It’s the start of a new year and while I don’t have anything specific for you guys this week, I just wanted to thank each and every one of you for the kindness and support I’ve received since starting this newsletter in March. This has been a genuinely enjoyable experience thus far and I wanted to share the joy with you this holiday season.
In my world, 2022 is the year of the Substack.
Look out for the next few weeks, as we’ve got some year-end round ups coming, along with some fun stuff. Then in February it’s my BIRTHDAY MONTH. I do need y’all to get me tickets to the Renaissance tour.
VIP only, don’t be stingy.
But today, I thought I’d offer a glimpse into my process with some articles that I started but didn’t finish. And one I did finish but chose not to publish. Sometimes I start with a title and go from there, other times I have an inkling that there’s an interesting angle that I just need to find, but more often than not I just cannot finish these things. There’s always something better around the corner, I just need to grab onto it.
Do Revenge with your Bodies Bodies Bodies
This was one of the ones that started as a title. To put it simply, I was very interested in how these two had such obvious similarities. It was mostly based on parallels in how they both attempted to play with tropes to create “genre classics”, but the more I got into the writing process, the less I liked it.
Because, ultimately, I realised this was just two movies I had seen relatively close to each other. ‘Do Revenge’ is nowhere near the quality level of ‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’, and it’s way too close to the teen comedy genre tropes and references for its own good. The film itself was a fun ride, but I knew I was trying to pull complexity out of a pretty simple product.
So I scrapped it.
I was proud of the title, and that’s why it’s the first one on this list. Unfortunately, I wasn’t just sending out a fun title, I was writing about a thousand words on the subject.
Or actually, I didn’t.
The Medea Affect
This one was actually the first thing I scrapped for this newsletter. I started the writing process with three concepts in mind. A ‘Euphoria’ review, something vaguely about ‘The Great’ and historical fanfiction, and something on the evil (sometime step) mother. The first two were finished, but despite rewatching a bunch of ‘Game of Thrones’, reading into the Greek myth of Medea, and compiling a bunch of research, it just didn’t come together.
I really did want this to end up published, and it’s followed me around all year. At one point I scrapped the literal “mother” of it all and pulled in things like ‘I Care A Lot’ to try and broaden the thesis. But that just made everything too abstract and I was also forced to watch that nasty movie.
I gave up in September, but this was originally conceptualised in February. It may get revitalised later, and even writing this explanation has given me some ideas that I won’t drop in here. But unfortunately, it just wasn’t a solid enough concept to write the way I pictured it.
Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, a review
This one is simply put: everyone, everywhere, reviewed this movie all at once.
I saw the film later than most, and by the time I did, walked out having had a lot of feelings, but nothing interesting to say. I wrote about 500 words on how beautiful it is, how much I loved the theatre experience, and I stopped when I read five reviews saying the same things. I was too late to the party and had nothing of value to add to the discourse. It’s still a 5-star film to me, but not one I felt necessary to explore on my own end.
Oh well.
Blonde, a review
I never saw the movie. After watching the Be Kind Rewind video, I’m glad I didn’t, but the honest truth is that I had no interest even prior. I had read part of the script ages ago, and it was bad. Marilyn Monroe was exploited enough this year, I didn’t feel the need to add to it drawing eyeballs to something that clearly didn’t consider her worthy of humanity.
JLo the Singer/Mariah the Actress/Jessica Simpson the Mogul
After I was finished with Madonna the Actress, there was the possibility of writing a sequel based around one of these women.
My first inclination, and the one that actually might still happen one day, was an examination of Jennifer Lopez’s music career. Simply put, I find the corporate product that is JLo fascinating, even if Jennifer Lopez herself doesn’t interest me. She’s just some lady who allegedly hates tipping. I’m not going to rewatch ‘Monster In Law’, but I will listen to ‘AKA’ again, because that’s a rich text in pop star construction.
The Mariah Carey analysis stalled for two reasons: she’s actually very talented and thus is usually mishandled. Plus, I had another article in the bag about her Christmas dominance as early as July, so I didn’t want to oversaturate the market. But the fundamental problem is that, unlike Madonna, Mariah Carey’s ego was way less of a driver during her peak. She had Tommy for that.
And then there was Jessica Simpson. I read ‘Open Book’, looked into her business acumen, and concluded that I didn’t care very much. She seems lovely, but there was nothing I grabbed onto. There’s so many sad but successful blonde women in show business. So, I gave up on the idea, and moved on.
There will probably be JLo content once the new album comes out, but I also know better and smarter writers than me are working on similar stuff, so I will hold off. But if there’s an opening, I will take it.
The fashion of The White Lotus
I got beaten to the punch and know nothing about fashion. So, it got scrapped and I just wrote a review. That one article about Portia’s fashion is the best one.
Spotify Unwrapped
This one was only an idea. Once my December roster got full, I gave up. Plus, I doubt anyone would be interested in my top 100 songs on a specific app.
A truly unhinged holiday watchlist
I really don’t watch holiday movies like that, so I thought a chronological list of films me and my family had been obsessed with for Christmas Day would be funny. We have a lot of weird ones over the years. I sketched it out, wrote a few paragraphs, and then my computer died so I lost that article.
I really have tried to put this back together again. I have tried so hard. But the momentum was gone, the new stuff I wrote sucked, and I gave up completely. There was no use writing it again if it wasn’t going to be fun.
For the record, it was 4 movies:
Return to Neverland
Land Before Time IX
Scream 2
Mars Attacks
Like the title said, it was unhinged.
Dear Zachary and the mother monstrous
To finish off, I want to talk about the article I wrote and then never published.
‘Dear Zachary’ is probably the saddest documentary I have ever seen. It’s the heartbreaking tale of an elderly couple grappling with the loss of their son and grandson. Through video diaries and interviews, it unravels a tale of obsession, abuse, and murder. In the university class I saw it in for the first time, people definitely cried.
I was one of them.
But a big part of the reason it returned to my conscious mind in the past few years was that a very similar situation occurred with people close to my family. So, around the time I started writing for this in earnest, I wrote almost 3000 words about the documentary and the death of a child. The problem was, even after editing it down and removing names, I knew I couldn’t publish it.
The death wasn’t mine or even my family’s, it was somebody else’s. Even before the swell of discourse surrounding True Crime, it felt wrong to share this story. I tried rewriting it without that horrible context, but nothing worked. I deleted the document at the start of November, because I didn’t want the temptation of ever releasing it.
To this date, it’s the only full article I’ve done that to.
That’s a wrap
That finished sad. Sorry!
I want to end this by again thanking everyone for sticking around! There’s a lot of fun stuff coming. I would ask for suggestions, but as the Minions review brought to light, I can’t do that. It was a bit of a disaster on my end.
May 2023 bring you joy, light, laughter, and peace. Not like, death-peace, but nice peace.
Happy New Year!