Enough time has passed that The Terminator franchise can be hard rebooted. You start from the beginning with a new, young cast. You redo The Terminator only with a significantly bigger budget. And, if you really wanted to go crazy, you might could even use AI to use a “young” Ah-nuld to play the Terminator role again, only in a new, rebooted story.
But should you do this, you make a crucial change to the plot in an effort to surprise audiences — you use the multiverse concept to throw them for a loop. It could be the big secret of the reboot — that when the dude is sent back in time to save Sarah Connor — he doesn’t realize he’s been sent into a DIFFERENT TIMELINE.
How, exactly, this would work in what would be a new, open-ended franchise, I don’t know. But that’s why they pay Hollywood suits the big bucks.
Hollywood is so dumb. It is clear that technology has reached the point where it could simply license Harrison Ford’s image and then churn out Indian Jones movies like Bond movies without having to worry about recasting him or rebooting the franchise with someone like Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
The audience wants Harrison Ford, so why not give him to them?
There is a narrow window of opportunity, however. Soon enough, everyone will have the opportunity to generate their own personalized Indie movie in the comfort of their own home through a digital personal assistant like from the movie Her.
But the point remains — Hollywood is strangely timed about something that is clearly the future. In the future, every major franchise can live forever through AI generated movies.
The original script for The Blues Brothers was over 300 pages long. While I don’t quite have the problem that Dan Akroyd had with that project when it comes to length, I definitely have a problem.
In number of scenes, at least, the first act of this novel is going to equal the entire second act. This is bad structure. And, yet, I think what I’m going to do is just finish an “alpha” release of the third draft then take stock of things. I will have two options depending on how things work out.
If the novel is no more, than, say, 140,000 words, then I will just say damn the torpedoes’ full speed ahead and try to pitch what I have. If the final alpha release is closer to 160,000 words, I’m going to think seriously about splitting it in two and connect the two novels through a cliffhanger.
No matter what, I think I need to YET AGAIN try to begin work on a backup project — probably a scifi novel. I have a really good scifi take on pandemic fiction that I think I could probably knock out pretty quick because I have so much more experience about how to write a novel after years of struggle.
But I am really pleased with how this third draft is sorting itself out. The big issue is there are all these elements to the novel that simply can’t be “yadda yadda yadda’d” if I want to do it properly. Now that I know how to tell a story, I realize that writing a novel — at least for me — is a lot like trying to move a huge ship one way or another.
You can’t just turn on a dime. If you think up a really cool element of the story with a secondary POV character, you have to give that element some thought or otherwise people will feel cheated.
That’s why I have a huge first act at the moment. And, yet, I try to comfort myself by realizing that the first act of The Girl Who Played With Fire is just as enormous. All this goes back to the cold, hard fact that the point of writing a novel is to equally tell a good story and finish the Goddamn thing.
So as long as I serve up a great story to readers, I doubt the average person will get too worked up that it has an enormous first act. And, remember, the issue is there are a number of known unknowns. I just know scene number, not length. And I haven’t rewritten the rest of the novel that is already written from the second draft.
So, I’m going to buckle down and finish the third draft without much regard to some pretty basic issues. Once the alpha release is done, THEN I can make an executive decision as to what to do next.
On a structural basis, my novel is a lot like Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire in the sense that the Big Event doesn’t happen until the end / beginning of the first act. It took me forever to figure out the structure of that novel…until I learned it was actually the first half of a much bigger story. After that piece of information, its structure make a lot more sense.
But other than having The Big Event be the thing that pushes my heroine in the the Special World, otherwise, if I do my job right, the rest of the structure of the novel should be pretty conventional. At least, that’s my goal.
My big concern is that it takes soooo long for The Big Event to happen that people will grow board or annoyed. And, yet, there is so much drama — and sex — in the first act that I’m pretty confident that people will be so busy reading all the spicy scenes in the first act that they won’t even notice that that many thousand of words have gone by without, well, The Big Event happening.
My heroine looks, in general, like Corrie Yee in my mind as I write her.
I, in general, like what I’ve come up with. But, as I keep saying, all of this is being done in a near complete vacuum so, lulz, I have no idea what the fuck the audience will think of it — especially some of the more spicy elements. Some of what I’ve come up with is supposed to be serious, but because it’s not hateful and scary…I could see it be as rather….uhhh…comical.
But I can’t help who I am. I’m just not as dark and scary as Stieg Larsson in my writing.
I have no friends and no one likes me. As such, all I have when it comes to this novel is my gut. I just tell the story with Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire as a hazy, general frame of reference. I have — somehow — managed to flip the script on some of the…uhhh….darker…elements of the first novel in a way that reflects my personality.
Instead of dark and scary, I do the same thing but in a consensual way that furthers the plot. (IYKYK)
At least, that’s the general goal.
There is so much sex happening the first act that I sometimes worry that it may come across as the mystery-thriller version of Debby Does Dallas. And, yet, because all of this is happening in a vacuum….I just don’t know.
And things calm down dramatically on the sexxy time front during the rest of the novel, to the point that I kind of feel uneasy that I come out swinning hard in the first act then everything goes normal for the rest of the novel, leaving the audience a little let down.
Or not. Who knows. I really do like what I’ve managed to come up with. The story is a real page turner, even if I have no idea what the reaction of the audience will be to some of the more….controversial editorial decision on my part.
Ok. Things are rocking now with this third draft of my first novel. I’ve finally, finally, figured out some pretty basic elements of the novel that I can work with going forward. I’ve swapped a gender and changed the ethnicity of one character, but now I am closing in on the end of the first act.
The Big Event that ends the first act is growing even bigger and more dramatic by the moment. Let’s just say there my heroine has a hell of a New Year’s Eve 1994. And that’s just the event that kick starts the her push into the “special world.”
I now have THREE MEN interested in my heroine for different reasons and one of them I have to flesh out so there’s a point to him even being in the story to begin with. He serves a purpose in the first act, but I’m at a loss as to what he does for the rest of the novel.
I have a few options. One of them is he shows up every once in a while to serve a specific purpose AND his appearance in the last scene would give the story a lot of symmetry. Which allegedly, is a form of good storytelling. But the key thing is I have to keep my eye focused on what genre this novel is. If I’m not careful, this thing is going to be more just general fiction than a mystery-thriller.
It’s not my nature to go dark in my writing and I’m not really all that interested in *showing* bad things happening to my characters, so, I dunno. I guess I’m going to have to be really thoughtful in giving a lot of pagetime to the results of bad things happening.
Or something.
The general premise of the story is really, really good. I’m very pleased. But, then, of course, that could be the delusion that has been a the core of all of this talking. There have been a number of times when I’ve winced at some mistake I made because I’m doing all of this in a creative vacuum.
I continue to be concerned that just as I’m about to query this novel, there will be a perfect storm involving AI and The Fourth Turning that makes all my hard work over the last few years very, very moot. But I’m well on my way to actually writing a novel — a real novel that I can at least be content that I’ve finished.
It is clear to me that the first Hollywood genre to be totally “disrupted” by generative AI will be animated movies. As such, it will probably be produced by some plucky startup without a direct connection to the Hollywood system. But it will knock everyone’s socks off to the point that everyone will realize that Hollywood as we know it is about to be totally upended.
We have to prepare for the prospect that it will be the arts that will be the first to fall to generative AI. It will be Hollywood that may be so completely upended that there simply won’t be any human jobs left. And it could happen far, far quicker than any of us could possibly imagine.
I continue to believe that this particular clusterfuck will cause a massive resurgence in live theatre, from Broadway all the way down to local community theatre. People may even begin to give value to such a human-created experience to the point that instead of watch an personalized AI generated movie in the comfort of one’s home, people will go out of their way to see live theatre.
Or something. I can’t predict the future. But this particular scenario definitely at least seems possible. It definitely seems as though we’re zooming towards something akin to a “Petite Singularity” within about two years. Or, if you really wanted to get dark about it — we’ll have a perfect storm of The Fourth Turning in politics and the Petite Singularity in technology starting in late 2024, early 2025.
Last we heard of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, she was walking away from the Mr. & Mrs. Smith TV show that she was supposed to do with Donald Glover. She was also in the latest Indiana Jones movie (which I largely liked.) But other than that, she’s been pretty quiet.
She has such talent, it’s annoying that she’s decided to go radio silent for such an extended amount of time. The hope is, of course, that she’s hard at work at some really cool movie. I’d like to see her do an Annie Hall-like movie, but seen from a female POV. And have START in LA and END in NYC.
I think it would be amusing to have a Fleabag-like character chase after a guy she met in London. The culture shock of a Fleabag-like character living in LA then NYC would be a real hoot.
I still think she would be great to play Dr. Susan Calvin in an Amazon Prime limited series. She’s would be perfect for the role and the current mass popularity of AI would be a great hook for a bunch of stories about a “robot psychiatrist.”
Things are beginning to stabilize with the third draft of the novel. Though, I found myself talking about it today and I realized there was a huge plot element that I had not yet formalized and I felt rather insecure.
My heroine looks like Corrie Yee in my mind.
I *think* I have that fixed.
My fear is that the novel will be seen as a jumble of different genres to the point that it isn’t focused. And, yet, I also think my implementation of a variety of genres is interesting enough and seamless enough that there won’t be a problem with focus.
I hope.
I’ve decided to lean into a somewhat “supernatural” element to the novel that I think will make it really thought provoking. I am also flipping the script on some of the darker elements of Stieg Larsson’s stuff so while it may seem familiar to fans of his work, my specific interpretation of such behavior is totally different and not nearly as…problematic.
But the subject is so loaded that just using it as a plot point could cause some readers to either blanch or chuckle. But being a good enough writer that I can pull of such a risky move is why they pay me the big bucks, right?
I have *got* to lock down the first few scenes (or, even better yet, chapters) of this novel so I can start to progress into the second act. Things are getting much, much better and I’m just about to do just that — I am still on track to wrap up the third draft around April 1st, 2024.
But I have GOT to stop futzing with everything. It’s never going to be perfect. I have a great premise and if I won’t stop tinkering with it until it’s “perfect” the Fourth Turning could happen and I’ll be too busy dodging bullets or weaponized ICE agents to try to query the damn thing.
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