Realism at the Movies

It is wicked cold. Nearly noon, and the earth outside is solid. I don’t think we will thaw out for a whole week. I really could do without winter. I should have been a bear.


We saw the Sherlock Holmes movie yesterday. The movie was good, but in a touch of reality, a couple sat down in front of us who stank to high heaven. Now I know that Western culture of that era was not all that concerned with personal hygiene, but I could have done without the reminder.

Still, the movie is fun. I wonder if you could get away with writing a character like Holmes now. I think there is an expectation that characters will be realistic, unless they are super heroes.


The movie theater is in a mall that used to be a theme park. It’s extremely long. My daughter wanted to look at boots when we were done, at a store which was on the polar opposite end of the mall. We wove our way through throngs of ambling people, darting through openings and changing sides of the aisle when necessary. It was kind of fun, something I had not done since I was a teenager and it was a game to race from one end of Dadeland Mall to the other at Christmas time.


I have been looking at my old nanos. Two years ago, I wrote a novel strictly as an exercise. I was trying to work out POV issues, so I wrote it in first person, from the point of view of a baker in her mid twenties who accidentally jumps forward 31 years in a Mazda. The interesting thing is that I had to invent history between 2007 and 2010, when the working class revolt takes place. I had the US economy, along with western Europe’s, crash during those years. Keep in mind that I wrote it in 2007. It culminates in a working class revolt, followed by a brief Afghan takeover three years later which didn’t stick, almost a footnote. The initial revolution began in a series of strikes in 2010.


I have no intention of ever trying to publish it, but it is my favorite. It is full of plot holes, and writing history only a short time into the future is probably not a good idea, but it has a strong social message about both class and racial prejudice, and good characters. The premise is ridiculous, but this is true of a lot of my writing. Social message buried under silliness.


If I had to pick a genre, it would be Nonsense.

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