Novel’s at 64,623 words.

My entire plot’s taken a huge left turn.

I’ve been off outline for a while, but not in a scary way. Most of what’s happening has followed on from what’s happened before, a nice logical progression of “this has happened, so the character would do that” kind of writing.

It let me forget that this novel has a villain. And they’re not sitting idle.

On Wednesday morning, they insisted on doing something so terrible, it’s thrown all my plans out the door. One of the characters might be dead. Another might be about to turn criminal.

And the villain? Well, they’ve taken a huge leap forward towards winning.

There’s no telling where the story’s going. It’s terrifying, but thrilling as well. I have to write it, now, if only to find out what happens next.

Stay with me on this one. Underneath all the Jar-Jar antics and the layer-cake of special effects is a good movie, I promise.

But there’s a lot of work we have to do to uncover it.

What Went Wrong

Let’s move on.

How to Fix It

First, Anakin needs to be older. Preferably pre-teen, say 11-12 years old. Just this one change by itself makes so much more of the movie make sense.

When Anakin meets Padmé for the first time, his lines are kind of creepy for a little kid. Make him a pre-teen, though, and suddenly he’s a very young man trying (and failing, horribly) to hit on an older woman.

The Jedi’s later remark that Anakin is “too old” to be trained is nonsense for a boy that looks no older than any of their younglings. If Anakin were 12, though, and already arrogant and head-strong, those objections would be sensible.

Second, we need a different motivation for the Trade Federation’s invasion of Naboo. I know, I know: the second movie gets bogged down in Senate procedure and no one cares. But that’s my point: the movie as written does a horrible job of making us care. The right explanation, embedded into the script, would go a long way to fix that problem.

Instead of some vague “trade dispute”, we should have a concrete problem. Naboo has an ore that gets mined by the Gungans and processed by the land-based Naboo into some material needed for making droids. Both the Trade Federation and a rival group buy that material from the Naboo and make their – rival – droids from it.

The Trade Federation comes to Naboo and asks them to sign an exclusive trade deal, so Naboo will only sell to the Trade Federation, which would give the Trade Federation a lock on the droid market.

Naboo refuses, of course, so the Trade Federation cranks up the heat: a blockade of the planet, cutting off all trade to the rest of the Galactic Republic. The Senate has to get involved at that point, since the Trade Federation are breaking the free flow of goods across the galaxy.

This is the dispute the Jedi fly in to resolve at the start of the movie: not a vague thing, but a concrete drama with greedy officials and brave (if naive) patriots facing off.

This scenario also sets up the “symbiont circle” between the Naboo and the Gungans that Obi-Wan talks about. Without the Gungans to mine the ore, the Naboo wouldn’t be able to refine it and sell it, generating trade. In return, the Naboo provide the Gungans both money – of course – and technology, by maintaining the systems that keep the Gungans underwater cities going.

The Trade Federation, with their invasion, break this circle. They not only take control of what industry the Naboo have, they start mining the planet themselves, using droids instead of Gungans.

This is why the Gungans have to flee their cities toward the end of the movie. No one is maintaining them – the Naboo are rather busy – and they’ve lost their main monetary supply. Not to mention all the extra drilling the Trade Federation is engaging in, to suck Naboo dry before the Senate can act.

Our final change is a series of small ones that add up to a big one: we need to shift both both Jar-Jar and Padmé’s roles in the story.

Jar-Jar needs a purpose. He’s a goofy-looking character that’s supposed to provide some comic relief, which is fine in theory, but he needs to serve some use for the other characters.

We should give him several things to do. To start, when he runs into Qui-Gon at the beginning, he should accidentally save the Jedi’s life: when they fall under the bot transport, Jar-Jar shields Qui-Gon from the heat of the transport’s engines using his large, floppy ears, keeping them both safe. When they leave the Gungan city to travel through the Planet Core, we should see Jar-Jar giving them directions, acting as their navigator. In their initial encounters with Trade Federation droids, Jar-Jar should take out a few, if clumsily and slowly. And when Qui-Gon goes hunting for parts on Tatooine, Jar-Jar should follow at a distance, unseen, “swimming” through the sand with just his eye-stalks showing, determined to keep watch over the human to whom he owes a life-debt.

Finally, Jar-Jar, not Anakin, should be the one locked in the fighter that ultimately – and accidentally – takes out the Trade Federation’s droid command ship. Taking Anakin to Naboo makes no sense, he’s too young (at any age) and should be left safely on Coruscant (perhaps under the watchful eye of Senator Palpatine?). Jar-Jar’s goofiness fits in perfectly with what happens in this sequence, and playing the hero here sets up his presence in the Senate later on.

Padmé’s scenes should all be shifted to show her headstrong, sometimes reckless, nature.

When the Queen and the Jedi are debating going to Tatooine, we should actually see the debate. Her Captain should make his case for not going, the Jedi should make their case for it, and the Queen should have her handmaidens weigh in. This last will frustrate the Jedi, so used to being obeyed without question, and give the fake Queen a chance to hear from the disguised Padmé what she should do.

And when Qui-Gon actually leaves the ship to search for parts, the Queen should send Padmé because he needs a translator: it turns out Padmé speaks Huttese. Instead of Qui-Gon playing reluctant tour guide to the handmaiden, we should reverse this. It’s Padmé who has seen poverty up close – which is perhaps why she ran for Queen in the first place – and the Jedi that has been coddled in the Inner Worlds. This change will give Padmé much more depth as a character, and reinforce the sense that maybe the Jedi are a little out of touch, a little too arrogant, to play their role properly anymore.

A final Padmé change: in the final assault on the palace, when she and her guard are pinned down by droids, she should be the one to shoot out the glass window and insist they winch up. It’d be a nice echo of Princess Leia’s garbage chute solution during her rescue, and again show us that Padmé is able to think sideways to get around problems.

With these changes, we take a movie that can be skipped without missing anything to one that is crucial to understanding the rest of the series.

Anakin, the young hotshot, both too old to be properly trained and too young to be left alone, shows both great potential and great risk.

The Republic is coming apart at the edges, its reach shortened and its ability to settle disputes peaceably in doubt.

Padmé’s recklessness in the pursuit of what she wants lets her reach her goal, but only at the cost of launching Senator Palpatine’s career as Chancellor, paving the way to his ascent to Emperor.

And the Jedi, assured and passive on the outside, are shown to have grown too insular, too used to their comfortable lives in the Inner Worlds to see the dangers to the Republic from within, or even to find a child as talented as Anakin in the Outer Rim.

Pushed the novel to 62,769 words this week.

I’m trying to worry less and less about picking the right words, about using the right sentences to get my meaning across. As I drift further from my original outline, I’m trying to focus on discovering what happens next, on keeping things consistent, rather than the particular phrasing I’m using.

That’s rough for me, since I’ve always been careful about the words I use when talking or writing, always worried about saying the wrong thing, about failing.

But in this case, failure means not speaking, not writing. So long as I can get something down, I can move forward, and discover more of the book. I try to remind myself of that, and to remember that only once the book is done can I go back and make it right.

Don’t change a damn thing.

Seriously, I’ve seen the movie twice now, and will go in for a third as soon as I can. It’s gotten me excited about Star Wars for the first time in years (you can date my waning enthusiasm for the day The Phantom Menace came out).

I think it echoed the original trilogy without aping it, subverted it when it could, and updated the whole thing to the 21st century without being preachy about its progressivism. It’s an amazing feat, and I don’t know how they pulled it off.

Already looking forward to the next one.

Novel’s reached 61,085 words.

New routine is still working. I’ve managed to hit or exceed my word count goal each day, by writing for thirty minutes each day, first thing in the morning.

Such a small thing, a small amount of time, and yet it’s made a big difference. I’m starting to see progress again on the book, scenes wrapping up and new ones getting started, new plot lines opening up ahead of me.

I’ve even allowed myself to take the weekends off from writing, so I can work on other projects. I think of it as both a reward and an incentive: reward for getting the writing done during the week, incentive to hit my word goal each day for the next one.

We’ll see how long it holds, especially as I head into the uncharted (unoutlined) territory ahead of me. But for now, it feels good to be making steady, if slow, progress.

Surprising, strange, and very well done. Manages to weave alien contact, game development, and anarchist politics into a story so good and smoothly written that I finished all 300+ pages in just two days.

Can’t believe I didn’t hear about this one until just a few months ago.

Learned several things about writing from this book, including:

• Little touches can go a long way to building both humor and character. For example, the narrator of the book is Jewish, so whenever a character says 'God', it's written out as "G-d"
• Using blog posts as the main form of narrative lets you cut out a lot of scene-setting description, get to the meat of each scene faster.
• Be careful mixing blog posts, real life narrative, and other written forms in one novel. If they all adopt the same casual, conversational tone (as this book does), they start to bleed together, and you lose the advantage of keeping them separate.

Terrible. Just terrible.

Wasn’t able to make it through this one; it was too tough a slog.

Every paragraph was a mess of unsubstantiated claims mixed with the author’s persecution complex and a dash of ignorance. Completely mis-represents everything from the history of rebellion to evolution.

I didn’t learn anything from this book. The author is too convinced of his own infallible intuition to do anything so mundane as deal with facts.

Novel’s at 59,195 words.

Didn’t get much writing done over Christmas break at all. Had all these great plans for cranking out mounds of text while I was off work, plans that got thrown out when my wife and I both came back from seeing my family in Texas with the flu.

Oddly enough, it seems the break was good for me. I’ve been getting up an hour earlier since the start of the new year, taking time to both exercise (nothing makes me worry about my physical fitness more than when my body breaks down on me) and write.

So far it’s working. I’m still sick, and now sore to boot, but I’ve hit my word goal every day this week. I feel like I’ve discovered an extra hour that was hiding from me.

I’ll also admit a small part of me likes writing despite my lingering cough, as if each word is me spitting in the eye of disease.

So here’s to the New Year. May we all use it to write more, to write better, to write, write, write.

Reads like a nineteenth-century fairy tale. Manages to weave these mythical characters into a bigger story about the immigrant experience in 19th century New York. Wonderfully well-done.

Taught me a few new things about writing:

• You can use multiple perspectives to build tension into the narrative, by giving the reader access to thoughts and feelings that impact the main characters later on.
• It's okay to give opinionated descriptions. In fact, letting your character's perspective color the way they describe the world around them is a great way to make both feel more real.
• Even an absurd premise, if taken seriously enough, can become drama.

Reads more like a series of essays first published in a paper or blog than a book with a single through-line. Probably a relic of its beginnings as a TV series.

Still, the writing was clear and concise, allowing me to learn the following:

• The lightbulb took 40 years to develop. Edison was just the last researcher to work out the kinks. Even his formula -- carbon filament in a vacuum -- was first used in 1841, 38 years before his success.
• Chicago's sewer system was installed by raising the entire city -- buildings and all -- ten feet.
• The artisans that made Venice famous for its glass were Turkish refugees that settled in the city after the sack of Constantinople in 1204.

Novel’s at 56,441 words.

Got most of my writing for the week done on Sunday, in one go.

I’m glad I did. Between the new dog, a root canal retreat, and pushing to get everything done at work before the holiday break, it’s been harder to slip into writing mode during the small breaks I have to get some done.

Hopefully I’ll be able to carve out some more time this weekend to write another chunk of the book, and once the holidays hit, make a concerted push to write more every day.

Fantastic. Not the drawing-room novel I feared it would be, nor the swashbuckling “strong woman” archetype book it could have been. Instead, it’s a wonderful travelogue for a nineteenth century populated by fantastical creatures.

This was a quick read, but I still managed to learn some things about writing:

• It's possible to convey a lot about the historical treatment of women without depicting brutality (I'm looking at you, Game of Thrones). It's enough to hear the narrator rail against the constraints she's placed under, or feel her frustration at having to pretend to not be an intelligent, scientifically curious person.
• You can invoke a time period's writing without indulging in that period's techniques. The book is written with a modern style -- short sentences built into short paragraphs that live in short chapters -- but still feels like it came out of an alternate Victorian period.
• A memoir can lose tension because we know the narrator makes it through. One way to push tension back into the story is to take advantage of the fact that the narrator knows more than the reader, and have them drop in sentences that foreshadow future tragedy or triumph.

Novel’s at 55,647 words.

I’ve been able to hit my 250 word goal most days, thank goodness.

Not every day; I’ll confess that when the brand-new tub started leaking again and one of the house’s walls started wobbling and my wife and I stayed up half the night talking about giving up and moving out, my brain was too distracted to do much writing.

But we’re pushing through that, and I’m continuing to push through the book.

I’ve had to shift to doing more outlining, though. I’m about halfway in, and I’ve introduced enough new characters and plot threads that I needed to spend some time adjusting my plan for the latter half of the book.

Granted, that’s time I’m not putting words on the page, but it’s helped me feel more focused when I do start writing again. By taking a step back, I get a better sense of what things are worth keeping going forward, and which characters need a little more fleshing out if they’re going to stay. I can also see what threads I’ve been dropping, and plan a way to bring them back in before it’s too late.

Paradigm-shifting. Should have been required reading for my philosophy degree. Beauvoir applies existential analysis to a real problem: the treatment of women through ages of male domination.

Her writing is clear and lucid throughout, whether elaborating the trails of a young girl approaching adulthood or demolishing arguments against legal abortion. This is philosophy at its best, digging past the concrete details of our lives to show the broken abstraction behind it all.

As someone who came into the book thinking men and women should be equal in all things, it’s still completely changed how I view the world. I had no idea of the scope of pressures women feel, starting almost from birth, to conform to an ideal of what it means to be female, an ideal that often prescribes their inferiority. There are so many traps to fall into, traps that keep women from achieving their full potential, many of which I can only see now, after Beauvoir has pointed them out.

It would be impossible for me to boil down everything I’ve learned from the book. But let me pull out three things that struck me:

• When abortion was illegal in France, it still occurred (her estimate is one million abortions a year) but was much more dangerous. She describes one instance where a women waited in bed, bleeding, for four days after a botched abortion, for fear of being sent to prison.
• In patriarchal societies, adolescence is much harder on women than on men. Teenage boys are given more freedom, so they can find their place in the world. Teenage girls have their former freedoms stripped away, so they can prepare for a life spent under their husband's thumb.
• Cultures that will readily grant some rights to unwed women (holding a job, owning their own property, etc) often strip women of those rights when they get married, and saddle them with a slew of new responsibilities. Thus so-called "family values" societies actually incentivize women to skip marriage and having children altogether.

Still no working bathroom, no walls on the house, no ceiling in one room, and no fix for my failed root canal.

But I’ve managed to get the novel to 53,225 words.

I’ve hit my word count every day this week, by writing in the cracks: while my wife is getting ready in the morning before work, on my lunch break, while I’m waiting to be picked up after work. It’s only 5, 10 minutes at a time, sometimes less, but it’s somehow enough.

I’m pushing myself to write, even on my phone, even if I don’t remember the exact line I left off on in the book. It’s forcing me to keep more of the story in my head, sure, but it’s allowing me to move forward despite not having a solid block of time to work in.

I keep telling myself that the only way to fail here is to quit. So I’m not going to quit, even if it takes me another six months to get to the end of the novel. I’m going to finish it.

Rewatched To Kill a Mockingbird this weekend. My wife had never seen it, and I hadn’t seen it years.

Apparently my memory of the movie is vastly different from what’s actually there.

For example, I don’t remember Scout’s older brother, Jem, at all. Ditto Boo Radley and his plotline.

In my remembering, the movie is basically Scout and her father talking about the evils of prejudice, then a courtroom battle where Atticus defends Tom – accused because of his skin color, and nothing else – then wins the case, and everyone lives happily ever after.

This is not what happens at all. The movie spends most of its time following Scout and Jem, not in the courtroom. Atticus loses the case, and Tom commits suicide by cop. Boo Radley emerges from hiding to kill another man, and gets away with it because the Sheriff lets him off.

It’s a dark, dark movie, that deals head-on with many of the issues of its time: segregation, the struggle for justice in the face of prejudice, the failure of our system of government to protect minorities against the depredations of the majority.

So how could it be updated?

We could shift the court case from race relations to a different battleground: reproductive rights.

The courtroom case is part of the fallout from a divorce. The couple had two children normally, and was in the middle of trying to have a third with the help of a fertility clinic when they split. The husband wants to keep the multiple fertilized embryos they have from their time at the clinic, while the wife wants to have them destroyed.

Who will get custody of the embryos? Are they property, and so should be divided between the couple? Or are they children, and so should be given to the parent that will best care for them?

To keep things from getting two cliché, we put the husband and wife on opposite sides of the abortion debate as well. The husband is generally pro-choice, but will be tempted to argue that the embryos are children, and so destroying them would be murder. The wife is more religious, and inclined to be against abortion. But she’ll be pushed to argue that the embroys are just property, with a monetary value that she could pay as compensation to the father, so she can dispose of them as she wishes.

Our “Scout” and “Jem” are the couple’s existing two kids. Through them we see the fault lines through the town: the anti-abortion protestors that gather into a mob at one point to try to burn down the fertility clinic, the pro-choice groups that can’t decide whose desires – the man or the woman – should trump the other, the judge that doesn’t want to end up trying two cases for the same divorce.

Our Boo Radley subplot is a woman from the poor part of town that has just discovered she’s pregnant. She’s not married, and the father isn’t around anymore. Should she get an abortion? In the southern town they live in, that’ll mean a long, expensive trip to the nearest large city. But keeping the child will mean an even longer, painful pregnancy followed by a very expensive mouth to feed.

The conflicts in this remake will push on multiple issues: abortion rights, women’s rights, the way the law treats the wealthy (the couple that could afford fertility treatments) differently from the poor (the woman that can’t afford to keep or get rid of the baby).

None of the solutions will be obvious or straightforward, despite the rigid way these issues are usually viewed. In fact, by filming the remake in black and white, we can visually undermine the simplistic approach that’s usually taken.

Even when we try to frame the events in black-and-white, we end up with nothing but shades of grey.

I’ve had to compromise on my daily word count multiple times. First I slipped from 500 words a day to 500 words per weekday, taking weekends off. Then it was 500 words three days a week. Then 250 words.

Now if I get any words down at all during a day, I have to pat myself on the back.

Somehow I’ve managed to push the novel to 50,898 words.

Meanwhile, the house we bought is being completely rewired, most of the walls have had to come down and be replaced, the living room’s missing a ceiling, and I haven’t had a fully functioning bathroom for five days (we discovered a leak in the walls of the shower that meant we had to replace the whole thing: tub, surround and all).

Oh, and one of my root canals decided to fail after humming along quietly for ten years.

I’ve tried to tell myself that this’ll all pass soon, and I can tread water until things get back to normal.

But what if they don’t? What if this cascading series of crises is the normal? What if it lasts 3 months? 6? A year? Am I going to wait to finish till then? Am I going to hold back and make do when I don’t know what will happen next?

I don’t want to tread water. I want to take what I’m going through and pour it into the book, to turn these failures into something successful.

I don’t have any control of what part of the house – or me – falls apart next. I can’t even control my schedule enough to have a regular writing time anymore. But I can push myself to write every chance I get, to use marlapaige’s suggestion and write on my phone, write in my notebook, write anywhere and everywhere. I can finish what I’ve started, and I don’t have to wait.

What Went Wrong

But the worst part of the movie is its treatment of Claire.

At the start of the movie, Claire is the hero. She’s a professional woman who doesn’t have time for children and knows it, who is struggling to find time for her sister’s kids – that were dumped on her, it’s clear she didn’t have any choice about the trip or its timing – and manage a multi-million dollar park, despite a CEO that doesn’t seem interested in business.

She’s surrounded by people that want her to give up and go back to a subservient female role. Her sister wants her to pop out some kids. Her boss wants her to stop caring about her job. Her subordinate (Owen) wants her to take his orders and his termination-worthy sexual harassment.

It’s clear that the movie wants us to find her off-putting at the start (they even dress her in white, for goodness sake, to emphasize her supposed frigidity). The intention is that as time goes on she’ll become more sympathetic, but only as she takes on a more traditional, more subservient, role: she takes off her outer clothing to expose her breasts (despite the chill of the evening), she accepts motherly responsibilities over her (frankly bratty) nephews, and she submits to Owen’s sexual advances.

But every step along the way is a loss of her agency. By the end of the movie, she’s the selfless, unambitious woman everyone wanted her to be, instead of the level-headed boss she was. She’s gone from hero to sidekick, from independent woman to love interest.

How to Fix It

We’ll start with Claire. We gender-swap the company manager and animal trainer roles. Now Owen’s role – velociraptor-whispering wilderness bad-ass – is filled by a woman, and Claire’s role – overworking manager who’s lost their sense of wonder – is filled by a man.

The manager’s character arc shifts away from forcing an ambitious person to fit into a traditional gender role. Instead, the manager, in contact with the kids and the trainer, and getting to see more of “his” park than usual, rediscovers his sense of wonder. Through their adventures – which have to include some moments of peace and reflection now, instead of pure destruction and death – he reconnects with the reason he took the job in the first place. By the end of the movie, he hasn’t abandoned his career for a family, but the park’s creatures become more than just assets.

We also change up the villains, which will let us give the trainer the character arc that’s missing in the original version of the film.

The villains are animal rights activists that want to free the dinosaurs and return them to the wild. They’d planned to do the release at night while no one was at the park, but their leader (still played by Vincent D’Onofrio) convinces them to take advantage of the chaos of the I. Rex’s escape to move ahead of schedule.

Now instead of mustache-twirling military villains, we’ve got real people with real concerns – the treatment of the dinosaurs at the park, their restrictions on breeding, etc – that you could make sympathetic arguments for.

In fact, at the start of the movie, the trainer is sympathetic to their arguments, and perhaps has a fight with the manager about it. Over the course of the movie, though, as she sees the destruction caused by their actions, she rejects the activists' extremism and comes to appreciate the balance between commerce and science that the park represents.

As for the CEO, we make him a Costa Rican native that was educated in the US before joining Hammond’s company. A real up-by-your-bootstraps guy, he cares about the business and making money, but he chose to build the park as a way of giving back to Costa Rica: the construction jobs, the tourist money, etc. Each one of the workers that dies is someone he knows, each one hits him hard because it’s one of his countrymen.

Finally, we need to change the kids. They’re no longer siblings, and they’re not here as part of a family “retreat”. Instead, the older kid is American and deaf, the younger is Costa Rican and autistic. Both are there as part of a therapy camp for disabled kids the CEO wanted to host.

The manager’s grumpy about the camp, since it’s more work for him. But the American deaf kid is his nephew; he got him into the camp as a favor to his sister.

As part of the camp, the kids are sequestered in a part of the park that’s herbivores-only. Within this safe zone, they can roam around inside the bubble cars as much as they want.

Most of the kids want to spend time outside of the bubbles, except for the autistic kid. He feels comfortable there, spends more time exploring in the bubbles than anyone else. This is how he finds a hidden route that leads to the velociraptor enclosure. He meets our trainer there, and develops a bond with the raptors.

He uses this bond later in the movie, when the raptors have turned against their trainer: it’s the kid that gets the raptors to back down, and gives the humans time to escape.

The deaf kid is too cool for most of the other kids – and can’t communicate with most of them, since he insisted on not having an interpreter – but the autistic kid finds a way to communicate with him using the HUD built into the bubble cars.

The two become friends. Eventually the autistic kid shows him how to get out from the confines of their camp, which is why they’re MIA when the I Rex vanishes, kicking off the trainer and manager searching for them.

It’s a lot of changes, but now we’ve got a movie where every character is sympathetic – even the villains – and they’ve all got story arcs that have them growing and changing over the course of the movie. And with the CEO knowing most of his employees, each death has meaning, each disaster is something personal. And since our antagonists are real people, causing real but preventable havok, we can end the movie with the park damaged but intact, having survived this attack, and the manager and CEO vowing to recover and rebuild.

We can do something that hasn’t been done in a Jurassic Park movie before: end on a note of hope.

Novel’s at 49,793 words.

I’m having to steal writing time from other things. Not set aside time, but literally steal, like jotting down a few dozen words while waiting for my wife to pick me up from work, or hovering outside the bedroom/office in the morning with my laptop so I don’t wake her.

It’s frustrating. I feel like I’m not making any progress, that I can’t build up any momentum. It helps that I’m trying to pants things a little more – easier to snatch time from other things for writing that way – but it also hurts, since without a larger plan of where I’m going I don’t have a way to track how far I’ve come.

I’m trying to be patient, to eek out what words I can until the house is in better shape. But we keep coming across problems in the house that need to be fixed – like the bathtub leak we found two days ago – that keep sucking up all my time.

I’m afraid; afraid that if I don’t get some sort of rhythm going again that I won’t finish the book. And I don’t want that kind of failure hanging around my neck.

Came out of this one with mixed feelings. Really enjoyed the first third or so of the book, but it turned into a slog about halfway through, when the focus shifted away from the monasteries. Almost broke off reading a couple times after that.

I did learn a few things about writing, though:

• In a work this long, with this many locations, maps become critical. I got lost in the monastery, I got lost during the overland journey, I got lost in every location despite -- or because of? -- the descriptions. Even a rudimentary map would have helped anchor me in the world.
• When introducing a new vocabulary, you need to be doubly-sure the reader understands those terms before they become critical to the plot. There was an entire section (the first voco incident) that had no emotional impact for me because I didn't know what voco was.
• Showing a different side of a cliché plot can be enough to make it interesting again. In the regular telling of this story, the avout would be on the sidelines, popping up only when things needed explaining to the other characters. But here they're the focus, so we see the entire incident from their point of view, making an old plot feel fresh.

What Went Wrong

There’s barely enough time to breathe in this movie, let alone let the main cast play off each other like they did in the first Avengers.

We get shortchanged on three fronts: the ensemble cast doesn’t get to interact enough, the villain doesn’t get to do enough to seem like more than a speed bump, and the twins have to info-dump all their backstory so you might care when one of them dies (I didn’t).

How to Fix It

Keeping the Avengers in the castle is easy: we let them find the scepter, but they can’t move it. Say its own power is being used to booby-trap it, so if they try to move it without disarming it it’ll blow up and level everything in a 10-mile radius. Stark and Banner will have to stay to study the scepter and disarm the bomb. The other Avengers will stay to guard them.

Meanwhile, the twins weren’t captured in the initial assault on the castle. They escaped and hid, so now they come out to strike at the Avengers, using Quicksilver’s speed for hit-and-runs that let the Scarlet Witch give the team disturbing dreams while they sleep.

We show their backstory by letting the Avengers discover it: they find a scrapbook in the twins' former cell, filled with pictures of their parents and news clippings of the collateral damage caused by Stark weapons. This will give us some sympathy for the twins, and at the same time use Tony’s guilt over his company’s legacy to push him in developing Ultron.

From here, the beats play out much like the original movie: Ultron kills Jarvis and escapes to attack the team, only to be pushed into hiding. And where does he hide? Why, inside the Hydra machinery buried under the fortress. He uses it to build his new body, an army of android servants, and the giant engines he will activate to push up the ground under the castle (and surrounding town) to create his meteor.

Ultron and the twins never need to meet or collaborate. The twins have their own reasons for going after the Avengers, and don’t need to team up. But the effect of both pursuing their own ends will reinforce the feelings of dread the Avengers and their team start getting from the castle, which feels haunted: a gust of wind from a speedster whipping by, the flicker of a computer screen as Ultron hacks another system, waking up in a cold sweat from a horrible dream that you feel is a vision of a dark future.

All the while, this slow build gives us plenty of time for the characters to talk, to play off each other even as the team fractures under the Scarlet Witch’s influence.

Our climax brings everything out into the open: the twins reveal themselves at the same time that one of the Avengers stumbles across Ultron’s robot army. The Avengers are caught fighting on two fronts, until Ultron reveals the second part of his plan: the engines roar to life, lifting everyone off into the sky, threatening extinction for the human race, with the twins' home town as ground zero.

The twins switch sides, Quicksilver sacrifices himself to help defeat Ultron, and they ultimately succeed in preventing the apocalypse, though they lose the scepter in the final blast.

But Ultron is not destroyed. A final shot shows the Cradle being hauled away on a truck crewed by Ultron’s robots, an ominous “Downloading” flashing on a display.

We leave the actual “Age of Ultron” and the creation of the Vision for a separate movie, so we can give that plot the time it deserves.

Rat Queens Vol 1: Characters are basically college kids with medieval weapons and magic. Wants to both undermine and keep the D&D cliches it’s reacting to. Doesn’t always work.

Wicked + Divine Vol 2: Holy shit, that ending. Much much better than Vol 1.

Deadly Class Vol 1: I don’t want to like this one. It’s violent, and its characters are prone to the world-weary adolescent philosophizing that felt important when I was their age but is boring now. But the art is amazing, and I can’t stop reading.

The Ghost Fleet Vol 1: Starts out with inventive art and an intriguing premise, then becomes just another massive conspiracy plus revenge story.

Saga Vol 2 & 3: Still perfect. Ye gods, how are they doing this?

Blatantly partisan, and frustrating more than informative. Was hoping for a survey history of Latin America, with a view towards US interference. Instead I got an overview of US elites' ideology as applied to Latin America, which was not nearly as illuminating.

The book skips around between years and places constantly, making it hard to form a coherent picture of what was happening at each phase. It also doesn’t quote many primary sources, or do more than mention a speech or paper only to summarize and condemn it.

Despite its many attempts to convince with rhetoric rather than facts, I did manage to learn a few things:

• The US military developed many of its air combat tactics fighting Nicaraguan rebels in the 1920s
• Reagan's administration established a policy office whose job was not just to present their "positive" side of the Contras but also to get citizen's groups to organize campaigns to lobby Congress, which is illegal
• US withdrew from the International Court of Justice because it ordered us to pay reparations to Nicaragua for mining its ports and conducting clandestine operations there

Greetings from Arkansas!

No writing post last week, because on Thursday I finished packing up the house, got on a plane, and flew into Fort Smith.

Got a lot of work done on the flight, but since then writing time has been hard to come by. The house we bought turns out to have bad wiring, bad plumbing, mice, and walls so shot through with mold we’re having to strip them down to the studs.

Oh, and our stuff hasn’t arrived, so I’m still living out of a suitcase.

Thankfully there’s a coffee shop nearby (ok, it’s ten minutes away by car, which is really damn close by Arkansas standards) with comfy chairs and semi-reliable wifi. It’s been my office all week, for both the day job and the writing job.

I’ve managed to push the novel’s word count to 46,417 words, though it feels like I’m writing while on some sort of weird business trip. One where I don’t go anywhere, but I also don’t know where anything is or have any space to call my own.

Thank goodness the same techniques that work on planes have been working here: put the headphones on, re-read the last day’s work, and write what comes next.

Pixie

• lisp
• own vm
• compiled using RPython tool chain
• RPython - reduced python
  • used in PyPy project
  • has own tracing JIT
• runs on os x, linux, ARM (!)
• very similar to clojure, but deviates from it where he wanted to for performance reasons
• has continuations, called stacklets
• has an open-ended object system; deftype, etc
• also wanted good foreign function interface (FFI) for calling C functions
• wants to be able to do :import Math.h :refer cosine
• ended up writing template that can be called recursively to define everything you want to import
• writes C file using template that has everything you need and then compiles it and then uses return values with the type info, etc
• you can actually call python from pixie, as well (if you want)
• not ready for production yet, but a fun project and PRs welcome

History of Programming Languages for 2 Voices

• David Nolen and Michael Bernstein
• a programming language "mixtape"

• Matthias Felleisen
• worst thought you can have: your kids are in middle school
• word problems in math are not interesting, they're boring
• can use image placement and substitution to create animations out of word problems
• mistake to teach children programming per se. they should use programming to help their math, and math to help their programming. but no programming on its own
• longitudinal study: understanding a function, even if you don't do any other programming ever, means a higher income as an adult
• can design curriculum taking kids from middle school (programming + math) to high school (scheme), college (design programs), to graduate work (folding network into the language)