“Characters with no integrity are just as interesting as characters with lots of integrity.”
~ Tommy Lee Jones, b. 15 September 1946
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Roald Dahl (b. September 13): “The life of a writer is absolute hell…”
13 Sep
“The life of a writer is absolute hell. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.”
~ Roald Dahl, b. 13 September 1916
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Jennifer Hudson (b. September 12): “Don’t block your blessings.”
12 Sep
“Don’t block your blessings. Don’t let doubt stop you from getting where you want to be.”
~ Jennifer Hudson, b. 12 September 1981
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Janet Fitch: “Write in scenes.”
11 Sep
Write in scenes.
What is a scene?
(a) A scene starts and ends in one place at one time (the Aristotelian unities of time and place–this stuff goes waaaayyyy back).
(b) A scene starts in one place emotionally and ends in another place emotionally. Starts angry, ends embarrassed. Starts lovestruck, ends disgusted.
(c) Something happens in a scene, whereby the character cannot go back to the way things were before. Make sure to finish a scene before you go on to the next.
Make something happen.
~ JANET FITCH
D.H. Lawrence (b. September 11): “Tragedy is like strong acid…”
11 Sep
“Tragedy is like strong acid – it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.”
~ D.H. Lawrence. b. 11 September 1885
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SPECIMEN & Other Stories
10 Sep
SPECIMEN & Other Stories by ALAN ANNAND
A six-pack sampler of short fiction by Alan Annand:
Bananarama: Reformed meat-eater embarks on a 15-day bananas-and-orange-juice diet, with surprising side effects.
The Date Square Killer: Mild-mannered hit man finds love, social justice and the meaning of life in non-random acts of murder.
River Girl: Middle-aged bureaucrat takes a detour on his morning jog that leads him to an unexpected rendezvous with Fate.
Specimen: A wealthy butterfly collector visits his twin brother, warden of a penal colony, who is building his own unique collection.
The Bassman Cometh: My night with Margaret Atwood: Hapless university graduate student in 1975 ruins famous Canadian author’s poetry reading.
The Naskapi & the U-Boat: A German U-Boat in WW2 visits northern Quebec to install a weather station, but a native family compromises their secret mission.
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Specimen-Other-Stories-Alan-Annand-ebook/dp/B00THKBJ22
Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/specimen-other-stories/id966756381
Barnes&Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/specimen-other-stories-alan-annand/1121209434
Kobo: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-CA/ebook/specimen-other-stories
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/518775
Amy: a review of the Winehouse documentary
10 Sep
When six-time Grammy winner Amy Winehouse passed away in July 2011, most attributed her rapid decline to the destructive nature of international fame. Magazine and news reporters descended on her personal struggle (with drugs, alcohol and bulimia) like a flock of vultures. Watching her burn the crack pipe at both ends became its own depraved carnival of affairs – a self-sabotage in slow motion. And while many were unable to see the real Amy through the media-censored lens, there is now a film that looks beneath the heavy kohl eyeliner and demented beehive hairdo…
Amy, out this year from the somewhat offbeat pairing of art house production studio A24 and DirecTV, does what it can to reveal the “real” Amy Winehouse – as she was to those who loved her most dearly. Directed by Asif Kapadia, the film tells the full Winehouse story, beyond the scope of the tabloids. Although he takes care not to leave those parts out either, Kapadia also endeavors to humanize his subject. Coming to understand the other chapters of her life is crucial if one is to gain a proper picture of her demise.
Through archived footage of Winehouse from her early teens through to her death, and statements collected from more than 100 interviews conducted with family, friends and coworkers, Kapadia shows a more complete picture of Winehouse as a creative, sensitive and artistic soul. Her love of music truly surpassed her love of fame.
While Kapadia stands by his final product, Amy has her critics, most notably her own father, who felt that Kapadia misrepresented his statements and intentions toward his daughter. Kapadia maintains that he could not rewrite parts of Winehouse’s life to make it seem more “pleasant” regardless of how much he would have liked to. Instead, he felt it was more important to accurately represent all those involved, using their own words whenever possible.
One of the strongest proponents of the Amy film has been Mark Ronson, the producer of her highly-successful pop soul album Back to Black. Ronson was heavily involved in providing both footage and interview material for the documentary, and he has spoken of his satisfaction with the final product. A major force in the UK music industry, Ronson expressed in the film his own affinity both for Amy and her prodigious musical gifts.
While it ultimately serves as a reminder as to why she achieved such remarkable fame in the first place, it also shows the fact that attaining international notoriety was something she was never interested in to begin with. Becoming known on a worldwide scale was something she neither valued nor chased, and it’s easy to see how the hollow business of fame can fuel the smallest inclinations towards self-destruction.
Many may find it hard not to compare her life and struggles with other artists who led similarly conflicted lives, faced similar issues in the limelight, and had documentaries made following their deaths. Winehouse is in good company among other members of the infamous “Club 27,” a group of talented celebrities who did not live to see past their 27th year. Perhaps the most notable among these comparisons is Kurt Cobain, who was the star of another recently released documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. Like Winehouse, Cobain struggled with fame and his “media image”, a fight that eventually drove him to take his own life in 1994.
In the end, Amy stands as a successful true-to-life tribute to the incredible talent and potential that died with Winehouse when she passed away much too soon. It also stands as a testament to the power of the media, touching on the unhealthy obsessions we have with those in the public eye. Like lambs to the slaughter, fame can indeed be a double-edged sword – one that will cut down many who wield it.
~~~~~~~~~
Beth Michelle is a Chicago-based blogger with a nasty film addiction. Her primary interests include pulp cinema, fashion photography and vintage Japanese film cameras.
Colin Firth (b. September 10): “I have a kind of physical neutrality…”
10 Sep
“I have a kind of neutrality, physically, which has helped me. I have a face that can be made to look a lot better – or a lot worse.”
~ Colin Firth, b. 10 September 1960
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Book review Al-Quebeca: “Annand is a master craftsman of reader anxiety.”
9 Sep
A book review of Al-Quebeca recently appeared on the Serenity Now website, written by Val Tobin. Following is an excerpt:
For Sophie Gillette, Detective-Sergeant Homicide of the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), it starts out as a routine investigation of a hit-and-run during a January snowstorm in Montreal. It ends in a terrorist plot to disable the electrical grid, behead a visiting governor, and kill thousands of hockey fans with poison gas. These two events sandwich between them a generous filling of biker wars, arms smuggling by First Nations warriors, militant student activists, drug financiers, and a rogue professor with a doctorate in chemical toxicology.
As if that weren’t enough to keep Gillette occupied, she’s recently suffered the loss of her brother to a covert military operation in Afghanistan, and her mother has turned to the bottle to assuage her grief. She also has to deal with being an attractive woman in a male-dominated work environment. As with author Alan Annand’s other novels, the lead character in his latest offering, Al-Quebeca, has more than a heaping helping of issues with which to deal.
How his detective, Sophie Gillette, follows the trail of brain matter and paint chips from the hit-and-run scene to the terrorist cell makes riveting reading. Annand is a master craftsman of reader anxiety. Much of his magic lies in his painstaking research. As with his other novels, he’s been meticulous in attention to detail, and ensuring what he writes is credible.
He also faced the challenge of writing from a female perspective. When asked about it, Annand says that he’d wanted his protagonist to “face the challenges of discrimination, physical struggle and self-doubt that made the choice of a female lead seem appropriate.” Annand succeeds in not only making Gillette a believable character, but also manages to make the reader forget she was written by a man.
All of the above make Al-Quebeca an exciting, suspenseful novel with well-rounded characters and richness of setting and plot. But what makes it particularly compelling, as well as frightening, is how plausible it all seems. In an April 2013 blog entry, Annand talks about the likelihood of something like this happening, and says, “I wrote the first draft of Al-Quebeca in 2009 and revised it several times since then. Each time it all seems even more inevitable.”
Fans of astrologer/palmist/private investigator Axel Crowe will be delighted to hear that Annand is currently writing a sequel to Scorpio Rising called Felonious Monk. He’s also rewriting his first published novel, an SF mystery set in post-apocalyptic New York, called Antenna Syndrome.
Get Al-Quebeca in Kindle or paperback at www.amazon.com/Al-Quebeca-ebook/dp/B00CHQOY8O
All other digital formats at www.smashwords.com/books/view/309140
Read the full original review at:
http://www.serenitynowgifts.com/resources/articles/al-quebeca_book_review.php
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