Here are a couple of real gems from an essay I graded today, which was a crusade against fast food: “If you eat out someone everyday, you can lose your relationship.”“Everyone must eat their homes.” Obviously, from a essay near the bottom of the grading pile, but still… amusing.
Month: December 2006
Ogallala Finished
Well, except the basic proofread that it’ll need before I send it out. It’s another novelette, at 9,350 words. I was hoping to make the story a shorter one, but of course, big ideas and big characters demand a big story, I guess. I’ll have to work something else up, though, for Tesseracts. Right now, I’m looking at “Realer” and “The Wager” as the next best possilibities (since I think “Professor Whitney’s Resignation” will take too long to work up, and “The Crystal Methuselah” might be too edgy for this market), but each story is going to take at least …
It’s Snowing, It’s Snowing!
It was the first big dump of snow this winter, today, at least in Bucheon. I didn’t see much snow in Seoul, though. Lime wrote some kind of exam. Apparently every intern in half of Seoul, Incheon, Bucheon, etc. was in the same place, writing the same test. We met for coffee and… Then we had some pho after. It comes with hot Jasmine tea. There’s a good little pho place in Hongik, where we sometimes go. I hope she won’t mind me posting this pic, as it’s blurry. But she might. Then we wandered around, and finally had dinner …
The Ongoing Ogallala Rewrite
For those following the saga of the Ogallala rewrite — which means anyone reading this blog, as 50% of my recent posts are on the subject (here’s the most recent one) — I’ve just hit 6479 words, which, when we count editing for wordiness may be more like 6300 words. That leaves me with anywhere between 700-1200 words to wrap things up, which is encouraging. I’ve rather radically transformed the family drama part of the story, though in a way that makes it more conventional, more related to the world the characters are living in, more poignant and more frustrating …
Oliver Stone’s Alexander
I do wish Oliver Stone would do things like Natural Born Killers, Platoon… things that he can do. I’m saddened by the fact that nobody told him a film like Alexander was beyond his reach. It turns out to have been, unquestionably so. Oh, wait… the grandiosity, the betrayal by silence of those surrounding him… I get it, dude. Alexander is a kind of mirror reflection of Stone himself. This movie is a self-portrait. Trying to conquer the world with his unique vision. Perhaps he believes the kind of rhetoric he puts in Alexander’s mouth about making an empire to …