8-23 Blog

In my audiobook reading, Abbie described one of Arcove's lines as being said, "in a voice like brooding thunder."  That took me a few takes, and then I decided I didn't know what it meant.  Sorry.  It's hard to decide how big to do some of these lines, especially when they are described as "exclaimed" or "growled" or "burst out."  But hey, hopefully my instincts are good.

I drove to the library in the next town, to check out the book that the story for the next Podcast That Dares Not Speak Its Name came from (I mentioned this the other day, but somehow, the edited version of the story became corrupted, and I had long since deleted the recording from back in November).  It was already checked out at the local library, but they had two copies at the next one, and I had been told that I could easily check out a book using my current library card (I had gotten a second library card in that town in 2007 or so, when I was working there, though I assumed--wrongly--that it had expired). 

There was a single librarian working (which just blows my mind, since there are usually three or four on duty at all times at mine), and she wouldn't take my hometown library card plus my driver's license as sufficient I.D. (she kept asking, "Do you have proof of address on your phone you could show me?" which I still can't quite get my head around).  What she wanted me to go back home, get a phone or utility bill, and bring it in to prove where I lived, and maybe I should have done that (I asked her if the envelope had to be unopened--I remember hearing that once from someone demanding proof of address--and she looked at me like I was being ridiculous), but instead, I went downstairs, got the book in question, and merely tore out the pages that I needed to do the recording.

Okay, that's a lie.  I just took pictures of those pages with my phone, but I still felt like I was committing some kind of espionage by doing so, hoping not to be seen by a teen library assistant or a security camera.

Later on, I went to my own library, and once again, my heart wasn't in my writing tonight.  I made the mistake of quoting a Jimi Hendrix song in my story, then went online to see if I'd gotten it right, then spent a while reading about the history of the song, then read about the songs he put out before that one.  Still, I had 515 words by the time the library wanted me to leave.*

For weeks, I'd been wanting to see Jordan Peele's new movie, NOPE, but things kept preventing it.  I told my cousin on Monday that I was going to go on Tuesday, so I didn't miss it, and to his credit, he said he'd go too (although I predicted we'd be the only two people in the audience, and it was still fairly full).  And even though I didn't like the movie (I'm not burying the lead, since I have so little time to blog tonight), I appreciated what Peele was doing, and that there was masterful skill involved.  But there were three stumbling blocks to my enjoying the movie:
1) There was a running 90's sitcom chimpanzee attack thread that I just couldn't understand (it was like it had been dropped in at random from another, unfinished movie),
2) I simply could not like the female lead, finding her loud and obnoxious and quite the opposite of sympathetic, and
3) there's a twist/conceit at the end of the film that just lost me, that I was unable to accept** or get past.  But ah well.

Arcove or Exercise or Writing: All Three

*Technically, they wanted me to leave from the first moment they saw me.  I need a haircut.

**His last movie, US, had a twist/conceit at the end too that I just found too ridiculous, and it lost me too, though not quite this badly; I was still able to enjoy US.