eye candy

Last week I found a teaser trailer on io9 for a short film that will apparently be turned into a movie. The teaser looked so interesting that I hunted down the whole short film on YouTube and decided to post it here. I can't say much about the plot because there isn't much of a plot, but damn if this isn't great fetish fuel. You'll see cyborg clones emerging from pods with glowing eyes and full, gorgeous, skin-tight battle armor - then, yes, battling one another. I won't pretend there's much logic behind their fighting, but it has that Maxtrix-y wire-fu look that never gets old, so that's all right. ;-) If this thing really becomes a movie, maybe this short film will be the opening scene and the rest of the plot will make more sense.

Anyway, enjoy.

Are you ready for a great new hypnosis movie?

Well, I don't know for sure that this will be great, but just look at the director (Danny Boyle of Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire, etc.) and the cast (headed by the beyond-great-in-everything-he-does James McAvoy). And it's about hypnosis, and it implies that McAvoy's character can be made to anything, and the title of the thing is actually Trance. So, really, what else do you need to know?

Because it's impossible to get too much of this

I posted this video once, long ago, but I was watching it again just now and realized there might be some poor, benighted fetishists out there who have yet to see it.

Then again, even if you have seen it before, you really can't see it often enough.

The fairness dilemma

Just a little update on the EMC novella I'm writing. I did a lot of work on it over the weekend. I'm currently about 2/3 of the way through the first draft, and last night I ended up in a strange dilemma. In the chapter I'm working on (which I won't specify) I'd planned to put Character X in a tight situation; but when it came time to write the scene, I realized it had to be even tighter. I needed more drama in that part of the story, so Character X's tight situation is now life-or-death.

That put me in a funny spot because I realized that ending the chapter with X mid-crisis would make for a perfect cliffhanger. I'd have readers tearing their hair out for a week. };-) On the other hand, it would also make for a chapter only half the length of the others, and readers would be crying "no fair."

There's a debate I've had with some of my fellow authors about how much we owe our readers. Most of the EMC writers I know admit to beefing up sex scenes just because the audience expects them, although what turns us on is the MC. Personally, I can get more turned on by a movie with an MC scene and no sex (like most of the ones in my last post) than an EMC story with explicit sex.

 Another part of the "How much do we owe our readers" debate is about plot. What do we allow to happen to characters the audience really cares about? Do we own our creations entirely, or does our readers' investment in their fates mean the readers have some ownership as well? You might be surprised to learn I take the latter view. After all, I've done some horrible things to my characters - even if they end up loving them! But I feel like I have an obligation to my readers. I write for my own pleasure, but also for yours. In fact, I probably write more for your pleasure than I ought to; I'm sensitive that way.

All this is to say that, by the end of the night, I decided to solve X's dilemma within the chapter and end it at another scene...which also, completely coincidentally, is a cliffhanger. ;-P