Wendy Tells It Like It Is

a quick plug for the frog who tells it like it is:

Wendy the Wide-Mouthed Frog

failing at this posting thing...

again i made a resolution to post more often. Again i fail.

on the plus side, i'm watching The Usual Suspects in belated tribute to the wonderful Pete Postlewaite. Is there anything better than this movie? Okay, maybe there is, but for me this is the movie that defined my teenage years. When Chris McQuarrie won the screenwriting oscar, i woke up everyone in the house with my happy dance. When i had a massive row in the cinema with my then-boyfriend, just as the credits were starting, i let him win because i so did not want to walk out of the movie in a huff. Just listening to the score brings a nostalgic tear to the eye.

also, i've just realised the credits at the start read "Bryan Singer's film", rather than "a film by...". Like he KNEW this was THE film of his career (not to belittle his career before or since, natch). I heart you, movie.

scream for me, cosa rica

watching Iron Maiden: Flight 666 and am about THIS far -

(holds thumb and forefinger a judicial half-inch apart)

- from jacking everything in and going off to form a rock band.

...Despite the fact that i don't have a musical bone in my body, have been thrown out of bars for my karaoke attempts, am 31 (positively ancient in musical terms), and the closest i've ever gotten to a rock n roll lifestyle is being booted off the tour bus for The Vandals by their terrifying yet petite manager.

Maybe i just wanna hang out on Ed Force One. Goddammit.

there's a mattress in the hallway

not a quote, there just happens to be a mattress in the hallway right now. It was delivered this afternoon, i haven't cleared space for it yet, and i keep forgetting it's there, so it gives me a cheerful surprise every time i go into the hall and walk into it.

anyway, mattresses aside, we seem to have survived another year. I've cheerfully failed at least one of my resolutions, which was to blog on here more often. But i did manage to get married, and i had a book published, and i've gotten a fair number of words written. About 274,000 words in total for the year (I kept a spreadsheet).

in a vague sort of breakdown, of interest to no one but me:

About 60k on my one finished project of the year, Blood of the Ancestors.
About 70k on my NaNoWriMo novel, which STILL ISN'T FINISHED and is beginning to annoy me now.
30k on an unfinished project, The Silver to the City. Once i finally figure out how to make it good, this will be my magnificant sci-fi octopus.
13k on Search and Destroy, most of which was written in 2009 and which, again, came to a staggering halt when i realised it sucks in current form. I think this will be the next thing i work on.
10k on the start of a lone-zombie story called (imaginatively) Loner. It might've been good if it wasn't so boring. Also unfinished. There's maybe a trend developing here.
About 7k on random world building, my first real attempt at world building. I liked it. I shall do more of it from now on.
15k on my stupid sucky ScriptFrenzy script, which sucked and was stupid. I maybe need to revisit it at some point.
About 25k on short stories... maybe four completed stories and one or two broken ones.
Aaaaannnd 20k or so on critting other people's stories (yes, i'm counting that in my word count, nyah).

that doesn't come close to adding up, but trust me, once you factor in a bunch of notes and aborted stories and the like, it does apparently add up to 274,000. Which (according to my quaculations), is something like 750 words a day. Ha! That totally cheered me up. I thought i'd been well lazy this year, but 750 words a day is more or less what i'd been aiming for. Plus i think i edited at least three or four of my novel-length stories to something approaching final polish.

didn't read nearly enough books, didn't reply to enough emails, hardly watched any films, but i did make my word count. And i drank a lot of wine in doing so. At the end of the day, could we want anything more?

Victory

NaNoWrimo is done for another year! I managed to complete a few days early, so came in with a final grand total of about 56k words, which i'm moderately happy with. The problem is... i seem to have underestimated the final length of this piece. I was aiming for fifty thousand words in total, but going by my 40 page synopsis (40 notebook pages, it's not as bad as it sounds), I'm about 25 pages through. That is WAY off. I can't believe i underestimated by so much. So the story's not finished last month, and i doubt it's going to be finished this month either.

i know i shouldn't be complaining, since i've got 56k words more than i had at this time a month ago, but still. It irks me more than it should.

But i love Nano. It's one of my favourite times of the year. I love frantic, deadline writing. I've got more done this novemeber than in the past three months combined. And now i've got to start planning for ScriptFrenzy... but i don't like that so much. I completed it this year and it turned out, eh, not so good, Al. The last thirty pages of that story were some of the worst writing i've ever done. In fact, the last ten pages was a flow-of-consciousness drunken discussion between three characters, because i reached the end at 90 pages and COULD NOT find a way to pad out an extra ten pages.

Also i have no idea what i'd do for ScriptFrenzy next year. What the hell would i want to write a screenplay about? It's weird. None of my ideas seem to come in script format.

Moth-eaten news

suppose i should get round to the self-publicising thing at some point...

My second novel, "Moths" is slowly making its way out into the real world. It's on the official Guy N Smith website, along with some very nice words from the man himself, and also (apparently) on Amazon, along with a frickin awesome review from the gorgeous Chris Hall, altho Amazon's saying it's out of stock at the mo.

I've also got a wodge of signed books here for sale at cover price (£6.99 - hopefully a cheerful and affordable price in these scary economic times) so if anyone wants one, drop me an email and i'll sort ya out. If i can figure out how this Paypal business works. :)

Part 1 of 3

November starts on monday... and with it comes NaNoWriMo. Doesn't seem like a whole year, does it?

if anyone wants to friend me, i'm here. This year, i'm doing a sequel to a story i wrote about a hundred years ago.

It's the second sequel i've ever attempted - the first was abandoned after my sister beat me with a Doc Martin boot. She gets very... punchy on the subject of sequels, and most of the time i tend to agree with her. After all, at best a sequel takes a bunch of characters you love and throws them back into a terrible situation, after they spent all that time and effort getting out of danger. At worst, they kill off the people you care about and sabotage relationships (hello, Alien 3 and Men In Black II, respectively). Plus, as someone much smarter than me once pointed out, a movie (or book, or whatever) is supposed to be about the most exciting/interesting story in the character's lives. So any sequel is going to be about the SECOND most exciting/interesting story in their lives. And who wants to pay £6.50 for that?

Don't get me wrong, i've nothing personal against sequels. Some of my best friends are sequels. I may be the only person you'll meet who's watched The Fly II more times than both the originals put together. Piranha 2 had flying piranhas AND Lance Hendrickson ditching a helicopter into the sea. Terminator 2, Aliens and Ghostbusters 2 were all better, imo, than the originals, altho i'm sure not everyone would agree.

What i dislike is the current trend for setting up franchises. Every freakin movie you see these days seems designed as the first in a series. No one gets to kill the bad guy, save the love interest and live happily ever after anymore - the bad guy has to survive, the love interest has to stay fiesty and out of reach, and we all go home and wait for the next movie. It irks me.

The Bitter Script Reader said something similar recently, which is maybe why it's on my mind.

so i'm wondering, is the same sort of thing happening with books? Does every novel need to be the start of a franchise? (Or, at least, the first of two or three?) Do we need to start being like Brian Keene and STOP THE GODDAMN STORY RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE?

It's got me thinking because i was talking to a few of my writery friends (we were in a coffee shop and everything), and, apart from me, they're all working on the first of three books (or the second of five, or... you get my point). It seems to be the done thing at the moment. Now, is this a corresponding trend in the publishing industry? Do publishers look at submitted manuscripts and say, "well, it's good, but it's a stand-alone novel. There's no way we can get a sequel out of this. PASS."? Would you get marked down for NOT leaving potential to continue the story?

why can't stories be told in a single book or film anymore?

does that question make me sound old?

i'll see y'all for the start of Nano on monday. :)