It's What Day Already?

Somehow it's December 9th. Somehow it's December. I shouldn't be surprised because of all the snow and ice on the ground. Writing has been good but slow. I go in spurts. I wrote a new short story, which I'm letting marinate for now, and I'm about 80 pages into the novel (91 or so if you count stuff I've generated - scraps of fabric I'll hopefully be able to use later) which I should be very happy about, considering. I'm in a thinking/considering/exploring phase and generally I don't get a lot of pages down during these periods. I don't outline, I discover things as I write and this is the downside of doing that: sometimes you hit a dead end and have to turn back and go the other way. Best to explore all paths, though.

I saw The Golden Compass yesterday. I was really looking forward to it, and it was entertaining in a general epic fantasy kind of way, but the script rushed through just about everything. It's far too talky (show don't tell is a good thing, sometimes). Major plot points come about either in asides or are left off the screen altogether (the film literally just ends - and despite having Lyra telegraph the next movie, it does not inspire the same narrative momentum or anticipation The Fellowship of the Ring did, surprising, considering how desperately New Line wants this to eumlate LOTR). Dakota Blue Richards, who plays Lyra, is a real find and carries the movie single handedly on her shoulders. David Craig and Nicole Kidman are fantastic, but basically have glorified cameos, Craig in particular. Eva Green pops up as a sexy ancient witch, but she's fleeting, too. They excised, ironically. all of the religious subtext that Pullman crafted into the book, leaving the film without the same urgency or certainty the books have. I only imagine this will get worse as the films go on, if they do, seeing how the trilogy only becomes more and more polemical toward organized religion.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Visit From The Goon Squad: Charting New Territory

Image
 Credit - Tessie Girl I recently finished A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and it's one of the best books I've read in a while.  It flows from one character to another in a kind of narrative relay.  At first it's disorienting and honestly I lost track of who the focus was or was supposed to be - the point, I think - and it required me to stop and start again once or twice.  The book also caroms from one era to another.  This narrative river just flows along and then washes ashore deep in the future, providing a brief, sober glimpse of the fate of the character we follow, before retreating back to the sea of the present.  At some point you almost long for a chart mapping out all these people, these places and times, and then as if on queue, Egan actually depicts an entire sequence of the book in a succession of flow charts.  I wa struck at how effective, and affecting, this was; the PowerPoint slides gradually became thought bubbles, accumulating tension
Read more

Get Lost Writing

Image
Writing for me has always been an act of discovery.  At various times you will feel like Magellan, or Columbus.  Others you will feel like the Donner Party.  You will feel these at varying times throughout the process of writing the same novel, if you're anything like me.  And at some point, you will experience another feeling - the sheer elation of knowing you are the first person to ever lay eyes on this undiscovered country of a novel.  That's the way it feels to me when a novel reaches that tipping point, when the mass is so great that the collapse from dust into light becomes to powerful to deny.  I've felt this feeling before, a couple times.  It's a great feeling.  I feel it now, as I'm 211 pages into the novel that I've documented here recently on the blog (otherwise known as the #scifijohnhughesbook ).  A lot of the disparate threads - fits and starts really - that I've experimented with over the last few years are finally bearing fruit.  This
Read more

Diamonds In The Rough

Happy to announce that my brother and I won the Main St. Waterloo 10th Anniversary Poster Contest, co-sponsored by the Metro Arts Guild . Our piece, entitled "Metamorphisis", is on display at the gallery -- unless it's somewhere else now. I'll try and get a scan of it to put up on the blog (why didn't you think of that before, Darby?) There's a new literary journal out there called A Public Space that could not have started off better. The contributors and bredth of the material really has me excited not just to pick this up, but submit there as well. The coolest thing is they have a new story by Kelly Link. Check out the excerpt . My own zine, Other Than , continues on pace toward completion. It seems like I may be hosting a joint reading at the gallery to launch it along side Osie's Murmur , which would be very cool and exciting. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter made it safely into orbit .
Read more