More Movies About Boats!

Good and Bad Writing Examples, News, and a Worthy Kickstarter from a Friend

There was a cartoon that came out after James Cameron’s film Titanic became the first movie to gross over $1 billion worldwide. It said something like this:

Lessons Hollywood Studios Should Take from Titanic’s Success: When we empower creative individuals to follow their visions we make successful movies.

Lessons Hollywood Studios Will Take from Titanic’s Success: Boats! We need more films about boats!

So often, when something works, people take all the wrong lessons as to why. And, in fact, a few weeks after Titanic’s success, I remember there was a script that sold for an enormous sum of money called Hindenburg. About lovers who met on the doomed zeppelin. Sigh.

Which is why I love it when a story takes the right lessons.

I’m a big fan of the 2015 Ant-Man film, not least of which is because they took a comic book character I knew next to nothing about and tugged my heartstrings with a story about fathers and daughters. But the thing that really struck me about Ant-Man was how they crafted the story. They did it with building blocks.

There was a very popular film in the late 90s that had nothing whatsoever to do with shrinking people or ants or fathers and daughters. The film was so popular that everyone ripped it off for the next few years. But what they ripped off was the theme of the film, the look of the film, the setting of the film, the action of the film, the sci-fi elements of the film.

Ant-Man ignored all of that. Instead, it took the structure of the film.

Seriously, it took the entire scaffolding upon which the story was hung—the outline off the film distilled down to its basics, as in “the protagonist is caught by the authorities,” and it built a completely different movie upon this framework.

And that’s interesting.

Ant-Man was comic book character + comedy heist film + daddy/daughter issues + structure of popular 90s movie = gold.

I’m not going to tell you what the movie was. I’d like to see if anyone can guess. Next newsletter I’ll name it and explain how Ant-Man took it’s scaffolding to build the movie they did. And then I’ll prove it by showing how it carries through to Ant-Man and the Wasp and Quantumania.

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Meanwhile, I’m over here looking at the print proof for Tales from Stolki’s Hall. How’s that going, you ask? They say the best way to catch typos in your manuscript is to spend hours going over it meticulously, publish it, then open to any random page. I know what I’ll be doing for the next few hours… days…

But… it’s going to be a great looking book. Books plural, really, because in addition to the trade hardcover version, they’ll be the “Deluxe Gamer Edition,” which will be full color, sized and designed like the Thrones & Bones RPG manuals, and have an appendix of magic items and monster mechanics so you can play with the elements of the stories. The Kickstarter is coming in May, and there’s most likely going to be a pledge level that allows you to become a character in the eponymous mead hall of the title. So stay tuned.

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Finally, my friend Friday Strout is in the last hours of their Kickstarter. They just funded while I was working on this newsletter, if not in the eleventh hour, very close to it. (As I compose this, they have eleven hours remaining.) The Vineyard is a queer-themed, 220+ page book that brings to undead life your worst nightmares in a fantasy gothic horror with a punk flair. In additional to Friday, I know and have worked with a couple of the folks writing and illustrating this project, and they always deliver top notch work. So check it out on its last day and see if you can help it knock down some stretch goals.

That’s it for now! Let me know what you think the movie I am talking about above is. And see you soon!