Sunny Holiday Weekends
My wife and I went down to Klamath Falls, Oregon to visit her family over the holiday weekend. The weather was wonderful and there was little more one could have asked for from the days.
Aging Stomachs
There is a price to living too long, such as one’s stomach no longer being able to handle a long holiday weekend filled with nothing but restaurant food. Too many rich, greasy, delightful meals left me reeling from a single cookie on Sunday afternoon. The annoying thing is I’d already tried to dial back the over indulging. Switching out my nightly travel whiskey for a beer. Oh well. My travel kit is being updated: next to the antacids will go fiber pills and a mental note not to order the cheeseburger at every restaurant all weekend long.
Writing Update
As previously noted, I spent the month working on Shepherds of Timeworn Dreams. Several thousand words were written, but it was only in the last week that I finally found a solution to a pacing problem plaguing the first half of the book. I’ve made some notes, and when I come back to it this summer I think I can finish the rough draft in a few weeks.
For June, I’m switching back to working on Vampire Detective Agency: Double Date. I’m going to give it another read and polish pass. It came together so smoothly that I’m still worried I’ve missed something. So, I’ll probably reach out to a few more folks about test reading it.
It may seem like I’ve got a lot of time left to noodle on it, but with an October 13th release planned, I’ve got to have it in the hands of ARC readers by September 1st at the latest. Which means by mid August the book needs to be done, polished, and ready to go.
Revisiting Old Works
Between preperations for some house work this summer, and working on finishing the Shepherds trilogy, I wasn’t able to get much reading done this month. I’ve got no books to recommend. Instead, I was only able to sit down and watch David Fincher’s 4k remaster of Fight Club.
The film remains perfectly paced and expertly filmed. Much digital ink has already been spilled online about the themes, characters, and impact of this film on a generation of viewers. So I’m not going to waste our time togheter rehashing Jack’s complete lack of subtly.
Rather, I thought it more intresting to talk about how the director couldn’t help himself from tweaking a few things on this recent re-release of the film. Having seen it many times before I was struck not by the changing of some color timing or the digital removal of some skin blemishes in a few scenes but rather by the new audio mix.
Fincher decided to pull a Christopher Nolan and have the music crush over the actor’s dialogue in several scenes. It sucks. There’s a lot of nice things I could say about Mr. Nolan’s films, but great audio mixes is not one of them. To me having the audience reaching for the subtitle button in the middle of the action speaks to a failure of the most basic princibles of storytelling.
There can be artistic merit to having dialogue be purposeflly obtuse. For example, 2003’s Lost In Translation by Sofia Coppola features an enigmatic final line that the viewer can’t hear.
Fight Club didn’t need several lines, admittedly not plot important, being buried under thundering soundrack music. It wasn’t originally presented or planned that way. The director apparently felt like it fit the vibe he wanted better. I’d argue we’re not watching a music video. We’re watching a film.
This changing of the film got me thinking about my own artistic work. I’ve been hoping to do a hardcover collection of the Shepherds trilogy when done with the last book, but I’ve also been unhappy with a few shortcomings in the first two books. Would readers be happy to have expanded/corrected versions of those first two books when it got a hardcover edition? Or would people rather have the original book as they first read it immortalized forever in the preimum edition? Something to think about, and probably poll people on.
