writing

Winter vacation, day 7

I did some writing today, and although it wasn’t on the ongoing short story — and although it wasn’t necessarily any good — I did feel good to get back into it.

“In this life, there are winners and losers,” Saul said. “There are the people who find true love, and then there are the people who wind up playing second fiddle at the lonely hearts club’s Christmas party. There are the people who make it in this business, and then the people who history gladly forgets.”

This was just one week after Patchwork Media had gone public; it had been an impressive opening, and the company’s stock was performing well, but Todd thought it was a little early to be making grand pronouncements about winners and losers, much less which half of that divide history would place them on. Deep Earth Zombie Bugs had been their only new game released this last quarter, and the sales were still a little below projections. Reviews of the first-person shooter had been mixed. Todd wasn’t going to panic until all of the global numbers were in, and there probably wasn’t going to be anything to panic about, but he also wasn’t going to start celebrating just yet.

But that’s what made Saul the idea man, Todd guessed, and what made him the less interesting money guy. He managed expectations, massaged them if necessary, while Saul laughed in their face. It’s why Saul could make an impromptu speech like this to the troops — half bombast, half pep talk — while Todd just wanted to get back to his office and find out if yesterday’s sales numbers from Taiwan had filtered through yet.

The game had been a risk, a year of development on which they’d staked their IPO and maybe the company’s future. Todd had only played it twice himself, once in prototype and once at the floor of the trade show where they’d debuted the game. DEZB was fun, and novel in that you could play it from the zombie bugs’ perspective, but it wasn’t the revolutionary experience he felt Saul had promised — and had kept promising. Gamers liked, but didn’t love, it, and it hadn’t sparked the kind of sales the company had wanted. It hadn’t been the must-but Christmas present everybody at Patchwork had been banking on.

And there were the rumors that the underlying design had been stolen. Todd wasn’t even going to try talking to Saul about that. He had more important things to do.

The writing prompts here, chosen by the three of us at random from three different magazines, kind of got away from me. I think in my haste to keep Deep Earth Zombie Bugs from straying along maybe too obvious lines, I also avoided anything like an interesting plot. But forty minutes of blah writing is still writing, so I’ll take it.

Afterward, I went to see Captain Phillips, which is very good, though it owes most of that to Tom Hanks. It would still be a modestly gripping story without his performance steering the ship, but he’s definitely what elevates it, particularly in its amazing final moments. (Spoiler warning for that link, obviously.)

Then I read a little this evening. I am laughably behind on my 2013 reading challenge, and being on vacation never seems to help with that, so it was nice to get involved in someone else’s writing for a while.

Winter vacation, day 6

I feel a little guilty about this, but I didn’t touch the short story today, except in those rare moments that I let my mind drift towards it. No actual writing. And though what I’m telling myself is that a break from it is good and necessary, I’m not entirely convinced that’s true. I’m not going to beat myself up about it, but I do feel a little guilty about it. The most important part of writing is just showing up. One of the things I really want and need out of 2014 is to be serious about my writing, to put in the hours, to show up.

But anyway, that wasn’t today. I had to drive my father around for a couple of errands, and then I spent a large chunk of the afternoon setting up the Christmas tree. It’s a fake tree that comes in many pieces and layers, so it takes a surprising amount of time to get it all finished. I spent the time kind of half-heartedly watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which I wish I could pretend was an underrated gem of a movie, but it’s about as disappointing as I remember it. (Though Crystal Skull has more than stolen its crown as “the bad Indiana Jones movie.)

This evening, I actually watched a couple of movies, two that could not have been more different. (Well, The Odd Couple and Hellraiser were a pretty weird duo.)

First I watched Fast & Furious 6, which was as dumb and fun as I expected it to be. The movie keeps trying to convince you that it’s all about the characters, and I guess there are people who have been heavily invested in the franchise since its beginnings, but for me it’s mostly just about watching people jump from fast cars and laugh at the laws of physics. There’s nothing quite as ridiculous as the giant safe dragged through the streets of Rio in the last movie — the only other one I’ve seen — but the car chase with the tank and Vin Diesel head-butting a guy into another guy come pretty close.

After that I watched Frances Ha, which is a black-and-white indie darling kind-of comedy in which there’s nary a tank or a head-butt. On the surface, there’s actually not a lot that’s special about Frances Ha…which is at least part of what makes it so special. As the Dissolve puts it:

In the grand scheme of things, the career and relationship crises of an educated woman in her late 20s aren’t as important as poverty, war, bigotry, and such. But Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s finely shaded, frequently hilarious character sketch Frances Ha succeeds because it recognizes this, and doesn’t try to blow its heroine’s troubles out of proportion.

But it’s Greta Gerwig’s central performance that truly makes you love the character despite her flaws.

So, no writing, but that will change tomorrow, even if it’s not on this short story, and even if it’s only for forty minutes during my weekly free-writing group.

Have I really been off from work for over a week?

Winter vacation, day 5

I poked a little again at the short story today, though not as much as I would have liked. It’s a bit like poking at a nest of bees, then being strangely disappointed when they don’t sting. The bees here, I think, are ideas, or words? I’ll admit I haven’t quite thought the metaphor through.

Mostly, though, I helped my father assemble a new snowblower, which was made excessively difficult by the instructions that came with it. We still have to put gas in the tank and test the machine out, and a really proper test will need to wait until a major snowfall. It’s kind of an enormous beast of a machine, and I think it might be overkill for the amount of snow we need to clear. (It might not even be maneuverable in the driveway with three snowed-in parked cars.) But the old snowblowers we inherited a few years ago when my aunt moved down south don’t do trick — even though that’s snowblowers, plural — and my father said this was actually one of the smaller ones he could find. I’m just hoping it works…and that we won’t need to find out anytime this particular winter.

After dinner, I watched Battleship, which was about as terrible as I expected and then some. It rallies a little near the very end, almost turning into dumb good fun in the last twenty minutes, but overall it’s quite terrible. It’s true that I’ve been watching a fair number of bad movies this week, but mostly in the hope that one of them will be as entertainingly bad as Equilibrium.

Winter vacation, day 4

So I mostly just poked at the short story today. And there was only one movie, mostly because it was Olympus Has Fallen and I felt broken and defeated after watching that dreck. In point of fact, I’m not entirely sure what I did today. I mean, I hung up a wreath, threw out some trash, read a couple of comics, stopped by the post office. But those daylight hours just fly by sometimes.

At least there was a pretty sunset.

Winter vacation, day 3

Another day, and a little more work on the short story. It’s sometimes like pulling teeth, but I think I recognize the mouth. (If that makes any sense.) And then it was a couple of movies.

First was Batman & Robin, which I’ve subjected myself to before but did this time with the Rifftrax commentary. (The movie is almost unbearable even with the funny mockery.) And then I closed the evening on a more serious note with The Hunger Games.

I thought the movie actually improved upon the book in some places, though notably not in the book’s best and most powerful scenes. I’m thinking this might be less of an issue in the sequels, as best scenes were in increasingly rarer supply. (I wasn’t too fond of Mockingjay, the third and final book.) This one felt simultaneously rushed and over-long, but it’s a well-painted future world with some good casting, so that helped. This is probably damning it with faint praise, but it was better than Batman & Robin. (Then again, there are certain types of cancer that are better than Batman & Robin.)

So that was my Wednesday. Including last weekend, I’ve now been off for five days, and there’s two whole weeks of it still ahead of me. Frankly, at this point, that seems a little ridiculous, but I’m not complaining.