Vault712

It's a killer allergy season here. My allergies are usually so mild that it takes me a few days to realize I'm feeling a bit fuzzy. Not this time! It's brutal. So instead of anything thoughtful and coherent, here's a grab-bag of stuff.

( Garden nattering. )

I've started watching The Other Bennet Sister, though slowly since the allergies are making it hard to focus on things I haven't seen before. Nice to see 1995-Mary back as Mrs. Hill! In the meantime, I'm spacing it out with rewatches of the 1995 P&P miniseries, the 1980 P&P miniseries (which I really should write about sometime), and Pride and Prejudice: A New Musical, which is a filmed version of a stage musical from 2020 with very catchy songs. Though it's a little disturbing to be humming along to Mr. Collins trying to decide which Bennet daughter to choose!

And finally, this "Writing Lessons" essay by Film Crit Hulk has several interesting bits, but especially this:

...there’s this fun intermediary step we do when we’re working out scenes. After we’ve talked about the scene goals and where the characters end up, then we do “The Info Version” of the scene. That’s where we work out the shape of the scene in the dialogue, but instead of wasting time coming up with the witty verbosity of language, we write things like, “I’m mad because you did that thing,” and then “I’m defensive, because of this element of my character” and this let’s us track the conversation, get to the catharsis point, and figure out how the scene works overall. Then because writing is like ironing. And we go back and come up with the actual lines later. You know, the ones that make it feel organic, that speak to the character’s voices, that are funny or biting, and that make the subtext clear, but not on the nose. The lines that are the way of saying it without saying it.

Anyway, there's some things. Here's hoping that the grass stops flinging pollen around and the wind dies down.