Back To the Land of the Writing

First, an update on my life and the craziness that has kept me from blogging, editing my manuscript, and doing anything else in the least bit writerly:

I started last week with the first all-nighter I’ve even tried to pull since college (this was Sunday night 11/15), and it was actually pretty successful, all things considered.  I stayed at work until 4 or later every night last week (Thursday and Friday I was there until about 6), came home, and passed out every night, only to get up around 4 or 5 am and do it all over again.  On Saturday last weekend I worked in the morning, rushed home, changed, picked up my husband and my sister, and drove two hours to visit family that I would only see that day if I wanted to see them at all for the Thanksgiving Holiday season.  We got lost along the way and it took us twice as long to get there as it should have (it should have only taken an hour).  Saturday evening, my husband and I went on a Wal-Mart run, packed hurriedly and threw all our stuff in the car, because on Sunday morning we left the house at 5am to arrive at the school where I work by 6am to get on a bus with 36 Latin students, the other Latin teacher, her husband, and two other chaperons, plus a bus driver, to go to the State Latin convention, which lasted from Sunday morning through Monday evening.  (It was a blast – the students did awesomely and everyone had a great time!)  Then, on Tuesday and Wednesday, I dragged myself to work and stayed until 4 both days.  On Thursday (we’ve finally caught up to thanksgiving) I baked brownie poppers (which are little brownie puffs filled with caramel and covered with peanut butter) and we went over to my Aunt’s for Thanksgiving Dinner (where no one sits at the table because the table is so full of food there is no room for anyone to sit there).  Yesterday, I slept in for the first time in two weeks and went out to a movie with my husband.  Then we had thanksgiving leftovers at my Aunt’s for lunch and then we came home, where I graded for the rest of the evening.  After that, I started having an allergic reaction to something we ate (I suspect there was rosemary in the italian pasta thing my aunt had made, and I should have been more careful about it).  Not a serious reaction, but it did feel like there was a rubber band wrapped around my throat, so I took some medication and went downstairs to sleep restlessly on the sofa propped up straight as a board (did I mention that I’ve had a cold throughout this entire two week period while all of these other things were going on?).  Anyway, here I am today, on a rough night of sleep with still more grading to do and I have looked at my manuscript once in the last two weeks and that was only two days ago.  So much for my self-imposed NaNoEdMo, eh?

And now about the title of this blog post:  Back to the Land of the Writing

I feel like I have stumbled out of a cavern of Latin and Family that consumed me entirely and removed me from my writing endeavors and now I am reawakening to the world of editing and actively writing for the first time in much too long.  I feel groggy, my fingers rather stiff, my normally well-oiled writing mind is rusted in places and won’t turn properly all of the time.  I still have 13 chapters to edit before I’m done with this round and then there are some things that I need to go back to the beginning and fix.  There are 4 days until the end of November, counting today.  Can I finish all the editing in 4 days when I still have at least a day’s worth of grading work to do?  Probably not, but I’m going to give it a try anyway.

A Brief Review of Clash of the Titans by a Classicist

My husband and I saw Clash of the Titans this evening in 2-D and liked it just fine.  I had to pretend I knew nothing about Greek Mythology for two hours in order to enjoy it, but I expected that.  I think it would have been better if they had just given the characters different names and tweaked the costumes and place names a bit.  It would have freed the plot up a little more (not that they seemed to care much what the original plots were in the original mythology anyway.)  The special effects were fantastic, of course, and I think it would be worth spending the extra couple of dollars to see it in 3-D if you’re into that kind of thing, but I did not feel like the 2-D experience was lacking because it was in 2-D.  I did feel like it leaned toward the cliché, the expected, and deus ex machina types of things, but I also expected that (this is a story based on Olympian Mythology – you just can’t tell that kind of story without some sort of deus ex machina creeping into it at least a little).

The thing that really made the movie for me was one scene in the  middle (and I won’t tell you exactly what it was because I do not want to spoil it for you) that refers to the older Clash of the Titans movie from 1981 that wowed the world with the equivalent of 3-D CG at the time, which was claymation.  When this reference scene came up in the newer movie, I laughed out loud for at least a minute or two straight.  That one scene was worth the entire two hours and all eleven dollars.

My recommendation is this:  Watch the old one first, and then go see the new one.