On Sunday Heather and I strolled down to the Grand Lake Theater and caught a matinee of Hot Fuzz. Great stuff. Spot on homage that celebrates the sublime ridiculousness of big action movies even as it sends up the conventions of same. I liked Shaun of the Dead better, but that's just because I like zombie movies more than action movies. Why oh why isn't Edgar Wright's TV show Spaced available via Netflix? Oh, the inhumanity!

I've been playing God of War II pretty constantly, and I like it even better than the first one. I am, literally, four button-pushes away from beating the game. I played pretty late into the night yesterday, and by 1 a.m. I was facing off against Zeus, the final boss, but I was simply too sleepy by then to hit the right buttons fast enough to complete the final finishing move, so I gave up. I'll give it another go tonight. It's a video game that makes me want to write epic fantasy.

We're still watching Rome -- really lovely. Truly an embarrassment of good TV lately. I love episodic audio-visual storytelling, when it's handled well.

Today I finished David Wellington's Monster Planet, which I'm sure I'll review for A Certain Magazine sometime soon. It's the last book in his awesome zombie trilogy, and it brings back characters from both the previous novels. The coolness factor is ratcheted up really high. I'm enjoying it. Recently read and liked Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr (which should be reviewed in the June issue of A Certain Magazine) -- if you liked Tithe by Holly Black, you'll probably like Wicked Lovely.

I pretty much live for narrative fiction. It's the art form that speaks to me most strongly, be it the interactive narrative of games, the reader/author imaginative partnership of prose fiction or comics, or the more passively-viewed narrative of film and television. I'm interested in creating work in all those forms, though because I do poorly in group situations and am an indifferently skilled collaborator overall, it's better if I stick with prose, I think, since the other forms require greater or lesser degrees of group effort. I used to privilege books over all other forms, thinking there was no higher art than writing prose to convey narrative, but in recent years, well, I've come to think that's nonsense -- there's more good prose fiction than good TV or movies or comics or games, yeah, but written fiction has been around for a whole hell of a lot longer, so of course there's a relative preponderance of quality in that form. I don't think written fiction is inherently superior to movies or TV or games or comics. If I did, I wouldn't have written "Impossible Dreams", which is all about how great movies can be.

(Speaking of fine narrative, don't forget to pre-order the new issue of Flytrap!)