The Muppets

It's no Muppet Movie, but it'll do.

80s Robot was absolutely perfect. Ditto Neil Patrick Harris. Jack Black, being somewhat Muppet-like himself, was acceptable.

The Muppets themselves are... not quite right, in a way that's both more subtle and more jarring than if they were actors fifty years older than their first performances. (Mostly noticeable in Kermit's singing, but bits of voice and characterization are off for many of them.)

Occasionally the self-referential humor felt heavy-handed. "We'll travel by map" worked for me; "This is gonna be a short movie," not so much. I think The Muppet Movie got away with it because it was a film-within-a-film.

Mostly it needed the human characters to not be the main focus. Also more Statler and Waldorf.

Good times. Recommended despite the nigh-Muppetless first twenty minutes.

ugh

I don't know what my bloody problem is but this addition / rewrite is slogging through molasses. Or #3 maple syrup, if you prefer. (I do.)

Some of it's timing in the middle of a busy month, some of it's having trouble getting into any kind of flow. More of it's looking at what I've written, both in the previous version and in the changes I've made here, and thinking, "this doesn't do anything at all like what i want it to." I'm not picking up the pace, not enough; I'm not making things get any worse any sooner; my new character isn't doing a damned thing. None of it makes any sort of sense to me. I'm trying to change the existing shape of a story and it is just. not. happening. Nevermind that I can see perfectly well why the shape as it is now doesn't work, nevermind that I know what needs to change to make it work, the changes are resisting my every effort. And then two days or a week later I look and say "of course it's resisting, because that's the wrong thing to put there, it isn't doing what i need it to at all." Bleh.

I keep reminding myself that there are people, at least two of them, who had good things to say about it as it was. It doesn't really help.

"You write quickly, right?" TNH asked me. And yeah, I do, when the words are coming, when I know the shape of the story. Then I can write reasonably fast. This right here is just horrible, slow, depressing. Getting nowhere.

I will of course be missing my self-imposed deadline of "submit by end of november." Maybe if I buckle down I can get it out the door, or at least drafted, by the end of the year. And hope the editor in question doesn't respond with a "pfft, took him that long to make a few simple changes?"

Some amount of this is directly related to a lack of writing community in my life. Oh well. I don't really see that changing in the near future so I had better learn to live with it.