Some Realizations
1. The reading period for Spicy Slipstream Stories opens in two weeks, and closes October 15! I'd better get writing on that genius idea I had. If it's still genius, that is.
2. Zero is a weird concept.
3. School is starting soon, and I will once again have to sigh and grumble and set aside the writing for now. Which means I dare not think of starting another novel at the moment, but with three manuscripts done I don't think I'm likely to be running a deficit all that quickly.
4. My financial aid cannot come too soon.
5. I've been approaching the elephant novel/story from the wrong direction. Literally, in fact; east to west instead of west to east. Figuratively, I've been conceiving of it as someone else's story. A stupid mistake that I don't usually make. However, it probably won't be written anytime soon (see #3 above).
6. Now that I've seen the entire series, I can say it with certainty: Carnivale should not have been cancelled.
7. Someone should make a movie or a TV series out of Scott Westerfeld's Midnighters. I just finished Book Two, and it's soooo good.
8. I don't really like to argue.
9. If, as is my plan, I live forever AND continue to get better at this writing thing, eventually I will be INFINITELY SUPER GOOD and change the world with a sentence. Maybe even a clause.
11 Comments:
why is zero a weird concept?
I still don't believe in Spicy Slipstream Stories.
(But yes, write that one, anyway.)
- H
Chance: prove to me that it exists.
Hannah: will do. It's the focus now that I've finished the novel and the new story.
I think you know what is it like when you don't have a thing.
no need to prove it.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?
(I don't find zero a particularly weird concept. Not knowing how to read a book--that's what I was thinking today was a weird concept. I'm not sure if I think it's more or less weird than the concept of knowing how to read one.)
- H
I'm not being deliberately obtuse. (For once.) It just seems to me that lack is not necessarily equivalent to nothingness. The more I think about it, the odder it seems. So do the rest of the numbers, but not quite as much.
(That's me in the corner . . . losing my mathematics . . .
Please, justify that ending of Carnivale in a way for me in which HBO would have been justified in continuing it. I've tried and failed on my own behalf.
I wish they'd just done the carnival parts of the show, as the preacher bits were always painfully hammy to me. But there were some gems in the entirety.
Which part of the ending? Or the whole thing?
I should say, I definitely assumed that certain aspects of the end of Season Two were a result of Network Pressure. Hence the sudden surge in pacing. But I could be wrong. Something like the way the end of Freaks and Geeks sort of jumped ahead with respect to certain character development issues, but still felt believable and inevitable.
Then again, maybe I'm giving Knaus too much credit. There were certain threads in the season that got dropped like a Chris Claremont subplot. But Claremont wasn't able to see all his storylines through to fruition because he didn't have creative control, ultimately. And that's what this felt like to me; as if HBO was saying, however politely, "Uh, hey, isn't it all moving a little slow?"
I thought Carnivale deserved cancellation. The problem, for me, wasn't the surge in pacing but what it revealed - that Knauf's story made no sense, that his characters were neither interesting nor believable, and that for all his talk about having the show carefully planned out, he had no sense of decent pacing or plotting.
But if you really miss the show, check out Battlestar Galactica. Ron D. Moore, who wrote some of the best episodes in Carnivale's first season (the one after Dora Mae's murder, for example), left the show the make Galactica, which is simply superb.
I've heard good things about Battlestar Galactica. I haven't seen it, but frankly the idea that it might be good still baffles me. I plan to check it out, though. It'll just have to be sometime when my usual spaceship-aversive viewing partner isn't around :-)
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