Many people who want unorthodox careers–writers, actors, cartoonists, artists of all kinds, underwater basketweavers and snipe hunters, kung fu fighters and professional fluffers–spend their early years in careers that have nothing to do with their dream. As lawyers. Computer programmers. Salesmen.
Fuck that. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was 12. I’m not going to wait until I’m 30 or 40 or 60 to start living like one.
At this point in time and space, we all need money. Most of us have to work for it. If you don’t, please leave your address and when you’ll next be out of the house. If you do have to work, if you have to put time in what’s known as a “real” job to support your quest for your “fake” one, take a look at how much time you’re putting into the former and how much into the latter. If the first outweighs the second, quit.
I’m not kidding. You’re making too much money. Either find more time for your fake job or cut back your real one. Your fake job won’t become a real career until you start treating it like one.
Or for a long time after that. Which is why you should get serious about it right now.
The money of a traditional career might be a safety net, but it’s not a very good one. Your corpse won’t end up any more nutritious than mine. I don’t want you standing behind a counter helping people buy slacks with someone else’s name on them. I want you lying on your floor in your pajamas sculpting Chewbaccas out of pipecleaners because that’s what you want to do with your life god damn it. So quit making money and start making pipecleaner Chewbaccas. If you try that for ten years and you’re not one step closer to making a living at it, you know what, late-stage capitalism will still be out there. They’ll still need dentists and retailers and personal trainers.
But at least you tried, and failed, to do what you really want, and probably had a lot more fun even when you were failing than you would have tallying someone else’s cash flow or selling someone else’s product.
I want to be a writer. I’m living like one before I can make a living as one. It’s pretty fucking fun. Failure ahoy.
Complete review here.
I know Slither is loved in certain circles, but I get the impression those circles are pretty small. Yet it’s a very enjoyable little movie, funny and gory and decently suspenseful–if I rated non-new releases, I’d peg it at a B+. I know it didn’t make back its money, at least not in the theater, but studios need to take a look at this movie’s quality rather than its box office and give James Gunn more scripts. (Unless they’re still punishing him for writing Scooby-Doo and Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. Then they’re doing the Lord’s work.)
I see he’s got a couple upcoming movies, actually. Here’s praying they do well enough to lead Gunn into regular Hollywood circulation, because he’s a talented guy. Watch Slither.
Review of The Losers available here.
So I lied when I said I’d say more about Kick-Ass! To make it up to you, let’s go out to dinner sometime. Just you and me, internet. Then I’ll not only tell you all the extras about Kick-Ass, I’ll tell you that although The Losers was deeply, deeply derivative, and could easily have been D material, they brought enough newness to the characters (and by “they” I’m including the overqualified cast) to make it less of a been-there suckfest and more of a fleetingly entertaining 90ish minutes that is nevertheless hilariously misguided if it thinks it’s going to make a franchise out of this and the sequel they’ve set up.
Upcoming later in the week: James Gunn’s Slither! Here’s a preview. I liked it!
I’ll have more to say on this later, but here’s my Kick-Ass review, currently the most-read article on the Tri-City Herald website.
In short: I liked it a lot. Something about this caught Twitter’s eye, too. This piece has been tweeted about fifty times since it posted this evening. For me, that’s a lot.
Available here.
Date Night would have been really, really shitty without Fay and Carell. I mean, “dude falls into the shitheap in Slumdog Millionaire” shitty. Every time I thought to myself “Self, this side plot is utterly worthless” or “Hey, that joke failed to work for the fifth straight time,” the leads made me laugh and my objections temporarily boiled away. This might be the best example I’ve seen of a talented cast saving a talentless production.
Reviewed here.
Okay, so don’t get me wrong, total trendchasing shitpile, but not quite as bad as rumored. Howard the Duck has a very low fun factor, but its cringe factor, while moderate-to-strong, can’t compete with the very worst films I’ve seen.
An upside to spending the last 2-3 years writing short stories is I’ve gotten a lot better at cutting. Come revision time, I can slice 5-10% off a story without crying out in anguish at all the brilliance I’m deleting. Sanding down sentences and extracting extraneous or redundant description is usually enough to hit the mark. When I can identify irrelevant scenes or subplots, as with my story upcoming at Reflection’s Edge, I’ve slashed out as much as 30% of the total word count. (Cutting almost always makes a story better, of course, but I think it’s funny in a not-so-funny way I’m putting in more work to get paid less–many places pay by the word. Granted, without those edits, they might decide not to pay me anything at all…)
My goal for The Roar of the Spheres has been to cut at least 5% per chapter. If I come to the end and haven’t hit the mark, I’ll go back for a second pass.
I haven’t had to do that yet.
I’m averaging a 7.5% cut per chapter. Through six, about a fifth of the full novel, I’ve dropped over 1500 words. At that rate, the draft will fall from 102.5K to 95K. By the time I’m done, this shit will be streamlined as a dolphin!
Oh, after I finish revising it, probably. Like, twenty years after.
I just finished the second draft of the renamed The Roar of the Spheres. I’m trying a new process this time: in the second draft, I fill it out. I expand the scenes that were rushed, slip in any missing back story and worldbuilding, replace scenes that don’t accomplish what I want them to, and patch up any holes in the story’s logic. That’s what I just wrapped up. I ended up inserting about 2200 new words. I don’t know how many I replaced/rewrote, but it’s probably in the same ballpark.
In the third draft, I intend to take things out. There’ll be some overlap with the replace/rewrite aspect of the second draft, in that I intend to take out the bad sentences and replace them with good ones, but the chief focus will be on trimming every excess word I can.
If I can cut 10 words per page–hardly a taxing task–that’ll bring the manuscript back down to 100,000 words. That’ll only be about a 3% decrease, in fact. If I can manage 5 or 6%, I’ll be extremely satisfied.
The White Tree
In Mallon, the dark magic of the nether has been banned for centuries. Its users have been driven out or killed. Its secrets lost. But the holy book of...
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