Is it justified to complain about simple plots anymore?

I’m referring to criticism leveled at, most recently, Pacific Rim and Gravity. In years past, film such as Lost in Translation were argued to have thin or even no plot at all.

After a few months of reflection, I may have been too harsh on the contest. (Here’s the updated page, including the submission form, which is open through the end of the year.)

True, the terms are still pretty bad, especially if you don’t win first place and the coveted publication spot. Royalties should always be part of an author’s compensation, and there ought to be some kind of monetary compensation for the runners-up whose work gets published on DarkCrystal.com.

I’ve been taking St. John’s Wort for three months.

This past weekend, Hayao Miyazaki announced his retirement, following the end of production on his latest work, The Wind Rises.

I’ve spoken – at great, unrelenting length – about my admiration for Miyazaki’s work. I’m especially fond of his thematic content: the futility of war, a need for respect and worship of nature, and a need for female as well as male heroes.

However, if there’s one lesson I took closest to heart, it’s this, in his own words:

(Or pre-Labor Day, in this case!)

Most of my time the past few months has been spent editing A Buried Stone Gate, aka A Buried Stone Arch, aka That Misshapen NaNoWriMo Novel From Last Year. However, I have had time to edit a couple stories.

I also wrote a peculiar series for The Daily WTF, based on a multi-part submission, and partly inspired by ninjitsu in pop culture and The Book of Five Rings. I’ll be sure to post links here when it’s up.

I have a conundrum. First, some backstory, which I shall infodump below, and then the crux of the matter.

And it’s not grad school. I can teach myself everything I need for my job.

Now, I have stories to write.

Can a story really be too topical or contemporary?

I’ve been shopping around a cyberpunk short story called “Brain Bombs” to various markets. I wrote the first draft about a year and a half ago, inspired by people I knew years ago who were involved with the ELF. I wanted to know how such individuals would operate in a scenario that genre readers are more familiar with.

I put the story away for a while, then revised and prepped it for critique on the Codex forums. A day before I planned to give it to Codex members, the Boston Marathon bombing happened.

Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Washington_Monument_Dusk_Jan_2006.jpg

I had an unpleasant epiphany a few days ago.

I had begun editing my NaNoWriMo novel from last year, now titled A Buried Stone Gate. I noticed a marked difference in writing style, pacing, and intensity in my manuscript right around the 50K word mark. The half written in November was plotted more slowly, with more tangents to edit; the latter half, written in spurts in December and finally finished in January of this year, is more judiciously written and far tighter, but missing a large chunk of the story.

I knew my novel would be about twice the size of the NaNoWriMo word count requirement, and that I couldn’t finish it in a month, so I set a deadline for December 31. However, after finishing the first 50,000 words, I had severe burnout, and I could only write 500 words a day for most of December. My pace picked back up in January to around 1K/day.

“The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it […] is rotten. This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics, is hopeless.” – Hayao Miyazaki

Here are my final thoughts on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, including some nit-picking and how my enjoyment of the series has changed over time.