Ah... it's finally here. The X Files: I Want to Believe, which in my head, I have retitled...

The X Files: I Want That 2 Hours of my Life Back

It’s always a danger revisiting the past. Nothing is ever quite as you imagine it. And so it is with this latest offering from the X Files world. The movie opens several years after Mulder (David Duchovny) has turned into a newspaper-clipping collecting recluse, and Scully (Gillian Anderson) is working as a surgeon at a local Catholic hospital, treating a boy with a rare brain disease. She is asked by the FBI to contact Mulder and ask for his help (all is forgiven with the stroke a Chris Carter’s pen, apparently), because there is an FBI agent missing and the only link they have to her is one Father Joseph (a very unfunny Billy Connelly), a defrocked priest and convicted paedophile whose vision have led them to one severed limb (not the victim’s) and therefore is believed to know something about the case.

Mulder, of course, gets involved (after the obligatory five minutes of refusing to have anything to do with the FBI – tears of blood will do that for you), and then Scully, too, falling back into her old role as a sceptic, not to mention her dislike of the priest who molested 37 altar boys.

From there, we plunge even further into the incompressible plot, which involves gay lovers (I think), another missing woman, non-English speaking Russian scientists conducting weird experiments in the US (where is so much easier to blend in than, well, Russia), inept FBI agents, smouldering at the inclusion of Mulder in their investigation. And then there’s the relationship between Mulder and Scully. The underlying tension between these two characters was at the core of the success of the series. Here it’s not. I read an interview with Duchovny recently where he described their relationship more like “brother and sister” these days. That maybe so, but only if you live in places fond of duelling banjos.

What I found most disturbing about this film was what it didn’t touch on, rather than the direction it took. Scully spends much of her time treating her patient suffering from one of those wonderful “movie cancers” which enables you to remain looking fabulous while knocking on death’s door. It also gives you an excuse to Google the one piece of vital evidence needed to put all the pieces together, because, you know, the FBI probably don’t know how to do that. Where was the angst? The hospital’s administration wants to send her patient to a hospice to die, because it’s the kind thing to do. Not a word about her experimental stem cell treatment. In a Catholic hospital in the US without someone asking where the stem cells came from? I don’t think so.

The plot is riddled with oddities like this. My friends and I (one of whom is a dyed-in-the wool X-phile) sat over coffee ranting, in fact, most sentences beginning with “how come they didn’t…?” or “what was the point of…?”, for a good half hour after we came out of the cinema.

So, if you liked the X Files, based on the opinion of the X-phile I took with me, you’ll wonder why they bothered. And if you don’t… well, I think the sentiment was expressed most succinctly by a young woman sitting behind us, who, at about the halfway mark, announced to everyone in the theatre at the top of her voice… “God… I am soooo bored.”

Look at this... a shiny new "browse inside" feature for HC titles. Aren't they just the clever ones:)

Browse Inside this book

They don't have all my titles up yet (I'm assuming it's yet) and they're clearly not adding them in chronological order... (Warlord is up but not Wolfblade or Warrior... huh?) but the full list is here.

Have fun wasting time while you should be working:)

Lisa from Seven Foot Shelves  has posted a mini-review of The Immortal Prince. Gotta love this one... it finishes with the line: Right. Thumbs up. Read this book, it is tasty goodness.

I like "tasty goodness". And she's says I'm starting to rival Robin Hobb. Did I mention Lisa is my new best friend?:)

Interesting though, that she comments how she got the "big reveal" quite easily. People say this a lot. An awful lot. All the time. Once a week I get quite an email saying "loved the book, Fallon, but I am so clever because figured out the big secret really early".

To which I always want to respond... I know, sweetie. But you're not as clever as you think. You were meant to work it out. I wasn't even trying to keep it a secret. I wrote it like that on purpose. You see, people patting themselves on the back for working the first "big secret" out, never saw the other one coming. Tee hee.

Anyway, here's the review. I suggest you check out the Seven Foot Shelves blog. It's an excellent site with some very interesting reviews for a wide variety of books.

I’m sticking to a mini-review on this book, because I’ve been putting off reviewing it for lack of verbose content. I don’t feel like writing a plot description – every time I try the summary falls flat and just doesn’t do the book justice. So, a mini-review!

Jennifer Fallon is rapidly rising on my list of authors I like – I have a feeling that by the end of this quartet she’ll break through from “good authors” to “favorite authors” on my mental tally. She just does characters and intrigue so damn well – what other author can claim that they have given me an aversion to a particular beverage based solely upon one of their characters’ use of it?

Woo, tangent! Stick to the mini-review. At first I was afraid that The Immortal Prince would be too predictable (I called one of her “big reveals” quite early) but she got me pretty good with another one of her reveals – any time an author causes me to emit an utterance loud enough to attract JD from two rooms over, it’s pretty impressive. The characters were excellent and well developed (as always) and I can sense the potential for angst building towards a head later in the quartet. Did I mention that Jennifer Fallon is starting to rival Robin Hobb for angst levels? Impressive, I know.

Right. Thumbs up. Read this book, it is tasty goodness.

It has occured to me, re-reading The Chaos Crystal, that there are some very big suprises in store, particularly for those of you who think you know where this series is going.

Because this is the book where everything comes to a conclusion, and because it ends in a place I can promise you, nobody will pick*, I was wondering if the ending is going to seem completely left of centre, or if you have some inkling of what's going on.

So here's a few general, non-spoiler questions for those of you have had read any of the Tide Lords series, and given the matter some thought...

Q1: How old are the oldest immortals?

a) More than 10,000 years old
b) More than 50,000 years old
c) More than 100,000 years old
d) More than 1,000,000 years old

Q2: Where is Amyrantha?

a) It's an alternate version of Earth
b) In a galaxy far, far away
c) In Fallon's imagination, mostly

Q3: Most Tide Lords...

a) ...lie about everything
b) ...lie about some things
c) ...only lie about the important things

And yes... all of these questions are relevant to the ending...

Muwahahahaha...

*Remember the title of my thesis - Subverting the Trope of Immortality.... hehehe

Part one of line edit of The Chaos Crystal finished (roughly 200 pages). Generally I'm quite happy with the changes.  Some of them, not so much...

For a laugh, I thought I'd share my favourite editing moment with you. You see, once upon a time, I wrote a sentence about a badly scarred character in a (now published) book that said:

He smiled, making him look quite fierce.

To which a very helpful editor replied with a note in the margin:

One can't smile and still look fierce so I have changed the sentence to what I think you mean -

He smiled, making him look...

(wait for it...)

WOLFHUNGRY

WTF!!!!

I am not making this up. But I can assure you, "wolfhungry" did not make it into the final draft.

It did, however, afford me an opportunity to demonstrate my mastery of cussing and cursing, which, as I recall, went on for a couple of hours, before I calmed down enough to pencil into the margin beside the correction "STET".

Ah... the joys of being an author:)