Day 561
The car chase scene above is from one of the great car chases of all time, from the 1968 movie Bullitt starring Steve McQueen. I had a car chase set in San Francisco. It was meant to be an homage to movie car chases, most notably Bullitt, but with my own different take on it. The car chase takes place when cars are autonomous. There are no bad guys involved in the car chase- everyone is trying to do the right thing. It does have life or death consequences, though.
I wrote it, and it sucked. It was not just because it was set in San Francisco, and I had to work it out on Google Maps because we were in lockdown during Covid and I could not do what I normally do- go to the location and soak it in. I know San Francisco reasonably well. None of that was the problem.
A movie style chase is focused largely on the visuals. If you know the area, you might recognize where you are and realize when they turn left onto a street that is actually on the other side of town. To recreate a high level of visual detail requires a lot of description. In the movies, it is about camera angles, and the rhythm of the editing. Typically, it is almost all visuals with tires screeching and engines revving replacing the dialogue. My problem was that all that description required to recreate that slows down the pace of the chase for the reader. I did not want to be the Ray Bradbury of chase scenes, so I completely reworked the scene.
When I write an action sequence, I get very into it. My heart is racing as I write it. I tend to write at a faster pace. I use shorter words, briefer descriptions. In a movie action sequence, too much tends to happen to take it all in. What I needed to do is what a good director would do- make sure that the focus goes to the most important things happening. Great direction and editing can take a complex action sequence and guide the viewer through it, controlling the focus so it is not just a blur of action. I needed to do the writing equivalent of that.
The rewrite is so much better. I also originally had three characters in the chase car, but that has been reduced to two for structural reasons having to do with changes in the story. It simplifies things to have just two characters in the car to deal with, which quickly turns into just one person. That changed the dynamics of the scene entirely, and upped the emotional intensity.
What’s Up With Us
I feel like things are clicking along again and I am back to the writing pace I had before. The depths of Covid killed my creativity and crushed my confidence. Things are still very bad Covid wise. As I write this, in the United Sates there have been nearly 41 million people who became sick with Covid, with over 650,000 deaths. People are dying in this country at the rate of over 1,500 a day, almost all of them unvaccinated and almost all of them with the deadly delta variant. Because of the anti-science vaccine opponents and mask opponents, a strain like the new mu variation, which is resistant to both the vaccine and monoclonal antibodies, could run wild and wipe out a big chunk of humanity. We are not even remotely out of the woods yet, and millions of Americans are playing out the scenario from the Twilight Zone episode The Old Man in the Cave. They ignore science, listen to the know-nothing fascist idiot, and all wind up very dead.
The second year of our container gardening experiments is coming to an end. I can’t say that our attempts at tomatoes were all that successful. We had four plants in a much larger container than last year, but they got a fungus when the super hot (110 degrees) temperatures hit, which spread to all of them and they died before we got much off of them. Our cucumber experiment was also a fail. The container was just not big enough to hold enough water to keep them moist under the extreme weather we had. We got one cucumber from the six plants. It was delicious, but not a great harvest.
One plant that we added did do very well and is quite fun to grow. It is called Queen of the Night, although a lot of similar plants are also called that. What we have specifically is Epiphyllum oxypetalum. It is sometimes called night-blooming cereus, but that is actually a very different plant.
It blooms at night, with all of the blooms opening at the same time. They will stay open for a few hours, and that is it. Over the summer, we had three sets of fist-sized blooms. They are very fragrant and quite spectacular, but unless you pay attention and go out on the night they bloom, you’ll miss it. I sort of enjoy the ephemeral nature of the way it blooms.
It is a type of cactus native to Southern Mexico and parts of South America. What appear to be leaves are actually very wide stems filled with a gel-like substance that helps it retain water. The flowers grow from the edges of these wide stems. The flower pods look quite strange, almost like some type of alien plant.
I love that these plants have to be so hearty and look so plain, and yet produce such gorgeous flowers. We have a large cactus garden out front, which also produces short-lived blooms, although they bloom during the day. You would think that producing such brief floral displays would be evolutionarily disadvantageous, and yet, cactus thrives and under the toughest conditions.
You might notice a small roundish fuzzy brown protrusion on the cactus a few inches below the white flower. These get larger and eventually become the flower, although they look nothing like something with flower potential at this point.