There are approximately six hundred and fifty concurrent Marvel movies and TV shows going on right now. Earth number 199999 has no shortage of colorful characters who have seen an amalgam of bizarre circumstances. Aliens coming out of portals, super soldiers fighting red skulled Nazis in World War II, people becoming big green monsters and insect-sized ant-herders, sentient robots lifting up cities and Norse gods turning out to be real. So why do they keep considering stuff “crazy” when they learn the overarching plot/maguffin? I watched The Defenders a little while ago and there’s a scene where the four of them have one of the bad guys tied up. They’re…
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Words that Take You Out of Fantasy Settings
Last night I was tossing and turning because I was worried about my new novel. It’s a first draft, it should be written badly, but that doesn’t stop me: it’s boring, the characters are flat, there’s not enough action, I’m wasting my time on scenes that don’t advance the plot. Stuff like that. And the biggest problem that I’m glossing over is that, while I’ve done a lot of world-building, I haven’t done a lot of terminology obscuring. What that means is changing those certain words that pull you out of the fantasy setting. For example, I had one character say “the heavens”, referring to up there. Well, this is…
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Words That Drive Me Crazy #1
Words That Drive Me Crazy: Today’s entertainment headline, stuffed at the bottom where Paris Hilton news usually goes, was today’s blog fodder: Van Halen to announce their reunion tour. When I took journalism class, there was a unit/lesson about writing headlines. Half of it is enticing the reader to read, the other half is communicating the message in the most succint way possible. All of it was about writing the truth.Now I don’t know whether it’s the fault of the journalist, or the fault of Van Halen’s publicists (lord knows there’s nothing redeeming about their lot), but here’s a little tip about English. If you are about to announce something,…
