May 8, 2006

And it’s a Monday. Mondays are usually good/bad for me; I usually have a good charge of new energy at work, but there’s usually so much to do that I burn out quickly. Mondays are usually pretty productive in the evenings, but it sets me up for a tiring Tuesday.

Tonight, I got very little done. Instead, I watched The Usual Suspects, which the IT Guy at work (the one I’m turning into an anime fan by judicious applications of good anime) loaned me. The movie impressed me; good acting, great plotting. The story did tend to jump from one plot point to the next a bit too jarringly for my tastes; I felt like I was being pulled over railroad ties from one plot point to the next. But that’s really my only complaint.

And man, Kevin Spacey does such an excellent job. He has that great actor’s ability to squeeze into a role and inhabit it as though he’s been practicing every line since he was eight years old. But, like all great actors, he takes on roles that work for him; I doubt you’d see him try on a Jim Carey role. So he chooses his roles like a good salesman chooses a suit: Carefully, with attention to details.

Everyone else was good, too, of course (particularly Gabriel Byrne), but Kevin Spacey just outshone them all. I wonder if they found that frustrating at all. Shades of Salieri, perhaps.

Anyway, I’m chattering on when I should be getting to sleep. Probably because, despite writing regularly on my novel for the past week, I’m barely two hundred words forward. I’m in the denoument, and I keep explaining details and describing character reactions as though I were still halfway through the book. The big climax has already happened; my readers want the mysteries explained and the book to end, not to inhabit every second of the hero’s flight home. We don’t spend much time on Luke flying away from the Death Star.

So, my frustrated Muse is using this blog as another outlet. Well, fair enough, but I have to wake up for work soon. So, enough! Time for a bit of reading (James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure; excellent), and sleep.

A Weekend Away

I’m back from a fabulous weekend spent with Saalon, catching up on stuff. We haven’t physically seen each other in almost a year, and it was great to spend some face-to-face time. It’s amazing, how powerful face-to-face communication is.

We watched…quite a lot of anime, actually. A lot of it was stuff we’ve wanted to watch together for a while: Char’s Counterattack, G-Saviour, and the first two Zeta Gundam movies. So much more fun to watch those sorts of things with others.

And, of course, we talked: About werewolf movies, about comic books, about Gundam. He loaned me five volumes of a fantastic superhero comic book series called Invincible, which I’m now going to have to buy. It’s difficult to explain how good this series is without giving away massive spoilers. The plot is fairly generic: the son of a superhero gains his powers. But it’s got such solid writing, it’s incredibly entertaining and does really fun things with its premise.

So, I’m back home, and feeling…a little lonely. It’s so quiet at home. And I like quiet, but I just….

…maybe I need a cat.

Comments:

Gret A stereo might also work perhaps?
Brent I appreciate the suggestion, but a stereo just gives the house a hollow sound. It can work for a night or two, but not in the long term.

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