Will's Good Idea for the Week of 10/24/21

Alec Baldwin picked up a gun and shot a woman. It's not this blog's job to mock Alec Baldwin in this, his darkest moment. It will fall to other blogs to point out Baldwin was petty, vindictive and mean. That he used other's personal tragedy to make political points. This blog would never point out that Baldwin's an gun grabbing anti-2A fascist. Even if Baldwin would, has, and will kick a man down with personal tragedy, this blog won't do it. 

Besides, apt Amazon reviewers have noted that we know little about firearms. Maybe it's appropriate to point un-checked guns at unsuspecting women. We shrug. Whether or not Alec Baldwin is a murderer is not for this blog to say. That's up to a jury. We'll respect their verdict.

At all times a man of the right must play by gentlemen's rules. Always. 

We finished Dune and will  be reviewing it all week. First off, we want to talk about influences. Here's director Denis Villeneuve talking about his influences which unsurprisingly are David Lean and Lawrence of Arabia.  

We start with David Lynch's 1984 disaster. We've seen the film many times. And while Lynch does some visually interesting things, his work is a confusing disaster. In college we read Frank Herbert's novel, which we liked well enough. We've never felt the need to read any more in the series. I 2000 we watched the Sci-Fi Channel's miniseries version of Dune. We re-watched it last year.  It's very British and feels like a lavishly produced episode of Star Trek TNG. This version is easy and sensual. The miniseries is well done within its limitations, about a $20 million budget. Denis  Villeneuve's version is better, of course. Not bad for a Q. 

Sometime yesterday we realized that we have four rough drafts in varying states of rough draftidness. That is, we have four novels written. Four books will be released next year. Remarkable.

The beta readers gave us a chapter of The Great Nuclear War of 1975 last night. It was appropriately marked with red pen. The more red, the better. To show reader(s) the nature of the business, we found a mistake they missed. That's it. That's the gig. 'Sefl publishing'; get fucked. We've found typos in history books put out by big fancy publishing houses. 

We may need to spend November going over 75 one last time. We thought of two small changes we can make. We'll see. Remember, 75 and 76 will come out nearly simultaneous. A six week interval? Maybe eight. There will be a third novel. Maybe that's the summer sneak in? Maybe we should write a chapter during the Christmas break?