past writing (cringe)

Reading blog posts from more than two decades ago (my first movie-review book compiles reviews from 2004 to 2015; I'm currently at around 2006) is an exercise in cringeworthiness (or as the kids say these days: an exercise in cringe). Not that my prose has gotten much better over the years, but damn—I was a callow, superficial writer. 

And back then, in the early 2000s, I was right around the age Stephen R. Donaldson was in the 1970s when he wrote his first Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. True: if you go back and read Donaldson from that era (his early thirties), he too betrays all the signs of being a young writer, but his writing was still leaps and bounds above my own in quality and depth. I'm older now, though, and I can see Donaldson's flaws a lot more clearly (including embarrassing gaffes on the merely technical level—e.g., the man has no idea how to use semicolons). More trivia: Stephen King was around the same age when he wrote The Stand. What was I doing with my life?

Unfortunately, the clarity and wisdom of age bring with them the pain and shame of critically evaluating my own long-ago prose. And it's awful. I admit I'm making a few changes, here and there, to my old reviews for this new collection, but I'm also leaving the overall style and tone of my early crap as it is, so most of the problems with my early writing will be out there for everyone to see. I have a sinking feeling that, for people who buy this first book in the series, the first half of the book is going to be a slog through some very immature, undeveloped prose. A lot of the mistakes that I, as a latter-day proofreader, have accused others of making are found smack-dab in my own prose from that era. So I add my commas and change my wording here and there; I use italics instead of quotation marks; I make other stylistic tweaks as needed. But the era of writing that I'm currently working on, covering the early 2000s, is pretty rough, and even with retroactive cosmetic surgery, the prose still looks laughably coarse. When I write this book's foreword, I'll be sure to beg the reader's forgiveness for the slog they've signed up for. And I promise the next two or three books will be better.

Of course, with this being a compilation of reviews, there's no reason why a person should read the whole thing linearly from end to end. But even for people who tackle the book's chapters in random order, it's still going to be a jarring, bumpy ride. The next two books, though, will be a lot better. In fact, by the end of this first collection (2015), it's fair to say that my prose has smoothed out a lot because I've found my rhythm as a reviewer.

My reviews have also grown longer over time, but you can always tell how much or how little a film interested or provoked me by how relatively long or short my review is. If a movie or book gets a one- or two-paragraph review, it probably wasn't worth my time and attention, which means I don't think it'll be worth yours. If I write an encyclopedia, go see it or read it.

More on all of this as I go. What's in the compilation so far:

1. Kill Bill: Volume 2
2. Wrestling with S. Mark Heim (book review)
3. Million Dollar Baby
4. Revenge of the Sith
5. Batman Begins
6. Sin City
7. War of the Worlds (2005, Spielberg/Cruise)
8. Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (book review)
9. Bubba Ho-Tep
10. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
11. The View from Mars Hill (book review)
12. Jesus Camp

Only 108 more reviews to go for this book, taking me through 2015. The plan is to make this an ebook first, then to create a print-on-demand paperback that will include little illustrations (done by me, not AI) for every chapter. The paperback will be much more expensive, so the illustrations will be there to make the book more worth your while.