Meanwhile…

First off: awesome little shout-out over at the latest issue of A Thousand Faces. I’m not in this issue, because I am lazy, but my cake is.

Second: this. I’ve met Kris and Scott on several occasions over the years, and they’re both great guys. I can’t imagine a better scenario than the one they found themselves in this past weekend. One of these days I’ll make the pilgrimage to San Diego, to shuffle and sweat amongst the glorious masses.

Yesterday I called my peeps in Los Angeles, checking on them after the earthquake. As usual, the media hype far outshined the actual event, which lasted a few seconds and succeeded in knocking over an upstairs neighbor’s lamp.

At any rate, friend Alissa is in the process of writing her first screenplay and has expressed some frustration at assembling the assorted scenes together into a cohesive work.

I can completely relate to that difficulty. A lot of times I’ll start with a great scene, or not even a scene, sometimes just a few lines of dialogue between characters. And obviously stories are constructed of such things. But there has to be something to connect the various bits together, to form them into a whole, interesting story, preferably with a character arc, a believable and entertaining plot, and layers of depth to make the story worth reading more than once. The ligaments of a story are as important as anything else, in order to suck the reader along and create some rhythm and flow for the tale.

It’s actually rather difficult for me to offer advice on this, as I haven’t quite tackled it myself. For flash fiction, it’s often done all at once, so it’s not really an issue. My longest published story is less than 10,000 words. For that particular story, I recall it took me weeks of staring and scribbling on a little calendar of events and charted plot points before I finally worked out how everything fit together. Even then, there were twists that occurred in the final paragraphs that surprised even me, requiring some revisions of the earlier material.

And this is probably what’s most intimidating about writing a novel. I get the concepts of novel pacing and more detailed descriptions and so forth. But the actual idea of sitting down to plot out 50+ thousand words worth of closely interconnected scenes is a lot to wrap a brain around. As I understand it, the process becomes easier once you’ve done it once, but that’s little consolation when staring at a blank screen and a 50,000-word goal.

Thanks for the great words, Erin!

Use: amoebe, crystallize

If I were more inclined at the moment, I’d probably do some research, come up with something more interesting than salt. I should have just made something up. I’d also expand the crystal scene. It’s pretty unimpressive as is. Oh well. This is what happens when you’re writing after midnight.

Oh, a cookie for anyone who catches the Pinky and the Brain reference.

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Ugh, I just haven’t been in a writing mood lately. I don’t know why. This is bad, as I have a lot to get done this week. I may dig something up and submit it somewhere, just to feel productive.

Maybe I need to get out of the house. Maybe some of the Writer’s Ink crew are up for a couple of impromptu write-ins this week? I got a lot of stuff to churn out by week’s end.

I’m kind of thinking of churning out a quick exercise, with audience participation. Someone toss me a noun or a verb, and I’ll try to whip something up. I need to get my brain working again under this insufferable heat.

So I finally got to see Hellboy II: The Golden Army yesterday.

It was…okay.

It’s a fun movie with some fantastic visuals. They brought in Johann Kraus, a great character from the comics and translated him pretty well. The general idea for the story is great and very appropriate for a Hellboy story. It’s more fantasy-inspired than the typical Lovecraftian fare we usually get for Hellboy, but it worked. There’s definitely a big fairy tale feel to the whole event. Abe even gets a fight scene that’s a lot of fun to watch, though it makes me wish they’d been a little more true to the character from the beginning. Praise be Odin that they finally let Doug Jones voice himself. There are some great character moments, like Hellboy getting Abe drunk, and some great banter between Johann and the other agents.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of huge problems that prevent me from being all that enthusiastic about the movie. First, there are some plot holes big enough to guide a Cthulhu through. Secondly, there is a major cheese factor going on here. del Toro and crew turned the corny factor up to eleven, and everything from the dialogue to the music suffers for it. Several cartoony slapstick scenes are quite groan-worthy. It doesn’t just make you roll your eyes there, though, it makes it hard to take the action scenes seriously. You rarely feel like anyone is really in danger (other than the predictably expendable human BPRD agents, of course). You feel like you’re watching Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck argue about who can get momentarily inconvenienced by a face full of buckshot from Elmer Fudd. There’s no gravity to anything that’s happening.

I don’t know. The more I think about the film version of one of my favorite characters, the more I feel like they strayed too far from the page.

Writing exercise:

Write about a character that has one of the following occupations: a. Parrot Trainer b. Clock Radio Salesman c. CEO d. Writer of vampire fiction e. Plumber

I originally thought I would be all cheeky and make the subject matter all dark and noir-ish. But it didn’t really turn out like that. Perhaps the brothers in question are just too cheery and shiny to really twist in such a fashion? This may be a good example of how video games are a unique art unto themselves, not easily translated into other medium. Further proof can be found in nearly every video-game-to-movie adaptation.

Avoiding the names was pretty awkward.

Either way, oof, not sure I want to post this. It’s kind of embarrassing. Oh well. That’s what this blog is for. Wouldn’t be the first time. About 530 words of fail. Maybe I should have gone with parrot trainer. Continue reading

Fresh new rejection letter! Quick one, too. Yay!

Saw Wall·E. It’s quite good, though I think Monsters, Inc and The Incredibles are still the best of the Pixar bunch. Wall·E seemed almost too short. I could have stood to watch the little guy roaming around on the dead Earth for a little while longer. I felt disappointed when it turned out there were still humans alive. I wanted to see robots still carrying out the programs of a civilization long dead, but gradually learning to overcome that and create a society of their own. There’s potent metaphor there.

Or maybe I’m just weird.

(I always misspell weird and villain. For some reason it bugs the hell out of me that the i comes second. Perhaps I use the words weird and villain too much.)

Hellboy is out! And Dark Knight this weekend! Gah! Too much going on!

Moving on…I have joined the ranks of Twitter. It’s sort of a strange (ha! eat that, weird!) combination of message board and chat room. I have added a feed over there to the right. What’s really cool is that there are a number of writers and artists whose work I admire on Twitter, and you can chat with them a little, as we are all simultaneously bored at work. But it’s a lot more relaxed and casual than a chat room. It’s interesting.

If anyone out there uses it, feel free to follow me, and I’ll make sure to follow back.

Writing-wise, I am feeling the tug of several directions at once. I’d like to write a western, but I’d also like to explore my superheroes some more, which is really what I should be doing. I also have a couple of other stories smoldering as well. It’s hard to choose just one when so many are calling. It would help if I actually got back to work. I’ve also got a number of pending critiques due to the writing group.

I had somewhere I wanted to submit my robot librarian story, but it appears they’ve closed to open submissions. Oh, well. It was pretty much going to be a shot for the moon anyway. My second choice appears to be in the process of switching over to a flash market, so that’s out; the story is about 500 words too long for flash. I have one more spot I’ve got bookmarked at home that I’ll try tonight.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, you should head over to A Thousand Faces and read the current issue, which contains several excellent stories. It’ll only be up for a couple more weeks before the next edition. After that you’ll have to order it.

This weekend, Hellboy II! I’m a huge fan of the Hellboy comics, and the films have done a pretty decent job of adapting them. There are some pretty big differences, but the core of the character is largely intact.

(One thing about the movies that bugs me is the whole “secret” aspect of Hellboy and the BPRD. In the comics there’s no secret; HB was featured on the cover of TIME shortly after he was found, and the rest is history. Pretty much everyone knows him, and no one bats an eyelash when this big red demon shows up to help them out. It’s great. But I digress, as usual.)

I am a bad person because I haven’t had a chance to see Wall·E yet.

I quite liked Hancock, but it’s not perfect.

I didn’t like the direction at all. The entire movie consists primarily of close-ups, and it just got old and noticeable after a little while. Add in the little bit of shakiness they gave it and I felt like I was watching an episode of NYPD Blue. It didn’t kill the movie for me, but it was a little irritating when I let myself think about it. Looking over Peter Berg’s resume, it looks like he’s worked a lot on television over the past few years, and it kind of shows.

Glancing over some of the reviews, it seems the critics wanted a much different movie from what they got. They all seem to like the first half of the film, then got thrown by the “big twist.”

The huge turn in the movie was actually very heavily foreshadowed. I don’t get why critics didn’t see it coming. It does take the movie in a different direction, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The original premise of the movie (“What if Superman were a dick?”) is a bit gimmicky and I doubt it would have carried a whole film. At the same time, it’s a bit unfortunate that the turn they took 1) created more questions than answers, 2) provided a (partial) origin story when they really didn’t need one at all, and 3) robbed time from developing potential villains. The basic idea was fine, but it was perhaps not so well executed. The movie could have easily been half an hour longer.

But really, it was a pretty entertaining movie. It’s worth checking out. It’s nice having a superhero movie that isn’t somebody staring in awe at their own hands for an hour.

It’s interesting how versatile the Western genre and the Western Hero archetype can be. You can put them in space, of course, and that’s been done very well on numerous occasions, from Outland to Cowboy Bebop and Firefly. I still have a bit of an itch to write one of those. But you can also do a lot of fun stuff with westerns right here on Earth. Western comics were big back in the ’50s, when nobody was really making superhero books, and of course that was their heyday on the big and small screens.

I wonder, has anyone done a western underwater?

Westerns have kind of made a comeback recently, with some fantastic movies and a few comics. I’m loving the new Lone Ranger comic, and I hear Zorro is quite good as well (both from Dynamite). There’s the fun Daisy Cutter series from Viper, one of which I picked up at a Free Comic Book Day a year or two ago. DC has Jonah Hex, supposedly one of their best titles at the moment. Marvel has a history of old western comics, like the Two-Gun Kid, Rawhide Kid, and Kid-Colt (sensing a theme here?), that they don’t really use anymore. It’s good stuff.

So here’s mine, the Dallas Damsel. No doubt her adventures will include aliens and steam-driven robots and mad scientists. Making her a red head kind of feels cliche, or at least wrong. I may change that. I dunno.

This was my first writing prompt of the month, and as I was chugging through it I realized I was revisiting my time traveling supervillain. I wrote a couple of little exercises about him a while back, then totally forgot about his existence. I changed his name (though I’m sure I’m not the first to use “Epoch” for a time-hopping bad guy), but otherwise he’s very similar, even hanging out with the same incompetent henchman. I realized when I reached the end that I should have written it from an entirely different point of view, which would have allowed for a really great ending and actually explained why Epoch was there to kill her to begin with. Oh well.

Prompt: Create a story using

• one of these settings: Luau, western bar, funeral, big city, construction site

• One of these people: comic book villain, DJ, poet, damsel in distress, business tycoon

• And one of these things/objects: nail polish, magic door knob, cancer, samurai sword, banana

(I played it a little loose with the requirements. About 600 words.)

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Looks like some of my friends and family got around to checking out my little mystery story over at Every Day Fiction, because it has suddenly leapt into not one but two of the Top Stories categories there. They recently revised their Top Stories lists to cover only the Top 10, but in several different categories. “Crush” fell out, but “Aftershocks” has hopped up to the low tiers of their “Current” and “By Rating.” I’m trying to think of a way to get more quote marks in this paragraph, but I’m not sure it’s possible.

I have been quite lazy of late, but I will get back to work. New prompt contest this month, so maybe I’ll get something mildly interesting posted up here soon. I also still need to submit a couple of stories I have laying around. But it’s been at least a month since I wrote them, so now when I look at them I hate them. It’s hard to work up enthusiasm for stories when you do that.