Here's what I put in the LATEST THOUGHTS section:

Moving the players in place.

Plotting is kind of like a chess game, you know? Moving the players in place...but you're playing with yourself, the internal sceptic who says, that's way too unlikely. You have to cope with your own internal critic, who is sometimes the harshest voice of all.

Oh, and yes, you've seen Ulysses Shore before. He's been in the Tidal Wave sequence. In fact, I'm adding him to the cast page.

And of course, it's all true. Both in writing and watching, we're all MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATRE 3000, making snide remarks, debunking this, deriding that.

It's the rare thing that will make such a critic shut up. Usually it's something new. To me, STAR WARS, even when it came out, was old stuff. But to most kids watching it, it was a brand new universe, something never seen or imagined before.

Part of the disappointment in EPISODE ONE was that the series hadn't grown up with the watchers. What they wanted was a complex STAR WARS that reflected their sensibilities then. Lucas went back to the original idea and level of maturity (c'mon, people. R2-D2 and Cthreepio? Are you telling me these were the height of subtlety and charecterization, even for robots?)

But most people who grew up in the seventies or eighties remember them in a Golden haze, before their internal critic could grow...

I hope I'm not sounding superior. Obviously, my obsession with Superman and other super-heroes comes out of a similar golden haze...different generations have different obsessions. For some it's Superman, for some it's Star Trek, for some it's Star Wars, for some it's Buffy.

I'm reading a charming and quite fascinating book, BEFORE THE FLOOD, by Ian Wilson. I expected to violently disagree with it, expecting it to be a Creationist track in favor of Noah's literalness. Instead, it's a fascinating look at the late Stone Age, and a disastrious flood thousands of years before the pyramids were built that changed the Black Sea from a smallish freshwater lake to a huge salt-laden body of water.

And part of its charm is, using scientific investigation, they get around the internal Critic, who can't accept the Flood as generally given, but can accept this---especially since they could verify any number of fresh-water species suddenly wiped out, all together, and replaced by salt-water species.

Fascinating and intriguing.

The trick is not to be a gullible idiot, but also not to let the internal Critic kill every enjoyment. Part of the joy of fantasy is that I don't have to play the games I do with science fiction, and justify or get around things that seem unlikely scientifically. It's simply fantasy, and thinking of it that way allows you to "let go" of certain mindsets and just enjoy the story...

Of course, no amount of rethinking like the above will get around a clumsily-written or badly-dialogued story. We talk every day, and our internal critic grows stronger with each sentence. And then it's a conflict between the finely-constructed sentence (see, for instance, the average Cary Grant movie) and the realistic sentence....between beauty and realism.

Oftentimes, the inner critic will come down on the side of realism, even to the detriment of the skill in which the sentence is written...Hemingway rather than Faulker.

Sometimes it would be such a joy to shut down the internal critic...

(Pausing.)

The Care Bears movie...

Little House on the Prairie, the TV series...

The Waltons...

Fox reality shows, like the second Joe Millionaire...

Star Wars: Episode One...

Hmmmm.

Well.........maybe not.