I stumbled across this in L.A. No, Iron Man was not inside.
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll already know that I went out west for work (and some vacation time) over the past few weeks. I went with the best of writing intentions, and even pounded out two scenes and 4,000 words on the cross-country flight. Super proud of myself. After that? Nada.
Given that this was the first real vacation/work trip I’ve taken after my novel sold — and thus increasing the pressure to produce more worthy prose — I quickly discovered that writing, while a joy and a major raison d’être, is still work. And thus after a long day at the mothership office, or out seeing sights, the last thing I want to do is plug-in and pound out words.
I thought I’d take a stab at writing on the flight back, but darn it if United didn’t put us on a plane with free Video-On-Demand. Combined with the 5 a.m. wake-up call to catch the flight, The Avengers were too tempting to resist. And after that, I decided to give John Carter a whirl to see what all the (largely negative) fuss was about. I hadn’t seen either before the flight.
The verdict? The Avengers was a paint-by-numbers summer blockbuster, but the people who did the painting had Picasso-level skill. John Carter struck me as a film that wanted to be far more than typical sci-fi fare, but fell short of that lofty goal on a number of fronts. And as a writer in the middle of the follow-up to his debut novel, it got me thinking about what makes a story click, and what makes it miss.
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R.J. Ellory is a British author of crime thrillers. He’s written ten novels that have sold a combined million copies, which qualifies as a major success. He’s won any number of awards, large and small, in his genre.
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Michael J. Martinez 