This is a guest post by Barbara O’ Brien, a writer on progressive political and health care matters. You can read other articles by her at The Mahablog, Crooks and Liars and AlterNet.
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Many obstacles and stumbling blocks remain in the way of health care reform. The House and Senate bills will have to be merged, and then the House and Senate both will vote on the final bill. We don’t yet know what will be in the final bill, or if the final bill will be passed into law. Passage will be especially difficult in the Senate, where it will need 60 votes to pass. It is still possible that after all this angst, just one grandstanding senator could kill the whole thing.
But just for fun, let’s look at what conventional wisdom says will be in the final bill and see if there is anything in it that will be an immediate benefit to people with mesothelioma and other asbestos-related disease.
It is likely that the final bill will provide additional funding for state high-risk insurance pools. Currently more than 30 states run such pools, which are nonprofit, state-sponsored health insurance plans for people who can’t buy insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The biggest problem with such pools is that, often, the insurance they offer is too expensive for many who might need it. Both the Senate and House bills provide $5 billion in subsidies for state high-risk pools to make the insurance more affordable.
Under the Senate bill, beginning in 2014, private companies would no longer be able to deny coverage to adults with pre-existing conditions, nor could they charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions. Until then, the state high-risk pools could provide some help.
Closing the Medicare Part D coverage gap — also called the “doughnut hole” — is another potential provision that could help some patients with asbestos-related disease. The “doughnut hole” is the gap between the coverage for yearly out-of-pocket expenses provided by Medicare Part D and Medicare’s “catastrophic coverage” threshold.
For example, in 2009 Medicare Part D paid at least 75 percent of what patients paid for prescription drugs up to $2,700. After that, patients must pay for all of their prescription medications until what they have paid exceeds $6,154. At that point, the catastrophic coverage takes over, and Medicare pays for all but 5 percent of the patient’s drug bills. The final health care reform bill probably will provide for paying at least 50 percent of out-of-pocket costs in the doughnut hole.
You may have heard the bills include budget cuts to the Medicare program, and this has been a big concern to many people. Proponents of the bill insist that savings can be found to pay for the cuts, and that people who depend on Medicare won’t face reduced services. But this is a complex issue that I want to address in a later post.
The long-term provisions probably will include many other provisions that would benefit patients with asbestos-related disease, including increased funding for medical research. Although there are many complaints about the bill coming from all parts of the political spectrum, on the whole it would be a huge benefit to many people.
— Barbara O’Brien
David Brooks, having woken up to find the Tea Party he went home with last night is in fact a giant rat king of cretinous lunatics, is attempting to climb out of bed quietly, and as per his usual “moderate” acrobatics, stumbling blindly through the kitchen, upending pots and pans and throwing dishes to the floor with all the grace of a hangover victim the day after Mardis Gras. This week’s tactic is to equate the Tea Baggers with the New Left of the sixties:
Because of this assumption, members of both movements go in big for conspiracy theories. The ’60s left developed elaborate theories of how world history was being manipulated by shadowy corporatist/imperialist networks — theories that live on in the works of Noam Chomsky. In its short life, the Tea Party movement has developed a dizzying array of conspiracy theories involving the Fed, the F.B.I., the big banks and corporations and black helicopters.
I see what you did there, Dave. and it’s not working.
This is what we call a false equivalency (also known as Moderate Spin attack). By implying that two extremes are diametrically opposed, he’s suggesting that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. If this were true, than in between chocolate and vanilla would be frozen yogurt. Or strawberry. Or I don’t know what. A decrease in the capital gains tax, most likely. But Brooks, master of GOP Judo, is using the obvious lunacy of one group to tar his arbitrarily chosen opposite as being equally nuts. The problem with his two opposites is that they aren’t really even remotely the same. It’s not just apples vs. oranges. It’s apples vs. an imaginary fruit that is both invisible and purple, smells like summer on your grandpa’s farm and makes you virile like a double shot of Viagra.
Noam Chomsky may have some rhetorical flourishes that get up the nose of some folks but he and the lefties of the sixties were essentially right in their criticism of corporatism of American culture. He’s only been proven more right by recent events, such as the bank bailouts and privatization of the Middle Eastern War effort. But some of Chomskey’s fans were hippies and hippies smell funny! And David Brooks was once turned down for a date in San Francisco, by a girl with flowers in her hair.
Meanwhile the Tea baggers believe things that aren’t even negotiably true. There’s no wiggle room around Obama’s birth certificate or their obsession with the Fed or beleif in the righteousness of the gold standard. They’re a bunch of inattentive, scared middle class white folk, stirred into a fear frenzy by the very visible failure of their party to do anything constructive for an entire decade (or more), all fueled by the lingering racist backlash directed incoherently at our country’s first African American president. They’re threatened by change and their own inability to do anything to stop that change. Perhaps the New Left failed to effect any major change back in the sixties but that may have more to do with the Republican counter revolution (of which Brooks is a card-carying member) than anything inherently unworkable in the general outlook of the sixties Left. Yeah sure, world peace wasn’t really going to happen but stopping the napalming of Vietnamese villagers (and subsequent profit generated by the sale of said napalm) would sure go along way towards an incremental step in that direction. I’m not sure what the Tea Baggers want to achieve but screaming about a government (Muslim/Kenyan/Socialist) scheme designed to kill your dreams isn’t going to get there.
Link via @ebertchicago
Paul Campos over at Lawyers Guns and Money makes an interesting observation about the lingua franca of our modern world, pop culture references:
[...] at this point I find that the only two film references that I can always count on the vast majority of the class to get are The Wizard of Oz and the first Star Wars trilogy. I’m wonder about the extent to which technology has and will gradually change this circumstance — that it is or will make pop culture, both in its high art and low schlock manifestations, more reliably intergenerational as pedogogical references or just subjects of general conversation.
Technological innovations in distribution like Netflix and streaming video are certainly going to provide a much larger window onto the collective pop culture scene than was previously available. Netflix alone has recently been granted access to stream the entire back catalog of MGM. There are silent movies on YouTube, in their entirety. This is a far cry from even when I was a kid, and we only knew the movies that could be rented on VHS. If ti was out of print or hadn’t ever been issued to begin with, it may as well have not existed. However. This doesn’t mean the kids these days are going to know what you’re talking about when you mention China Town or Dirty Harry or even The Shining. Just because they can watch those movies doesn’t mean they’re going to. Other than the odd teenage cinophile, there’s no reason to expect every teenager[1] to have seen The Princess Bride, even if it is one of the best movies ever.The flip side of this are the outliers. Movies like Star Wars and Wizard of Oz and Indiana Jones, those pieces of art that have become embededed in the culture at large. Everyone gets a star Wars reference or an Oz reference, even if they’v enever seen the movies because parts of those stories have become so pervasive, you pick it up through osmosis, or just repetition and homage.[2]
This is part of a larger set of assumptions that educators and librarians are runnign into when it comes to the younger generation of students. I keep seeing this in the university where I work, where everyone assumes the Millennials[3] are all computer experts. The problem is, this expectation has been around since they were children and what I’m finding more and more is, since everyone assumes these kids already know how to work with computers, they’ve never bothered to train them to do anything. So they come to college and something as simple as format a word document is beyond their ability to comprehend.
Basically, it’s safe to assume that they’ll get the Star Wars references but if you want to riff on The Venture Bros.or Firefly, you may need to test their knowledge before hand. You may be surprised at what they have seen but will definitely be shocked at what they haven’t.
That, and for the love of Steve, add a basic computer literacy course to your school’s curriculum.
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1. Or even people in their mid twenties. I’m surprised at the number of people just five or six years younger than me who had never seen Labyrinth and had no idea that something like the Dark Crystal even existed. And these weren’t exactly sheltered people. It’s just not something they would have thought to look for and so never were exposed to it.
2. My wife had enver seen Casablanca until a few years ago. After watching it she wass startled at just how many lines and scenes she knew, because that movie had been so thoroughly assimilated into our culture.
3. I detest generational tags like this but that’s to be expect form an old Gen Xer like myself.
The single best writing day I ever had was when I was writing The Machine of the World. I wrote 7000 words in a span of 8 hours. I took a half an hour break for lunch but otherwise wrote for an entire day. This was exhilarating in itself, to see that I was capable of such a creative output.[1] It was also a total fluke.
Seeing as how most books range between 40 and 100,000 words,[2] congratulating myself on completing 7000 at a go seems silly. But the hardest part of writing is the process of putting words on a page.[3] because unless you’re doing National Novel Writing Month, (and even if yo are) you won’t be dropping 7000 every day. Unless you’re Jack Kerouac, but then the Speed helped and he was typing so fast, he forgot to use punctuation.
But you should have a reasonable daily word count for yourself. This will vary by the author.
Tom Robbins, famously, doesn’t count at all, he works on one sentence, getting it perfect before he moves on to the next. So some days he’ll write a page, others, just one sentence. This is of course absurd but not as absurd as Marcel Proust, who wrote as the whim moved him, and only in a cork-lined room.
[find some other author word count anecdotes]
For those like me, who are just starting out and may have a day job as well, you won’t have time to wait for the whim of the muse to grip you by the wrist and dip your perfumed fingers in the ink. You have to find an hour in the evening or thirty minutes on your lunch break, bang out a few hundred words and then get back to work. For the working writer, Cory Doctorow makes a good argument for aiming at a nice and tidy 500 words a day:
- Short, regular work schedule
When I’m working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I’m working on it. It’s not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it’s entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there’s always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn’t become a habit). The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day’s page between sessions. Try to find one or two vivid sensory details to work into the next page, or a bon mot, so that you’ve already got some material when you sit down at the keyboard. - Leave yourself a rough edge
When you hit your daily word-goal, stop. Stop even if you’re in the middle of a sentence. Especially if you’re in the middle of a sentence. That way, when you sit down at the keyboard the next day, your first five or ten words are already ordained, so that you get a little push before you begin your work. Knitters leave a bit of yarn sticking out of the day’s knitting so they know where to pick up the next day — they call it the “hint.” Potters leave a rough edge on the wet clay before they wrap it in plastic for the night — it’s hard to build on a smooth edge.
This has been working for me for the past few months. I feel a nice sense of accomplishment if I get that 500 goal. Some days, I can’t resist the urge and keep going, regularly breaking 1000. But that extra 500 words? That’s gravy. Doesn’t count towards the next day. Still need to do 500 words then, too. And the day after that. Unless it’s Saturday. I usually take Saturdays off.
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1. The most impressive part is that most of those 7000 words are still in the finished book. For those interested, it’s the second part of chapter two, all of three and four and the end of seventeen. I didn’t say they were consecutive words.
2. The SFWA says a novel starts at 40K words. NaNoWriMo requires yo to write 50K in 30 days. there’s no standard length for a novel but generally speaking, you only get to break 150K if you’re Stephen King or Neil Stephenson. If you’re getting into that range, you should probably set aside a few minutes to examine your plot and see if you aren’t trying to shoehorn too much into one story.
3. Or a screen. Some authors write longhand in notebooks with actual ink pens. This strikes me as archaic. But hey whatever works for you. I’ve tried writing longhand and before I finish a page, I’ve usually crossed out half of what I’ve written, forgotten how to spell the other half and filled the margins with addendum and arrows identifying which sentence goes before or after which other sentence. I am a decidedly untidy writer. I think in images and phrases, not in paragraphs. if it weren’t for word processing software, I probably would never finish so much as a blog post and would have even worse spelling.
The other night, I was in bed, half asleep (sans frog pajamas), when I solved the biggest problem the plot of my book had: the ending. Up until then, I had only a vague sort of general idea what would happen in the end. This was problematic for a variety of reasons. The most obvious being, if you don’t know how your story ends, then how do you know when to stop? At various points, I was adding subplots tot he story and had swelled the projected length to more than 150,000 words. That’s a rather svelt book for Stephen King but for me, that suggests kitchen sink writing.[1] You could kill someone by dropping such a book on their head. Not wanting to write a weapon of mass destruction, this became a problem.
It was also slowign me down. If I don’t know where I’m going with the story, I can go anywhere. That makes it hard to follow through on themes and damn near impossible to write. If I get stuck in chapter 12, I can’t just jump down the line and pick up a later scene because what happens if, when I get back to chapter 12, it changes things that happen later? I’ve just wasted days writing scenes that need to either be rewritten or thrown out entirely. This starts us down the road to second guessing and muttering to yourself and eventually drinking a whole bottle of Ouzo in one sitting.
So having a solid, clear end point is a necessity. At least for me.[2] And for a while, I didn’t have one and this made things complicated. And by complicated, I mean frustrating. But! while in the hypnogogic reverie, floating like a leaf on a pond, I figured it out. The End. and everything was made transparent. Themes became solid. Motifs fell into place. The story–wobbly and jellylike before–became a walking breathing thing, apparent and mobile under its own momentum. Within two days, I had not only a complete plot outline but had written nearly 3000 words.
Getting to this point was a lot of work.[4] Moving on from here to the end will still be a lot of work, though not quite as frustrating. I can now pay attention to the writing and not have to spend sleepless hours figuring out the plot. If I get stuck in a scene, I can jump ahead to any scene that catches my fancy (or picked at random) from the outline and start writing, confident that it will fit into place, because it now has a place designed to fit it, in whatever shape it ends up. Because, while I have an outline, there’s still plenty of wiggle room to surprise myself with turns of phrase and character moments I didn’t anticipate. The muscle and meat of the plot outline can be adjusted to meet those minor changes, now that I have the skeleton in place.
From here on out, it’s just a matter of putting words on the page. That is the fun part, but also the biggest challenge, as it means finding time every day to meet my daily word count. And what should that daily word count be? That’s a very good question.
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1.Don’t have an idea what your story is about but plenty of wacky ideas? Throw it in! It worked for Lost. If by worked you mean, made an endless muddled mess of a story with so many chaarcters and subplots and sub-sub plots and smoke monsters and polar bears in the tropics and ooh, time travel! but no resolution that could ever make sense. Yeah sure, that’s something you could do. But it won’t tell a satisfying story.
2. Some authors are confident in their craft to just let the story unwind and wouldn’t dream of writing a plot outline, as it would kill their creative flow and they’d loose interrest in the story. Neil Gaiman apparently writes this way but then he’s not too teribly worried about his story structure, since every novel and story he writes is basically the heroes journey. [3] At the othe rend of the cale we have Tom Robbins, whose legendary writing style is the stuff of legend: he perfectly crafts a single sentence with no thought as to the one that came before or that will come after. No plot. No character sheet. No idea where anythign will go. He’s perfected the absolute zen art of writing. At least, according to his own mythology. It’s not possible to start writing a book that begins “The magician’s underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami,” without knowing at least a little something about who the magician is and what their underwear is doing in that suitcase.
3. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. The hero’s journey is a tried and true tale, as old as humanity and has enough room for infinite variation and Mr. Gaiman does it better than just about anybody. It’s just not the story I want to tell, necessarily.
4. And there’s no easy way to get from point A to point B except by trudging ahead until you build up that momentum. I wish there were some easy program or solution to this problem but it’s really just a matter of perseverance. You have to be confident enough in your craft to get through that hard slog. Not everybody can and more than one great American (or Canadian or Tasmanian or Chechnyan) novel has died in this valley between the cool idea and the point where it takes on enough mass and heat to burst to life like a little star. But once you get to that ignition point, that’s where writing becomes the most fun and fulfilling.
Over at the Onion Av club, they have an interesting discussion of movies, TV shows and music that people have fallen out of love with. As much as I’m loathe to admit it, Sam Adams has a point about Tim Burton. I still think Beatlejuice is a great movie and enjoy Sweeny Todd but I have to admit, Burton is a hit or miss director. Even if we exclude Mars Attacks!, He’s hitting about a 50/50 average, with most of the good stuff falling into his early career. I’m still looking forward to Alice in Wonderland though.
But, alas, I have fallen out of love with a few filmmakers and musicians. Once upon a time, I used to love Bjork, swan dress and all. But only recently, I’ve found that I can’t stand to listen to any of her music, even Vespertine. I’m not sure if her Mathew Barney-inspired last album has retroactively tainted her music or what but Bjork has lost me.
I’ve already documented (possibly in a bit too much detail) my falling out with George Lucus. Let’s just let that one go. The Star Wars trilogy was completed in 1983 and as far as I’m concerned, he’s done nothing since but fiddle with speakers.
I’ve also come to realize that David Lynch is just not a good director. None of his movies even attempt to be satisfying films, or psychological pictures of the inner workings of a character or even just a decent story. I couldn’t even make it more than half way through Inland Empire before I was just bored. He just makes weird art filmic things that invovle actors and ocasionally there’s even something that apes the basic outline of a plot but in the rare event that shows up, it’s quickly ushered out back and beaten to death with a tire iron.
There is hope though: for years I was pretty much bored with Star Trek but the new movie reminded me what I saw in the first place and managed to reinvigorate my love for the older movies as well, even ones I had previously written off as sentimental and week stories.* It’s possible Bjork’s next album will remind me of what I saw in her music or that the rumored live-Action Star Wars TV show said to be starting up filming in Australia will remind me of the Star Wars of my youth. I wouldn’t count on it though.
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*Except Nemesis. That one still sucks.
So, where was I? Right! Chapter 9.
Chapter 9 was giving me some trouble. We’re already about 8 pages into the story. We’ve met two of our main characters and established a premise and shown a bit of the world. Time to get into the guts of the story and have some fun. But I still have to take care of some business, namely, getting us to a stable plot point form where to progress. Remember, our hero,Major To has traveled through time and is in a world that looks similar tot he one he left but just enough is different to throw him off. he’s got to get his legs about him before we can just throw him into the wilderness again. This is the point of chapter 9 and at first, chapter 10 as well. That was my problem. I had given myself way too much space to do what is essentially the novel-equivalent of an establishing shot. Where is Tom living and how is he coping? That doesn’t need 5000 words. In my attempt to fill up the alloted space, i was spinign out a web of cliches. Tom gets a cell phone! Tom meets his wacky gay neighbors! Tom has an epiphane about the tragic nature of the future… Well, so what? That’s not the point. Noone wants to see Major Tom sit in his livign room, trying to figure out how to order a pizza with his brand new iPhone.
So, I took the parts of chapter 9 that worked and the parts of chapter 10 that worked and smooshed them together (well, edited them together).
This seems like a trivial thing but it’s not. I have the whole rest of the book to show how Tom is or is not adapting to this crazy wacky futuristic world in which he finds himself. no need to dump it all out on the table at once. Our goal is, whenever possible, to do at least two things at once. We can both move the plot forward and establish that Tom finds this world confusing and strange. Idelaly, we would do more than just those two things but for th epurpose of our illustattion, the take-home lesson is this: Don’t waste your reader’s time. If you, the writer are bored by the idea of doing that scene, skip it. If it doesn’t interest you, it sure as hell isn’t going to interrest your reader, who will never know it’s missing. And if it turns out later you need to add that scene back in, well, that’s what the second draft is for.
This cleared the way to jump into the complication, or Act 2, where things start to get really interesting.
My, how the recruitment standards for the Plumbers have fallen. Almost 40 years on and you fuckers still can’t figure out how to tap a phone* right but at least G. Gordon Liddy never dressed up like a fake pimp to pull a Halloween trick and then demand it be taken as serious journalism.
And this is how you dingbats are planning to build an empire? Hiring Young Republicans to shit themselves in a fit of public embarrassment as part of some ill-conceived plot to undermine the Democrats? The Democrats? All you have to do is ask politely and they’ll undermine themselves. Instead, you find some eager young fascist willing to pull some old-school Nickelodeon prank and expect that to send a message of fear and loathing into the hearts of your enemies. Instead, we’re all pointing and laughing.
This is why America is doomed: Nero set the city of Rome on fire and then blamed it on the Christians, and that was just for a laugh one Saturday night. Meanwhile our would-be emperors are cribbing their grand master plans from Saturday Night Live skits. We’ll just skip the Glorious Imperium stage, thanks, go straight to the part where the descendants of madmen squat in the ruins of a once-upon-a-time beacon of hope and enlightenment.
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* Now they’re claiming they weren’t trying to tap senator Landrieu’s phone, just disconnect it. Because sabotage is so much better than unlawful surveillance.
It doesn’t help our claims that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aren’t modern-day Crusades when the military is using firearms inscribed with Bible verses. In the great and infinite list of bad ideas, this one is pretty much number 2 (number 1: don’t start land wars in Asia).
Why don’t we just send clerics and wizards over there and be done with it.
So, the other day I had a story-related epiphany–
Wait. Let’s back up a sec, so I can make sure we’re all on the same page story mechanics-wise.
When writing (or just telling) a story, it’s important to now what the nature of the conflict at the heart of that story is about. Some of you may recall the conflict types discussed in English lit classes but for those who don’t, a quick refresher. All story is conflict. Period. Nice happy tales about people getting along, communicating clearly and always telling the honest truth and never hurting anyone’s feelings are boring.[1] Drama comes form conflict. There are a few archetypal conflicts:
Man vs. Man
Man vs. Nature
Man vs. Society
A few examples:
Man vs. Man: Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth vs. Darcy, over their true feelings. Man vs. Nature: any disaster movie, ever. Something bad happens (tornado, volcano, killer fog, alien invasion, etc.) and our characters must overcome the world to save their asses. Man vs. Society: 1984. Winston feels compelled, by his own humanity, to rebel against an arbitrary and repressive society that regards him merely as a useful tool. This arbitrary society at various points in the story manifest in the form of characters, namely O’Brian, who is it’s mouth piece and Julia, who is likewise used to seduce him into thought crime.
So. The epiphany: I had the wrong conflict in mind.
I kept thinking that The Man From Planet X was a Man vs. Man conflict, namely it would all resolve down, after much running about doing cool, dramatic bits, two Tom and his idealism vs. Our villain, Victor Malenfant, and his cynicism.[2] But, ahah! It doesn’t. I was trying to figure out why I couldn’t break act 4 into a satisfactory conclusion and it wasn’t working, because I was trying to contrive a way for our villain to be responsible for all the other problems that our protagonists encounter. That felt hollow and didn’t ring true but I couldn’t figure out why. Sure, on the most obvious level, having one man be responsible for everything wrong with the world is unrealistic. But beyond that, it’s a cop out. It makes our villain a scapegoat. You kill him and then the world is fixed because all the bad stuff goes away. Except, it doesn’t. The real world doesn’t work like that and neither does this particular fictional world. Malenfant is a villain, sure, but he’s not a magical font of concentrated evil. He’s not Voldemort or Sauron.[3] He’s just this guy, you know?
Which made me realize that the conflict of my story is not Man vs. Man but Man vs. Nature. Tom and our hero protagonists are trying to figure out why the world is so screwed up and how they can unscrew it. Malenfant is not our antagonist, he’s a villain protagonist. He’s trying to take advantage of the fact that the world is screwed up for personal gain. This changes the dynamic of the story a lot. Instead of a major climatic battle between the two characters, they instead will circle each other in ever tighter spirals, eventually meeting and realizing that circumstantial evidence has made them think each other is the cause of their problems. This causes the characters to have to reevaluate what they’re trying to accomplish. More conflict! More drama! But it all comes out of the characters making choices based on faulty information, a classic and ever-relatable story hook that goes back forever, at least to Homer.[4]
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1. It’s slightly more complicated than that, but not by much. This is the reason that the Twilight series is riddled with such bad story telling: it’s not that the vampires are lame (though that certainly is a contributing factor)* it’s that there are no real dramatic conflicts in the stories. Everyone likes Bella. She and Edward are in love. The only moments of pseudo tension wrung out of the plots in those books comes when one character picks up the idiot ball and does something to create conflict for no real reason. Edward runs off, without telling Bella why, making her mopey. This is the basic plot impetus for all subsequent drama in New Moon. It’s sudden, unmotivated and once you learn why he left, doesn’t hold up to a moment’s inspection. He did it just because there was no drama and Stephanie Myer had three more books to write.
*The reason the vampires are lame: Stephanie Myer forgot what vampires represent. They’re dark symbols of sexual predation.They aren’t bad boys or cool. They’re rapists and murders who murder you with their mouth rape-y fangs. Worse: they seduce you into letting them kill you slowly, in a manner that is pleasurable for them by convincing you that you deserve to be raped to death. Falling in love with a monster is not a good thing. See; Buffy: the Vampire Slayer for how that kind of self-loathing relationship turns out.
2. This being a science fiction story, these internal conflicts and ideas will be manifested concretely through metaphor. Because that is what fantastical literature is good at: taking abstractions and giving them a concrete form against which to examine yourself. There’s a school of thought that in sci-fi and fantasy stories, all your metaphors should be walking around in the story, given a voice, and that descriptive passages should contain similes only. I find this intriguing and might need to give it some more thought.
3. The problem with both these villains is that they are too big to be believable. While the respective worlds they both inhabit do not become happy magical fun lands when the villains are defeated, way too much of the evil does vanish. The surviving Death Eaters are still mass murdering fuck heads. Same with the Orks of Middle Earth.
4. Homer never has correct information. That’s why his get rich quick schemes never work, like invading Troy to corner the market on doughnuts.
