Support the worst film ever made

Atlanta Nights was deliberately written to be the worst book ever produced and now they're making a film of it. Would you like to support it through Kickstarter?

The reason for writing such a terrible book was to see if PublishAmerica would take it on. They did. This "not a vanity publishing press, oh no, not us" company later withdrew their offer - but only after the authors owned up and told them that it was a hoax. Previously they hadn't noticed misnumbered and repeated chapters or an entire chapter generated by a program that simply recycled sentences from earlier chapters.

The film is intended as a terrible warning. I'm not sure whether I'm up for shelling out for it but it's interesting. What do you think? You can find the Kickstarter page here and it's worth looking at the Wiki article too.

Bad sex

The winner of the Bad Sex Award 2010 as his "winning" speech said

There's nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of a nation, I thank you

I thought that was a rather gracious response to receiving an award that no one wants to win.

I was intrigued to learn that his story is

about how the scars of childhood abuse affect later relationships and it's based on two people's real experience

and I wonder how the lines that have been so often quoted would appear in context. I may have to get hold of the book to find out, so it's true what they say about publicity.

The article by the award winner is here. If you're at all interested in writing books then it's worth reading.

First Contact

For those of us interested in science fiction, I wrote in a previous post about the problems of talking to aliens. How could we communicate with beings so vastly different from us? Most of us have enough problems understanding someone from France or Russia.

A lot of people seem to think that drawing and maths are key. I recently came across this article which makes some interesting suggestions.

I'm not convinced that even simple drawings would be understood across such a vast cultural gulf. Suppose the aliens "see" by echolocation? But if we're writing stories we have to assume a lot of commonalities or there would be nothing to tell. Or would there?
 

Spot the mistake

In the book I'm reading the narrator discovers someone on the point of death:

The body... sucked in a shuddering breath... and then... exhaled it in a single word...

'Vale!' it said.

A little later the narrator looks the word up in the dictionary:

What was that word the stranger had breathed in my face? 'Vale!' That was it!

...here it was: vale... It was pronounced val-eh...

Am I the only person to see something wrong here?

When someone says something to me I know how it is pronounced but not necessarily how it is spelt. In this story, the narrator knows how to spell a word she has heard but not how it sounds. How is that possible? It pulled me right out of the story.

A story emerges

My story is emerging as a Diana Wynne-Jones/Isaac Asimov fan fiction mishmash.

I'm amazed I haven't been approached by a major publisher yet but maybe I need to add a few ninjas first.

Bad sex writing

It's a pity they didn't have the Bad Sex Award back in 1968. I've just come across a gem in the Pop Sensation blog. Scroll down to the excerpt from page 81 and you'll see what I mean.

I tell myself that nothing I write is ever going to be that bad.