Just hit the 200 page mark in the new book, The Apocalypse Corpse. That’s around 55,000 words in Pages, the word processor I’m using. I estimate it to be around the two-thirds mark, as I think the book will come in somewhere between 250-300 pages.

So I’ve been averaging a little more than 100 pages a month, which is like warp speed for me. And I’ve only skipped one minor scene so far, which I’ll fill in later.

I am now officially exhausted.

I’ve got family visiting for the next week, so I probably won’t do much more until March. But who knows — maybe I’ll have a rough draft done by April rather than June, as I was originally predicting.

Oh yes, the body count continues to climb.

Just discovered the work of Nele Azevedo. Stunning stuff. If you like this, you may also like the art of Jason de Caires Taylor.

Today while I was working on the new book, Alden toddled into my office, grabbed a Mark Leyner book from the shelf, and then toddled off down the hall again. Later he came back and pulled some more books off the shelf to read. I guess I can’t complain. Now if I only knew where he’d put that Leyner book….

I’ve rented three sci-fi movies in the last few months: District 9, Monsters and Transformers: Revenge of the Batteries. Guess which ones I liked and which one I thought was even more idiotic than I expected it to be.

District 9 — Great use of that documentary/security camera feel. The whole film should have been done that way. The weak parts were when it used conventional static camera shots to flesh out parts of the storyline. Those parts made me wonder if they were demanded by studio execs who worried people wouldn’t be able to think the story through.

District 9 also did what sci-fi is supposed to do — use the future to talk about the present. (Because really, isn’t that what Alien and Blade Runner are? Anxieties about the time in which they were filmed, projected into the future.) We don’t really need to discuss the “messages” of this film, do we? Let’s just say it was actively engaged with the geopolitics of the current era, and not an escapist fantasy about the future, and leave it at that.

Monsters — Just watched it last night. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting more than a sci-fi thriller or horror flick, based on the marketing. It looked like another Cloverfield. Instead, it was as thoughtful and as politically engaged as District 9. The film is set mostly in Mexico, parts of which have become an “infected zone” after a spacecraft brings back some alien hitchhikers and crashes there. The aliens start off small and then grow into large tentacley beasts that try to migrate into America. The Americans build a wall to stop them and launch a war on the alien immigrants…. get it? It’s full of nods to the war on drugs, illegal immigration, the role of the media, even the subprime crisis (if you look at a destroyed neighbourhood the right way). Interestingly, the closer the characters get to America, the worse things become.

Monsters is more subtle than District 9 — it’s largely an emotional film rather than a political action film. There are some stunningly beautiful shots, and a lot of moments that just celebrate humanity and community. Communion, even. The ending, well, let’s just say the film ends on an emotional note rather than a plot point. It could have been overwrought and anti-climatic, but it works perfectly.

Transformers — a film about toys. And maybe cars. The cars could be toys though, so I’m not sure they deserve a separate category. The film is also about…. no, that’s it. Toys.

It saddens me that this film gets a blockbuster release, while District 9 and Monsters have to be “discovered” and championed by celebrities, just to get medium-sized releases. And only then when their marketing campaigns try to present them as films they aren’t — bug hunt shoot ’em ups or horror flicks. But I guess that’s what sells.

I don’t know who I’m really upset with more — the Hollywood studios or the film audiences.

I can’t decide which I like better, the Radiohead version of “Single Ladies”

or the Cleverys’ version

One of my favourite writers, Peter Watts, has been afflicted by flesh-eating disease. Sounds like’s going to be all right, but wow.

Hit the 175-page mark today. Researched prosthetic limbs — which led into an accidental detour into prosthetic tentacles. Yeah, we’re a freak species. Also making an appearance in the book:

– subprime ghost neighbourhoods

– Ronald Reagan

– a shootout with pepper spray.

I also took  the time to shoot a background video for my story “Deja Yu Makes the Pain Go Away.”

Plus, you know: Valentine’s Day.

All right, back to the bodies.

So it took me one night to write an 8,700-word short story. Then it took me two days to cut 2,000 words from it to make it a publishable length. Now it’s taken me two days to cut 200 words to bring it in at 6,500 words (a number that has meaning only to me).

I don’t even want to think about how long it’s going to take me to come up with a title.

About 44,000 words in now. And many more bodies since the last update. Maybe I should call this book The Apocalypse Corpses.

I’m thinking about doing short video intros for each of my stories and books. Here’s one I recorded yesterday for my latest story, “we continue to pray for something to end our prayers,” which was recently published by This magazine.

we continue to pray from peterdarbyshire on Vimeo.