Flickering Shadows

February 4

So here we are on sff.net. And Tropism looks exactly the same! Except no banner ads at the bottom, which is lovely. My Tropism archives are still on Geocities, but I'll get them moved over here gradually. The general infrastructure of my pages are transferred as well-- my fiction page, my bio, my bibliography. Not the picture pages, but I want to re-do those anyway. If you find broken links, let me know-- there are probably lots.

A better word count today, but not as much as I'd hoped/expected to do. I don't mind, though-- the distractions were mostly fun or necessary. The story's one good burst away from being finished.

I went to see Shadow of the Vampire this afternoon. I'd been looking forward to this movie since I first read an article about it a couple of months ago in an issue of Realms of Fantasy. The movie has good qualities, but I was disappointed overall. The film obviously wanted to make all these grand, deep statements about obsession in art, and about film as vampirism, but I thought if fell flat-- too obvious, too pretentious. In the article I read, the director seemed really excited by the idea of a vampire far past his prime, but that's an idea I've encountered before in fiction. The characters annoyed me, too. They didn't react in believable ways to discovering Schreck was really a vampire. I thought Murnau was under-developed (because Malkovich wasn't given enough screen time or interactions)-- he was sketched-in as an Obsessive Director, and that pochade characterization didn't satisfy me, especially when his behavior gets a little... extreme... at the end.

This is a movie that thinks it's a lot better, deeper, and more profound than it actually is.

That said, Willem Dafoe was wonderful as Schreck/Orlok.

Odd note that I forgot to mention in yesterday's entry-- the version of Nosferatu I saw was in English rather than German (well, it's silent, but the dialogue bits written down were in English), and it referred to Orlok as Dracula, and to the protagonist as Jonathan Harker (instead of... whatever his name was) and to his wife as Nina (Why not Mina? I don't know) Harker ... weird. I wonder how whoever did that translation managed to finagle the rights to do that, when the Harker estate refused to let Murnau use the characters from Dracula? There was even a credit in that version of Nosferatu that read "Based Upon the Novel by Bram Stoker." Odd.

Elsewise, I did some lovely fiction reading, and I spent a long time tonight talking to Meg. Every once in a while the strange weight of miles begins to overwhelm one or both of us, and we feel the need to talk at length, work things out, figure out where we stand (aside from standing a continent's width apart). We usually emerge from these discussions reassured and re-oriented, and I think that was the case tonight, as well. We're all right. We just need to be together before too much longer.

Total Word Count: 7263

Today's Word Count: 2,223

The Daring Darlings:

Jim C. Hines

Hilary Moon Murphy

Nicole Montgomery

Melanie Miller Fletcher

Karina Summer Smith

Anne Hutchins