Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 290

Who Sunday: The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, Russell T. Davies

Just stab me in the heart, Davies.

TWICE IN ONE EPISODE, YOU BASTARD.

It’s the Who equivalent of the Red Wedding.

Popular Twitter Joke:

Russell T. Davies, George R. Martin, and Joss Whedon walk into a bar.

Everybody you love dies.

Okay, the original was Moffat, Martin, and Whedon, but Moffat doesn’t tend to send people into outer darkness the way Davies does.

I just want you to know, there are worlds out there, safe in the sky because of her. That there are people living in the light, and singing songs of Donna Noble, a thousand, million light years away. They will never forget her, while she can never remember. And for one moment… one shining moment… she was the most important woman in the whole wide universe.

I’m going to be bitter about Donna forever.

Cherry Saturday 8-24-2013

August 24th is Vesuvius Day.

Blow up at somebody. They’ve probably been asking for it anyway.

You Again and Again and Again and Again . . .

So this time I am going to finish a book. I’ve got three different major projects started (not counting the minor ones) and I want to work along with the McDaniel students so I had to pick one and get serious. It’s You Again.

I have 60,000 words done, most of them unpublishable. So I gathered up everything I’d done on the book since 2002 when I started it. Four hundred and eighty-one documents and folders with more documents in them. I made four new folders: Drafts, Notes, Images, Research. I sorted everything I had into those folders, and then I went through and deleted everything that was redundant or unreadable (some of the files did not survive the years).

I cleaned out the Notes Folder last night. Now it has nine folders in it: Blurbs/Titles (6 docs including poetry and the acknowledgements), Character (11 docs), Crits (1 doc), Outlines (54 docs including four synopses), Scrivener (3 docs), Time (4 docs), and the You Again Voodoo doc. That’s a lot of notes, and it doesn’t count the research docs (26). All of which I have to wade through. Plus the images folder: 264 jpgs, and I’m missing a lot so there’s another folder of those some place.

And then there’s the drafts folder. Dear God, I did keep writing. Over four hundred documents in there. I started that over a decade ago and never stopped writing it. I think that’s either a good sign–I really want to write it–or a bad sign–I obviously can’t write it. What I’m hoping for is that I’ll find work of such brilliance it will inspire me once again. What I’ll get is a lot of rough draft, much of it useless, some of salvageable with a rewrite.

Oh, well. It’s a process. Now I need to go find what I did with the collage . . .

Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard died this morning, which I mention because he was terrific writer and respect should be paid, because so much of what he said about writing was so damn smart, and because there were some things in his obituary that I didn’t know:

He’d sold his first story in 1951, but he didn’t become a bestseller until the 90s when he was in his sixties.

His first novel was rejected 84 times.

He wrote long hand on yellow legal pads from 10 to 6, trying to get three to five pages done.

In 2001, he wrote a piece for the NYT called “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points, and Especially Hooptedoodle,” with this first line: “These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story.” Although Leonard was never invisible–his voice was too strong–his prose was always sharp and clean, concentrating on the story and not the author. His rules are rules any author should live by, rules I endorse whole-heartedly and at length (my favorite is “Try to leave out the parts that people skip”). He was an amazing writer, and he leaves the world a much more interesting place because he wrote such good stories.

Elmore Leonard’s List:

Never open a book with weather.

Avoid prologues.

Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.

Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Next Who Sunday: The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End

AKA: The Family Reunion at the End of the World.

Have a notebook handy, this one gets complicated. You may need diagrams.

Who Sunday: Turn Left, Russell T. Davies

“There’s something on your back . . .”

This episode isn’t fun, but it’s riveting. And Donna, even in her pre-Doctor state, is amazing. One thing I love about this is that it gives me hope that she found her way back to the strong, confident woman she became before that bastard the Doctor kneecapped her at the end of her season.

Cherry Saturday: 8-17-2013

August 17th is National Thriftshop Day.

As far as I’m concerned, EVERY day is thriftshop day. BARGAIN!

Google Maps Is Fantastic, So Allons-y

Go here, go to Street View, and click on the double white arrows in the street beside the police call box. Once inside, you can travel around by using the arrows in the white circle in the top left hand corner.

(By way of Jalopnik, thank you very much.)

Next Who Sunday: Turn Left, Russell T. Davies

This one’s for anybody who ever doubted that Donna was important, including Donna.

Who Sunday: “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead,” Steven Moffat

So meet River Song, but don’t blink. I have never understood the “she’s time traveling in one direction, he’s going in the other” bit, and I don’t think the writers do, either, but this is still a great episode. (River meets the Doctor for the first time in “Let’s Kill Hitler,” which is another amazing episode, but he’s Eleven then, so I don’t see how she recognizes him in this one since he’s Ten. Very confusing.) Also, that epilogue? Really, that’s what River Song wants to be, a stay-at-home mom to three kids? I have nothing against SAMs, Clara would be brilliant as a SAM, but ass-kicking, gun-blazing, “hello, sweetie” River? I chalk this up to Moffat not thinking things through.

But the story itself is an excellent example of how to build suspense, especially the use of you-can’t-see-it-so-you’ll-have-to-imagine-it monster, SO much better than showing the Silence or even the Daleks. Especially the Daleks. I love the Daleks, but they’re basically giant salt-shaker hovercrafts. The Vashta Nerada, though, they give me the cold grue.