I suppose that A Movie About The Morality of Warfare and The Implications of Advanced Technology would have been too long for the posters. That’s a shame, really, because underneath all of the special effects and the glibness of the “elite pilots have feelings too” method acting that’s what Stealth is really trying to be.
[Read more…] about Stealth
Archives for July 2005
Withdrawal isn’t just church-approved birth control
I wish I could say that my depression rolled in like a weather front, black clouds heavy with self-loathing and self-doubt, easy to spot and take precautions against. But it’s not. It’s more insidious than that, moving in on little cat feet in the dead of night when I can’t sleep making me puzzle over some remark I made off hand or something that didn’t go quite right or some perceived unsatisfied “should.”
Withdrawing from contact with other people seems like the most natural reaction; after all, if I can’t stand my own company who else would want to be around me, right? It’s also the worst possible thing I can do: with only my own perceptions as feedback the hole underneath me can do nothing but get deeper and deeper as the cycle turns and I, eventually, find fault with the very fact that I exist. Yet, I have no alternate plan.
Last night we had dinner with one of The Girlfriend’s friends from college and her new girlfriend who were in town unexpectedly. We hadn’t seen this woman in about eight years. The last time we saw her she was in the middle of a long-term relationship with someone else. Inquiring politely, we were told a very long story about S’s method for dealing with her depression: she went to bed for three years.
I kid you not. According to The Friend, S. would get up, go to work, come home, and go to bed. That’s it. End of story. Last night it struck me as sort of a silly way to approach something. Today it’ seems like a not bad idea.
What does gas cost again?
<rant>
I am deathly sick of the sound of running truck engines.
Yes, we had a storm over the weekend. Yes, we had another one Wednesday night. Does that mean you have to sit in your truck with the engine running for an hour while the crew chainsaws the tree?
</rant>
Homeland Stupidity
I’m trying to figure out when Mark Fiore sleeps. While I do that, there’s always his brilliant and timely animation to watch. Check this one out, and check out the rest of his site. You’ll need Flash. Go get it. It’s free.
Editing the sex is the hardest
Last fall I entered the collective insanity that is National Novel Writing Month: you agree to write the first draft of a novel in 30 days beginning midnight 01 November and ending at 23:59:59 30 November. It’s not as hard as it sounds as the NaNo people consider “a novel” to be 50,000 words, which works out to 2,000 words per day.
Two thousand words, for most of us used to sitting in front of a computer, is not much more than a long e-mail or blog entry, right? The problem is that unless you stuff yourself into some mythical NaNo format, even if you make 50,000 words by or before November 30th your book probably isn’t going to be finished. And NaNo’s hard work, make no mistake. It illuminates for you how much of your life you spend doing other things besides writing (like watching 18 year-old Patrick Swayze movies on TV ’cause you’ve had a glass of wine with dinner and since you don’t drink any more you’re kind of a cheap drunk and when you’re slightly drunk you’re too stupid to do anything but suckle from the glass teat).
Some good things came out of the disciplined insanity of writing a first draft in a month: well, obviously, most of a first draft (I didn’t really “finish” the book until January); I met Jim; and I learned once and for all that writing is not a group activity.
But now I have this first draft of what is a moderately good novel and what the heck am I supposed to do with it? I skipped National Novel Editing Month because I don’t believe it’s possible to “speed edit.” The past few days without electricity, though, gave me the perfect opportunity to commune with the book. And what I discovered is that editing the sex is the hardest.
Yes, that’s right, there’s sex in my book, and as Susie Bright tells us “a good sex story is something that arouses the author.” The problem is, it’s damn hard to figure out if that comma should be deleted, or if an act is physically possible or it bends the characters into a parallelogram, when you’re all hot and bothered.
So I read it, made some small edits, and moved on to the rest of the book. Now that I’ve been through the entire thing once and gotten the obvious mistakes, I’ll go back and rework the sex. It’s a sacrifice but somehow I think I’ll manage.
Note: this entry, minus this note, the title, and the URLs, is 409 words.