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?
Okay… ‘Weekly’ is probably a total lie, but it’s the thought that counts. It’s Monday, and we all deserve a little cute on a Monday. Kit has actually been declared to be ‘paru-kawaii,’ but you’re going to have to wait for Emergence to come out to find out what the Hell I’m talking about.
Anyway… Kit picture:
(Obligatory dumb male comment…) And who wouldn’t want Kit nursing us back to health? AmIright? Huh? Huh? (Or “wink, wink, say no more” for the older British folk among us.)
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.
Tagged AI, artificial intelligence, cyberpunk, Ex Machina, Ghost in the Shell, movie
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*
Over on Facebook, someone suggested that my ultra-secret ending for Emergence might be that I was going to have Kit get pregnant. (People on FB don’t read comments about not speculating, it seems, but they have gone for jokes and it’s FB.)
I said “Well, there goes the plot for the next book.” Ha ha.
Then I thought, “What would that look like? Gotta do it.”
So, pregnant Kit. About 6 months if AIs have a 9 month gestation. The father is Vali, of course. I’ve never really subscribed to the whole “pregnancy makes a woman beautiful” thing, but apparently if you’re just a virtual image, you still look too damn cute.
And it’s a shame it isn’t April 1st.
Well, this morning I started work on the next Fox Meridian book, Emergence. Technically, I started on Sunday, but that was plotting and character planning. Today I started writing again. Rather to my pleasure, the 25k words I already had don’t need to be changed for the new plot elements I’m adding in, but as I write this I have one glaring problem: the ending.
Here’s the thing, and I’d value your opinions on this, I have three ways this could end. Essentially they follow a continuum between status quo (near enough) and extreme change. I want to go with the extreme change, but that’s a problem. Even the mid-range option has hints of the same issue, but I can work with that.
The problem these endings have is repeating myself. I want to make a big change in Fox’s life which isn’t exactly the same as something I’ve done before, but it’s so close I might as well just call it a repeat. I believe I have things to say about this which are worth it, and it’ll make several future plotlines massively more convenient logistically. I was going to do this in a later book (if I decided to go with it at all), but it just fits so beautifully into this one it’s hard to resist doing it.
I’ve now given enough away that attentive readers paying attention to throwaway scenes in the books might well guess where I’m going. PLEASE DON’T SPECULATE IN THE COMMENTS!!!
What I’d like to know is… Do you trust me to have new things to say about something I’ve done before? I’ve got a couple of weeks, at least, before I need to make a final decision. Tell me what you think.
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.
You can find her here:
As I type this, I haven’t had notification from Amazon that the process is finished, so Hunting Mink may not be available in all areas. If it’s showing as not available, try again in a few hours.
Okay, I’m now working on the final edit for Hunting Mink. I am trying to get this out for tomorrow, but I’m taking this opportunity to say that I’m working through corrections in a document, while trying to hold off a blazing headache. I’ll get the book out tomorrow. I’ll work through the pain for my readers. (I will get all the sympathy I can for this.) But it’s slowing my down, and it may delay things a little. Sorry.
As partial compensation for any delay, and because I was going to do this anyway… Some art. We’ve got the cover for Hunting Mink here, and the character sheets for Cygnus, Twilight, and Mink. If you click through any of the character sheets, they’ll take you to the ArtStation page where I put all three sheets plus an extra which may give a little hint of one possible future for Twilight.
Posted in News
So… I got up this morning and checked my mail, and discovered that DAZ had released V8 and that it going for free just for today. Given I’d just converted Cygnus over to G3F/V7, I figured she would be best to illustrate the features of the new model. So here she is in all her glory, beside her converted version…
Posted in News, Ultrahumans
Tagged April Fool, DAZ, DeviantArt, Sequential Art, Sunstone, V8
Witches and Ray-Guns 