there are always posts unwritten

Not much blogging in the past week because not much is really going on. I’m working through the first draft a The Brilliant Beacon! story, one involving radio dramas in the 1940s. At the store, we’re gearing up for the release of Modern Warfare 2, which I desperately want to play but have no money to buy because I’m accumulating a massive credit card deficit applying to graduate schools. So far I’ve applied (at least in online form) to five of my planned eight schools. The two stories I’m using for my writing sample are in pretty good shape, but my personal statement is all over the place.

Also, I do eventually want to write a post about my experience watching Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door movie, which is one of the singular most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen, even though it was not nearly as disturbing as the novel of the same name. Also been watching the second season of Castle, which continues to be a really fun show. And then there’s also the potential to talk about the games I’ve been playing: how Uncharted 2 was the best-told video game story I’ve ever played, how Brutal Legend misses a few opportunities, and how Borderlands became a serious time sink that I had to stop playing because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop if I kept going. And also how much I want to play Modern Warfare 2 partially because of an alleged scene in which you play as members of a terrorist organization. I have a deep and abiding love for narrative innovation in games, and I’d love to see what happens when the player is forced to play as a character who, to progress though the game, is required to do things that the player may not actually want to do. It all goes back to what I thought was so terrific about the latter levels of Bioshock. It seems that games are finally starting to play with the idea that they are in fact a game through which players must progress to reach the goal of completing the game. More of this after I finally get to play the game.

Also, there’s a post or two in my current reading of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, a book that I can’t yet decide whether I like or not. Nonetheless, it had gotten me thinking more carefully about the idea of death and the afterlife, and also about the use of terrible similes to affect literary-ness. That could potentially lead into an enumeration of all the things that I do not want to do in my graduate school fiction. Which could lead into my thoughts on Stephen King’s really excellent definition of literary fiction vs. popular fiction (extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances vs. ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances)

But, for now, it’s early for a Friday evening, but I have to open my store tomorrow, and I’m kind of tired. So this tease is all the blogging I’ll be doing. Not much to wait for after a week of silence, I know, but that’s how it goes. Consider this a preview of possible coming attractions.

And, yea, I realize the first sentence of this said that there wasn’t much going on. But it never seems like a lot until you list it all out like this. So, in the meantime, go read/watch/play something good.