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Books Lying Open
Soul-Devouring Worry:
Answer of the Day:
Curse of the Day:
Phrase
of the Moment: Hey, it beats, "Shut up!" which is what we used to yell, which had about as much effect on the cat as you might expect. -- August 16, 2004 |
Monday September 27, 2004 |
| Quote
of the Day -- QotD Archives
"Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future." --Niels Bohr |
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Despite delaying this a day, I still don't really have anything to talk about, and it's not for lack of activities, for once. We drove up to Davis on Monday (about 60 miles north) and ran some errands, ate lunch at a good Mexican place (Dos Coyotes), hit CostCo and got food and Halloween candy and Dark Tower VII (the first chapter, all I've read thus far, was better than anything in the entire anemic DT VI, which is a good sign), and after I took my regular dirt hill run and we enjoyed dinner from the huge pot 'o soup I made a few days ago (my usual 30+ ingredient semi-masterpiece). I suppose I've become accustomed to going out and doing things on enough of a regular basis that they're no longer cause for bloginess. Anyway, it wasn't as if last week's blog entries lacked for substance or length, at least so long as you couldn't get enough of the wacky ravings of CAP Alerts Guy.
In other sort of news, Malaya finished the huge Chapter Two of my ongoing fantasy novel last week, and she was pretty pleased with it, on the whole. She thinks it needs massive length cutting, which it certainly does, but she liked all of the info, action stuff, world setting, character details, hints at the larger plot, etc. Her culprit for the main length excess is too much present description. So where I now have say 50 page devoted to the 2 characters crossing a mountain range, 35 of those page are describing them climbing secret paths, avoiding their pursuers, nearly falling from dangerous cliffs, etc, with the other 15 pages background info about the characters, their quest, the state of the world, etc. The block of 15 pages must be included since they're the most interesting stuff and the reader needs that info for the rest of the novel to pay off. It's the 35 pages of semi-interesting action that needs to be whittled down, since even though it's not bad in of itself, it's just too much, too long, too thorough, too detailed, etc. I know/knew this, and I've been telling it to myself as I wrote and edited, but it's far easier to know it than to do it, at least the first time through. My goal/challenge from here on out is to keep that concept foremost in my mid and think through what I'm going to write more thoroughly before I begin writing it. I'll get chapter 1 and 2 down to what I want them to be, but it took me months to write them in the first place, weeks more to edit and rewrite, and it'll take a few more weeks to work through it all again next year, when I'm going back for another semi-final revision. I'm not opposed to all that work, since I'm thinking it out as I go and it's improving in flow and tone and content. But it is a lot of time-consuming work, it's mentally draining to work over the same portion of the novel again and again, and it's time I could better spend writing more new stuff, rather than slowly and painfully improving the early stuff. Months ago, I wrote the first 25 (or so) pages of chapter 3. Of those, perhaps 3 will remain in the rewrite, since I was treading water too much. I knew that at the time, but I wasn't sure where the chapter was going, so I just kept writing and delving into the minutia of the new setting, what the characters were doing, and so on. As the saying goes, "If you don't know where you're going you're unlikely to get there." I get there in my novel, eventually, but so far it's taking lot longer than it should, and having a better map/idea of where I'm going in the first place would improve things as well as speeding them up. When I'm editing I often think of what Blizzard North used to say about designing their games (back when the original designers still worked there). When people asked why it took them so long to make Diablo II, they'd admit to making a lot of mistakes along the way, but always said they were not attached to things too strongly. They'd spend months on a game engine, or a level design, or a game concept, before eventually realizing that it just didn't work that well for what they were trying to do. So they'd throw it away and start over again, or delete 95% of it and use just the best kernel, etc. Time consuming, but their dedication to quality showed up in their games being so good overall. That's not a great analogy for my writing, since after all, I'm doing now (sort of) what they were doing then, while saying I can improve upon it by having flawless plans to start with, rather than feeling my way towards quality over multiple long revisions. So I'm making lots of false starts and producing extraneous material, and my biggest problem is how long that's taking. I'm also too attached to the stuff; it's hard to delete a large section or scene that I like just because it kills the flow of the chapter or because it's not really necessary to the whole book structure. But it's got to be done, to make the overall novel work. Basically, when I get back to working chapter two, months from now when I've written up through chapter 6 (or more) and chapter 2 isn't so fresh in my mind, I'm going to have to wield both the scalpel and the scythe. |
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would say this
is on top of my Xmas list, but there's no way Malaya and me won't be
at Fry's or CostCo on the 14th, buying it ourselves. Feel free to buy me
the $80 super-duper collector's edition though, if you so desire. I'd love
it, but not enough to pay an extra $50 for a CD, a miniature statue, and a
different box.
I was looking over my reviews section a few days ago when I added in my overall scores to the reviews main page, and reading the RotK review again to remember just what I liked about it so much. And damn did that make me want to see it again. We've not seen it since our second viewing in the theaters in early January, and we skipped the theatrical DVD release in order to hold off for the full size extended edition. Sucks that we've got to wait another three months, but that was pretty much to be expected. Also, with no new LotR movies coming out this Xmas to brighten the holiday, RotK with 50 new minutes isn't a poor substitute. I'm also curious to see if the extended edition improves as much as the first 2 LotR movies did. I didn't write an organized, categorized score review for Fellowship or Two Towers, so I couldn't compare those to my reaction to their respective SEE versions, but I liked both much more in longer form. Of my current reviews, the Fellowship Special Edition is the only overall 10, and the theatrical RotK is one of only two 9.5 scores (Alien 2 is the other.) Since Fellowship went up about 3 points for me from the first time I saw it through watching the extended edition a year later, and TTT went up a couple of rating points as well,
It's funny how time works; I normally dread watching TV for even an hour at a time; there's so much else I want to do, mostly in relation to my writing. I don't mind driving Malaya up to Davis, or going to Kali class for three hours, or shopping or other such errands, but that's because I'm not home while I'm doing them. It's illogical, but if the computer is far away from me I don't really think about the work I'm not getting done. But when I'm sitting around the house for the past month or two I've hardly watched any TV unless it's something to watch while eating, or with Malaya. I hardly get any reading done either, since sitting down with a book means time away from the computer. This would all be more understandable if I were actually working eight hours a day on my novel, as I should be. Since I'm often screwing around with blog stuff for hours, or playing video games, or surfing, or watching people injure themselves in amateur skateboard videos, it's unclear why I fret over another 30 minutes of MXC when I'm enjoying snarking on it with a kitty on my lap and Malaya beside me. My point though, was that I'm eagerly looking forward to sitting through the 4+ hours of Return of the King, even though it's just as big a waste of time (in theory) as channel surfing or watching creatures from the shallow end of the gene pool shout at each other on the Jerry Springer show.
Speaking of Peter Jackson, if you don't know about it, check out KongisKing.net, the official unofficial fansite for his upcoming remake of King Kong. It's run by the same people who did the phenomenally-successful TheOneRing.net site, and while there's very little news about the upcoming super monkey film at this point, they do have a dozen short video clips from the set of King Kong, starring and narrated by PJ himself. He sends them in and a new one goes up every 2 or 3 days, and they're interesting if you enjoy the "making of" type behind the scenes features on DVDs. I personally had no desire to see the original, the last remake, or any future remakes of King Kong; it's a giant monkey, grabs a blonde, you feel sorry for its pathos and misery in captivity, it escapes, climbs a skyscraper, is killed by circling biplanes, etc. It's not a bad story, but everyone knows it, even people who've never seen the movies, so it's hard to see what need there is to remake it again. I don't dislike the concept of the film, I just don't much care one way or the other, especially since I know how it's going to turn out in advance. (Assuming they aren't going to make massive changes to the story this time around.) However, I certainly knew the story of Lord of the Rings going in, and loved 2/3 of those films, and that was all about PJ's direction and editing and the script he helped put together. There were an awful lot of ways the LotR movies could have sucked, good source material or not, and if you don't believe it head to the fantasy section of your local video store; once you get past LotR and Harry Potter and Conan 1, it's pretty gruesome. But they didn't suck in any of those ways; far from it, so at this point I've got to give PJ the benefit of the doubt when he's doing a genre even close to something I want to see. And since KK is pretty much Jurassic Park 2 with a monkey and more human elements, how bad can it be? It'll probably be worth the price of admission just for the KK vs. a T-Rex fight on the island before the capture the ape. It's strange for me to look forward to a movie based on someone associated with it. Most people (as far as I can tell) have their favorite directors and movie stars, and they want to see everything and anything that person works on, sometimes even if their beloved's role is very small. I've never been like that. I've liked the work of various actors quite a bit at various times in my life, but that was almost entirely based on the type of films they were doing. I liked Mel Gibson a lot in The Road Warrior and Lethal Weapon 1 & 2, but I've never made any effort to see him in most of his recent pictures or in his vintage pics that I didn't want to see in the first place. The same goes for Arnie back in the days of his action hero status, and yeah, Twins was watchable, but did any real fans of trashy fun like Predator and Total Recall really want to sit through 90 minutes of Jingle All the Way, or Junior, or Kindergarten Kop? So while 98% of the reason I'm anticipating King Kong is because it's being written and directed by Peter Jackson, if he were doing some romantic comedy with Julia Roberts I wouldn't pay it a second of attention, other than to gripe about him wasting his time on something disposable like that, when The Hobbit needs filming. (Not that that's up to PJ; it's all tied up in rights since two movie studios own pieces of it and after the billion+ cash cow LotR turned into, they're fighting tooth and nail.) My lack of loyalty holds true when it comes to authors as well; though it's less pronounced. I suppose this is because I like reading (good stuff) more than watching movies, and since a novel is, in theory, entirely the creative work of that one person. With a movie the best actor alive can still be unwatchable in a bad movie, the best directors can choke on poor subject matter or be brought down by a bad script, bad acting, etc. Also, I learn things on a professional level by reading novels and seeing how they are put together (For good or ill), and while that's somewhat true for movies, I'm not so much of a movie buff or expert that sitting through an awful film still keeps me interested as I analyze why it's not working. There's no real point to my loyalty discussion here, if you were wondering. I wouldn't expect my fans, if I ever do anything to deserve such people, to follow me everywhere I go, just because it's me going there. It would be nice, and flattering, but I can completely understand that some readers might love my fantasy stuff and have zero interest in my contemporary horror, or non fiction, or whatever else I'll be writing over my career. It should make for some interesting forum fights, at least, as the "Write another goddamned fantasy novel!" people square off against the "Where the hell is the Miss Pretty Lies sequel?" faction. Malaya certainly hopes so, since she giggles with glee at the thought of smiting people with her forum admin power, assuming I someday have an official website with forums to discuss my work, etc, etc. |
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All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
kay,
I'm actually writing this early Tuesday morning, after posting a note
Sunday night that Monday's blog would be delayed a day since I had nothing to
talk about. But let's just pretend this went up on time Monday morning,
since that would make me happier.