Skull dump.

I saw a movie the other night, John Dies at the End. It started out so well. The first several scenes were comical, that is, written gags, verbal and physical, with punchlines. Those scenes were hilarious. They raised my hopes so much. Unfortunately, after the beginning, it stopped being comedy with some horror elements and started to be just campy horror. They needed to go more one way or the other, either make it more comical, or make it less comical and more horrifying. In a way, it reminded me of Phantasm, a schlocky horror movie of the '70s; except that movie wasn't deliberately made to be campy. There's something about willfully making a movie to look and sound bad that ruins laughs, especially if you're paying to see it.



I hope Cabin in the Woods is better. I'll find out when I find it.

I'm reaching the midpoint of the "final" draft of the novel. I'm arriving there about eight chapters and 40,000 words sooner than the previous draft. In 3rd person omniscient, I liked to change POV a lot. I've restricted it this time through, and it's kept the thing much shorter. I've been writing a steady 2,000 words a week and presenting it to the crew. Then I consider their suggestions. I end up taking about 85% of them, and make changes in the story accordingly. It's so easy to fall behind though. If I fall behind, it's so easy to lose the hard copies with the corrections. Correcting last week's writing is part of the chore. Writing is the one profession where you probably spend the most time correcting your mistakes. Sometimes writers will say that they right two pages a day, or a thousand words a day. That's misleading, because it's just one part of the process, and depending on your experience and skill level, you might spend far more time making changes than you do generating the text.

In On Writing, Stephen King warned against writers' groups. He didn't think they were very effective. I believe it depends on how much experience and skill you have. King wrote his first short story when he was eight. He probably had written a half million words and read ten times that amount by the time he was twenty. An average writers' group would have just slowed him down. If you're well trained in writing, you're not going to need a "self-help" groups so much.

The group I'm in has a very simple formula. People meet once a week without fail. They've met every week for seventeen years. They even met on 9/11. Each person then can read up to 8 pages or 2,400 words. The reader hands out copies before the reading, and everyone makes corrections and notes, and gives verbal critique for a certain time.

In recent months we've had so many people join the group we've had to limit it to 2,000 words and time the critiques, otherwise we might not get out before midnight. We start at 6:30.

And that's the simple formula. Many people in the group have been published or have agents, or have books being considered by publishers. It's a much higher proportion than the general writer population. I would call this a winning formula, and would-be writers would probably do well to follow it.

It's going to be difficult to get work done this weekend. I have a friend coming into town. I just have to get my writing and reading done tomorrow and Friday. I've also fallen behind on reading for my writers' group. Some people have short stories that need critiquing late next week. These are flawed short stories that generally have failed to sell. The group reads them and tries to figure out what's wrong. There are six stories, I've only read one.

In case I failed to mention it, I have a huge list of tasks written up on Sticky Notes. It's about three columns long, but I'm relieved to report that it's getting shorter.

Today I wasted a lot of time but still got a lot done. The time-waster was posting at the Democratic Underground and IMDB on the Orphan Black discussion board. I wrote some for the novel, went to the pharmacy, made some comments on a friends blog, did my finances, set up a cloud backup on my computer. I've become obsessive about not losing data. I have two clouds, four hard disks and three flash drives that I copy data to.

I rambled a little. For this entry, I just wrote whatever came to mind. Meanwhile, I've been feeling my mental stamina leak away as it does this time of night. I have a few more things to do, then it's to bed.

I have a few ideas for future blogs, I better write them down, or I'll forget them and will have to skull-dump again.