I'm a writer. I love writing, I may not be good at it, as my high school English teachers were so quick to point out, but that's a moot point, because if you love something, even if you aren't good at it, you should do it! Take that English teacher's, how'd you like that for a heinously long run-on sentence?
One of the side effects of my writing, is that it often comes across as sarcastic, and a little negative. You see, the problem is that my writing is a reflection of my view point. I tend to think that I'm a pretty optimistic person, and that is manifest in my daily interactions with people. But for some reason, when I get behind the guise of a writer, the voice I choose is one of sarcasm and irony. Go figure.
My first order of business, is to post a few thoughts about a couple movies I've watched recently and a book I'm reading right now.
Last Saturday night, through the wonderful medium of Netflix, I began watching the movie "Bounty Hunter." I got about 15 minutes into it and decided to watch "Waterboy" instead. Now for people who liked "Bounty Hunter," or were planning to watch it, I'd say that's a pretty bad omen for the full experience I had with "Bounty Hunter" (and yes I did finish it eventually). But seriously, I chose to watch "Waterboy" over "Bounty Hunter." Now admittedly most Adam Sandler movies are a guilty pleasure for me, though some I can't stand. I'm ashamed to admit that, as I pride myself in watching what I call "good" movies, and I would be chagrined to include anything from the Happy Madison movie database in the genre of "good" movies (so sue me).
So Tuesday night I decided to get around finishing "Bounty Hunter." I was decidedly let down by this movie as it should have been good. It had Gerard Butler, who's a way cool actor but repeatedly chooses stupid movies to be in, and it was supposedly produced by the guy's who did "Hitch" which was an awesome movie. That's a pretty promising equation for awesomeness right?
Sigh...wrong! It should have been good! I get so tired of watching movies that should have been good. I would rather watch a bad movie, than go through the painful process of watching something that was almost intelligent, but reach into the depths of mediocrity and ruin the movie! My beef with this movie is that I felt like it was trying to do too much with too little. Nothing was developed to the extent that it needed to be, and it was because the development process they had for the characters was for them to experience the same things over and over in different situations. Bad writing my friends. Even the running jokes they tried to establish were done sloppily and, frankly in a really stupid manner.
Alright, now that ranting is over, I'll move onto the book I've been reading lately. It is called, "The Way of Kings: Book 1 of the Stormlight Archive." Now I'm mad at this book. Not for the same reason I was mad at "Bounty Hunter." I'm mad because this book is good. Really good actually. I get upset when I have to go in for work in the morning and interrupt my morning reading. But that doesn't change the fact that I'm mad at this book.
You see, I swore a long time ago that I was never going to read a fantasy book series that was more that 5 books long. This all started after reading the Wheel of Time series all the way through for the third time. Don't get me wrong, I loved the Wheel of Time series, especially the first three books. So nobody get on me for hating those books, because I enjoy them, and I'm extremely excited that my favorite author (Brandon Sanderson) is finishing the series (who incidentally is the same person who's writing the "Way of Kings" book series).
But I was burned out after reading those thousands and thousands of pages, trying for the life of me to remember who Galad is, and why there are so many characters, that I swore I would never read a series that large again. Brandon Sanderson has made me break that promise with this book. "The Way of Kings" is book 1 of 10 in this series. Ten books! This book is over 1000 pages long (I'm somewhere in the 800's and I'm just starting to see the end). If the trend continues that means this series will be at least 10,000 pages long. At a page a minute, that would mean I would be giving this series at least 7 days of my life (I think, math isn't one of my talents). That is a lot of time! (remember that is 7 full days of my life, it would take me months to finish the entire series from start to finish, but all the hours put together reading would equal 7 days).
Luckily...the book is really good. And so far there are only something like 15 characters. I can deal with that. None of this introducing 15 new characters every book like Wheel of Time did (not that there's anything wrong with that). What I like about Brandon's books is that there is extensive world building. The setting that you enter with his (very believable) characters is beautiful and has a depth that denotes the amount of time he must have spent creating this world. It runs a little slower than most fantasy adventure books out there today, but I prefer this level of pacing in my books. Though some will find it frustratingly slow at times, if you don't like reading books because they are too slow, Brandon Sanderson is not the author for you.
Sadly this blog entry is getting fairly long, too long for those with short attention spans, so I'll skip my thoughts about the movie "A-Team" right now. Instead I'll say a quick thing about the Folk Band "The Avett Brothers." Really talented group, and while my siblings will probably disagree, don't listen to them really loud on your speakers. They sound terrible with the volume up high. I never thought I'd discover a band that sounds better at normal audio levels, but there you go.
So that marks the end of my first ever blog entry. I certainly enjoyed it, which frankly was the point and purpose of this blog. So I must congratulate myself on this achievement. Thanks all!
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