Balls and Walnuts
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Monthly Archives: April 2005
Sin City, yeah!
Karen and I went to see Sin City this afternoon. We left Jake behind, which turned out to be a good thing — way too violent for him. Almost way too violent for me. I didn’t do a Joe Bob Briggs-style amputation- or decapitation-count, but it was up there. Fortunately, none of it was particularly realistic.
Good stuff, however. I can’t think of a movie which captures the look and feel of a graphic novel quite as well as Sin City . . . The Crow comes close.
Not a great writing weekend. I’ve done a fair bit of critting for others, and a lot of thinking about my prologue. Lev has given me a lot to chew on. Leading with my villains has thrown more than a couple of people, so I may go back to an older version of the prologue where I opened with one of my protag, and quickly segued into my villains — first, clearly identifying them as such. That dumbs it down a bit, but clarity is paramount.
D
My Troll Lover
Sometimes I wish we lived in a world where you didn’t have to be Stephen King or Neil Gaiman to get a short story collection published. Shorts come out of me like nobody’s business. It took three days to write “My Troll Lover”. Would have been two, but last night I left it with a lame ending, and that had to get fixed. Spin the penultimate scene like so, add a new last scene, and voila. The result made me feel all gooey inside — a good kind of gooey.
“My Troll Lover” is a sober meditation on sexual identity in the postmodern adolescent demimonde. Here’s an excerpt:
Mitzi Gaines and the rest of the Spirit crowd had started in on me as soon as the Ghost was out the door.
“Troll tramp, troll tramp . . .â€
Yeah, on and on like that. Bitches. They kicked me off Varsity Cheer when I first began dating the Ghost. If he were Negro I could sue, Daddy said, but the law gave no protection to trans-species . . . relationships. And the way Daddy said that, I could almost hear it. You know what I’m talking about.
Troll tramp, troll tramp . . .
Proper girls don’t date trolls. We don’t touch them; we don’t kiss them; we certainly don’t allow them to rake their pointy triangular teeth through the frizz above our Holy of Holies.
Okay, so it’s really just a fluffy bit of mind candy about horny* kids. Fun to write, fun to read. I had to break away from The Brakan Correspondent because, honestly, my poor birdies are taking it in the tail right about now. I needed “My Troll Lover” to pull out of this funk.
Steamy troll-foo is up at the BBS, if you’re interested (Fantasy Challenge). Let me know what you think.