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.

you see the hat? i am MRS NESBIT.

afternoon all, i have returned and i am now a married woman. Again. :)

thank you everyone who sent happy wishes, twas very much appreciated. We had a lovely time, drank far too much wine and danced to Abba (it's obligatory, isn't it?). For those of yous with facespace tolerance, there's some photos up here.
i'll post some up here when i get my stupid internet fuctioning like it should again.

anyway, i have more stuff i wanted to mention but it's all gone out of my head. Pleh.

belated invitation

afternoon, all.

right, so, me and my significant other, John (aka Special John, aka SJ, aka Seej), are finally getting married on saturday (cue much rejoicing). We're tying the knot here:



which is, y'know, moderately cool.

also, because of multitudinal reasons not least of which is the fact that i've left this to an amazingly last minute, i appreciate that at lot of people won't be able to attend. So i've sort of organised a pre-wedding chat room get together. Jacob-Pancake at Permuted Press has very kindly loaned us the PP chat room for a few hours, and basically, there's a party there and you're invited. :)

the permuted boards are here - you'll have to register to enter the chat room, but seriously you should be on this message board anyway because it's the most fun.

so yeah, if you're not busy, drop in about midnight UK time (that's about 6 pm CST... i think... please correct me if i'm wrong). There will be party hats and glow sticks and cookies.

(also, we're doing the donation thing in lieu of pressies, so if you're feeling generous, please check out these links:
Just Giving (UK)
idofoundation (US)
thank yooooou!!)

hey, i think i met you once!

Adding to my tenuous list of famous people I've maybe met...

We're going to see The Book of Eli tonight, a movie I've managed to hear absolutely nothing about. But I was unreasonably excited to find out it was written by Gary Whitta, one time editor of PC Gamer, who (if i recall rightly) took the reins of that fine magazine not long after the Matt Bielby Golden Age, no less. Also, I think I met him once. It was at the Future Entertainment Show in London, way back in 1994. I certainly met a very nice bloke from PC Gamer magazine called Gary, and I guess it could've been him. It's difficult to tell from his imdb photo because all chubby bespectacled nerds have a certain similarity. But I remember he was lovely, because he gave me his autograph AND a free magazine.

So there we go, yet another tenuous link to the famous and fortunate. My mate Gary Whitta--I promise not to say anything rude about your movie, at least until after I've seen it. :)

awesome creed 2

our xbox finally succumbed to the red rings of death a couple of weeks ago (i love that microsoft couldn't fix the fault that causes instant death in their consoles but they did put helpful lights in so you can tell when it's fuxxored). We thought we could survive without it... turns out we were wrong. How shallow we are.

it didn't help that i was halfway through Assassin's Creed 2 at the time of fuxxoring. So we bought a new box, and i sat up till 5 am to finish the damn game.

i... am not sure how i feel now.

the ending was better than the last one. As in it almost had an ending as opposed to abandoning us in mid sentence and causing my heart to shatter into a thousand tiny pieces. But even so it was a bit of a bastard.

oh, spoilers. Btw.

it was like the sodding Architect all over again. I'm sure it was supposed to be a head-fuck but really it was just an annoyance. What's wrong with giving us actual endings to stories? why does everything have to be setting up the next sequel? Are y'all so afraid of finishing things, in case we don't come back for more later?

right before the end credits, Desmond asks the question we're all asking by that point: WHAT THE FUCK?

so in summary... AC2 did not break my heart. But it did make me very angry at five o'clock in the morning.

a whole new year

happy 2010 everyone! 2010... aren't we supposed to be living on the moon by now?

as usual i made a bunch of resolutions and as usual i'm ignoring them to the best of my abilities. The "cut down on drinking" and "take more exercise" ones are looking particularly ropey.

One of the biggies is: WRITE MORE, WRITE BETTER, GET PUBLISHED. I'm happy enough with my output levels of writing (altho last year was a bit slow), but i can always use improvement, and i could really use getting published.

My master plan so far, therefore:
1. Buy a copy of the Writers And Artists Yearbook
(conveniently, i got a copy of it for christmas)
2. Write a bunch of synopseses
(i'm notoriously bad at synopsis writing and try to avoid it wherever possible)
3. Actually submit some stuff
(failure to actually submit anything anywhere has maybe hindered my grand plan to be more published)
4. Update website and blog more often
(hence this update)
5. Take up acting classes

okay, the last one is a bit of a tangent. Really, i wanted to take up writing classes, but since i live on an island the size of a shallot there are no writing classes, so i've taken up acting instead. I figured it could be useful - if you understand actors, that must make it easier to write dialogue for them, right? Don't correct me if i'm wrong, i'm happy in my blissful ignorance. Anyway, i had my first class today.

first thing i realised (or remembered) is that i don't really like actors. They bug me unreasonably. Maybe it's because I can't think of any other profession, other than fine art maybe, where a person can talk so much bollocks about what they do. Also, the guy teaching the class was very keen on method acting, so much so he insisted there was no other possible way to act (he also seems to have a man crush on Al Pacino, bless). Due to being ranted at by certain intervals, i've become slightly suspicious of people who insist "this is the only possible way of doing things". But aside from that it was a lot of fun. The people were lovely and the teacher guy was helpful and knew his stuff. I will never be an actor, i lack the whole 'ungodly acting talent' thing, but hopefully i can pick up a few tips.

viva la resolutions!