Okay, I lied. I got another rejection today and it only had a $.39 stamp on it. That made me wonder why it is that the old stamps can't be "forever stamps" if the new ones are going to be. Maybe it's something to do with processing them.
Anyway, I'm super bummed because I had to work today so that meant no Motor City Comicon for me.
On a whole other boring topic, lately, I've been thinking a lot about how in some books and movies it's so easy to make the right choice. Everything is obvious. This person is completely good or completely bad. Good beats evil, happiness wins over money. It just always seems so easy. Everyone knows what's going to happen because there is only one choice that makes sense. I know not all book and movies are like that and I really know life isn't like that.
I think most often I write characters that are completely good or bad. It's easy for me to decide their fate. I need to learn how to break away from that and make the characters more complex. But if I never know what to do about those tough situations in my own life how will I know how to deal with them in my writing?
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Did you know that 14-year-olds have no sense of how the United States Post Office works or what a stamp costs? We read an article about the USPS and the forever stamp and the kids were clueless. "What? They raise the prices?" "What's the USPS? Did they misspell UPS?" They couldn't even identify the main argument of the article (that the Post Office could eventually be doomed to go out of business) because they didn't have enough prior knowledge on what the Post Office even does! Just try explaining the Forever stamp to kids who don't realize that stamps actually cost money! YARGH!
When the movie "New Jack City" was being made, they cast (I believe) Wesley Snipes as the cop and Ice-T as the crime boss. Then the director said, "No, no, this is too obvious"...and they swapped the actors. (Since then Wesley Snipes has become stereotyped as a bad guy, and Ice-T has played cop after cop.) So maybe you can take a character you've written as good and make them into the villain, and take the bad guy and make them the hero.
By the way, I'm watching Clerks II and I'm hating it. No character development, no nothing...the whiny, shiftless 20-somethings of Clerks are now whiny, shiftless 30-somethings. It's like nothing has happened since 1994, or even since early 2001 when Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back wrapped. So far the only person to even hint at some dissatisfaction with the status quo is Jay. Maybe that's the point of the story, and I need to be patient and keep watching. I'm probably just over a half-hour in. Then again, watching the bonus stuff with Kevin Smith suggests that he hasn't matured much as a person - maybe he's gone backwards a bit, wallowing in immaturity as he's gotten older. So maybe my first impresseions are correct.
OK, Clerks II picked up pretty quick after that. Randall was being really hateable in the beginning, what with the whole throwing ice at Elias bit, but rvrntually he settled down into being clueless and insecure. In the end, I liked it...but the opening 20 minutes were hard to get through.
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