cleolinda | (no subject)

I'm done with the entire niamhstar thing. Apparently it "all makes sense now" because "things happen." Maybe there are "explanations" to be had and she'll "crack her code" for us, but I, personally, have better things to do.

In happier news, Sister Girl is now out of bed and back at work. Apparently they had to actually cut into her jawbone and take one of the teeth out in pieces, which is why recovery was so hard for her (I don't think she spent an entire day out of bed until yesterday). My mother and my aunt are out on their bikes, because my aunt's off from teaching for Good Monday (yes, I know it's not Good Monday. Birmingham City Schools: We Maek Yer Kids Smrt!). Me, I've been doing a lot of writing lately and feeling pretty good. I've mostly been working on the Fantasy Opus, whose details I am guarding so closely that I would rather give it a lame-ass nickname like "the Fantasy Opus" rather than actually tell you the title. Good times. I'm mostly still in the drafting phase, where I sit down and freewrite and sort of describe to myself, in present tense, what I see happening. This way I get down dialogue and plot details--and, occasionally, actual turns of phrase--without having the pressure of Writing with a capital W. Half the time I slip into my narrative voice (dead giveaway: past tense) anyway, and usually by the time I get to a revision phase, I discover that there's not all that much I have to change, other than verb tense and a bit of cleanup, anyway. The freewriting/describing is more about tricking myself into thinking that no one's looking, if that makes any sense.

Meanwhile, my mother (who is still off work) and I were having lunch a couple of hours ago, and we got to talking about The Second Book. The second book is not coming along so well. I think what's stressing me out is that I set myself a premise--big movies of 2005--that's pretty much already outdated. I mean, by the time it would hit shelves, it would probably be 2007, and this kind of year-in-review thing can't be more than a year old at the most. And then, if you've done one year, you've basically committed yourself to doing several unless you want to have one lame year-in-review all by its lonesome, and this does not, after some consideration, seem like a good idea to me.

But I hated giving up on the book entirely--one of the things I liked about that selection of movies was that it was chock full of franchise movies: Narnia, another Star Wars, another Potter, etc. So we're sitting there eating takeout from Panera, and it finally occurs to me: Why not just do a book of recent franchise movies? Batman Begins was already on the list, and there is a sequel confirmed for that; in the next three months alone you've got new X-Men, Superman, Mission: Impossible and Pirates of the Caribbean installments. Throw in, let's say, Sin City (another confirmed sequel), and you're already up to nine. And since POTC2 is in July, you've already set aside a good three or four months in which you cannot finish, because even if you do, you're waiting on a new movie to come out. So there's scheduled downtime and less pressure. I like that.

Which reminds me: I always swore I'd never do Pirates of the Caribbean, because it was already funny. Same reason I won't do The Princess Bride: it's just redundant at that point. But we watched POTC with my grandmother last week, and... it's really not... quite... the movie I remembered it being. I still love POTC, and it's a good movie, but after three years, the creakiness shows in places. The entire last, I don't know, forty-five minutes of the movie, with the endless battling of the undead? Yeah. And watching the Jack Sparrow scenes was a little like watching Casablanca again: you've heard all of it repeated and parroted so many times that the gleam of novelty's pretty much gone. I think a sequel would be doable, is what I'm saying, and I wouldn't mind doing the original to put online if time allowed.

(Tenth movie for the book? I don't know. I'd be willing to do any movie from late 2004 to mid 2006 that is part of a confirmed series. Well, I say "any," and that's not true. Any movie from that period would be eligible, let's put it that way.)

Another thing that bothered me about the old configuration of the book: it basically took all of the 2006 movies people wanted parodied and trapped them in print format. That is, none of them could be posted online, and I was too tired--from the first book, and trying to work on the second--to write up anything else. Honestly, V for Vendetta got written because I was just that burnt out on everything else; January to March tends to be a bad time for me, seasonally. So what would happen now is that anything originally destined for the book that wouldn't go in the new series-only version could be written, time allowing, and put online. (As far as that goes, I had DVDs for Constantine for the Reeves-Swinton factor, Serenity, King Kong (on which I have a lot of notes), and Kingdom of Heaven that I could do. Again, time allowing, and anything that would help pay bills would, of course, come first.)

So I'd get one good book of franchise movies out of 2005-2006, maybe wait a couple of years for another slew to come out (Prince Caspian! The Golden Compass! Spider-Man 3!), and in the meantime be able to work on my children's book ideas and the Fantasy Opus and Black Ribbon, and not have to worry about squeezing paid funny out of a yearly turnip. Or something.

So I'm probably going to throw Narnia and Goblet of Fire back in the DVD player and work (some more) on those first, for the book, and get them locked down. Thoughts?

zombiequill: "I'd like to request that the next time you do a Linkspam post, you alert your many readers to the newly-created, thoroughly wonderful Neptune Navigator Online, a Veronica Mars blog. An extension of the Neptune High School newspaper (The Navigator), the online edition is geared toward fans and non-fans alike. It features celebrity gossip, computer how-to's, video game reviews, private investigating tricks, an advice column, et cetera. The articles are written by the Neptune High Journalism class, who are characters on the show. There's a tremendous amount of talent onboard, and the blog is terrific! New issues are posted every Sunday."

Current Mood: full
Current Location: Uh... my desk? As usual?

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From:

sigma7.livejournal.com

Apparently it "all makes sense now" because "things happen." Maybe there are "explanations" to be had and she'll "crack her code" for us, but I, personally, have better things to do.

Hell, I'd lost track of that whole dramallama a few days back. My original empathy was with her, but if she's going to be OMG en1gmat1c about it (not that I can blame her with the Internet Furies breathing down her back) then, yeah, not going to break out the decoder rings and polygraphs. Besides, the few things she does say outright don't compel me any further.

As for book two, sometimes magic happens (like V), but the greater part of writing is hard hard work -- which is the way it is for lesser mortals 99% of the time. But you've got enough going on that I can understand needing writing as a diversion more than work -- pastimes lose their luster when they become necessities. Would just rather you still found magic in the writing, and hope that it never devolves into a chore for you. That's...that's just no good for anyone.

Just hang in there.

From:

cleolinda.livejournal.com

Well, that's why I'm trying to divide it up and space it out a little more so that I get to do some of it for fun and some of it as work. The way I'd scheduled it before, it was all work, and nothing to post online.

Classy dame, sparkle consultant, gothic enthusiast, sporadic recapper.

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