Pete,

I really liked your story a lot. It held my attention all the way through. Good through-line and back-story. Great pacing. Believeable characters. Sympathetic hero. Good setting and world. All items on the usual check-list were completed to satisfaction.

Here are some suggestions for improving the next draft and what worked particularly for me:

WHAT WORKED

1. Great job on Aragorn's character. You turned him into a reluctant hero, a slacker king, and for that I applaud you. Tolkein's Aragorn is flat, knows who he is from the first scene in Bree, and yet the last book is named for him. Hello? Drama? Send up a plate for Professor Tolkein please.

2. Thank you for putting Arwen in the story. Tolkein seems to admit he fucked up here, by including the loves story of Aragorn and Arwen in the appendix. Like, "If I had been asked to edit, this is what I would have added to the story." Nice work, Pete.

3. Thank you for elves with performances like Blanchett's and Weaving's, who didn't merely act like they had foul cheese being waved under their noses (heads up, Orlan-doh).

4. Saruman rocks. Gandalf too. Great, dueling, thespian voices like Christopher Lee's and Ian McKellan's don't happen in cinema often enough these days.

4. Favorite lines:

"We've had one. What about 'second' breakfast?"
"Your love of the halflings' leaf has slowed your mind."
"Leave now...and never....come...back!"
"They come in pints? I'm getting one!"
"Ride for ruin -- and the world's ending!"
"You don't know pain. You don't know fear.....You will taste MAN FLESH!"

5. Thank you for Gollum. And Lothlorien. And wargs. And Saruman conjuring a storm. And oliphaunts. And Boromir in his funeral boat. And the dead elves in the swamp. And the Phial of Galadriel. And...and...

6. Great job turning Faramir into a real character, and not leaving him as a flat mirror of Frodo's gentility.

7. Loved "The Passing of the Elves," which you added to the DVD version of FotR. The music and mood were about the only thing that soothed me during 4 months of migraines this year. I do sincerely thank you.

8. Sean Astin didn't deliver his lines as if he were reading them aloud at a Tolkein Society function. He seemed to believe that Sam had his own observations and ideas.

9. Thanks for cutting Bombadil. Damn hippie clown.

10. Great job making medieval battle bloody and physical, and not just groups of actors hitting each others' swords in unison.

WHAT SUCKED

1. The music. It was great back in FotR, but that damn hobbit tin-whistle sounded like a dentist drill after the third film. Wouldn't a slightly different score for each film have been a nice gesture for those of who plan on watching your epic all the way through?

2. Ditto Viggo's nasally voice. Sure he got the look. But he started sounded like Fozzie Bear by his Great Big Speech in RotK.

3. Is Haldir actually Nick Mamatas in an ill-fitting blond wig?

4. Color pallet. Alan Lee's drawings are great, but hey, they're DRAWINGS! Grey on green on black is a good choice for film? This should be Hollywood socko color-blast, and instead we get dreary pencil monotones. Yes, certain action scenes, like the battle over Balin's Tomb, were amazing feats of choreography and editing, but for long moments they were inscrutable because of the lack of contrast. Treebeard might ahve been a cool character but i couldn't tell. He got lost in his own environment.

5. Liv Tyler thinks she's sexy and breathy, and maybe she is, but often times she just sounded like a drunk on the verge of blacking out.

6. Orlando Bloom's emotions range from confused to constipated. Have him work on showing "fear" or "love" or, gad, even "amusement" now and then.

7. In FotR, we're missing a scene between Strider's description of the Nazgul in Bree, and the hobbits walking in line behind him in the wilderness. Please re-insert. By cutting the letter of recommendation from Gandlaf (in the book) without replacing it somehow, you give us no reason to believe that the hobbits can really trust Strider.

8. If Bilbo gets old when he doesn't have the ring anymore, why doesn't Smeagol turn into a pile of bones without it?

9. Cut all those smarmy soliloquys about hope and good. They make me want to drive needles into my ear drums.

10. In Helm's Deep, Legolas skating down the stairs on the shield, while shooting arrows, has GOT to go. And what was up with that orc and the giant sparkler? Dude.

All in all though, a great effort, Pete. I hope you'll send me the final draft once you finish it.

Best,

Barth

it's probably a terrible cliche to get all gloopy about "it's a wonderful life." but i really dig the fact that we have one christmas movie which doesn't ram the baby jesus or the book of matthew down our collective throats. i mean, think about it. the big christmas miracle of this movie is decidedly NOT christian. it's an existential crisis that drives the main character to embrace his fucked life with gusto. it's very much albert camus' "the stranger" when george baily prays on the bridge and says "i don't care what happens to me. i want my wife and kids back." magical, sure, but not a jesus-driven miracle. george willingly chooses debt, jail, and public humiliation, and when he kisses mary at the house, with the kids draped over him, for all george knows his arrest is imminent, and these might be his last embraces.

i know, i know, jonathan lethem covered this far better than i do here in his exquisite "franz kafka's 'it's a wonderful life.'" but i'm feeling that dark-christmas, existential magic today. so indulge me.

here's another "wonderful life" observation for ya. while drunk, the more you laugh like jimmy stewart, the more you'll laugh like jimmy stewart. it's a hideous downward whiskey-spiral that ends with you running up a street in st paul shouting, "hello, you ol' building and loan!" with your brother waving to passers by and laughing like jimmy stewart at the top of his lungs.

er. that's "you" as in "me."

bush ordered the 30% steel tariffs lifted yesterday, gambling that US manufacturing sectors will get fat off cheaper steel and spur the sluggish economy (yes, it's still sluggish, no matter what bush says).

my guess is that iraq will be less of an issue next fall and the damage done to workers' retirement, 401K, and medicare packages during the last four years will be the real issues. i think whoever the demo-candidate is, if they can make the most hay out of bush's ridiculous stance on the steel tariffs (take your pick: clintonian pro-EU free-traders and gephardtian pro-union fair-traders alike can jump on bush for this one) they'll paste him as an incompetent handler of the economy. anti-war, pro-UN hand-wringing won't cut it, since america has a rich history of waging illegals wars. US incumbents get boosted out of office for mishandling economy or industry, and bush has messed up on both counts now.

"Our union will now work very hard to make sure George W. Bush joins the ranks of the unemployed next year," said Mark Glyptis, president of the 3,000-member Independent Steelworkers Union at West Virginia's bankrupt Weirton Steel Corp.


http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Northeast/12/05/steel.workers.ap/index.html

organic satsumas in the house. their kid-glove peels are easy to shed, the flavor is saturated, and the juiciness, ejaculatory. Johansen Farms out of orland, california grows the very best satsumas i've ever had. go now. find them. devour a plethora.

noted satsuma lovers: cosmo kramer. and science fiction author lyda morehouse loses her freaking mind for satsumas. so we're friends.

and i hereby go on record as being anti-florida for citrus. no. don't argue with me. texas grows the sweetest grapefruit there is, and california grows the best navels. got it? hell, australia grows better citrus (and does democracy better) than florida does! all this crap about florida being the citrus capital of the world? i say feh. i say double feh! i'll take a deep red rio star or even a marsh ruby from southwest texas organics over the very best, aspirin-tasting, nasty-ass grapefruit florida can cough up!

so there.

i'm back from my hometown in west bend, wisconsin which is always a headtrip for me. when i left town in '85, west bend was half-way between being an industrial and agricultural town, with its very own identity - 70 years ago, we even had our own beer label "west bend's old timers." now the town is an outer-ring suburb, with bus service into milwaukee, and all the small german taverns have been replaced with applebee's and a pervasive, bedroom-community air. the worst part of this is that west bend is still a very conservative wisconsin burgh - the anti-war peace-float in the christmas parade carried all the aging liberals my parents hung out with when i was a kid. the best thing it gets out of the 1990's gentrification? gourmet coffee downtown!

but it was a great roots trip, since most of my family had not seen our new baby. great to show him off to an appreciative crowd.

i also got the opportunity to speak to midori snyder's short fiction class at marquette high school. she's been teaching my story "lot 12a: the feast of the dead manuscript" (new genre magazine) for a couple years now, but this was the first chance i had to speak to her students about it. she's a great teacher, and if you know midori, this comes as no surprise, so there was a core of intelligent and outspoken kids who asked great questions about the story ("how many genders did you intend to portray?" "why did you tell it this way instead of with a beginning, middle, and end?") and also about writing ("so who buys your stories?" answer: freaks like me!). the one thing i wish i'd asked the students was whether or not they thought it was really a science fiction story or not. hmm. maybe next year.

speaking of genre issues, i also got to see the Interstitial Arts Foundation website in its ur-state, thanks to midori. it's quite beautiful and ultimately the very best means of showing what the IAF means by "interstitial" to the casual observer. the IAF is offering new ways for people to talk about writing and other media and offers a variety of ways for people to look at the term that the IAF has pushed forward, "interstitial", with essays (both academic and artistic), links to artists which the IAF finds interstitial, and examples of pertinent work. all very handsomely packaged.

to some, "interstitial" will always be amorphous, because, well, to be interstitial is to work and sell one's work without the customary guard rails present. to me (whose work some sf writers say is not sf, and who non-genre readers often say is not sf, and yet whose work is sold in magazines like asimov's), this movement or arts-language or whatever the hell you want to call it is an inevitable development in the creation and marketing of strange, un-categorizeable art forms.

*

quote of the weekend:

"he's standing on my manhood." - robin, my bro, holding my four-month old son