Pace Yourself, Connor: Or, Cross-Novelistic Similarities (and fight scenes)

Using a bit of crude math off the top of my head, I discovered a curious thing today. I have been working on Faceless for approximately three months (I began it not long after the first of the year). It is almost fifty pages long.

The writing of Kiriana took me just a little under two years. It is approximately four hundred pages long.

The ghost of John Saxon spurring me on, I did a little calculating. Multiply three months (Faceless) by eight, and you get 24 months, or two years (Kiriana). Multiply fifty pages (Faceless) by eight, and you get 400 (Kiriana!).

I guess just a hair over sixteen pages a month about does it for me. :D Not that I wouldn't mind writing faster...now that I know this, it's a statistic just waiting to be beat, don't you think? I mean, come on, twenty pages a month? Not really beyond my grasp if I set myself to it.

I have had in mind for a little while now a fight scene (Faceless-related) that I would guess most of Hollywood would not like. Without revealing too much, here's why: I want this scene to emulate physical realities pretty closely. You see, at least to my fairly limited and theoretical knowledge of combat, even movies like The Dark Knight and The Bourne Ultimatum that profess to be "gritty" and "realistic" and "bone-crunching" don't really show you what a fight between even trained professionals would probably look like. First of all, to my knowledge, most punches don't sound like thwump-thwump-thwump, whizz, ker-thwack! Not only do most filmmakers add in punch-noises, which probably aren't really punch-noises, they also add in whizzing air, as if every punch were supersonic or something. Well, maybe in the Matrix they're supposed to be. You free your mind and suddenly Mach 3 kicks are within your capabilities. Not to mention having your back break concrete walls, instead of the other way around. But anyway. It's charming and all to have the hero be punched in the face, shot in the stomach, kneed in the groin, speared in the foot, gored in the shoulder, thrown from a cliff, and have his head repeatedly concussed against a brick wall, and then spit out the old tooth, wipe his mouth, get a determined expression, and somehow destroy the villain with ONE kick. But in real life even the toughest hero would probably just sink down and bleed to death. And then the "minor" punches--like the kind that would break my rib or yours--just make the hero take a step back, which is probably necessary anyway to maintain the choreographed beat of the fight.

I'm not averse to these kind of fights on all levels. In fact they're pretty interesting to watch, though at some point they can all begin to look alike (as the chorus goes haia-ho, haia-ho, hai-a! in the background). Also, I'm writing a book, not making a movie. Even so, I have taken a fancy to wondering what would happen if an actual person in the real world, say, had a bottle smashed over his head or got kicked really hard in the stomach by a chap who knew his way around fighting. I've gotten it into my head, for one reason or another, that fighting is hard, and usually makes you sweat, and bleed, and tire out quickly. That it can take eight or more shots to kill someone, and that this actually applies to villains as well as heroes. That, in a situation of more or less equal training and conditioning, a man will probably beat a woman in a straight fight. That the participants of a fight aren't thinking about being cool, but about not waking up in a morgue the next morning.

Keanu Reeves, Angelina Jolie, and Wesley Snipes will probably faint in horror if they ever read it, but that's okay. I'll just direct them to Kiriana, which does have a level of super-combat in it.
:-D



For what it's worth, I actually enjoy this scene. But it's also ridiculously unrealistic, and includes things like stopping a falchion with one's bare hands. ;-)

Oh, and at the end of the week I will be trotting off to Texico to visit the bro, which rhymes, at least sometimes. :D I am very much looking forward to it, and would appreciate your prayers for a bonny, convivial, turbulence-free flight.

Lithesome Protagonists and Goggling Extras

Hello, everyone! Sorry for not having updated in a rather long time, but I haven't been able to either think of or work up the gumption for a suitable post. I suppose I'll just make this one broad of topic and treat on some of the various happenings of mea vita. :-)

I've found miles of walking trails that can be walked to from my house. My longest hike so far has been about 3 hours and I haven't exhausted any trail system yet. Despite the signs warning of cougars and rattlesnakes, I have so far only seen a bucketload of rabbits, a few squirrels, a bunch of raptors that might be golden eagles (though I wouldn't know the first thing about bird identification of that precision) and a positive ubiquity of fuzzy caterpillars. I'd like to think the cougars wouldn't dare mess with me, but I suspect they're just aloof and shy by nature like any predatory animal. ;-) My three hour hike, by the way, thanked me for my pains with a ripping good case of sunburn that makes me look a bit like a roasted beet.

I watched the movie Godzilla yesterday: the 1998 Roland Emmerich remake. I shall be sure to review it on Tolle, as soon as revitalize the bally thing (sorry David!), but I'll make some comments on it here as well, just for fun. :D

Godzilla him- (or is it her?) self looks like a dork. If you've ever imagined a 500 ft. iguana with skinny legs and Stegosaurus plates, a sort of upside-down rectangular snout, and the intermittent-only-when-it's-convenient-for-Roland-Emmerich ability to breath fire, then you may have imagined something extremely similar to the nuclear lizard. The plot is so basic I may be able to sum it up in one sentence. Let's see: French nuclear tests in the French Polynesian Islands mutate a hitherto undiscovered dinosaur into a vast and virtually impregnable monster which swims around destroying fishing boats in search of its coveted food, and eventually ends up in New York, where it whallops the crap out of the Big Apple, performs a broad series of improbable actions which touch the lives of flat and silly characters, and lays about a billion young in Madison Square Garden.

Matthew Broderick takes about fifteen steps down from his hilarious role as Ferris Bueler to portray Niko Satopolos, or something like that, a former anti-nuclear activist now trying to effect "real change" by working on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission studying the effect of radiation on existing species. Somehow the filmmakers have managed to invent a job position perfectly suited to studying mutant monsters. Yeah.... Anyway, this cove exists primarily to chew up and spit out improbable pronouncements like "we're looking an incipient creature. The dawn of a new species. The first of its kind." Woo-hoo. His egregious ex-girlfriend, who becomes his current-girlfriend by the end of the film, is blond and shows it. After stupidly, predictably stealing a VHS tape from the military labelled TOP SECRET in order to get a one-up on her snotty boss and prove she can be a real reporter, she makes Broderick mad because her actions have ended up in getting him kicked off the team, because everyone thinks he leaked the information. Duh! She then performs one of the most fake sobbing sessions I've ever seen, one that might make Mel Gibson into the greatest tragedian of all time.

Roger Ebert quite sensibly pointed out some, er, aberrations between the laws of physics and the actual behavior of Godzilla. I'd like to point some out too, which may overlap with his list.

1. How does it remain underwater for hours without gills?
   
2. How do suspension cables on a bridge trap it in place when it can literally blast Godzilla-sized holes in steel skyscrapers and crush tanks like paper cups?
   
3. It can breathe fire in such a way as to blow up three or four cars at a time. The creature is also smart enough to evade and then lay a trap for a flight of three attack helicopters and lead a torpedo back toward the submarine that fired it. Nevertheless, when it has a carload of main characters trapped in a tunnel, it never even occurs to it to simply roast and incinerate the whole shebang and leave all four main characters as barbecued ash. It also never occurs to it to use this fire-breathing capacity against the military, even though this would probably be four times more effective than just stomping.
   
4. In one of the most improbable actions scenes in the film, why does it hold a flippin' taxi in its mouth for five minutes and give Broderick enough time to electrocute its mouth? It would be as easy as pie for a creature of that size to just EAT the taxi. Presumably a nuclear digestive system could take care of the metal parts--or maybe that's how it would die. I don't know, just don't hold it there like a dork because it has main characters inside!

Finally we must turn to the question of the Iuvenes Godzillae, the terrifying and monstrous Godzilla Juvenile Brigade! Now, Godzilla is big, but unless it had a womb the size of Central Park, I don't see how it could have laid several hundred 8-foot tall eggs in small clusters all around the bottom level of Madison Square Garden. Be that as it may, the movie tells us it did. Now, I fully realize that many animal babies are born far less dependent than any human baby, but nevertheless, gimme a break. The Godzilla-lets are 9 feet tall, agile, intelligent, buffed, and fully ready and capable to ingest a human at one minute old. It was hilariously obvious that this scene was copied by rote from the Velociraptor set-pieces in the two Jurassic Park films made prior to Godzilla. We have a Iuvenus Godzillus tap a door with its forehead in exploratory fashion, which swings out a bit and then swings back to bump it in the forehead; now convinced of the door's facility at swinging open, the beast gives it a hearty shove and stalks into the room. I happen to have seen the first Jurassic Park film a number of times, and I can assure you that when Timmy and Lex run into the kitchen toward the end of the film, one of the velociraptors does the exact same thing. There's even a scene of one plastering its face against a small glass window in a door, going eye-to-eye with a main character, which unsurprisingly also happens in Jurassic Park a couple minutes after the above-mentioned scene. Broderick manages to trip up about a half dozen of these creatures with basketballs and Jawbreaker candies, which is kind of funny in its own right.

But here's the deal. Something that permeated the whole film. When a monster wants to eat an extra, its physical prowess is in top form. Its bites have consistent and lethal accuracy. Its leaps are fantastically high, its intelligence works in some kind of predatorial hyper-mode that cancels out every attempt of human ingenuity to avoid being eaten. Come to think of it, though, it just as often poses for the camera in front of the extra while that extra goggles at it in impotent horror, and THEN it goes in for the kill. But when a monster wants to eat a protagonist, it is suddenly all bark and no bite. Its appearance of savagery and hunting capability trebles, but its actual success rate falls to about .0001%. As mentioned above, Godzilla takes about three minutes trying to decide whether to crunch a cab full of main characters when it had no compunction about chomping down on a HELICOPTER hard enough to make it explode earlier in the film. As for the juveniles, if they want to kill an expendable French dude (the French secret service is involved in this film, don't ask), they just bust through a door, slam into him, and start feasting. If they want to kill Matthew Broderick, he just can just go "whoah!" and kind of suck in his stomach, and their jaws will clamp shut on the empty air where his acrobatic navel was a millisecond before. These characters literally dart through crowds of these monsters, supposedly crowding them together in such confusion that they can't really be bitten. But even if these 'little' guys weren't pack-hunters by nature it doesn't take that much effort to just rip somebody's arm off when you're nine feet of sauropod ferocity.

Well. I had fun with that. There are other things I could mention about the film, but I'll leave it be for now. :P

I have some cool things coming up. In just a couple weeks I'll be off to Texas to visit Robert in his natural habitat. :-P A few days after that, David will be coming down here to visit. About a month after that, I'll probably be visiting the Deckers. Roughly two weeks after that, I'll be taking a summer class at Hillsdale. A month after that, I'll be in Italy. A month after that, I'll be back at Hillsdale for freshman year. Yipes! :D

Cheerio, peeps!

~Connor

Woot!

After the Long Wait, so long that I had a good while since forgotten to even worry about it, I discovered today that I'm a National Merit Finalist. Sweet!

I also translated a small bit of the Domesday Book today, which was pretty cool for historical and nerdy value, but which intrinsically was actually quite boring. "This property had blah-de-blah ploughs, so many villeins, and their woodland was such and such. Oh, and then this property had blah-de-blah ploughs..." And so on for about five paragraphs. Tomorrow I'm starting on Pope Urban II's speech that sparked the First Crusade, though, so that ought to be more interesting.

Oh, yeah, and I finished Kiriana. :D 418 pages, although editing may either lengthen or shrink it slightly (depending on whether winnowing the chaff or patching the gaps ultimately wins out).