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So I watched the movie "Tolkien" last night, and it brought out in full relief what I find so frustrating about most biopics, and that's how unnecessary so many of them are. Take this one, for example. There really isn't anything extraordinary or unusual about his life. He was an orphan, he fell in love, his guardian said "you must wait til you're an adult". Then he went to war and survived (his friends did not). Then he came home and became a professor, got married, had some kids. Nothing about any of that deserves a whole movie. The only thing that makes it interesting is the fact that decades later Tolkien published some amazing stories that appear to have been influenced by his personal history. But other than a couple of anecdotes he related, there's no way to know exactly what influenced him in what way, or whether its influence was direct, or anything else. Tolkien himself said he detested allegory and tried to avoid it whenever he caught a whiff of it, so claiming that the flamethrowers became dragons, or that his personal batman was the reason he wrote Sam Gamgee, is spurious.

And what's really maddening on that score is the things we DO know were direct influences - like his future wife dancing for him on a picnic, which gave birth to an enormous part of his legendarium in that instant - are treated like little throwaway moments, while the film is busy extrapolating HUGE MEANING out of stuff that's iffy at best and a flat out fabrication at worst. AND the film is shy about naming names or doing any direct attribution, so unless you already know his story, you're left wondering what's so important about, say, the steams and smokes rising above the battlefield that the director feels he has to keep hammering home how ugly it all is. It's just so fucking hamhanded and clueless and CLUMSY, I couldn't figure out why anyone would have thought this film was a good idea.

ARGH



And how are all of you?
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Just want you all to know that I am still turning that E/C/Z idea around in my head. I think it could be something really interesting, a challenge. Unfortunately, I'm impeded by my lingering sadness and sense of betrayal at having Ethan snatched away like that.** But I am trying! At the moment, I'm just sort of "dreaming with it", as Robert Duvall calls his process of preparing a character. I let it drift in and out of my head when it wants, and examine it. It seems pretty, though I don't know what it is, and hypnotic. It tastes strongly of absinthe, and if it ever incarnates, I think it'll be very fun to write. I can give you this, though, as a little taste. The one thing I'm sure of, and that's the title:

Daguerrotype.




**(You know, if it turns out Logan has forced my fucking hand into doing his goddamn job for him and writing the entire goddamn fucking story the way it should have been told in the first place, I will bitchslap him into the next century. Should I ever get the chance.)

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Okay, back now. Sorry about the freakout, but you guys are really the only people in my life I can cry to. Pathetic, I know. Thanks to those of you who were so kind about it. HUGS BACK

Since then:

1) HOLY SHIT, SCALIA'S DEAD.

2) I got weed poisoning on Thursday night. I was sitting at my computer, watching a movie and toking the way I usually do, which is taking a hit or two maybe every twenty minutes or so until I'm at just the right level. Usually when I smoke too much, I just end up falling asleep in my chair and then waking up and going off to bed, but this time... hoo, boy. After just a few tokes, I got hit with a MASSIVE wave of dizziness and nausea. Nearly fell out of the chair and ended up crawling to the bathroom, where I threw up a few times and then slept curled up next to the toilet, because I couldn't get up from the dizziness. I'm still feeling a bit of it - the dizziness, that is - but it's passing. I've only been able to eat some slices of whole wheat bread and drink seltzer, but I had a fruit smoothie today and I'm almost back to normal now. Gods, that was awful. The only other time that happened to me was a couple of years ago when I took a Vicodin for my shoulder and forgot to eat first. NIGHTMARE TIME.

3) I can't write that story I mentioned. It's just much too close to my emotions at the moment and far too painful for me to actually enter it now. I'm still taking notes, and want to wait until I get some distance before I try to write it, mostly because of the pain but also because I'm not completely certain it's actually a good story - it may just be a scream I need to scream. It's hard to tell for me, because so many of my stories come out of my own life and emotions, are ways to express things I'm feeling or grappling with in real life. But no, this one has to wait awhile. It's okay, though, because like I said earlier, it's a one-off, not part of High Contrast, so letting it go for a time won't affect anything else I'm writing.

4) HOLY SHIT, SCALIA'S DEAD.

5) Looking forward to John Oliver coming back tomorrow night. Anyone seen Samantha Bee's new show? She is SO awesome, and she's having a fucking great time with this. And MAN, is she vicious - it's utterly glorious. I think I may be crushing on her now that she's doing her own thing and not that Fox News Bunny character that she did on TDS, which was a wonderful caricature, but I didn't like her much. She's so much better as herself. <3 <3 <3

6) Drum Tao was on Stephen's show the other night. I have such intense desire to see these guys live. They'll be here in March, but I haven't got the money or anyone to go with. *sigh* Maybe someday...

Fullscreen that puppy and TURN IT UP TO ELEVEN.

7) I'm tired of writing angst. Somebody give me a prompt I can mess around with to take the taste of tears out of my mouth.

8) HOLY SHIT, SCALIA'S DEAD.


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Here's something fun: Wil WHEAton is weirded out about this photo, and has asked his readers to explain it:


What's this guy's story?


You get 150 words to talk about the guy in that photo. At first, I thought, "What's the problem? He doesn't seem strange to me." But then I looked again, and got a little chime, and wrote a squib. Fun!

So take a look and jump in if you feel like it. :)
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So after I got back from the dispensary last night with a gram of a new strain (Black Diesel, very tasty), I had a smoke and decided to try and tackle that plot bunny image that's been gnawing at me. It's very strange writing such a different version of these characters. What they're dealing with in this story is very much not the shit they're dealing with in High Contrast.

I'm dithering a bit about the structure, though, so I may be asking for a beta to get another pair of eyes on it.

What fun. :)

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Oy, I'm SO crap at doing things in plenty of time...

Nevertheless, I'm getting to the holiday stuff, so if anyone would like a card, please leave a screened comment with your address, or you can PM me with it. I'll get them in the mail this week.


( In other news... )

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Here's another great writing tool, courtesy of Metafilter:


Writing Exercises from John Gardner's The Art of Fiction


A series of hard-core writing exercises to help you sharpen up your skills as a storyteller. I call them hard-core because they're very focused and no-nonsense. Here's the first one:

1. Write the paragraph that would appear in a piece of fiction just before the discovery of a body. You might perhaps describe the character’s approach to the body he will find, or the location, or both. The purpose of the exercise is to develop the technique of at once attracting the reader toward the paragraph to follow, making him want to skip ahead, and holding him on this paragraph by virtue of its interest. Without the ability to write such foreplay paragraphs, one can never achieve real suspense.

They're all like that - do exactly this, and here's why you should do it. They're all intriguing exercises, at least to me, because they isolate specific things that are key to good storytelling and give you ways to work on those things. Not areas, mind you. Things. I really like that, the one-pointedness of the prompts, as well as the insistence on focus and outcome. (Each of them leaves you with this implication of "and don't fuck around" that amuses me. I keep envisioning Sister Mary Ignatius, with her imperious glare and her long ruler, waiting for us to take our seats. Anne Bancroft really should have played that role, alas. But I digress.)

Anyway, I think this is another great thing to put in one's bookmarks. It's the kind of thing that's great for writer's block too, of course. Enjoy! :)

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Jesus, Casey is dragging my heart through the fire. Goddamn, haven't these boys ever been happy?
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So, still wrestling with Zeke about that chapter - it's slow in coming. I'm getting a tad impatient with this idea of holding chapters back, frankly, because I keep getting little flashes of ideas that could become full chapters, but am losing the impetus because that makes it look like it's going to take longer to write this thing than I thought, and I've discovered I'm crap at continuing without outside encouragement. So I've decided to start posting stuff I already have written, at least the parts that aren't already marked for inclusion at a specific point. This thing is pretty tumbled and jumbled in its structure anyway, and having them pile up is starting to interfere with my sense of how to release them. So what the hell.

One thing I've been concerned with is placement in the timeline. Since the chapters do bounce back and forth time-wise, I've been trying to write in details or mentions that clarify when the bits are happening (weather being the most obvious way to do it since Ohio is a part of the country that has pronounced seasonal changes). But I'm wondering if it's a strain to try and guess the time placement as a reader. Opinions? I'm thinking I should just include a month/year indicator at the beginning of each chapter to make things easier. It wouldn't bother me to do so. It just hadn't occurred to me before. What do you guys think?



P.S. I do want to give a shout-out and OMG THANKS to danae_b and aliensouldream, who've done some pre-reading and given me pats before posting some of what's gone up (and what's coming). It's really helped to make sure I'm not stepping on my own toes or writing anything completely WTFRUDOING?? Love and hugs!

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How interesting.

I just popped over to AO3 to look at my stats, and found something interesting: among all the chapters of High Contrast that I've posted, the last one I put up - Erik - has gotten the highest number of page views...by at least double. It's up to 74, but the highest any of the others has gotten has been around 30.

I wonder why? There's nothing terribly extraordinary about that fic, it's really a piece of connective tissue rather than a story in itself. [ETA: (And there's no sex in it, so it can't be that.) I mean, something is getting people to read this fic, but I can't figure out what, LOL. Is there some kind of C/Z feed out there I've never heard about? Did my C/Z break some kind of tipping point somewhere? Is it the LACK of sex? Unanswerable questions, ARGH LOL.]

So I'm really curious to know how people hear about fics up at AO3, because I've been puzzled by how the hits shake out over there. The piece I've posted that's counted up the most readings has been Bargain, a drabble I wrote back in '03 when I first started on LJ, and the only thing I've ever written off Pirates of the Caribbean. (Though I must admit it was pretty good, I'm surprised it's up to over 500 hits now.) After that, a slash fic I wrote off the Star Trek reboot, and then that Hawaii Five-O thing. It's odd the way these things go, isn't it? Just can't predict what people will like!

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