There's A Place In The World For The Angry Not-Young Writer
I was reading through the boards on nanowrimo.org today and there's a topic on "So What Is Your Favorite Band?" and imagine my shock and dismay when who should show up multiple times but Jimmy Eat World.
I was just feeling in a contrarian mood so I started my own list of the most overrated bands of all time. Sure I could think of hundreds of average bands that get no end of love but I narrowed the list down to the following:
Jimmy Eat World
The White Stripes
Modest Mouse
Spoon
John Spencer Blues Explosion
Dashboard Confessional (but I do love Further Seems Forever)
Sepultura
The Darkness
Scissor Sisters
Massive Attack
Brian Jonestown Massacre
ABBA
Badly Drawn Boy
Dave Matthews Band
And, of course, instead of writing anything tonight, I've spent the time defending my choices. :)
But I stick by every single one of them. One person challenged me to listen to "Clarity" and "you can still honestly tell me that you didn't enjoy it, and that it wasn't amazing and quality music, then I guess you're just a pretencious hipster snob who loves Xiu Xiu and obscure experimental noise stuff. Which, I guess, could be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it."
I fucking love (speaking of which I wonder what my favorite little hipster dude is up to) the interweb! I get this crap all the time on this form of communication. Because obviously if I don't like mediocre pop punk, the natural thing for me to enjoy is obscure experimental bands that no one's ever heard of and to flaunt them. I miss the 1990s so bad.
But I did listen to it again and I actually enjoyed track three somewhat but by the time I got to track five, I was so bored I had to rip off my headphones. It just sounds like everything else in its genre and there are bands that do it so much better (and I don't care if Jimmy Eat World predates most of their soundalike bands now)!
And that's what I mean by overrated. It doesn't mean bad, people, it just means that people think they're better, more groundbreaking, more talented than they actually are!
I could actually post today's progress and have it be a decent length blog entry. See I made the mistake of posting my excerpt. To do so, I went back to Chapter Three of my novel and read through the description of the creation of the Enemies of the Commonwealth Act. And it was so rife with grammatical errors (one sentence just stops in the middle). Not that this discouraged me so much as took up all of my free time going through and correcting all of the mistakes I knew I could.
So, I won't present them to you, but I'm kind of proud of the first part of my 372 words today.
Yes, 372 words today. I think that may be my lowest output of the month.
For those who have been following the various storylines and my word count outputs on them, it's probably pretty obvious which one I'm dabbling in right now - the John Harper Society. See, I'm on Chapter 11. It's the chapter that I like to call "the bankrupt chapter" in each novel attempt that I write. For some reason it's a huge sticking point for me. In this particular Chapter 11, I tried to at least make it liveable as Liam attends the meeting of the John Harper Society where he's finally officially inducted.
The big ceremony was going to be a mock scalping but I wussed out since I though, "how's he going to explain a giant gash in his forehead and how would the John Harper Society stay underground if the new members are walking around with this war wound."
That internal monologue was almost as long as my writing today. :)
So instead they get gashed across the right cheek by the butt end of a knife shaped like an eagle. Not very dramatic but a little more symbolic. The right cheek to symbolize conservatism and the eagle is pretty obvious.
Anyway, what the chapter ended up being (I actually started it yesterday) was an exercise in method writing. I tried to avoid this technique this year. But, I was growing sick of the John Harper Society and how nothing was happening in that storyline so I had Liam get sick of the John Harper Society and how nothing was happening in the meetings (he begins to wonder if they're just keepers of arcane knowledge). He goes to confront the leader and is stopped by his recruiter. The recruiter goes to see the leader and they decide to officially induct him then and there.
At least there are some redeeming qualities to the chapter. For one, Liam takes charge and so he's not a wishy-washy characters. And, two, at least now the next time I mention the Society, Liam will actually be involved in some of their more seedy activities.
Of course that may be in December since I have to come up with a conspiracy plot before the assassination plot so Liam can prove his worth to the society. It can't be anything too thuggish like the snakes would be involved in but it can't be too wussy like the tagging and agit-propaganda the Cane and Candle group was involved in. Maybe he'll be involved in a nice bank robbery or something.
And I am not doing method writing for that! :)
Finally, the word wars:
incendiarymind: 29,444 words
reliantfc3: 26,120 words
2004 NaNoWriMo: 32,953 words (in New York City at this time last year so this should be obliterated soon)
2005 NaNoWriMo: 29,444 words
I was just feeling in a contrarian mood so I started my own list of the most overrated bands of all time. Sure I could think of hundreds of average bands that get no end of love but I narrowed the list down to the following:
And, of course, instead of writing anything tonight, I've spent the time defending my choices. :)
But I stick by every single one of them. One person challenged me to listen to "Clarity" and "you can still honestly tell me that you didn't enjoy it, and that it wasn't amazing and quality music, then I guess you're just a pretencious hipster snob who loves Xiu Xiu and obscure experimental noise stuff. Which, I guess, could be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it."
I fucking love (speaking of which I wonder what my favorite little hipster dude is up to) the interweb! I get this crap all the time on this form of communication. Because obviously if I don't like mediocre pop punk, the natural thing for me to enjoy is obscure experimental bands that no one's ever heard of and to flaunt them. I miss the 1990s so bad.
But I did listen to it again and I actually enjoyed track three somewhat but by the time I got to track five, I was so bored I had to rip off my headphones. It just sounds like everything else in its genre and there are bands that do it so much better (and I don't care if Jimmy Eat World predates most of their soundalike bands now)!
And that's what I mean by overrated. It doesn't mean bad, people, it just means that people think they're better, more groundbreaking, more talented than they actually are!
I could actually post today's progress and have it be a decent length blog entry. See I made the mistake of posting my excerpt. To do so, I went back to Chapter Three of my novel and read through the description of the creation of the Enemies of the Commonwealth Act. And it was so rife with grammatical errors (one sentence just stops in the middle). Not that this discouraged me so much as took up all of my free time going through and correcting all of the mistakes I knew I could.
So, I won't present them to you, but I'm kind of proud of the first part of my 372 words today.
|
Yes, 372 words today. I think that may be my lowest output of the month.
For those who have been following the various storylines and my word count outputs on them, it's probably pretty obvious which one I'm dabbling in right now - the John Harper Society. See, I'm on Chapter 11. It's the chapter that I like to call "the bankrupt chapter" in each novel attempt that I write. For some reason it's a huge sticking point for me. In this particular Chapter 11, I tried to at least make it liveable as Liam attends the meeting of the John Harper Society where he's finally officially inducted.
The big ceremony was going to be a mock scalping but I wussed out since I though, "how's he going to explain a giant gash in his forehead and how would the John Harper Society stay underground if the new members are walking around with this war wound."
That internal monologue was almost as long as my writing today. :)
So instead they get gashed across the right cheek by the butt end of a knife shaped like an eagle. Not very dramatic but a little more symbolic. The right cheek to symbolize conservatism and the eagle is pretty obvious.
Anyway, what the chapter ended up being (I actually started it yesterday) was an exercise in method writing. I tried to avoid this technique this year. But, I was growing sick of the John Harper Society and how nothing was happening in that storyline so I had Liam get sick of the John Harper Society and how nothing was happening in the meetings (he begins to wonder if they're just keepers of arcane knowledge). He goes to confront the leader and is stopped by his recruiter. The recruiter goes to see the leader and they decide to officially induct him then and there.
At least there are some redeeming qualities to the chapter. For one, Liam takes charge and so he's not a wishy-washy characters. And, two, at least now the next time I mention the Society, Liam will actually be involved in some of their more seedy activities.
Of course that may be in December since I have to come up with a conspiracy plot before the assassination plot so Liam can prove his worth to the society. It can't be anything too thuggish like the snakes would be involved in but it can't be too wussy like the tagging and agit-propaganda the Cane and Candle group was involved in. Maybe he'll be involved in a nice bank robbery or something.
And I am not doing method writing for that! :)
Finally, the word wars:
incendiarymind: 29,444 words
reliantfc3: 26,120 words
2004 NaNoWriMo: 32,953 words (in New York City at this time last year so this should be obliterated soon)
2005 NaNoWriMo: 29,444 words
posted by incendiarymind at 8:22 PM
2 Comments:
ABBA is overrated? I thought everyone knew that they were cheese. :)
Anyways, I actually agree with you on most of those bands listed (the remaining ones being the ones I haven't heard of). I remember being forced to listen to a Dave Matthews Band CD in high school at some kid's class presentation and coming away terribly unimpressed.
You know, until a few years back, I thought that no one in the world liked ABBA. But in recent times, I've discovered that people think they're influential and talented.
Weird. Hope you don't run into any of these people. :)
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