The Desolation of Smaug

I saw The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug over the weekend and thought I'd post a short summary of the movie with some, er, annotations. Needless to say, spoilers. Oh my God so many spoilers for a book that's nearly a hundred years old.


Audience: Why are we in Bree OH LOOK IT'S PETER JACKSON
Audience: Is that young Aragorn oh I guess it's not young Aragorn I kind of thought it might be young Aragorn.

Bilbo: HOLY CRAP A BEAR
Gandalf: Yes asshole, I know about the bear! We gotta hide in this house.
Bilbo: Whose house is this?
Gandalf: The bear's house. SHUT UP

Beorn: I am a generic neanderthal Viking werebear.
Bilbo: You were a lot more fun in the books.
Beorn: You made fun of Peter Jackson's songs. You don't get any more joy in this series.

Azog: STILL ALIVE MOTHERFUCKERS
Bolg: I was in charge in the books. Grumble mumble.

Spiders: Eats them all!
Bilbo: HOLY SHIT STAB
Spiders: It stings!
Sting: And that's how I got the name.

Bilbo: Attercop?
Peter Jackson: I TOLD YOU NO MORE JOY IN THIS SERIES
Bilbo: Didn't I spend most of this part of the book being invisible?
Peter Jackson: Oh sure, that would look good on film.

Tauriel: I am perfect and I will die horribly in the third movie.
Legolas: I am perfect and I will live through all the movies.
Tauriel: Ours is a doomed love.

Gandalf: Guess I better look in this perilous hole. HOLY SHIT
Radagast: Hi! *hic*
Gandalf: WASH YOUR FUCKING HAIR

Thorin: You abandoned my people to a dragon!
Thranduil: DO NOT TALK TO ME OF DRAGON FIRE
Thorin: OH my GOD what's wrong with your FAAAACE

Gandalf: Hey Necromancer, get out here!
Azog: Heh, dumbass.

Thranduil: Do you love my son?
Tauriel: I don't know, I don't think he likes me...
Thranduil: He totally does.
Tauriel: Oh my... *blush*
Thranduil: Don't you dare touch him though.
Tauriel: Oh.
Thranduil: Yeah.

Kili: My mother gave me this stone that'll kill you if you read it. LOL J/K
Tauriel: Ours is a doomed love.
Kili: At least you've got a chance to live through the next movie.
Legolas: Stay away from my girl, dwarf.
Kili: OH my GOD what's wrong with your FAAAACE

Bilbo: Get in the barrels!
Dwarfs: Okay. Wait FUCK
Bilbo: Good, now I just have to... oh.
Peter Jackson: HOW DID THIS HUMOR GET IN HERE

Kili: OW MY LEG
Tauriel: Oh no, now I have an excuse to stay in the movie!

Gandalf: Hey Necromancer, get out-
Sauron: LOL OKAY
Gandalf: SAU... RON...
Sauron: MAKE FUN OF MY GIANT FLAMING EYE, WILL YOU?
Audience: THAT'S FUCKING AWESOME

Bard: I'm going to be too important later to save for the next movie.
Tolkien Nerds: That seems reasonable.
Bard: Check out my black arrow, it's a siege weapon.
Tolkien Nerds: WTF
Bard: How much you want to bet I can't talk to birds anymore?

Stephen Fry: Take all the humor out of The Hobbit, will you?
Peter Jackson: Watch it or I'll kill you in the next movie.

Dwarfs: We can't open this door. Fuck it, let's go home.
Bilbo: Wait, the door's opening-
Dwarfs: YOU'RE AWESOME. Now go into the dragon hole and get us our rock.

Bilbo: Okay, so if I'm this big and the dragon is this big, I'm proper fucked...
Peter Jackson: STOP AMUSING THE AUDIENCE

Benedict Cumberbatch: I AM SMAUG AND I AM AWESOME
Audience: HELL YES YOU ARE

Thorin: Do you have my rock?
Bilbo: GREAT BIG DRAGON
Thorin: GIVE ME MY FUCKING ROCK OR I WILL STAB YOU
Bilbo: Good thing I didn't tell him about the Ring.

Gandalf: Wasn't I in this movie earlier?

Kili, Tauriel, Legolas, Bolg, Bard: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON IN LAKE TOWN

Thorin: We have to lead Smaug into the forges!
Bilbo: Something about this plan seems off.

Thorin: HAH TAKE THAT DRAGON
Benedict Cumberbatch: Ah. Just so we're clear, your big plan was to drown the fire-breathing dragon in molten gold?
Thorin: Er, yes?
Benedict Cumberbatch: SMAUG'S GONNA MAKE IT RAIN UP IN HERE
Thorin: That worked a lot better in Game of Thrones.

Benedict Cumberbatch: I am fire. I am... Death.
Martin Freeman: What have we done?
Peter Jackson: To be continued in Sherlock season three!
Audience: WTF

(I should note: In spite of the above I thought the movie was okay. My wife loved it, we both thought it was a bit too long. But Smaug alone is worth the ticket price if you want to see a dragon done right.)

The Fever Dreams of Nurgle

I remember once, I think, I wanted to write something... but that thought is gone now, washed away in a tidal flood of snot and blood and sweat.

Nobody warns you when you have a kid that you are putting yourself at risk of getting every childhood disease known to man, again. Well, they may warn you, but they say "just wash him when he comes home from daycare and you'll be fine." Liars, all.

Daycare is not a place where loving people care for your child while you work to support him. Daycare is a festering plague pit where only the strong survive. I've been to the pediatric emergency room twice since Ben started daycare over fevers that turned out to be almost nothing, then he got pinkeye.

My wife has been sick for a solid month. She actually talks to people in that hellhole. Upper respiratory infection, bronchitis, strep throat, pinkeye, upper respiratory infection again... I've honestly lost track and I'm not sure either of us has an accurate tally. I escaped the reckoning for awhile, but I've been sick for a week now with something in my nose and throat and an ear infection that came from nowhere.

Neither of us has any paid leave left. I'm relying on a Higher Power to get me out of work to see my family on Christmas Eve. Possibly that power is meteorological.

We have three great-grandparents who haven't met Ben yet, and because we want him to continue to have those great-grandparents they won't meet him until everyone is healthy. Current estimates set that sometime in October. 2015.

Everyone got flu shots, the TDaP booster, and the other necessary illness prevention treatments, but they are helpless before the wrath of a strange toddler with pink eyes and grabby hands. (Still no autism, mind.)

And now Ben, who has been healthy since he got over the pinkeye, had his nose fill up with snot tonight and is warm. Not feverish, just warm. I suspect the cycle is about to start again...

Isn't he adorable? Wash your hands. Don't touch your eyes.

Top Cow Talent Hunt 2013

So I blow off NaNoWriMo, rededicate myself to my novel, and then Top Cow decides to hold a writing contest.

Really? Now?

Yes, I'm putting a script submission together. I've got a fun Irish Witchblade idea that should hold up for 22 pages and nothing much to lose.

No, I'm not stopping work on the novel. I've just finished putting my notes together for easy access and I'll be drafting a new outline soon.

In other news, I just managed to blow a deadline for the latest Writer's Digest short story competition, but I was planning to expand an existing short story for it and I'm not sure that would have been allowed anyway, so oh well. I've also got a few thoughts toward a new blog series on using a wiki to write (after futzing around with various implementations for waaay too long), so watch this space...

Happy NaNoWriMo! I'm Out, Here's Why

Welcome to National Novel Writing Month! This month you will be encouraged to write an entire novel in only 30 days. It will involve pushing yourself to your limits to get 1,667+ words written every day, no weekends off, no exceptions. You will probably lose some sleep, miss out on some Thanksgiving festivities, offend your spouse or your dog, and find yourself sneaking a few paragraphs in at the office. But once you've reached the end of the month you will have a fully-fledged first draft manuscript, ready to polish into a shining stone of brilliance. And that's awesome. If you're participating, stop reading this post right now and go hammer out that word count.

...Okay then. Any NaNoWriMo peoples who stuck around: folks, you're on your own this year.

I've participated in NaNoWriMo five times now, and enjoyed it every time, even when I didn't finish. It's fun! Turbo-charging your writing output is exhausting, but damn if it doesn't feel good to see all those words on the page.

Here's the thing:

You still have to finish the novel.

The novel you'll have completed by November 30th?  It's still just 50,000 words of rough draft. In today's market that's usually considered a novella, for one thing, but that's quibbling over terminology. What's more important is that those 50,000 words are seat-of-your-pants prose that is almost certainly chock-full of typos, bad metaphors, adverbs, padded descriptions (you can easily add a quick 100 words by elaborating on someone's clothes), and enough plotholes to murder a Vegas tour bus and the tow truck they send out to rescue them.

I've discussed the ghosts of NaNoNovels past before. Suffice to say that none of the four novels I attempted in the past have come off. My latest one, A Boy and his Demon... well I've discussed that too, and I'm still mired in worldbuilding and filling in the details I'll need to put together a coherent universe that will last me through three books. (I am still searching for friendly worldbuilding advice, by the way.) Which is why I'm not participating in NaNoWriMo this year: I'm not abandoning a project that, as far as I'm concerned, is still viable and pretty badass. Even if it drags on for another year.

So what's my point? Am I just writing this to discourage you? Fuck no. Go forth and conquer like a mighty literary giant. But while you're conquering, keep a few things in mind?

1. Take copious notes. I'm serious, every little scrap of idea you have in November should be written down, either in the margins of your notebook or on an index card or a sticky note or typed into a dump file on your computer. You are flying very fast and loose this month and when it comes time to revise, you can't afford to forget anything. If you want to add the notes to your word count I won't tell anyone.

2. Begin and end. Your novel should have both, even if they're terrible. Ideally you should have a fairly solid through-line from one to the other as well. If you can't work out what to write for one section, you are permitted to jot down a brief summary of what you think happens and move on, as long as you still make your word count.

3. Don't stop. A related point: once you reach 50,000 words, keep going until you've got your beginning, ending and through-line. Perhaps your final book is 80,000 words, or 100,000 words, or whatever. Don't stop writing until you've got everything written down, and try to fill in any summaries you were forced to add in November. You are allowed to slow down, if sanity demands, but don't stop.

4. Okay, stop. Once you've got everything down, of course, you can take a breather. Do so. Don't be tempted to start your second draft, because having finished NaNoWriMo you are technically insane and likely to stay that way for at least a month. Use that month to rest and recover. Work on something fun and easy for a bit, go outside, reconnect with friends and family, eat something horrible for you, go run a marathon, whatever. Just don't look at your novel yet.

5. Now go again. Once your month is up and you're well rested, open up your manuscript and take a look. Carry a red pen and, again, take copious notes as you read through. Try to do this as quickly as you can. Your goal is to get a broad idea of what shape your novel is in and where you're going to need to do the most work. You are not correcting spelling and grammar, because you will be tossing out entire sections of the manuscript and there isn't much point yet. Just get a high-level view of your novel. Then, start patching.

There's probably a step six, but if so I'm not done with it yet. And you don't have time to read it anyway! What are you still doing here? Go! Write! Be fruitful and inkify!

Notes From Kelly Sue DeConnick's Writing Workshop

This past weekend I attended a writing workshop at Third Eye Comics, my local badass comic shop. Kelly Sue DeConnick, current writer for Marvel's Captain Marvel series among other things and creator of the new Pretty Deadly Image book, ran a two hour lecture-with-participation on how to write for comics. For the record, she's aces at it. All of her advice was on point and helpful to anyone looking to break into comics, so if you get a chance to catch her doing this sort of thing again I heartily recommend you attend.

What follows are the notes I took that are applicable to any sort of writing, not just comic books. I'm not going to reproduce my entire note pool because A. it would get unwieldy for one blog post, B. I don't write comic books for a living, C. a good chunk of it is exercises that won't translate well, and D. Kelly Sue does write comics and if anyone's going to dispense her specialized wisdom in that area, it's her. But I'll gladly steal (well, post with permission - thanks Kelly Sue!) the more general tidbits, because they're fucking worth knowing.

Disclaimer: Anything in quotes is a direct quote. Anything outside of the quotes is subject to the stupidity of the stenographer. Now, in no particular order:

1. Ideas in your head are always going to seem more perfect than words on the page. Deal with it. You need to put the words on the page. The shitty first draft is better than perfect words in your head.*

2. Variant: "Ideas are shit. I have six a day!" Sitting down and getting the story done is the hard part. Nobody's going to pay you for your ideas. You are welcome to make people pay you to write their ideas down.

3. A good part of your job is sitting like this, listening to the voices in your head. Kelly Sue's method involves writing down conversations she hears in her imagination, but you might see freeze-framed scenes. Whatever works.

4. An exercise for the crazy: Get a favorite comic book's script (or a favorite book) and copy it out in longhand. This will help you focus and read critically. (I have tried this and it works, though it is a time commitment.)

5. Warren Ellis's advice for fight scenes is to call your shots, meaning if somebody is going to be hit with a club in one panel, the club should be visible in the previous panel. In a book, this means foreshadowing: if an object or plot device is going to be crucial to a scene or the whole book, try to make sure you've at least mentioned it before you use it.

6. “What is the Get?” Once you have a first draft, go through and ask yourself with every scene: Does it tell us something about characters, or push the plot forward? If not, cut it. Kill the darlings, basically. But create a Morgue file on your desktop to set your darlings aside, and one day, when you're at loose ends, go through it and look for new story ideas.

7. If you're having a rough time of it, just think "I need to get through today, tomorrow I'm quitting." Remind yourself of that until you're done for the day. Then, tomorrow, think: "Okay, just one more day, but then TOMORROW..."

8. Kelly Sue recommends the South Park writing method, which is making sure your scenes are connected by "but" or "so", not "and" or "meanwhile". (She also admits to a bit too much "meanwhile".) You can watch Trey Parker and Matt Stone describe their method here.

9. Some "don't"s: Don't fall in love with your words. Don't add captions that tell us something we can already see (in prose, consider this to refer to adverbs). Don't be a petty child (or at least try). And finally don't give your stuff (manuscript, self-published work) to editors at conventions. 75% of the things editors get at conventions will go in the trash before they get on a plane. Instead, get the editor's contact information and their permission to send them your stuff.

10. Feminism 101: First, when writing someone of the opposite gender, pretend they're people! Kelly Sue also recommends the Bechdel Test, and introduced the Sexy Lamp Test, to wit: Can you replace a female character with a sexy lamp and not change anything else in your plot? If so, fuck you. This means you've written a female character who is nothing more than something to rescue or avenge, or a reward or decoration. To fix this problem, simply ask yourself what the sexy lamp wants; then, give it agency, meaning the ability to go out and try to get what it wants. Note the "try": a character doesn't need to be successful to have agency.

11. In the same vein, let's have a 5 year moratorium on rape in comics. It's a lazy choice. So is killing children or dogs. Kelly Sue still feels bad about killing a dog in one issue just to get to an ending she wanted. And I'll note that my wife will stop reading or watching anything that kills a dog immediately. Which is why I still haven't seen House of Cards. Thank you Kevin Spacey.

12. On creating characters: Use the old improv trick of "yes, and" when you're coming up with a character. Ask yourself what your character wants. Another old actor's trick: keep a journal for a character you're trying to develop. Take notes as you see themes cropping up.

13. Characters again: Ask yourself, "What is their [your character's] wound?" Try to tie that in with your character's gift. (For example Superman has all his powers, but he's the last of his kind.)

14. Once more on characters: Ask yourself, what part of the body does your character lead with? As an example Kelly Sue noted that Captain Marvel leads with her heart and her chin: she sees a problem and her response is to march in and hit it. Her best friend Spider-Woman on the other hand leads with her hips: her first response to a problem is to get up and walk away, she has to try very hard to be a hero. (Yes this last question will make you sound like a crazy person.)

15. Put your characters through hell. You are allowed to feel bad about this afterward.

16. Further reading recommendations: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield and Shawn Coyne, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, Writing for Comics and Graphic Novels by Peter David. Also Chris Claremont's run on X-Men, and pay attention to the way he throws out random details that end up paying off into great stories down the line.

* Originally this ended with "And the second draft is going to be a hell of a lot harder than the first." Then I got a note from Kelly Sue: "I probably did say this, but it’s not quite true. The hardest part - the actual hardest part - is getting the first draft down. After that, it’s grunt work. You get stuck, you get upset when you see things that don’t work, sure - but having a manuscript to work with is infinitely better than NOT having a manuscript to work with." I believe I lumped two statements made over the evening together, and somewhat mangled the context.

I do disagree with her, though. I find getting the first draft down painful, but doable. The second draft, where I have to fill in roughly a thousand plot holes, flesh out my cardboard cutout characters, and get the hideous goddamn creature that is my novel breathing, is infinitely harder for me.

That might be because I'm working on a NaNoNovel and huffed raw nitrous oxide during the first draft; it might be that I failed at Proper Preparation and Planning the first time through; or it might be that novels are a different beast than comics and short stories, because with short stories I've found the first draft absolutely is harder than the second. And Kelly Sue has vastly more experience, so take my opinion for what it's worth.