Many Masks

A quick note to detail the cool presents I got for my birthday/Christmas this year.

Birthday

• Fairyland Brownies from CCP (quite tasty!)
• An Optimus Prime bobblehead from mithras 
• A $75 Best Buy gift card from garchangel and greebotrill 
• A DVD of the new Star Trek movie from my mom
• The Welcome to the Jungle Dresden Files graphic novel, also from my mom
• And $50 in cash from my grandmom-in-law

Christmas

• Flip MinoHD from CCP
• Gateway LY3103u Netbook from garchangel and greebotrill 
• And another $100 in cash from my grandmom-in-law (which went toward a copy of Windows 7 for the netbook)

Note: As people comment here and in other places, I plan to update this with footnotes providing citations for various points (for and against). Because I love playing with Sherlockian research, even if I'm not that awesome at it.

To preface this, I have been a Sherlock Holmes fan for twenty-five years, since my father gave me a water-stained and dog-eared copy of the "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," containing the first twelve stories of the canon. I have read everything by Doyle, probably read an additional two dozen pastiches, listened to close to a hundred audiobook and radio versions, and watched a variety of television and movie renditions of the master detective. While I by no means consider myself a Sherlockian scholar, Holmes is certainly my first and most persistent fandom.

It has been with equal parts excitement and trepidation that I've been awaiting the Guy Ritchie vision of Sherlock Holmes. I planned to see it at a midnight showing on my birthday (because that would have just been awesome), but it turns out that the nearest theater to where we were in Tennessee was well over an hour away. So I waited until Sunday, when we got back. I had a terrible cold, and didn't want to go out -- until David asked if I wanted to go see the Sherlock Holmes movie.

Because that's different, you see.

Interestingly (and to a great extent, flatteringly), a number of my friends have been waiting on my opinion of the film before going to see it themselves. They know of my obsession fanaticism interest in all versions of Holmes, and since I gave my brief review on Twitter, a number of people have contacted me asking for a more detailed review.

If, however, you just want the short version, here it is: I thought it was a very fun and enjoyable update to Sherlock Holmes that keeps to the core of the canon, although casual audiences might not realize that.

( More detailed thoughts (minor spoilers) )

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

Due to work and the holidays, this evening is the first chance I’ve had to sit and even think about Whitechapel, and I’m not likely to get much more time until around Christmas. My options are to try and crank out a shitty episode, or push it back a week, and I’d rather do it right. So, in order to keep my life somewhat sane, I’m going to push back episode 10 to next Wednesday, December 30th.

Before I start my latest installment of "Head to Keyboard," I want to tell you a quick story.

A Quick Story

A while back, I made some comments on Facebook and Twitter agreeing with a writer who doesn't want people to give him their manuscripts to critique. I got some pushback from a couple of my peers saying that they would rather give advice to struggling writers, as a way of paying it forward. I was resistant to this, and I hid behind the old chestnut that there really isn't anything new to say on the subject of writing advice, especially since just about any "rule" I could lay down can be broken to great success.[1]

After a lot of reflection, the real reason is that I didn't really consider myself all that advanced of a writer that I could dole out advice with any authority. It wasn't that I thought I wasn't good, but rather that I wasn't good enough to have my advice be actually useful. In reading Chuck Wendig's "Advice You Should Probably Ignore" posts, I realized that sharing my own experiences as a writer could be beneficial in its own way, in much the same way as the early episodes of Mur Lafferty's "I Should Be Writing." I've been doing a lot of that through my episode post-mortems on Whitechapel, but I'll try to do more generalized revelations here.

For the children, you understand.

( Read more... )

Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

Quick note before I dive in: yes, there isn’t any post-mortem for episode 8. I was hella busy that week preparing for a LARP event, and I thought I could catch up on that during the Q&A that got canceled. If someone really has a question about the writing process for episode 8, I’ll answer it in the comments, but otherwise I’ll just dive into episode 9 and move forward.

Author’s Commentary

Because of the previously-mentioned LARP event, I only did a couple hundred words on Saturday, and really didn’t have a chance to write a full draft at all until Sunday night. Worse, I really had no idea what was going to happen (aside from laying the tracks to the next plot point). To top it all off, I had a tie vote in the poll. So I did a lot of hasty and heavy writing and rewriting on really short notice. And yet, I’m really pleased with how it turned out. Such is the creative process.

( Read the rest of this entry » )