True Blood, Se2 Ep1

It's been a while since I read the second Sookie Stackhouse book, so this morning I spent some time refamiliarizing myself with the plot. Once I started watching the season premiere this morning, I noticed some pretty big differences. First of all, I guess I never realized that the Tara on the series is waaay different from the Tara in the books, who apparently didn't appear until sometime in the second or third books and was never, like, Sookie's best friend. Which is fine, though, because I like the character of Tara in the series. She's spunky. And besides, for a show set in Louisiana, it would be absolutely weird if there were no African American main characters.

Oddly enough, they've decided that the body in the car that is discovered at the beginning of the book and the second season is not Lafayette in the series. I'm unsure as to why they did this. After all, part of the reason that Lafayette got killed at all was because he was going to these sex parties in the book. Having the voodoo lady from the woods killed is kind of weird, because I just can't picture her at sex parties...

Hmm. We'll see what they do with that. Overall, I guess I'm glad Lafayette isn't dead. He's a superfun character. I think it's weird that he's being held captive by Eric, though. WTF??

I'm guessing that the lady that Tara is staying with is the maenad from the book, but time will tell about that as well.

I'm also unsure as to why there's this new character of the new vampire that Bill has to take care of. I don't remember her from the book either.

I read an interview with the show's creator, where he said that the second season would probably be less faithful to the book than the first season was. In some ways, I'm a little disappointed by that. On the other hand, for the most part, the departures that the television series has made from the book so far have been pretty solid. I really enjoy the television series. It's smart and sexy.

(Although, I got to say, I was a little weirded out by Sookie kissing Bill after he bit her and getting her own blood in her mouth. I mean, I've got no problem with kissing after oral sex, but blood... Eew. And messy. Messy, messy, messy. Of course, while we're on this subject, I want to know why no one ever talks about menstruation in vampire stories. Maybe that's gross too, but I just brought up vampires and oral sex in one paragraph. I think it was a natural progression.)

Overall, I'm excited for this season. It's very cool to have an awesome show with new episodes in the summer. Hooray!

Morganville Vampires and True Blood

What could I possibly be doing that's more fun than blogging? Doing? Not so much. Obsessing? Maybe, just a teensy bit.

So...Breathless is going on its third week of serialization, and I've been on summer vacation from teaching for exactly five days. What have I accomplished in this time? Well, I've been working on getting the novel's episodes, or chapters, into pdf format. I'm up to chapter 11 at this point, so that's at least one tangible accomplishment. I created some t-shirts. I also made a linkable banner which I posted on the site and on myspace. So, those are also some tangible accomplishments.

Today, I started really looking into putting the darned thing into print. I'm using Createspace, which is Amazon's P.O.D. service. It looks like it's going to be pretty simple. I started formatting the book files in word (they'll have to be exported to pdf at some point), but then I realized that formatting should probably be the last step and that I should really make sure I had done a final edit of the book for sentence issues, spelling and the like. That sounds about as fun as root canal, so I abandoned the project for now.

Instead, I decided to focus on the cover, because designing a cover sounds like way, way more fun. I just spent about an hour collecting jpegs of covers of current YA books so that I could get a feel for what the designing trends are like these days. Sadly, books no longer feature covers with tons of images floating into each other like they did when I was a kid. It's too bad, because when I was a teenager, I spent hours creating covers for my stories, and they always looked like that.

Today, most covers feature a dominant image, and disturbingly enough, it's generally a female body part. I think this must have started with Twilight and the hands. Still. Nearly all of the covers I looked at featured a girl's face or her hands or shoulder or her back. I'm torn. I could certainly go this way with the cover for Breathless. Heck, I've even got an idea, featuring a certain necklace that Azazel's mom gives her in like episode nine. I'd have to dig up a necklace like that, of course. Still. I'm not sure why women's bodies are used to sell like everything. Men's magazines. Women's magazines. Beer. Makeup. Cars.

It's ridiculous. If I'm going to use a body part, I'm toying with the idea of using a guy's. That's right, Aaron, prepare to be my cover model. Mwah ha ha!! Besides, I really like my boyfriend's hands, and I already did use his eye for a Trembling banner.

Blegg. But who cares about my writing, right? I mean, everything I read about blogging says that if you're trying to use your blog to attract readers, you should not talk about yourself, because, let's face it, if people don't know who you are, they aren't going to google you.

Which brings us to the title of the blog. Right.

Um, kay. So, I'm in the middle of reading Rachel Caine's Morganville Vampires series, and I am absolutely blown away. It is super awesome and fabulous. I love the moral ambiguity she's weaving through the story. I love the fact that the vampires are actually scary (they are monsters, remember?) and I really like the fact that it's set in Texas. I only lived in Texas for two weeks, but I really enjoyed my time there.

And I'm learning tons about the way to construct a love scene (minus the, uh, love since it's a teen book) from her. She writes such sexy, sexy...let's call them makeout scenes, shall we? I am absolutely drooling over Shane.

And, I'm ridiculously excited about the new season of True Blood. I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of Charlaine Harris. She the best thing that happened to vampires since Laurell K, and the only adult vampire series I read anymore. (Despite the fact that she has weretigers. I mean, really, come on! Whoever heard of weretigers????)

The first season was great. I think the television show has a little bit of a different tone than the books. It's not quite as funny. But it's good stuff. It's one of the best vampire shows on TV.

I won't be able to watch it until tomorrow, since I watch all my TV online. No cable. It's the wave of the future, really. But I plan on writing a blog about the first episode and all my impressions.

Ta ta for now. (And really. I'm going to get better about this blogging thing. I swear.)

The Vampire Diaries

I'm not really posting blogs very often, am I? Not cool on my part. I think that once summer starts, and I'm no longer teaching, I'm going to try to get in a rhythm of posting at least one or two blogs a week.

Anyway, I saw some teasers for The Vampire Diaries, a new show next fall on the CW, based on L.J. Smith's book series from the early 90s of the same name. I'm actually kind of excited. Two things I think this series has going for it which mean that it might actually be good:

One is writer Kevin Williamson, who wrote both Scream and Dawson's Creek. The other is Ian Somerhaulder, who is going to play Damon. Effing gorgeous. Also, his character is the kind of wicked sexy that you can't get enough of. Think Spike meets evil Angel, with a little Logan thrown in for fun. (!!) (That's Logan from Veronica Mars.)

I had my doubts about this show when I attempted to read the source material. I picked up the first book in the Vampire Diaries series, but never ended up finishing it. In a word, the book was bad. Not only did it suffer from the most purple prose I've run into in a long time, (Adverbs out the whazoo and over adjectived like crazy.) but it was full of really pretty, really snobby people who I couldn't actually bring myself to care about.

The main character, Elena, is the most popular, most beautiful girl in the school who swears she'll get any boy that she wants. She wants the new boy: Stefan--Italian, gorgeous, and brooding. (and a vampire. duh.) After a few missteps, she gets Stefan. However, there's a twist here. Stefan has a really evil brother named Damon, who actually likes being a vampire. (Unlike Stefan, who drinks the blood of animals.) Oh, and did I mention the fact that the only reason Stefan is interested in Elena is because she looks exactly like the vampire chick who brought him over and who he and Damon fought over? This is the point where I stopped reading, I think.

The biggest problem for me with the book, despite the fact it was badly written, full of overly used cliches, and not the least bit romantic or creepy, was that I really didn't like Elena.

It seems the CW has taken some steps to change this. First off, I notice that Elena isn't blonde. She's a brunette. (For some reason, we can identify better with brunettes as women. Why is that?) Secondly, she seems to have some depth. And she doesn't seem snobby and spoiled. All good things.

Stefan himself is blah. The actor is attractive, but compared to Somerhaulder, he fades away into relative good-looking-ness.

As long as we can keep Kevin Williamson from having his teenage main characters tell their parents exactly what is wrong with them in long psychobabbly terms, I think the show will rock. Bring on the fall!

(Wait. No. I don't mean that. I want this summer to last forever.)

Barnes and Noble Ate the Midlist, or why I'm Thinking about Self-Publishing

As I've begun to gather friends and fans on myspace for my book Breathless, I've discovered and a large number of them also are writers. Since I've been seriously considering opting out of traditional publishing and going the indie book route, I wanted to let them (and other authors know) some of the reasons why I'm thinking of chucking the mainstream.

Basically, the traditional publishing industry has changed, owing mostly to big chain stores like Barnes and Noble and Borders and to the internet, which has changed the way we read and communicate. These days, it's a lot tougher than it used to be to get published, because less books are getting published and marketed and because more people are trying to get published.

When they first appeared, people were frightened chain bookstores would change the way people bought books forever, and so these stores have. Because chain stores make decisions about books centrally, individual branches have little say on what is stocked. "When chains order, Corporate Buyer orders a number of copies ... for the entire chain, and these are distributed per a computerized formula to the various stores" (Lisle "How"). So various stores get a certain amount of copies which are then sold in the store. "Frequently, chains will only get one or two copies which will be spined out, dooming them to invisibility. Even if they are not, though—even if Local Chain receives seven copies and sells six, Local Chain WILL NOT REORDER THE BOOK unless it sells above a set number chain-wide" (Lisle "How").

So, big deal, you say. What does that mean? Well, say you're an author whose book gets five or six copies put out at a local Barnes and Noble. If all six sell, wouldn't you want more to appear on the shelves so that you could sell more? Instead, however, your books are gone, and a casual book shopper cannot "stumble" across them. Worse, however, the chain bookstores don't always order enough books for the book to ever hope to make to the re-order number (Lisle "How").

It gets worse, however. When an author's next book comes out, the big chain will order only the amount of books that the author's last book sold, dooming it to even lower sales numbers (Lisle "How"). The chains, you see, are looking at numbers sold, not percentages. If the book sells 90 % of the books ordered, that's a great percentage. But if that's only 900 books out of 1000, unlike, say J.K. Rowling's or Stephenie Meyer's numbers, then that book doesn't look like much of a good investment for the big chain.

Because big chains are looking at what sells well on a global level, they miss books that are selling well on a local level, or even books that are selling adequately on a global level. With no nurturing or attending, these books are squeezed out of the market. They don't make any money for the publishers, and they don't make any money for the authors. Eventually, these books (and their authors) disappear.

This model, over time, leads to a mass-market product. With very little competition, the big chain stores eventually only sell what they want to sell--big-name, big-selling products. This leads publishers to be less likely to want to publish books that are not going to be big-name, big-selling products, because they can't sell them at big chains (and the big chains have squeezed out all the small, independent stores) and therefore, they can't make money off these products. "There are no industry statistics that calculate how many midlist books are published annually, but publishers say it is obvious that the numbers are dwindling because houses are pruning their lists for publication in a time of declining hard-cover sales" (Carvajal).

Midlist books are books that are not front list. Books that sell "less than 15,000 copies" (Carvajal). Midlist authors are the authors that write these books. If the current model continues, there will eventually be no midlist. It will appear that the midlist died because there was no market for it and because it couldn't sell.

How does this affect the author trying to get published today? As mentioned above, there aren't really industry statistics that prove that currently less midlist books are being published. There was a study done by the Author's Guild, way back in 2000, by a guy named David Kirkpatrick (New Rules Staff). Kirkpatrick found that, in 2000, just as many midlist titles were being published as had been in the past (New Rules Staff). However, since then, things have changed a lot.

Back in 2000, I had no idea who J. K. Rowling was. Sure, I knew my younger brother was reading some book about some guy named Larry or Harry or something, but other than that I was clueless. In 2000, The Da Vinci Code hadn't been published. In 2000, Twilight hadn't been published. In short, the blockbuster book as we know it today didn't really exist yet. These kinds of crazy success stories are a product of a globalized, centralized distribution point--the result of Barnes and Noble and Borders and others of their ilk.

(A brief aside about Stephen King, clearly the first and forerunning blockbuster writer who was selling books way before Barnes and Noble appeared. Stephen King wasn't made by Barnes and Noble. Barnes and Noble got the idea for the blockbuster writer because of Stephen King.)

Am I saying books don't get published by authors who aren't bestsellers? Of course not! After all, bestsellers have to start somewhere. And the publishing industry publishes an enormous amount of books per week. Books are still getting published. All the time.

However, it's clear that if the current distribution model continues, the midlist won't continue to exist. I think that we're seeing a recognizable difference in terms of how many books are published and what kinds of books are published.

We definitely have seen a difference in the way first-time authors get published. It wasn't so long ago that major publishing houses had what were called slush piles. This meant that an author sent their manuscript directly to the publisher (what a concept, right? Send your book to the people who ACTUALLY publish books) and these manuscripts languished (sometimes for years) in the publishing house until someone read them and rejected or acquired them for publishing. Pretty much no major publishing houses do that anymore. Instead, they rely on agents.

So, if you're trying to publish a book these days, you send it to an agent. There are a lot of people claiming to be agents, but there aren't very many who are actually good ones. They also have their likes and dislikes, and will only represent certain kinds of books. In my experience, for any book I've written, I've usually ended up with a list of 20-30 possible agents (with about half of them being long shots.) Agents receive hundreds of submissions a day. They can't possibly read that many books.

So, you don't actually send your book to an agent. Instead, you send a query letter, a synopsis, and maybe the first few pages of the book (if you're lucky). What's rejected then, is not your manuscript, but your query.

I'm not proposing that Barnes and Noble is responsible for major publishing houses not accepting slush anymore. I will say that a tightening number of books that publisher can publish certainly couldn't have helped that situation, however.

No, this brings me to the second part of my discussion. Why is the world different? The internet.

Recently, the number of submissions to agents seems to be going up, according to Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency. I've also seen various agents comment on this on their blogs. Why is this? Well, no one knows. Most people are blaming the economy, because that's the hot thing to blame these days. I'm blaming the internet.

Okay, so flash back fifteen years to 1994. You're an author who wants to write a book. Okay, great. You maybe have access to a personal computer (after all, you're an author, right?), or maybe not. After all, who really needed personal computers before the internet? If not, maybe you type the manuscript on a typewriter. You know nothing about how to write a book, except what you've picked up from reading them. Maybe you think that's enough. (Maybe it is.) Maybe, however, you think it's not.

How are you going to find out how to be a better writer? Well, you'll have to buy a book. That's right. Go out to a store and look for a book about writing. How will you know if it's a good book? Where, indeed, will you even find a list of books about writing? In a magazine? (Augh, thinking of this dark age is making me depressed. Of course, maybe it's because I was thirteen at the time and pretty much depressed about everything.) Point I'm making here is that it required a concerted effort to find out how to write better.

If you finally did finish the thing and decide you wanted to send it out, you'd also have to go buy a copy of Writer's Market, and then go and buy a book teaching you how to write queries and synopses. Lots of effort. Not to mention postage. No email submissions, remember? You had to actually mail the darned thing out. It also required a concerted effort to send out a book and even more of an effort to send it out right.

Just thinking about it is discouraging. Most people probably didn't bother with that effort. Therefore, most of the books that were sent out were probably bad. There were also probably less of them.

Okay, it's 2009 again. (Yes, breathe a sigh of relief everyone. Yick, life sucked before the internet!) Now, say I want to write a book. Great. How do I do that? Um, google "write a novel." (Do it. Really.) Loads and loads of FREE, EFFORTLESS information appears in seconds. Now, google "query letter." See where I'm going with this?

In 2009, it's easier for people to find out how to write a novel well, and how to submit it to the right places in the right formats. It's easier, and it's cheaper. It follows that more people are going to write novels, more people are going to write better novels, and more people are going to submit novels in a better format.

This would be fine if there was an expanding market for novels. However, because less novels can be published and less novels can be sold at high numbers due to chain stores, we have a problem.

It's harder to get a book published than it used to be because there's more competition for less spots.

Well, I've created quite a dull, dismal picture for the aspiring novelist, haven't I?

Before all aspiring writers everywhere give up with a collective sigh of defeat, let's examine things a little further. Some people would say that the reason that there's less of a market for books is that people don't read as much as they used to. If it were the 1980s, I would agree with them. The 80s were the age of video. Everything was video. Want to listen to music? Watch a music video. Want the news? Watch TV. And no one wrote letters anymore, because there were telephones.

Now, however, people read all the time. On the internet. And people write all the time. Email, texting, blogging, twitter, social networking. People are reading. But they aren't reading books.

Is it because people don't want to read books?

If people don't want to read books, then why are Harry Potter and Twilight as popular as they are?

People want to read books, and they'd read other books besides the blockbusters if Barnes and Noble weren't squeezing out the midlist.

So...where can the midlist go? I've got several ideas. The first is the idea favored by most authors today. They say that you persevere until your book gets an agent. (This process, most of them tell you, will take years and years and years. There will be lots and lots and lots of rejection. You should get used to this, however, because it's what everyone has to go through, and by God, if I did it, then so should you, and when I was your age I walked uphill five miles to school barefoot in the snow.) Once you've got an agent, the agent gets you a publishing deal (this also takes a really looong time). Okay--now that you're on the shelves, you begin your crazy marketing campaign to take down the chain stores. Create buzz for yourself. Have a website. Have a blog. Join myspace. Plug your book endlessly. Your book will become so popular that your readers will go to Barnes and Noble and beg them to get more on the shelves.

This isn't an awful idea. In fact, it's probably the best thing you can do if you want to go the traditional publishing route.

What are my other ideas to save the midlist? In a word, self-publishing.

Yeah. I know. The word used to make me cringe too. What's wrong with self-publishing? (I'm going to forgo a discussion on vanity presses vs. PODs here. If you're interested, google it. Suffice it to say, when I say self-publish a tangible book from here on out, I'm talking about POD.) Self-publishing means that you decide your book is good enough and make it available to the public without it ever being accepted by an agent or a publisher or ever being professionally edited.

Generally, most people are of the opinion that self-published books are bad. Most people think that if a book got rejected by agents and publishers, it's not good. And you know what? It might be.

But...bad is kind of a subjective term, isn't it? Is what I think is bad the same thing as what you think is bad? And how many times (as a writer) have you wailed to someone over the "crap that gets published these days" when no one will publish your stuff? Aren't many published books "bad?"

Or...to put it another way, just because a book is published doesn't mean you'll read it, does it?

My radical idea is this: if a book is bad, people won't read it, whether an agent liked it or not.

My radical idea is this: why do we need gatekeepers to tell us what is good to read? Why can't we decide for ourselves whether it's good or not?

My final radical idea is this: if you have a burning, itching desire welling up inside you, telling you that you HAVE, HAVE, HAVE to write a story, then you're a writer. You aren't someone who wants to be a writer, you are a writer. If you write, you're a writer. And because you have that need to write, you deserve to have the opportunity to let people hear your story. (You maybe don't deserve to make a living off your writing, but you deserve the opportunity to find an audience. And NO ONE, not an agent, not a publisher, not your best friend, not your worst enemy, should be able to stop you from getting that opportunity.)

But here's the problem with self-publishing. If you put your book out there, without any kind of marketing campaign whatsoever, the same thing that's happening to the midlist will happen to it. Because no one will ever hear about it, and you can't even get it in Barnes and Noble at all.

So the public will have no idea whether or not the book is good because they will never read it.

This brings me to my final idea for saving the midlist: Online publishing. For free.

If you're like me, you don't just buy books on a whim. You buy a book for one of the following reasons: a) someone recommended it to you, b) you've read other things like it or by the same author, or c) you've read it already and want it forever. I audition books and authors using the library. I can check a book out for free, read it. If I like the book, I'm much more likely to buy a book by that author.

So, to build an audience as a writer, you need to let people read your book for free. Sure, you could self-publish the book and put copies of it in libraries all over the country. Or you could try to use the techniques authors use to market their published books to gain an audience, and then let them read your book for free online.

If people like it, you can then self-publish tangible books. You can sell e-books. You can sell merchandise using café press. You can be your own publishing company. (And keep all your royalties, but that's a discussion for another time.)

If it sounds like I'm pretty much sold on the idea of self-publishing (or indie publishing, as I like to call it), it's because I pretty much am.

I have no idea whether or not my book is good or not. But I'd like to find out. And I think the only way I will be able to is if I let people read it.

Works Cited

Carvajal, Doreen. "Authors With Less Than Stellar Sales Are Unwanted by Big Houses." 18 Aug. 1997. 22 Apr. 2009 .

Lisle, Holly. "How to Kill a Career in Three Easy Books." 22 Apr. 2009 .

New Rules Staff. "Chain Bookstores Squeezing Out Midlist Titles." 1 Aug. 2000. 20 Apr. 2009 .

Watchmen

I watched this movie Saturday night, but I haven't had a chance to write anything about it, considering the time change screwed me up something awful. This may be the first moment of my life since then that I don't feel extraordinarily tired, and that may have something to do with the can of Coke I drank...

So...I've been waiting in eager expectation (ever since I saw the trailer when I watched The Dark Knight this summer) for the movie version of Watchmen. I wasn't expecting much. After all, Alan Moore's graphic novel is a pretty thick text. It's literally thick, meaning there's a whole heck of a lot going on. It's also a thick text in terms of the layers and layers of social commentary, statements about heroic behavior, and overall insight into the human condition. It's dark. It's deep. It's got a lot of characters. In the end, I wasn't hopeful that Hollywood would be able to distill the essence of the comic into film. I was worried they would try to resurrect a hero from the story, would strip away his grungey outer layer, and set him up a moral center for the film (much the way Wanted did last year.)

Wow.

I was blown away. Watchmen not only manages to convey the messages the Moore intended it to convey (which is ironic, considering that he's completely, totally, and in all other ways against the project), but it also manages to keep most of the story intact. (A few story lines, mostly the early stories of the Minutemen, the murder of the original Night Owl, and various other sundries were cut, but the loss of them wasn't detrimental to the overall impact of the film.) The thing that impressed me so much was the LOOK of the film. While there were some "updates" to some of the costumes (most notably Night Owl's. It looked very, um, nowish), they still felt loyal to the spirit of the original material. I had the sensation, while watching the film, that the graphic novel had come alive. It was as if the characters had stepped off the pages and began moving.

Alan Moore has said that he does not think that comics should be treated in the same way as movies are, because he says comics are a poor excuse for a film. They are a film which doesn't move, has so soundtrack, and no big name actors to attract readers. I can't disagree with Alan Moore. (Not just because doing so would be tantamount to sacrilege.)

What Watchmen does, however, in terms of exactly these three criteria, is flesh out the comic to a sense where it is readily available for everyone, even those who would never pick up a comic book. There's movement. The movie "moves" like a comic. Big name actors? How's Billy Crudup for you? Okay, wait, how's Billy Crudup NAKED for you? No wait, it gets better. How's Billy Crudup's naked PENIS for you?

Okay, that's a little crass, but hell. What's a better draw, seriously, especially considering the fact the film really has little appeal to most women?

GO SEE WATCHMEN. BILLY CRUDUP IS NAKED FOR ALMOST THE ENTIRE FILM.

And blue. But maybe I'd leave that out if I were trying to sell it it to my female friends. :)

The final most mind-blowingly excellent part of the movie is the soundtrack. OMFG!! From the first strains of Bob Dylan's "The Times, They Are A'Changin'" to "All Along the Watchtower," which underscores Night Owl's and Rorschach's approach of Ozymandias' stronghold, the music is effing PURRR-fect. Several times during the movie I had chills because of how absolutely apt the particular piece of music was to the film.

So...yeah, Moore's right. Comic books aren't film. But if you think you'll never read Watchmen, and have been told by all your geeky friends that you really should, then watch the movie. It's not a substitute, but it's a good film. It tells the story. It gets the themes across. And while you might walk out of the theater feeling just a tad bit disturbed, that's what the story is meant to do to you. Being a little disturbed is good for us. Really.

Friday the 13th (2009)

There's not a lot about this less-than-great remake of Friday the 13th that hasn't already been said on the web, so I don't want to spend too much time rehashing it. Most people agree that the movie wasn't very good, but considering the source material aren't too offended. After all, Jason flicks have never been in the running for an Oscar.

The good: Friday the 13th delivers on what you might expect from a movie of its kind. Namely: tits and blood. Lots and lots of topless girls. Even a girl waterskiing topless, which just seems to me like it might be...well, uncomfortable. Not to mention it would be difficult to even see that you were topless while waterskiing, so one wonders why either the filmmakers or anyone would want to do that. But. Suffice it to say that if you want to see a movie with lots of half-naked chicks, Friday the 13th does not disappoint.

Blood.... Lots of people die. There's a lot of blood. Since this is also something you'd expect from a movie like this, it delivers.

The bad: Um....it's not gory enough. The filmmaking tends to move quickly, cutting and shaking its way through the death scenes, making it difficult to see what is actually happening to anyone. I miss the lovingly long shots of Tom Savini's handiwork from the 80s. I want to SEE what's happening. After all, it's a slasher movie.

Jason runs!

Yeah. How dumb is that?

Like Michael Myers, one of the main reasons Jason is creepy at all is the fact that he's ominous. My boyfriend Aaron and I were talking about this and we both felt that the fact that Jason would determinedly WALK after his victims, clutching his machete, was much creepier than a Jason who ran. It made him seem so confident, so unconcerned. He knew he was going to kill you.

Overall, this isn't the worst remake I've ever seen. However, I wasn' t super impressed either.

Gossip Girl Se2 Ep17

It's been a week since this episode aired, so I'm a little behind the curve. Hopefully, I can get more on track now. I'll try to post about tonight's episode sooner. :)

Incidentally, I haven't meant this to be a Gossip Girl blog, but I haven't been watching much of anything else lately, or reading things. I am super, super, super excited for Dollhouse this Friday. I'm a HUGE Joss fan, so anything he does, I can't wait to see!!!

I still think my plot ideas for Gossip Girl were better than what they did in this episode, but I was pretty freaking close, anyway. Dan and Serena are over. And Dan is most certainly banging Ms. Carr, as the last few minutes of the episode let us know. I think it would have been cooler if Dan hadn't broken up with Serena, but those two crazy kids just can't seem to get it together. Overall, I liked the arc of the episode. It bodes well for the rest of the season, I think.

I wasn't crazy about the Eyes Wide Shut thing with Chuck, but maybe it will turn into something more interesting later on in the series.

Finally, poor poor Blair. Her dad's finally seen the real Blair and he doesn't seem to like it. Will Blair soften up? Let's hope not. Soft Blair is boring Blair, as we've already seen from the Blair loves Chuck fiasco. No, no. Let's keep Blair bitchy, please.