaniment for this post is Meatloaf’s Life is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back. YouTube link provided.

 

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Division of Labour

Posted on March 9, 2016 | 9 comments

Okay, so most of today was lost to Tom Clancy’s The Division. It arrived around midday and I held myself back until after lunch, but I was playing it pretty much non-stop (aside from a break for dinner and Lucifer) until midnight when my controller batteries died on me in the middle of a firefight. At least I now know how long the batteries last…

I figured tomorrow was going to be lost to it, but no. Tomorrow I need to get back into the right rhythm, which means writing until at least mid-afternoon (when I usually start noticeably slowing down and have trouble maintaining concentration: yes, just like a day job). Already The Collective has fallen to not being able to figure out how to get the protagonists where they need to be, so I’ve moved on. Frostburn, the next Ultrahumans book, has been more or less plotted out and started. Looks like there’ll be two Ultrahumans books in a row. Oh, and book 3 now has a name: Hunting Mink.

So… Do I like my new game? Well, obviously, though it’s not a real certainty until it keeps me entertained for several months. However, it also has the most ludicrous concept of any game I’ve ever played (with the possible exception of the Riddler’s parts in the Batman: Arkham… series). It sounds clever and kind of realistic, but it’s totally comic book. There’s an apparently airborne virus which is spread through infected bank notes… Um… We have a vast army of ‘sleeper agents’ embedded in the populace who are basically special ops soldiers living as normal people and no one has noticed. Real special ops soldiers train constantly. No one has noticed that the girl who works in the coffee shop down the road shoots 2000 rounds a day at the firing range and runs 10 miles before going to work? Mind you, it is set in New York, so… maybe.

Anyway, tomorrow, back to superheroes who aren’t trying to be normal…

In case you’re wondering, I don’t have super-willpower…

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Well… Damn

Posted on January 14, 2016 | Leave a comment

All right, I admit to being a bit non-committal about David Bowie dying. British and certainly great, and I liked some of his stuff and didn’t like some of his stuff, and it was a shame, but…

Alan Rickman on the other hand!!! Damn. I mean… damn. That’s about all I can say right now. I’ll go on saying it to myself for a bit.

And these celebrity deaths tend to come in threes…

Addendum: A friend just pointed out that we had Lemmy before Bowie, so that’s the three. I hope.

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Star Wars… sigh…

Posted on December 15, 2015 | 8 comments

Okay, so the new Star Wars movie is out… and I’m sick of hearing about it. It’s headline news on the BBC! What’s with that? It’s a film. The public broadcasting network of the UK is hyping a film for Disney! Gah!

So, I have this love/hate relationship with Star Wars. I was twelve when the first movie was released (which is called Star Wars, not Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, just for the record). It blew me away. I read the novelisation, I collected models and figures, and I stood in the huge line outside my local cinema (with my long-suffering mother) to see it. We scraped in: they had to close the doors as the theatre was full and we were about the last people in. I had never had to stand in a queue to get into a cinema before. I won’t say that my love of sci-fi came from Star Wars, because I had to go see it because I was already into the genre and this was really the only genre movie there was. It did start the modern Hollywood love affair with effects movies (I won’t say sci-fi, because there’s relatively little of that made these days).

But… The Empire Strikes Back was cool, but far too much of a middle movie. Return of the Jedi was overly repetitive, and while I didn’t hate the Ewoks I was starting to get irritated with the commercialism. I have never sat through all of the “first three episodes.” I just wasn’t interested, and I refused to give George Lucas any more of my money since he didn’t seem to care about anything else and he was trashing my childhood.

On top of that, my tastes changed. Star Wars is space opera and I was gravitating toward grittier stuff. When Alien came out I wasn’t allowed to go see it: too young, but I was in university when Aliens hit the cinemas. I saw Aliens three times in a week. (As an aside, that was fascinating. The jump-scare with the face-hugger in the tank made me jump, twice. The third time it was like I leaned forward as the entire audience went up and back around me. Surreal.) And I started seeing the flaws in my old love. The clichés started looking a bit too clichéd. I still think Star Wars stands up, even after all this time, but I don’t hold it quite as high on the list of great sci-fi movies as most fans do. I don’t even have a copy of it in my collection.

The Force Awakens is reawakening my interest. Or it was until the level of hype began to make me wish I lived on Mars (maybe Venus: it’s warm there this time of year). For one thing, it’s not Lucas. J. J. Abrams has a spotty career as far as my enjoyment of his work is concerned. I’m glad I never got into Lost. I liked Fringe until it got weird (I know that seems redundant, but it’s not). Super 8 was weak, but I’ve enjoyed the new Star Trek movies and I have high hopes that the new Star Wars may well be worth some attention. But, damn, it’s going to have to be something truly fantastic to live up to expectations.

What I hope (no, it’s not an entirely new hope) is that this is going to mark the start of a new burst of proper sci-fi films. Along with Guardians of the Galaxy (which is also a space opera and one I really enjoyed), The Force Awakens may be a sign that Hollywood is going to produce some quality sci-fi rather than relying on horror set in space and teen fantasy. If that’s the result of this… awesome!

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A Foxy Experiment

Posted on July 4, 2015 | 1 comment

iFox

Pre-orders are the new black. At least that’s what Mark Coker at Smashwords keeps telling me. Not just any preorders though, it has to be pre-orders with Smashwords. I’ll give his reasoning in a bit, but some new changes in the rules mean I am able to put Fox Hunt out for pre-order, thought Smashwords to Apple iBooks, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.

If you buy my stuff from any of the above, here’s your chance to get in an early order. You’ve got two months, there’s no hurry. Any orders placed before the release date (August 31st) will be counted as sales on release day, plus the book will be available on those stores on release day, which is a plus since there’s usually a delay. That could mean the book pops into the top sales lists on those retailers, and that could mean more people see it and buy it. That’s the logic behind pre-order system.

Here the logic behind me never doing this before. Essentially, to do a pre-order on any retailer up to this point, I had to write the book, edit the book, have the book proofread and edited, do the cover, and make all the final edits. I needed to have a finished book which I could hand to Smashwords/Amazon months before my intended release date. That might make sense to a large publisher who has an entire anticipatory marketing machine to get up to speed, and has lots of money to keep them going while they aren’t selling books to anyone. It might make sense to an author with a bestselling back-catalogue who’s still living off their last advance payment. To those of us who self-publish it’s downright dumb.

Smashwords have apparently worked out that this is kind of silly for most of the people who actually publish material through their service, and they now have what’s called “assetless per-orders.” It means that I can cut out the need for a finished manuscript, and even a cover, and still make a pre-order available for sale. They’d like me to do it a lot further in advance of the release date, but I still want to have a finished first draft (my first drafts are maybe more finished than some people’s, who will go through a dozen drafts before release) before I commit to a release date, so I’m not going to do pre-orders more than 3 months ahead, at maximum (2 months is far more likely).

So, if you read on an IPad or IPhone, or you try to avoid buying from Amazon, go take a look on your favourite retailer and consider a pre-order of Fox Hunt. And just remember, watch out for the fox.

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Reality Hack – Still Not Sure About the Genre

Posted on June 30, 2015 | 13 comments

So, Reality Hack is due out on the 4th of July and I’m still not sure which genre it sits in. I hate genre classifications and it’s always been clear to me that those responsible for such classifications know not what they are talking about. Please allow me to vent…

If I go to Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, and I go looking for a science -fiction movie, I am going to find myself looking at a load of fantasy, some horror, quite a bit of romance that has a vague hint of sci-fi about it. (Well, with Netflix’s idea of classification, looking for a sci-fi movie is an exercise in frustration anyway, but the general idea is the same.) These companies classify everything with any form of fantastic basis as the same genre. I can’t help but wonder whether this general lack of clarity bothers other people as much as it does me? I mean, if they have to split things into groups, could they not do the job properly?

Meanwhile, the book publishers are worse. They want their books classified into increasingly narrow bands of genre, but they haven’t a clue what the genres mean. The Game of Thrones books are not science fiction. Twilight is not science fiction, but of course that august work more or less defined a genre which spawned from some publisher’s desire to corner a market, the ‘Young Adult’ genre. (I believe that YA actually stands for ‘Youthful Angst,’ but that may be just me.)

The genres they create usually don’t work for real books. You take the series I’ve been reading a lot of recently, J.D. Robb’s In Death books. These are police procedurals, set in a high-sci-fi near-future, with a fairly high romance/erotic content. Well they don’t get classed as erotica, or ‘adult,’ but they do get a load of other categories lumped on them. The aforementioned Game of Thrones: is that political thriller or grim, ultra-low fantasy?

So, I’m having difficulty with Reality Hack. It’s clearly urban/contemporary fantasy, being to do with magic and the supernatural in a modern setting, but I’m inclined to avoid that area since there’s no romance involving vampires. It has some distinct horror elements (and if it gets a sequel there will be more of that). The actual setting has some heavy science fiction elements to it as one might expect of a book called Reality Hack. There is romance and sex, yes, but there’s also some twisted psychology, and drama, and questions about the nature of reality, and I have to pick a couple of narrow slots to drop this complex tin of worms into.

Don’t get me wrong: without those tight little boxes I doubt anyone would have noticed Steel Beneath the Skin and most of you would not be reading this blog. It’s just that around the time when I have to decide what box to put a book in, I sort of long for the time when it was just ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction.’

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