potentialities

I'm regretting now that I didn't find a cave or something four years ago when I saw Iron Man and devote myself to consuming vast quantities of Avengers-related comics (which would, of course, later be recapitulated in a five-minute training montage). I just want to write all the porn and find myself hampered by a lack of paracanonical knowledge to draw world-building detail from. I mean, seriously, how are you going to set a sex scene on a planetoid if you're not sure how its gravitational pull would affect visiting humans?

Speaking of source canon knowledge, we probably would have seen The Avengers again yesterday if it hadn't been for the release of the latest messy and rather self-indulgent Tim Burton/Johnny Depp/Helena Bonham Carter collaboration, Dark Shadows. You see, a while back This American Life reran their Conventions episode, and we learned that my mother had been a youthful aficionado of Barnabas Collins and his gothic doings. In fact, she said, when her family went on vacation in 1967, her friend Carla made copious notes for her so that she would be apprised of everything that had taken place in Collinwood. My brother and I both being huge genre dorks, naturally we thought this was amazing, and when we heard about the movie with Johnny Depp, whom my mother will watch in literally anything although she denies that this constitutes a crush, we knew we were going to be taking her to see it.

Even better, before we actually left for the movie, my mom combed through all of her keepsake boxes and actually found a letter from Carla with her recap! I have transcribed it for posterity and your reading pleasure ( below. )

The movie itself was not bad, although it relies pretty lazily on fish-out-of-water humor and Johnny Depp's funny reaction faces to everything. To be fair, Johnny Depp does have some very funny reaction faces.

It turns out that you can either have an Epic NaNoWriMo Catchupathon or a Four-Day Weekend Family Holiday Roadtrip and Hug-In, but not both. And by 'you', of course, I mean 'me'. In my defense, I wasn't aware that I was planning on a Family Holiday Roadtrip and Hug-In until sometime last week, so I wasn't really factoring this into my NaNo optimism.

I wasn't terribly upset, to be honest with you. Me and NaNoWriMo 2009, we had some good times, but it was time for both of us to move on. By which I mean that I'm going to move on and my 25,000 word masterpiece is mostly going to stay put. Possibly when I am bored, I will reread it and copypaste any bits of it that are still funny.

I have written a whole bunch this weekend! At the moment, my novel has gotten so boring that it is actually putting me to sleep, but I am still guardedly optimistic about finishing it by the 30th if I keep super-busy and come up with some more exciting trouble for my characters to get into. Sorry, guys, you thought it was bad enough that you burned down your own (shared) house with fireworks, you're hiding from your thesis advisor, and your parents think that you're enrolled in law school, but your lives are just going to have to get weirder,

22728 / 50000 words. 45% done!

And now, as I said, sleep. It's early enough that I could actually consider waking up early tomorrow morning and doing some writing like those weird morning people do.