I Have Become Accustomed To Rejection

Outstanding Submissions: 27

Rejections: 1, Hobart, personal-ish

Rewrite Requests: 1, Reflection’s Edge, They’d like to me to add 100 or so words to a short thing I sent them and I’m okay with that. I’m going to percolate on it for a short while and see what I come up with.

Self-Esteem: Eh.

I should have gone with my initial instincts when I considered seeing The Taking of Pelham 123. I don’t care for Denzel (yes, yes, revoke my Negro Card, whatever) so I’m not really sure why I thought seeing this movie would be a good idea. I guess you can say I did it so you don’t have to. This iteration of a movie that has now, I’ve since learned, been tackled three times, is an abomination that is an insult to bad movies everywhere. There’s bizarre overacting from John Travolta, and pandering to the audience from Denzel, and a bunch of bit players jockeying for camera time and the whole thing is simply painful. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a very high tolerance for bad movies. I welcome them, in fact. I am a movie masochist. The worse the movie is, the more I am likely to enjoy it, but this movie is making me use my safeword. Horrible. Just horrible.

I also finished Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife. It is extremely long, which is fine. I like long things, but it is overwritten and unnecessarily long. A good editor could have easily excised three hundred pages from this book without changing anything about the story. Also, Alice Lindgren Blackwell, the protaganist, may well be the most annoying, falsely drawn character I’ve read in a while. This book had so many problems that I can’t even get into it, and still, it is readable. It’s all very perplexing.

Over at the PANKblog, I talk about Monkeybicycle 6, which was a far more enjoyable read. Now, I have to finish creating the surveys I’m going to use for my dissertation research on Survey Monkey. It is a real thrill.