11 July 2002

Well, I promised you'd find out today what the yellow blob was in yesterday's picture... So, without further ado:

Isn't he cute? In a sort of surly way?

I can't even remember where I got him, anymore, but he's one of my favorite monitor pets. He's almost perfectly round, so he makes a good subject when I want to play wallyball with myself. And that 'tude just perfectly sums up my opinion about being at work, most days.

So, since yesterday was Wednesday, I went over to K.T. and Kevin's. K.T. made kielbasa and 'kraut, and we watched A Beautiful Mind.

If I'd known what the potential for disaster was, there, I might not have ever suggested it.

K.T. had told me Kevin wanted to to see it - but I didn't find out until just before we sat down to watch it that the reason he wanted to see it was so he could decisively say that Lord of the Rings had actually deserved to win the Oscar for Best Picture.

I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to watch A Beautiful Mind because I'd heard it was very, very good. I wanted to like it. I didn't want to have the movie end and then have Kevin immediately start picking at it and finding fault. I made a few quips, hoping he'd at least wait until I left before he started.

K.T. was only watching the movie (I found out afterwards) because both Kevin and I wanted to see it (albeit for different reasons). She expected it to be dull to the nth degree.

So. We put our dinner plates on our laps and started the movie.

I had one - and only one - complaint: Sound editing, which seems to be a problem with a lot of movies. The music was so loud that we'd turn the volume down, but then it would move to a dialogue, which I would have to strain to hear over the fish tank. I missed a good third of the dialogue that way.

(Of course, every time I watch a movie at K.T. and Kevin's I wonder if I should get my hearing checked - I'm always the one who has to ask them to turn up the volume, even when I'm sitting on the couch that isn't right by the fish tank. But my annual physical never finds any problems with my hearing. Maybe K.T. and Kevin just have Super Hearing and have forgotten to mention it.)

But I digress. We watched the movie. About halfway through, I realized I was hungry again and wanted seconds on dinner. I couldn't move.

The movie ended, and we just sat for a moment, watching the credits roll. The first person to speak was Kevin.

"Okay," he said, almost regretfully, "that deserved Best Picture."

(You tell me - how good does a movie have to be to change the mind of someone who was biased against it in the first place?)

"I think I need to add it to my list," K.T. said.

"List?" I asked, wiping tears from my eyes.

"Of movies I want to buy."

(So much for dull.)

Really. It was a beautiful, wonderful movie. Funny and charming and spooky and moving by turns. If you haven't seen it yet, do so.

I need to watch it again, so I can catch all the dialogue I missed. Damn; guess that means we'll have to buy it.

I finally got Missa to cooperate yesterday, and I churned out a three- or four-page story. I'm still not especially happy with the ending, but I'm relatively happy with the result.

What I need to do soon is start going through all the stories and clean them up. I need to be ruthless about certain things. Get rid of all the contractions that aren't part of dialogue. (Get rid of all the contractions that I accidently left in Kevil's dialogue.) Fix the spelling and grammar. Get rid of all those unnecessary commas. (I have this love/hate relationship with commas.) Separate out the awkward sentences and phrases and beat on them until I come up with something more graceful. Invariably, I use too many synonyms for "said" (whispered, gasped, muttered, groaned, cried, sighed) and too many modifying adverbs (softly, harshly, angrily, tearfully, wonderingly). (I've seen it suggested, actually, that one strip out every synonym and adverb - every last one. And then decide where to put them back in, allowing no more than one synonym every third occurrence, and adverbs even more sparingly. I don't know if I could actually do that, but I do need to rein them in a little.)

And then, because we're trying to work together on this, I need to do all that for the things K.T. has written, too.

I don't know any writers who don't re-write constantly. K.T. was talking about this just last night, actually. You go to write something, and you re-write it at least three times in your brain before your fingers touch the keys. You type it in and then you notice where a word could be different, a clause a little more graceful. You go back and read it later and notice that your character's speech patterns or mannerisms aren't quite right. You go back a month later and wince at the stupidity of the whole thing and re-work entire sections.

Of all the writing I've done, I've never been able to re-read something two years later and not find at least one thing that makes me cringe. In fact, I'm always astonished and happy when I only find a couple of cringe-worthy things - it's much more usual, two years later, to read a story and think, "Dear gods, was I really that awful? How could I possibly have thought this was any good?" (No, I'm not fishing for compliments. In fact, I've been known to get hostile with people who insist something I wrote is good when I think it's crap.)

All of which would explain, I suppose, why I'm not a professional writer.

--Liz