Having seen Neil Gaiman’s post about the passing of Iain Banks, I wanted to explore my own goals. It’s hard for someone to keep going in a creative field, especially in hard times. So, in honor of those who spend their lives making good art, I try to do the same.
Enjoy?
I’m trying out something different. Knowing in advance that I’m going to see the latest Rebuild of Evangelion movie, Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo, I thought it would be fun to share my thoughts about the franchise and what I’m hoping for. Not wanting to stop at an easy point, I’m going to also share what I think after seeing it as well.
Anyone who has seen many movies in the past ten years has seen at least one occasion where a character in the source material was one race, but they ended up another race when they hit the screen. This is especially true in movies based on comic books, like Thor, which features Idris Elba as a Norse God.
Elba’s version of Heimdall was one of the more impressive figures in a movie filled with divine figures, making it easy to forget that Norse characters are ethnically Caucasian and have red or blond hair. For one reason or another, this keeps happening, largely in the name of diversity.
At least, diversity is the reason I use when I change a character’s race in my own works.
In my effort to improve my storytelling abilities, I’ll look over a number of things, not just books or stories, but comics, movies, and TV shows too. As someone who has been a fan of How I Met Your Mother from the very beginning, I get to enjoy the show on multiple levels because I am a writer.
So, I’m going to take a moment and explain why the ending of Season 8 of How I Met Your Mother works. I’m going to talk about everything new brought up by the finale, including that last detail.
As we look for books, what is it that we’re looking for? Do we want something that is going to appeal to our tastes based on spatial placement and marketing analysis? Is there a writer or genre that we’re trying to explore?
Despite what professional booksellers would tell you, I don’t think we’re after any of those things.
A year ago, The Avengers came out. In the weeks leading up to that release, I was subjected to one commercial for the movie roughly 280 times a week. My post at work was about twenty feet away from a screen that played the ad every eight minutes. By the time the movie came out, I was sick of it. This wasn’t the case with Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, or the first two Iron Man films.
Now, with the success of The Avengers, which was a decent movie, we have the next big Marvel release, Iron Man 3.
I haven’t done movie reviews for a while, since I wanted to focus more on the core elements of writing, like characters, narrative, and storytelling. Having seen Oblivion over the weekend, I felt I could say a few things about the movie that would speak to what I like in a story, be it a movie or a book.
If you’ve ever glanced by here before, you know what I want out of life. As a writer, I’m not seeking fortune by any means, though it’d be nice to make enough money to pay the bills and keep everything going.
That’s the dream.
Since I’m always interested in getting a reader’s attention and keeping it, I’m starting a new feature. First Fifty Pages is going to be a simple assessment of the first fifty pages of whatever book I’m reading now. First up, since it’s the book I’m reading now, is Peter V. Brett’s The Warded Man (known as The Painted Man in a large part of the world).
Watching last night’s episode of The Walking Dead, I found myself drawn into a tense situation. The episode began in media res and did a great job of it. Then, they opened a door and found the Governor (The Big Bad) standing with his hands empty.
And they didn’t kill him.
