Bryce Moore's Blog, page 247

My Thoughts on the Government Snooping Scandal

Check this out, people. Imagine a government--any government. You read a front page news story about that government. It's been collecting the phone records for all its citizens. Numbers called, locations called from, duration of the call. For months. And what does this government say when asked by the press about this practice? "Oh, that old program? We've been doing that for *years*."



Because if you've been doing it for years instead of months, it makes everything all better, right?



A few days later, a second revelation is made about this same government. It's managed to get direct access to the servers of most of the major tech companies in the world. Google. Apple. Skype. Microsoft. Yahoo. Facebook. AOL.  This access lets them see whatever they want. When pressed about this practice, the government replies, "Oh, that old program? We've been doing that for *years*." It then goes on to assure the people, "We only look for stuff that's from or to foreigners, not citizens." And when asked how the people can be sure that's the case, the government essentially says, "Trust us."



Oh. My. Stars.



This isn't the Russian government, people. This isn't the Saudis. Or the [insert totalitarian government here]. This is the good old US of A. This isn't the Bush Administration, either. That evil bunch of crooks everyone liked to disparage (though a lot of this started under the Bush administration). This isn't Cheney. This is Obama.



Let me put this in Geek, so you'll all understand. Imagine that at the end of Return of the Jedi, right after the Ewok orgy scene, Luke whips out a black hooded robe, puts it on, and then force lightnings everyone to death, unfurling a giant banner that says, "EMPIRE 4 EVER."



Imagine that Frodo hadn't thrown the ring back, and that Middle Earth had a new reign of terror, Hobbit-style.



This is what's going on in America. Right this instant.



When the Verizon thing broke, I was troubled, but I wasn't incensed. Phone records? Shrug. Who I call. When I call them. I have nothing to hide. (But at the back of my mind, I wondered. What if I did? What if I had family over in the Middle East? Or what if I was back in Jerusalem for a while? And some of the calls I made were monitored, and they were to suspicious numbers, and suddenly I'm under way more scrutiny than I have any idea. It's not hard to paint a scenario where even the phone records are far more intrusive than any government has a right to get without a warrant.)



But then this article broke. PRISM? Access to everything I do on Google? My searches, my emails, my anything? My work email is through Google, too. The work email that's supposedly oh so secure. Rife with private information on students? That's snoopable, too.



And the government doesn't even need a warrant. It just promises that it won't snoop on things it's not supposed to.



Why don't I mail them the key to my front door while they're at it? Would they like my bank account information? How about access to my hard drive? Because I TOTALLY TRUST that they're not going to snoop into things they have no right to snoop into.



Oh wait. Check that. I've already been communicating with people outside of the country. Slovakia. Germany. England. Lots of communication. And that means that my information might have been sifted through already. Without a warrant. Without letting me know.



And the justification for this is that THEY'VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR YEARS, SO IT'S TOTALLY OKAY? (Sorry. Some things in life deserve nothing less than all caps.)



As the New York Times points out, Obama's had a habit of pointing the finger at the Bush Administration whenever he's been called on the floor for distasteful practices. That, or issued a cloud of "I need this information so the terrorists don't win. Trust me." It's your second term, buddy. The time for blaming Daddy is over. Man up, and eat your Wheaties. You're doing this because *you* want to.



And it's just plain wrong.



This is something straight out of a dystopian novel. I can't simply "trust" the government. Not when it does things on this scale. Not when it tries to hide the things it's doing, and then when we find out about them, just says it's for our own good. This is the land of the free, last I checked.



I'm sorry. I'm just outraged, and the rest of the country should be, too. I don't care if you're Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Tea Party, or some other party. If the government wants to be doing something like this, the people have a right to know it's happening, at the bare minimum. They have a right to be able to offer some input on the matter. If you tell us we can't know, because then "the terrorists win" and "the program won't be as effective," tough luck.



The terrorists have already won.



No tinfoil hat here, people. This PRISM thing is huge, and the outcry against better be just as big. And that's all I have to say about that at the moment.

Movie Review: Lincoln

It's become my specialty: reviewing movies long after everyone else has seen them. I wonder if there's a way to monetize this . . .



Anyway, I finally had the chance to take in one of last years critical favorites: Lincoln. Steven Spielberg. Daniel Day Lewis. Abraham Lincoln. Part of me feels like a review is superfluous. You know exactly what you're getting before you even start the movie, don't you?



Or do you?



The traditional take on a biopic would present the whole of Lincoln's life. You'd see him born, grow up, become a lawyer, become a politician, become president, become (SPOILER!) assassinated.



This isn't that movie. This movie could actually be more appropriately titled, The Thirteenth Amendment. Of course, who in their right mind would want to watch a 2.5 hour movie about that? They'd really be missing out, actually. I had no idea the passage of that amendment was difficult at all. (Yes, this proves what an idiot I am when it comes to history, I suppose. But come on--no Southern states were there for the debate. So you had a bunch of Northern politicians debating whether or not the US should allow slavery. Preaching to the choir, right? Wrong, apparently. Very wrong.)



Even more laudable, the history presented in the film is good enough that not all historians criticized it. Some actually even praised it. So you're not just getting the Hollywood-ized version of history. You're getting some of what actually happened. (More or less.)



The acting is, of course, superb. I wouldn't be surprised it I heard that Daniel Day Lewis had eschewed running water, deodorant, and air conditioning throughout the course of filming, just so he could remain in character. The man really is an incredible actor. There's a reason he's won Best Actor three times now. Tommy Lee Jones also does a remarkable job as Thaddeus Stevens. The directing is spot on (of course), and the pacing is as good as a film of this sort can hope to have. (I mean, it's an historical film. Don't expect tons of explosions and pyrotechnics. Although it still had some pacing issues, even for a film of this nature. I found the beginning and denouement to be on the clunky side.)



So if you haven't seen the movie yet because you don't want the old Lincoln biopic, then rest assured this is much much more than that. 3.5 stars. Highly recommended.

Revision is a Jigsaw Puzzle With No Picture

I'm in the middle of revising GET CUPID at the moment. I've made some comments about it on my social media sites, if you've been following along. It's a biggie. The second draft of the book was 109,000 words long. I'm shooting to have the third draft come in at 60,000 words. (Of course, I'm shooting for that knowing that I almost always end up longer than my goal. So because I want the final thing to be in the 70,000 word range, I'm focusing on 60,000 words as the goal. I know this seems stupid, but this is how my brain works. Deal with it.)



When I'm approaching a revision of this size, it can be pretty daunting. Honestly, part of me just wants to throw everything out and start over fresh. I'm restructuring the whole thing, taking out characters, chapters, plot elements--you name it. Wouldn't it just be easier to write a new book? It probably would be. So why don't I?



Well, for one thing, this is a book I've put a lot of work into it. I like it. I see that it has potential, and so I want to put in the effort I need to in order to realize that potential. I realize this might not be the best of reasons to do a revision. There's such a thing as a sunk cost--sometimes it's better to just walk away from an investment. But while the task is daunting, I think it'll take me less time to revise this than it would to write it from scratch. So it's not that bad. My goal is to be done by the end of August. Two months ain't much, from a writing perspective. I've got to be writing something while I'm waiting for feedback on THE MEMORY THIEF, for example. Revision is a great project for that.



Plus, there are big chunks of this book that I'm very happy with as-is. I could rewrite them, sure--but my gut tells me that would take longer. I could be wrong on this. I suppose there's no real way to know.



I've tried several approaches to the revision so far, and nothing has been a home run as yet. At first I thought I'd be able to just re-outline the plot, and then start with a fresh document and begin cutting and pasting sections in as they come up in the new and improved plot. And I've stuck to that more or less, but as I go through, I keep having to toss out pieces of that plot when I discover something else needs to change drastically.



Case in point:



GET CUPID is a heist book. The original concept was Ocean's 11 meets Mistborn. Contemporary setting, magic specialist crooks. Young adult fun. It's been tweaked a bit since then. Now it's more Ocean's 11 meets Harry Potter. A bit more whimsical, and there's a school involved. (Long story.) In the original plot, one of the crooks is a spirit-walker named Luke, who only speaks in Star Wars quotes. I really liked Luke. He was a fun character. Some people really liked him, too. Others didn't like him at all. For the revision, I decided to keep Luke in, but tone down on the Star Wars a bunch. Bring him closer to the middle of the road.



One of the main villains of the book was Raphe, the twin brother of Eldin, the protagonist. A really nasty piece of work. For the revision, I decided to take Raphe and make him neither a twin nor a really big antagonist. He became a loan shark who Eldin owes money to, and that outstanding loan becomes one of the main reasons the plot gets going. It's an engine that was supposed to drive the book. But as I wrote the beginning, I discovered that Raphe-as-engine only works if some serious time is devoted to Raphe. He had to be built up and developed some to make him important.


Fine. I did that. I built him up, and all felt right with the world. Then I got to the point where Eldin is supposed to have a brief confrontation with Raphe--something to "seal the deal," as far as the engine goes. Really solidify that Eldin has to take a certain job in order to get free from Raphe. It looked like it would work fine when I was planning it, but I discovered a problem when I was writing it:



After I'd spent so much time building up Raphe to be strong enough to work as an engine for the plot of the book, he was suddenly out of the picture for almost all of it. It went from "Raphe is a big problem" to "Raphe is that guy we don't have to worry about for the next 2/3 of the novel."



This doesn't work. It felt wrong. When I'm working on plot or writing (particularly during the revision process), so much of what I do comes down to feeling. It's like a jigsaw puzzle with no picture. I've got all these individual pieces, and I know they fit together somehow. I keep turning them around, comparing them to other pieces, looking for something that fits. That just clicks together. Sometimes I might think I've found it, and then later on I discover something else that fits even better.



That's what happened with Raphe. I was in the middle of that scene, knowing that Raphe had to do more. Be more. And then it hit me: Raphe would insist on coming with the others on the heist. This is something Eldin would hate hate hate. But it's something that felt right. And it works on a lot of different levels: it increases tension throughout the book, it lets Raphe be more important, it complicates life for Eldin. It just clicked all at once. I wanted to do it.



But then I had to look at the implications. If Raphe is with the gang for the heist, he needs to fill a role. Imagine if in Oceans 11, a Ben Affleck suddenly pops up in the plot, hanging around and doing nothing but being a nuisance. That wouldn't work at all. So Raphe had to have a Purpose. I could tweak the plot, of course. Come up with some reasons for him to be there. Some roles only he could fill. But that felt wrong. That's complicating things *too* much.



On the other hand, I could also make Raphe become one of the other characters. Erase that character from existence, and have Raphe assume his responsibilities and abilities, but keep his own personality. And there was Luke, just kicking around, quoting Star Wars movies and not really doing much else.



Sorry Luke. It just felt right to eradicate any mention of you from the book.



Of course, once I made that change, then a bunch of the plot I had retooled had to be worked through again. You see why it's a complex problem? It's only made trickier by the fact that the more I work with this, the harder it becomes to really be able to tell the effect my changes are having. Once I've been revising a book for a while, it's hard for me to know if I'm making it better. That's where readers come in. Once this revision is all done, I'll need fresh readers to look at it and tell me how it's doing. That'll be a chance to step back and see if the picture my puzzle pieces made is one worth viewing.



In the meantime, I just keep going by feel--trusting my instincts. It's a really nebulous way to do a revision, but it's what's working for me at the moment, and if there's one thing I've found during my years writing, it's that I should use what works for me. So there you have it.

Diet Update: Week 15

This week, I got serious about the diet again. Exercise. Food. The whole shebang. There were a few meals that weren't strictly budgeted--I didn't keep track of calories during them--and that didn't help, but when you have company in town, sometimes that has to come before dieting 100%. But really, it felt like I was "DIETING" again--hungry quite a bit of the time, actively not eating a lot of what I wished I could be eating.



No fun.



Then again, the fact that it felt different probably goes to show just how not well I was following my diet previous to that.



So it wasn't a fun week, but it *was* a successful one. I clocked in this morning at 191, which gives me 2 pounds lost this week, and 23 pounds overall. That sounds like a lot of weight, even though when I look at myself in the mirror, it still seems like I've got a fair bit to go. 13 pounds until my goal weight. We'll see how that goes.



I did see a picture of myself on Sunday, and I was surprised by how thin I looked. That was a nice touch to my day. I don't want to be a stick or anything--just healthy. I feel like I'm there already, honestly--but I've been this weight before, and it was all too easy to go back to overweight. Hence the onward and downward mentality.



13 pounds left . . .

Two Fallen Trees and a Downed Electrical Line Later . . .

Denisa and I went off with family yesterday to do a little exploring. The agenda was simple: head up to the Wire Bridge in New Portland, have a light picnic, and then come back home again. There were scattered thunderstorms forecast for the area, but it had been pretty hot, humid, and rain-free for the weekend, so we weren't really worried.



On the drive up, I noticed heavy dark thunderclouds to the north, ripe with jagged bolts of lightning. "That looks . . . interesting," I told Denisa. She concurred. But I'm not one to let a few clouds spoil a plan, so on we went.




The wire bridge was cool as always. You can get the whole thing swinging from side to side if you kick it just right with your feet. It's like you're on a huge swing, and it can make you motion sick really easily. After illustrating this principle, we went down to the picnic area to have some food. (Because nothing says "Let's eat!" like motion sickness.)




Enter thunder, stage left.




We ate quickly--some of Denisa's great bread, along with meat and cheese. But the thunder picked up, and it started sporadically sprinkling, so it was deemed a Good Idea to start packing up and heading out. We'd taken two cars. My father took everyone but Denisa, MC and me and headed off back to home base. Denisa needed to feed MC, so the three of us stayed behind.




And then things got crazy. Like, wind-ripping-through-the-trees, hail-coming-down-everywhere, garbage-cans-flying-through-the-air, torrential rain crazy. The clouds were swirling above us, and I couldn't help wonder if there might be a tornado in the area (and it turned out there were tornado warnings, as a matter of fact . . . )




It was an interesting afternoon, but Denisa and I waited it out, and we managed not to get squished by any falling trees. Yay!




On the way home, we were soon stopped by firetrucks. A tree had fallen across the main road back to civilization. It had downed a power line in the process. The road was impassable, and was likely to remain such for quite some time. There was an alternate route, but it was on dirt roads and 20 miles out of our way. However, company was over, the kids were with said company, and so we decided to try the detour, despite the fact that we'd never driven there before. (This is how many horror movies begin. I understand why now.)




Off we went, using our trusty GPS and our trustier road map of Maine. We pieced together the route, and things were going okay. Sure, there was still End of Times lightning arcing across the sky, but that just set the mood. We were delayed, but okay.




And then we came to another downed tree in the middle of the dirt road. No firetrucks this time (but no power lines, either.)




Friends, there are times when you just accept what the universe is telling you. When you resign yourself to never getting home at a decent hour, and just decide to take a nap in the car.




This was not one of those times.




Denisa and I got out of the car in the middle of the storm, walked up to that tree (which was probably 1.5 feet in diameter at the base), and moved it.




That was the plan, at any rate. We managed to move the tip of it some. (Newsflash: trees are heavy. Even for librarians.) But no matter how far we moved it, it had a tendency to spring back into place. (Newsflash: trees are springy. Even for authors.) But if we gave up, that meant a long ride back to another downed tree. There wasn't really a second detour option.




Drawing on herculean strength (and possibly the Powers of Greyskull), I held the tree back far enough for Denisa to get in the car and drive around it. Because what's a Sunday if you don't get to Hulk out once in a while?




We made it home. No one died.




Mission successful.




What did you do on *your* Sunday? :-)

Rocksmith: Getting Better By Not Practicing

I had an interesting experience the other day. With all the busy-ness in my life, it's been several months since I've been able to play guitar. Part of me was really dreading picking it up again, knowing that the amount of no practicing I'd been doing was bound to hurt me. I'd been playing almost every day, and then I'd stopped for weeks and weeks. Because I didn't want to face the fact that I'd gotten worse, I was even less motivated to start playing again. Stupid, but there you have it. Having Rocksmith would make it even easier to tell that I'd gotten worse. It keeps track of your "score" for each individual song. I would be forced to see the fruits of my laziness in a very quantifiable way.



Still, eventually I just really wanted to pick up a guitar and get playing again. So I braved the scorn of my video game, picked up my bass, and started up Rocksmith. I played my first song, going with something easy after all this time: Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out. I played through the song, having a blast, and then waited for the verdict. When it came, I couldn't believe my eyes.


I'd improved my score significantly.



I tried a harder song. And then another. And another. I switched over to electric guitar and did the same thing. Almost every time, I got the same result: I beat my previous score. I wasn't even that rusty. There were some tricky spots that I'd practiced a lot before I stopped playing, and those were troublesome again, but as far as the basics of playing went? Somehow by doing nothing for a few months, I'd become a better guitar and bass player.



I wonder if there's been some sort of scientific study on this. Something that shows that the brain sometimes needs time to process new skills to improve at them? I have no idea. All I know is that I don't need to hang my head in shame in front of my video game, and that feels great.



And I've said it before and I'll say it again: if anyone's looking for a fantastic way to learn to play the electric bass or guitar, they should look no further than Rocksmith. I love love love that game, both as a game and a teaching tool. Can't give it high enough marks.

Thoughts on Arrested Development Season 4

I'm a huge Arrested Development fan. I'd been looking forward to the show's return since the day it was canceled and went off the air, hoping against hope that one day it might rise in glory again. So when Netflix brought it back from the dead, I was overjoyed. I've been looking forward to new episodes since it was announced. As most of you know, those episodes came online Sunday. There are 15 of them. I've now watched 12.



Warning: some serious nerding out ahead. If you're not an AD fan, then this probably isn't the blog post for you. If you are an AD fan, then I'll do my best not to spoil anything for you. Ready?



Honestly, at first I was kind of disappointed with the season. The first episode was okay, but everyone was different. Lindsay looked very different. (Nose job? Botox?) George Michael was older. Tobias was fatter. Maeby was older, too. Somehow in my head, I'd envisioned a return to the exact same show I've loved so much over the years.



And of course that's not possible.



But it wasn't just the characters looking different. The show itself seemed changed. One of the strengths of the original series was how the shows were done individually. Things that weren't funny at first set up things that were hilarious later on, as the show began to flesh out each storyline, adding layer and layer of references to plot elements, pop culture tidbits, character development--it all just builds until by the end, everything explodes in a fountain of awesome.



This season wasn't like that. The next few episodes just didn't seem to be coming together. Had I been wrong? Had I built my hopes up too high? Another thing I noticed--the original was 100% an ensemble show. You need to have all the characters together to have the real funny happen. Gob by himself or George Michael alone, or George, Sr--they needed each other to act as foils. With this new season's focus on an individual character each episode, a lot of that ensemble feel seemed to be missing.



I was beginning to lose faith. To doubt.



But then episode 5 (a Tobias episode) hit, and it was hilarious. And I kept watching. And bit by bit, it dawned on me.



Season 4 isn't a season at all. It's one extremely long episode. 7 hours or so. And just like with the original, the funny afterburners don't kick in right away. It takes time to lay the foundation. So the first few episodes are all about setting up the rest of the show. You literally have a punch line given in the first episode that isn't even remotely funny until the 12th--6 hours or so later.



Arrested Development took the formula of the original show, and they changed it. Exploded it for a new platform. Binge watching. People can and do watch hours of a show each night, not just a half hour or an hour here or there, once a week. The show could afford to work on a much more macro scale than it was before. And it needed to in order to succeed. The show's stars are too big these days. Scheduling must have been a nightmare. They couldn't do it like they used to, so they found a new way to get it done.



My faith in the show is restored. I've been loving the episodes, and I look forward to rewatching them and getting even more of the funny out of them. I'm also very curious to see where this type of show takes the future of serial programming. I really do think it's a fundamentally different approach, much more of a hybrid between a movie and a TV show. True, shows like Lost and 24 have already been doing that sort of thing, but it's just getting more and more complex. AD is certainly the first comedy I can recall that's attempted it.



Anyway--there are my thoughts. I'd love to hear what other AD fans are thinking of the show. Please share!

Lessons Learned While Fishing: Try Not to be Stupid

I went out with some friends fishing yesterday, taking along TRC and DC for the ride. It was a different type of fishing than I'd done before. More like hunting, really. We were out on a lake in a canoe, and we were hunting bass. You look down into the water, searching for spots where the bass are laying eggs at this time of year. From what I understand, the male bass just hover over their spot, protecting it from anything they think might be dangerous.



Such as a bare hook.



You find the bass, you lower the hook, the bass sees it, bites it, you reel in. Did the bass get away? No worries--he swims right back to his spot and resumes guarding. Lower the hook. Reel in again. As I told someone else, it really felt like I'd found a cheat code for fishing. (Of course, it felt this way because the friend I was with is insanely good with a canoe paddle. He also knows just what to look for when searching for these egg-laying spots. After a while I got so I could tell them apart, too. But you need the water to be perfectly still so that you can see to the bottom. Polarized sunglasses would also help. Plus, knowing how to stand in a canoe and not tip over. Really, it was more my friend fishing than me, even though he never lowered a hook once. He had to keep maneuvering the canoe against the wind, keeping us over the bass. I have no idea how he managed to do it. I had a fantastic time--as did TRC and DC--but this is not a fishing expedition I could do on my own. Maybe if there were absolutely no wind . . . )



Anyway. We caught three bass in the space of an hour and a half or so. I caught the first, TRC the second, and my friend's daughter the third. They were each around 17 inches long, weighing around 3 or 3.5 pounds. A great afternoon expedition.



But as is often the case when I'm fishing, I couldn't help but think about some life lessons in the middle of the trip. There are the obvious ones--like DC complaining she was bored in the middle of the trip. We're out on a canoe on a picturesque lake in Maine, a gorgeous spring afternoon, there's a rainbow in the sky, loons swimming by, and bass being caught. And she's bored. Lesson learned? Appreciate what you have when you have it. But like I said, that's the easy lesson.



I was watching these bass as we caught them, amazed that something could be that predictable. It's very paternal of the fish, I'll grant them that. (And before you think we're awful human beings for doing this to the poor fishies, realize that the bass in this particular lake aren't supposed to be there. They were illegally stocked a while ago, and the state fish biologists would really prefer it if fishermen could eradicate all the bass. Hence this approach is actually helpful for the environment of that lake, as I understand it. But I digress.) It just was stunning that a fish could make the same exact mistake, over and over and over. Biting the hook must have hurt. It struggled like anything to get away once it was hooked, but it just couldn't not bite that hook the next time.



Stupid fish.



But then I looked at myself. At my dieting (which is always on my mind these days). In many ways, don't I do the same thing as that fish? I see a brownie. I know I shouldn't eat it. I eat it anyway. And brownies are just the easy example. There are lots of things I do that I know I shouldn't do. Stay up too late watching movies. Don't clean the house. Snap at my family. Slack off on my goals--you name it. I know I'd be happier if I didn't do those things, but when they're right there in front of me, I just can't seem to help myself.



I bite the bare hook.



There's hope, however. We found one last fish--a fourth. He was there over his eggs, protecting them the same as the other three had. The kids had all caught their fish, so I was casting again. I placed the hook perfectly. The fish went right up to it, looked at it, and then swam away. I thought I must have done something wrong, so I tried again. And again. I hit the fish in the back with the hook. I bobbed it up and down appealingly. The fish wasn't having any of it. We tried for twenty minutes, and then went elsewhere.



That fish is my hero. I want to be that fish.



It's good to have goals in life . . .

Diet Update: Week 14

I have a confession to make. I've been getting sloppy with my diet. Yes, I think there are some good reasons why that's the case, but it's still a fact. Somehow over these 14 weeks, I've stopped being as rigid in counting those calories. Instead of weighing everything, I've been rounding. Estimating.



And in those estimations, I'm afraid I've been rather generous to myself. To make things worse, I've been seeing my daily calorie intake go up from around 1600 to around 2000. Still technically below my goal, but higher than it needs to be.



As a result, where I used to be 3 weeks ahead of where I wanted to be, I was only a day ahead as of yesterday. That's a trend that just won't work. In fact, as of yesterday, I hadn't lost any weight for the week. So I had to somehow get through a barbecue day and somehow lose weight.



I played tennis for two hours, mowed the lawn, and went fishing. I ate only 1600 calories.



And I lost a pound. Yay! So now I'm at 192.8. Total lost on this diet: 21.2 pounds. Pounds to go: 14.8.



I'm hopeful that approaching my diet with a renewed commitment to following the rules rigidly will help me keep those pounds going down. Weight loss leveled off for a good 2 or 3 weeks, and I want to correct that. That said, it's tough to keep doing this week after week. Honestly, if I didn't have the accountability of this blog, I think I might have given up several times over the course of this ride. So yay for accountability.



In the "good news" department, I played tennis for 2 hours yesterday, and I didn't feel winded and awful during the experience. I love playing tennis, but the last few years I've played, it's been a wheezy affair. It looks like regular exercise helps with that. Go figure. :-)



Anyway--that's it for this week. Onward and downward!

Some Thoughts on the Pixar Rules

A friend linked me to a post on Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling--something I'd come across a while ago, and hadn't really responded to at the time. But I'm currently in "editing and revising" mode, and it spoke to me in a different way this time, and I wanted to get some thoughts down on virtual paper.



These are great rules--principles to keep in mind when you're creating a story. I wish I could have them all mastered, but I don't.



The problem I run into is that I don't think about rules when I'm writing. I don't sit down and say "Don't do this--it breaks rule 42." In some ways, I can't help but think my writing would be better if I took the time to think about those little details. But in other ways, I think my writing would be ruined.



One of the worst obstacles I have to get over whenever I'm writing is my natural inclination to dismiss what I'm writing as bad. I'll get something down on paper, and I'll just think it's awful. Chock full of flaws. And here's the thing--the more rules I try to keep in mind at the same time, the more I think what I've written is garbage.



I wonder sometimes how I'll be as a writer farther down the road, when I have even more practice. I do think I'm getting better, and that it's a craft that can be honed and refined over the years. I think I might get to the point where some of the things that I have to consciously force myself to do now come naturally to me in the future. For example, right now I have to really work hard to get all the descriptions of a scene in and do it well. What does the setting sound like? Smell like? What's the temperature? Things that really transport a reader to a place, but do it in a way that isn't jarring or intrusive. That's just plain hard for me to do. I'm better at it than I was, but still . . .



When I get to the point that I'm better at that--that I have more consistent practice with it--maybe I'll be able to start focusing on some other elements of writing. Step by step. A process.



So on the one hand, I love things like these Pixar Rules. They're simple statements I agree with. But on the other hand, I often have to do my best to ignore them. If I have one more rule in the back of my mind, nagging at me to follow it . . . it just might be too much.



Thoughts?