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I am all caught up on NaNo! \o/ For definitions of "caught up" that mean "my goal for the month is 20,000 words instead of 50,000." But this is further than I've gotten most years regardless of goal, so I'm calling it win if I make 20,000.
In the process I am crossed the 10,000 word line on both the Dresden-files-in-a-Canadian-shack story and the Enjolras-and-Grantaire-are-running-for-President AU. I am posting that one as a wip on AO3. Under my pseud because who knows if I will actually keep going on it. Although I gave myself until next November, so we'll see. The first three chapters are now here: Primary Failure. Whee.
I think I'm going to let those rest for awhile and work on something else. Brick discussion on Tumblr has gotten me nostalgic for writing serious canon-setting Les Mis, so maybe I'll work on one of those. (Of course, my options for 'serious canon-setting Mis' wips are the one where Valjean's cock heals TB, the one where aliens make Valjean and Javert have sex, the Valjean/Montparnasse kink pwp, the one with the guinea pig, the one with the squirrels, and the one were Javert and Courfeyrac team up to solve a mystery, so. For certain definitions of 'serious and canon', I guess.)
I also just crossed 5,000 words on two of the original fantasy stories I have in my WIPs, which is way farther than I've gotten on anything original in an embarrassingly long time. They've both just passed their action climax and are at the start of the emotional climax, which means of course I am going "Oh crap I didn't lay the groundwork for this nearly well enough earlier on." (They were also both supposed to max out at 5,000 but ehhhh. They will both need a ton of revision anyway, I'll figure it all out then.)
Writing original fantasy is hard.
It's been awhile since I have reported on a Sunday movie night. That is partly because I had a couple of busy weekends. It's partly because this is the first time the random number generator got me a movie that was, well, bad. It was the Keanu Reeves Constantine , which I was not precisely expecting to be good, and wasn't really sure it was my kind of thing regardless, but it's a movie that I wanted to have watched even if I didn't actually want to watch it, so I went for it.
It is a reasonably competent noir urban fantasy that keeps trying to be schlocky horror, so whenever I started to actually get into it I would have to sit through a boring sequence of badly-animated insects crawling out of somebody's eyes or something. As a result it fails as both noir and horror.
I was going to be forgiving of this because maybe urban fantasy hadn't quite found its feet yet, but it turns out that despite the fact that watching this movie felt like being breaded and fried in the late '90s, it was made in 2005, so actually it does not get a pass. Also it was very wet. I mean, if you wanted the movie to constantly feel like cold drizzle, why would you deliberately not set it in England?
Anyway, other than a few guest appearances in other folks' titles, this was my first real exposure to John Constantine. I'd heard people say it was a reasonable movie if you didn't know anything about Constantine. Sadly that is not true. There were some good bits - I liked the way John did magic, like he was punching the universe. And Papa Midnite was great. But I suspect those are the bits that are least changed from the real Constantine.
I wanted to say that at least the characterization was kind of compelling, but that is not true. I wanted to like this Constantine, but every time I started to, they would decide it was time for another scene where he physically assaulted a screaming, struggling woman. For her own good. Obviously. I watched the movie in four half-hour segments because that was about all I could take at once, and like clockwork in every half-hour there was a lengthy scene of him physically assaulting a struggling, screaming woman. I could almost forgive the character for the exorcism scenes - there were plot reason for those, fine, he had to do it - but I am not forgiving the director for it, there were definitely ways that could have been filmed without looking quite so exactly like a rape scene. For her own good. To fix her. The other two times John did not have to do that and afaict were just John being in a bad mood and deciding to take it out on the nearest woman. Because why not ehhh. We all want to drown a chick in a bathtub sometimes amirite.
So that takes him beyond "broody antihero" territory and into "avoid at all costs, do not be in the same room with."
Anyway now that's gotten over with I should finally get around to exposing myself to some not-awful Constantine. I hear there was a lot of Papa Midnite in the TV show.
Other than that my media consumption has been mostly trying to get through Hugo-eligible stuff. (Over the Garden Wall is the next DVD. I expect it to be ~10,000% better than Constantine.)
It's been fun! I'm going slower than I'd hoped, and I haven't read anything that's blow-my-socks-off-amazing yet, but most of what I've found from this year's SF output is good. Unfortunately I am used to finding something good and then going and finding all the fanfic for it, and none of these have enough fanfic.
Would anyone be interested in a kinkmeme for 2015 Hugo-eligible works? I think it could be cool. I think there's enough of us trying to do noms this year that we could make it work. And I miss having a kinkmeme. Anybody else think we could make it work? I could run it, probably, if we had critical mass.
In the process I am crossed the 10,000 word line on both the Dresden-files-in-a-Canadian-shack story and the Enjolras-and-Grantaire-are-running-for-President AU. I am posting that one as a wip on AO3. Under my pseud because who knows if I will actually keep going on it. Although I gave myself until next November, so we'll see. The first three chapters are now here: Primary Failure. Whee.
I think I'm going to let those rest for awhile and work on something else. Brick discussion on Tumblr has gotten me nostalgic for writing serious canon-setting Les Mis, so maybe I'll work on one of those. (Of course, my options for 'serious canon-setting Mis' wips are the one where Valjean's cock heals TB, the one where aliens make Valjean and Javert have sex, the Valjean/Montparnasse kink pwp, the one with the guinea pig, the one with the squirrels, and the one were Javert and Courfeyrac team up to solve a mystery, so. For certain definitions of 'serious and canon', I guess.)
I also just crossed 5,000 words on two of the original fantasy stories I have in my WIPs, which is way farther than I've gotten on anything original in an embarrassingly long time. They've both just passed their action climax and are at the start of the emotional climax, which means of course I am going "Oh crap I didn't lay the groundwork for this nearly well enough earlier on." (They were also both supposed to max out at 5,000 but ehhhh. They will both need a ton of revision anyway, I'll figure it all out then.)
Writing original fantasy is hard.
It's been awhile since I have reported on a Sunday movie night. That is partly because I had a couple of busy weekends. It's partly because this is the first time the random number generator got me a movie that was, well, bad. It was the Keanu Reeves Constantine , which I was not precisely expecting to be good, and wasn't really sure it was my kind of thing regardless, but it's a movie that I wanted to have watched even if I didn't actually want to watch it, so I went for it.
It is a reasonably competent noir urban fantasy that keeps trying to be schlocky horror, so whenever I started to actually get into it I would have to sit through a boring sequence of badly-animated insects crawling out of somebody's eyes or something. As a result it fails as both noir and horror.
I was going to be forgiving of this because maybe urban fantasy hadn't quite found its feet yet, but it turns out that despite the fact that watching this movie felt like being breaded and fried in the late '90s, it was made in 2005, so actually it does not get a pass. Also it was very wet. I mean, if you wanted the movie to constantly feel like cold drizzle, why would you deliberately not set it in England?
Anyway, other than a few guest appearances in other folks' titles, this was my first real exposure to John Constantine. I'd heard people say it was a reasonable movie if you didn't know anything about Constantine. Sadly that is not true. There were some good bits - I liked the way John did magic, like he was punching the universe. And Papa Midnite was great. But I suspect those are the bits that are least changed from the real Constantine.
I wanted to say that at least the characterization was kind of compelling, but that is not true. I wanted to like this Constantine, but every time I started to, they would decide it was time for another scene where he physically assaulted a screaming, struggling woman. For her own good. Obviously. I watched the movie in four half-hour segments because that was about all I could take at once, and like clockwork in every half-hour there was a lengthy scene of him physically assaulting a struggling, screaming woman. I could almost forgive the character for the exorcism scenes - there were plot reason for those, fine, he had to do it - but I am not forgiving the director for it, there were definitely ways that could have been filmed without looking quite so exactly like a rape scene. For her own good. To fix her. The other two times John did not have to do that and afaict were just John being in a bad mood and deciding to take it out on the nearest woman. Because why not ehhh. We all want to drown a chick in a bathtub sometimes amirite.
So that takes him beyond "broody antihero" territory and into "avoid at all costs, do not be in the same room with."
Anyway now that's gotten over with I should finally get around to exposing myself to some not-awful Constantine. I hear there was a lot of Papa Midnite in the TV show.
Other than that my media consumption has been mostly trying to get through Hugo-eligible stuff. (Over the Garden Wall is the next DVD. I expect it to be ~10,000% better than Constantine.)
It's been fun! I'm going slower than I'd hoped, and I haven't read anything that's blow-my-socks-off-amazing yet, but most of what I've found from this year's SF output is good. Unfortunately I am used to finding something good and then going and finding all the fanfic for it, and none of these have enough fanfic.
Would anyone be interested in a kinkmeme for 2015 Hugo-eligible works? I think it could be cool. I think there's enough of us trying to do noms this year that we could make it work. And I miss having a kinkmeme. Anybody else think we could make it work? I could run it, probably, if we had critical mass.