h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I may well borrow the bit about the answer phone and stick it on mine for a while. That'll make people wonder about me!

I had a friend whose answer phone said something about being put though to his microwave, which I really liked.

Ha! Ha! I used to have a forty-second-long answering machine tape on which I used to put scripted multi-personed mini-productions and fake movie listings...The number of hang-ups was prodigious...Music and faked old radio shows...

My spousal unit and I did an answering machine tape to the tune of Monty Pythons 'Universe Song' one time. Took us about an hour.

Another one he did was a message for burglars. I can't remember the text, but it was funny.

40 seconds is a long time to wait to leave your message. Mine says something like 'Hello, thanks for calling, leave a message if you want to!' and I don't promise to get back to callers.

I went to forty seconds because I wanted some space to play and it irritated the phone sales people. I do not know if you have anything similar to the volume of sales calls that we get on a daily basis.
It is something like six a day. Three of them usually around the dinner hour. They use random dialing computers, so they are usually not even sure who they are talking to.

I had to hang up on a burial insurance recorded pitch just a few minutes ago.

I don't understand this entry at all - it's on a higher level...

Stacked higher...or like on helium?

I love it. I want to see more. I'm not going to suggest that it needs any changing, but we have to talk about tone. The first two chapters are full of stream-of-conch-shell-ness, then it the tone whiplashes, serious as a crack baby.

More.

Yeah, well, I've never seen it before. It's all new to me. First draft. I hit the edit button and I don't know what's going to happen next.
Kinda like jazz. You may start out with 'Stardust' but you may end up with Beethoven's Ninth done as a reggae polka.

So what happened to you in real life between Clipter Twow and Clopter Free? It got sombre (somber?) in a hurry.

More!

The first two were inside, in a personal space.
The third was outside, in a municipal, um, civic space.
City fixtures are orphaned a bit by the fact that people move on.
And there was the fact that my toothache flared up again. I've been stoned on Ibuprofen for the last three weeks off and on.
But it is kinda hard to deal with a car wreck in a lighthearted manner.

"City fixtures are orphaned a bit by the fact that people move on."

You mean the street, intersection, walk/don't walk signs?

"kinda hard to deal with a car wreck in a lighthearted manner."

But you didn't draw your subject matter out of a hat. Choosing to deal with a car wreck meant that you were choosing to steer away from lighthearted territory. Anyhow, it started getting more serious during your description of the priest too.

Whatever you're doing, don't stop! And wherever you're getting those Ibuprofen, tell me where I can get some too. I have yet to find anything that affects my headaches, including the prescription migraine medicine "Midrin" that a doctor suggested. You actually feel stoned on Ibuprofen, or are you just kidding? They don't affect me any more than a tic-tac.

At least I can enjoy the irony of swallowing pills that sound like they're named after a city from Middle Earth. Next time I'll ask the doctor for 25mg of the Mines of Moria, or some Gollum caplets.

I am a sensitive.
I have a condition where I experience everything at a very heightened level. I can feel a room full of people and if the vibe is overwhelming, I have to leave.
I avoid drugs like the plague, so when I do have to take them, they have a stronger affect on me.

See, the piece begins with two people.
They end their bits getting into cars.
The third bit is where cars go, and go past, and through.
Every part of the infrastructure that cars have influenced was built by people who sweated and strained and painted and poured.
And that is the enduring part of the world that cars pass by everyday, believing pedestrians to be just people without cars.
And the cars pass by people. Leaving them. Ignoring them.
The fellow on the stoop used to have a car. And he was proud of it.

The bit about the Bishop fell out of the bit about the fellow who used to be a deacon.

And the bit about the temporary agency came out of my own experiences with them.

You walk along eating an ice cream cone and you find a dead cat in the road. Tone can change at any moment. And those first two bits are not particularly lighthearted. There is a small pall over them.
Whimsy can come out of despair.

Latest chapters looked great. Looking forward to how you'll tie it all together.

I feel like I must be a novice where tone is concerned, because I would expect to see problems with such extreme swings in tone, but you make it all work in this piece. If someone had shown me an outline of all this, I would have told them to be careful with the tone, that having scenes too funny might detract from the serious parts, or the heavy parts would bring down the humor. But you still made it work. It's one of those "rules" that good writers can break if they can somehow make the thing work, and you managed it.

I'm glad you brought up tone again, because I just watched "Life is Beautiful," the Roberto Benigni movie. Have you heard of this one or seen it? Starts off as a comedy set in 1933 Italy, but moves into dangerously grim territory when the protagonist and his family are eventually taken to a concentration camp. The father explains the ordeal to his son as if the whole thing is a game, that he'll win a full-size tank if they play along and hide from the referees of the game for a few weeks. Some of the scenes after they enter the concentration camp seem intended to be funny, like when the father volunteers to translate the German camp officer's instructions for all the Italian prisoners. Continuing to shelter his son, he translates all the words as if explaining the rules of The Game, playing hopscotch and hide & seek, warning the prisoners about eating lollipops, etc. Maybe if the scene were taken out of context from the rest of the film, it could be funny, but I couldn't laugh at much of it from the time that they get rounded up from their homes and forced into trucks. I'm not sure if they meant for the audience to laugh, or just meant to show the hero trying to be funny to keep his son's spirits up. Different people might have different feelings about it.

It's a really good movie, but I don't know how they juggled the tone so well. It got good reviews from critics, but I wonder how many average viewers walked out of theaters angry, expecting comedy but finding heavy depictions of life in a concentration camp. Even the packaging of this video version I bought tries to describe the movie as a comedy that will "lift your spirits." They mention that World War II threatens his happy family, but no hint that the second half of the movie takes place in a concentration camp. Were they trying to avoid spoiling the surprise, or spoiling the chances of anyone buying a comedy this grim?

For this movie, it works. I just don't understand how. I wouldn't have thought it could be done.

"You walk along eating an ice cream cone and you find a dead cat in the road. Tone can change at any moment."

Right, but that's real life. A story has to be better than real life in some ways, at least arranged in somewhat more meaningful ways. It has to re-organize and present situations that are close to real life, but packed with something more. Real life is sometimes boring, sometimes disgusting, sometimes absurd, confusing, meaningless. A story that presents a really accurate view of life can sometimes be boring, disgusting, absurd, confused, meaningless, plotless, sometimes too much for anyone to like it. Okay, disgusting or absurd stories can be useful, but if someone tells you a story is boring, confusing, meaningless or plotless, that's usually a bad review. (If you've seen "Gummo" or "Dazed and Confused," those might be good examples of what I mean, too realistic in depicting boring and meaningless scenes.)

The question is not whether the tone of a person's day can change in real life, but how much we can manipulate tone in a story and still turn out a meaningful story. You and Roberto Benigni got it licked, but I'm still struggling with it.

I don't have any idea how it's going to end.

No, I haven't seen that movie.
I tend to miss the critic's favorites.

I'd like to believe there is hope in Hell or none of anything makes sense.

Finished.

Oh, and since some idjit let the cat out of the bag, you might as well see this, too:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A689213

it's not finished, it's just a first drift.

I can't read the end yet, but you're in danger of this getting nominated for #14. Perfect example of how to break lots of rules with positive results.

I don't understand all of it, but I definitely like it. Do you want to polish up the spelling and formatting before getting nominated to AGG/GAG?

Jwf's rummaging through it now.
We'll see what he has to say.
Spelling?

Suggestions as to formatting?

If you do a search for the word "pupper" on that page, you'll find it more than once, when you really meant "puppet." (I assume you meant puppet!)

Formatting is a matter of personal preference. I like to leave a blank line between paragraphs. It makes a page look less dense with print, and it's not like you're wasting paper or ink to do it.

How would you feel about breaking it into separate pages? Some people might be daunted by the length of the thing, all on one page. But if you give one or two thousand words on one page, then link to another page with the next couple thousand words, it might be more palatable. (I wonder if anyone has done studies on this? The likelihood of someone reading a long bunch of text versus clicking through several pages of text?) But it's not really a problem if you prefer to leave it all on one page.

I'd recommend taking out the dates on some of those sections, unless they have a message that makes them important to the story. It looked like you were just using them for yourself or for people following your progress, to mark the stuff that was new?