pleasedBut, in the flurry of December,
fosteronfilm and I have managed to catch a couple of fun flicks. We attended the Sweeny Todd advance screening on the 5th as well as Enchanted last week. Delightful pair of movies...in totally different ways—although the idea of a Sweeny Todd/Enchanted double feature appeals to me in a twisted fashion, and hey, they're both musicals! But between them, I liked Sweeny Todd best. Tim Burton's just got a macabre gift for lushly beautiful cinematography, and with a stellar cast of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman, it was gruesome, lurid, and decadent—a gothic fantasy of a movie. Check out
fosteronfilm's review.After the final scene, I leaned over to Matthew and giggled: "Everybody die. Die die die"—my favorite mantra when I'm stressed out, overwhelmed, and being attacked on every side by hamsters. (I've found it works much better for lowering the blood pressure than "om mani padme hum.") Matthew's heard me mutter it under my breath on several occasions, and it happens to also be the perfect synopsis of the movie's plot as well as its theme. Hee!
Writing Stuff
Received:
• 240-day SALE of "The Tortoise Bride" to Cricket. This makes my 13th sale to the Cricket Magazine Group and my 11th to Cricket magazine. Woot! I hadn't sold anything to the Cricket folks in over a year, and I was beginning to fear I'd lost my appeal to them. So I was verily ecstatic to get their stamp of approval on this one.
'Course now I don't have anything in their slush pile. Wonder if there's any chance I can get my current WiP and a new folktale written before session starts...not very likely, but I know I'm capable of producing that amount of wordage in that timeframe; I've done it before—although I think that was before I agreed to helm Tangent and now The Fix. Hmmm.
• 95-day pass from IGMS. A bit dismayed at this one. I've sold to them before, and this was a form rejection from the assistant editor. Trying not to engage in rejectomancy...
• 147-day complimentary and personal "not for us" from Spacesuits & Sixguns with invite to submit more.
• 139-day kindly no on a reprint from Rachel at Podcastle after holding it for a second round.
New Words:
• 1500 words on "Morozko." (4272/3500) And, yep, my word-count-fu is totally on the fritz. I'm just hitting the last scene. Undoubtedly there'll be room for culling when I start into my rewrite/editing, but at 1K+ over my original estimate, I don't think I should be trying to gauge story lengths until I recalibrate my story-length-o-meter.
