TWIC: Rapture, periods, Bulwer-Lytton, cities, sketching

Fred Clarke at Slacktivist has been very slowly going through the books and movies of the Left Behind series, explaining why they are terrible. I am certain this post went up a decade or more ago, but he reposts older entries now and then. Clarke's dislike of the evangelical Christian story is not based on a dislike of the religion; he is a devout Baptist of the sort that give Christians a good name. Instead, he dislikes the terrible writing and in dissecting it, he shows writers what we should do and what we should avoid.

I would have thought that the medium of film would require detail in place of the book’s vague generality. Film, by it’s very nature, avoids the pitfall of Jerry Jenkins’ apparent motto as a novelist — “Tell, don’t show.” Yet for all that we’re shown here of the panicked passengers and the remnants of the naked and the dead, it all somehow still seems abstract and devoid of the specifics of human detail.
We see Harold’s clothes, but the camera doesn’t linger or focus our attention on particular detail any more than Jenkins’ words did. They still seem as generic as the “Harold’s clothes” of the book. Here they aren’t even Harold’s clothes, since the movie doesn’t bother to give the poor man a name.
Actually, no one on the plane seems to have a name. As Buck heads to look for the missing husband, a woman realizes her children are missing and begins shouting about “my kids.” She doesn’t call them by name. She doesn’t call them at all. She just starts shouting to other people, “I can’t find my kids!” As the other passengers realize their loved ones have also disappeared, they join in this shouting, all similarly using generic terms for their missing family members. It makes it seem weirdly like we’re watching people acting out the description of the scene rather than the scene itself.

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Hooray! There is some support for putting two spaces after a period!  The evil 'one space' team had worn me down to the point where I sometimes use one space and others two and if I mix it up, I let it go.  I've fallen so far.
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In research for a story I am writing, I learned of the Athenaeum, a high-brow private club in London that shared membership with the Royal Society and such. Most importantly for me, Bulwer-lytton was a member. This allows me to offer a link to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. I guess I first learned of this contest in 1984, as this entry, the winning one for that year, has remained in my imagination all this time:

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These cities have caused other forms of themselves to live on text form, separate from the original themselves.

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Sketches and gifs on how to sketch.

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The comedy writers of the Onion and their process of selecting the best ideas for this hardcopy and online journal (Video).
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