Hello folks! It’s time once again for the Weekend Wrap-Up, in which I blather on at length about whatever I’ve been writing, reading, and doing. It’s not really a complicated or a novel concept.

Anyway, let’s get to it, shall we?

What I’ve Been Writing

Another week, another writing update. As I said last week, I’ve shifted my attention from the story I was working on to a new epistolary short that I’m calling “Gosling Gardens” for now.

At my last writing group meet up, I was having quite a bit of trouble. It wasn’t that I was having trouble coming up with ideas for the story. It wasn’t writers block. The format of the story was just so different than I’m used to writing that pantsing the draft, which is how I usually handle short stories, wasn’t working. Or at least, it felt like it was taking forever.

I got a little worried that this story would end up being yet another bust, but then Tobias Buckell retweeted an older blog post titled “Why I Wrote a 21,000 Word Outline for My Novel.” I’ve always identified with the way he thinks, and I’d already been thinking that I probably needed to outline this story first so I could plan out each social media post and email, so I thought I’d give his method a try.

So far, it’s working out really great. The method he describes in his post is actually very similar to how I brainstorm anyway, but I’ve never used that stuff for an actual outline. I usually just use it to come up with sentence scenes and then delete it all, but now, I’m essentially writing out a summary of the story in paragraph form. It’s like a medium level view of the events of the story. Once that’s done, I’ll be able to go back and essentially redraft the story, but I can focus on getting the tone and feel of the social media posts and emails correct instead of trying to figure out what comes next.

If this process works, I might try it on future projects, too, and I will definitely keep it in mind for November when I try NaNoWriMo again.

What I’ve Been Reading

I’m a little sad to say that I haven’t been reading as much as I’d like. I’ve been very busy between work and writing and exercise and a variety of other things. But I’ve also just been extraordinarily tired recently. I may be having a bout of depression because I’ve frequently felt ready to go to bed at around 8:30, and even if I don’t go to bed, I’ve been lethargic and useless.

That said, I’ve still been making my way through K.C. Alexander’s Necrotech. I’m still really enjoying it, and I’m glad I ordered the second one at the same time so I won’t have to wait to get more of the story.

I’ve been reading Slash of the Titans in chunks, but since my brain has been so scattered, it’s been hard to focus on nonfiction, so I’ve also started reading Tade Thompson’s Rosewater. It’s a near-future sci-fi novel in which some sort of alien structure has landed in Nigeria. People travel from all over because periodically the structure will open and heal people of ailments — sometimes mental, but usually physical.

Meanwhile, the main character works in cybersecurity, but at this point the internet is hooked up directly to your brain. There’s some really neat stuff here with the blending of the person with technology and it appears to be playing with the idea of the internet being a place that is both real and in our minds by making it literally a real place in our minds.

I picked up Rosewater based on a suggestion from Alasdair Stuart’s newsletter, and I highly suggest you subscribe if you haven’t. He does a lot of great and insightful writing on things he’s watched and read recently (among other things), and it’s really worth your time. (And he has a ko-fi where you could kick him a few dollars if you wanted just saying it’d be cool of you okay thx bai).

One last thing I want to mention: I have been listening to Nightlight, a podcast of black horror fiction featuring some amazing talent and hosted by the very talented Tonia Thompson. They opened with a bang featuring a new short story in the Dread Nation universe by Justina Ireland. That one was good, but I think my favorite so far has been “Wilson’s Pawn and Loan” by Lamar Giles. Not only does it feature great horror fiction, but really insightful interviews as well.

Please give this a listen and subscribe on their Patreon if you can. This is a well produced, and well curated podcast of horror fiction and I want it to stick around as long as Pseudopod (my other favorite horror fiction venue).

What I’ve Been Watching

Besides Brooklyn 99, which we’re almost caught up on, we only watched one thing this week, which was the new stalker thriller/domestic horror movie Greta, starring Chloe Grace Moretz, Maika Monroe, and Isabelle Huppert.

I don’t mean to be a bummer, but I wasn’t in love with this one. I wanted to like it. I went in expecting to like it. But ultimately, I’ve seen this concept done better several times before.

There are two ways that I’ve seen to make this concept work. One is to take the concept and somehow turn it on its head, twist it so that you examine it from a new angle and bring something fresh to the conceit.

The other way is to go full b-movie and let everyone really lean into the schlocky, goofy tropes. These movies can live and die on their villain and while I would love to see Isabelle Huppert as the quiet, classy villainess in something else, in this she wasn’t allowed to really go off in a satisfying way. I wanted my “NO WIRE HANGERS” moment, my Kathy Bates breaking someone’s foot with a croquet mallet moment, and I didn’t really get it.

That’s not to say there’s not some fun gems hidden along the way. There are 3 stand out sequences for me in which the director lets the tension build, or pulls the rug out from under you, and they are great fun. One involves following a character with a camera while a third person is receiving text updates that was genuinely thrilling.

Also, my wife pointed this out to me after we left the movie: Frances’s character is treated as some sort of naive out-of-towner simpleton because she finds Greta’s purse and returns it to her. The roommate is so aghast at this, she says, “This city is going to eat you alive.” Frances defends herself by saying, “That’s just the way we do things where I come from.”

But the thing is, Frances doesn’t come from some podunk Mayberry town in the middle of Nowhere, USA. She comes from fucking Boston. You know, the state in which residents in the greater New England area are known as “Mass-holes?”

This bizarre characterization, which actually comes up a few times in the movie, gave us the impression the writer is either from New York and enamored with the pervasive idea that people from New York are just tougher than other US folks, or the writer isn’t from New York and thinks this is just how all New Yorkers think of themselves.

Ultimately, I ended up giving it 3 stars on Letterboxd because while the plot does meander and get lost in the weeds of its own narrative, there were still some fun moments, and the climax was pretty entertaining if a little lacking in surprises. A solid, “meh” from me.

**Spoilers ahead, apologies, skip on to the next section to avoid**

The biggest trouble is it felt like 2 movies smushed into one. There’s the stalker thriller movie it starts and that’s advertised in the trailer. The looming threat over the first half of the film is waiting for Greta to finally be pushed too far and kidnap the main character, Frances, for whatever purposes she has. The problem is, when this does eventually happen, the pacing is dragged to a halt while the film sets up a new movie — this one more Misery than Single White Female.

And also, maybe it’s just me, but I knew this film was heading toward captivity, so I kept waiting for something to happen that would surprise me. Maybe when folks finally came to save Frances, she’d gone full stockholm syndrome. Maybe it turned out her friend was secretly working with Greta. Maybe Frances would turn the tables and end up holding Greta hostage in a reversal and we’d see the victim become the torturer. Something.

The best thing about the movie, besides that three sequences that I alluded to above, is the reveal that Greta is not actually French, but Hungarian, and that the French accent she puts on is an affectation. This is great because the movie, too, puts on a pretentious French affectation. Unfortunately…that’s as deep as it goes. I really wanted there to be more here than there was, or at least for Greta to get really crazy, but sadly, there just wasn’t.

What I’ve Been Doing

Due to some happy financial news, we’ve been making some plans to alter things around Casa del Dow. For one thing, we’ve been looking at moving out of our one bedroom apartment and into something more sustainable. We looked at several options, and although we really wanted to make the jump to renting a house so we wouldn’t have to deal with annoying upstairs neighbors crashing around at 3 or 4 AM, we weren’t sure we could keep up with the increase in rent.

We’ve found a few places that seem like decent choices — one place in particular, if we can get in, would nearly double the size of our apartment while keeping the rent pretty close to the same. Whether any of this pans out remains to be seen, so no promises at this time. But hopefully here soon, I’ll be writing these posts from an office for the first time in nearly 3 years.

Additionally, I’m planning to replace my current HP Stream laptop with a Chromebook. The irony is the HP Stream was bought to replace the last Chromebook so that I could install some writing programs on it, like yWriter, and so I wouldn’t have to rely on an internet connection to write. However, since then, I’ve started using Dabble, which is browser based and syncs to the cloud, so I don’t really use anything that needs to be installed anymore.

Chromebooks run like lightning as long as they have an internet connection, and since almost everywhere that I would be writing does, too, it means I can get everything I need from in a machine at a fraction of the cost of a laptop. Plus, I still have my desktop for everything else. This is just for easy, portable writing.

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And that’s the wrap up for this week. How has your week been? Done anything your proud of and want to share? Watched or read anything you want to chat about? Comment below! Or, if you’d prefer, you can drop me an email or hit me up on Twitter. I’d love to hear from y’all.

‘Til next time!