A voice I'm hearing, sweet to my ear

Because lugging around 350 loose pages is hard I saved the Final Draft document as a .rtf, opened it in Calibre, exported it as a .mobi file and dropped it into the Kindle app. Processing the files took less time than it took the phone to sync. And then, hey presto, I was reading my new novel on my iPhone.

It's not perfect. The left hand margin is too wide (Final Draft's default page set-up accommodates punch-holes) and the chapter headings aren't linked, but for proofing purposes, it's ideal.

Every six months formatting ebook has become easier. A lot easier.

Writing -- that's still hard. And publishers, they still have to make money, so tomorrow probably belongs to Mia and her Twitter followers. But remember in BSG when Adam lends President Roslyn his copy of A Murder on Picon? I'm hoping the day after tomorrow will be like that. A little less Dani, a little more Runkle.

Boom! There she was

I have a short story 'Here She Comes Now' in the latest edition of Landfall 223, Fantastic, edited by the poet David Eggleton. Landfall is sometimes hard to find but there is a new dedicated site here.

I've seen David Eggleton perform many times over the years, at rock concerts and live events, and always enjoyed it. If I remember correctly he was at Sweetwaters in the 80s, and maybe something in Myers Park with The Swingers, and his work always held its own. He had a dynamic stage presence and a smart, accessible approach to writing about New Zealand. In the wake of The God Boy and Owls Do Cry you felt like there had to be another way of going about it: Eggleton was one of the people who said yeah, there was.

PS: A nice piece from a crime writer who watches watches too much sport. Put him in the books column.

She's not that indie, you

Your Sister's Sister is the story of a man who having failed to notice that Emily Blunt is in love with him accidentally sleeps with Rosemarie DeWitt. This is unlikely but the acting's good and you get to hear Bluntsky whisper at length in that plummy Surbiton accent while watching Midge Daniels from Mad Men, and Mark Duplass brings shine to what could have been a silly role. Directing and writing -- those truly unlikely bedfellows -- are shared by Lynn Shelton (Mad Men). The ménage à trois and its rustic setting are beyond any human reach (behold the luxurious chill of dawn trickling golden across my ladycabin) but all the more desirable for it. This Nora Ephron for the Nirvana crowd; Sex, Lies and Videotape for people who are too young to know what that is.

And all the earthly things they stop to play

Why Jean-Luc Godard is as cool as fuck. Full interview here.

London transport

Today a dune buggy caught fire on Pankhurst Road in Nag's Head, approximately 65 kilometers away from any dunes. Peoples stopped to film it on their smartphones. A man in an electric wheelchair parked on the edge of the pavement to watch. A young woman standing next to me asked for help: she did not know how to operate the zoom function. 'You pinch the screen, like this,' I said, but her iPhone did not respond. 'No mate, you can't zoom while you're filming,' said a man next to her. He suggested she switch to still mode. She thanked us both. Remaining vehicles that were not on fire continued to maneuver around the vehicle that was. The dune buggy's front tyres exploded. Later as smoke filled the road there came the sound of sirens and the cars that were still moving / not on fire stopped, blocking the one-way street completely. There was a long pause. The flames were now twice the height of the car. 'I hope there's nobody in it,' said a man. I said a dune buggy has no doors or roof. He looked doubtful. After several minutes an ambulance broke through the traffic and drove past the burning dune buggy to the intersection further down the road. 'A woman at the lights had a panic attack,' another woman explained. The fire engine was still stuck several cars back. Some firemen had got out and were shouting at motorists to move. By now the dune buggy was a black wire frame in an orange sheet of flame half the height of the lamp posts and the smoke was so thick it was difficult to take a decent photograph. The cars pulled over and the fire engine began to move forward until an Audi pulled out and stopped at an angle across the lane, blocking it again. The firemen moved the Audi by shouting.  The dune buggy was beginning to die down, now. The tender pulled up and two firemen ran out a hose. People filmed them putting out the fire. 'You'd better watch out, the fuel tank could explode,' said a third woman. Wouldn't that have happened by now? I said. The man in the wheelchair shook his head, reversed, and drove away.

Sunlight on a broken column

The Newsroom. Fucking A.

I believe I'm an Aaron Sorkin fan. Loved Sports Night, hated The West Wing, sneakily attached to Studio 60 (disclosure: dolphin girl), openly admired The Social Network -- greatly; kinda liked Moneyball... Liked The Newsroom. A lot.

Smart move (i): setting it in a newsroom. We expect bored media-savvy types to talk in a media-savvy, bored way about the media. Smart move (ii): setting it all just a little bit in the past. Unlike The West Wing (AKA The Waltons), The Newsroom invites us to examine its narrative churn with the benefit of hindsight. Not a lot of hindsight, because that would be history and require us to work: The Newsroom skates on mid-term memory, perfectly. For example the Gulf oil spill was about BP and Halliburton but, yes, long term, we would all better remember the new iPhone. We are the hollow men, and so forth. You know the drill.

The beautiful victim

Watching A Perfect Murder (1998) again reminded me how much I like it. Written by Patrick Smith Kelly for director Andrew Davis (The Fugitive), the story is based on Frederick Knott's play Dial M For Murder, which Knott adapted for Alfred Hitchcock's film version in 1954. There are a few nods to its heritage, such as the camera in the opening credits spiralling upwards to a loft window with a touch of Vertigo, but the story is its own movie.

A Perfect Murder works because it focusses almost entirely on the triangle of Steven, Emily and David: there's no relief from the mental lock they have on each other, and no rationalisation offered by other characters. The casting is perfect. Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow are believable as wealthy, successful people (because they are) and Viggo Mortensen is just on the right side of smart. He lives in what is now an unbelievable loft, but his boho life is as intrinsic to the plot as the Taylors' wealth: if they didn't live like that, there wouldn't be a story. New York is presented as a village in three parts: the two apartments and Emily's home -- again, mirroring the characters -- and there is no escape either by car, boat or train. No friends, no-one you can trust. Most of all what I like about it is its economy. No set ups, no back story, information rolled out when it serves the story and not before. The technology has dated -- landline telephones, slow trading screens -- but it's credible. This is one of the last pre-smartphone thrillers: once everyone had a handset, killing would change.