Bradley P. Beaulieu

For your viewing pleasure, I give you Al Gore’s Energy Crisis speech and challenge to the United States. You can find out more at www.wecansolveit.org.

This story, which appeared in the June issue of Realms of Fantasy, picked up a Nebula nod. Only nine more to go!

If you’re a member of SFWA, and you’d like to give the story a read, you can do so here.

My story, "No Viviremos Como Presos," is now live over at IGMS, courtesy of Issue 9. For my Clarionite friends out there, this was the Wall story. If that doesn’t help, you can preview a portion of the story even if you don’t buy the issue.

I picked up The Magic Thief at WisCon, where I managed to snag a really cool autograph from Sarah. She signs it in the runes she uses in the book, which I thought was a totally cool way to sign for someone. I doubt she did that just for me, but I like to pretend that she did.

Anyway, the book… Here’s the product description, via Amazon:

In a city that runs on a dwindling supply of magic, a young boy is drawn into a life of wizardry and adventure. Conn should have dropped dead the day he picked Nevery’s pocket and touched the wizard’s locus magicalicus, a stone used to focus magic and work spells. But for some reason he did not. Nevery finds that interesting, and he takes Conn as his apprentice on the provision that the boy find a locus stone of his own. But Conn has little time to search for his stone between wizard lessons and helping Nevery discover who—or what—is stealing the city of Wellmet’s magic.

I didn’t know what to expect from the book, because I hadn’t read anything about it before buying it, but I’m familiar with Sarah’s writing from her short fiction (as well as trading a few crits on good old OWW). I was certainly not let down. The Magic Thief was a wonderful ride through the city of Wellmet told through the eyes of Conn. It’s being marketed as a middle-grade novel, but to me it holds its own to "older" YA novels. It is difficult for me, as a writer, to attain that trancelike state of reading where the world falls away and you live the book. But with The Magic Thief, it did so practically from cover to cover. If I had to make any comparisons, which are often unfair but useful for those who haven’t yet read the novel, I would liken it to The Thief, by Megan Whelan Turner. There are some parallels in plot, but I’m speaking more of the simplicity and beauty of prose and story. Sarah’s style is perhaps a bit more bright and shiny, particularly early in the story, and so I think it lends itself more readily to younger readers.

I loved the interplay between Conn and Nevery. I’m hopefully not giving anything away by saying that the way their relationship grew from an initial, chance meeting into one of deep complexity was a treasure to read. The same was true of Conn and Benet’s relationship as well as a few others that revealed themselves only after the story was in full swing.

Sarah did a good job of closing the story while leaving a few unanswered questions for the rest of the trilogy. I’m certainly ready for more whenever they come out.

If you have a young reader of fantasy, or if you enjoy books written in that vein, I would strongly recommend this book.

So I finally managed to see Cloverfield. I had it Netflixed and tonight carved out eighty-five minutes to watch it. I had been interested in it because (A) it seemed cool and (B) it was a movie I knew practically nothing about. If I find one of those, I usually avoid previews and reviews like the plague, because just like George Castanza’s dad, I like to go in fresh!

Overall, I enjoyed it. I hadn’t seen a take on a monster movie like this, viewed purely from the point of view of the victims. That particular strength became a weakness, oh, about ten minutes in. One of the characters, Hud, got hoodwinked into filming the movie for his best friend’s going away party (and for the rest of the movie, essentially, so that we, the "ones left alive" could view it after the fact, a la Blair Witch). Hud took to his assignment like, well, like his job as an actor depended on it. And that was the problem. You quickly came to view Hud as a proxy for the filmers. His actions, which were largely questions stiffly framed to draw out exposition, came off as a clumsy attempt at painting him as part of the scenery. And that sentiment struck me before the beast showed up, which was an issue.

That being said, I new it wasn’t going to improve, so I simply suspended disbelief, and largely it worked. The story doled out the information in relatively small chunks, never giving too much away, but enough to keep the viewer interested. You never did get any sense of where this creature came from or why it had found itself in Manhattan. There was an overturned tanker, from which the monster liberated itself, and that was just about it. That in itself was cool. They stayed pretty tight to the point-of-view of these characters, who wouldn’t be privy to any of that information, and I appreciated that they stayed tightly within that frame.

The beastie had some tricks up its sleeve, too. It wasn’t just a run around and stomp on things creature, though it did plenty of that. It had babies, little Alienesque creatures that stormed through the darker parts of Manhattan. And they did Alien-like things after they bit you, too. I liked the effects quite a bit, and they weren’t overly gratuitous with them. They spaced them out between the more human-focusing scenes of the movie, never giving the thing too much airtime or daylight for that matter.

Here’s the other main problem I had with the movie, though. The monster? Man, did it have a lock on these characters. Wherever they went, there it was, giving them all the grief they could handle and more. I know, there’s no story without it, but when the monster follows them around, apparently by accident, it makes the viewer overly aware of the hand of the director, and just like the guy behind the camera, it was too present, especially in the middle and later portions of the movie.

But overall? I liked it. Don’t expect anything deep. It’s just a little diversion, but a tense and interesting and scary one at that.

I give it a B-

What about you?

If anyone has ever wondered what Stockholm looks like, well I have just the thing. I humbly submit to you the pictures I took (no captions, sorry) via this web album.

The time is approaching for the IGMS anthology, which includes my story, "In the Eyes of the Empress’s Cat," to be released. I found out something interesting while I was in Sweden recently. Kathleen Bellamy, Orson Scott Card’s assistant, called to ask how to say my last name. Apparently they’re coming out with an audio version of the anthology as well. Professionally read and produced and all. I’m totally stoked about this. I’m really curious to hear how someone else will read the story. Probably better than I could if they have any chops at all. (Not that I have no chops when it comes to reading. I’m just not, you know, stellar at it.) I’m not yet sure if it’s going to be a download or CD-only. I imagine it’ll be downloadable somewhere, but I’ll post more details when I have them.

Oh, and by the way, my last name? You pronounce it BOWL-yer. You can’t look at the name when you say it. Just gotta think Bowl Yer Ass Off, without the Ass Off.

I have a story in this anthology, and it just went officially on sale. I share the TOC with friends and fellow writers Paul Genesse, Anton Strout, and Don Bingle. If you pick up a copy, I’d love to hear what you think of the story.