Today's Word: Office

A soul-deadening location that pulls you away from your life's pursuits and loved ones. On the other hand, it is a fierce engine for daydreams and escape plans.

Class last night went well. A lot of good feedback on the synopsis revision, as well as a thumb's up from my teacher about revising the first chapter/contest submission. The postmark deadline is Feb. 22, but Monday is a holiday here in the states and that means the post office will be closed on Monday. So, it looks like I'll have to get it into the post office on Saturday to be sure it's in the mail. Backtracking further, that means I have to get everything ready to go late Friday which means (deep breath) synopsis revision tonight and chapter editing Thursday night with one final going over Friday night before The Great Big Print Out and All-Important Filling Out the Contest Entry Form. I have this vision that I'll be pounding a lot of caffeine into my system until I revert to the 100-cups-of-coffee Fry from the sorely missed "Futurama." After that 100th cup, the world around Fry slowed to a Matrixesque "bullet time" where Fry could move at near sonic speeds. I figure I'll be operating at that rate for the next few days, concentrated on textual perfection, so blogging might be lighter than usual.

Bring Your Own Towel

Alright. I'm breaking through my normal chrysalis of passive bemusement and into my officially shamelessly giddy clown tuxedo. The new trailer for the upcoming "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" film is up at Amazon, of all places. I'll write more about Douglas Adams, author of the sci-fi/comedy novels on which the movie is based, closer to the film's opening, but nearly everything about this movie makes me smile. The adventures of the hapless Arthur Dent was a bright spot in an otherwise rocky childhood, and Adams' quirky humor gave nerdy kids like me a secret language to use on each other, leaving the more popular cliques in the dark. His books were smart yet accessible, densely packed but textually light. Everything about Adams' prose suggested a friendliness, a laughter in the face of danger. The universe might be enormous and aliens threatening, but at least they were neurotic and clumsy as you were. The film (at least the trailer) suggests the same, and from what I've read about the test screenings, it's mostly true to the book. I imagine some purists will be steamed at any tampering (just as some were fuming with how the Lord of the Rings film trilogy swerved widely from the source material), but Adams had a hand in writing this script, so some of his spirit will be in there somewhere. Adams always altered his "Hitchhiker" stories, even to the point of having versions contradict each other when "Hitchhiker's" came out as a book, radio show, TV miniseries and (soon) movie. With Adams' untimely passing in 2001, we'll never know the answer, but I imagine he must have had a grin at rewriting the same jokes over again and still getting smiles and applause from the audience.