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A (Not So) Quick Warmup Post Before WritingPosted by dhoffman on February 16th, 2009

I was a bad little blogger this three-day weekend; I didn’t get online and blog even once.

So, let’s see . . . I wrote Friday night, did a heap of necessary editing on Saturday (and had a late afternoon crash which knocked me out and cost me any new words I might have written), then spent Sunday running around, but still managed to get some writing done into the wee hours of the night.

Today was President’s Day in the US, which means we didn’t have to go downtown, but I still spent a good portion of the day working. So it goes. It’s about eleven now and what I’d like to do between now and bedtime is finish off Chapter Two. Figure I can do that and be good for starting in on Chapter Three tomorrow night.

It’s funny how things go: Chapter Three is, in my head, going to be an interesting chapter to write. At some point on Friday night I had it in my head to guzzle a mess of caffeine and see if I couldn’t power through the entire chapter in one push.

It’s going to be pretty stream-of-consciousness and I find, when writing stuff like that, no matter how hard you try, the tone shifts from session to session. I imagine it’ll be a shorter chapter — between 6,000 and 8,000 words — so while that may be a daunting task, it’s not impossible for me.

Don’t know that it’ll happen (the numbers alone make it unlikely). That means I’m going to have to be careful going back and editing to make sure I don’t take things too far in one direction or the other.

Anything else? We went and saw Coraline again to catch it in 3D before the stupid Jonas Brothers movie takes over the 3D projectors in a week’s time. I’m glad we did. I caught a few things I’d missed, confirmed that I still like the changed Henry Sellick made to Neil Gaiman’s book and am looking forward to seeing it again.

Have you caught it? I’d make it a point to see it this week before the Jonas Brothers poop all over the 3D theaters.

At any rate, this was my warmup. Going to stretch my sore legs, refill my water glass and get cracking. When I called it a night last night I was at 19,845 words. There was a temptation to push for an additional 155 words to make it 20,000 even. I’m glad I waited. This last little bit of chapter (it could be as little as 500 words to close off Chapter Two) is going to be tricky to write. I think, in editing, I’m going to cut a lot of what I have for the chapter. I was playing around with a bunch of stuff as I wrote and now that I have a better handle on it, I can clean it all up a bunch.

Onwards, then, to close Chapter Two and welcome Chapter Three to the story.

New Coraline TrailerPosted by dhoffman on January 23rd, 2009

Seems to be a new Coraline trailer out.  This one’s nice and creepy and very evocative of the spirit of the book:

I need to make that the next book I read or I’m not going to get around to it before the movie comes out.

In which I go link-crazyPosted by dhoffman on January 19th, 2009

There are two awesome, fun-looking movies coming out on my birthday this year. Considering the only things in the theater right now are either magnificent, artful, depressing-as-shit stuff like The Reader, The Wrestler and Benjamin Button (ah, Max Tivoli, how must you feel about that?), it’s nice that the “happy” season seems to be starting up just for me.

Here’s a little embedding magic to pop the trailers up.  First off is Fanboys, which has been fighting for a release — and a proper release version — for, I believe, years.  It’s the story of a bunch of Star Wars nerds on a quest to break into the Skywalker ranch and steal a copy of Episode One before it comes out.

At one point, they were stealing it for their fellow Star Wars nerd friend, who was dying of cancer and was not expected to live to see the (incredibly disappointing, childhood-raping) movie in theaters.  There have been various versions of the movie, some with the dying kid, some without, over the years.  I *think* this version has that storyline, which I consider an official Good Thing.

Here’s Fanboys:

The “other” movie is Henry Sellick’s Coraline.  It’s only “other” because, heh, (a) that’s kind of funny (if you read Neil Gaiman’s book, on which the movie is based), and (b) because I grabbed the Fanboys trailer first.  Point in fact: Fanboys is getting a limited release that weekend and Coraline is probably going to be freaking everywhere.

Also, if I had to pick, as cool as Fanboys looks, I’m seeing Coraline first.  Henry Sellick directed The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach and is an official Amazing Creative Person.  Neil Gaiman is, himself, no slack, and while Mirrormask might have been a bit slow, I’m fully down for this one.

So, here you go with a Coraline trailer: