Don't you hate breaks in a season?
Many of us are rapt with out favorite shows, as things seem to be building to a natural crescendo. Many of the storylines of the season are coming to a head and you know that soon there is going to be an epic episode that will end with a either a major question or a major revelation...then you have to sit and wait for a few months.
In television circles, its called the mid-season finale and usually happens in December during a time called sweeps week. That's when networks bring out their big guns because they are going to use those rating to set the rates for advertisers. They want maximum viewership, but then everything screeches to a halt.
The viewers are left in limbo trying to figure our if their favorite character is actually evil, did she really sleep with him and yes, I am your father. It's hard enough when we get preempted because of a sports game on a holiday like Thanksgiving, but giving us months of reruns or second rate shoes that didn't make the main season cut is a nightmare.
If there is something we can take away from it, then it's that soon they will back on and we can once again get out weekly fix. At least until the season ends and we're back in the same boat again. I don't mind the end of a season because the storylines are wrapped up and there is some kind of conclusion, but often mid-season finales are cliffhangers that offer little in the way of resolution.
Books vs. movies
Long before I ever read The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker, I had seen the movie version Hellraiser on cable. Hellraiser was only one of several stories in the book, but it's what made me want to read the book. It went the same way with The Stand, Carrie, etc. I had always ended up seeing the movie first.
I guess as a child, I was a much more visual person because when it came to horror, the movies always came first. I soon came to realize that many of the movies I loved to watch were actually based on books or stories in books. I voraciously began reading everything I could by King, Barker, Koontz and others.
It wasn't long before I realized that the books were vastly different than the movies. The books had more details, more plot points and were much more thought out than the movies. Movies were like a shell of the books. Screenwriters took license with the plot and characters in order for them to fit within the time allotted and into modern conventions of movie magic.
I still don't know which one is best. I love them both for different reasons. It's like the Team Jacob and Team Edward dilemma. If I had to choose, then I would say that books were my preferred medium. There's something about exploring every aspect of a character that is appealing and you just can't do that in a movie. At best, a movie can truly focus on only couple of characters and everything else is background.
That's not what we agreed on
The problem with most writing jobs on the Internet is they are often done on the fly. You reply to a Craigslist ad or something from a writing website and soon you wash in a flurry of e-mails and fast deadlines.
If you are lucky, then you can develop long-standing relationships with people who will come to you again and again. I recently had a person that I've worked with many, many times before contact me. I had never had any issues about completing the project before getting paid.
It's a courtesy I do for some of my clients. We always hammered out the details about when and how much before I started and it never was an issue. Recently, I had completed a project and she sent over a payment significantly less than what we agreed upon.
She said that the person that paid her only gave her that much and that was all she could give me. Needless to say, this didn't sit well. We writers depend on that money because it's part of our income and when it doesn't all come in, then we get put into a bind.
I told her that I needed that money and that if she needed a few more days to get that would be fine. Days turned to weeks, and soon she wasn't even returning my e-mails. It's obvious that she never got the money and didn't want to tell me. About a year goes by and she e-mails me again about a job. I tell her that given the last transaction, I didn't trust her and that I would need the payment up front. That's how we do it from here on out.
Serpent and The Rainbow
Long before Max Brooks and his ilk began the revival of zombie horror, a 1988 movie decided to take a very real look at Haitian zombies. While we mostly think of zombies as the flesh eating undead, that's not how zombies are portrayed in places like Haiti.
The Serpent and the Rainbow is a gripping story of a researcher's look into the very real world of Voo Doo and the use of rare and exotic plants to create a zombie. In popular Haitian lore, zombies are the living dead, but they don't eat people. They simply do the bidding of their Voo Doo master.
While Voo Doo brings ideas of magic and spirits, many of this can be attributed to its use of various plants and other items in its ceremonies. Zombies, for example, are actually living people that are given a drug to make it seem as if they had died, but when the drug wears off they “come alive” again.
The film is directed by Wes Craven and based on the book by Wade Davis. Davis is said to actually have traveled to Haiti and brought back some of the zombie power, but that everything else in the movie is completely fake.
As you can guess from a Wes Craven movie, it has its fair share of scary moments, but it isn't a supernatural movie. They are more looking at how strange and frightening the truth can really be. It stands out amongst other more conventional zombie fair and is a great film in its own right.
New Grand Theft Auto is set to impress
Anyone who has played Grand Theft Auto games knows that you take the good with the bad. It's an expansive, free roaming world with plenty of opportunities to do carnage and mayhem, but hand to hand combat pretty much sucks driving feels like you're transporting Miss Daisy.
When Rockstar decided to put out a brand new GTA game, they took everything back to the drawing board with the goal of using the current generation of game systems to their absolute max. They took the complaints of earlier games and decided to actually improve the game instead of the status quo.
Granted, the game is a ways out and things could change by the time it's finally shipped. The developers have some high hopes when it comes to the hand-to-hand elements as well as driving. The goal is to make the hand-to-hand more fluidic and less 8-bit. The driving is going to get an major tune-up so that it actually feels like a racing game.
As it stands, the graphics just didn't have the umph to make the driving anything more than an interesting way to get from one place to the other. Chases were sluggish and jarring, but they are hoping to change that.
What has always made GTA great has been the story, music and lawlessness. Where else can I blow people's heads off and drive a tank through downtown? If they can succeed in making the most unattractive parts of previous games a draw for the newest, then they may have created the perfect videogame - for adults only, of course.
You didn't write your novel during NaNoWriMo did you?
So, you joined NaNoWriMo this year with the intent of finally getting that novel out of your head and onto the page. Odds are your started out really good, but after a week or two, things started to slow down. By the end, you hadn't written on it for days and what you did write is pretty much gibberish.
Don't sweat it. Only a small fraction of people that join NaNoWriMo actually get through to the very end and frankly, that's a good thing. If everyone that joined actually wrote a book, then the market would be flooded with thousands of hastily made books self-published and sitting lonely on Amazon's digital shelf.
NaNoWriMo isn't actually about writing an entire book, it's simply a way to spur creative thinking and writing. If you get through half your book, then you're half way to finishing it. Don't think of the end of NaNoWriMo as a failure, but as a success. If you even wrote one additional word on your novel, then you did what you were supposed to do.
The key to getting the most of NaNoWriMo is to take what you've got and make it better. NaNoWriMo is supposed to be about regurgitation. It's literal vomit. You puke it out and then it's up to you to clean it up. Now that you have something written, take it and polish it. It might just spur you on to more writing. I know it does for me every year.
Bring in the wife
People often get the misconception that successful blogging is easy, but that's completely untrue. That doesn't stop spouses with Pollyanna eyes trying to start up their own blog and emulate their hubby. Mom bloggers have it a little bit easier as far as support groups, etc., but the competition is fierce.
There are mom bloggers on every topic under the sun and trying to carve out your own niche isn't easy. Dad blogging is much easier because let's face it: we're more laid back. We don't sweat the small stuff and if things don't happen as fast as we want, the we just go with the flow. This is where bringing in the spouse can get a little hairy.
They may want to get as popular or as many hits as you in a short amount of time. They want instant gratification and that's not going to happen. You need to sit down and talk to her about the logistics of blogging and what she needs to do to start her blog and make it successful. The talk alone might be enough to have her reconsider.
You can help her out by promoting her on your own blog and asking other blogging friends to do the same. Just don't fall in the “write this for me,” trap. It's where you're suddenly writing her posts because she doesn't have the time. Once you start, it never stops.
Having two blog writers in the home can be fun, but they both need to know that they are separate and things won't always be in the same ebb and flow.
What I've learned from NaNoWriMo 2012
Today is the last day of my seventh NaNoWriMo. I started participating in this challenge back in 2006, and I've done it every year since, though I've failed to reach 50K words more often than not. Although I'd won last year, and again in August when I participated in the summer session ("Camp" NaNoWriMo), this November I failed to reach my 50K word goal.
However, I don't consider this NaNoWriMo to be a failure.
Since I was finishing the novel that I'd gotten halfway through in August -- I figured 50K was a good halfway mark for this novel, at least by the way it felt -- and since I'd lost the thread of the novel in September and October, the biggest success this month was getting me back into the novel. The hardest thing about writing a novel is picking it back up again if you happen to take a few days or a few weeks away from it.
The other thing that NaNoWriMo did for me this year was to force me to fill in my outline -- so, even though NaNoWriMo is leaving me with more work still to do, I know where I'm going with it now. Having the rest of the story in your head always makes it easier to keep writing.
And the final thing that NaNo has done for me in 2012 was to help me figure out more of the series outline. This novel is the second in a planned series (I wrote the first book last year and am working on revisions). I figured out gaps in my plan for the series, and solidified plans for future books, too. It's all coming together, piece by piece!
And that is how NaNoWriMo can help you, even if you never make it to 50K words!
Cartoon hijinks on Supernatural
I was wondering when they were going to have one of those funny episodes again after the death of the Trickster, so I was pleasantly surprised by the recent episode. The brothers and Castiel investigate the strange death of a man whose heart literally beat out of his chest.
They also find out that banks are being robbed using similar cartoony tricks and trace everything to an old folks home. There they meet an old friend and powerful psychokinetic that can warp reality. He had retreated into his own mind and was being manipulated by the center's manager.
Besides the endless cartoon actions and stunts, this actually did a great job of moving the plot without getting too serious. We learn more about what happened to Sam through flashbacks, possibly the worst part of the show, and that Castiel doesn't want to return to heaven because of what he did to it when he went all bad.
He's afraid that if he goes back that he'll want to kill himself. It's pretty powerful stuff, but it peppered with literally zany hilarity. Amanda Tapping was back as Naomi and they have Castiel on a pretty short leash. They won't let him visit heaven except to where they are. Although, at this point we don't know exactly on what team she's playing.
Is she God in disguise? Rogue angel? Who knows? Hopefully, we will know soon enough. There's still more new episodes coming, so my guess things are going to get flushed out pretty quick.
Lindsay Lohan's nightclub brawl: Will she ever be OK?
Sometimes, the headlines just write themselves. Take this week, for example, when tabloids far and wide were quick to report that Lindsay Lohan punched a woman in a New York City bar. Why, pray tell, did Lindsay allegedly throw a punch at an unsuspecting patron inside a club? What could possibly set the actress off so much that she felt the need to throw a mean right hook?
Get ready for this: Lindsay supposedly flipped out because she was jealous over a boy band member. Yes, Hollywood's biggest hot mess went bonkers on the East Coast because she wanted a member of The Wanted. If you're not familiar with The Wanted, let's just say they're up there with One Direction (almost) in terms of teens. Why, Lindsay?
Here's what went down, according to TMZ: Lindsay Lohan at some point decided she had the hots for The Wanted singer Max George. She hit up the band's show on Wednesday night. They opened, by the way, for Justin Bieber at Madison Square Garden. After the show, Lindsay met up with Max and his fellow band members. They went clubbing, ultimately ending up at the swanky Avenue nightclub together.
That's when things got weird. TMZ says that Lindsay Lohan got "sloppy drunk" and that really "turned off" Max George. Max wound up talking to another woman, briefly, and Lindsay didn't like that one bit. Never ignore a crazy drunk actress! Lindsay then reportedly punched the woman, later identified as psychic Tiffany Mitchell.
Lindsay Lohan was arrested, Max went home with another woman and Tiffany Mitchell wound up with a pretty sore face, one would imagine. When will Lindsay get it together? The short answer, I'm almost sure now, is never. I predict that she'll dominate tabloid headlines in 2013, too. The girl is a wreck, and she's got to stop drinking!
Do you think Lindsay Lohan will ever get her life together? Why, or why not?