First Impression: 750 Words

Yesterday I found this fun website called 750 words. It's a free writing tool to help writers set and keep writing goals, and sharpen their skills by practicing them every day. It's got a function that keeps track of how many words you're typing as you type them, and saves your work every couple of seconds. After you're done you never have to look at your writing again, so lots of people use it to journal and get bad feelings out by writing them down.

I have a lot of trouble free writing. I never saw the point. To me, if you're going to write something, you should take a little time and think about what you want to say before getting it down. I like to edit as little as possible. I was the one always getting in trouble during English class because I'd glare at the clock during free writing instead of putting a pencil to the page. "I don't know what I want to write!" I'd protest to my frowning teacher. "Then write THAT!" she'd reply. My glare would grow deeper, because I knew in my heart that writing "I don't know what to write" is a HUGE WASTE OF TIME, and of my writing talent. If you're going to write, write something interesting.

Anyway.

What makes 750 Words even more fun is that when you're finished, it shows you all kinds of stats about your words: how long it took you to get them down, how many breaks you took during that time, and how many words you typed per minute. Then, it shoves eight or nine pie charts in your face, showing you the main feelings of your writing. Yesterday I wrote about a game I'm playing called Neko Atsume (Kitty Collector), and mostly whined about the money mechanics, so my stats for that day say that I was mostly "self-involved." Well, yeah, but it wasn't a bad thing. There was also a chart that informed me that I spent most of my words on the subject of money. I didn't need a colorful pie chart to tell me that, but it's pretty, and I like the font. There are a few bar charts near the bottom of the page that I'm not sure about yet, but since today I'm writing about something completely different, I'm hoping that I'll be able to puzzle them out when I look at my stats from THIS piece.

I had so much fun with the site yesterday that I told my very-busy-doing-National-Novel-Writing-Month writing partner about it so that she could check it out if she wanted to. I don't like to recommend things to people unless I know they're not going to come back to me and say "hey, this thing you told me to check out is crap; why did you tell me about it?"

So that's why I was so disappointed this morning, when I was poking around on the site and saw a teeeeeny tiny bar at the top that said something along the lines of "you're enjoying your 30 day free trial of 750 words!" And I was like... "Um, I'm WHAT?"

Usually when a site makes you pay to use it, they won't let you sign up for any kind of free trial without giving them the goods so that they can start charging you the second your month ticks over. But there was NOTHING about paying after a certain time, or paying at all, when I signed up. Just name, email address, password, make sure your password is right. No check box for a terms of service, making sure I knew what I was getting into, nothing.

I was really looking forward to using the website to get back into the habit of writing every day, since it was super easy for me to fall out of it. And based on some of the things that other users are saying, it's a really fun way to do it... and it gets addicting. "We hook you with the free Flamingo Badge, and you'll be paying us five bucks a month for the Super Squirrel Badge!"

I guess I'll stay... I mean, I do have 30 days. I really enjoyed taking days off of writing, though, and just relaxing on the weekends, back when I was posting every weekday on my blog. If I'm going to pay to write, I'd feel bad taking a day off to relax, even if I needed one.

Also, there's no italics. I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT ITALICS. (Apparently caps lock will have to do.)

I mean, how fun is that?! (Answer: SUPER FUN!!!)

Review: Lost in Austen

So Amazon Instant Video’s got this new thing: a long list of shows that you can watch through their service, but only the first episode is free.

There are tons of titles available through Amazon Prime, but if you’re not up for anything on that list, you can always pay for your movies and TV... or torture yourself by trying to watch only the first episode of something. I mean, there’s no way you’re going to watch the second episode if it isn’t free, right? Surely you can resist watching the rest of the show in our current binge-television-watching world, right?

Long ago, Lost in Austen was on Netflix and available to watch on Prime, but I was hesitant. The synopsis painted a picture of a modern London girl inserted into Austen’s world, so the literary purist in me shouted, “but that would make everything all wrong!” But then of course the day I decided I finally wanted to try it was the day that I found out it was no longer available (for free) anywhere. Last night, though, I saw that it was on the dangerous list of Amazon’s “only the first one’s free.” I said to my husband, “It might be terrible; I may as well watch the first episode and find out.”

Well, it turns out I was right. About everything.

Not about it being terrible, but I guess that depends on your definition of "terrible." Inserting a modern person in the Regency period was disruptive and it did mess everything up. And watching only the first episode of a television show is like trying to eat only one potato chip: IT’S IMPOSSIBLE. So my advice for trying out Amazon’s drug dealer style “first episode free with ads” service?

(So far this has been more a review of Amazon Instant Video’s new attempt to get you hooked and give them your money. We now return you to your regularly scheduled review of fan fiction on film.)

Here’s the question that sets the whole thing up: what would any loyal Austen fan do if they were inserted into one of the books? The answer is: try to make sure everything happens the way it’s supposed to. And what would happen instead? Of course everything would go wrong.

No Austen fan, no matter how devoted, would be able to switch over in to the speech patterns of the early 1800s immediately. There would be at least one moment when they would be yelling, “WHERE ARE THE HIDDEN CAMERAS??” And no one would be able to resist predicting things or trying to influence the characters. Nobody who is a true Austen fan would be able to just sit back and watch things happen when they have a chance to interact with the characters they love.

And that’s what Lost in Austen is about. Amanda Price is a Londoner whose favorite night in consists of curling up alone on the couch with Pride and Prejudice, even though she could probably recite the greater part of the book without opening it. She’s understandably shocked when she finds that Lizzy Bennet has entered her bathroom through a secret door, and even more shocked when she goes through the door and finds out it won’t open after Lizzy closes it behind her.

Amanda is rude and sometimes vulgar and gets drunk at pretty much any opportunity (which may put you off watching it if you can’t tolerate that kind of thing). But she tries her best to get things done the way they should be in Lizzy’s absence while trying to hang on to her sanity. “I may be losing my grip on reality, but at least I’m still in control of my hair.”

The greatest part about this romp through Austen’s world is how well the writers grasp the characters (although I suppose it isn’t hard when you’ve had two hundred years to study them). Bingley just wants to fall in love with someone beautiful, Darcy wants someone who doesn’t fall all over themselves trying to make a good impression on him, Mr. Collins is susceptible to any kind of praise (especially of Lady Catherine), Caroline Bingley is a snob, Mr. Bennet loves his daughters despite the fact that they drive him crazy, Mrs. Bennet is determined to have all her daughters marry well, and Mr. Wickham is an unscrupulous liar.

It’s hard to find good fan fiction. And it’s even harder for Austen fans, a fact that is unfair, since our beloved author only wrote six books to begin with! Pretty much any re-imaginings of Austen are the raindrops that quench Austen lovers’ souls.

Is Lost in Austen ridiculous? Yes. Is it fun? Absolutely. Is everything wrong? Pretty much, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. It’s Austeny. And if that’s what you want, Lost in Austen is what you need.

Just know that you’ll only be able to watch the first episode for free.

Review: Honest Abe's Burgers & Freedom

Most burger places have an "awesome sauce." But often, they're misusing the term because we as a culture have forgotten what it means. "Awesome" doesn't mean "cool," "radical," or "really neat," it means choirs of angels, speechlessness, and being unable to comprehend the greatness before you. When you see the words "awesome sauce" on the menu at Honest Abe's, they don't mean it cowabunga style.

"We make honest burgers for honest people," their website explains, "Get off the internet and come find out for yourself."

Honest Abe's Burgers & Freedom is shoved in between the Valentino's To Go and Great Wall Chinese at Meadowlane Shopping Center on 70th and Vine Streets in Lincoln, Nebraska. They are open from 11 am - 9 pm Monday to Saturday (closed on Sunday). There is seating room for 24 people plus eight stools against the wall where you can wait for your food to go. There is hardly ever an empty seat, even by the wall, and as soon as a chair is vacated, someone waiting snaps it up. On a busy day, it can take close to half an hour to get your food.

It's worth it.

And you need to be able to appreciate Honest Abe’s, so it’s not the kind of place that you can go a couple times a week for lunch. If you do, it just becomes that place you go for lunch. It becomes, “yeah, whatever.” Honest Abe’s is not "yeah, whatever." This place is a treat, a place you go when you need a gastronomic high five. It’s the food equivalent of traveling to a remote spot to get an amazing view of breathtaking scenery, and it would be sad to ignore the gorgeousness if you decided to commute past it every day instead.

You can decide for yourself how often to allow Honest Abe’s to grace your taste buds; if you go too often, you might find yourself saying things like, “This is a good burger,” and Honest Abe’s deserves more. My personal self-imposed length of absence is anywhere from two to four months. It seems like a long time to wait to eat at a place this fantastic, but as I said, appreciation is a necessary element in the Honest Abe’s experience.

Also, you need to go when you're hungry. Pretty much any food tastes like ambrosia from the archangels’ buffet table when you're hungry enough, but if you skipped lunch and then hit Honest Abe’s at 4 pm, that first bite will have you feeling guilty that someone may have accidentally slipped you God’s main course.

They have a rotating menu that you can keep up with on facebook so that you don’t miss anything, but they also have a few fixed items (my husband always gets the “United States of America”). When you've allowed enough time for enjoyment of the food and are ready to speak again, any one of these burgers should have you saying something along the lines of: “That was one of the most delicious things I've eaten in my entire life.” Saturday I had the “Hotel California,” (a rotating menu item that could be gone soon, so don't wait to get there and try it!) and my response was, “How do they do it?” I glanced suspiciously toward the kitchen and reasoned, “One of them must be a wizard.”

It doesn't matter that the dining room is tiny or that they only have 6 different fountain drinks to choose from (they also sell bottled “Mexican” Coke). Yes, their parmesan truffle fries are good, you can substitute a vegan patty on any of their burgers, and the Sasquatch cookies are awesome (baked fresh and sold from the tiny building across the parking lot that used to be an ATM). Many visages of our sixteenth president decorate the walls and counter, but don't let any of that distract you from the real reason that you want to go there.

The greatest burgers ever.

The first thing on the menu (and coincidentally my favorite fixed menu item) is the “Greatest Burger Ever.” Nobody is being modest, here; when they say “Greatest Burger Ever,” they mean it.

Honest.

Review: Widdershins

I love history. I love adventure stories. I love just about any tale in which magic is an everyday, normal thing, accepted by society. I love wacky time travel narratives. And I love webcomics. So when all of these things are rolled up into the same gorgeous package, I can’t resist.

Widdershins is a comic by Kate Ashwin that has been updating since October 24th, 2011 every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Excellently drawn and in full color (except for a few Q&A sketches between chapters), it takes place in alternate reality England, in the fictional Victorian city of Widdershins. From what I can gather, it seems to be located somewhere between London and Manchester (which doesn’t narrow it down much, that’s like saying that it’s somewhere between Los Angeles and Sacramento).

But the interesting thing about Widdershins is that it is the location of an anchor of magic. This means that those who have the talent for magic can perform it more easily there. The academy in Widdershins teaches potential wizards how to draw circles and speak the correct words in order to summon spirits.

One of the wonderful things about the comic is that there isn’t just one main character. One chapter features a wizard and a bounty hunter, and the next, a couple of buskers with unusual abilities. And another stars the most promising cake baker from the year 2013. These characters are not featured in the same chapter, but they do brush up against one another.

The only thing that makes me sad about this comic is that there are only four complete chapters. Of course, I’d be sad if there were fourteen. I could read this comic for years and never have enough. It’s wonderful.

It’s a gorgeous, well written, exciting webcomic, that has everything I love about webcomics. I highly recommend it! And now I’m going to go and reread it. Again.

Review: The Desolation of Smaug

It makes the Lord of the Rings fan in me sad to say it, but I honestly was not that impressed with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Sure, we got to go back to Bag End and they got Martin Freeman to play Bilbo, but there’s tons of dwarves everywhere that you can’t keep straight unless you memorize them beforehand and Gandalf is acting like a super creepy dude, “hey I knew your mom so it’s okay for me to be here and by the way you should come with us on this road trip and you won’t mind if I bring a few of my friends?” There was some cool action, and the endearing The Hobbit-esque tendency of getting captured and nearly killed every time they turned around. (“What, really? Again?”)

When my husband asked me if I wanted to go see The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, I shrugged and said, “Okay… If you want, I guess.” This weekend, we headed off to East Park, the last theater in town still playing it.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe the mediocre feeling I had after leaving the theater last year when An Unexpected Journey ended? I knew The Desolation of Smaug had plenty of things going for it: it was made by Peter Jackson, was going to be the same interesting story I’d read when I was eleven or twelve. Plus, I knew from internet rumor that Bilbo’s conversation with the dragon was in there. Maybe I didn’t want to be the same kind of disappointed by going in with hopeful feelings.

I did expect more party elk.

Of course, I loved it. Anything that can make the group’s trip through Mirkwood more clear is bound to be an improvement on the book, and speaking of improvements, I enjoyed the addition of Tauriel. The three Lord of the Rings movies had so much material to cover, it was understandable that some things be left out. When you’re making three movies based on one book, moviegoers should see the need for a little more material to be added. And everyone enjoys a good love story.

The barrel scene was great (though the “Bombur knocking orcs all over the place and then fighting from inside the barrel” gag was a little bit much), the conversation Bilbo and Balin have before he goes after the arkenstone was hilarious, and the banter with the dragon was awesome. And the ending was perfect!

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug was such a fun movie. The addition of Evangeline Lily, Peter Jackson with his carrot in Bree, Stephen Colbert the king of all Tolkien nerds, and Stephen Fry made the original story more enjoyable. It was wonderful, and the best way that it differed from An Unexpected Journey was that it made me wish it was July so I could go see the next one!

We stood up and stretched as the ending credits began to roll, and listened to Ed Sheeran’s I See Fire playing over them. We left before the song was over, but the second I got home, I looked it up on youtube and hunted out the lyrics.

I see fire

Inside the mountain

I see fire

Burnin’ the trees

I see fire

Hollowing souls

I see fire

Blood on the breeze

The idea of fire “hollowing souls” perfectly captures what the people of Laketown would feel every day. Gazing up at the Lonely Mountain, they would have given anything not to see fire. Fire meant the end of everything to them: their boats would be charred and unable to aid them, their homes would burn, and their lives would be lost. The fire would hollow their souls, leaving them hopeless.

Bilbo’s final line of the movie, “What have we done?” shows that he understands what fire will do to the people who awaited the dragon’s wrath.

Desolation.

Review: BAGU

I love my blog. It’s a wonderful place to share my writing, and at the same time has that pull that reminds me to write every day: “if you don’t work, there won’t be anything on the blog!” I like to go back and look at it from a reader’s perspective sometimes, and see the way it looks on the website instead of just staring at the software. And it’s nice, but it’s not something I can hold in my hands.

Last month my husband stopped at the mailbox and brought in a package in one of those bubble wrap envelopes. “This came for you,” he said, and tossed it to me. It had a customs stamp in one corner, and I recognized the name of the sender.

I ripped the package open with my hands, not wanting to use a sharp pointy object that may have subjected its contents to harm (and not wanting to wait to procure said pointy object). “It’s HEEEERE!” I sang. “What?” said my husband, who was already in the other room. I held up the small gold and black paperback, dancing it around in front of his eyes.

Being a Grown Up... cover design
by Adam Murray

It was my copy of Being a Grown Up: A User’s Manual for the Real World.

I agreed wholeheartedly with Harriet Putney’s Use Your Hands: it does feel great to do physical work, to be tired after working and to know that you earned that feeling. Carl Palmer’s poems were wonderful, and I’m not a poetry person; I had to put the book down and find a kleenex after reading Dad’s Hands. Jurassic Park and Jewel-Toned Suits is exactly the piece I’ve been thinking of writing for months; Morgan Ashworth expressed the thoughts that have been rolling around in my head perfectly: “People don’t ‘grow up’; they stay the same, while things just happen chronologically around them.”

The Words of Wisdom were great, a sentence or two of common sense and advice which served as a buffer between essays. My favorite was one of Raisah Ali’s: “If someone deserves to be in your life, they will make the effort.”

Alya-Monic McKay presented an refreshing idea about baskets and apples in Categorically, Love; it was wonderful to read something so straightforward since you expect things written  about love to be all squishy feelings and romantic sighs. I loved the idea presented by Judith Marks-White that memories soften and change as we “rewind the tapes” to look back at them. And I have stood at the edge of Kathleen C. Healy’s well of creativity, and have been similarly washed away by its waters.

I may be a biased source, but I found many of the pieces in Being a Grown Up entertaining and thought provoking. They grabbed my heart and made me laugh. Ideas that were conveyed well made me agree out loud: “yes! I love this!!”

Don’t worry, you can procure your own copy by going to http://allgrownupbooks.bigcartel.com/ or by going to BAGU’s facebook page, facebook.com/BeingAGrownupBook.

I love my blog, but it’s not the same thing as having my work (The Life Cycle of Dish Washing, by Patricia Livermore, page 13) bound in a book, alongside such good company.

Review: Papers, Please

A video game doesn’t have to have gorgeous eye-catching visuals to be interesting. It just has to be engaging and fun! It’s nice when all of those things come together, but I’d prefer engaging and fun to gorgeous and boring. And moments of intense excitement separated by super boring segments of riding a horse across the countryside falls into the latter category (sorry, Assassin’s Creed and Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess). Sometimes, games that sound like they would be super-boring and totally ugly are not. I mean, how fun does checking for paperwork discrepancies as a border official in a fictional former Soviet Republic sound?

Papers, Please might not be pretty, and definitely doesn’t sound exciting, but fifteen minutes in, when your heart rate is accelerating because you need to get through two more people in line to make sure you can feed your family, you’ll change your mind.

As the Inspector, you have to double check passports to see if they are genuine, make sure that foreigners have the correct documents in order to enter the country, verify that diplomats are who they really say they are, accept those seeking asylum (as long as their paperwork is correct), and detain smugglers. The rules for entrance change almost daily, not to mention the added duties of watching for criminals and preventing terrorist attacks!

There are twenty different possible endings to this fast fact checking game, and your ending depends on the choices you make. Do you strictly adhere to the rules, refusing to take bribes? Do you unite the lovers? Do you aid the secret society? Do you help a heartbroken father find his own justice in revenge? The decision to allow someone into the country even when it validates the rules has consequences: you are fined, and these fines cut into your earnings, which could have serious repercussions on your family’s well being. They could be cold, go hungry, get sick (requiring expensive medicine), or vanish from existence.

If I haven’t convinced you to try this awesome game yet, then I guess you’re going to have to ask someone else, or just take my word for it; I’ve got to get back to playing it.

Glory to Arstotzka!

Review: Angel

I once received a particularly hurtful review when a story submission of mine was rejected for publication. I don’t remember the review’s exact words, but it was something like “I hate this sort of shallow and useless thing,” (only less kind). I never really understood why that person thought it would be beneficial to share something like that with me, but I’m sharing it with you because I finally understand what that reviewer felt like.

Movie cover from imdb

Because of Angel.

It is a 2007 film based on a novel by Elizabeth Taylor. Its promotional poster is very appealing, and the teaser for it on Netflix reads: “Romola Garai plays Angel Deverell, a grocer’s daughter who writes her way to success as a romance novelist and then falls for a libertine nobleman.”

I was in the mood for a romantic movie last night, and Netflix says, “Dramas, Romantic Movies,” so I thought I’d try it out. I was expecting a young girl working very hard on something wonderful while her mother sells cabbages, a girl waiting on pins and needles for a response from a publisher, seeing her anguish when she received rejection letters, and her joy when finally receiving an acceptance letter. I expected that she would turn down the first publisher who offered to make her work available to the public, but I thought it would be because they would try to take advantage of her financially.

I expected her to be a humble girl who works hard and lives for her craft, and though she writes about love, she doesn’t expect to fall in love herself until she meets a young nobleman at a party. And then, as the movie poster suggests, they kiss in the rain (or possibly snow).

My husband left the couch early on in the movie and went to read a book, but he came back for the last ten minutes. “Why did you even watch this?” he asked me. “I don’t know!” I responded. “I just kept expecting it to be... good!”

Instead of being modest, Angel was rude and stuck up. In one scene, she flounced up the stairs after boldly telling her mother and visiting aunt to “be quiet so I can concentrate on my writing!” She jumped at the first offer to publish her book, but walked out of the publisher’s office when he told her she’d have to tone down one scene and change another. He gave in and published it anyway, even though you don’t need a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne. Angel’s rise to fame was immediate; everyone loved her books. She finally did meet her “libertine nobleman,” and fell in love with him at first sight even though he was rude to her at their first meeting. After hiring him to paint a portrait of her, he begins to like her too.

I paused the movie during the kiss in the rain, at a party where Angel unveils the painting, and asks her nobleman to marry her. “I’ll pay all your debts,” she tells him, “Come live with me at Paradise House. Marry me! I love you!” It was only about a third of the way through the two hour movie. I thought, “what else is there to tell?”

A better descriptor for the movie would have been, “Romola Garai plays Angel Deverell, a grocer’s daughter who writes her way to success as a romance novelist and then when things stop going her way, she goes crazy and dies.”

Angel had everything: success, the man she loved, and the home she’d always dreamed of. When things happened that she didn’t like, she rewrote them and made her life fiction because it was more appealing to her. Her mother died, and she transformed her into a famous concert pianist, instead of telling a reporter that she ran a grocery. Her husband killed himself after coming home wounded from the horrors of the first World War, but the man interested in his work was told that he died of a heart attack.

The final blow for Angel came when she found a letter from her husband’s mistress and learned that all the money she had given him for his supposed gambling debts had been to keep her and the illegitimate child she’d had. Angel had never told her husband about the miscarriage she had while he was in the trenches, so she was full of anguish and jealousy. She returned the letter to her husband’s mistress, and as she was leaving, happened to see the little boy who could have been hers. She reached out to him, but he was frightened of her rather wild appearance and ran away.

I realize that life doesn’t end during the scene where you kiss in the rain, and that if you rise high, you have the potential to fall even further. But if I’m going to watch a romantic movie, I’d rather have mostly the good things and not the bad. I’d rather have a ‘happily ever after’ than a descent into madness accompanied by twenty cats.

There is a quote on Elizabeth Taylor’s wikipedia page that I don’t quite understand. “It is not possible to have perfection in life, but it is possible to have perfection in a novel.” I agree with this, but the part I can’t grasp is why, if she believed this, she would write such a horrid end for her character. Suffering is a part of life, and it can make a person grow, but it didn’t make Angel more humble or more giving. All it did was to make her more selfish, and to drive her insane.

I hate this kind of thing. I personally don’t find it entertaining. There are some people who love romantic tragedy, but I prefer romantic comedy. I knew before I started watching that this movie wouldn’t be a romantic comedy, but I didn’t expect it to be so tragic.

I’ve learned my lesson. Next time, before I watch something new on Netflix, I will at least pay attention to how other users have rated it (2 out of 5 stars on Netflix, imdb has 5.9 out of 10). And when I submit a story to a literary magazine, I won’t expect everyone to love it as much as I do.