Not Today, Sorry.

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I’m not posting anything today.

I’m not.

Look, I know I’ve been pretty consistent with my posts for a long time now, dropping a little something every monday, just for consistency’s sake. And then posting a little something extra later in the week. But I’m not going to do that this time.

I, Alan Horne, am not going to post anything at all this monday. You’re going to go to my website or my Steemit main page, and you’re just going to see a blank space where a new post would be.

And just to reiterate: you’re not going to get any kind of writing advice from me this week.

Although…

Nope. I’m not gonna do it.

Even though I’ve been meaning to blog about how one of the marks of a great story is how it pits the overarching plot against the motivations of your characters, and that these dynamics really need to be determined before you begin writing the actual words of the book.

I mean, consider, for example, how much more effective The Lord of the Rings is as a story because it pits the plot against the hero’s motivations. Because the story is about a person having trouble with his magical journey through a fantastic world when he doesn’t even want to be on a magical journey through a fantastic world.

There’s a reason so many of the best stories rely on this theme of the “reluctant hero”. If we look for even more examples, you can see how this idea is one of the foundational…

NO!

Bad reader! Bad, bad reader! You know I’m not posting anything this week. And your feeble attempt to trick me into sharing any kind of information with you was mean spirited, and I will thank you not to try anything like that again.

So, Once Again…

I am not posting anything this week. And I am certainly not going to spruce it up with a lot of graphical jokes or entertaining GIFs, such as this one:

Or this one:

Or this one:

So don’t expect to see any this week.

And Speaking of Which…

I know it’s a very special weekend for the internet. You’re probably all expecting me to do some kind of April Fool’s post.

But I’m not gonna. You know why? Because I’m tired. I’ve been busy all weekend, and I don’t think it’s my business leading you on with some manufactured news story. Things have been hard enough, what with the giant meteor that destroyed Los Angeles this week.

I am naturally upset by this course of events, so I will not be participating in this year’s festivities.

And Another Thing…

You’re not going to see any Netflix reviews from me today. I’m just not feeling it. It’s not that I haven’t been watching any Netflix. I’ve been watching tons. But not everything I watch is worthy of a review.

Take, for instance, Alice Through the Looking Glass.

I watched this one a few weeks back, and was thoroughly unimpressed. Of course, I wasn’t a fan of the first Tim Burton Alice outing, but that one at least knew what to do with itself, even if it didn’t know how to do it.

This Alice, on the other hand, manages to feel both forced and lazy at the same time. Consider the following points:

  • A bizarre time-travel plot that has nothing to do at all with the source material and violates its spirit.
  • A gaggle of side characters that have nothing to do in this new adventure, but were not excluded from the film for unknown reasons.
  • Uninspired acting on the part of everyone.
  • Choppy pacing that doesn’t give us time to make a connection to any events of the plots.

It’s a complete trainwreck of a movie and does not even merit me explaining its many faults, so I am not going to. You won’t even hear about my overall feelings about the film, which were that it was a complete non-moment in entertainment history, as well as a shameless cash grab that epitomizes everything wrong with Tim Burton’s latest string of failures.

So There.

Yes, I am simply not going to be posting anything today. I’m sorry if you were expecting anything from me, but you simply can’t always get what you want.

I’ll probably be in a much better position next week, but I’m going to give it a rest for now. So please try not to be upset when you see on monday that I have posted absolutely nothing at all. It does not mean that I have quit blogging. It just means that I’m a bit tired at the moment.

Thank you for understanding.

 

 

[This week’s tagline: “Where people come…back later.”]