Weekend Clouds
Posted on September 28, 2015 Posted by John Scalzi 25 Comments
And it was a good weekend for them. I was concerned that the clouds would prevent us from seeing the lunar eclipse last night, but as it turned out there was a gap in the cloud cover just as the moon was sliding into the shadow of the Earth. So we got to see it in all of its blood moon glory. I didn’t take pictures of that; I assumed everyone else would. I was not disappointed in that expectation.
I spent the weekend largely away from the Internets because I was working on a project and I didn’t want to be distracted. The project was a screenplay, specifically an adaptation of one of my shorter works. I did it primarily for my own benefit; I don’t expect you’ll see this screenplay out in the world, although you never know. Stranger things have happened. In any event I enjoyed myself and learned a few things, too. It’s nice when that happens.
How was your weekend?
Beautiful shot :)
My weekend was pretty good. Lovely weather for the Baltimore Book Festival, but Cat Rambo got the flu and couldn’t make it, which was a bummer. Still it was very nice to meet Carmen Maria Machado, Bill Campbell, G.L. Tomas (which is the pen name of two sisters, Guinevere and Libby Tomas), Michael R. Underwood, KM Szpara, Bud Sparhawk, Emmie Mears, and others, and to see friends like Fran Wilde, Tobias Buckell, and Justina Ireland. Sarah Pinsker did a great job putting the program together.
I would have gotten to meet even more if I had made it in for more than just Friday! Sadly, I was not feeling well Saturday and stayed home instead. (Meanwhile, Brian took Rosie to a Fall Festival for corn mazes and such, and she had her first hayride! It sounded like fun.)
I was especially excited to learn just before the festival that Rosarium Publishing is putting out a comic book adaptation of Tobias S. Buckell’s Arctic Rising next year. That and other upcoming releases are highlighted in a flyer I made for the event,
http://netmouse.com/me/portfolio/2015_UpcomingReleasesBBF.pdf
–AFTER I made that flyer, I found out during one of our panels that Nisi Shawl has a Congolese Steampunk novel coming out in 2016 as well! It’s called Everfair and I am quite eager to see that. At the Festival I picked up a copy of the anthology she and Bill Campbell put together called Stories for Chip. Bill signed it and everything. He’s really neat! I think we can expect great things from Rosarium Publishing.
Last night’s Eclipse was really neat. Been too long since I shivered in the cool night air, staring up at the sky in wonder.
The God Engines: A Burlesque Rendition
I spent a beautiful Saturday downtown in St. Petersburg, Florida in a coffee shop grading student papers and taking breaks by watching all the interesting people. And then I had a nice, slow lunch at at Italian restaurant, eating and reading Ian MacDonald’s Luna: New Moon. Have you read it? I am loving it. It has such a rich world-building to it. Nice to be reading it and then later to go out and see the eclipse.
Maybe your screenplay can be made by Netflix (they are doing so many things like that now–as well as Amazon, as far as that goes).
Cheers!
This weekend was good, I finished my paralegal certificate course. Now I can start writing, crafting, and housekeeping again.
Glad you had a productive and educational weekend, sir.
My weekend included an assortment of mixed blessings, lots of work in the house and the yard, some reading (finished Felicia Day’s memoir, which was highly excellent – thanks for hosting her on the Big Idea a few weeks back, as I would not have found that book otherwise) and a little bit of restorative meditation time at the pottery wheel. In other words, pretty much business as usual.
Watched the eclipse last night with Tammy, Bruce and Kathy Coville, and Cynthia Bishop. I even tried taking pictures – but do you know, cameraphones aren’t very good for photographing lunar eclipses? It beat the run of crappy Bollywood movies we kept hitting last night!
I stayed home myself and took care of kitties – but Tammy was GoH at RoberCon, a small and new (but well-run, Tammy says) SF Con in Binghamton, NY…. So here’s a plug for them in her name! :)
http://www.roberson.org/exhibits-events/robercon-roberson-scifi-convention/
I turned 61 on Saturday. Went to the local corn maze, which had a theme of Alice in Wonderland this year. They have games to play within the maze that involve finding objects or answering quiz questions. Spent about an hour and a half walking the maze, and felt much more like 61 by the time I finished.
Love the play of blue with that. Weekend was fair to middling.
Meant to say, “play of blue and yellow.’ Ack.
That photo looks very Van Gogh. Beautiful!
I did a Walk to End Alzheimer’s on Saturday and helped out at the Maryland Library Association booth at the Baltimore Book Fair on Sunday. I did take a few minutes to pop over to the SFWA booth to say hello to folks. Hey, happy Banned Books Week, readers!
Also, I ate an ice cream cone. Mmmmm.
Very disappointed that heavy cloud cover prevented any view of the eclipse, but I did catch the supermoon as it was rising, before it hid behind the clouds.
Of course we’re all secretly hoping that it’s the long-awaited film adaptation of this: http://www.tor.com/2013/04/01/shadow-war-musical-john-scalzi/
Well, if they can turn a 1 page blip into “2001 A Space Odyssey” whatever you did has to be better.
What you should pitch is an anthology show on Cy’s-Fry or whatever the heck they call themselves. Different 30-60 minute stories from new authors or those willing to sell cheap for the joy of it, unknown actors. Sort of a space opera version of The Twilight Zone. You could even kick in a couple of shorts and do the bumpers. But if you start smoking I’ll come down there & kick your butt, we lost Mr Serling too soon.
What did you learn about screen adaptation? I know from my amateur attempts at it, it gives you a whole new view of the source material. Writers cheat! They can zip through an elaborate transformation or setup with a couple of sentences, counting on the reader’s imagination to fill in such details as the reader cares about (probably few). “They met below the monument on the hill and she quickly briefed him on what she’d done.” Easy! But when you make a script, you have to think through every damn fiddly detail or step in that sentence. What is it a monument of? What’s the time of day and the weather? Which of them got there first? And most of all, what did they actually say? Because you know, they have to speak, and the actors will expect to find some lines in the script you’re writing, so you have to invent the dialog your source couldn’t be arsed to think up — and make sure the speeches fit well in those character’s mouths, as well as conveying the needed info to the audience. It’s quite challenging, but in a different way from writing the story in prose.
PetMaster 2000- in 3D?
I went to the LA County Fair with a six-year old. Very hot, but the kids buildings had lots to occupy him, and he got thrown about a million bead necklaces at the parade.
I was thinking of you, because I drove to Ohio for the weekend to visit family. The weather was flawless right up until the Eclipse began and THEN it clouded over completely . So we watched it on the internet. Glad you got to see it directly!
Since it costs me nothing to be wrong, I hereby choose to believe firmly that Scalzi is writing a screenplay for “Shadow War of the Night Dragons”.
I truly hope it’s a screenplay of The God Engines. It’s one of my favorites and underrated I think.
I’m really hoping for a God Engines movie. I’d definitely see that.
How was my weekend? Really, really good… because of Facebook. Seriously.
Let me explain.
I spent much of my youth damaging my hearing in one not-going-anywhere band after another. Now that I’ve got a bit of grey, a business and a child my musical life consists of writing songs to play at our local pub’s open stage. Our Australian, *rural* local pub. The biggest ‘crowd’ we’ve had in the year or so I’ve been going is 15 or so. And of those folks I always know the vast majority of them personally.
Despite the low numbers, and the supportive nature of the audience I get really, really nervous being the front man. So much so that it’s always an internal struggle to convince myself to go. I’m not particularly good. it’s why I own a bicycle shop, and I always feel like I’m wasting people’s time when I play. This is despite the fact that I had a bit of breakthrough a while back where I realised that being perfect was an absurd goal.
On Saturday I changed my FB profile pic to a family selfie of me, my wife, and my child. I got a lot of comments about how happy we look including one from an old friend who knew me when I was a clinically depressed youth. He congratulated me on “…making it there.”, meaning making it to happiness. Reading that woke me up.
I realised that there is no ‘there’ when it comes to happiness. That feeling is an incessantly moving target, conditional in the extreme. I realised that happiness is in fact the effort you make to land on that target, (Please understand that I know that this is not great revelation to anyone but me.) That realisation absolutely made my weekend.
I was still nervous getting up on stage. But I took a second after setting up and asked myself “Do you enjoy playing music?” The answer is of course a resounding “yes”. I wouldn’t have spent so much of my life doing it otherwise. In answering that question I somehow gave myself permission to have fun.
It worked.
It worked so well that I got literal goosebumps when singing the song I wrote for my wife.
It worked so well that everyone commented on how good I sounded, friends, family, and the few strangers who had wandered in.
People bash social media as trivial all the time. And sure, it can be. But it can also connect us in profound ways, life changing ways.
How was my weekend? Fan-fucking-tastic, thanks for asking.
“Shadow War” would be expensive in CGI terms, and you’d lose all the (and I mean this in the nicest possible sense) maniacal unhinged babbling about the demon squid Drindel.
I think “An Election” would make a nice shortish film, though. And it actually has a plot, unlike “Shadow War”.
Good luck on your project! You are one of our favorite 1%’rs
Really, REALLY gorgeous picture, John.
Love these – and the landscape and sunset pictures you share with us.
My weekend was restless. We drive to dallas to pick up my car (military family) which was a 9 hour drive and straight back home after that. So was a long almost 20 hour drive. But other than that was good. :)
FossilFishy, that sounds like a really great experience. And of course, really great insight. thanks for sharing that!