How to really hate your work

Friday or Saturday is a day where I just write. Oh, or get tired and lie down. Despite the long hours, today wasn't as productive as it should have been. I'm going to write more this evening.

But the chapter I'm working on wasn't panning out. So, hit it with a sledge hammer, broke it into little pieces. Now I'm putting it all in a different order, but more importantly, I'm throwing out pieces that don't work, or information that can wait.

The scene is a conversation, but not one anybody would ever have in real life. I'm noting that those scenes are difficult. It's hard to keep track of what information would be most important to the characters, but crucial: what would be most important to the reader? How do you address those in dialog? And not make it obvious?

Finished reading:

Leonard Mldinow's Subliminal: "How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior." It's Nonfiction. Mldinow is a physicist who works with Stephen Hawking. This book is a bit of science journalism, off his specialty. He goes through the results of different experiments to identify how the unconscious operates. It's both exciting and disturbing. It confirms my longtime conviction that the unconscious mind is the one acts and our conscious mind simply comes up with the cover story. Though I now have to look at everyone's behavior (including my own) with a sense of humor.
Oh, I also recommend Mldinow's other book, "The Drunkards Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives." It changed the way I looked at everything from conspiracy theories to "self-made" wealthy people. 

Next book I'm going to read is fiction. A YA book, Jandy Nelson's "I'll Give You the Sun." It's a story about fraternal twins torn apart by tragedy. 

For films, I've seen:

For Halloween I watched several horror movies:

The Babadook, finally. I give it four out of five stars. It's great all the way through, but it comes apart at the end when the makers of the movie forget the difference between text and subtext.

For comparison, let's take Ginger Snaps. You know way before the end that there's an analogy drawn between turning into a werewolf and suffering from adolescence. For the end, though, the director, John Fawcett remembers the story is a werewolf story first, and does away with the adolescence symbolism. The werewolf is not literally adolescence in that fictional world. (Instead, after the the resolution, he does something else even better, but you'll have to see it.)

I also saw Insidious 3. Since this one was a prequel to the first two, it seemed a good place to begin the series. I'd give it a three for five. The plot is a watered down version of "The Exorcist" with "Poltergeists" thrown in. Nothing special, but nothing to recoil from either.

I also saw Carrie 1976 and Ginger Snaps once again.

Next on my list: Excision.

But tonight I'm going to write. After I lie down for about a half hour.