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Snowbody’s Business
Well, at least the pain let up since Wednesday. Connor is home for the weekend and we’re getting a lovely decorative snow.
Lovely Winter Weather At Last!
Freshly fallen snow is very picturesque as long as it’s not causing power outages. Luckily, we’ve got a decorative coating instead of the massive depths we sometimes receive.
Connor is home for the weekend. As always, that’s a special treat for us. He’s learning a lot of interesting things at college and he’s got plenty of stories to share.
Kelly and I binged two seasons of Jack Ryan and now we’re ripping through The Expanse. As a diehard Trekker, she’s less than impressed with how bleak the future is depicted in the series. We’re nearly done with Season 1, so she’s adapting to the milieu as it’s defined. It’s an interesting series in spite of the dystopian Solar System its characters inhabit.
It’s almost tax time. The paperwork is trickling in. I’ll have to knuckle down and get that done once I’m sure all the relevant documentation is in hand.
Frosty!
Frosty the Snowman (1969) – Full movie
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Technically it’s a Christmas special and Santa shows up near the end of it, but today is a great day for snowmen. I would have picked Jack Frost, but that’s technically a Groundhog Day special and we’re only halfway through January. Next Saturday is Lunar New Year.
Moving The Lines
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. ~Gilbert K. Chesterton
Well, that’s pretty extreme but it is fair to say that lines need to be drawn somewhere in order to define your work. A friend of mine told me ages ago that “When you try to be everything to everybody, you wind up being nothing for nobody.” You need to make some choices so people know where they are in your story.
My story starts with a half-baked burglar trying to break into an apartment in Empire City (the parallel dimension analog of New York City). If it was in outer space, people might jump to the conclusion that it was a Space Opera story. Some superhero stories are set in outer space, but mine is not. I’ve drawn the lines around Empire City and the more recognizable comic-book-style urban milieu.
I’ve also redrawn the lines to try to tell the story from a collection of viewpoint characters. My pantsing work was more along the lines of a third-person omniscient viewpoint. This is more typical of comic-book-style tales. You can freely bounce from scene to scene, sharing thoughts as needed.
The varying third-person subjective or “limited” viewpoint character is an interesting twist that I haven’t tried before. The third-person omniscient may be convenient for me to bounce around but it puts me in the position of glossing over stuff that’s there in my head but doesn’t make it onto the page. I know what I’m on about but it doesn’t appear in text, so my vision of what’s going on won’t necessarily match that of the reader.
On the other hand, switching to the perspective of a viewpoint character forces me to slow down and see events through their eyes. This approach is used in the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin and also in Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman.
Not only have I thoroughly enjoyed these books, but I think they set an interesting precedent for me to follow. I’m already getting a lot more depth of character by getting behind their eyes instead of looking in from beyond the fourth wall. If you think of it, trying to novelize a movie as you watch it is a distinctly different approach than seeing the world through the eyes of the characters who inhabit it.
I’d like the Sentinels stories to be more immersive than simply reading a comic book or watching a superhero movie. Even so, I’d like to eventually produce a graphic novel version. I will need to provide enough visual content to make that possible. Ah, the First World Problems…
As for the rest of my business activities, I’m still unsure how to get back on track with my various sites. I’ve got plenty of catch up work to do and no coherent ideas of how I’d like to attend to all that. Meh. I’ll figure it out later.
Not much to say today, honestly. Story-typing/editing now. Taxes soon. I hope you’re enjoying your weekend as much as I am.