Cleolinda everywhere

Welcome to the big time, baby.

( Stewart sparks up, pie-eating on Tyra, Jacob to be recast? )

And finally, the news (well, speculation) I think y'all really want: Could Twilight’s Success Pave the Way for a New Buffy Movie?

Meanwhile, we're just going with the choicest linkspam of, oh, the last umpteen days I didn't post: ( Regular linkspam )

I still can't get over The Happening (here in Fifteen Minutes). It's the kind of movie that's soooo bad (HOW BAD WAS IT?) that you desperately want to make other people watch it so they can commiserate with you. Because they are not going to believe you if you just tell them how bad it was. I did make up a few things in the parody... but not enough. ( Spoilers )

Meanwhile: The Legendary Stan Winston Has Died after battling cancer for seven years. In Memoriam: Stan Winston:

Aliens earned Stan Winston his first Oscar. But the visual effects genius, who succumbed to multiple myeloma yesterday at the age of 62, hardly stopped at outer-space shenanigans. Though Winston majored in painting and sculpture in college, and went to Hollywood with dreams of making it as a actor, he found more work on the other side of the lens. In the early '80s, he set up his own studio and worked with James Cameron on the surprise box-office hit The Terminator (1984). The success of that film lead to a fruitful partnership between the two men — notably, Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) — and he and Cameron went on to found the renowned F/X shop Digital Domain.

Over the course of his career, Winston earned four Oscars (including two for the makeup and visual effects in T2 and another for the groundbreaking dinosaurs of 1993's Jurassic Park) and multiple nominations — impressive in any category. His other work includes (but is hardly limited to) Predator (1987), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992), Interview with the Vampire (1994), Pearl Harbor (2001), Iron Man (2008), and several other films currently in production.

( More linkspam )

1. I fought off several attacks of The Blahs today, but ended up getting a lot done. I'm trying to sort out the first three chapters at this point--rearranging the old material into logical concert with the new, and so on. Let's put it this way: I wanted to finish this by my birthday, December 14. Today is November 13. I'm not going to do the actual math, but we're talking twenty chapters that have to be filled out and whipped into shape in roughly thirty days. When you consider that I won't be able to write every single day (that's just Murphy's Law talking. Also, you've got Thanksgiving, and I know at least one or two days will be given over entirely to midnight-showing Golden Compass squee), and that I'd probably like to have a little time just to revise things on a word-by-word level... we're talking one chapter per day. Some chapters'll probably take an hour's run-through; the last chapter is going to involve a lot of raw drafting. Really, I just want to have it in a complete, readable format so I can show it to some close friends and, hopefully, my agent, with the understanding that I can still polish it at my leisure and double-check some research details for a little while, while it's shopping around. I've been working on it for four years now--I'd like to give it six months in a drawer, but it had a year or two in a drawer, unfinished, as it was.

But it's an arbitrary deadline. I made it up. Why is it such a big deal?

Because I'm going to be twenty-nine, which is almost thirty, and this is what I've wanted to do my entire life--write novels and, with any luck, publish them--and I haven't done it yet. If I don't draw a line at some point, any point, when is it ever going to get done? This point's as good as any other point.

2. Unfortunately I have a headache now, but it comes with the territory.

3. Questions that are not the most helpful to ask a writer: "So... who's the audience?" "Uh... people who like to read this kind of thing?"

4. I'm saying this here so as not to pick on any one person, but: ARGUING IN CLEO'S JOURNAL BAAAAD.

5. In other housekeeping issues, enough people are emailing me about the Free Rice thing (which I linked!) that it sounds y'all want a little graphic at the bottom of the page. I'm worried about reaching a saturation point with the reminder graphics, though, so I'm thinking of combining all the click-a-day sites into one graphic. Would this work for people? There's tabs at the top of the Hunger page to the others.

( Linkspam )