3 Green Fish

Whoo, I added another 4 pages today! As you can see, I’m almost a third of the way along in what I’ve written, by page count. In truth, I’m probably even farther along, story-wise, as I’ve made this draft a little more compact and less needlessly verbose than the last. The dialogue has been a lot easier this time through, so that helps make everything flow better without lots of exposition.

I was able to recycle a decent chunk of the last draft, which helped move things along. Almost all of Fink’s dialogue remained the same, and I was able to reuse much of Bandolor’s and Tibalim’s in their scene together, with some expansion and alteration. Sadly, I ended up having to remove a joke/wordplay from the conversation due to the change in language I’ve been working on. The good news is that said wordplay wouldn’t really be funny to anyone but me and the lone scholar of Middle English who happens to pick up my book and read it. So it’s not a big loss, although I think I’ll have to go back to those particular lines later and make sure they flow well.

On the other hand, I was able to add a tiny joke about shellfish, so I guess it all evens out a little. And no, you’re not going to see either of them at the moment — they don’t really work outside of the dialogue anyway, and as for the original one, you wouldn’t laugh unless I told you why it was funny, and then you wouldn’t laugh because as we all know, a joke isn’t funny if you have to explain why it’s humorous. But maybe if I end up with a “director’s commentary” in the back of the book I’ll include it there.

I think I’m getting close to being able to skip ahead to later stuff. I’ll probably go over what I have and map out the scenes a little so I have an idea of what I’d be working off of, but after that I think I could move ahead to playing around with newer stuff from the middle of the book. This draft is a big improvement, but I want to move ahead to text I haven’t written yet, especially given all the story ideas that have popped into my head as of late (I hardly have room for them all).

It’s been over two weeks since my last post, and I’ve made slooooow progress in that time. It probably didn’t help that I had a busy holiday weekend and such, but even taking that into account, my work has been in fits and starts and tiny little amounts. This is definitely the best draft so far, but it’s still a little like pulling teeth out of a flea when I try to get it down.

But things are shaping up. I really think I’ve nailed some of my characters this time around. They just work, and I feel like their characters actually inform their actions. I know what Bandolor wants, and why he does the questionable things he does. I know why Adrianna fights against him throughout the first 10 chapters or so — it’s because she wants something else. No duh, huh?

I’ve also been able to smooth out some logistical plot-related issues this time through, which is really nice. As always, I wish I’d been able to figure out a lot of this before, but I’m making do as is. Hopefully things will pick up a little through December and I can get some of the later stuff done too before the month is out.

Also, I still need a semi-archaic sounding name for the dog, if anyone has any ideas.

Today’s excerpt is a little bit about Adrianna.

Adrianna’s sense of humor came from her father, and she had her mother’s dark green eyes, but there was one thing she had that neither of them did, something hidden deep within their genes that only came to fruition in their daughter. Her memory was eidetic, or nearly so, able to recall events with photographic accuracy. She could still remember her fifth birthday, or at least bursting into tears when she opened all her presents and didn’t get the sheep she was hoping for. Later that day, she shaved her brand-new Totally Hair Barbie in a brutal act of retaliation.

It’s interesting to see just how much trying to antiquate the language of some of my characters has hamstrung my writing in the previous drafts of this novel. Now that I’ve abandoned that for the most part, mainly just using “ye/you” and “thou/thee” where appropriate, it’s a lot easier to write the dialogue, and it makes the going a lot smoother. Combined with a much better understanding of characters, this draft is really a huge improvement. So, on the one hand, I’ve unbound most of the characters from major restrictions on what they can say, and on the other hand, I know what Adrianna wants in the scene where she talks with Bandolor for the first time.

It’s already playing out a little bit in the Iggsle/Adrianna scene right before. While the overall gist of their conversation remains the same, just having a better sense of who these people are really makes is more real for me, and hopefully for the reader as well. We’ll see if that carries through for the rest of the book, but for now it’s definitely a nice feeling. I have a sense that the upcoming scene is going to be quite interesting, given that it has a strong dramatic set-up (both the characters have strong desires and they don’t exactly line up at all).

Or maybe it won’t be. I don’t know. Whoohoo!

Okay people, I need a little help. I’m having trouble deciding on a name for Bandolor’s dog. Originally I named him Reginald, but it just doesn’t seem quite right, and the best I’ve been able to come up with so far is Caleb — which is still kinda bleh. Any thoughts? I’m looking for something that sounds at least vaguely like an olden style human name (hence the Reginald), or something no weirder than Bandolor or Iggsle. The dog is large black mastiff. I’d love some suggestions, especially serious ones!

So, I got a bit distracted today when the lyrics for a song from a potential musical about evil tyrants popped into my head. To be specific, it would be a musical about dethroned evil tyrants. They’d be unemployed, you see.

If there is any justice in this universe, said musical will never ever be made. But I amused myself with it for a while.

Anyway, back to the book. I added another 3 pages to draft 3, these corresponding to the first section that really delves at all into Iggsle’s character. It’s no longer the introduction to Iggsle, as he appears more in earlier bits, but at least this is where he gets some up close and personal time with the reader. I cut out most of his past, as it felt like a lot of unnecessary exposition in the previous drafts, and I think it might show up later in the story at a more meaningful time. We’ll have to see. It’s interesting to see how Iggsle has changed between drafts. It’s become clearer now just how he fits in to everything, and while his function is pretty much the same, somehow this understanding informs everything he does in a way I wasn’t expecting. Adrianna is quite different this draft, and I have a better sense of Bandolor, but the change in Iggsle is stronger than I expected.

All in all, I added 3 pages to my third draft. That’s progress, which I’m quite happy to see.

To the commenter claiming to be Bruce Campbell:

Although I would not deny the possibility of getting a comment from said actor, given my recent rise into the lowest margins of internet visibility, there are certain limits of plausibility. A comment consisting entirely of “Hi there…Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts ! it was a great Monday” and linking to a site about Bruce Campbell / Burce Campbell? Please, I may be gullible at times, but I’d have to be far more drunk that I’ve ever been to believe that one. Yeesh.

I mean, come on, everyone knows it was a great Tuesday.

Day one of my hopefully three-day long writing “weekend,” (yeah, yeah, I know the weekend was, like, yesterday and all), and I’ve made some progress. I have the house to myself, more or less, as the dog is pretty happy to sit around most of the day, and my plan has been to sit myself down and force jumpstart this project. It’s not been easy the last couple weeks, and my motivation has cycled from low to really incredibly low, but I’m doing okay now. About half of my new material since last post was written in fits and starts between then and now, and the other half was mostly done in one run tonight. I think the opening chapters are much stronger now, and I’ve gotten to explore a few places I glossed over in earlier drafts. Is it good? Well, time will tell with that.

One such previously glossed over scene takes place after Bandolor’s magic goes awry at the beginning of the book. While Adrianna is unconscious, Bandolor and Iggsle look through her backpack:

Bandolor fingered one of the dangling pieces of metal that seemed attached to the spines. Ah, this was how the pack opened, he could see it now. With a flourish he pulled up on the tag and watched as the pack slowly split open, disgorging its contents. Brightly colored cloth spilled out onto the table. Iggsle picked one up and examined it closely. “A cap with three holes, perhaps?”

There were several of these, and it took Bandolor a moment to realize what he was looking at. “Nay, ’twould seem to be yon maiden’s undergarment.”

Iggsle quickly dropped the pair he held. “Colorful,” he choked out.

I’m probably more amused by this than I should be. Bedtime.

I don’t know where to begin with Bubba Ho-Tep. I avoided this movie like the plague whenever I saw it in the video store. It stars Bruce Campbell as Elvis in a rest home. Given that Campbell is a legend for his campy overacting, I could never bring myself to spend money to watch this film. The amazing thing is, it’s actually quite a good movie, if extremely bizarre. Bruce Campbell does a great job as an old Elvis who traded places with an impersonator years ago, and has been living in obscurity ever since.

At the start of the film, Elvis is lying in bed at a rest home, where no one really believes that he actually is Elvis. He’s got a friend in Jack (Ossie Davis), a black man who claims to be John F. Kennedy, patched up and dyed black by Lyndon Johnson. If this sounds weird, it only gets stranger when an Ancient Egyptian mummy starts stalking the halls of the rest home.

It’s a story about Elvis and JFK, a story about a mummy sucking the souls out of elderly people, a story about purpose and aging and our culture’s abandonment of the old. The film tries to be a comedy, a drama, and a horror story all at once, and it is surprisingly successful at it. Bruce Campbell’s performance here is almost certainly the best of his career. It’s almost like he was born to play Elvis, and he and Ossie Davis manage to transform this film into something poignant and nuanced.

Bubba Ho-Tep, staring Bruce Campbell. Directed by Don Coscarelli. 2002. Available on DVD. Amazon link.

Over the last few days my 3 Green Fish email has suddenly come under a deluge of spam. Where it used to get only about 66% of the number of junk messages that my other spam-filled account got, that number just ballooned to almost 200%. While some of that might have been a gradual shift that I didn’t really notice, it’s still a pretty shocking change.

Wondering if something I’d done recently had resulted in the posting of my email address online, I did a little search for 3greenfish.net. What I found shed no light whatsoever on my spam issue, but it brought up some other interesting results.

Apparently people I don’t know have found my website. Oh, sure, most of them are things like a Korean site’s mirroring of Google results, or the automated web sites that troll the internet and aggregate links to every page that talks about Heroes or Waitress. My reviews have ended up linked to from several of them, most of them now gone.

Once you set all those aside, two things really stand out:

The first is from Kathryn Lang’s blog, The Peculiar Club. She linked to my Seven Steps for Writing a Novel post. This is very special — it’s the first time that I’m aware of that someone has linked to a post of mine and recommended it to their own readers without knowing me already. That’s pretty awesome, to use a decidedly uncreative word.

The second leaves me trembling, with goosebumps and butterflies and whatnot. Someone on the Lois McMaster Bujold Mailing List linked to my review of The Sharing Knife, Book 1. Actually, scratch that — if I’m reading this page right, that’s Lois McMaster Bujold herself who read my review. Ye gods. I’m used as an example of a skiffy (science fiction fan, I think) who reads the book from a SF perspective and views the “personal stuff as Unimportant,” not really getting the romance side of the book. And then someone went ahead and reviewed the reviewers — but I’ll get to that in a minute.

My first response to this is to want to defend my review. “No no,” I want to say, “you’re not getting it at all. That’s not what I meant.” I want to go back and rewrite the review, so that Bujold, a writer I respect, can see exactly what I think and not feel like I’m dissing her book (’cause I’m not). The thing is, she’s probably right — I don’t have the background reading romance and I don’t really get the conventions of it. I could go on and on about how I felt the book started off with one kind of story and ended with another and how the plot never seemed to get to high stakes again … but that’s only my opinion, and perhaps if I’d been reading it differently I’d have come to a different conclusion. Perhaps not reading romance novels has left me too connected with my own background when it comes to relationships — I don’t see disapproving families being threatening, because I know my own family would ultimately support me even if I ended up with someone they disapproved of. If that was what I truly wanted, they’d try to help me make it work (of course, I’m happy to say that’s not an issue). On top of that, I haven’t been exposed to the right stories, so yes, almost being eaten by a horrific monster does seem to overshadow worries over what one’s family will think.

So no, I’m not going to rewrite my review. I’ll let it stand. I’m new to the whole review thing anyway, and this has been something of a learning experience. I no longer feel like I’m writing entirely in a vacuum, with only close friends and family ever seeing my reviews. I always thought that other people might run across my site, but without links or comments I never knew about them. It kind of shifts my paradigm. Lois McMaster Bujold, if you ever read this, I’m sorry for not getting your book. I’ll try to do better next time.

Which brings me at last to my final point. Victoria on the Bujold list reviewed the reviewers (I was one of four linked to), and she had this to say about me:

Reader’s Agenda: All action requires combat or physical struggle. All
conflict requires action. Likes good world building, good characterization,
humor, and easy-to-read writing.

This is, on the one hand, scarily accurate. The last half especially describes what I often look for in a book. While I have space in my heart for the hard-to-read works (hey, I read Chaucer in the Middle English), I do love a book that I can just open up and let the words and sentences flow over me, and almost forget that I’m reading. Interesting worlds, good characters, humor? Yeah, I dig those. And the rest, the bit about all action requiring physical struggle? Five years ago, that was me spot on. There was a long time where I didn’t understand how it could work to have the conflict be non-physical; perhaps I’ve seen too many action movies and cartoons. I once started to write a story about an immortal man, who gets cursed to never be able to die, no matter what, and I very quickly ran into a stumbling block the size of Jupiter: how can I put this character in danger when he can never really be harmed? I was a lot younger then, so I set it aside. Now I see it clearly: just because you can’t be hurt doesn’t mean you’re going to be happy. For the story to work, it needs to revolve around his psychology, his happiness. “Not getting what you want” doesn’t have to mean “death” (possible exception: holding up a bank while wearing dynamite trousers). It’s a realization that sounds so obvious now, but wasn’t back then. I’m only now starting to explore this in depth with my own work. So, perhaps I didn’t read Bujold’s book with as clear of a gaze as I should have, or even as I thought I did.

The irony, after all the angst I went through? Looking back at that review, I see I gave the book a good score: 8.5 out of 10.

Have you ever gone to see a movie that was full of violence but only got a PG-13 rating? Have you ever wondered why a violent movie might be rated less restrictively than a movie with nudity? Just who are the people who decide what rating a movie gets, anyway?

Kirby Dick had just these sorts of questions, and he set out to find answers. This Film is Not Yet Rated is Dick’s disturbing foray into the world of the MPAA rating system, a system that is secretive, uncontrolled, and capricious. Comparisons of films that were rated R and films that were rated NC-17 showcase just how subjective and arbitrary the ratings are, and sequences involving a private investigator hired by Dick give us a glimpse into the secrecy and sketchiness surrounding the ratings board. Ultimately, the message is clear: the system is broken in several ways, and it’s a system without checks and balances.

The film succeeds as an exposé, and it could certainly make you step back and think about the movies you see and just what their ratings mean. Unfortunately, Dick fails to provide a way out — while the film revels in the strange and sordid behavior of the MPAA it does little to suggest how to fix the problem. In this sense the film feels incomplete, although perhaps there isn’t a solution at all. The ratings are a private unit of the MPAA — no government regulation involved.

This Film is Not Yet Rated. Directed by Kirby Dick. 2006. Amazon link.

If all is well with the world, you haven’t heard of the Creation Museum, an entire “museum” devoted to showing how the Earth is only 6,000 years old and how dinosaurs lived at the same time as man.

John Scalzi apparently lives near this bastion of holey-ness. And lo, it did come to pass that he agreed to go and view and report on the abomination if his readers would donate $250 or more, said funds to be donated in turn to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. As it so happens, he was flooded with donations, to the tune of over $5 thousand. So he kinda had to go.

The result? A pictorial tour through the entire museum, 101 photos long, each one with amusing titles and commentary. It’s a simultaneously terrifying and hilarious experience, primarily in the form of the tortured logic and inconsistencies that are all that shore up the museum’s skewed concept of reality. To add icing to the cake, other people have commented on many of the photos, adding a bonus dose of snarkiness to something that deserves as much respect as a ham sandwich. Without the humorous remarks of Scalzi and others, these photos would be only scary, but the commentary exposes the unintentional self-satire that oozes from every hole in the museum’s so-called “logic.”

The photo album is well worth a viewing, and can be found on Flickr.

Also worth a read is Scalzi’s accompanying essay.

The Creation Museum itself? Not worth the high price of admission. But the photos are pretty funny.

[seen on Boing Boing]