New Writing and Old Reading

Well, I started writing Part 2 of my sci-fi fantasy series yesterday. The outline still needs a bit of work, but I think the first half (or at least the first third) of it is solid enough that I can start the actual story and see how things go from there. I didn't have a full outline prepared when I started Part 1 in the series, and I think the end result came out pretty smoothly. My goal is to have the first chapter done in a week, which was about how long it took me to write the average chapter in Part 1.

In the meantime, I've also started reading The Hobbit again. It's interesting, because I'd read the book four times prior to the movie's release, and yet when I saw the movie, there were a lot of things in it that I didn't remember at all from the source material. I'm not just talking about the stuff with Radaghast and the White Council, which definitely wasn't in the book; I'm talking about things like the Necromancer, the orc who killed Thorin's grandfather, and the rock giants that were fighting on the Misty Mountains. Now that I'm reading the book again, I realize that all of those things are mentioned very briefly, almost in passing, so they probably didn't fully register when I was reading about them before.

How I managed to miss all of those things four times, I can't say. Maybe I'm just used to Tolkien's slower and more atmospheric writing style in The Lord of the Rings.

I also didn't realize while watching the movie just how closely it follows the book. The first ten minutes are almost a perfect adaptation of the first chapter, right down to the way the dwarves are introduced and the songs that they sing at dinner. I haven't gotten to the chapter "Riddles in the Dark" yet, but from what I remember, the scene with Gollum in the movie seemed to follow the source material pretty closely as well. I'd say that the movie only covers the events in Chapters 1-6, so it'll be interesting to see if my perception changes while reading from Chapter 7 to the end.

The Golden Globes were on last night too. I usually don't like watching award shows, but my mother had it on, so I overheard a few of the winners. Daniel Day-Lewis absolutely deserved winning Best Actor for Lincoln, and I'm very glad that Adele's "Skyfall" won for Best Song. If I didn't know better, I would have sworn that the song was from a 1970's James Bond film -- very classy.