It’s November, and all writers know what that means: National Novel Writers Month! For those not in the know, NaNoWriMo is an informal competition in which people commit to write 50,000 words of a novel over the course of the month. The end result doesn’t have to be polished in any way—in fact, only word counts are checked to verify a “win”—but the goal is to prompt would-be novelists to stop making excuses and get that first draft done. (If November’s too busy for you, as it usually is for me, there are other options like Camp NaNo throughout the year.)
Aspiring novelists naturally seek out writing advice, and there’s no shortage of advice-giving authors, from Elmore Leonard to Stephen King to Anne Lamott. Some advice is helpful; some is decidedly not; and for some, your mileage may vary. Most writing books contain lists of dos and don’ts. But writers can benefit from detailed analysis of books that fail, or that are wildly popular and/or critically acclaimed despite being objectively bad, just as they can from books that succeed. While amateur reviews like Mark Reads Twilight can give authors a sense of what the average reader expects from a book, it’s hard to beat the analysis of another author. And that’s exactly what Mark Twain provides by skewering James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales in his 1895 essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.”
Now, in discussing a book written in an earlier era, a reviewer has to be careful not to judge by present-day standards that didn’t apply at the time. That’s not what Twain does here, aside from one remark about dialogue style. Rather, he begins with eighteen rules for good writing, from “a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere” to “Use the right word, not its second cousin,” and then shows
with specific examples how these rules are violated. Given his experience as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, for example, Twain points out ways in which Cooper’s descriptions of a river in The Deerslayer defy logic and the number of ridiculous coincidences and improbabilities in the behavior of Indians attempting to attack a barge on said river that strain credulity to the breaking point. Six men hiding in a sapling is only the beginning of the mess.
Other outrageous passages Twain cites are Natty Bumppo’s ability to trace a cannonball’s trajectory backward through dense fog to find a fort (“Isn’t it a daisy?” Twain snarks) and his ability in The Pathfinder to hit an unpainted nail with a flintlock rifle while standing the length of a football field away from it. “Cooper seldom saw anything correctly,” says Twain. “He saw nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly.” And then there are major inconsistencies in the characters’ diction, which stand out all the more for the overall melodramatic style, and a list of thirty-one word usage errors culled from a six-page section of The Deerslayer. Clearly, in Twain’s estimation, Cooper needed a much better editor! And to the critics who hailed The Deerslayer as a work of art, Twain replies in conclusion:
A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are – oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.
Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
Granted, any first-time author can fall into the same errors, especially those who follow models like Twilight. But whether you apply it from the first draft or only in the revision stage, Twain’s advice is important. What Tolkien later called “the inner consistency of reality,” crucial to keeping the reader engaged, depends not only on the plausibility of the setting and plot but also on the details like believable dialogue and correct word usage. You have to learn the rules before you can break them—and some rules should never be broken.
Avengers stories are at their best when the stakes are both huge and personal, and that’s what we get in the “Ultron Unlimited” storyline that ran in The Avengers (vol. 3) #19-22 in 1999, written by Kurt Busiek and drawn by George Perez—two top, veteran talents in the comics industry.
This story draws on the 35-plus years of Avengers continuity that comes before it, something the movies simply don’t have time to do. While it enriches the overall experience, it also bogs down some parts with exposition so the newer readers aren’t lost.
Ultron, as he explicitly points out here, has always been something of a “family man,” and he is connected to an impressive family tree. In “Ultron Unlimited,” he kidnaps his “father,” Pym; his “mother,” the Wasp, who at this point is Pym’s ex-wife; his “son,” the Vision, whom he programmed with the brainwaves of the then-deceased Wonder Man, who’s alive again and also gets kidnapped; his “daughter-in-law,” the Scarlet Witch, who was married to the Vision for a while, though they’re long since divorced here; and the villainous Grim Reaper, the brother of Wonder Man.
This storyline can be read by tracking down the individual issues or the out-of-print trade paperback Ultron Unlimited. Your best bet, however, is probably the Avengers Assemble vol. 2 trade paperback, which includes several other issues that come before (just make sure it’s written by Kurt Busiek. There’s another Avengers Assemble series by another writer, which I haven’t read). You can also subscribe to Marvel Unlimited’s digital library, which has this as well as most, if not all, of the earlier storylines it references.
I love science fiction and I love comic-book movies, and this movie is both. I love 
We meet 14-year old Hiro Hamada (
For me, though… The way that the evil businessman trope is so clumsily pushed the into the first act was really an early signal of a script filled with heavy-handed cliches, just like the dozens of bits of flatly expository dialogue.
Up until now, I hadn’t known much about this film. Granted this trailer has been out for a while, but I wasn’t all that intrigued by the things I had seen or read on this movie. Naturally, I didn’t know what to expect going into this trailer for the first time, but if you go in with low expectations, you might just find yourself pleasantly surprised!
demonic and lose his mind. Cut to a quick, but effective, montage of him terrorizing some locals and screaming at no one in particular about what really happened the night of the murder, all leading up to a final glance at what he’s really turning into, which is some ultra-creepy devil-looking thing. I’m a fan!
Why on earth are we comparing a space science-fiction epic with a period romance melodrama you ask? Simple: both 
hand, chronicles the tumultuous romantic relationship between famed Cambridge physicist, Stephen Hawking, and the love of his life, Jane Wilde (
At the core of these widely different films though is a single thematic concern: the interplay of science and love. Both films spend a considerable amount of their running time examining love in the context of scientific pursuit.
Theory of Everything, though not dealing with love on such a macro scale, similarly examines if and how science and romance can co-exist. Ironically, it is not the physical handicap that presents the most obstacles to Stephen and Jane’s relationship, but rather Stephen’s academic pursuits and subsequent fame as physicist. In this way, the film questions whether the demands of science and one’s commitment to its tenants allow for a romantic relationship. The issue of the existence of God, for example, is one of particular importance to the couple who are divided along the lines of faith – Jane an Anglican Christian and Stephen an agnostic. Again without spoiling too much, Theory of Everything’s conclusion proffers quite satisfyingly that regardless of whether in science or in love – its the tangibles that count.
That’s my immediate response to the title 
But for all those good things that are built up in the first three-fourths of the film, the end just throws it all out. I won’t give away the ending by any means (because it’s a great twist that I really enjoy), but the very end shows this intense progress by our main character that seems incredibly hokey when it’s all said and done. It seems like the film has built up all this sadness, all this mental instability, but they felt required to stabilize things by the end. It just felt like a cop-out, and maybe when you check it out, you’ll know what I’m referring to.
As I write this morning, the baseball world is still in shock over the sudden death of 22-year-old Cardinals rookie 
Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that Marlowe’s best known for his 1588 masterpiece, 
Yet the displays of Faustus’ power that Marlowe shows on stage are hardly the stuff of nightmarish necromancy or of the grand dreams of empire that drive Faustus to embrace sorcery. Rather, once the bargain is struck, Faustus seems more interested in feasting, carousing, and enjoying popularity with nobles and students alike. He plays childish pranks on the Pope and various rubes who cross his will, conjures ghosts like Alexander the Great purely for the spectacle, takes Helen of Troy as his lover, and has Mephistopheles bring a pregnant duchess a plate of out-of-season fruit. It doesn’t seem like the kind of life and power that would be worth selling your soul for—and that’s the point. Whatever Marlowe himself thought on the matter, the story of Faustus has always hinged on one simple question: “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world but lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36).