Hello fans.
Today I come to you to reveal that I've reached an impasse. After taking some
wise counsel (specifically from my wife) into account, I must be honest and
face the facts:
Many of my
most recent Scared Silly reviews have just been too long, and not properly
edited. Through some misguided notion I conceived that readers would want as much detail as possible, coupled with a hyper-focus brought on by ADHD tendencies, we've arrived at this place.
This has been
an issue on several levels. Since I can only work on Scared Silly in my spare
time (there is no publisher paying me to write this – the payment will come on
the back end, after the final manuscript is delivered to whichever publisher
decides to publish it) – in-between a day job with ever-increasing demands of
my time as well as outside projects – writing long reviews is just
counterproductive.
Take my
previous review, of The Three Stooges in Orbit. It didn't take me weeks to put that together; it took months. The
end result is a rather unwieldy concoction where I give way too many details on
too many gags and too much plot minutia.
I've written
a few reviews like the one above. Not only do they take way too long to write
for someone who doesn't have the luxury of a lot of time to work on the project
to start with, but in a way they also take away some of the fun for folks who
may want to watch the films. A good review captures enough of the flavor to
enable someone to decide whether they want to watch a movie or not. It doesn't give away every detail.
Needless to
say, I’ll have to go back and rewrite some of my lengthier reviews once I
(hopefully) land a publisher. And I’ll have to return to the more balanced
reviews I wrote earlier on, such as Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.
Hoping to
get more reviews up here soon. I have some shorts lined up and if all goes well
perhaps there won’t be as many tumbleweeds rolling through here the rest of
this year…
Now, apropos
of nothing… or maybe apropos of everything (if you equate film editing to book
editing that is), here’s Olsen & Johnson: (with an assist from a couple of our other favorite funnymen, Shemp Howard and Hugh Herbert):
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