Here’s what I would do. I would open this revised version of Don’t Look Up with our intrepid scientists calmly getting ready for their big interview on the Morning Drip. The camera would focus on the prosaic elements of their preperation. Noting flashy. The sound would be ramped up so you could hear every move as they straighten their clothes, etc.
THEN, when they go on the show, you would have your big freak out — we learn that everyone knows that the earth has less than a year before the end of the world and absolutely no one is taking it seriously. You give Jennifer Lawrence her big freak out scene and the story gets going.
And then here would the biggest difference in the two versions of the movie — my version is a lot softer and meant to be played for drama, rather than hysterical comedy. There wouldn’t be so much fucking chaos that would turn people like me off.
The plot would be direct and calm. You could even focus methodically on how the end of the world is being treated as a lulz until in the third act, we finally get around to doing something about it for the stupidest reasons possible.
And, what’s more, the movie wouldn’t be so fucking bloated in its run time.
This seems like something of a gimmie, and up until recently Phoebe Waller-Bridge was set to star in a reboot of Mr. & Mrs. Smith that would have put her in a position where she could do as I’m about to propose: an action star. But she pulled out of the project for some reason, so lulz.
But I think Ms. Waller-Bridge has a lot of potential as a female action star because her comedy is very much Bruce Willis in Moonlighting. He was not the first pick for the lead in Die Hard and I think Ms. Waller-Bridge could be a huge, huge action star under the right conditions. She has the John McClain wise-cracking vibe to her, only with a British spin to it.
Hollywood’s next great action star?
She obviously can make Americans laugh, as shown with Fleabag and I think all she needs is the right vehicle and her career will go to the next level. Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t also point out that I think she would make a great Dr. Susan Calvin, robot psychologist.
I could see that being a whole franchise for her — there are oodles of short stories about Dr. Susan Calvin waiting to be adapted. My favorite is “Liar!”
I have no idea if anyone else realizes Ms. Waller-Bridge’s potential as an action star. Only time will tell.
From the beginning of this project, Stieg Larsson’s “Girl Who Played With Fire” has been my textbook. My goal is anyone who has read Stieg Larsson’s three novels will read my work and instantly feel at home. It’s meant to be like putting on an old brown shoe.
Throw in a lot of influence from Mare of Easttown and away we go. I don’t want to challenge the reader with anything too fancy, I just want to spin a great fast-paced yarn. And, yet I also want a lot of character development. I’ve read parts of one novel that wants to do pretty much want I want to do and I found it lacking. It’s author seems to have come away from Larsson’s work with a dramatically different interpretation of what made those first three books so popular. It was way more about the vigilante thriller part of those first three novels rather than the part I liked — what a unique person Salander is.
To me, what makes Lisbeth Salander so interesting is she’s weird, yes, but the case could be made that she would have been a lot more normal but for her upbringing which was pretty fucked up. And I want to write something really fast paced — so fast you stay up all night on a weeknight to finish it — but I also want to present well developed characters that seem like real people.
One thing I find interesting is how using The Girl Who Played With Fire as my “textbook” has caused me to make some decisions that I keep hearing people contradict in books and in conversations. I think what I’m really noticing is there is no reveled truth as to how to write a novel. Everyone writes a novel differently and the point is you tell a story in a coherent, cogent manner that keeps people turning pages — how exactly you do that is very much up in the air.
My interpretation of Lisbeth Salander looks like this.
You’re the master of your own fate when you write a novel. There are plenty of rules of thumb to tell your story in a better, easier to understand manner, but in the end, lulz, do whatever the fuck you want. In the end, the only thing that matters is when a gatekeeper reads your work they like it and understand it enough to be willing to buy it.
That’s it.
In the end, that’s the only hard, fast rule of writing a novel. Everything else is a lulz, in real terms.
As such, these five novels owe almost all their structure from what I’ve been able to discern from The Girl Who Played With Fire, mixed with what makes the most sense to me from all the “how to write a novel” how-to books I’ve read over the last three years.
It just can be annoying sometimes how absolute people — or books — can be about how wrong this or that thing that Larsson did, or didn’t do is. But I’m quite please with what I’ve managed to come up with.
Well, I’m stumped on this one. It make no sense what so ever for dingus Trump to suddenly embrace COVID19 vaccines. None. I honestly don’t understand what’s going on. It feels like some sort of surreal alternative universe. Which, I have to admit, is what everything since Trump coming down that goddamn escalator has felt like.
The only thing I can think of is Trump is subtly shifting his attention from a pure base play to a more Traditionalist play. He knows he’s weak right now and maybe he thinks if he embraces vaccines then those conservatives who are “MAGA adjacent” might like him more? I’m thinking of those conservatives who have taken the vaccine but because of negative polarization and an extensive permission structure would never, ever for any reason make common cause with liberals against MAGA.
I dunno.
And, yet, that is a way too complicated political consideration for someone demonstrably as stupid as Trump is. Whatever the most simplistic, stupidest political judgement might be for Trump doing the exact opposite of what you might expect from him is why he’s doing it.
Or, I guess, you could say he’s finally grown so senile that he’s lost touch with reality to the point that he has actually begun to do what he should have done when the pandemic started. This doesn’t eliminate the question of, like, why? Why the fuck is Trump doing…gulp...the right thing?
It remains a mystery to me. Either it will become very obvious soon enough what he’s up to, or Trump risks destroying himself for no apparent reason.
Between now and New Year’s Day, I’m going to try to just distract myself rather than throwing myself back into writing. They say once you finish a first draft, you need to chill out for about a month so when you start working on the second draft, you come at the project with fresh eyes.
This is not going to stop me, however, from bouncing around the other books in the series while I wait to write again. One thing that is going to both be a serious pain in the ass to keep consistent and yet will also really make for a far more compelling character is the use of a foreign language occasionally in certain scenes.
Me, late 2021, working on five novels.
I hope to use this foreign language so much — and so consistently — that I may have to have a small list of the foreign words used at the very beginning of the novel (along with a map or two) so readers won’t get frustrated or confused as to what the fuck is going on. But the use of this foreign language on an incidental basis is crucial to what happens later on in the series.
In fiction, at least, things can’t just randomly happen. You have to lay out your cause and effect in a very clear manner so when some big event happens, it doesn’t blindside your audience. As such, I’m really going to make it absolutely clear that my Heroine –and her son — have a direct connection to another country and culture so when the time comes it will obviously make sense that such a thing would happen.
The fact that I have gone backwards in time to show the audience exactly how we ended up with such a strange little Southern town in novels set in the modern day has really helped a great deal. I’m also digging very, very deep into my personal history to tell these five stories, to the point that if you read them all you will know an embarrassing amount about me on a personal basis.
But they say you have to bleed onto the page to be successful, so keep the faith.
The first book in this projected five book series is beginning to coalesce. And, as they say, it’s a dumb thing to talk about who might play this or that character in any movie adaptation of a novel you’re working on. But absolutely no one listens to me or cares, so let’s daydream a little bit.
I mean, really, who’s even reading this beyond stalkers, haters and random people who happen to stumble across this obscure Website?
So, anyway, it’s occurred to me that Olivia Munn would be perfect to play the heroine of any movie adaptation of this first novel. She’s the right age and jibes with what I imagine the character looks like in my mind. She would have to learn a Southern accent if she decided to play the part, though. Wink.
The first few novels in this series owe a huge thematic debt to Mare of Easttown. That’s the work that I think about the most as I write these first two books and to a lesser extent the third book. But it’s thematic, not a one-to-one. The Mare of Easttown is something of a stepping off point for a story that is similar, but set in a much smaller (Southern) town than Easttown.
But Munn — mixed with someone else — is who I think of when I write this heroine. And, yet, I’m really being delusional. I’m a middle aged man that can come off as an Internet crank, so there’s a good chance nothing will happen at all when I try to sell these novels.
I going to keep the faith, though. I believe in myself. Keep the faith.
Well, this is surreal. Two of Trump’s most ardent far Right supporters, Candace Owens and Alex Jones are in full blown rebellion against him because of his come to Jesus moment on the effectiveness of vaccines.
Just a few days ago I was writing about something like this having to happen to puncture Der Fuhrer’s air of invincibility, but I didn’t expect it to come from the Right like this. I thought it might be Mike Pence. (Ha!)
So, now what?
You can look at this a few different ways. One way is that Trump has, at last, lost his touch. He’s a hasbeen who has become so addled that he no longer has a natural, innate feel for his base. I guess another idea would be Trump is up to something that will only make sense later.
But the fact remains — if Trump doesn’t get this sorted out soon, people like Mike Pence could, very well, begin to get restless and make a break for it in hopes of destroying Trump once and for all. Pence must know that he’s never going to become president in the conventional way — the most delegates. His only real shot at the moment is a brokered convention where no one would-be autocrat gets enough to win the nomination. He might win the nomination because he promises to put all the other would be autocrats in his cabinet or something.
I’m not counting Trump out quite yet, however. He still has plenty of time to destroy America and potentially start a civil war just by being a dingus.
I did not finish watching the movie “Don’t Look Up.” But that has caused me to have strong opinions about it what I did see. The thing that bothers me so much about the movie is it could have been a modern day Network, but it totally blew its chance.
At the core of that failure was it’s social commentary was way too heavy handed and preachy. It was like a very long SNL skit, only the writers were hysterical about global climate change. Sometimes, less is more. Or, put another way, I would have made the movie more of a drama that was funny at times than a heavy handed, ham fisted extended SNL skit that swerved between comedy and dramas as it served the purposes of the plot.
There came a point, at least for me, when I didn’t care if anyone lived or died. After a great beginning, it just seemed like the movie became Mars Attacks, only about a comet-which-was-really-global-climate-change. I just didn’t care about the characters when they started screaming at each other. So, I stopped watching.
But there was a much better movie crying to come out of what was there. Like I said, I would have really tried to make the movie a modern day Network. In fact, I might even have started the movie much later than it was. Why not start the movie about where we are right now with global climate change — we all know it’s real and we’re not doing anything about it?
So, instead of going through the rote process of meeting POTUS, you start with a Network-like freak out by our Hero on TV. But, and this is the key issue, you play it for drama, not forced laughs. Then the rest of the movie would be about how everyone simply refuses to take the coming end of the world seriously. What I saw of Don’t Look Up had the air of liberal-progressive wish fulfillment, in the sense that I felt the producer really wants to scream his frustration live on TV (specifically Morning Joe.)
I wouldn’t get too complacent about 2022 being anything more than yet another pretty shitty year. Here are my Christmas Day predictions for why this is:
Lots of Old Powerful People It is inevitable that someone like the Queen is going to drop dead next year. And with it, there will be a lot of talk about What It All Means. And it’s not just the Queen. There are any number of very powerful American politicians who are old, old, old.
Potentially More Deadly COVID Variants It’s at least possible that next year, a much more deadly version of COVID will pop out and everything will get thrown up into the air.
Republicans Are Probably Going To Win Congress It’s very possible that a very damning January 6th Committee Report will come out in the summer and…nothing happens. Republicans win in the fall like they would anyway and then we have the setup to civil war / autocracy in 2024 – 2025.
Wars and Rumors of War It’s also very possible that there will be at least one major regional war somewhere in the world in 2022, which could so destabilizing the global order that something akin to WW3 happens.
Trump sure has been acting weird lately. He’s still as deranged and insane as usual, but for some weird reason, he’s embraced getting vaccinated. This is really, really strange because usually Trump plays to his base more than Tay-Tay when she releases a new album.
The fucking Patriot Party flag.
I struggle to figure out what’s going on.
And, let me be clear, for the time being, Trump has a clear path to win the nomination and ultimately win in 2024. I’m also unwilling to accept that Trump may have “lost his touch.” He remains the Republican Party and the Republican Party is him.
It’s just, two things are happening at once. One is, relative to the fascist, autocratic Republican Party, Trump has done his historical job. He’s stress-tested our political institutions and give a dozen younger, more focused would-be autocrats a blueprint for how to strangle Lady Liberty once and for all. Call this Trump’s “Traditionalist Problem.”
Traditionalists want Trump without Trump. They want all of Trump’s racist, misogynistic autocratic policies…without the deranged parts that make them blanch. Hence why someone like Ron DeSantis is so popular. Traditionalists no longer believe in American democracy. Though, they don’t realize that all but ensures that we either have a civil war or we turn into an autocracy and yours truly gets an ICE bullet in the back of the head. (Sorry, you think I’m being hysterical? Well, fuck you.) Add to this how the Republican Establishment is probably pretty tired of Trump for same reason and, lulz.
Now we come to the other thing going on — Trump continues to have an air of invincibility that hasn’t been tested of late. If someone crossed Trump and…nothing happened…then all those other would-be autocrats would begin a very nasty pitched battle to stake out different parts of the autocratic electorate so they get all the Putin-level goodies instead of Trump. (Mike Pompeo, specifically, knows, I’m sure that if he gets to be president he can become just as powerful as Putin and as wealthy — hence his dramatic weight lost of the last few months.)
As I’ve said before, I think the person with the means, motive and opportunity to fell Trump is Mike Pence. If Pence turned state’s evidence on Trump, he would have a whole lot more of a shot of getting the nomination in, say a brokered convention than he does right now with Trump on top.
But there is one last issue that I can’t figure out any solution to — Trump’s ability to bolt the party if he feels slighted. So everything I’ve laid out could be true but Trump simply starts his own party, nukes the Republican Party and we’re back to facing the rise of fascism.
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