WritingMadeHard

I met James Doohan twice. I found him delightful. That and having grown up with him on my TV makes me miss him as I would a friend. James Doohan (Scotty) died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., homewith his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and long time friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumoniaand Alzheimer's disease, he said. I still miss DeForest Kelley, Bones, who was the first of the original Enterprise Crew to depart for destinations unknown. I hope they both fare well.

Recently took in the Ray Stevens show at Branson, MO. All I can say about that is that it was terrific! I thoroughly enjoyed it. On the other hand, I also recently saw the new Fantastic Four movie. What Can I say about that? Well, it was entertaining. So was the original one, the one made by Roger Corman for $1,000,000. The new one had fancier costumes, but it cost about 100 times as much as the Roger Corman movie and it was not 100 times better. It looked better because all that money buys a lot of production values, but they changed the origin story a lot--okay, they had to update it to be believable and this blog is about writing--but they made changes merely for political correctness and that is unacceptable! As an example, everyone who reads Marvel comics knows that they have black people, hispanic people, Asain americans and Asian Asians in them. Everyone also knows that for the last 45 years, Alicia Masters has not been black. In this movie she is black, and the only reason I can think of is because the producers decided they needed a black person in the movie. If that is the case, they should have put in someone who has always been black and not "made" a black person. If they had changed a hispanic or asian person to a black, I think there would have been complaints. (other than mine) As a writer, I appreciate the need to make stories realistic, especially when they are fantastic to begin with, but this was a cheap and lazy way out. If the writer wanted to write a black person into the story, or deal with blacks or any other group on any level, that would have been okay with me, but to take a character who is not black and "make" her black just to pander to a certain audience is simply avoiding the work of writing it correctly.

By the way, I'll be having an Author's Day at the Whiskey Creek Press Reader's Group on July 25. Join me, I'll be there all day. Just click on this link http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WCPreaders/join
or cut and past it into your browser to join the group and visit with me online. I'll be giving away books and other prizes. Come on, it'll be fun!

I guess I'm showing my age, but I found the new War of the Worlds way too loud! Maybe it was just the theater I was in. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. This blog is about writing the hard way which is the way I seem to do most things. I wondered about how the writer/producer/director of War of the Worlds would handle the fact that when the book was written, many people took it for granted that Mars was inhabited--that is one reason they accepted the premise that Mars had attacked Earth. However, today, most people take it for granted that Mars is not inhabited...so how would they respond to being attacked by beings from that Planet? This was something that had to be addressed in the film or people would find it totally unbelievable. I thought and studied and thought some more trying to figure out ways to address this problem. Finally I decided to wait and see how the writer of the film handled it. As usual, I worked myself into a dither over nothing. Literally. The screenwriter chose simply not to handle it at all. There is no mention of Mars in the film or where the ivaders came from. A marvelous solution. And a simple one. The special effects were terrific and believable. I heard one critic say that he found it impossible to accept Tom Cruise as Everyman. What a totally idotic thing to say. Here the guy is watching a movie that shows aliens invading and literally destroying the entire civilization of a planet. He can believe that, but he can't believe the actor playing a father!!! But that is par for critics. They tend to not understand scifi and so feel the need to find something wrong with them so they have an excuse for not understanding them. The fact is they simply don't pay attention and so have little idea what is going on in film unless it is a slow-moving gabfest that they can ignore for five or ten minutes at a time while they are taking notes and talking with friends without missing any of the plot. I recommend War of the Worlds, even though I loved the Original. They are apples and oranges. Different but both good.