Yesterday after work we grabbed some pizza from Mazzio's and headed over to K-- and N--'s place. We had dinner together, then watched about 45 minutes of the premier of Kings.
Honestly, I'm disappointed, because it's a story I very much want to see. It's a retelling of the David story from the Bible, but pretty much any Western story depicting a king in a good light is going to be, to some extent, a retelling of the David story from the Bible.
Problem is, they named the kid David Shepherd (son of Jesse, with a ton of brothers), and had him gain his notoriety by taking out a tank named Goliath. They've set up a pretty awesome alternate history (or distant future with relatively current technology) story presenting monarchy in a viable (if not necessarily positive) light, but they're doing it with such direct connection to the Bible story that I don't have much hope for it.
That's because there's going to be people who recognize it as the Bible story, and love the Bible story, who are constantly disappointed at ways in which this story doesn't match. (I saw plenty of that last night, just with my small group.) Then there's going to be people who recognize it as the Bible story and don't love the Bible story, who will be irritated that somebody had the nerve to try to tell a Bible story on prime time television. The only part of the audience that will really be taking the show on its own merits is that subsection that doesn't recognize it as the Bible story -- and the writers significantly trimmed that subsection down with their flagrant, oh-so-clever use of the Biblical names.
I'm disappointed, because (for what it is), the story is already better than I would have expected it to be. And this is exactly the sort of story I want to hear. I want to see it succeed, but just with the naming conventions they've already used, I don't see it surviving. That bums me out.
We got back home around eight, and then put AB to bed around 8:30, and then T-- and I watched The Big Bang Theory -- considerably lighter fare, but always fun. After that I headed back to the office, for my first stab at a new venture.
I'm going to try to learn how to write at home. I've never had any success at that. D-- and I were discussing it Sunday night, and he pointed out that it seems to be a common theme among writers. It's certainly been the case for me, for as long as I can remember. I write during church service, I write on long drives, I write over lunches and during boring meetings at work. I don't write at home. Last time I really remember writing at home was in high school, and back then I didn't have anything else.
T-- and I talked about it on our drive back from Dallas last Saturday, though, and it's a skill I need to have. It's progress I need to make, too, because my work life has been so busy the last few months that I haven't had any of the free (even over lunch breaks) that usually keeps me in the game. I had some high ambitions for this year, and I'm way behind on fulfilling those, so getting some hours in at home might bring some of that back into reach.
And...ultimately, my goal is to write from home. I want to quit my job and be a writer. It's not happening anytime soon, but I'm going to have to learn how to do that at all, before I can really commit to it as my only form of income. So that's my big self help project for the near future.
Last night I started on it. Nine to eleven is my new writing time, so right at nine I headed back to the office. I haven't used my office at all since the robbery, so most of last night was just set up. I got the fileserver moved to a closet (which I'd intended all along, but it had been running at my old desk), and set up a workstation area with laptop, connected to a full keyboard and mouse, and an old CRT monitor that I'm using as a secondary monitor at that station.
It actually didn't take me as long as I'd expected to get a comfortable spot set up, and I ended up getting a couple pages written last night. Not too shabby. If I can do a chapter a day (which is a pretty ambitious goal all by itself, but I've already got the whole book outlined), I can still finish my sequel to Gods Tomorrow this month. That's my goal.
Other than that, it's just things and stuff.
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When you're at home do you still write by hand? I think it's a good idea to have a "writing only" spot. So you're kind of ahead of the game if you haven't used your office in a while. You can develop good "writing hygiene" (with the parallel being "sleep hygiene"). Cancelling your WOW account could be a big help, too. :-p
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