May Sweeps - Day 472

Big Anklevich got back to me with the cover for "Two Month Retreat."  Behold:

I only wish the darn story were as good as that cover is.

But ah well.  Live and learn.

Sit-ups Today: 111
Sit-ups In May: 1838

My cousin and I went to see ARMY OF THE DEAD tonight, the epic zombie movie by Zack Snyder.  I had wanted to see it ever since hearing the fun premise (Las Vegas is overrun by zombies, and the government plans to nuke the city, but a team goes in right before to raid the vault of one of the casinos of its two hundred million dollar cargo), but I felt weird asking my cousin to go see it with me, since he had really wanted me to go see MORTAL KOMBAT 2021, and I outright refused, having seen MORTAL KOMBAT 1995 in the theaters and never quite being able to get the stench out of my clothes.

But he seemed willing to go, and the local theaters have started to do the discount five dollar Tuesday shows again, so I drove over there and grabbed us tickets.  Half of the theater had been set up for vaccinations, so I had to buy the tickets from the concession stand.*  The girl who rang me up wore a mask, so I can only imagine what she looked like, but her name was Ashton.  I've never known a female Ashton before, but the names of young people tend to be both vexing and fascinating to me.

You might be asking, "Rish, why would you pay to see a movie when it will be available for free on television in three days?"  To which, I say, "Well, I don't have HBO Max, so I wouldn't be able t--"  To which, you say, "No, Rish, it's on Netflix.  You pay twenty-three bucks a month to have Netflix, despite never watching it."**  To which, I guess I have to say, "Really?  It's not on HBO Max?  Huh."  

But the thing is, I love going to the movies.***  I love the history of it, the darkness of the theater, the experience of being whisked away on a journey of laughter, tears, and sticky floors.  There's a laundry list of movies I love that I never saw again after the theater because that is the way I'd prefer to see them (and dang, during the pandemic movie season last summer, I should've gone to more re-releases, instead of the four that I did see (RAIDERS, EMPIRE, JURASSIC PARK, and SUPERMAN).  Going to the movies is one of my favorite things, and I'm happy to pay money to support the local theaters and ticket-takers that were born in 2004.  

The movie itself was very long (I guess you could call it "epic," if you wanted to praise it, but two and a half hours is more than we've ever gotten for a zombie flick), and to call it excessive would be to call THE WIZARD OF OZ colorful, or SE7EN a little dark.  It was fun, though, and super violent and mean-spirited, and had a lot of fun ideas I'd not seen in a zombie movie before (though granted, I haven't seen one since probably WORLD WAR Z, which was even more expensive than this one, though not nearly as enjoyable).  

The film it most reminded me was ALIENS, and after two or three scenes that directly paralleled that classic, it made me wonder what James Cameron would do with a zombie movie.  Besides rack up an unprecedented budget, that is.

Push-ups Today: 50
Push-ups In May: 2011

As far as writing goes, I got nearly none done.  I took the work I'd done on Sunday and tried to drop it into the main document, but somehow, I'd written one of the same scenes either on Thursday or Friday or so, and had to find a way to make it fit.  

One of the things they teach you in screenwriting (not quite up there with Show, Don't Tell and Get Into The Scene As Late As You Can) is to Kill Your Darlings.  That means to not be precious with the stuff you write (the scenes, the dialogue, the descriptions, the characters), because to make a good screenplay, you'll have to change and/or cut out quite a lot, even stuff you've grown to love.

I never learned that lesson.  At least, not very well.  It would take six months or longer before I'd be able to do an edit on my scripts with anything like objectivity.  

And I apply that lesson to my prose writing not at all.  Screenplays, by their very nature, require honing and trimming, sometimes endless rewrites, and it was always hard to lose stuff I had worked very hard on, because you feel like you're throwing it out.  In my stories, I end up writing scenes over again when I lose them ALL THE TIME, and occasionally, I'll find the previous scene, and I always try to keep everything from both of them.  In a laundry list of bad character traits I carry around with me, it's annoying, sure, but not one I'm particularly interested in eliminating.

I was talking to my friend Jeff about comic books last night (he called me at nearly two am, because of the time difference), and he was complaining about how Stan Lee wrote comics, packing every single page with two to five pages' worth of dialogue and action.  And today's comics now do the opposite.  I have read modern books where the same story would have been told, in the Silver Age of Comics, in three or four pages.  The sweet spot should be somewhere in the middle, I realize, and my stories probably should be too.

I always complain, when I write a story for a contest, that I have to cut too much out to make it fit into the 1000 or 500 word limit, but I tend not to bat an eye when a two thousand word idea ends up as a four or five thousand word story.

Words Today: 334
Words In May: 10,670

*Oh, this was a weird little thing I noticed.  There was a big sign in front of the two bored medics waiting for people to get their shots that read "VACCINATIONS ARE BY APPOINTMENT ONLY."  But underneath that, in Spanish, it read, "No appointments necessary."  I found that really strange, and I wonder if they were just trying to be accommodating to Hispanics, since they are less likely to come in to get the shot.  That's just a guess, though--I don't know why they'd turn anybody away at this point, since they're surely going to have to throw out vaccine doses that go unused, now that the demand is far outweighed by the supply.

**This is actually true.  I did start watching that ENOLA HOLMES movie about two months ago, but turned it off about halfway through because I was enjoying the accents a little too much, if you know what I mean.  And I never turned it on again.  Every two weeks Netflix sends me an email that says, and I quote, "Don't forget to finish Enola Holmes!"

***Years ago, my friend Kristina told me that I would never, ever get laid if I spent my weekends going to movies, and Bossk bless her, she was a true precog.