In an effort to use my blog more effectively - thanks to Lydia Marcus of fotonomous for the pointers - I'm going to start posting regular updates as to what's going on with my work. Seems logical, yes? Silly of me not to have done so earlier. In any case, this is what's on tap:
- My review of Wait Up Harriet posted today at both The Front Page and my personal site ink [and] ashes. It's the second film sent to me by Echelon Studios that I've been less than enthusiastic about. For the first film to receive an unhappy review from me, I was afraid of delivering news to the PR rep tantamount to announcing that the family pet's been run over; I just sent a link without comment. This time, I was a bit more forthcoming about what to expect, and I got a very reasonable response, confirming just how great an opportunity it is to review films from a distributor of independent films.
- I submitted three poems to the Ontario Poetry Society's Spring Poetry Contest. Strange as may seem, I feel both very confident about the poems I sent in - the only "happy" ones in the collection I'm working on - and bereft of any kind of expectations. I'd love to win, but perhaps more importantly this my first step towards really getting my poetry out there. I'm just glad I could get over my psychological reticence and just submit.
- I'm doing a third round of edits on my novel, Rebel in Waiting. The most significant change was adding a 10,000 word short story, my allegorical western Unarmed Men, to the beginning of the book. Not only does this offer a stylistic and structural counterbalance in the sense that the second half of the book contains two plays while the previous drafts had nothing comparable in the first half, making the novel seems bottom-heavy, but I think this helps blunt the impact my protagonist seems to have on my beta-readers. It's a tricky balancing act between staying true to a character many readers will initially find unsympathetic and making that character just sympathetic enough to be interesting. I think I've finally hit it, though. Other edits include changing character names, particularly since, for some strange reason, female characters tended to have names beginning with "A." Next up: sharpening the dialogue, because it's never sharp enough.
And that, I think, is all there is for now. Good night!
2 comments:
Good to see you're keeping busy. :) As much as you probably don't need to (or want to) I'd like to see a review on your thoughts about the Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed doco.
Thank you!
It would be interesting to see Expelled, but unfortunately (or fortunately) my review stack is piled high as it is. Besides, I'm not sure I'd have anything insightful to add to reviews and discussions already out there, like this excellent one from Skeptic Magazine.
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