Coming Down Off of Everything

In the past two weeks, I have been sick, overseas, drunk, driven mad by the rabid brain-children of a true sociopath, and then sick again. I've also helped log in several hundred packages at work, entertain my little brother, and celebrated mine and my father's birthdays. The Colts lost the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics started, and I got some new shoes.

I have renewed spirit to finish my screenplay and novel. I just wish I had the physical energy to follow through.

Another Matter of Perspective

For this blog entry, I thought I’d vent an idea that’s been in my head for a while. You see, horror monsters, in particular the kind like Jason Vorhees or Freddy Krueger, are largely frightening (if you react that way towards them) only because they don’t fall down when perforated. Their single-minded, nonnegotiable, relentless pursuit of a goal gives them some distance from humanity, as well as the way they can travel without leaving footprints for all the dead bodies in their wake, and their extra-special attention to details whendealing with the opposite sex, but these are qualities just as easily attributed to “normal” people like politicians, obsessives, and mass-murderers. So what is so different about these particular characters that allow them to go from sick individual to unbelievable horror monster, except for the fact that any other person would drop after a 300cc injection of hot lead, but immunity to same gets you a movie deal.

Now for the above paragraph, replace “horror monster” with “action hero”, and notice that it still works.

I present to you one John McClain of [i]Die Hard[/i] fame. For brevity’s sake I’ll only go through the first film, but think about what he goes through. Once he notices that people with guns are threatening his wife, he’s determined to secure her no matter how long it takes or who’s in his way. Between all the people killed by the robbers and the robbers killed by McClain, you could just about fill an Olympic swimming pool with the blood spilt, and what’s worse is that a good share of that IS McClain’s blood. He is stabbed, slashed, beaten, burned, blown up, shot, thrown off of buildings, and while this is about the same as any slasher flick villain goes through, any slasher villain has shoes.

While the “slash” term is fresh in your mind, my next examples are Riggs and Murtaugh from the [i]Lethal Weapon[/i] franchise, and I’m going to treat them like a single entity. Whenever a criminal with greater ambition, impressive resources, and a better-than-average success ratio comes into town, Riggs and Murtaugh focus on stopping them at the sacrifice of family, regular meals, and at least two cars. Between them, they can count on being run over, kicked in the face, multiple bullet wounds, broken bones, smoke inhalation, and being crushed in any number of somewhat creative ways. Bad guys wind up strewn about the city like a bomb went off made out of corpses, the property damage is about the same too, now that I think about it.

But maybe the most perfect example is one James Bond. His capacity for ending life is so amazing that rather than attempt to prosecute him, the government of Britain decided they'd be better of licensing him, and they gave the same license to a few others so that it all looked right. He's also good at taking hits from hammers, bullets, and hats, but as if that weren't good enough he's possibly better at avoiding those same hits. Freddy liked to show off by crawling out of seemingly inescapable instruments of death, but there's something disturbing about the was James Bond can stare one in the face, find a way to make it kill everyone except the person it was aimed at, and pass it off as something casual like fixing the back of your own collar. Getting back to my point about women, both James and horror monsters face the prospect of leaving every woman they encounter dead, but where the horror monsters can't think of anything more to do with women than decorate the walls, James has trained women the world over so that they come to him willingly. That, to me, elevates him above the most vicious slasher movie star any way you put it.

So from now on, I'm going to write my action heroes like slasher villains and my slasher villains like action heroes, and I'll bet you I get praised for my efforts.

Things Rust in Winter

So I need to bust said rust. The thing about working in a mail room - any place that deals in shipping, really - is that things pick up a lot during December. There are holidays, and whether you celebrate them or not those holidays affect what your life becomes. As little writing as I got around to doing, looking back I'm very lucky to have done what I did. I'm even happy with a few parts of it!

I'll try to post more in the coming days, since I have quite a few of them off coming up. Maybe I'll post my loot list, and a few other things I plan to work on. Right now, my brain is fried.

I May Be In Trouble

I first realized this at the beginning of the week, when immediately after my health screening I spent twenty minutes saying everything I had wanted to say that was smartass-y, only afterward realizing that I had just said them to my boss, and if she had been anyone but my best friend I'd be fired by now. You'll be delighted to know that I'm in excellent shape - I believe they're going to name the Highlander gene after me.

It takes an average of 2,000 words a day to make NaNoWriMo happen, and I am well well short of that. The odd thing is I'm getting much closer as the process goes on. It's getting easier to start a segment, harder to stop until it's done, and my excitement builds the more I get into it and find the shape of the story. It's a lot of fun, writing this novel, so I'm almost certainly doing it wrong. On the other hand, what a fucking coup it would be if I could DO something with it, right?!

I have extra motivation to make progress, as I promised my co-conspirator in the movie biz that I'd shift focus onto the screenplay after NaNoWriMo.

So yeah. Trouble.

Video Games

I might have mentioned this before, but for those to whom it's new, I used to be addicted to video games. They're what I did in high school, and little else. I spent my weekends with Mega Man X and Samus Aran, I admit it. I got a taste of life without the controller in college, and afterward made a concerned effort to put myself away from them. I've slipped every now and then, but I thought I was doing well.

So well that when the holidays came around last year, with people coming by that I hadn't seen in years and myself with a new job, I figured it'd be safe to buy a 360 and a few games to be sociable. Since then I'd been worried that I was relapsing, since my library is mostly narrative-focused, single-player games like Mass Effect and Prince of Persia, and what multiplayer I do play is with select friends only. I don't think I've joined a random game more than three times.

Well, after my spending spree two weeks ago, and Dragon Age: Origins out last week, I may have to shut the hell up. I'd been excited about DA: O for the better part of this year, but I have only put in maybe 12 hours, not enough to get through one of the four big chapters after the introduction. I've had Brutal Legend on for the soundtrack whle doing laundry, I've played Borderlands twice, and Fallout 3 - a game of the year - isn't out of the plastic wrapper yet.

I enjoy them all, and I feel like I will get to them eventually, but after a full work day and some stolen writing time, I just don't have the energy. High school me wouldn't recognize today me.

A Quick Note

I am NOT going to make it through NaNoWriMo successfully, but I will be much closer than last year. I might even have a full story, though absolute garbage.

I'm considering starting a new blog that is made entirely of 50-100 word stories based around my word-a-day mailing list. Not certain yet, but lately I've been giving those emails lip service at best and I think that's a shame, on reflection.

Carry on.

Something New

I like the idea of being a focused person. People that can narrow their field of interest and get one thing at a time done seem to accomplish more than average. There've been times in my life where I've been able to get into that kind of mode and have done very well, and during my course in Falmouth that was a nearly essential skill.

But I'm trying something different. A week or so ago I had a really neat idea for a story that I wanted to get out of my head, problem was I'm in the middle of a completely different project and not anywhere close to finishing. It was late enough in the day where I needed to write something then if I was going to write anything at all, and I've had a few nights that I just sat in front of the screen trying not to take the winking cursor in the wrong way. So I wrote what I wanted to, not what I was working on. It's not something I'm going to get back to any time soon, and my current project isn't anywhere closer to completion, but I got over 1,000 words out, and damn it that felt good!

I'm often torn between the confidence that comes from having a masters degree and the fear that comes from having no recent publications. Most of my favorite writers insist that developing your ability with the art of writing is a continuous process, that you will never write as well as you want to, and that this is not necessarily a bad thing. I like this philosophy, for one thing because it's accomodating for when I lose focus. I also believe that it's better to write something each day than only write when the mood fits the project - it keeps one from losing touch with the brain muscles that squeeze the words out.

In other news, I'm trying to upgrade to Windows 7 after a long series of mild frustrations with Vista, but my very compatible machine is being "finicky" about the change, and so I've had to adopt drastic measures to simply clear out the old. I won't find out until tonight if any of it has worked for real, so here's hoping.

And in a bout of weakness, I took advantage of a 3-for-2 deal for video games. I'm going to hold to my "write what you know at the time" strategy in the hopes that I can get enough of the productive stuff done at work to make my playtime acceptable. Wish me luck.