100 words - October 2010

Knightfall and I finished our first 'batches' of entries at 100Words.com!

It's been a really interesting writing game, which we were both playing along with a bunch of others from the Mass Effect Fanfic forums. I think writing alongside four friends makes it much more enjoyable! Espescially when it's something tricky and fun like this.

If you missed our earlier blog about it, it's a simple but surprisingly hard challenge. Once you sign-up you have to write a 100-word piece (any subject, any style, fiction or non-fiction) every day for a month. If you're too late writing, you're out. If it's not exactly 100, you're out.

So we had a lot of fun! Knight wrote a series of hilarious skits, impressive poems and little prose vignettes that were like something Joss Whedon took out of his new show because they were too good for it. I wrote... mainly about Frankenstein and superheroes.
Regardless, we both full enjoyed it! here's Knight's October batch, and here's mine.

And here are our final entries:

As he began to fall, the elf's life flashed before his eyes; and given the density of his lifespan, that flash seemed like a very long time.

He saw the Kastarn Spire as it glowed bright with energy just beyond the Nightwisp Hills. Then came the Breaking of the Clan, where he received his weapon and the one direction he would follow for three years.

He saw the Edge of the World.

The last thing he saw, before everything got crazy, was a single arrow flying across his periphery. The rope around his neck went taut - then severed.

------

Mister Laurie crept up the stairs, swaying from side to side, eating smarties. Up the spiral staircase of Castle Frankenstein. When he reached Peter's door he peered into the thin strip of black, widening it by half-inches and giggling. In his hand he clutched three Brandon Routh 'Superman Returns' action figures, painted green.

Peter is wearing his Ben 10 pyjamas. This does not make him any less of a genius.

Laurie creeeeeaaks open the door and steps through. The moonlight is weak but the atomic supermen glow in the dark.

'Mah-ster,' she whispers, 'the first batch is finished!'

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I've decided to have a stab at the November challenge too! that's 30 days instead of 31, so it should be easier. This might be the beginning of a beautiful hobby. Expect another post about it in a month ;)

Half-Life: Directed by Joss Whedon

I had my preferences for who would direct a Half-Life film if it came down to it, but I never expected this. Mister Joss Whedon would like to direct that movie, and it seems he would also like Nathan Fillion to star as the Freeman. And he would do all of this after The Avengers is done shooting.

Wow.

Personally, I love this combination. A lot of people seem to be against it, but...yeah, anytime Whedon and Fillion team up, magic happens. I would absolutely love for this movie to get made with those two attached. Would have been even better if we could have seen Dennis Hopper as Breen, but...R.I.P., easy rider.

EDIT: Ah, I guess we've been had. This is from Big Gabe himself. Disappointing. =(

Fanfiction is for losers

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This is going to be another rant. I've been thinking about the incredibly uncool stigma fanfiction has.

I'll say this right away - I know it's never going to be cool. In my spare time, rather than going out and meeting people or playing sports, I stay in a single room and type stories based on computer games and space movies, and hope that the strangers who read them will leave a review. It's extremely nerdy.

But!

Did you see the movie Terminator: Salvation recently? How about Star Trek? Did you ever see Jaws 3 or 4? Alien Ressurection?

Those scripts are one step away from what we do - and that's a big budget. They were no better than the good fanfics (Jaws 3 and 4 were far worse), they were made as tributes by gushing fans who use too many references (I'll Be Back, CGI Arnold, The photo and tapes of Sarah Connor etc etc etc.) The Director of Terminator 4, one McG, even uses a catchy net-like pseudonym instead of his real name. He also did 'Charlie's Angels'.

That's a fanfiction writer, right there. Not even a very good one. He just gets paid millions for it.

These are movies made as expansions to classic nerd favourites that the directors and writers loved. They were not written by the same writer as the original, directed by the same director, or had the original cast (except for Spock's brief role in the new Trek and Sigourney Weaver embarassing herself in Alien 4.)

These are good mov..... Star Trek was a good movie and we all loved it. But please remember that it's just a fanfiction script that happenned to be written by rich, succesful writers and got picked up by JJ Abrams.

There are hundreds of better Star Trek sequels, spin-offs and reboots which nobody noticed when they were online and which weren't comissioned by a studio. Certainly, there are billions of piss-poor fics in which two random characters meet, have terrible out-of-character dialogue and then have sex.
But then, Star Trek had a random, out of character coupling too - remember? I loved that scene, but if I were reading a fan script in which Spock and Uhura kiss in a lift after Vulcan exploded, I would have instantly discarded it and handed over a critical review.

I don't know what my point is here. I must sound very angry and impotent, like a yapping, chained-up dog barking at cats across the street.

I'm just saying. 20% of fanfiction I read is really good. And 60% is better than Joss Whedon's script for Alien 4.

So stop making fun of us, internet. You're hurting our feelings.

(And I LOVE Joss Whedon. He's like a god to me. If I live to be a hundred I will never equal 'Firefly', 'Hush', 'Once More With Feeling' or 'Dr Horrible'. He is a god.)