I’ve rented three sci-fi movies in the last few months: District 9, Monsters and Transformers: Revenge of the Batteries. Guess which ones I liked and which one I thought was even more idiotic than I expected it to be.

District 9 — Great use of that documentary/security camera feel. The whole film should have been done that way. The weak parts were when it used conventional static camera shots to flesh out parts of the storyline. Those parts made me wonder if they were demanded by studio execs who worried people wouldn’t be able to think the story through.

District 9 also did what sci-fi is supposed to do — use the future to talk about the present. (Because really, isn’t that what Alien and Blade Runner are? Anxieties about the time in which they were filmed, projected into the future.) We don’t really need to discuss the “messages” of this film, do we? Let’s just say it was actively engaged with the geopolitics of the current era, and not an escapist fantasy about the future, and leave it at that.

Monsters — Just watched it last night. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting more than a sci-fi thriller or horror flick, based on the marketing. It looked like another Cloverfield. Instead, it was as thoughtful and as politically engaged as District 9. The film is set mostly in Mexico, parts of which have become an “infected zone” after a spacecraft brings back some alien hitchhikers and crashes there. The aliens start off small and then grow into large tentacley beasts that try to migrate into America. The Americans build a wall to stop them and launch a war on the alien immigrants…. get it? It’s full of nods to the war on drugs, illegal immigration, the role of the media, even the subprime crisis (if you look at a destroyed neighbourhood the right way). Interestingly, the closer the characters get to America, the worse things become.

Monsters is more subtle than District 9 — it’s largely an emotional film rather than a political action film. There are some stunningly beautiful shots, and a lot of moments that just celebrate humanity and community. Communion, even. The ending, well, let’s just say the film ends on an emotional note rather than a plot point. It could have been overwrought and anti-climatic, but it works perfectly.

Transformers — a film about toys. And maybe cars. The cars could be toys though, so I’m not sure they deserve a separate category. The film is also about…. no, that’s it. Toys.

It saddens me that this film gets a blockbuster release, while District 9 and Monsters have to be “discovered” and championed by celebrities, just to get medium-sized releases. And only then when their marketing campaigns try to present them as films they aren’t — bug hunt shoot ’em ups or horror flicks. But I guess that’s what sells.

I don’t know who I’m really upset with more — the Hollywood studios or the film audiences.

I can’t decide which I like better, the Radiohead version of “Single Ladies”

or the Cleverys’ version

One of my favourite writers, Peter Watts, has been afflicted by flesh-eating disease. Sounds like’s going to be all right, but wow.

Hit the 175-page mark today. Researched prosthetic limbs — which led into an accidental detour into prosthetic tentacles. Yeah, we’re a freak species. Also making an appearance in the book:

– subprime ghost neighbourhoods

– Ronald Reagan

– a shootout with pepper spray.

I also took  the time to shoot a background video for my story “Deja Yu Makes the Pain Go Away.”

Plus, you know: Valentine’s Day.

All right, back to the bodies.

So it took me one night to write an 8,700-word short story. Then it took me two days to cut 2,000 words from it to make it a publishable length. Now it’s taken me two days to cut 200 words to bring it in at 6,500 words (a number that has meaning only to me).

I don’t even want to think about how long it’s going to take me to come up with a title.

About 44,000 words in now. And many more bodies since the last update. Maybe I should call this book The Apocalypse Corpses.

I’m thinking about doing short video intros for each of my stories and books. Here’s one I recorded yesterday for my latest story, “we continue to pray for something to end our prayers,” which was recently published by This magazine.

we continue to pray from peterdarbyshire on Vimeo.

UPDATE: The article was viewed a couple of thousand times in the two days since it’s been up, so I guess there’s some interest in the subject.

Book Madam has just posted an article about self-publishing on Kindle and the future of the publishing industry. Please is one of the featured books. It’s getting a lot of hits, so go check it out.

Back when The Warhol Gang first came out, I gave away copies of a new story, “We continue to pray for something to end our prayers,” to people who reviewed the book favourably. It was my way of saying thank you for taking the time to engage with the book. Now This magazine has been kind enough to publish the story, after a bit of sharp editing by Stuart Ross. And it has fresh art! Check it out here.

With a short story!

I’ve written a couple of supernatural western stories — it’s a genre fetish of mine — and I’ve been itching to write another one. It must be some sort of infection. Anyway, the idea came to me yesterday morning — it’s High Plains Drifter meets… well, I’m not going to tell you quite yet.

I couldn’t put off writing it. I knew I’d be able to jump back into The Apocalypse Corpse with no problem, but I worried if I left this new idea too long I’d forget about it, or work it out too much in my mind and get bored with it. So I figured I’d put the novel aside for a few days and write the story. But I managed to write the whole thing in one feverish sitting, accompanied with much maniacal cackling — that was my son playing downstairs. I write in silence. Seven thousand words later, I had a decent first draft at midnight.

I’ll let it sit for a while, because I always let stories settle for a bit before I return to them. In the meantime, I went back into The Apocalypse Corpse today and got in another seven pages. I don’t think the novel even knows I cheated on it.

Now what the hell am I going to do with a supernatural western…?