Moving On

In the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, the top 2 contenders for the Ladies’ Singles Category were Evgenia Medvedeva and Alina Zagitova. Both had the same coach, as they were part of the Russian delegation. The coach discovered that the stupid routine checklist that the athletes had to go through and exists to punish creative individuals that tried to push for new moves like Surya Bonaly, could potentially be rigged to reward more mediocre athletes. Medvedeva was the best, Zagitova was the second best among others. The coach decided to train Zagitova to perform all the checklist movements in a big explosion, as it turns out that performing the in such way is easier. The athlete just needs to robotically train for those few seconds of complex movements, and the rest of the routine can be just soft skating. Medvedeva went for the traditional, harder, actually beautiful routine. She got a loser’s silver. Zagitova got the winner’s gold.

Traditional publishing used to reward Medvedevas and punish Bonalys. Now they reward Zagitovas and punish Medvedevas. The Indy lane was always the refuge for the Bonalys, and it’s becoming the place-to-go for the Medvedevas. Except that the rink is made of fire and your skates are filled with nails and your coach is Jeff Gilloly.

I’m quite bummed by the whole ordeal that Terminal 3 has been so far. From people who pre-ordered the book only getting their copies now to very embarrassing typos in the blurb featured on cover (which I didn’t notice until later since the first version of the cover didn’t have these typos, and since then the blurb became a visual element for me), to a Kafkian process to get the SFWA to use their channel with Amazon to update the cover on their website so the typos won’t shoo away prospective buyers (it will be too late if anything happens anyway, not sure if my novel could bounce back).

So I’m giving up on prose writing for the time being and will be only working on screenplays. I may go back to prose. Dunno. What I like about writing screenplays is that at the end I have this awesome blueprint to move forward with a work of prose (Terminal 3 was originally a teleplay).