blog

Flash Friday

Posted on By Wil

Flash Fiction, that is, you filthy animals.

This is another one from my dumb Tumblr thing, based on another neat work of sci-fi art I reblogged.

Peter Elson, Pirates of The Asteroids
Peter Elson, Pirates of The Asteroids

Jace looked up from the scanner. “Two colonials, Hep! On the other side of the rock.”

“Perfect,” Hep said, almost to himself.

“Perfect?! How are we gonna handle two?!”

Hep took a short breath. The rookie was jumpy and a little panicky, but what rookie wasn’t? Flying through space is fun and all, right up until someone’s trying to blast you into it.

“Colonials are good, but they’re also cocky, Jace,” Hep said, powering up the Needle’s thrusters.

The scanner flipped from green to red and Jace instinctively interrupted him. “Two colonial Zona fighters now moving to intercept, sir.”

Hep continued. “One of them, alone, could be a problem, but a pair? These idiots will be so busy trying to impress each other, we’ll be able to fly circles around them.”

The scanner sounded and began to flash. “A third colonial Zona fighter has activated its ions and is now moving into attack formation Delta,” Jace said.

A moment of tense silence filled the Needle’s cockpit. “Hang on.” Hep pulled his controls toward him and the Needle arced sharply upward, spun 180 degrees, and flattened out again. Hep powered the ship’s thrusters to maximum, pushing both pirates heavily into their seats.

“What are you doing?”

“Two is a patrol group. We can handle two.” The Zonas came around the asteroid in a tight formation.

“Three is a combat defense squad. They only put a combat defense squad around this rock if there’s something more than metal in it.

“The good news is, we just found something very valuable.”

The Zonas opened fire.

“The bad news is, we may not get to tell anyone about it.”

I’m proud of these things, because I do them off the top of my head, taking the first bit of inspiration I find in the image, and writing without judgment. In this particular one, I decided to sort of flip it and make the pirates the two people in the foreground, who are probably not meant to be the bad guys in the image. Then, while I was writing it, I realized that I thought there were two ships that I called the colonials, but there were actually three. So I decided that our heroes had also made the same mistake, which is why they are fleeing from them

blog

Life is too short to be Voldemort

Posted on By Wil

My talk to Miami University went very well, and there were way more adults (like, old people like me adults, not college-aged adults) than I expected. Turns out I was terrified for no good reason.

I recorded the entire thing, and once I have a chance to clean up and edit the audio, I’ll post it on Radio Free Burrito. Until then, here’s an excerpt from my prepared remarks.

(NB: I write these things to be spoken, to be performed. I don’t know if it translates perfectly to written text, because if I were writing this to be read, I would change a bunch of things.)

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blog

I’m not terrified to speak to a bunch of college students. You’re terrified to speak to a bunch of college students.

Posted on By Wil
Cincinatti Airport Sunset
This picture does not do the sunset I saw when I landed last night justice.

I’m in Ohio for 24ish hours, because I’m giving a talk at Miami University later today. I’ve given talks at conventions over the years, and some of them have even been successful. I’ve keynoted two PAXes performed at lots of w00tstocks, so speaking to large groups of people is nothing new for me … but this is the first time I’ve actually prepared a talk on a subject, and traveled across the country to give it to a bunch of college students.

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Film

Remake Culture is the Worst (except when it isn’t)

Posted on By Wil

I posted a thing on my dumb Tumblr thing about how awful the Stallone Judge Dredd movie was, and a lot of people asked me if I’d seen the 2012 Dredd with Karl Urban. I hadn’t, and didn’t intend to, for reasons that will become clear shortly. So many people recommended it to me, though, and it had such a great group of creative people behind it, I gave it a chance … and I loved it. Here’s what I wrote about it this morning:

I hate reboot culture. I hate that studios remake movies that were perfectly fine the first time around, simply because they’re too afraid to take a chance on something new, different and unproven.

That said, in an instance like Dredd, where the original film adaptation was a catastrophic failure of flaming shit, I should be willing to make exceptions.

I should be, but I’m usually not, because I’m stubborn. So when I posted about how I didn’t want to watch the 2012 version of the film, about two dozen people urged me to reconsider. I decided to take a chance (you know, like studios won’t), and watched it last night. I am so glad that I did, because I loved everything about it. A lot of fans fixate on Dredd never taking off the helmet, which I understand, but I don’t think that’s its strongest selling point. What I loved about it was how it felt like a proper motion picture adaptation of the 2000 A.D comics I read in the 80s, and the Games Workshop games I played from that universe. The city blocks felt massive. The Judges felt powerful. The relationship between Dredd and Anderson felt real. She didn’t need him to save her, even when he was trying to. The design of the entire picture, from the costumes to the sets to the little details like graffiti was pitch-perfect. And the photography was sensational.

I felt like it started to wobble a little bit in the third act, but like I originally wrote yesterday, I was on board by that point so I was willing to go along with it and let it be. I’m guessing that there won’t be any sequels, or we would have heard about it by now. If that’s the case, it’s a bummer, because I’d like to see these characters and this universe again … but maybe it’s for the best that this film can simply exist as its own thing, without being tainted by a sequel that lets us down (OH HAI THE MATRIX). Or maybe it’s a tragedy that Dredd won’t get its Aliens or T2. I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.

So now I’m thinking about other movies that missed the point of their source material (Running Man and The Shining come to mind, though they stand on their own in their own glorious ways), and trying to figure out what other pictures I’d remake, if I could pass a universal law that requires two new movies be made for every remake, because I am a powerful, tyrannical king.

Following these rules, what would you remake, and why? Show your work.

creative writing

fun with writing prompts

Posted on By Wil

I’ve started doing this thing on my dumb Tumblr thing where I take a picture from one of the blogs I follow, and use it to inspire a little bit of prose fiction.

I really liked this one, so I’m sharing it here.

Illustration for article ‘The Scientist, The Humanist, and Us’ (1981) by Ron Walotsky in Future magazine.
Illustration for article ‘The Scientist, The Humanist, and Us’ (1981) by Ron Walotsky in Future magazine.

“Everything in our world, from the food we eat to the bombs we use to kill each other, is just reflected light.”

Poe floated in the isolation tank, the lecture playing into the darkness from an unseen speaker.

“Reality is real because we all agree upon it,” the lecturer continued.

Was there anything beyond the darkness of his solitude? Did the world exist if he wasn’t there to experience it?

If it wasn’t there, what was holding the isolation tank?

“Or maybe reality exists because we are, all of us, inside the mind of an even greater being, the way our thoughts and ideas – our reality – is within our own.”

Poe exhaled all the air from his lungs, and floated in the darkness.