Absolutely awesome from start to finish. Blends haute-cuisine, horror, and comedy into a cocktail that went down so smooth, I’ve already ordered the sequel. If you’ve ever wished Top Chef were more like The Dresden Files, this is the book for you.

Taught me three things about writing:

• With an omniscient narrator, you can just drop backstory on readers, instead of having flashbacks or waiting for it to come out through dialog. Keep it short, though, so it doesn't interrupt the flow of the story.
• Opening with action is tough. It's a good hook, but without really vivid descriptions, it's going to be hard for the reader to picture what's happening, since they don't yet have a feel for the characters.
• It's easier for readers to accept the fantastic mixing with everyday life if the characters take it seriously as well. They shouldn't be blasé, but having them face the weird head-on is a great way to make it feel more real (as opposed to, say, spending half the book in either denial or ignorance).

A mixed bag of interesting, well-thought out essays mingled with articulate but specious arguments in favor of traditional conservative opinions.

The first half of the book, made of the first 8 essays, is the better half. His arguments in these essays about the limits of law are based on evidence, as when he uses the conflicting conclusions reached by medical studies and the legal system in the Benedictin cases in the 80s and 90s to argue that courts are bad places to decide essentially scientific questions.

In the second half of essays, he begins to twist logic and ignore evidence in order to forcefully insist on the positions he’s adopted.

He claims that the states have changed since the Civil Rights Era, and so there’s no need to worry about devolving power from the federal government to them, ignoring the many groups – women, the LGBT community, non-Christians, immigrants – whose rights the states routinely trample on.

He dismisses Proportional Representation to elect legislators as absurd and unworkable, despite its use in the majority of democratic countries around the world.

In one of the last essays, he goes so far as to say that pushing power down from the federal level to the lowest level possible – county or city – is an alloyed good, a goal to be pursued even if the evidence shows that it makes things worse.

Despite the uneven nature of the essays, though, I did learn a few things:

• In product liability cases, defendants that rely on statistical evidence are more likely to lose in jury trials.
• Making employers check their employees' immigration status is an example of private gatekeeping: when the government delegates part of its regulation powers to private individuals.
• Modern mass tort litigation (in the US) is only a few decades old. It was basically invented in 1969, and continues to be a cobbled together reaction to the fact that a single company can now affect so many lives all at once.

Novel’s at 68,869 words.

My characters are smarter than me.

Throughout writing this book, there’s been a couple of weak links in the chain of my original outline. Places where various plot threads didn’t quite meet up. I’ve been debating – and discarding – different ways to resolve them, but never quite hit on the right way.

That is, until not one, but two of my characters told me the solution.

One of them did it quite early on, but I dismissed it as too easy a way out.

But this week, another character told me the same thing. This time, I listened.

It creeped me out a little, because they handed me both the solution and the justification for it. It ties all the plot threads together, makes sense of the entire chain of events, and deepens the conflict at the same time.

It’s beautiful, but even though it came from one of my characters, it doesn’t feel like my idea.

I’m using it anyway, though.

Fantastic. And I’m not just saying that because I’ve been a Chuck Wendig fan ever since Blackbirds (you have read Blackbirds, haven’t you?). Nor am I saying that because his blog is a fountain of NSFW writing inspiration (though it is).

I’m saying that because it’s a Star Wars book that tells a great story, fills in some of the time between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, and manages to feel like a Star Wars movie in novel form. That’s a tough balancing act, and kudos to Wendig for pulling it off.

Here’s what I learned about writing from it:

• Don't be afraid to be opinionated in giving description. It can help keep things brief while still being vivid.
• Part of what makes a hero feel scrappy is not things going right, but things going wrong, all the time. Little blunders and bad luck that they just manage to survive make them feel more real and keep the reader rooting for them.
• You can frame the start of scenes just like framing a shot in a movie. Think of a character's head popping through a hatch, or opening on a lightsaber glowing in the darkness. Can be a visual hook into the rest of the chapter.

Almost done with the prequels. Thankfully this is the best of three, though given the generally low standards of the first two that isn’t saying much.

What Went Wrong

Most of the problems with Revenge of the Sith are carryovers from mistakes made in the first two movies, emotional beats that fail to land with as much impact as they should because the foundation work for them hasn’t been done.

For example, Padmé and Anakin’s romance should feel tragic, with Anakin’s concern for her driving them apart even as they try to keep their growing family a secret. But their interaction in Attack of the Clones was so still and formal, it’s hard to believe either of them would miss the other, except that the plot calls for them to. Instead, their “love story” feels like a piece of background that Lucas wanted slotted into place, as cold and unfeeling as a CGI’d starship.

Even Count Dooku’s death, which should be a pivotal moment, is treated so perfunctory that it feels trivial, just one more Sith slain by a righteous Jedi. No big deal.

How to Fix It

This means there’s no Count Dooku in this one. He died in Attack of the Clones, a tragic end for a renegade that thought he was doing the right thing.

We also have to continue rewriting the scenes between Padmé and Anakin. Two people in love, hiding their child from their superiors, should display a lot more fear and desperation than they do. We need to see their relationship deepen and grow, despite their need to keep it in the shadows.

It would help if we got some hint that Padmé made an effort to hide her relationship with Anakin. We should see her dating other men, or dropping hints that she was being courted by someone else, to deflect attention from the young Jedi that apparently spends every night in her quarters.

Ditto for Anakin. We need to see him lying to the other Jedi, making excuses and begging away from assignments that would make him leave the capital. We need to feel the danger that Anakin and Padmé are in, and how far they’ve already gone to maintain their relationship. So when we see Anakin slipping to the Dark Side in order to save her, its one more small step along the path that he’s been on for years.

We also need to see more tension between Anakin and Palpatine, preferably over Padmé. As a Senator that’s presumably alarmed at the direction the Republic is going, we should witness her at her work: campaigning for re-election (with Palpatine possibly campaigning for her rival), lobbying for support for bills from her other Senators (bills that would likely reduce Palpatine’s authority), giving interviews with the media to support her position.

All of this should make Palpatine grit his teeth, and Anakin should be constantly defending Padmé to the Chancellor. It’d be one more sign to the audience of his feelings for Padmé, and it would tip off Palpatine to the significance of Anakin’s devotion.

And once Palpatine realizes that, he decides to kill Padmé.

That’s the final change we make. The visions Anakin sees of Padmé dying are not of her “losing the will to live” – which is frankly insulting for such a headstrong character – but of Palpatine draining her life force.

We know Palpatine has manipulated the Jedi’s visions of the future before. He decides to kill Padmé, knowing the visions of her in danger will drive Anakin further down the path to the Dark Side.

His plan is originally to blame her death on the Jedi, pushing Anakin to break with them for good. But when he finds Anakin near death after his fight with Obi-Wan, he drains her life force and uses it to keep Anakin alive, in a single stroke sustaining his most powerful apprentice and sealing Anakin’s allegiance to him.

Novel’s at 66,694 words.

This week’s events have thrown more light onto the villain of the novel: what he wants, how far he’s willing to go to get it, and just how long he’s been planning to take it.

One of my protagonists is gone. The other has to carry on mostly alone now, and I don’t know if she can survive. She’s out of her depth, and she’ll need all the allies she can find – or cajole – to win this one.

Here’s hoping.

Another tall order. I like this one more than Phantom Menace, but it’s flaws are deeper, even if there aren’t quite so many mistakes.

Let’s dive in.

What Went Wrong

How to Fix It

Let’s start with the assassination attempt on Padmé’s life, which leads to Obi-Wan and Anakin guarding her and makes the entire romance subplot possible.

The assassination makes no sense. They put it down to Padmé being the leader of the opposition, but the opposition to what? The Chancellor is from her world, so Naboo is basically ruling the galaxy at this point. How could she be part of opposing her own government?

There’s also no tension in that first explosion. We don’t know what’s happening, suddenly things are blowing up, and now we’re watching a scene that should be moving and sad between Padmé and her guard. Unfortunately, since none of the guards even have names in the last movie (or this one), let along personalities, none of this works.

The explosion needs to almost kill Padmé. We need to see her coming down the runway, and watch it blow up, and her vanish under a pile of rubble. They dig her out and get her to a hospital, where we learn that several leading senators have had unfortunate accidents in the last few months. None looked like assassination attempts, until now. That’s why the Jedi get involved: to solve a genuine mystery.

With this change, the confusion at the beginning adds to the tension. We care about Padmé, and we share her confusion at being targeted. Who is after her? Why are they targeting Senators? We want to know, so we want to watch the rest of the movie.

This leads directly into our first major change: the romance between Padmé and Anakin.

It has to be entirely rewritten, from start to finish. Anakin spends the first part of the movie glowering at Padmé like he wants to take her in the basement and do weird things to her with a pair of pliers. He spends the second half glowering at her like she’s just hit his favorite puppy. All of that, along with the lines about “teasing the Senator” and “I hate sand” and everything else, all need to go.

Instead, their feelings for each other should be a surprise to both of them. They should remember each other, and be friendly – but nothing else – at the start. As they flee Coruscant, they reminisce about their adventures from the first movie, and catch up on what’s happened in their lives since then (this sharing will also catch up the audience, filling in details on how Palpatine has taken Anakin under his wing and why Padmé gave up being Queen to become a Senator).

Once on Naboo, among the beauty of her retreat, they both start to relax their guards, and discover they enjoy talking with each other, perhaps too much. This should climax with the kiss on the balcony, as a mix of everything their feeling: the danger they share, their past history, the way they can confide in each other.

The very next scene is Anakin having his nightmare about his mother and waking up in his room, sweating. We skip the fireside scene and its awkward “I’ve brought you into this incredibly romantic room to break up with you” vibe altogether.

Instead, we let their decision about their relationship be ambiguous. Neither of them has decided to take things any further than that initial kiss. They could still pull back and stay friends, stay loyal to the causes they’ve pledged themselves to. Or they could take the plunge together, and damn the consequences. It’s not knowing that adds tension to the scenes that follow.

Anakin doesn’t tell Padmé about his nightmare at first, but over breakfast that morning she pulls what’s wrong out of him. And when she hears, it’s her idea to go to Tatooine and look for his mother, not Anakin’s. He wants to keep Padmé safe on Naboo, and doesn’t want to put her in danger. She sees a chance to distract both of them from their feelings for each other, while helping out a friend (she might even feel her own debt to the woman that sheltered them on Tatooine and allowed her own son to risk his life to help them).

She wins the argument, setting them on their course towards the final third of the movie and reinforcing our impression from Phantom Menace of Padmé’s willingness to take risks.

Now instead of the stiffness of the kiss between Anakin and Padmé before they’re led out to the Coliseum to die, a stiffness that comes from it being a kiss with no risk behind it, a “might as well say this because it has no consequences” scene, it’s one of mutual discovery, of the two of them realizing that they do love each other, and deciding to act on it.

So that’s Padmé and Anakin sorted. Now for the last major change: Count Dooku’s role.

As written, he screams villain at every turn. He dresses all in black, he speaks in ponderous “I’ve got you now” style, and he’s played by Christopher Freakin Lee.

While I’m a Lee fan to my core, the character as written is completely uninteresting. He’s a cackling capital-V Villain in a trilogy that’s all about how good intentions can lead you astray, about how evil can masquerade as virtue, about how hard it is to tell what’s the right thing to do.

Dooku should be an earnest renegade. Instead of being Palpatine’s Sith apprentice, Dooku discovered that Palpatine was a Sith, and broke with the Jedi Council because of it. He didn’t tell them because he didn’t think they would believe him, or if they did that it would be because Palpatine had already corrupted them. He went from system to system, cobbling together an Alliance to fight Palpatine and bring down the Sith.

He’s behind the assassinations, but only because he thinks the Senators he’s targeting are in league with Palpatine. In Padmé’s case, it would make perfect sense for him to add her to the list: she’s from Palpatine’s homeworld, she helped him become Chancellor, and if Dooku looks into her future, he can see the rise of the Dark Side.

Dooku thinks he’s the good guy, doing something hard but necessary to fight a greater evil. We should see him as being very similar to Qui-Gon, if Qui-Gon had lived and disagreed more with the Jedi Council.

He doesn’t want to fight Obi-Wan when he captures him. He makes an earnest attempt to get Obi-Wan to join him, to help him overthrow the Sith that have taken control. The scene between them should be fraught with tension, and we should actually wonder if Obi-Wan will join the rebels at this point, especially once he realizes that Dooku is telling the truth. When he refuses, and Dooku sentences him to death, it should be with regret and reluctance, not relish.

All of Dooku’s scenes should be shifted to show the conflict within him. When Mace Windu shows up with the other Jedi, Dooku should be horrified, not triumphant. He doesn’t want to see the Jedi Order destroyed, but he can’t let them win, either. He’s in an impossible situation, and his dialogue with Windu should be a plea for his one-time friend to join him, to stop doing the bidding of the Sith.

All the way up to the final combat between Dooku, Obi-Wan, and Anakin, he should be trying to get out of the fight, trying to find a way to work with the Jedi instead of against them. His reluctance should be clear at every point, and it should be the Jedi that act as the aggressors, that push him into fighting them.

This will inject a sense of tragedy into each scene Dooku’s in: we know he’s only playing into Palpatine’s hands, even if he doesn’t, and we can see how the Jedi are blind to how they’re being manipulated as well. Dooku becomes a much more interesting character, and we should feel sorry for him when he dies.

That’s the last change we need to make to the movie: Dooku should die at the end.

He should still take Anakin out early, by lopping off his right hand. He should still fight Obi-Wan off, and then move to escape. But Yoda stands in his way, blocking his path.

Here, Dooku refuses to fight his old master. He’s lost his way, but he’s not a Sith. He won’t go that far.

Trapped, he turns back to fight Obi-Wan, to see if he can get out a different way. Obi-Wan has gotten Anakin back on his feet, and together they manage to fight Dooku till he is on his knees, and disarmed. Helpless, he agrees to go back with them, to face trial and punishment.

Yoda turns to go back into their transport, and Obi-Wan as well. Dooku and Anakin are left alone for a moment.

This is when Anakin finds out Dooku was behind the assassination attempts. Dooku tells him as part of one last plea for mercy, for Anakin to help him, and as a warning about what he thinks Padmé will do. Instead, Anakin is enraged that Dooku would threaten Padmé’s life. Filled with anger, he kills Dooku.

Thus the movie ends with three things certain. Palpatine has grown so powerful that even the opposition to his rule is playing into his hands. Padmé and Anakin are going to act on their love while keeping it hidden. And that love, though unlooked-for and hard-won, is driving him towards the Dark Side.

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.