Friday, June 28, 2002
Friday morning and it only seems like Thursday morning, so I'm catching up. Things went relatively well yesterday. I wrote 1,003 wds. on Chapter Ten. I have this vague (and probably misguided) ambition of having another Friday like last Friday, something close to 2,000 wds., to make up for wds. (=time) lost this Monday and Tuesday, but I have my doubts.
Gothic.net, which hosts my website, is down. Again. It was offline over four hours yesterday. When Gothic.net's ISP goes down, my website and discussion boards go down, as does my ability to post Blogger entries to my website (and check my gothic.net e-mail). So, although I'm writing this at about a quarter past eleven a.m., I have no frelling idea when it will actually be posted.
I had a thought this morning, during coffee, because I fell asleep to Alien last night (well, this morning). I made it as far as Dallas, Lambert, and Kane's hike from the Nostromo to the derelict spacecraft before I nodded off, which means I really saw all the best stuff. I woke briefly at the sudden noise of Kane being attacked by the facehugger. Which led to this morning's thought. Characters in long form fiction, be it written or filmed, are more prone to doing stupid things than are people in short form fiction, be it written or filmed. Up to the point that Kane insists on being lowered down the mysterious hole near the fossilized alien pilot, everything's fine. No one (except maybe Kane) really wants to be out there in the first place, but they have to check out all systematized transmissions blah blah blah or lose their paychecks. So, the characters are behaving perfectly reasonably by investigating the ship. They hardly have a choice. They go and see spooky, marvelous things. And that really should be the end of the story. At that point, they should leave, having done their duty to The Company. But no. Since it's a movie, and movies need to be in the two-hour range, Kane has to go rappelling down that damned hole into the egg chamber and all hell breaks loose (and thus we get three sequels). It's one of the few things any of the characters in the film do that's actually stupid (I've spent many nights defending Ripley's going back for Jones, so don't get me started). And, when you get right down to it, it only happens so that we can have a two-hour movie. Alien (which I adore, don't get me wrong), would have been a far more sublime piece of film-making had it stopped before the descent and the alien of the title been that bizarre thing in the chair. And if you can understand why I'm saying all this, you can understand why I prefer writing short fiction to writing novels, and why my novels are, by genre standards, relatively short.
|
|
