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When December started I was riding a wave of perceived accomplishment. And I imagined / assumed it would continue to flow. I had huge plans for the month. I was going to put the 40,000 words I managed for NaNoWriMo on the back burner for the month and write the first draft of a second, unrelated, novel. But something drowned my plans (ok, done with the water metaphor, I swear). It's happened the last few years, and it has been getting worse, but somehow the pattern escaped me. It's not the depression I'm familiar with - the one that arrives for no reason, at no particular time, and leaves only when the drugs drag it out the door kicking and screaming. It's not a weather-related case of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). First of all, I live in Arizona, our weather is only slightly more existent than my native California. We have only: lightweight sweater weather, 3 days of pleasant perfection, hot, hotter, and 'the armpit of hell' hot. Those of us who aren't

I had signed up for NaNoWriMo eons ago, and by eons I mean over a decade. And yet, despite the initial, and recurrent, desire to take part, I never did. First and foremost, it's taken me years to come to terms with the idea of sharing the odd goings on which call my head their home. Secondly, there has always seemed to be some perfectly convenient excuse, as there always is, for why it's not convenient to do it now . But despite the eternal headaches of holidays, schoolwork - and this year, actual final exams - coinciding with NaNoWriMo, I decided to shut up and just try it this year. Something about feeling that I had such lovely, and valid,  excuses built in for any possible failures, made it seem somehow less frightening to think of doing so. So what if I only hit 20,000 words, I thought, that's way more than I had, and I can always blame it on school. In the interest of honesty, I must admit, I started with about 4,000 words I'd previously written. But since I am a

Visceral reactions or existential angst? All the interviews and articles paint "Wild Tales" as being six separate short stories having a running theme of revenge. Ok, that’s true. Revenge does come up in every tale. And they are completely separate stories. They don’t have a single character weaving within them to tie them together, as in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Nor is there the bird flying above, or the narrating writer, that Szifron mentioned having considered adding to weave them into one. But I do see much more than just vengeance as a common theme. The most glaring component I noticed was the theme of power, or lack thereof, and the shifting of it. The rich are uniformly rude and entitled in every story, while the poor get used and pushed around until they usually reach a breaking point. In every story the powerless try to fight back, and the powerful try to stop them, but who really wins in the end is unresolved. There is a delicious vicarious pleasure from watching t

Trains that don’t go anywhere ... La Grande Belleza was hard for me. It’s the first film we’ve been assigned in my contemporary film class that I didn’t fall in love with on some level. My gut reaction to the film the first time around was that there was some profound stuff in it, but that is was achingly long and headache-inducingly convoluted. I just didn't 'get' it. I appreciate it more now, after considering the questions which were posed to us, and reading the articles, interviews, and reviews. There are now things I find interesting about it, and questions it left me, but I’m still not in love with it. The initial party scene instantly made my mind flashback to Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby party scenes. Though I admit the excess and debauchery were grittier and more palpable in this film. But the break-neck montages almost made me nauseous at times.  And after a certain point the cinematography felt like just another layer of distraction in a film so much about exactly that

What is Survival? What is Failure? Those are the questions this film makes me ask myself. I had seen a film called “The Grey Zone” several years ago – which is also about the Sonderkkommando. So the concept and the basic story were familiar to me, in that respect. That movie had been disturbing and haunting enough. However, this film, while upsetting on most of the same levels, seemed somehow more jarring. In trying to figure out why I felt even more affected by “Son of Saul” I came to think it’s mainly due to the cinematography. I feel like the cinematography actually forms its own language in the gaps lefts by the lack of dialog and emotional display by the actors. In watching “Son of Saul” the thing that hit me immediately was the point of view of the camera. So much of the time the camera is held closely on the one character, and mostly from behind him. It gave me this feeling of standing beside him rather than watching a person performing for me. The choice of camera angle and

Ok, since I've been kind of neglecting my blog lately (Bad blogger!), I've decided to try something new here. Last semester I included book reviews and commentary for what I was reading in some of my classes. Since I'm taking a film class this semester, I've decided to share the commentary I'm writing for that class on here as well. Why not? They're all stories I'm experiencing in some fashion. They're all reactions and thoughts I'm having as a result. Who says I can review or comment on a book, but not a film? Not me ;-)

So this summer has gone to hell in a handbasket. I  had planned to get my "novella" (in quotes because of its awkward length), Fall On Landing out in June, but tomorrow starts Aug and it's not up yet. Part of the reason is because I tried to hire someone off Fiverr to do the cover, and it didn't work out. I had an idea, expressed in both writing and a sketch, but didn't trust my skills to do it myself. After that fail, I decided, despite not having done much painting since I was a teenager, to give it a go. What I created isn't quite the Old Masters epically nuanced version I had in my head, but I like it enough to use it. So, a couple weeks ago I finished it and ran it through the Canva site to make a cover. Now, I'm just trying to decide between two covers I made.  Anyone up for a poll? I feel one coming on 😉 I've decided to start two different series, and I had planned to get book one in each series at least written this summer. Now, I'm hoping