I’ve been writing the Amazing Grace journal for 2 years and 4 months. I don’t work on it every day but they’re short posts so I have enough stuff to cover a day every day in that period. If you put it all together it would be an 800 page novel. A novel with no story and no structure and very little dialog but that didn’t stop [novel you hate] am I right?
The past few weeks I’ve been thinking about it more than working on it. Partially because I’m thinking of doing another “stop journal and switch to narrative” segment even though it doesn’t seem like those are as popular. You know getting 3 views instead of 7.
In doing this deep thinking I’ve realized that despite 2 years and 4 months under my belt I haven’t really gotten the hang of Amazing Grace. Setting aside the pointless wrestling stuff and the filler (character work if you want to be nice) it’s basically a monster of the week story but I’ve never come up with a good way for Grace to research what’s going on or resolve anything. Which is bad.
I never watched Buffy or Supernatural or Charmed, but I did watch Grimm. It was okay. That was back in the days when that was enough to make me watch a show. Simpler times. Sidetrack #1 – it annoyed me that 85% of the monsters on that show were just different kinds of humanoid animals. It is hard to come up with new monsters but come on.
Grimm is no help because Peter Grimm (Paul? Justin?) just murdered all the monsters and I’m trying to play by comic book rules. Which is tricky because superheroes are kind of pointless since their enemies just keep doing bad stuff. It’s almost like criminal justice and rehabilitation is a problem that humanity has been struggling with forever.
So what about the “good” episodes of the X-Files. How did they resolve things? I rewatched most of the series not that long ago and I still don’t really remember. I feel like a lot of the time they didn’t solve anything. Sometimes Mulder did shoot people. I feel like if there was a resolution often times it happened on its own and the heroes accomplished nothing.
In the episode where the kid from Sneaky Pete becomes Electro he murders Jack Black and a couple other people and then in the end I think he gets hit by lightning again? And then he’s in the asylum but at the very end horror movie style they show that he still has his powers? So nothing he’s still a threat to everyone and the FBI accomplished nothing?
Remember Baywatch Nights? The show where the lifeguards get second jobs as private investigators? I sure do. But what I didn’t know until yesterday is that the ratings weren’t great so in the second seasons they said “fuck it, let’s just do X-files”.
Such as –
Mitch and Ryan (David Hasselhoff, Angie Harmon) encounter mummies and zombies when they investigate the theft of Egyptian artifacts.
Donna exhibits psychopathic behavior that a medical examiner traces to a serial killer’s blood, which may have infected many people.
A survivor of a shipwrecked freighter blames Ajogun, a legendary cannibalistic creature of New Guinea.
So, another idea I’m kicking around is doing something like Amazing Grace – A Pale Horse, where I set aside the “real” Grace story for a while and steal all the great ideas from Baywatch Nights doing a sidetrek that’s a little more lighthearted and silly while I’m figured out how to get better at writing the thing I’ve been writing for 2 years and 4 months.
I don’t know why I wanted to share this but I did.
Rocket Cat 