Contests: Postcard Story and 3-Day Novel
November 18, 2009
Yesterday I revised a flash fiction for Geist’s postcard story contest — I don’t enter contests, typically, but I’ve always wanted to do the Geist postcard contest, and my friend Natalee Caple suggested that we both enter. Their deadline isn’t until January, but I sent my story off today anyway. I don’t know what she plans to enter or when.
Speaking of contests, this year my friend Ryan Fitzpatrick and I co-wrote a 3-day novel, another thing I’ve always wanted to try. The book we wrote, In Defense of My Father, Who Shot Me with a Crossbow Last Spring, turned out pretty good, if I do say so myself. For an unedited, three-day binge of writing. It will be fun to return to it later on in life and edit it into a decent shape. The book is written from the perspective of a young child whose father is — well, I’ll just throw an excerpt your way.
(Disclaimer: This is first-draft stuff)
I like action movies because even when the characters relax they relax by kicking apart walls and so there is never any part of the movie where nothing happens like in some movies where the bad guy does something bad and instead of kicking him through a wall the good guy just says that what the bad guy did was bad like nobody knew it was bad until the guy said so. Most movies are the same as other movies, but action movies are more imaginative, like if one guy gets kicked in the face the next guy will get his leg broken and then the third guy will get shot in the gut. And unlike other movies where people learn things about themselves, in action movies you learn things about the world. There’s a part in Under Siege where Stephen Seagal grabs hold of this guy and twists his neck, snapping it to kill him, which is something I didn’t know you could do before I saw the movie, so now I know that you have to be careful when you’re grabbing somebody by the neck when you’re wrestling or in a fight where you don’t want to kill the other person but just win the fight. I asked my Dad if you could really break a person’s neck that way. Dad said, “Well, I could,” and that he was going out to get us some ice cream.
Two days later, when he came back with the ice cream, I asked if it was time to take the movie back yet. He said it wasn’t due yet but when he checked his agenda he saw that he was free for the rest of the day so we might as well watch a new movie and so we ate ice cream as we walked to the movie store. My ice cream was an O’Henry cone which is my favourite because it’s like eating ice cream and a candy bar at the same time which is efficient. The store where we rent movies is a twenty minute walk away so it’s good exercise but also efficient because you’re getting a movie too and it’s good to be efficient as long as you don’t overdo things and can still enjoy life unlike people who get too wrapped up in efficiency or otherwise focused on their work and doing things the right way and forget about their lives outside of work like in Out for Justice where Seagal is so focused on killing Richie because he killed his partner that he doesn’t spend enough time with his wife and doesn’t have time to play ball with his kid but then later in the movie he realizes the importance of family and life outside work in the part just before Seagal’s family has to hide in the bathtub and Richie’s guys shoot up the house.
There weren’t any new movies that looked good because they don’t make many action movies anymore with guys like Seagal and Van Damme which is weird because they used to be in all the movies and they were in good shape so they probably aged well and could still kick someone if anybody asked them nicely. Dad and me have seen all the old movies at the movie store and didn’t want to re-watch a movie so we looked around the other sections of the store for something else to watch. There was a whole rack of movies like Harry Potter and Twilight and Dad asked if I wanted to watch one of those and I said no because they are stupid baby movies and he said good because he didn’t want to see them anyway, he was just being polite.
It’s hard to rent movies when you don’t want to watch a horror film because they’re too stupid and you don’t want watch a comedy film because most of them are too unrealistic and you don’t want to watch a stupid baby film which is almost every new movie so you can’t do much else except watch classics which are hard to watch because the women have way too much hair and it’s distracting. There are a lot of TV shows on DVD now too which is annoying because TV shows are already on TV and Dad says that if he wanted to watch TV he would just turn on the TV and not waste his money renting stuff that isn’t movies but now there are two whole racks of TV shows on DVD and not as many action movies with Jean-Claude Van Damme. I couldn’t find anything I wanted to watch even though I looked through all the new movies twice because I guess Vin Diesel is on holidays and Matt Damon must be trying for an Oscar or something but there was a James Bond film that wasn’t too old and had Daniel Craig in it and even though I’d watched it before there was nothing else and I liked the part at the start where he chased the guy for a long time and wound up in the embassy where even James Bond isn’t supposed to go. But after I gave up and decided that I could just re-watch something Dad said he’d found something old that we hadn’t seen.
The movie was called Blow-Up and Dad said it must have been in the wrong section because it was called Blow-Up and so must be an action film. He didn’t recognize any of the actors except the girl from Mission: Impossible when she was younger. So we rented that and Dad told the clerk that he expected them to have some good new movies by the time he returned Blow-Up and the clerk got mad and said he wasn’t a Hollywood movie executive and then Dad got mad and said that maybe he should be because his talents were wasted at the movie store and so I didn’t get to buy any Doritos because Dad said he wasn’t giving any more of his money to the movie store but on the walk back I convinced him to go to Rick’s Grocery and buy some Doritos there, the kind with two flavours in the same bag and the ones we bought tasted like guacamole and also habanera.
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