Long time reader of the site and member of the review teams for The Last Track, the Pollster is another year older today. Happy B-day!
My memories of you are rich and varied, and stretch back to our childhood.
I’ll build a leaf fort with you anytime, Pollster.
After processing the suggestions over the weekend, I implemented the editorial feedback to the first three chapters. This is proving a very good learning experience.
For starters, until Friday night, I was unstudied in the art of proofreading shorthand, the notations editors make to indicate changes. Usually when vetting my stuff, I insert the fix immediately above the affected word, sentence or passage. Proofreaders, though, flag an issue very discretely in place with a symbol, then link that symbol to details in the margins. In this way, it’s possible to keep the actual text–and the fix–in perspective, without overweighting either. My crude, brute force method swallows the whole page in green circles, arrows and scrawl.
Now the suggestion of leaving 1 inch of white space all the way around the page suddenly makes sense for reasons beside aesthetics. They use that margin. Imagine that. And there’s another lesson, too.
For all the markups, for all the suggestions, in the end, the manuscript is there. It can be tweaked in subtle ways, and would benefit from a completely virgin set of eyes, with no emotional investment, which I have requested. More on that when I hear back.
In the meantime, I’ll miss my chicken scratches.
Completely unrelated but so far this year site traffic is up substantially over last at this time, even after trouncing comment spambots by disabling pingbacks. Of the four years of this site’s operation, I’ve never spent less time trying to promote the place. Curious.
I will post more in the next day or so. Just a very quick note for now…
Rented 2 DVD’s this weekend, films that I skipped purposely in the theater, because they were better suited for an in home viewing. First up: Lady in the Water.
Admittedly, I am a M. Night Shyamalan admirer, one who wanted to like this movie, because his previous 4 films ranged between quite good and excellent, and I enjoyed each on a multiplex screen. Enough peers warned me off this flick, so I passed, and waited for the DVD. I watched it carefully, and will make only one observation. The real problem with this movie was the form; it needed to be a book. Interesting characters, a workable situation and a reasonable paced plot, Lady could have been a great read. A classic fairy tale, even. Some imagery plays well mentally, yet translate those same ideas for screen, and it falls short. Also, because the medium lacks the depth to bounce between a number of characters thoughts, complicated story arcs get lost, or dampened. Both compromises happened here. Chalk it to an extremely ambitious concept executed with the right intentions, but unfortunately in the wrong media.
Hollywoodland suffers from a different–and oh so similar–problem. This concept was the stuff of a made for television movie, twenty years too late. As a twelve-year-old, I might have liked this one as the Sunday Afternoon Million Dollar Movie. Alas, it surfaced in 2006, fifty years after George blew–or someone blew–his brains out across his bedroom wall. Ben Affleck did better than I expected, and Adrien Brody is a talent of note, but otherwise this could have been done for a lot less scratch, and for similar results. The storyline offered countless possible explanations for the former Superman’s death, yet very few reasons to care about the characters, why someone might want to kill him, or why he wanted to die.
Verdict: Lady, rentable; Hollywoodland, flushable.