Movie Review: Margin Call

For a movie that studies the hazy gray area between right, wrong, and necessity, Margin Call spends a lot of time in darkness. First-time director J.C. Chandor’s exploration of thirty-six hours in the life of an unnamed Wall Street bank as it teeters on the verge of financial meltdown plays out the majority of its narrative in one tense, pivotal night, but even the daylight does little to chase away the shadows. They fall on everyone, sucking the light from the monochromatic color palette of crisp whites and expensive Armani blacks - and this is surely deliberate. If nobody is truly guilty in Chandor’s financial world, nobody is innocent either.

Boozing and Sniffling

My neighbour came in to say goodbye this evening and we both ended up in tears. I suck at letting things go. So, with a sense of profound self-congratulation for having the foresight not to pack the gin, I’m spending my last night in my house toasting the memories and making a list move-related of things for which I’m grateful:

The Closing Door

The time has come...

I was filling a spot on the wall this evening that my dog had chewed (yeah, my dog chews walls. Is that not a thing dogs do?) when he was a puppy, and it suddenly hit me: I’m leaving. I’m not too proud to admit that I promptly burst into tears.

Winging It

Luckily, it turns out you can’t tell how a day’s going to go by virtue of the fact that you lose your iPhone first thing. I’m on my way home from the BECTU Freelancer’s Fair in London, and it was fantastic.

Star Trek Into Darkness: Why the Abrams Defense Doesn’t Work

(NB: I'm a film and gender theorist by training, but I'm also a huge Trekkie of many years' standing. Please don't mistake this for an anti-Trek rant; it's not. STID is not my favourite Trek movie by any stretch, but I'm about to go and see the film for the third time and I am very much "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY" about anything to do with Kirk or Spock. This is a response to an effort to position to Marcus Sequence and the Kirk Sequence as something they're not, pure and simple. I didn't like the scene in the movie, but it wouldn't have bothered me enough to write about it without Abrams' appearance on Conan.)

In the wake of the recent controversy around a scene in the new Star Trek movie, Into Darkness, in which Science Officer Carol Marcus (Alice Eve) strips to her underwear, writer Damon Lindelof took to Twitter to offer an apology to fans and moviegoers offended by what they saw as exploitative female bodily display. “I copped to the fact that we should have done a better job of not being gratuitous in our representation of a barely clothed actress,” he wrote on his Twitter feed (@DamonLindelof). “What I’m saying is I hear you, I take responsibility and will be more mindful in the future.” He did, however, qualify the apology thus: “We also had Kirk shirtless in underpants in both movies.” Likewise, director JJ Abrams, appearing on US talk-show Conan on May 22, posited not only the Kirk scene - in which actor Chris Pine is seen shirtless in bed with two scantily clad alien women - as a balance to the Marcus scene, but also suggested that a further sequence, cut from the theatrical release, in which villain John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) showers as the camera pans in on his naked upper torso, effectively answered accusations of sexism.

I want to use this article to argue that these counter-scenes - what I’m referring to as the Abrams Defense - do not, in fact, redress issues of sexual objectification and female bodily display. In doing so, I want to bring in issues of power, dominance, and the gaze, and to look at the disavowal mechanisms built into the Kirk scene that effectively allow him to reclaim his objectification in a manner denied to Marcus.

On Holidays and inspiration

View of the Alhambra from the Mirador, Grenada

So, I've been working pretty much non-stop for the past three months - and when I say non-stop, I mean evenings, weekends, lunch breaks, down time at work. It's been stressful, it's been unhealthy, and it's been utterly, bone-wearyingly exhausting, and, worst of all, it's become unproductive. An exhausted brain struggles to be creative; the concomitant reduction in output causes the pace of work to increase in order to compensate; and the whole thing becomes a vicious, ugly circle that leads to nothing good. But what's the alternative? The work needs to be done.

I had a holiday planned, and, as the date got closer and the project still wasn't finished (side note: one day, I will learn not to underestimate how long it will take me to complete any particular piece of writing. Because I'm never right. I could guess sixteen years and it'd end up taking thirty-two. I'm that bad at looking at a volume of work and trying to set a realistic completion date), I started to wonder if I'd have to take my laptop and work in the evenings. The whole idea of that just made me want to cry - and that's not me. Writing doesn't make me want to cry. It makes me want to tear my hair out and yell profanities at the heavens sometimes, but it never, ever causes that level of despair, that sense of "Dear God, just get me away from this because I cannot look at it any more."

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And So The Scary Begins...

Well, it is the Year of Living Recklessly. But now there's probably no going back.

What happened was this: I told my landlady that I'm going to have to move out. Why am I going to have to move out? Because I'm off to live in a garret and be a writer.

Allow Me To Play You The Song of My People

Jasper was excited for all of thirty seconds, and then was very 

much more, "Yeah, no. Why is this fun? We're done here."

The sirens are going nuts here. I hope it's just the snow...

The Art of Procrastination

It's bad when I'm seriously considering housework over writing.

This is what editing does to me.

Don't get me wrong, I can do it. I'm disciplined enough these days that I can come home after a full day's paying-work, open the laptop, and, ignoring all objections, sit and bloody well hash out a few thousand words. And then I can take a day or so away from them, come back, read them over, and fix the bits that don't work. I can do this even when my inner 2-year-old is moaning and whining and stomping her feet because she doesn't wanna. But for some reason, editing to someone else's notes is just... terrifying.

Why this should be, I'm not entirely clear. The two readers I'm working with at the moment are fantastic: generous, intelligent, knowledgeable, and very clear, and they've given up hours of their life to do me what amounts to the biggest favour I've ever asked. They've actually reinforced my self-belief in a lot of ways, because they've been kind enough to be very positive about the book. Maybe it's because, in order to write, one has to believe that one's work is, essentially, transmitting itself fully-formed to its readership and suggestions for improvement knock that one right out of the water. It's not that I think my novel is perfect - far from it; I can't read over a sentence of the damn thing without wanting to pull it to pieces - it's more that the natural instinct of a writer is to secretly suspect that everything they create is crap, and a beta-read that's doing its job is going to gently encourage that part of the writerly psyche to throw a party.

Or maybe it's just me. I don't know, I'm blatantly procrastinating here so that I don't have to do my edits. Or my laundry.

www.rachaelkelly.com

One Does Not Simply Get An Article Pitch Accepted

So, I've been trying to pitch an article (no shit - that's what the title says!) to an online humour magazine, of which I am a regular and enthusiastic consumer. I'm pretty sure that no-one goes into something like this without secretly imagining that the editor will read their pitch and be dazzled into paroxysms of joy by the quality of this new, undiscovered gem of writing brilliance, but, delusions of grandeur notwithstanding, I didn't exactly expect that it would be easy. Plus, I know from experience that these things are always much harder the first time out than they are on the second or third. But, dear God, what a first time out it was. I think, by mid-week, I was already slightly deranged by sleep deprivation (full-time job, home, work on pitch, go to bed at 1am, and then, because the restless spirit of that goddamn paperclip that used to be the scourge of MS Word has apparently taken up residence inside my skull since being justifiably murdered by Microsoft, my brain would immediately flip into a two-hour cycle of, "It looks like you're trying to sleep! Would you like me to (a) endlessly recycle the past four hours on a three-second loop of crazy, or (b) Shut the fuck up and die? And option B is a lie.)

I've just changed the title of this blog, because the year has changed and I have big plans for 2013. BIG, crazy-ass plans. Lets see what happens....

Exciting Times!

So... guess who just found out they were shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2012? (Hint: it was me. This would be a fairly random post if it wasn't). It was shortlisted and then completely failed to win anything, but I can't muster up the sads to worry about that - it was shortlisted! The Bridport Prize is HUGE and it's a Big Deal to get shortlisted.

I am OVER THE MOON!

A Political One

I do try and keep this sort of thing to where it belongs - political pressure groups, private discussion, that sort of thing - but this morning I need an outlet and this is my blog, after all. I'm a member of Amnesty International and an opponent of the death penalty in all cases, but last night was a particularly difficult case to stomach.

Huge doubts remain about Troy Davis' guilt, and he was executed anyway. The method was particularly barbaric - not just lethal injection, with which I have plenty of problems to begin with - but the manner in which it was carried out. To have allowed the execution to progress to the last hours three times previously is bad enough, but last night he was due to be executed at 7pm (EST), and at 7.05 news came that the Supreme Court had delayed it while they considered whether to issue a stay. A little over three hours later, the stay was denied, and at 10.53 the execution went ahead. Who are these people, to toy with a man's life like this? As The Guardian's Ed Pilkington tweeted from the scene, it doesn't matter if he was guilty or not - no human being should ever have to go through that.

Seven out of the original nine eye-witnesses - a precarious basis for evidence anyway - recanted their testimony in recent years. Some of them cited police coercion. No physical evidence linked Troy Davis to the scene. A man died - a husband, a father and a son: his life was taken away from him as he attempted to help a homeless man who was being attacked, and the perpetrator should be punished. Of course he should - life without parole sounds fine with me. We don't need people like that in society. The thing is, if it turns out (as it very well might) that Troy Davis was innocent all along, then there's nothing we can do to reverse what happened last night. I make no bones about it - if anyone hurt or killed a member of my family, I would want to rip them apart with my bare hands just to watch them die. Absolutely I would. Does that mean I should be allowed to? Is it justice or vengeance we're after as a society? Because only one of those is the mark of civilization.

Something I Probably Shouldn't Admit To On The Internet (But Oh Well)

Is it bad that I've found myself identifying with Sylar from Heroes? Okay, it's bad, but is it bad bad?

I mean, I'm not going to start murdering people any time soon. But I've recently (belatedly) started watching the first season of Heroes (okay, getting newly obsessed with Heroes. Hey, I'm unemployed and sometimes the thesis just will not be written) and I found myself really relating to that idea of living a life that's much smaller than you expected it to be and suspecting that it's not what you were supposed to be doing. I'm sure, 100% sure, that I'm supposed to be writing. It's just what I do, and when I'm not writing I'm thinking about writing, so it's not an exaggeration, really, to say that it's my life. This - the whole unemployment/no money/still in Belfast thing - this isn't what my life is supposed to be, I'm sure of it. So, maybe I'm not going to start murdering people and stealing their brains (I mean, I'm only 5'2" for a start, and not particularly threatening. Both my younger siblings can hold me off with one hand. My 5 year old niece could probably take me in a fight) but I get that sense of isolation, the sense of, isn't there more than this? Aren't I more than this?

Of course, the fact that he's played by Zachary Quinto might have something to do with it as well.

Of Pestilence and Stories That Don't Know Their Place

Bleurgh. Pity me. I went to bed on Wednesday night with the vague sense of a cold in the works, and I've been down for the count ever since. It is surely not normal to be pestilent for this long. And I also have a hyperactive puppy that I can't get out of the house to walk and who, for reasons best known to his creator, is approximately the size of a small caravan but as intelligent and empathetic as a brick. A particularly stupid brick. That has suffered a recent head trauma.

However, there's only so long a virulent snot-fest can keep a writer down, and I've been taking advantage of the fact that, while the flesh might be weak, the brain is only partially marinated in excessive bodily secretions and it's not like I have any kind of better excuse to put off washing the damn dishes. So I've been trying to work on the ultimate goal again this weekend, and I've got a couple of poems sent off for a competition and I've also identified a couple of magazines who are about to bear the full force of my enthusiastic interest. The problem is that my absolute favourite short story at the moment, and the one I really, really want to share with everyone, is well over 5,000 words long, which kind of puts it around double the maximum length of most short story competitions and well into SCARY MANIAC!!!1!1! territory for a lot of magazines as well. It's not my fault. My characters wouldn't shut up. And then the protagonist insisted on looking for information in the wrong places for a while (for reasons of pacing, if you can believe it: I swear, the pacing was necessary!) and before I knew it I was pushing six grand. I wonder if other writers have this problem, pacing-wise? I read my work back over and it often feels like I'm rushing to the good bits so I stick in more exposition in case my readers feel like I'm cheating. I'm absolutely certain that's the opposite of the way it's supposed to be - didn't Stephen King once advocate chopping a third out of your manuscript in the editing process? If anything, I tend to add another ten percent. Oops.

So, being as how it's a Sunday and all that, and the world didn't end last night (super yay! Snark) I also tried to get moving on another short story that I've been working on now for well over two years. Although admittedly there's been a gap of, well, two years where I wasn't doing any work on it at all. So... yeah. But I'm not used to short stories giving me this much grief. Usually, what happens is: I get an idea, I think about it for a little while, and then I sit down at the computer and I make that idea my bitch over the course of a few hours. Voila: the creative process at work. Except this time, I feel like the story is making me its bitch instead. But I persevere, because I do think this could be quite good. I'm already a little bit disturbed by the vaguely sinister direction it's taking (which is incredibly tricky to write, since I'm using an unreliable narrator who doesn't think the situation is sinister and... yeah. I can see why I Bravely Ran Away last time) and I happen to know that the hook scared seven kinds of shit out of me when I... All right, I dreamt it. It's based on a dream I had. But really: you should see the kind of weird-ass, messed-up shit I dream sometimes. Actually, you shouldn't. Except in this case. And maybe one or two others.

Oh, and the thesis still sucks, but my lovely friend and former thesis-advisor has given me permission to turn a cold shoulder upon it for a few days. And, in the words of the great philosopher Terry Pratchett (whose career I unashamedly want), hate is just love with its back turned. I do love ya, baby. You just need to stop bitching at me for a while and make me remember why...

Again With The Crisis-of-Faith Thing....

I don't know. Everywhere I look at the moment, I keep being smacked in the face with reminders of how difficult it is to (a) get published and (b) make a living out of writing. It's not like I don't know this. It's not like any of us go into the business for the yachts and the four Caribbean cruises a year. The chances of being the next JK Rowling have got to be on a par with any given RADA graduate becoming the next Catherine Zeta Jones. Or, I don't know, someone who went to RADA. She might have done. I don't follow her obsessively the way I might follow, say Zachary Quinto.... guh.... mmummumummuh... huh.... hmmm....? 
........
........
........

Nothing, I don't know. What?

My point is, it's another one of those Debbie Downer days (which seem, strangely, to be linked to the phases of the moon. Being female sucks, sometimes) and I'm basically on here now for three reasons:

(a) to moan; I might as well be honest about it
(b) to make fun of myself for moaning, and
(c) to avoid finishing off the boring stupid nitpicky damn stuff in Edge (I have, for example, discovered at least one Chapter Pluh and one Chapter That Follows The Last Chapter in the current MS, which made me snicker happily but also made me fear for whatever other placeholders I might have left in).

But I digress. To to get back to the object of today's Random Synaptic Rant, I'm not sure, for example, that I overly needed to know that middle-performing novelists of many years' standing are currently being dropped by publishers and agents alike, simply for not being the Catherine Zeta Jones (Zachary Quinto Zachary Quinto Zachary Quinto) of the literary world. I'm not sure I needed to hear that it's harder than ever these days to find an agent and then for that agent to persuade a publisher to publish you (really, when is it ever not hard for these things to happen?). I know it's hard, but the only reason any of us manage to keep on trying is because we know it's hard but we also know it's going to be different for us. This is very difficult to sustain when we're assaulted from every angle with a chorus of how badly everything in the universe sucks.

People, everything in the universe does not suck. I intend to demonstrate this one of these days.

Oh, and my thesis is the spawn of a syphilitic demon from the seventh pit of Hell. Today. Tomorrow we might be friends again (though don't hold your breath, because it's requiring me to read Cicero at the moment and that whiny little sod gets right on my tits), but today we are not speaking and IT KNOWS WHY SO STOP ASKING IF YOU LOVED ME YOU WOULDN'T HAVE TO ASK!!!

Little Bit of Win, Little Bit of Fail

I've been going a little bit online-ordering-happy lately (this is what happens to me when I'm broke: for some reason, my inner consumer awakes and starts feverishly justifying all kinds of purchases. Perhaps I need an exorcist?) so the package that arrived at my door today didn't overly fill me with any kind of thrills or giddiness, besides the vague delight at the prospect of receiving Leonard Nimoy's autobiography. Yes, that's right. I love me some Nimoy. I am an unrepentant fangirl.

So, imagine the flailing that was done when I opened the package to find.... My latest printed word! It's a book review that I submitted to a (self-promotion alert) very prestigious academic journal this time last year, and it's made it into print! Nothing will ever dull this feeling, I am privately convinced. Every time I see something I wrote, out there for general consumption, it feels a little bit like flying. I am sick with excitement. I am jubilant. I am rapturous.

In other news, though, I got a rejection from the magazine to which I submitted my short story a few weeks ago. It was a bit of a blow. Never mind that I was fairly sure it wouldn't be their thing (it's science fictiony-ish, but they are out-and-out science fiction, and I didn't think it would wash. It didn't) it was still a bad moment. This comes at a point where I'm physically (and occasionally violently) forcing myself to Sit The Hell Down and Look The Hell For Some Agents, so now would really be the time to work on developing that thick skin you always hear that you need, but... yeah. It would be very easy to use this as an excuse to not try at all. Fortunately, I'm just far enough into my thirties to be horrified at my lack of progress in the novel-publishing business and have spent enough time in my head to be able to reliably call myself on my own bulls***. Plus, while I'm looking for agents, I'm not working on thesis rewrites. To be honest, I would imagine that's what really did the trick...

Excitement! Thrills! Awesomeness!

So - final redrafting is finished on The Edge of Heaven! Updated sample chapters are available at www.rachaelkelly.com - and, naturally, any interested agents or publishers can have the full draft on request! Even if you don't know that you want to request it, I'm going to be trying to convince you that you do. You have been warned...


Sci-fi with a beating, emotional heart, that's how I like to think of it. Smart future-noir, character-driven but with hefty dollops of painstakingly-researched plot. And when I say "painstaking", I mean painstaking. This stuff has kept me awake at night. I'm pretty sure it's watertight now.


Here's the synopsis (imagine it with the Deep Voiced Narrator from the movies. I do...)

Limbe do Cælom is not the worst place in the world to live.  Granted, an objective observer might protest that the worse places could be counted on one’s fingers; possibly, if pushed, adding a couple of toes.  Some of those places are also in Olvido…

In the late twenty-second century, the habitable world is shrinking. The answer is Olvido, a bi-level city; a metropolitan leviathan that scrapes the clouds that hover over what used to be Provence. Olvido is the melting pot of nations, a city of a thousand languages, where the dark streets explode with colour and festas and violence. It’s the place where you go when home is just a memory.

Danae lives alone in the nineteenth district, Limbe do Cælom, nursing the kind of secret that can get a person killed. Turrow lives a little life and plans for a better future, maybe even a job where no-one punches him. Neither one hopes for the spectacular or the glorious, so when the city throws them together, neither one is prepared for the depth of their connection. But it's the kind of love that comes with a price.

Because Olvido isn’t the land of happy ever afters. Crumbling buildings and casual violence vie with endemic disease to top the mortality lists in the crowded, heaving streets. And now there’s a dark shadow from the distant past creeping up on the city, ready to strike. Danae is going to have to make a decision: what would you give up to save the one glorious thing in an inglorious life?

The Edge of Heaven is a story about holding onto the little things in life that make us human in an inhumane world; about making a life where life is cheap; about conspiracy, loss, and hope.

Yes? Yes. PEOPLE, I WILL GIVE YOU CAKE.

Serendipity

Well, I've gone a bit quiet lately, admittedly, but it's been for good, honest reasons: I finished my paper - in the predictable last-minute chaos of "Aaaarrrrggghhhh-I-have-negative-time-to-write-six-thousand-words-and-I-know-nothing-nothing-NOTHING-WHY-GOD-WHY???", but it's finished nevertheless, and, if I haven't learned how to write without ulcer-inducing panic by the age of thirty-two, then I think it's reasonable to assume that this is my standard modus operandi for the rest of my life. It's not the best thing I've ever written, but I'm pleased with it and happy to have it sent off. Let's see if it makes publication now; it's a little on the short side, but fingers crossed.

Good God, did I just write those words? "It's a little on the short side"? Coming from me? About something I wrote? Could someone just quickly check outside and see if there are any other harbingers of the Apocalypse? kthx. I'll wait.

In other news, I've been carrying on with the final final FINAL edits of The Edge of Heaven and am almost finished now, which is scary, but in a good way. The intransigent middle section has been transigented. It is now transigent. I have even re-read it a quite, quite obsessive seventeen thousand times (possible hyperbole) and it seems to confirm the transigency report on fanatical review. So then I got to the beginning of the third act and was absolutely certain that I'd taken a shot at re-writing it during the doomed 2009 blitzkrieg but couldn't find any evidence of the rewritten scene on my hard drive. This was a cause for panic, as I had been in the habit of saving everything onto a pen drive until I abruptly (and predictably) lost it last year - fortunately, after I'd been beaten around the head with the stupid stick by enough people to back most everything up onto the hard drive - but the only possible explanation was that this draft that I'd been working from was not the most recent draft. Worse: the most recent draft must have been on the pen drive when it disappeared. Luckily, some of the folks with the stupid stick had also known enough about computers to recommend that I back stuff up to a... thingie, I don't know. One of those thingies that stores stuff in cyberspace for you. A cyberspace file storage thingie. There's only so much the stupid stick can do for the technologically illiterate. And it was there that I made the dramatic discovery: the existence of a hitherto unsuspected seventh draft!!! Ach, du liebe! Sorry, I've been reading the most fabulous fic site recently and that term crops up a lot.

Now, remember I was saying that I didn't know how much damage Insane 2009 Rach had done with the Insane 2009 Purge? I'd been quite pleasantly surprised at how little of the flesh was hanging from the skeleton of my poor, eviscerated baby. Turns out, Insane 2009 Rach, in serial killer style, had been hiding the actual carcass in cyberspace this whole time. So it seems that I've been working off of the last, decent draft before the insanity began, without even knowing it. All right, Insane 2009 Rach had a moment of clarity with the cytokine storm scene (impressed? Be impressed! You have no idea how hard it is to research stuff like that when you have no background in human molecular biology!) and I'll have to do an unexpected sweep through of the cannibalised remains at some point and see if there's anything else good that might transfer over, but, all things considered, it could have been much worse. I like this novel. I would like to release it on the world at large. If anyone has any inspiration (or a publishing deal that they'd like to give away), you know where I am.

Also: remember I have cake....