WritingMadeHard

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!