Feck-Arse Industries

so i reckon i'm at the end of a first draft of the dumbass story i'm working on, which always provokes mixed emotions. I'm happy it's done, but i'm less happy it's totalled a grand 76 thousand words. that's... shorter than i wanted. And less than i expected. I've also got the usual worries that it's generally a bit pile of poo and i've wasted three months of my life on it.

on the plus side, i think i've figured out what's wrong with the beginning - i started in the wrong place. Once again i've tried to jump into the middle of an exciting scene to, y'know, stop everyone falling asleep, then realised i've not developed the world or the characters enough and tried to jam in a load of backstory and exposition, in what's supposed to be an action scene. Gah. I've also belatedly realised my last three and possibly four stories have suffered from the same problem. What the heck's wrong with me?

so i've got the easter weekend to kick the crap out of the stupid story and maybe make it into something good. Yaaaay.

fangirl overload

my husband bought me this movie today. How happy? MOST happy.

i love Dave Bautista. I know it's sad and i know the movie's gonna be awful and i have a sneaky suspicion Mr Batista's not even going to be in it for long (like they gipped me with Chris Jericho in Android Apocalypse) but, my god, i can't help it. The man brings out the fangirl in me.

You know what i'd love to see? A God of War movie with Batista as Kratos. I think that would be the best thing ever.

Screnzy

so i'm planning to do Script Frenzy this year. Tried last year with a graphic novel, failed, am trying again.

Wanna friend me? Pls?

these are the Glengarry leads

ahahahaha, thank you Royal Mail, you finally came through for me. And, may i say, BOUT TIME.

this, the thing i hold in my sweaty palms, is Ex-Heroes by Mr Peter Clines. I am VERY excited about it. *squeeeee*

EDIT: btw, i don't actually live in a store cupboard, it's just the way my webcam is angled, honest.

because you're mine

btw, go to Concern.net and download their charity single, raising money for Haiti. Not only is it a good cause, but amazingly, it's a damn good song as well. And Simon Cowell has been nowhere near it.

(best reaction of the day: "who told Shane MacGowan he could sing?" ... to which the answer has to be, who the hell's gonna stop him?)

spacey sunday, friend of mine

a smug smile of female solidarity to Kathryn Bigelow, first female director to win the Oscar. You go, girl.

Hurt Locker wasn't my favourite film of the year (i'd probably go for District 9 there), but it also wasn't the worst and it at least deserved the win. Quite apart from anything else, i'm kinda glad Tarantino didn't win. Not that i have anything against Quint, but an Oscar would just encourage him.

and Christoph Waltz as best supporting... the academy are slowly rebuilding the faith they shattered with the Titanic fiasco.

blame it on the bad actress

seej is sitting next to me and helping edit this post by usurping the delete key, so this may take longer than usual...

i'm perservering with my acting classes, altho i did miss a couple of them due to the whole getting married thing. Acting is fun (discovery of the week, i know). I'm not sure i'll ever get good at it--in fact, i'm pretty certain i never will. Like most things in life, i reckon that if i really put forth the effort and tried my very hardest, i could manage a solid C average.

something i've picked up over the last few weeks is that writing isn't actually intended for actors--Instructor Carl has told us that most stage direction (and pretty much everything else in the script that isn't dialogue) can and in fact SHOULD be ignored when you're acting. It's a distraction, the writer telling the actor how they should be feeling when the emotion should be coming from inside the actor.

and i'm not quite sure how i feel about that. I mean, speaking as a writer, how dare those flipping actors ignore all those hard-written words? who do they think they are? But equally, when you're reading the scripts as part of the class, you start to notice how superfluous a lot of stuff is. Like, if the sleasy male character says "there's something you need to know about your husband", is it necessary to tag the woman's reply as "(worried)"?

you also realise how annoying it is when people put commas in the wrong place in dialogue. I may have to start bringing a red pen along to make corrections.

partiallyclips

remembered something i wanted to squee about. Since it's been around for eight years and i'm notoriously slow about these things, y'all probably know about it already, but anyway:

PartiallyClips.com, which has been consuming my attention all week.

this one is my favourite.
or maybe this one. It's hard to say.

you also wouldn't believe how long it took me to understand the name.