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NEWS AND VIEWS - MAY 2019
WRITING NEWS The latest Signalverse novel, Champions Weekly, is available now! Here's the cover art, by Tom Martin: 
You can read a little more about the book here. So what's next? Well, last month I mentioned I was working on an outline for a kind of flintlock fantasy; I finished that outline around the end of April and started the actual writing towards the beginning of May (I'm about seven chapters into it already). I'm going to be focusing on this project exclusively this summer, and into the fall; I'm hoping to finish it around September or October, but that may be optimistic. As for the Signalverse...well, like I wrote last month, I'd love to keep working on this series, but I haven't had a lot of sales success with it and I think it might be time to move on. * * * * * * * * STUDZ Several years ago -- this would've been around 2005, I think -- my friend Ant decided that the two of us should start a band. This wasn't a totally crazy idea; while I'm not much of a musician myself, Ant's a pretty good guitarist, and he knows how to mix music. So I was like, "Okay, sure." And he was like, "All right, we're going to be a boy band, called STUDZ, and all of our songs are going to be about how awesome we are, and about how girls can't resist us." And I was like, "Okay...wait, what?" And that's how it started. Ant had been watching a lot of Hong Kong movies and listening to a lot of silly manufactured Cantopop, and somehow or other he had come to the conclusion that there was a lot of comic potential in the idea of a parody boy band. So, inspired by groups like Spinal Tap and Tenacious D, we started STUDZ (the name is a riff on the Cantopop group Boy'z), featuring Rob (Ant), and Chase (me). These characters were a couple of affable, Tiger Beat-type airheads, always falling into undeserved success. 
We had a lot of fun with this concept. We recorded music, took stupid pictures of ourselves in costume as Rob and Chase, and even put together a fake fansite called "Heartbreak Nation," written by "studzfan1" and full of fake news stories about female STUDZ fans passing out at our concerts. I came up with a whole cast of supporting characters: STUDZ's girlfriends (Melody and Harmony), their monoymous pop rival Evan, their drunken manager, their hair metal idols Whyte Vyper (consisting of frontman Rick Ragnarok, bassist "Thunder" Gunderson, and drummer Mitch "Boomsday" Brewer), and so on. I made up a few fake magazine covers, too, and wrote up some radio-play adventures for them to have. 
Some of the music turned out all right, despite my very questionable singing abilities, but unfortunately the whole idea turned out to be just a little bit too high-concept for most people to grasp. They didn't get that we were playing characters, and that the whole thing was basically just a big joke. No one understood the website at all, and I wound up shutting it down after a few months. STUDZ, alas, is currently on hiatus. Probably our best song was "Heartbreak Machine." I came up with the hook, wrote the lyrics, and sang this one, but Ant did everything else. The song is prefaced by a sort of grindhouse-style movie trailer. Another good one was "Weekend Pop Star," which was the first song we did. Ant was still getting the hang of mixing music, so it's maybe a little rough, but I like it. We're alternating on vocals here. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M WATCHING I've been getting into some older movies lately: this month I watched It (the 1927 movie starring Clara Bow, not the one about the clown), and It Happened One Night, a cute little romantic comedy, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. I liked them both. It, of course, is a silent movie, and silent movies can be difficult for modern audiences to understand and appreciate; they can sometimes seem excessively staged and artificial, and it's harder to connect with characters when you can't hear them speak. It, though, was a later silent movie, with a more modern sensibility, I think; I found it a little bit easier to get into. It's about a spunky shopgirl, played by Clara Bow, who falls in love with her boss, some kind of wealthy department store magnate. It's fun, and fast-paced, and Clara Bow absolutely lights up the screen: this is the movie that made her a star, and it's easy to see why. You can watch the whole thing here, on YouTube. It Happened One Night is a 1934 Frank Capra flick which swept the Oscars that year. It's a cheerful, good-natured road-trip kind of movie, about a spoiled socialite (Claudette Colbert) who falls in love with a down-on-his-luck reporter after running away from her father. The only thing about it that didn't quite work for me was the casting of Claudette Colbert in the spoiled socialite role -- the actress was in her early thirties when she made this film, and her voice has a sort of contralto quality that makes her seem older still; I had a hard time accepting her as a totally naive ingénue. 
But there's a lot to like about this movie. Clark Gable's exasperation with this girl is fun to watch, and his (spoiler!) reluctant declaration of love at the end is an all-time classic. Highly recommended. |