Friday, July 25, 2008

A very good week!

My goal for this week was 10,000. So, here's were I'm at:



Yea me! I've got a reward system in effect. My reward: I get to watch Dr. Horrible's Singalong blog. Cause, you know, Joss Whedon and Neil Patrick Harris is something I just have to see. Since I expect this novel to be 60,000 words, and Dr. Horrible is a three act thing, every 20,000 words I get to watch one act of Dr. Horrible. So if I make 20,000 next Friday (which is my goal), I'll get to watch act one. I already have it all downloaded from iTunes and everything.

Of course it's going to take the whole month of August before I get to watch act two...

The writing is going pretty well in terms of quality as well as quantity, I think. Some writers do what's called a SFD (Shitty First Draft). I am not such a writer. I can't leave a "insert something funny here" note in a chaper and move on. I just can't. This isn't last-draft polished to perfection, but it's about 80% what I want it to be.

I have three POVs characters in this one, and they rotate chapters. Omesh's chapters are the most clearly outlined, as he drives the plot more than the others. Rabiya I've found pretty much writes her chapters herself. She's a little... strong-willed. But Takashi is the tough one so far. I know him, but I'm not yet feeling him (if that's not to writery, wishy-washy for you). At this point it's his nemesis that is the more full-dimensional character, which is a problem, but as I've said, this is only 80% there. It's easier to work out some of these issues after you've typed THE END.

In unrelated matters, my movie posts are hands-down my most popular hit-generators. Speaking to movie fans: I have the perfect blog for you. It's called The Wilhelm Scream. If we're playing the Kevin Bacon game: Kumail Ali went to college with a guy named Fred that used to work with the guy I'm married to. So Kumail doesn't know me from Adam, frankly. But his blog is the bomb, and we share a least favorite genre.

Monday, July 21, 2008

Let's see how this goes

This week I have school but no work, and next week I have work but no school (this is as close as I get to actual time off unless I'm leaving town, in which case I'm not writing). I polished off my outline over the weekend and I'm ready to start from word 0 today. My goal is to write at least 10,000 words this week and 10,000 more next week to give myself a nice headstart before August, when I'm back to working and schooling both. So here's my handy little progress meter:



And I'll be updating it on Friday.

In the meantime, a little music. I already posted the song that inspired me to use MITWA as a working title, but any word meaning dear friend or beloved is going to come up in lots of songs. Here's my second favorite, "Yeh Mausam Ka Jadoo Hai, Mitwa" from the movie Hum Aapke Hain Kaun. I can't embed it here, perhaps because the movie producers are the ones who put it up on Youtube (so it's probably legal - cool! You think the resolution would be better when it's official, though). Link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=EMOEjA6UMsQ. This was the first thing I saw Madhuri Dixit in, and about my fifth or sixth Salman Khan movie. One of my favorites to let run in the background when I'm doing other stuff, the songs are all so singable.

OK, first school and then MITWA. Wish me luck!

Friday, July 18, 2008

Movies in June

By language seems the easiest way to sort this. Let's start with English...

First up: Inside Man. When I first got the soundtrack to Dil Se, the song Chaiya Chaiya (the one with Malaika Arora on the train in the movie) sounded vaguely familiar. Which was odd, this was only Bollywood movie #10 or 12 for me, where would I have heard this Hindi song before? Finally in the car much, much later I heard it remixed with an added rap bit on one of my husband's mix CDs that he had gotten from a coworker. Turns out this remix was used as the opening of a Spike Lee movie, which my husband promptly insisted I pick up for him (he really likes this song, and not just on account of Malaika). Inside Man is a pretty well done heist film (Quin's favorite kind of movie) with Denzel Washington and Clive Owen. It was a fun watch, but like most heist films it didn't leave me with any great desire to watch it again.

The other English movie was a family film night for us: National Treasure 2. I suppose it must be a guilty pleasure; I feel a bit sheepish admitting I really liked this. It is a much better film version of Tomb Raider than the Tomb Raider movies, for one, and the interactions between the characters are just plain fun. Clearly there is going to be a National Treasure 3.

Chinese: Warriors of Heaven and Earth. I got this on Blu-Ray, and it is a gorgeous film with some stunning canyons and deserts (it takes place on the Silk Road, where China ends and Afghanistan begins, although this is set in the past). Alas, I found this a bit of a disappointment. The fights weren't particularly good, the characters didn't do it for me, and the plot just sort of plodded along. Still, pretty to look at. And I haven't watch a movie in Mandarin in a while; I love the sound of that language.

I saw my first Pakistani film in June as well. Most Pakistani films come from the film studios of Lahore, so they are called "Lollywood" (similarly India actually has several different film industries. Bollywood from Bombai/Mumbai is the biggest, but there is also Tollywood which are in Telegu, Kollywood which are in Tamil, and others without the cute names. India has some 21 official languages, after all). The movie I saw, Khuda Kay Liye, is actually an independent film, so I haven't seen an actual Lollywood movie yet. The official language of Pakistan is Urdu, which when spoken is pretty much Hindi (there was only one character I had a hard time understanding, and he was probably putting a lot more Arabic words in his speech, given that he was meant to be an Islamic fundamentalist, but that's just a guess). The film centers around two brothers who are aspiring musicians and their cousin in London. One brother falls under the influence of said fundamentalist and leaves music entirely to join the Taliban, the other has the misfortune of being in the US studying music on 09/11 and is arrested under suspicion of being a terrorist. The cousin's father panics when she is about to marry a white boy and lures her to Pakistan only to leave her in a remote village over the border into Afghanistan where she is forced to marry her Taliban cousin.

So yeah, it was a bit of a heartbreaker of a film. Very well done, though. It reminded me a bit of American History X, another film dealing with how one charismatic talker can lead a whole bunch of young men astray simply because they don't have the life experience to realise the talker is spouting absolute nonsense. And when the Taliban boy listens to the scholar called to testify during the court case at the end of the film and realizes how wrong everything he had been lead to believe really was... Oh yeah, heartbreaker.

OK, Bollywood. Khullam Khulla Pyaar Karen stars Preity Zinta and Govinda. I picked it up for 99 cents. 'Nuff said.

Insan had the same plot as last month's Garv - Hindu cop versus Muslim terrorists, but was much better done. The line between good guys and bad guys is not so clear here, with a lot of people clearly floundering and trying to find their direction. The guy who played the terrorist I've never seen in anything before, but there was something so haunted in his eyes you just know he had seen terrible things (he had disappeared during a riot and his family had been waiting for years for news of whether he was alive or dead). Not that anyone accepts that as an excuse, even his own brother (Akshay Kumar), a rickshaw driver who is not trying to be a hero he's just trying to do the right thing. In Hollywood, he would be played by Bruce Willis.

I Proud to be Indian didn't really work for me. I liked the idea of skin heads versus Indians, both having some claim to the "Aryan" name. But the main character's back story was only ever hinted at, never explained, and his motivations were not particularly clear.

Two more Salim-Javed films, both starring Amitabh Bacchan: Zanjeer and Deewaar. Zanjeer had some very colorful characters. Amit falls in with a red-headed Muslim named Sher Khan (king of the lions, hence the mane-like hair and beard) and a tough-talking girl who sharpens knives, who in the end shows that she's just as proficient at throwing them. Even Quin liked that one. The second, Deewaar, was about two brothers, one who becomes a cop and the other becomes a gangster, and their mother is stuck between them. Both very well written, and worth a see (although they were made in the 70s and look it. Actually that's kind of a plus for me...)

Bhootnath stars a much older Amitabh Bacchan as a ghost who befriends a boy. As a fantasist this movie disappointed me; there were no clear rules for what the ghost could or could not do, what he could touch or not, who could see him or not. It was frustrating. Also, this was one I borrowed from Shikha. She gets her movies from her grocer, whom I believe wears an eyepatch and maybe has a peg leg. I'm just saying, the movies I get from her always have quirky subtitles. In this one when the boy's father confronts the son of the ghost who went away to America to study and never came back and tells him he should "make prays", the man says "In America we don't make prays, but even we still find peach." I puzzled that one out for a while. Is peach a metaphor? Was he saying preach? (In America we don't pray but we get preached at a lot, perhaps). Actually he meant "find peace", as it became clear later. Not a great film, but the only one I've seen where Amitabh Bacchan raps. Oh yes, he raps.

Last film, best film. I mentioned a while back how much I loved Farah Khan's Main Hoon Na. Her second film, Om Shanti Om, came out on Blu-Ray (finally!), and I'm still in raptures. Again, this is so much just my kind of thing. Shah Rukh Khan is Om, a junior artist in 1970s Bollywood (which means he is an actor employed by the studio to be in the background of scenes, never a hero). He is completely in love with Shanti, a huge star (he talks to her billboard that looms over his neighborhood). Alas, she is already secretly married to a producer who kills her when she becomes pregnant. Om tries and fails to save her and dies himself, reborn as the son of his acting idol. Growing up in the lap of luxury has made him into quite a jerk, but his memories start coming back and he hatches a plan to make sure the producer who got away with murder is outed.

This is probably not the best entry into the world of Bollywood, as it's very referential to other films (although there were only a few things I knew I was missing, and in the big Deewangi number which featured some 30 stars of Bollywood past and present there were only 4 or 5 I didn't recognize). Still I loved Om's message, that life really is like a Bollywood movie, and if it doesn't seem like you're getting a happy ending, that just means your film isn't over yet.

This month's song clip is from Om Shanti Om. This is another one where I had the soundtrack for a year now, awaiting the subtitles to know what I'm singing along with. Aidan likes this song in particular, and I tried to parse out what the title meant but it didn't make any sense. "dard" means pain, and "disco" is self-explanatory. What on earth could "Dard-e-Disco" mean?

I pretty much had it, actually. Young spoiled Om is supposed to be playing a scene which is complicated by the fact that his character is blind, deaf, in a wheelchair and has no hands. How to show his anguish at his beloved's wedding to another? (Tough call, and when he finally realizes what's in the script he never bothered to read, Om says, "What the fish?" What the fish, indeed.) Om decides what's needed to convey this anguish is an item song, a dream sequence so he can dance, only the heroine (played by the producer's girlfriend) is not hot enough for this number, better get 10 or so item girls. But what sort of music to show the emotion? A trance number? A rock song? No, it has to be disco. Dard-e-disco.

It all makes sense now...



Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Books in June

I only read three books in June, but two were monstrous door stops so that skews things a bit.

The first was Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I've been meaning to read this one for a while, at the very least to put Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors into context. I really got swept up into it, but it also messed with me quite a bit. It's a very disturbing book. The end of my edition has a series of quotes from other authors, and I found Robert Louis Stevenson summed it up pretty nicely for me:


Many find it dull: Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me. It was like having an illness. James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikoff was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and, on further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of today, which prevents them from living in a book or a character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purified. - Robert Louis Stevenson


I actually enjoyed it more than the second book I read last month, Dostoevsky's considered masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov. That one I read more as an outsider observing. I liked the way it was structured, it seemed a sort of precursor to James Joyce's Ulysses in some ways. But it didn't consume me the way Crime and Punishment did. Also, when I reached the not-ending, I was as baffled and disappointed as the girls who sat behind me in the theater for The Fellowship of the Ring. What sort of ending is that? Apparently Dostoevsky had planned a trilogy he hadn't lived to write, so we only get a single volume. Since just that book is the size of all of The Lord of the Rings, I admire his ambition.

The last book I read in June was lighter fare: Passage by Lois McMaster Bujold. This is the third book in her Sharing Knife series. I found the first two books a little underwhelming (engaging enough, but no where near the level of her other work), but in this book things start to get interesting as her characters begin to explore the mechanics of how their magic works. I like a book where magic is just another sort of science with rules to be discovered and applied. The setting on a river boat on a fantasy version of the Mississippi I liked as well. This series is looking up for me, I'll be interested to see where she takes this next.

In non-book-related news, my grocery delivery service just went out of business. They had been making a lot of little adjustments in the last few months to compensate for the rising costs of food and fuel, but they've given up. This is a bit of a blow to me; I don't actually have time in the week to go to the grocery store. Honestly, none. What used to take ten minutes on the computer on Tuesday and ten minutes putting food away on Wednesday is now going to involve at least an hour at a time I'm neither working or homeschooling. Which means it has to come out of my writing time. We're going to make it a family activity, partly so that the boys can be involved in it and get a sense of what things cost and how we make food decisions, but mostly because it's a huge drag going out to stores and I'm not doing it on my own.

I hate shopping in stores in general. I had to get clothes for all of us for one of last week's parties so we went to Kohls. Now I love Kohls.com. I can search just for three-quarter sleeve tunic cotton shirts, and that's all I see on the screen, and I can pick what I want in five minutes. I spent nearly an hour walking in circles before I found anything remotely like what I was looking for among racks and racks of not-what-I-was-looking-for. Man, I hate shopping.

OK, rant done. I have to finish cleaning my house so I can get back to the outline. I think I figured something out while I was half-asleep this morning that will resolve something that was nagging at the back of my mind...

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Some Cool Stuff I've Seen

I had a few days off of work before the Fourth, and aside from going to parties where I either knew no one or knew everyone but they were fundamentalists and I feared to open my mouth unless something horrifically pagan should just come flying out of it, I did do some cool stuff. Like take the boys to the beach. Although either the water level is really low this year or they moved the ropes in at Medicine Lake; even Oliver couldn't get in deeper than his hips, so I didn't bother trying to swim. I did bring a notebook with me and got a bit of writing done

(Mostly outlining. My original stab at MITWA ran aground. Someday I'll admit I'm not a pantser and stop trying to just plunge in and find my way. I carried that same notebook around all week, except to the parties. Because not even I am that socially retarded. Outlining has got me excited about the story again, which is good news. I hope to be at the point where I can start writing from word 0 again soon.)

We also took the boys to see the Star Wars exhibit at the Science Museum, which was cool. Now the previous museum exhibit I had seen for Star Wars was at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and focused on the folklore and mythological roots of Star Wars. Star Wars succeeds much better at being folklore than science fiction, and that prior exhibit was a better one, but that was when my firstborn was a wee babe and the second not yet a thought, so they never saw it (although I bought a stack of books at the MIA bookstore about Star Wars and myth, which they've paged through a million times).

This exhibit had props from all six movies plus little video segments with the special effects guys talking about how they designed the ships, etc. plus some more peripherally related segments about city design (tying in to Coruscant) or exploring the Arctic and Antarctic (Hoth, natch). Even cooler were the experiment stations where the boys got to try to build a mag-lev train and get it to work in increasingly more complex ways (loosely connected to Landspeeders), or to try to build robots that could stand on its own legs on flat ground or a slope, or build and program a more complex robot to navigate mazes. We spent a couple of hours there; it was very cool (although the more peripheral it was to Star Wars the more interesting I found it. Perhaps this is because at this point there is not much I don't already know about those movies).

Also Natalie Portman is teeny tiny. They had one of her costumes up on display and I'm quite certain I could fit her in my pocket. Samuel L. Jackson is pretty tall, though.

The other cool thing we did with the boys was take them to see the new Pixar movie WALL-E. Pixar doesn't make bad films (they are second only to Hayao Miyazaki in my book), so if this one wasn't as good as THE INCREDIBLES, it's still better than most other animated films. I particularly liked the robot EVE; she was a grumpy bitch blasting away at things which annoyed her and then quietly fuming. You don't get much of that in movie love interests, you know?

So anyway, June book and movie posts still to come, but this writing thing has me pleasantly distracted (so much nicer than being distracted by day job overtime, let me tell you).

Friday, July 04, 2008

After a week of parties, I think I'm in touch with this emotion:

Cordelia (at her party): Hi! Are you having fun?
Angel: Sure. This is, ah...
Cordelia: Your idea of hell?
Angel: Actually, in hell you tend to know a lot of the people.

I think I've finished my spouse-placating social activities for the rest of the year. My next week off is going to be just about writing, I swear...