What I Learned on My Winter Vacation: So what have I been up to while I've been away?

Mostly learning how to edit.

And I'll bet my readers will be so grateful.

Here are some actual recreations of the kinds of stuff I did. They aren't verbatim; as Dan Rather would say, they are accurate forgeries.

"What was I--" He stopped mid-sentence. (Duh.)

He stood up and walked across the room, crossing to the other side, where everything in the room looked slightly different. (This is for the sake of people who don't know what happens when you cross a room.)

"You are the dumbest person I have ever known." There was contempt in her eyes. (You think?)

You get the point. Lots of noted writers suggest you trim around 10% from any manuscript.

Actually, I think I like the way Algis Budrys says to do it: Trim as if you had to pay the publisher by the word. I'm trying it and it's working. Those who had to wade through "Beautiful Hands" as a 10,000 word beast of a novellette will be shocked to hear it's now a 7,500 word short story. And it works really well at that length. Gone are all the instances where "Tevya thought about how much she hated her father, loathed him, wish he would choke on herbs and die." And so on add infinitum. Instead Tevya gets on with the story.

The side benefit of playing such hack-and-slay with old manuscripts is that it's helped me feel freer in my current drafts. No need to fret over each sentence like I was carving scripture on gold plates. Just get it down on paper. They'll be plenty of time to fix it when you're done, and you can see each bit in terms of the whole story.

So look for a new piece soon. And look for me to put something here more often.

Because nobody does 24 commentary better.

More On 24: First off, with 24 back on the air, that means one more bonus: Dave Barry is back to blogging about 24.

Here's my recap of Sunday's second episode of 24.

Agent: We need to figure out a new way to go in.
CTU Director: Okay, but hurry, because we've got to go in fast.
Agent: You bet. We're going in.
CTU Director: How long until you go in?
Agent: Right about the time we go in.
Jack: Go in through the left side. Use the itsay away aptray maneuver.
Agent and Terrorist: Wow. No possible code there.
CTU Director: No need to change our plans. Let's continue stalling when we go in.
Terrorist: Oh, I can't wait until they go in.
CTU Director: We're probably just about ready to go in.
Agent: We're ready to go in, unless anyone else wants to review our plans.
Samwise Rudy: I want to review all your plans before you go in.
CTU Director: Okay. But then we're going in, we swear.
Samwise Rudy: I think Jack may have used a code. Change a bunch of stuff before you go in.
Agent: But we want to go in!
Erik, at home watching: You know, by now I could have driven to the Ontario Airport and gone in myself.

Yeah, I can see why some people have a problem with it, but for some reason, it's like crack for me.

Usually.

24 Spoilers: You want spoilers for last night's 24? Within the first 20 minutes, my two favorite characters, besides Jack, croak.

But I just keep on watching.

In Case You're Wondering: The fourth Harry Potter movie is great, contained hardly a single unnecessary frame, and while they took a few of the subtle clues to one of the big twists at the end and swapped them for beat-you-over-the-head obvious ones, I can forgive them, because the rest of the movie was so perfect, in pacing, tone, and acting.

Anyone who didn't know what to expect when seeing what was "taken" from each contestant for them to find in the lake would have been . . . surprised.

I enjoyed it tremendously.

Maybe in another three months I'll get to see Narnia.

The Brothers Chaps Are Not Dead: In case you didn't follow it all winter on the fan forums, it was a big deal that the Homestar Runner website went over a month without updating.

Anyways, they updated.

What A Co-inkidink: You know how some movies, when played with some albums, contain coincidences?

We used to do that as kids with cartoons. We'd turn down the volume on, say, Popeye, then turn up the volume on, say, Weird Al, waiting for moments when it looked like the character onscreen was singing or the lyrics seemed oddly appropriate for the cartoon. We got some good laughs that way.

Well now, they're doing it with movies. As in, you play more than one movie at the same time. Specifically, all six Star Wars movies.



Then, you look for coincidences. Like, say, how the shots of Obi-Wan and Padme from Revenge of the Sith match up both in the framing and timing with the shots of Luke and his dad from the end of Return of the Jedi, at the same moment in the film.





Nothing earth-shattering. But the most amazing part, to me, when I watch the few video segments he has on the site, is how he managed to notice any of the coincidences in the chaos that watching all six movies seems to be. Maybe it was such chaos that any patterns leapt out at him amidst the randomness. Or maybe he's from the MTV generation and I'm just an old one-frame codger. I have a hard enough time with the multiple frames on 24.

And I saw it over at the website at the end of the universe, which is usually worth checking out.

On Ants: I don't know how I made it to 30 without noticing that ants have a smell. They really do. I'm even smart enough to know what I'm smelling. Formic acid, right? But as Hulk Hogan used to say, those are some pretty bad odoriferous emanations.

And why do they only come out when it rains? Is it because they've figured out we need the sun to get the magnifying glass to work?

Yeah, yeah. Their home's probably flooded. If only I could figure out how to explain to them the concept of "indoor pool" in ant-speak.

Without, of course, teaching them the concept of swimming.

I hate ants.

DOUBLE FEATURE Movie Review of the Day: Fantastic Four and Sky High

You know, if I were to be totally honest, Fantastic Four was probably at least a good a movie as Sky High.

So why did I like Sky High so much better?

Some of it's got to be expectation. I didn't ever read Fantastic Four as kid. Not even when one of my favorite comic book writers, John Byrne, took over. I only had so much money for comics, and frankly, I saw that foursome as kind of oldy-moldy and stale. Of course, I was buying Justice League, which I guess was even older, but it was oldy-moldy for the Marvel universe.

Still, though, when they make a movie out of franchise characters, there's high expectations. After all, the makers of the movie have years and years of stories to draw from. There are thousands of Fantastic Four stories already sitting out there. There is a lot of potential for the filmmakers to be able to combine the best elements of the various stories to create a great movie.

I already explained how the Spider-Man people did exactly that. They dipped into the Spider-Man mythos and pulled out a bunch of the cool stuff, mixed it together (including mixing characters into one person) and came up with something great.

In the case of the Fantastic Four movie, it felt like the opposite. Like they thought, "These are such great, well-beloved characters, we'll just put their story on screen and it will be great."

Well, for me it wasn't great. I already knew everything in the movie. They made couple of changes to simplify the story--like having Doom get powers in the same storm where the Four got their powers--but overall, they brought nothing to the story.

With the exception of the guy that played Ben Grimm, who I thought was terrific, the actors all struck me wrong, too. It was more like they were at a Halloween party playing the Fantastic Four than that I was seeing the comic book characters come to life.

Sky High, on the other hand, was terrific. While there were unbelievable characters in this one, that was deliberate. You notice all those performances were given by the grown-ups. Keeping the grown-ups as stereotypes not only accurately portrayed a kid's view of the world, but it helped establish the fact that all the problems should be solved by the kids--the only way it should be in any kids movie.

This one didn't surprise me much either. The villains all turn out to be who you expect them to be. Naturally every kid's power, no matter how bizarre, ends up having its role to play in the climax.

But it was fun and witty and everybody did a great job doing what they were doing. You get to see Linda Carter again, too. So there's really no down side.

And there's a really, really rockin' soundtrack of covers of 80's songs by current bands that's worth checking out.

About Art: My four year old loves to dance. It's just a natural thing in her. Ever since she gained any coordination at all, she's had to move if there was any music on. One of my fondest memories is her as a little bald-headed toddler, lying on the couch. We thought she was asleep, but when she heard some music from a TV commercial, she had to raise her barely-conscious arm and bounce it with the music.

She's learned a little more about dance since then. She'll do her version of ballet when she hears classical music. She'll rock out, even play air guitar when she hears rock. Tap to tap. You get the idea.

I'm not saying she's a child prodigy or anything. She's not particularly graceful and I'm not all that sure about her sense of rhythm.

But man, does that girl ever love to dance.

There's an honesty in her dancing, where you can tell she's doing what she feels with the music. No matter how it might look to anybody else, to her it feels right, and it shows.

So tonight, I was watching her dance to some music on a National Geographic for Kids video they'd picked out from the library. Some animal or other was cavorting to the music on screen, but Miriam wasn't watching so much as she was listening, so she could dance.

And I got to thinking. About the things that draw us to art in the first place. About that raw love we have for the art form, for the way performing or creating that piece of art makes us feel. The way it is for my four year old, just to move her body the way the music tells her to. The way it seems to be for my three year old and drawing--even though the shapes are barely starting to become recognizable, she loves making them. The way it was for me, as a kid, making up stories.

And that got me thinking about the transition. The one that comes as we begin to go from yeomen in our art to journeymen. We start learning the techniques of the craft, the way everyone else does it. The things people have decided work and don't work. What was raw and free form is given a structure, an organization.

In some ways, that can expand our abilities. We discover things we didn't previously know about. Our means of expression expands.

But in some other ways, we begin to feel boxed in. All that organization and structure begins to put limits and boundaries on what had previously felt to us to be limitless.

Even the language of our art begins to put boundaries on us. I realized this when I learned another language. In Portuguese, there's a really terrific word--jeito. Now if you plug that into Babelfish, it will tell you that word means "Skill." That almost makes me laugh. The word jeito is actually a terrific concept. When you talk about a person's jeito, you're talking about their aura, their comportment, their methods of doing things, the whole way they present themselves, their charisma. But it's more than that--it's almost the whole way a person interacts with the world. When you say you're going to get something to change, you say you're going to give it some jeito.

Now Portuguese speakers are probably going to post here to say my definition here is inaccurate or incomplete. They're right. Again, the whole concept doesn't really exist in English. For us, it's complicated to explain. For them, it's one word. It's jeito.

It's the same way as we start building the vocabulary of our art form. Suddenly you're not just flinging out your arms because it felt right, but you're getting a name for that, and a way to fling them that's the right way, and reproving click-clicks of the tongue from the teacher if it's not.

Like I said, there's value in learning what you can about the art. A musician can never dream of making the beautiful music their heart yearns to create without being willing to slog through repetitious scales that familiarize their fingers with the instrument. A dancer, through repetition and training will enable their bodies to do exhilarating things the casual dancer only dreams of.

The trick, the hardest part of it, is maintaining that love of the art, maintaining that spontaneity and creativity that drove you into the art, even while you're having to spend all that time focusing on the nuts and bolts of it, seeing the rough stitching on the underside rather than the lovely presentation up top.

That's the part where a lot of people get lost as they work to become artists. All of that analysis, criticism, study--it's like taking your favorite dog and dissecting him on the kitchen table. All of that doesn't really reveal all that much more about true "dogginess." And it certainly doesn't explain the magic of the bond the person has with their companion. If anything, it strips a little of that magic away. It denigrates it. It says, look--this is all there is! Just flesh and bone and puppy parts. What were you getting so worked up about?

So that's the key. I don't know the language for dance or music or painting, but for writing, it means absorbing and mastering the principles of plot and character and hooks and twists and viewpoint and pacing and beats and still being able to generate that little squeal of a thrill from feeling that a story or a scene or even just a sentence feels right.

Like a basketball player who's done drills and learned plays and knows techniques and form, but in the heat of the moment all of that gets pushed to the back of his mind as he gets by on that same instinct that got him by on the asphalt courts at his junior high.

The difference is, now his instincts have the benefit of all that training and study and practice to rely on. Because he managed to maintain his love of the game through it all, he's now able to be paid to do it. Others want to crowd arenas to watch him do it.

I think that makes the difference in taking him from journeyman to master.

So I know that my daughter is eventually going to have to make a choice. It's the same one I have to make in my writing. The same one you've got to make in whatever you do. Do you love it enough to lay it out, dissect it, and understand it? Can you endure all of that enough that it can bring you back to where you started, that place of innocent creation, only this time, armed with the tools to create what you only barely sensed was possible in your first fledgling attempts?

I sincerely hope the answer is yes. For me at least.

My daughter's still got time to decide.

For Pete's Sake: Will everybody stop talking about this letter as if it's news? Seriously, no one, not Lewis, not Lewis's Mom, not the president of Lewis's fan club would have thought The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe would have made a good live-action movie. He basically said, live action effects don't do these kinds of films justice, and he was right.

But that was nearly thirty years ago. That was the year Ben-Hur won the special effects Oscar. Peter Jackson wasn't even born for two more years.

This letter was pulled out of some vault somewhere by some PR guy to get a little more buzz going for the movie. It's anything but news.