3 Green Fish

If there’s one thing that can be said for movies based off of video games, it’s that they almost always suck. What might be an extremely fun game often makes a horrible movie. With this in mind, I watched DOA: Dead or Alive with such low expectations that I was almost guaranteed to be pleasantly surprised. After all, it crashed and burned at the box office. However, I was indeed pleasantly surprised.

The plot of the movie is incredibly flimsy, revolving around a fighting championship run by a shady dude on his own island. The prize? 10 Million dollars. The catch: oh yeah, like you never saw it coming, it’s all a ruse for some secret plan to become an unstoppable master of combat, and make even more money. For an action movie, it’s got just enough plot to hold it together, barely, which still amounts to more plot in the first fifteen minutes than the games have in their entirety.

On the whole, though, I enjoyed the movie. There are no angst-ridden, Oscar-worthy performances, and a lot of it seems like a flimsy excuse to get attractive babes in bikinis fighting, but the action is actually quite good. To top it off, all the actresses and actors seemed to do their own stunts, which always earns my respect. If you can get past the sketchy plot and just enjoy the action, it’s a fun film. Jaime Pressly stands out as American wrestler Tina Armstrong, and there’s a cute sideplot with a nerdy guy named Weatherby.

If you’re going to watch this one, you’ll probably want to rent it. For some reason it’s only available at Blockbuster, but if you’re the type to forgo physical stores entirely, you can also find it on Netflix.

I had a busy day with friends today — not as productive as it could have been, but I had a lot of fun. I’m down to pretty much one scene before I have to add some new content, and I’m really looking forward to that. I want to be done with this revision so I can move on.

After I add this bit, the rest is mostly just an issue of patching things together in the right place. That’s good, because it means I can kind of skim a little as I go, and hopefully wrap up revision of part one by the end of next week (or earlier! That would be nice).

Just how do you deal with a sentient, evil tongue, anyway?

“It’s a tongue,” Adrianna said.
The sorcerer nodded. “Aye, that it be.”
“How hard can it be to destroy a tongue?”
“As thou hast seen, ’tis a tongue with a wrathful will. ’Twould not succumb lightly to harm, nor any magic I might devise.” He looked down at the bread in his left hand. He’d crushed it into a solid lump. “As much I might desire to end its life, ’tis not an easy task.”

Wow, it sure looks like I wrote a huge amount today, doesn’t it? Well, I did make progress, but a lot of that was due to some pretty good writing that I’m willing to let be for now. I’ve moved a couple chapters up in the story so I can introduce the Tongue of Erskavit sooner, and then complicate matters vaguely related to it. That introduction, I think, works really well — it pisses Bandolor off and I think I managed to capture that.

Also, the farther I get in revision the more the characters seem to be what they ended up as at the end of the first draft. Big surprise there, huh? Anyway, it makes things easier to deal with revising for the moment. I have about 3 more pages to revise before I start working on the new section (which is sandwiched between old sections, rearranged). Making progress!

Today I revised Chapter 6. The important part of this was towards the end, as Bandolor and Iggsle discuss what to do about Adrianna. I needed to move around motives a little and complicate intentions, and I’m not quite sure it’s exactly where it needs to be. However, it’s suitable for now, and I can always go back later and adjust it further.

The big issue I had here was subtlety. I’m trying to add in a certain amount of conflict to one of these characters, and I’m not sure when it’s going to come to the fore. Heck, it might not even be in this book. Actually, no, it’ll probably show up at the end of this book. Regardless, I want that revelation to kind of put things in perspective, without having everything out of perspective beforehand. Do I even know what I mean? Maybe not. Anyway, it’s difficult.

Revising Chapter 7 might not be too difficult, by contrast. It’s another Adrianna chapter, so I need to pay attention to her characterization throughout, but overall it’s mostly a fun little interlude with Finkerner. I enjoy Fink, even though his dialogue takes forever to write, as it’s completely incomprehensible to everyone but Chaucerian scholars. Even I don’t understand it, but that’s kind of the point. The end of Chapter 7 is where I start snipping everything up and completely rearranging them, like some sort of literary collage that’s supposed to be end up looking like a photograph. I expect a major headache.

Wooo! My revised second draft of Part 1 has reached almost 20 pages! I’m moving along at a healthy clip. Of course, it helps that I’m not changing Iggsle and Bandolor as much as I am Adrianna, and she isn’t the perspective character of Chapters 4 and 5. I kept a lot of stuff from my first draft of both of those, and did some rewriting and revision here and there throughout. On the whole, it all evened out to a rather small increase in total length of about half a page.

(Math Fun Time! I “added” 9 pages to my previous draft 2 total (that’s the +9 in the title), but my revised pages only went up by 8.5, and my complete total by .5. That adds up to 9! This concludes Math Fun Time.)

Today I worked primarily on Chapters 4 and 5, as I mentioned above. Chapter 4 introduces Iggsle, and I worked a bit on rewriting some of the backstory I included in my first draft. Honestly, though, I’m thinking of cutting most of that out and revealing it gradually in later chapters (or a sequel), much like the way that I let Adrianna’s traumas take a backseat to other more immediate concerns — they’ll come out stronger when the time is right (or wrong, for her). Chapter 5 is partially just some necessary explanation, but also a way to establish how Bandolor and Adrianna are going to work together (not well). Bandolor’s a bit pushy, and Adrianna doesn’t like to be pushed.

Here’s a clip from Iggsle’s intro (yes, his surname is Potter — that’s what his father was):

Iggsle Potter was a man of patience, born as wild of a child as ever there was. As a youth, he railed against his father’s authority at the slightest provocation, blundered his way in and out of trouble, ended up in a gang of highway bandits, and generally disappointed his father in every way possible. His father fancied himself a man of the upper classes though only a poor potter, claimed literacy despite barely knowing half the alphabet, and imagined himself cultured when he had no ear for music and poetry, no eye for art, and no tongue for delicacies.

Imagine the smartest, most creative guy you know. Give that guy a brain-boost that doubles his wit and imagination, then lock him in a room and force-feed him pure sugar and caffeine until he’s vibrating so quickly you think he’ll drill through the floor. Now ask him to write the script for a comic book. That’s the image I have of how Joss Whedon wrote Sugarshock, a comic available for free online, with fabulous art by Fábio Moon.

Okay, there’s this band, right? One guy’s a robot, another girl claims to work for a secret government agency and has a thing against … vikings. Other characters are, uh, other things. And then this dead alien dude lands on their car with an announcement about a battle of the bands on an alien world. Or something. My head is still swirling from the awesomeness of it all.

Each issue is 8 pages long, and full of clever dialogue and complete randomity. Joss Whedon is a master of dialogue and a fountain of creativity, and in this case it seems he pulled out all the stops. I’m always impressed with Whedon’s work, and these little episodes, while short, pack more entertainment than a week of the newspaper’s funny pages.

Part 1 can be read here, Part 2 here, and you can also visit the Dark Horse Presents page for new issues and some other comics.

Well, I almost made it to the end of New Chapter 3. And then I suddenly got really really sleepy. So no more writing for me tonight!

I’m definitely liking this draft better. Even working Wallace the radio-obsessive crazy person in the early chapters works better… which is odd because I kept most of his dialogue the same. Context is everything, I guess.

So, I got a request that I note total pages as I revise (hey sis!). Currently I’m at 68 pages. You’ll note that’s less than my last full count plus the amount I’ve added since I started this second draft. There’s several factors here: some of what I do is new stuff (especially chapter 1); some of my old draft is left more or less intact; and some stuff I cut or alter. So I might make 3 pages of progress but only get through 1 page of revision (thus, at least theoretically, adding 2 pages). In theory, the exact opposite might well occur — I might end up cutting more than I put in, thus lowering my overall page count while raising my revision fraction!

Ow. 3:30 AM is not math time.

We’ll see how well these metrics hold up when I start getting to the main divergence between drafts 1 and 2, plotwise. I’m going to add some stuff and move some other stuff completely around. All in all, though, I’m actually trying to reduce exposition and portray more in conversation. We’ll see how that goes…

‘Night all.

So, oddly, I keep on adding pages as I “revise,” without really getting very far in my revision process. Oh well. It all seems to be working better this time through, and I’m able to keep the better bits and toss the worse ones, and since I have a much better idea of which is which, that makes my job a lot easier. Also, these earlier chapters require a lot more rewriting than later ones will, so hopefully I’ll speed up as I go. I might even reach a point where I won’t need to revise much at all in certain chapters as I get closer to the end of what I’ve written. There’s always the third draft, anyway.

As for metrics, you’ll see that while I added 2.5 pages to my second draft, I’ve still only revised 2 of my previous 62 pages so far. The fun part will come when I reach the end of the revision process and see just how much everything has grown by!

Bandolor and Adrianna are still jelling as characters. That’s good. Adrianna has a personality from the beginning this time around, which is certainly an improvement, and I can save some of the revelation of trauma for later in the book. I’m off to a good middle.

I’m moving ahead with my revision. I need to move a little faster, but at least I’m making some progress. Today I added more to my new Chapter 1 (my old Chapter 1 is now Chapter 3), and began the process of reworking the old prologue into Chapter 2. Now that I’ve got a better handle on Bandolor it makes a bit more sense, and I can cut out some of the awkwardness that was there when I first wrote the prologue.

I’ve revised 1 out of 62 pages. That means that I have taken approximately a page of my previous draft and reworked it. In general, though, reworking means that I’m adding more text than I’m taking out, or so it seems, and most of that is just to make thinks flow well, rather than adding major plot changes or new events. Those come later in the redraft.

It’s nice to see how I’ve learned a little about these characters. Adrianna in Chapter 1 seems to be working better, and Bandolor is a bit clearer now that I’ve learned about how sorcery works in my made-up world (you wouldn’t think I’d have to learn that, would you?). So, progress is good. More tomorrow!

Here’s Bandolor’s opening as it stands. Still a little awkward, but it’s getting better. It’s closer to what I’m looking for in my final product, and I’m still expecting another revision process after I get to the end of the book.

Bandolor O’Sorce stood on Mount Jormu’s plateau and stared deep into the stone serpent’s gullet, its carven head and fangs looming above him. From deep within the mountain’s twisting caverns, the true Serpent’s breath drifted out as a dank wind. Bandolor inhaled deeply, letting the beast’s breath swirl down into his lungs, tasting the magic in its exhalation, the invisible particles of sorcery like burning embers in his mouth.

“Egads,” you say, “what happened? Did your computer crash and lose your entire book? Was all that hard work for naught? Why did I say ‘egads’? Who says that, anyway?”

Good questions.

Okay, I’m not really back to square one, although I kind of feel like it. After another long weekend away from my book, I’m able to notice some major deficiencies in what I’ve written so far. It’s not so bad that I have to scrap it all and start over, but I have decided to do some big revising now rather than later. It’s a method I’ve gotten used to at school: write the first section of a story, get critiques from fellow writers, then redraft the first section and continue on from there. In this case, I’m able to skip the critiquing part and address some issues with plot structure and character development. I need to complicate some characters and flesh out others, as well as add a bit more excitement up front, so for approximately the next two weeks I’m going to be working through what I have and rearranging it, at times supplementing it with new material.

I actually added 2.5 pages today, but I’m still at 0 out of 62 pages in terms of revised pages, and I haven’t quite decided what the best marker of this revision process is going to be.

With luck, the end result of this process will be a firmer structural basis for when I start part 2 later this month.

Today, though, I mostly added a scene at the beginning with Adrianna getting some advice.

“You will never amount to anything,” the college advisor said. He was thin-lipped, thin-cheeked man with a sallow complexion and a pencil moustache. Adrianna found herself staring at a large brown wart on the side of his nose. It trembled as he spoke, expanding and deflating with each nostril-flaring breath, the two wiry black hairs sticking out of it twitching like insect antennae.