Found Objects

January 8, 2004

We saw The Two Towers. In the extended edition, recommended by all and sundry as throwing more light on the character of Faramir. Well, yes. I now know how the movie version of Faramir came to be such a creep. Send the Ring to Denethor, just to suck up to him, brrr. I'm glad we paid three euros rent instead of shelling out thirty or more to buy it.

The rest of the extra material also seemed to make the bad things worse - except Théodred's funeral, which ought to have been in the theatrical version. Arwen was even more simpering, and Éowyn even more little-womanish in her infatuation with Aragorn, and now I think neither of them is worthy of him. After the first movie I thought that this Aragorn ought to marry Éowyn, let Arwen go West, and leave Faramir to be eaten by a grue, no, wrong universe, a flying whatever.

The point is probably that Peter Jackson is a horror movie maker, and even when he isn't out to make a horror movie it has all the tropes. It was most noticeable in the parts that were scary; they were scary from the effects, not from the content.

In spite of that we'll probably go and see Return of the King in the theatre Real Soon Now, both for the outing and for the fun on the train home picking it apart.

The Two Towers made me want to write fanfic to make it right, but not badly enough to actually go and do it; anyway, it's been done. Warning: explicit sexual content, and very soppy too (some people object to that).

Writing

Thirty thousand words seems to be critical mass for me. Suddenly I don't have to think about plot any more: it just happens. Now it's the actual wording that keeps me from writing a thousand words a day. I have Jilan out of town, and a vague plan (which I shouldn't write down, at least not in any file in the actual writing directory, it's probably all right here as it's just "telling people") to make the thing in three parts, the first and the last in Rizenay in the Frozen North and the middle out in the world. He's probably the kind of person who comes back.

I changed my counting system as a New Year's resolution: instead of trying to do 300 words every day I set a weekly target of 2.500 (yes, that's slightly more). Weeks run from Thursday to Wednesday, because the year started on a Thursday and Wednesday night is good for catching up because I have to sit and wait for my hair to dry after washing it after folk-dancing anyway. On Tuesday in the first week I went 126 words over target, causing negative numbers to appear in the To Go column of my spreadsheet. I could change the To Go column to show negative numbers before I hit the target, but that would be discouraging; I'd rather have some negative numbers with positive meaning. But I do make them turn bright green with a Conditional Attribute. I wish I could set a coloured background with a Conditional Attribute, but I don't think KSpread has heard of that.

I thought for a while that I put far too much detail into the parts I really liked (variant on "kill your darlings"). Then I resolved to write it anyway and kill it later. Boudewijn read one scene I apologized for in advance ("I know it's much too elaborate, I'll reduce it to about a quarter later") and said "don't, extend it, I want to read more of that!"

Boggle.

I have a hard time choosing between what I want to write and what I think the readers will like to read. I'm very bad at second-guessing my readers, so I should really be writing what I want to write, but that makes me skip over or skimp on what I think are the boring bits, bits that the story needs nevertheless. Grrr.

Apropos of "kill your darlings" - a google search suggests that most people who give that advice assume that writers fall in love with their "flowery sentences full of fancy words" and have to edit those out ruthlessly. Well, that is true enough; if I catch myself writing a flowery sentence full of fancy words I delete it with extreme prejudice before it makes it to CVS. But until now, I'd always read "kill your darlings" as "that you think this bit is good means that it can only be bad". If I took everything I thought was good out of my writing, I'd be left with the things I thought were bad and I'd have to take those out too-- why write, if it's like that?

Reading

I've finished reading Paul Biegel's Man en Muis to the kids (well, to everybody, really). We liked it more and more with each page. When I started out, I thought I'd perhaps chosen something too hard, or too allegorical - I can't stand political commentary thinly disguised as fiction myself, usually. The point with Man en Muis is that it is political, or rather social, commentary, about racism and drug dealing and plain old betrayal, but it's also real fiction, not an ineffective disguise for something else. Paul Biegel seems to be saying (thanks, B., for putting it into words) "I care about this little mouse, and by the end of the book you, reader, will care about this little mouse as much as I do". And we did. He's so old (and famous) now that he can afford to write what he wants to write without pandering to anyone else's wishes.

I've been reading a lot of mysteries, including one that wanted to be mainstream so badly that it was neither flesh nor fish nor good red herring, Secret Admirer by Patricia MacDonald. I didn't know until the end of the book - and indeed I'm far from sure now - whether the author was so clueless about human interaction, or the characters were.

But there's always Robert Barnard. In the same library run I got The Mistress of Alderley, of which the first half is mainstream, and if it had been a whole mainstream novel it would have worked as well; the second half is mystery, however, with the very likable Charlie Peace, and if he'd been there from page one the whole book would have worked as mystery. And it doesn't matter that it's half-and-half; having the first half a non-mystery primes the reader to be interested in (at least some of) the characters.

The World

I've changed the background colour of my navigation buttons to "lightseagreen" - not perceptibly different from what it was before - in honour of my result on the colour quiz at Spacefem.

Your dominant hues are green and blue. You're smart and you know it, and want to use your power to help people and relate to others. Even though you tend to battle with yourself, you solve other people's conflicts well.

About right, that. At least, when someone else has a conflict that I'm not involved in, I'm usually clear-headed enough to think of a solution.

Your saturation level is higher than average - You know what you want, but sometimes know not to tell everyone. You value accomplishments and know you can get the job done, so don't be afraid to run out and make things happen.

Hmm... If I only knew what I wanted all the time.

Your outlook on life is brighter than most people's. You like the idea of influencing things for the better and find hope in situations where others might give up. You're not exactly a bouncy sunshine but things in your world generally look up.

Good of the thing to tell me that. I don't see myself as a person with a particularly bright outlook on life, but I must be or I'd have fallen into deep depression long ago.

And if we're wasting time anyway: one of the girls pointed me to Word Shark, a typing game for people who find Tux Typing too easy. Warning: enable Java in your browser or it won't do anything except bleat at you that you have to download Java. It's not exactly addictive, too intensive for that, but it's fun. I got to level 20 with lots of accuracy bonuses before I was eaten by the sharks, so I must be some kind of typist.

It's taught me some useful lessons: I need context, separate letters go slower than whole words, familiar words go faster than unfamiliar words, and I hate getting one word at a time instead of whole sentences. I made it to about 60 wpm, but I suspect it would have been much higher if I could have typed text instead of separate words. And don't get me started on the mutant sharks where the words change as you type them.

Also, I'm used to taking back my typos, not typing the right letter when the wrong letter is rejected; and the program doesn't allow for skipping: "rjected" for "rejected" is six typos, where I would think it only one. Still, I rated it 8 out of 10 when asked to rate it. The eight-year-old thought it was too hard, mostly because all the words were (American) English and many were very obscure.

Real Life

The Theophany was on a Tuesday this year, so we had the Blessing of the Waters in the vigil instead of separately at the river IJssel. It seemed a very spare service after three years in a row with all the works, and strange to sing "The voice of the Lord over the waters" without having a procession to sing it in.

Three years: the muddy year, when I had the book in a plastic bag to read without getting it soaked, the grey year, when the river was so high and slow and the sky so low that it really looked like all the waters of the world, and the Blessing of the Ice last year, except that the running water wasn't as frozen as the city moat and we didn't have to hack a hole in the ice like the Russians.

This time it was just a couple of buckets and a carrier bag full of jars that received the blessing of the Jordan. And still it works.

Kids

School has started again and they're enjoying it. Quote: "it's a good thing that we go to school some of the time, or there wouldn't be any holidays".

Necessary Luxuries

Cheese. Edammer. Commissiekaas (second item on that site at the time of writing).

I wrote about Kaashandel De Brink before. We bought a whole Edam cheese, the real thing, called "mimolette" in French because 90% if not 99% of it is exported to France where the populace appreciates it. We let it mature on our own shelf from September until Christmas, took it back to the shop to be cut into quarters and three quarters to be sealed in impermeable plastic, and started eating the fourth quarter.

I understand the French. I don't understand the Dutch. At least on this point.

O Tempora

One of the free papers one finds on the train had the interesting snippet of news that "there are as many counterfeit euros in circulation as there were at the time of the guilder". Now if only that were true... They meant, of course, "... as there were counterfeit guilders at the time of the guilder", but that's not what it said.

The fact that smoking is now outlawed almost everywhere in public makes many smokers behave like outlaws. Trains don't have smoking compartments any more, so they snatch a quick puff in the hallway (where it's not allowed either) or the lavatory, or sit down in just any compartment and light up anyway. I'm not a smoker myself, but I think this is going too far. There's much more annoyance from smoking than there was when there were designated smoking places.

A commentary in the paper, in the discussion about overt religious symbols in public life (outlawed in France, possibly about to be outlawed in the Netherlands). Quote, my translation:

Does the LPF (right-wing anti-immigrant party, IR) really think that not expressing one's religion makes a person less religious, and thereby more independent and objective?

Yes, I suppose it really does think exactly that. In that, it's making the same mistake as the Soviet Union with its state-mandated atheism. One of the few institutions that survived under that suppression, and even grew stronger in some areas, was the Orthodox Church. If anything, making it an offense for people to express their religion makes them more religious, and if they're already independent and objective, more independent and objective as well. Religion, as I know but the LPF seems not to, doesn't make people dependent and subjective. Religious leaders may try, and often even succeed.

I just noticed that I wrote about the same subject in March.

It was very heartening, in that light, to see a young librarian with a headscarf at the public library. I put an anonymous note (because I don't want any discussion, just to make the compliment) in the feedback box to say that.

Before they fly away

Suddenly, cycling around town, I perceived my surroundings whole, as an ever-changing tableau vivant, rather than a collection of meaningful and less meaningful details.

If only I could write like that.