Do you want to see something really scary?

In the last post but one I referenced The Twilight Zone, surely one of the best American TV series ever made. 

The series was/is popular enough to warrant a movie version, where four different directors tried their hands at remaking four of the iconic episodes. It was a disappointment, with some good bits, most notably a new prologue where a hitchhiker is picked up by a driver who tries to scare him by driving recklessly and turning out the headlights from time to time. The hitchhiker begs the driver to be more careful, he is getting scared. Talk turns to the original Twilight Zone TV series. Both driver and hitchhiker try to scare each other with memories of the spookier episodes. At the end of the trip the hitchhiker takes  one parting shot. He asks the driver if he wants to see something really scary. The driver naturally says yes, and in an instant the hitchhiker turns into a hideous blue monster that lunges at the driver. I’m not sure if we saw blood or not. But I remember the reaction in the cinema at the time.

Something really scary

There was a momentary gasp then a delighted roar of laughter. Frankly, the movie doesn’t have much going for it, although the fourth story, directed by George Miller is a beauty. It’s based on an episode Nightmare at 20,000 feet where a nervous passenger on an international  flight can see a sort of imp creature, tearing up the aluminum wings and feeding them into one of the engines. The passenger (played by William Shatner) tries to alert the cabin crew, who of course see nothing when they look at the ‘imp’ sabotaging the plane. I think the story worked so well because a lot of people on flights have wondered what it would be like if they saw something appear on the wing. (You can see a still from it at the top of this post)  It’s truly a nightmare scenario, though it’s played for laughs. In the original Twilight Zone episode, the imp looks like a cross between a gorilla and one of the Zygons  from Doctor Who. 

One of the aforementioned Zygons, and my apologies if this constitutes a spoiler

It’s a  risible imp and somewhat detracts from any element of horror. In the film remake, the imp is a beauty. He’s spindly and blue., complete with a leering face and clawed hands. The nervous passenger (played in the movie by John Lithgow) is thoroughly believable. Here again, when the imp appeared, there were  gasps then laughter from the audience. My good friend Kimpton knew I had seen the movie. She wanted to know if it was too scary for her daughter Tiffany (14) and friend (same age). I had no hesitation in recommending it, not thinking for a moment that the monsters might give nightmares to a young teen. And Kimpton took ages to forgive me. The girls had nightmares for weeks. I really didn’t think there was anything in the movie to give nightmares. After all, hadn’t we all laughed?

Anyway, Kimpton never asks me for movie recommendations these days. Which is a shame because it means she will never see Iron Sky. And I’m genuinely sorry the girls were as upset as they turned out to be. I honestly thought the movie was funny, even if the dull stories (especially Kick the Can) seemed to go on forever.

We all find different things funny. And if the scares are ingenious and completely over the top, I tend to laugh. I’m not a ghoul and absolutely hate the current crop of torture porn movies. I would no more recommend one of them to a teen than I would recommend a movie about a deranged scientist who sews human bodies together in such a way that they resemble an underendowed centipede (and I thank my editor, Dmetri Kakmi, for drawing my attention to this movie).

But I’ll be more careful when I recommend movies to kids in future. Because some of them don’t see movies in the way I do. And I should keep reminding myself that these things used to terrify me.

So, we meet again, Mr MacLeod

The gun-wielding Penguin is back with the extraordinary news that my book, The Shiny Guys has been shortlisted in the older readers category of the CBCA awards.
Here's the shortlist for the older readers category:

And here is the complete shortlist.
The armed Penguin congratulates you all.

No Foreknowledge Necessary

In order to overcome what I hope is only a temporary case of writer’s block, I went to the St Kilda library to get out some kick-ass Young Adult fiction, that might present me with the inspiration I so obviously need. The first book I chose was Billy Mack’s War.

I selected it because I’ve met James Roy and enjoyed speaking with him. I’ve also heard him talk to teens and he seems to have a good idea of what goes on inside the head of a teenage male. I would have borrowed anything by Scot Gardner too, for similar reasons, but there was nothing there. I didn’t consult the catalogue. I’m sure that the St Kilda Library has no shortage of Scot Gardner titles but that I arrived on a bad day. I probably wouldn’t have borrowed a Nick Earls, because I’ve read 48 Shades of Brown. In the back of the book there is a quote from Cleo magazine that if you read a Nick Earls book you will ‘never be unhappy again’. Perhaps they should stop using that quote, surely penned by a well-meaning friend of Nick’s? It’s certainly enticing but incredibly hard to live up to, and didn’t apply to me, though I certainly would never recommend crucifying a book then setting it aflame, which some angry YouTuber did, complete with visual directions. I wish they’d remove it. I see books burning and I hear jackboots.

I had limited time at the St Kilda Library. The next two books I grabbed were Quintana of Charyn by Merlina Marchetta, because everyone keeps telling me how wonderful she is, and The Sending by Isobelle Carmody, for the same reason. 

I started on Quintana of Charyn. Somehow, when I gazed at the cover, I had missed the subtitle: Book Three of the Lumatere Chronicles. However it became very clear on closer inspection that I was reading a portion of a much larger work, and was ill-equipped to do so. The volume is over five hundred pages long. Presumably this means I have to read around one thousand words to finish the first two volumes and get a decent idea of what is going on. I figured that rather than read ten thousand words so I could pick up the thread, that time that would perhaps be better spent on learning to use my Dragon voice recognition software, so that I can speak my books as I compose them, and not have to rely upon my stroke-addled fingers. The idea of writing a novel by way of voice recognition software seems cumbersome, though I understand that Rod Serling wrote most of his Twilight Zone episodes that way (although his Dragon was a stenographer) and there were some really wonderful Twilight Zone tales. An Easter treat was watching DVD’s of the old fifties shows, and marvelling at how well they still hold up. Does anyone know of novelists who dictate their novels? Is that how Dan Brown did it? Anyway, I put down Book Three of the Lumatere Chronicles and picked up The Sending. Reader, I had made the same mistake. While it doesn’t leap off the cover, there is a line of copy alerting us to the fact that this is Book Six in The Obernewtyn Chronicles. So, once again I had a little reading to do before I was ready for this book. Now, Book Three is overwhelming enough – but Book Six! The Sending is 750 pages long. Why do these fantasy writers feel the need to go for such massive Russian literature-style word counts? Assuming that the first five volumes of this Obernewtyn Chronicle are of similar length, I would be committing myself to reading a total of 3750 words before I could fully appreciate The Sending, knowing of all the elegant twists and turns the narrative had taken before Dragon, a creature of quite astonishing beauty, appears on a broken stone column on the night of a full moon (my precis of the first paragraph of The Sending). I put it aside.

Picking up James Roy’s novel was a more promising exercise. Unlike the two, no doubt splendid fantasy novels that I had put aside, this book didn’t have shadowy goth girls on the cover. It had a title that included no invented place names. And it certainly wasn’t Book Three of the Billy Mack Chronicles. It was a stand-alone. A decent looking book without a bloody map before the story starts.  I could read this one secure in the knowledge that I already knew everything there was to know about Billy Mack (that is, nothing) before entering the world of young adult fiction. It read well, but I had this niggling feeling that I wasn’t getting the full picture. The writer seemed to presume some amount of foreknowledge on my part. But this wasn’t a whacking great doorstep of a novel, involving dragons on stone columns on moonlit nights. It was a down-to-earth slice-of-life fiction, like Jasper Jones, which I had read recently and enjoyed.

This is when fate played a particularly cruel trick. I learned from examining the back cover blurb that what I was reading was a prequel to a well-regarded book called Captain Mack. I’m sure Captain Mack is a fine work, and that most people have heard of it. But I hadn’t. Perhaps more importantly, I hadn’t read it. And yet I felt I really had to for Billy Mack’s War to be fully enjoyed. So, the books I had borrowed to coax me to invent new stories for teens were a Part Three, a Part Six and a Prequel. And we authors point accusing fingers at Hollywood when they dare to bring out a sequel to Shrek. (‘Typical of Hollywood to exploit a successful movie.’ ‘They’ll be doing a sequel to Blade Runner next.’)

Please understand that this is not a blog post that drips poison. It is more despair than poison, though perhaps I was a bit poisonous to Nick Earls (who’s actually good) to mention that horrible YouTube movie about his book 48 Shades of Brown though I certainly don’t advocate that books should be crucified and burned - despite what I might have recently muttered about Stephanie Meyer when I was on a panel at The Wheeler Centre, and it was filmed.

I’m the fool. First of all, I knew I was being filmed. And secondly, anyone who doesn’t take the time to read book covers carefully or realise that paperback cinderblocks about fictional places with names like Lumatere or Obernewtyn are unlikely to appeal deserves what he gets. It’s just, I was hoping to get some reading done today. In the end I blogged. Even last night’s Doctor Who: ‘The Rings of Akaten’ (silly place names again) was boring and forgot to tell a decent story, just because all the aliens looked so cool. What a rotten long weekend.

And this is not just a selfish whine because I couldn’t think of a sequel to my only book to cause any kind of modest commotion, The Life of a Teenage Body-snatcher. At least, I couldn’t write one. 

Oh, no. But one day I might speak one.

And for those who might still be interested, plenitude is, of course, alive. John's father is John Lamb, the real character from history, and Thomas's resurrectionist name is (perhaps ironically) Modesty.

Leave it alone

This post refers to a deleted post that was really much sharper than this one. But it’s Friday and I had to write something.

I got an email this week. It was from Sandy Cull, an art designer who did one of my book covers for Penguin. Normally, the art director who designs my covers is Karen Trump-Scott Here is the first cover that Karen did for the book:

You see, back in those days the book was called The Summer of Seth Parrot and not I'm Being Stalked by a Moonshadow. People I respect convinced me that The Summer of Seth Parrot was far too poetic a title, given that the book is, basically, a funny rom-com for boys. Though I did like this cover because Karen had somehow found a photo of two kids who look exactly like the kids in the book, and the fireworks were a nice touch, because there are literal fireworks in the book. However, the powers that be weren't crazy about the cover. They thought it looked old-fashioned and unfunny, and nobody liked the title. So, the first thing was to find a new title. I liked the sound of I'm Being Stalked by a Moonshadow, because I'm Being Followed by a Moonshadow is such a sweet song, and 'stalking' is such a nasty concept. The collision of opposites like sweetness and nastiness often gives you a funny outcome.) So the book had a new title, and a new designer in Sandy Cull. And this is the first new cover I was given:

It was very different from what I was expecting, but it grew on me. The title character, Seth, had uncontrollable red hair. The artist decided to go overboard with this, and I decided I liked it. So it was full steam ahead. Which is why i was so surprised when I was presented with this as a fait accompli:

Where on earth had that girl come from? She wasn't part of the equation. Why did the she have spider eyeashes when MIranda, the girl in the story, never wore makeup? Perhaps more importantly, given that Seth makes such a big deal about how beautiful Miranda's arms are, wouldn't it be a good idea to actually give her a pair of arms?

 The point is, I thought the cover art was so unexpectedly bad (in that I’d been given no real warning about what I might end up with, as it was nothing like the previous image of Seth with his tornado of red hair) and I didn’t seem to be getting very far with Penguin in my polite but doubtless annoying requests to have it changed to better suit the story, that I did something stupid. I changed the completed cover art myself, using Photoshop. I added some arms, I got rid of the spider eyelashes.  Now, there are a lot of artists in my life and I know how much they hate this. Indeed, I would hate it if a designer took one of my stories, re-edited it, then submitted it as an example of how it should be written. My good friend Jane Tanner recently had this experience with an author who is really too famous to name. He didn’t like the way some of Jane’s artwork for one of his titles was going so he used Photoshop to ‘fix’ it himself.

Jane was cut to the quick. I don’t blame her, because I know how hard she worked. Anyway, after I sent the email with Photoshop ‘improved cover art’ attachment to Sandy Cull, I realised that what I had done was probably unfair. I felt bad about disrespecting the artist, and decided to email Sandy to apologise for photoshopping the artist’s work. Sandy emailed back immediately stating that it is every art director’s nightmare when a writer gets hold of Photoshop and messes around with art in an effort to show what they would prefer. Sandy went on to say that she hoped I would find a self-help group in St Kilda for 46-year-old men with too much time on their hands. Now, this really was a spectacularly rude email for Sandy to send (even if only because it reminded me that I was 46), and I only rediscovered it long after I had received it, when I was going through piles of emails in a spring clean-up. It occurred to me that I should have responded to this email and not merely left it to fester on my hard drive.  As always, my timing was way out, and I decided to respond to the email in a blog post  – years later. I wrote to Sandy that it is every author’s nightmare when they are given a lackluster cover for a book on which they have likely spent years, and that the art designer can’t grasp why this would conceivably be important to said author.  (I am paraphrasing, out of necessity.)

The post was written so long ago that I was surprised to get an email from Sandy Cull recently. She titled it ‘very humbling’ and she apologised very sincerely for her behaviour. I felt so bad for Sandy that I hacked away at the original post on my blog so that the ‘nasty’ part where I alluded to Sandy’s lack of empathy was removed. The result was a very boring post, but, I consoled myself, it would make Sandy feel better. But it didn’t, and this is where I really must take off my hat to Sandy.  (And it isn’t a metaphorical hat, I’m actually wearing one. It’s St Kilda, I can wear what I like.) Sandy opined that bowdlerising the post made it boring . She was right, I just thought she would be pleased to see how I had ‘fixed things’. Of course, in deleting the potentially offensive bits of an email, I hadn’t fixed things at all. I had merely beeen untrue to myself. My original post, which was far better than this one, really, it was, represented an accurate summation of the frustration and impotence I felt at being given a book cover that I felt was no good – though people have since professed a liking for it. It was an emotionally honest post. In editing it, I made it dishonest, and Sandy had the guts to email me and say so. So, thanks to Sandy Cull. The lesson of all this, I think, is to stand for what you stand for, provided you’ve given it enough thought and consideration, and not to dilute your message in an effort ‘not to offend’. Our blogs should be written from the heart and left as written, unless you go back to do some necessary grammatical editing or spelling correction, such as turning ‘alright’ into ‘all right’. Our blog posts are our emotional and philosophical outpourings. And for whatever reason we write them (for posterity, out of protest, in an attempt to sharpen our writing skills or simply to be – gulp- understood and loved) they should be left alone.

Ooh er … I like The Hunger Games

I was almost determined not to like it. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins is a phenomenon: a Young Adult bestseller. And for me those words conjure up images of effete teen vampires, anodyne heroines and shirtless muscleboys who can't act. Given that Stephenie Meyer herself had said such wonderful things about The Hunger Games, surely it must be on a par with the ghastly Twilight books?

But I liked the book from the start because I could identify so fully with the idea at the core of The Hunger Games, that society will devolve so completely that one day we will actually be watching teenage kids fighting to the death on a reality TV show.

I used to work for Granada Australia, a subsidiary of the huge Granada TV production company in the UK, which wanted a nice, little production arm in Australia to service some of its massively successful ‘format’ shows. When I left, they were making a program that is shot in Australia, but which – to my knowledge - hasn’t made it to Australian terrestrial TV yet. The show is called, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. It’s pretty much like Big Brother, only the ‘house’ is an encampment in a  hostile-looking jungle somewhere in Queensland, and the various contestants have to tough it out in a series of elimination rounds (‘challenges’) where they are forced to do things that your average punter would rather not. Most of the challenges I’ve seen have involved eating disgusting food or taking on a physical challenge that is just quirky or potentially dangerous enough to entice an undemanding and indulgent viewer. The ‘celebrity’ aspect of the show's title is a bit of a misnomer. The last clip I saw was someone challenging Colin Baker (only Whovians would know him from his thankfully brief tenure as one of the Time Lord’s incarnations) and I don’t think he quite counts as a celebrity, but I think the term covers any person whose name might have appeared in the newspaper a few times and who isn’t averse to being belittled on television in the hope of giving their ailing careers a bit of a shot in the arm. Anyway, the Colin Baker bit that I saw made me recall why we all stopped watching Doctor Who when he took over the title role. I didn’t know the celebrity who had challenged him, but he would have been known to UK viewers, perhaps as the man with the dictionary on Countdown or the one with the deep voice who says ’Mind the Gap’ when you travel on the tube. Suffice it to say, his celebrity probably wasn’t stellar. But, through a series of name changes and takeovers, I was now working for a company that was well known for its ‘reality TV’ formats. I’d enjoyed all the shows I’d worked on before the English acquisition of Artist Services, which is the company I used to work for, the one that made all those daggy Australian sketch shows like Fast Forward and Full Frontal. But it seemed fairly likely to me that I would end up working on one of these reality shows. And I really couldn’t do it. I’d watched Big Brother from time to time, not least because handsome Alex, one of my fellow workers, ended up on series two. I also kind of knew Johnny from series one, but then, it seems that everyone kind of knew Johnny from series one. (Big Brother was not a Granada production.) It was a crappy, mean-spirited show that gave young viewers the idea that they didn’t actually have to learn anything, achieve anything or have a particular skill to be famous. Hell, they could just be ‘normal’ like the Big Brother roommates and that was enough to guarantee stardom and public adulation. (Which of course it wasn’t.) Even after Four Corners did a particularly harsh critique on how manipulative the show is, the Four Corners forum after the show was flooded with requests from people about how they might be able to get on Big Brother. These people had just seen a documentary about how Big Brother was nothing but self-abasement for the contestants, and that the show could be edited in any number of ways to yield an infinite number of storylines. (Before I get too hot and bothered about this I should add that David Attenborough nature documentaries, which I happen to like, use exactly the same editing tricks to kid you into believing you are watching a story. The brave mother penguin who rescued a drowning baby penguin then reared it as her own, bravely fending off penguin bullies, probably didn’t exist. She was probably six different penguins edited together in such a way that we couldn’t help saying, Ahhhh!’ It helps, of course, that humans are very bad at telling Penguins apart.) The people who’d seen Four Corners give an absolute caning to Big Brother nevertheless wanted to be on it, so that they too could abase themselves.

Peter Andre, no stranger to the recent batch of 'celebrity' reality shows.

The Hunger Games’ author says she was inspired to write the book after watching one of the reality shows. Of course she was! I would have done it too, if I’d had the skill. Besides the Big Brother shows, there were countless other global ‘reality’ shows which I got to preview, so that we could edit together their worst excesses and make something called Unreel TV, a questionable clips show whose only saving grace was having Tim Ferguson as compere. He struck just the right level of enthusiasm and disgust for clips of shows such as the one where contestants had enemas and there was a prize for whoever could squirt out their colonic water the farthest. (Seriously, it was on a Swedish show.)

So, I’m a big fan of The Hunger Games, because I appreciate the desperation and despair that caused Suzanne Collins to write it. I like the movie as well. Though one thing that the movie didn’t seem to get is that Collins has a very dark sense of humour. There are so many wry parts of the book that never quite made it to screen. (Though Stanley tucci and toby Jones as the commentators were suitably grotesque.) I like the main character Katniss’s fear that her stylist might make her appear completely nude on global television. The implication is that this had already happened in a previous season. Apparently, one year there was a ‘nude Hunger Games’. There are regular references to Hunger Games of the past that have gone horribly wrong, such as the one in a desert where all contestants merely had a slow death by starvation. That one hadn’t rated so well. The nudism thing amused me, because it was one of the more prurient aspects of Big Brother. If there was a jock in the house, the viewer could be fairly confident that said jock would be parading his nudity before long. ‘But that’s not fair!’ screech the producers. ‘We warn them that there are camera everywhere, even in the shower room, and the contestants have the option of showering in their underwear.’ – which of course no sane person ever does. And where exactly do you change out of yur wet underpants if there are cameras all over the place? There was a sauna in one series, though the girls didn't use it much. I used to wonder why the guys who used it would look directly out at the TV viewers and not at each other while they were chatting, flexing their muscles and readjusting their towels so that they were a little more low-rise and titillating. Were they really doing a sort of testosterone-fuelled strip-tease for the viewer? It occurred to me then that the entire sauna wall opposite them and unseen by us would have been a one-way mirror behind which the cameras were filming. So of course the two jocks were looking at it constantly, flexing and preening appropriately at their reflections. They were doing it for themselves.

The Hunger Games made me laugh and kept me reading. I’m glad that such an inventive book did so well. (And yes, I know about Season Seven and Man Bites Dog, two cult movies that cover very similar ground to the Collins novel. But so what? Collins does a great job of keeping the reader intrigued, while I had no trouble whatever in turning off the relentless and revolting Man Bites Dog.)

The Hunger Games makes almost every comment about the media’s plummeting depths that prompted me to leave the industry for a bit. It was clever and fresh in a way that Twilight absolutely wasn’t. It’s interesting to read the reviews for the movie on IMDB. People are very polarised. Many critics would have liked less of the morbid violence, many others would have liked more. I think the movie got it about right. Bot movie and book stand as clever bits of dystopian fiction, and give us all plenty to think and talk about.