Wednesday in October means we get TOY STORY OF TERROR! Seriously guys, I'm excited for this Halloween special. I love all things Pixar and can't wait to see it. Here's a trailer for you, and let me know what you think after you watch it tonight. All I gotta say is, it has to "out do" Charlie Brown. And I think we could all use a little humor given how our government is completely dysfunctional and is ruining our lives. Have a great day and remember, ghosts aren't real. Woody said it, so it must be true.
Are you insecure about meeting new people? I know I am. And that's a detriment for those of us that actually want people to read our books because marketing is all in the hands of the author these days. Maybe it all comes out of a fear of rejection. This Dating Tip from Ken, I think, is applicable to most situations, including those we face as a writer. I know I take his advice to heart. It's so simple. Know yourself. Be Yourself. Who knew?
Remember. Solid. That is the key. Thank you, Ken :).
I'll be on a blogging break until Monday. My friend Tomeka is flying in from Detroit, and my friend James from Idaho is driving into town too. We're all going to go see Prometheus at the IMAX, I'll show them the KIA Optima (which is most likely the next car I'm buying), and probably eat really good food.
If only all stories, and all lives were this perfect. UP was a great film because of the age of its characters. Not only that though, it touched on issues of Ellie not being able to have a child, loneliness, and how two people can be so perfect for each other right from the very start. Whatever writers at Pixar came up with this story are absolutely brilliant. It's really the first movie I ever went to with my father where he said afterward, "I really liked this movie."
This is the octogenarian story that stole my heart.
I saw 1000 Ways to Die and stopped to watch. A man was impersonating a superhero, and he had the costume complete with cape. He saw some delinquents on top of a building smoking illegal drugs, and decided to interfere. He pushed one of the kids and the kids began to approach him. Outnumbered, he backed up. However, he tripped over his own cape and fell off the side of the building, landing in such a way that his ribs ripped his heart open.
I think any of us that write can understand how we sometimes include unnecessary details in our stories that really just gum up everything and basically, almost kill it. I've had to look long and hard at questions brought up by beta-readers and ask myself, "Is this a cape? Does this thing have any purpose? Or is it just something that's gonna drag me into a jet engine."
As an aside note, encouraged by feedback I got on my picture of Kolin that I posted a week or so ago, I decided to draw my protagonist, Jordan. This is 100% original artwork. I did it with Prismacolor coloring pencil on illustration board. Then I scanned in the original on my scanner and enhanced all of the colors, added effects, and redid problematic areas using Adobe Photoshop Elements. Please be kind, I am not a professional artist. I wanted to make sure that Jordan looks 17 and not how a "high school student played by 27-year-olds" looks (Think GLEE, SMALLVILLE, etc.). I'm happy with the result. Have a great Monday.
In the opening scenes of Pixar's Wall-E, the robot returns home from a full day of garbage cleanup with a little pile of treasures to add to his extensive collection. Carefully, Wall-E puts each item in its place, but a spork stumps him. Does it go with the spoons, or with the forks? He's never seen it before, so it will take some investigation to determine exactly what it is. This type of questioning is at the root of good science.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, author, speaker, and professor says:
"In contemporary America, the notion that a higher intelligence is the single answer to all enigmas has been enjoying a resurgence. This present-day version of "God of the Gaps" goes by a fresh name: 'intelligent design.' The term suggests that some entity, endowed with a mental capacity far greater than the human mind can muster, created or enabled all the things in the physical world that we cannot explain through scientific methods.
But why confine ourselves to things too wondrous or intricate for us to understand, whose existence and attributes we then credit to a superintelligence? Instead, why not tally all those things whose design is so clunky, goofy, impractical, or unworkable that they reflect the absence of intelligence?
Take the human form. We eat, drink, and breathe through the same hole in the head, and so, despite Henry J. Heimlich's eponymous maneuver, choking is the fourth leading cause of 'unintentional injury death' in the United States. How about drowning? Water covers almost three-quarters of Earth's surface, yet we are land creatures--submerge your head for just a few minutes, and you die.
How about the silent killers? High blood pressure, colon cancer, and diabetes? It's possible not to know you're afflicted until your coroner tells you so. Wouldn't it be nice if we had built-in biogauges to warn us of such dangers well in advance? Even cheap cars, after all, have engine gauges.
Stupid design could fuel a movement unto itself. It may not be nature's default, but it's ubiquitous. Yet people seem to enjoy thinking that our bodies, our minds, and even our universe represent pinnacles of form and reason. Maybe it's a good antidepressant to think so. But it's not science--not now, not in the past, not ever.
Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem. Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes. We know when and where they start. We know what drives them. We know what mitigates their destructive power. The only people who still call hurricanes "acts of God" are the people who write insurance forms."
As a person that does not believe in intelligent design, I want to explain myself. I'm not against the people who do. But people who believe in intelligent design are trying to put this into the classrooms to teach children ideas that do not stand up to scientific questioning, and that's wrong. Keep it in your Sunday schools. Science has never knocked on the doors and insisted that evolution be taught alongside whatever it is that you teach. So why then is religion knocking on the doors of the science classrooms and trying to get their agenda passed?
Yesterday I got reviewed by Ben at the book blog, Dead End Follies. Please go read his review of SLIPSTREAM if you are so inclined (and introduce yourself to very intelligent young man). I will see you on Monday for my "H" post in the A to Z challenge.
In that crazy moment when you feel struck by a tsunami of rewrites (like when you get fifty pages of corrections from a beta-reader that means months of edits--I love you Jeff and Donna >,<)...
And you feel that you've been swept out to sea...
by your own Attention Deficit Disorder (ummm A.D.D. is bad for a writer...) OH SHINY OBJECT...I shall write two hundred pages about shinies and then my W.I.P. will only be 150,000 words and no one will mind that, right? Right?
Sorry...
for a moment I got taken over by Briane Pagel who writes 200,000 word blog posts...
Back to my Pixar-infused narrative... Ahem...
And you feel that you've been swept out to sea
as if the whole world has turned against you.
And the most obvious solutions in your writing escape you, and you look like an idiot...
Remember the words of Dory the fish
And keep in mind that if, while you're singing this, someone you meet ever says to you these words:
"You are my Nemo".
That you should stop typing and go with them. Because these words mean that they would search
every inch of the world just to find you.
When you get back, all the crap your betas gave you will still be sitting there in the pile of dung that used to be your manuscript. It's all good. Sometimes when stuck, all it takes
is to make the best of a situation. Criticism gives you the freedom to explore areas that you hadn't. Like maybe your story... in case you wrote two-hundred pages about hockey games. And when it's our writing, grab that shovel with both hands, apply spit, and get to shoveling. Writing is hard. George R.R. Martin said so. Hence, it must be true. Have a great Friday.
I'm excited. My first book is already on sale on Amazon and other websites. But I have apprehensions, and I thought about Ken and his note to the other toys on Toy Story 3. At how they probably don't understand him (as colorful and wonderful as he is).
When in your excitement, you write something
But the people that read it have gotten
the wrong impression of who you are as a person.
You are just being you. You try
to convey it through your blog.
But might be sorely misunderstood by those
who have never seen your kind before.
So...I hope this doesn't happen. My story is about a boy. He's seventeen. He's cute. He's smart. He's athletic. He has six pack abs, blond hair, and blue eyes. But unlike random chance, there are reasons for all of these things. But all is not perfect for him.
He does a lot of hard drugs. He makes awful choices.
He is immature, self-centered, but lonely.
He's gay, but it's not something he admits right away.
He's bright and that sometimes makes him smug.
He's proud to the point of it being a vice.
He falls for a very bad boy.
He loses his virginity; it's not a lovely experience for him.
But he helps broken people.
He redeems them. He fixes things.
And in so doing, he learns to understand who he is.
And maybe, he can learn to fix himself.
The world of SLIPSTREAM is dark and evil.
I'm excited for you to read it. But I'm also afraid. Please don't misunderstand who I am. SLIPSTREAM is not a book written for Catholic nuns. Senator Rick Santorum would hate my book. Michelle Bachmann would decry it.
No matter what our differences are, I think you are wonderful. Thank you, from this "Ken" who hopes you are on the same page as me. But even if you aren't, I appreciate you anyway.
This post is taken from a Tumblr called Long Live Lemons which is no longer around.
"The car who has her headlights as her eyes from Cars 2.
I drew her the way I see her in my mind - beautiful; like all the of the lemons. I even gave her a name, Claudette.
One of the lessons of Cars 2 can be interpreted [as] bullying is a bad thing. The movie gives us the examples of cars from an era of which they just couldn’t catch a break; this is true. The movie shows these characters as what we’re supposed to see as mature men...so it leaves us to believe that their bullying happened the most when they were younger.
As the years passed and they progressed into the adults they are today, they finally broke down...and they took it to drastic measures.
One of my signature things in the Cars fandom is drawing the characters the way they want to be seen. I don’t draw the lemons with rust and angry faces. At the same time, I don’t draw them as incredibly happy cars as well. Here we have a lemon because her eyes weren’t built the way the other cars were built. I guess we should interpret this as a disability. At least, that’s the way I write it in my fan fiction. I didn’t draw her rusty and crazy like the movie portrayed her to be. I drew her casually.
The thing about Cars is that when you change the way they look, you’re changing their character. Each character is made to look a certain way. If people did more research and looked up the meanings of colors, one would find that the color of their paint jobs actually means something that has to do with their personality (besides the tuners and modified cars). I can see how some would think that I change the characters when I draw them the way I do. I agree, I do change their character. I make them more confident, but they’re still the same character.
If you were someone who didn’t feel so great about himself, you would tend to wear clothes that match your mood; your own looks will mimic your own feelings. However, that one day you smile and your clothing and appearance matches your attitude now, does that mean you’ve changed your character? No, it doesn’t. Confidence does not equal a personality change and I say that because people think that moods are the same as personalities. Personalities are permanent while moods are not, no matter how permanent they seem. If you’re feeling sad one day, even if you’re entire day feels like it’s been sad, there was a change in your mood at some point in the day, even if it were for a split second.
Not everyone can be the super cool, super agent car
I think most people don’t sit there and take the time to analyze the Cars movies. They just see that it doesn’t work and they don’t give it the chance they deserve. There’s a lot to pull from both of them. Yes, I said both of them.
You know what else doesn’t work? Talking toys, fish, rats, and so on. None of it works because none of it is real. This, my friends, is the beauty of fiction. To be able to be pulled into a world that is crazy; that is completely insane. That’s why it’s so fun."
I have nothing to add to this.
I agree totally.
Learn from Cars.
Celebrate you.
Write fiction.
Buy the book that critics say is a "mind-blowing sci-fi read from start to end." $4.99 from Amazon now. Begin your journey today.
This is our first sort of fairytale,” John Lasseter told an eager crowd on the of Disney’s D23 Expo in Anaheim, California, “This is our first period piece. This is our first female main character. This is Brave.” The first clip showcased featured the lead, Merida (Kelly Macdonald) riding on her giant horse through the forest, shooting down targets hanging from the trees with her bow and arrow. The horse stops short of a log, throwing her into the mud. In anger, she throws a clod of mud at the horse’s nose, and he snorts it back to his face. She approaches him, angrily, but then kisses his muzzle.
Lasseter was joined on stage by the film’s director, Mark Andrews (clad in a kilt) and producer, Katherine Sarafian. They pointed out that they had two different research trips to Scotland to get everything down.
“We’re inspired by all the stories that are already there,” Andrews told ComingSoon.net backstage after the presentation, “There are stories about every landscape and every tree and every rock. It was inspiring to try and fuse that idea of how it connects us all.”
Sarafian told the crowd that Scotland’s phenomena of blue bog gas, called Wil-o’-the-wisp, will feature prominently in the story. The wisps have the power to “change your fate”, and lead Merida to the cottage of a witch. Seeing this as an opportunity to get away from being married, she insists the witch cast a spell. Naturally, everything goes wrong and the spell starts a chain of events that brings the highlands closer to war.
Concept art for the witch in BRAVE
Macdonald and fellow voice talent Kevin McKidd then took to the stage. McKidd pulls double duty in the film, voicing both Lord. MacGuffin and his incomprehensible son, Young MacGuffin.
“He’s a lovely guy and his heart is in the right place,” McKidd told us, “but no one can work out what he’s saying because he has a strong Scottish accent.”
The next clip featured King Fergus (Billy Connolly), who has called Merida’s suitors together to compete in a game of her choosing, the winner will receive her hand in marriage.
“[Merida] is reeling against her mother,” Macdonald said backstage, “She doesn’t want a suitor. She’s quite happy and wants to live her life, but her mother is trying to create this perfect princess. It’s a bit of their battle and their reconnection.”
Concept Art for Queen Elinor
“Merida sees an opportunity here,” Andrews told the audience in reference to the clip, “Do you know what game she picks?”
To which the crowd shouted back, “Archery!”
Unfinished, the scene played with some parts featured only as animatics and others roughly rendered. Most of the parts with Merida in them played beautifully. As the suitors shoot their arrows, Merida and King Fergus laugh about their ineptitude.
First is Macguffin. He timidly shoots his arrow and barely hits the target. Next is the Gene Simmons-esque son of Lord Macintosh, who fares better than Macguffin but misses the bullseye. He angrily tosses his bow into the crowd, where a young girl shouts “I caught it! Yay!” Finally, the aptly named young Dingwall goes next, barely enough brains in him to knock the bow. King Fergus angrily shouts at him to get on with him, and the spooked by looses the arrow and miraculously gets the bullseye.
Enraged, Merida appears on the field and shouts that she will be competing for her own hand. As she gets a perfect bullseye in the first target, her mother screams at her to get stop. Merida ignores her, and goes to the second one. At Dingwall’s, she not only splits the arrow, but her arrow cuts all the way through to the scaffolding of the target. Merida then turns to face her furious mother and the clip ends.
“We have our own take on Scottish lore,” Sarafian said of the overall tone of Brave, “It’s really Pixar lore, but it’s set in Scotland and its inspired by Scottish storytelling and designed to be a story that’s perfectly set in that landscape.”
Brave hits theaters on June 22, 2012, right after Prometheus :)) Oh summer...how I love thee.
