Month: May 2008

I’ve been on telephone standby for jury duty all this week, and tomorrow morning I have to report to the courthouse. I don’t know if I’ll actually sit on a jury, or just sit around all day, but don’t be too surprised if the Friday Random Guess 10 is a little late. (You could always use this opportunity to guess the seven lyrics remaining from last week’s post.

Scott Tobias on the new Speed Racer movie:

It’s forward-thinking, visionary, and much of the time unwatchable.

As always, Neil Gaiman offers some simple writing advice that I should keep plastered to my forehead:

The second draft is where the fun is. In a first draft, you get to explode. The objective (at least for me) is to get it down on paper, somehow. Battle through the laziness and the not-enough-time and the this-is-rubbish and everything else, and just get it written. Whatever it takes. The second draft is where you go and gather together the fragments of the explosion and figure out what it is you did, and make it look like that was what you always meant to do.

And he goes on to say:

At some point in the revision process you will probably need to remind yourself that you could keep polishing it infinitely, that perfection is not an attribute of humankind, and really, shouldn’t you get on with the next thing now?

My chief problem as a writer, besides the laziness and the not-enough-time that I think nearly all writers — all people — share, has been my propensity to revise, and therefore stall out, as I go. I think if I could put blinders on, at least for that first draft, and not get so hung up over the perfect word or the perfectly crafted scene, I’d have a much better time of it and get a whole lot more written.

It occurs to me that I never posted my mix for April, so anyway:

As always, if you’d like to make a trade, just let me know.

I’m no expert in these things, but didn’t the “Age of the Dinosaurs” happen before the Ice Age?

Iron Man, though, was thoroughly enjoyable.