Can You Hear Me in the Back? Good.

I think it's time for another update here to my sadly neglected blogspot blog. Which would be here. Duh. Anyway, there's been some progress, of a sort, on the writing front that I feel the need to ramble about just a bit.

On the getting published front, well not a whole lot of progress there. Unless of course, you consider rejection letters progress. I guess it could be seen as progress in a way. I mean hey, that's 3 rejections I didn't have before! I'm hoping to collect the whole set! Heh. I've changed my mind on the issue of saving the things. Don't know why I thought it was a good idea, but I had my rejection from The Magazine Of Fantasy and Science Fiction up on my wall. I guess I thought that it would be some form of motivation. It was, but all it motivated me to do was get irritated and play World of Warcraft. While that's fun(the WoW, not the irritation), it wasn't getting me anywhere. So, new plan! Rejections go in the circular file, and instead, where that letter used to be, I now have my certificate of ordination from the Church of Dudeism. AHHHHHH! MUCH better.

So, the ACTUAL progress is that I've hit on a way to rework the Nemesis series that may pan out. Changing it to largely first person from the perspecitve of a pilot that I've based on myself. Yeah, I'm a STARFIGHTER PILOT! YAY! heh. Also, at least one of the other characterizations is changing. The captain of the Nemesis is one of the main heroes, and used to be just a rather generic hero type. Now, I'm going to base it on my father. A tribute, and I know Dad would have loved to travel the stars. He wouldn't have liked to fight a war, but I'm sure he would have been one hell of a leader. So that's what I'm going to do.

Those are the brain droppings of the moment.

Thanks but no thanks...

So it seems that The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was not hip to what I was layin' down in the story I sent them. The rejection letter wasn't mean, but yes, it was a disappointment. I wasn't really expecting to get accepted on this one, but I was hoping, so it didn't come as a surprise really. The rejection I got thanked me for sending in the story, but said that it didn't grab his interest. Ah well. Only thing to do is to send it elsewhere and send them something else. I will say that I think mainly, what I sent them really doesn't fit with what they usually publish, as I went out and bought an issue, which I should have done before, but I just picked a mag at random and sent it in. Now, I know better and I'll be able to tailor to them, and that might work. I also picked up copies of Analog and Weird Tales to research those a bit as well. I'm considering taking a page out of Stephen King's book, literally and hammering a roofing nail into my wall to keep my rejection letters on. Of course the rest of that story where the nail breaks and he has to graduate to a railroad spike disturbs be a bit. heh.

Back in Business...

It's been too damn long since I updated this thing, and really too damn long since I did much writing at all. I have my goals, but sitting on my ass just isn't going to get anything going where I want it to, so no more of that mess. Now, I'm actually taking some steps to try and actually get somewhere with this writing lark that I've had in my head for as long as I can remember, but wasn't doing what I needed to do to bring it out of my brain and into reality. The first thing I did was to print out and mail off a story I've had sitting around for a good long while. I don't expect to see it get accepted and published first time out of the gate, but hey you never know until you try, right? Don't know what's been holding me back, but I know that I'm just damn sick of it. So no more of that. Now, I'm actually working to get somewhere with all of this. Yup, time to get back to work.

Scooped!

It's a bit of a pain in the ass when you come up with something that you think will make for a good story. You sit there at your computer, typewriter, notebook, whatever it is you use and write out the story that you just came up with. You make some progress and are pretty pleased with yourself. Then, you stumble upon some things that show you that your idea has really already been done. I've recently had that experience.

Came up with an idea that I thought was really cool, then got some stuff done on it. Then(and I don't know why this didn't at least half hit me before), I realized that what I was working on was just far too similar to a couple of other, already existing comics out there. One was Powers by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. The other is The Boys by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. It was more similar to Powers than The Boys, but still, the similarities where there, too obvious and too many. Damn. Ah well, things happen.

So, I'm mothballing the idea until I can come up with a more unique angle for it. Although I do like one of the characters I came up with, and might have to use him in something else. We shall see. I'm not trying to sound all pretentious here and that I only want to come up with things that are TOTALLY unique, but like I said, there are just too many similarities to the point where it would look like a ripoff of either one of those two comics, and I'd rather not do that. So, back to other things that I don't think make me feel like I'm ripping off someone else.

Back to the drawing board. heh.

Dammit...

Kurt Vonnegut has died. I've only gotten around to a few of his books, but what I've read, I've really enjoyed. I think in tribute, I'll go home and reread Slaughterhouse Five after work.

To close this out, a few quotes by the man that I really like...

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center. "

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."

Rest well, Kurt. You'll be missed.

Grindhouse Gets Ground Up...

I dug the hell out of Grindhouse. Apparently, a lot of the movie going public this past weekend, didn't agree with me, considering the film took in only around 11 million bucks and was in fourth place behind Are We Done Yet?, Meet the Robinsons, and Blades of Glory. Ouch. Now, Harvey Weinstein is talking about breaking the film up into 2 seperate moviesin the US in a couple of weeks, and adding some deleted footage to each to make each one more feature length, as they're already doing to the film for overseas release. That's bad enough, but apparently, they're also considering breaking the film up for the DVD release. NOT cool. Yes, I understand that it's a business, and they want to make their money back and hopefully turn a profit, but from the beginning, the movie was envisioned as a "Double Feature in a Single Feature". To cut it up now is not going to help. There would be the additional expense of a new marketing campaign, plus new prints, and they're going to alienate a lot of the film geeks who were the ones that actually spent their bucks on the film in the first place. The same will happen if they release it on DVD as 2 seperate films, they'll piss off the hardcore. The only way that I think Grindhouse really works is as a double feature with the fake trailers in the middle. Breaking it into two seperate movies really wouldn't give you the same experience.

Personally, I think a lot of the film's rather dismal performance at the box office is due to mistakes that were made on the part of The WeinStein Company. First off, releasing it on Easter Weekend was a bad move. It's just not the kind of movie that was going to do well on a very family-oriented weekend like Easter. I mean, just look at what beat Grindhouse. For the most part, family-oriented crap. Even Blades of Glory, which isn't so much family oriented, but is a much much lighter movie, more suited to the kind of weekend we just had. Second, they wouldn't release prints of the movie to actual Grindhouse theaters or the Grindhouse Film Festival. That right there was a decision that, in my mind at least elevates Harvey Weinstein from normal, garden variety idiocy to The Fraternity of the Galactically Stupid.

If they break the film up into 2 seperate films, ok, fair enough. If they release it on DVD as 2 seperate films, fair enough. I just hope that they see the sense in also releasing a version that has both films back to back with the fake trailers, as they've done with the original realease, and on REGULAR DVD, not on Blu-Ray or HD-DVD exclusively. I'm not very optimistic though.

Personally, I'm planning on going to see Grindhouse again this week during the afternoon sometime, so I can see it as it was intended one more time, then sit back and hope that they release it on DVD the right way. If you haven't seen it yet, and you want to see it how Rodriguez and Tarantino intended it to be seen, I suggest you do the same.

Slainte'.

Time Enough I Think, for a Piece of Wood!

Greetings and saluations. I felt that a brief update on the state of writerly stuff was in order, so here we go.

Recently, I've made a promise to myself to make sure that I either write or look over something with the intention of editing it every day. On days that I write, which has been most of them since I made this resolution to myself a month or two ago, I try to write for at least an hour. On other days, I've been going back over the first draft that I wrote for this past year's NaNoWriMo, trying to figure out where it can be expanded and what can be added to it to push it from around 53K words to closer to the 90K sweetspot for a novel. After I play around with that for a bit, I intend to go back and give the same treatment to 2005's NaNo, Nemesis: Cry Havoc.

In other writerly news, I finished off a first draft of a short film script about 2 dueling ice-cream truck drivers entitled The Cold War, and gave it to a couple of director friends of mine to get some input. Also, my GF took a story that I wrote several years ago and gave it to an artist friend of hers to turn it into a short graphic novel. Apparently, he's made some headway, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what he's come up with. Other than all of that, I've been working on a couple of new ideas that will definitely bear some fruit, I think.

So all in all, a productive time here in the Deadpan Den, and that makes me quite happy. =)