Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!
Today I’m exhausted, and highly caffeinated after getting perhaps an hour of sleep last night. Oh the wondrous complications and aggravations that can derail our writing… The Memorial Day holiday weekend turned into a very packed affair and I got very little writing done. It wasn’t a bad weekend by any means and I had a lot of fun, but I could feel the hours that I needed to write slipping away.
I did manage to get some good work done on Monday, but not nearly enough. I’ve been going all-out to finish my entry for the Reddit contest that opens on Friday. Sadly, a very difficult Tuesday afternoon and an evening that included a fight with an old friend pulled me away from the writing I wanted to focus on. I found myself needing to get the piece ready by this morning so that my alpha readers could check it out and hand it back with notes and proofreading. Only then could I get it cleaned and ready to submit by the 29th.
So I pulled an (almost) all-nighter, reaching an acceptable story point for my entry to end on and be submitted. I just powered through with the help of much midnight oil. I knew that I couldn’t finish the whole story in time for the contest like I wanted, but I did find a good place to stop that works well. Now the piece is in the hands of my alpha readers while I tottle bleary-eyed in a bow-tie through the workplace with a sense of accomplishment against the odds. :-)
This has been a situation of going for the bonus points. The section that I will be submitting to the Challenge is the first part of the story at about two thousand words. The whole thing is currently over eight thousand words and growing… I’m not sure if I’ve reached the halfway point yet or not, but I’m going to finish this thing up! My contest entry will have the excerpt as my official entry, and include a link to the six thousand additional words of the full story thus far.
I think I’ve written some very good action and characters with this one, and I’m eager to share it!
To switch gears a bit, over my packed holiday weekend, I got to see Mad Max: Fury Road which I had really been looking forward to. I was not disappointed and I’ll honestly say that I’ve never seen a film like this before… And that is saying a lot coming from a big, geeky movie buff like myself!
This film isn’t for everybody, I’m sure, but I really recommend seeing it! It features incredibly intense action non-stop… I think I still have grit in my teeth as I write this… but it also features some incredible storytelling! If you want a visual illustration of “foreshadowing”, “character development” and “show don’t tell”, then this film is the one to see!
You may have heard what the “men’s rights” activists are saying about this film being “too feminist”, or what the feminist commentators are saying by holding it up as a watershed feminist movie. I’d have to say that the former’s position is pretty weak (there are lots of strong male characters) but the latter’s assertion isn’t truly accurate either. This story is only about feminism insofar as it is included as part of the greater message of HUMANISM.
This tale is about having hope in bleak hopelessness. The heroes struggle against that overwhelming dread for the entire movie, each with their own taint and scars. And the villains… just take the absolute worst aspects of mankind and distill them down into a dirty, oily twisted mess of rust and gears… and there you have them.
No one is safe. No one is cracking any jokes. But in the end, the insanity of hope trumps the demons of our darker nature in a way that is utterly believable in these flawed, wounded men and women. That’s what I enjoyed most of all about this film: gritty hope.
So if you have a chance, try and check this one out while it’s still at your local cinema! If nothing else you can be amazed at how they have crafted what is essentially a two-hour car chase into a watchable film with surprising depth of story!
Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some fiction! Take care!
Aethereal Engineer 
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