Mes Amis
What hope is there...? There aren't that many paying print British magazines for crime fiction out there... sure there's Bullet and, um, um... well there was Crimewave who were the great hope for British short fiction. They were a little literary for me sometimes, and maybe a tiny bit poseur but there was always something I could find to read in there. But now they've been gone for over a year and Andy Cox keeps saying he'll come back to it soon, but so far no sign. He's naturally busy with the new Interzone magazine and with TTA itself. But without a regular crime magazine, its not wonder that the British short stories are thin on the ground. I do hope Andy gets back to CW soon but I'm a little worried, to be honest, that there might be a fatal announcement soon.
"Nothing exceeds like excess..." I'm going through my old movies at the moment. Its great remembering why I bought them all in the first place. Most of these things are still fresh as hell and Scarface is not exception. It is, on the face of it, a garishly violent move, but then one feels that is precisely the point. As Michelle Pfeiffer points out, "nothing exceeds like excess" and this movie is all about 80's excess. From the horrific tiger print car to the grand mansion with a tiger in the grounds that Tony Montana finally buys for himself, everything in this movie points to the horror of having everything and how the more you have the more you lose touch with reality. On top of that it has one of the most melodramatic and fantastically violent movie endings I've ever enjoyed. If you haven't seen it (and why not?) watch it. Now.
Isn't it nice to be nice?... I hate rejection letters. I get a lot of them. Its part of what I do. Every writer has drawers full of the buggers. But I got a real nice one today which is very odd. I don't know, actually, if its worse than a brush off. Basically, "Of the several submissions you've sent us this one comes closest to being a [magazine's name] story" before going on to praise the characters and local colour but saying it was a bit long and the actual case wasn't surprising. Although the case wasn't the point of the tale, I can accept this. But it is nice when people are nice - - even when they have to do something horrible like write a rejection letter.
Anyway, till next time, mes amis
Au revoir
Russel
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