Night of the Living Footnotes? When Footnotes Attack? Footnotes in Space?

Sometimes my footnotes get out of hand. Therefore, two things related to what I said yesterday:

Firstly, a movie that I love for no sensible reason at all.

I currently have this kind of bizarre affection for X-Men: First Class. When I first saw it, I enjoyed it. Then I noticed all the things that were wrong with it. Then I went and watched all the other X-Men movies because I was having a thought about it that I couldn’t get out of my head.*

I didn’t find what I was looking for though and I tried to let it go. Then, two weeks later, for no discernible reason something happened in my head. And I started to write. And I decided absently that I loved that movie. In the way you love the person who introduces you to your future spouse.

Actually I’m in love with an idea that has very little to do with the movie. But it happened in my head because of the movie. So I have this absurd fondness for the thing.

I finally got to watch it again last week for the first time since I saw it at the cinema. I still liked it (although not quite as much as the first time when it was shiny and new and I couldn’t see its flaws). But mostly re-watching felt weirdly nostalgic. Especially weirdly for something I’d only ever seen once before. My brain is a bit of a strange place.

Secondly, I want to make something that can do that.

Not the… having weird thoughts thing. People’s brains are squirrelly. You never know what they’re going to do. But I would like to make people feel.

When I was younger my ambition was to mildly amuse the whole world. (Also I wanted to learn to do a cartwheel, change lanes without running over the cat’s eyes and jump out of an airplane. But now I’ve done all those things so…) I still want my books to make people laugh**, but I’d also like them to… well, traumatise people. In a good way? Is there a good way to traumatise people?
I guess I just want them to feel something. To gnash their teeth or yelp in delight or… throw the book across the room and yell, “No!”

So far they’ve just made people cock their heads at me and say, More? I have received a couple of Noooo…’s, but I think that’s just cause of the cliffhangery nature of the first book. One of my readers named his laptops after his favourite characters though. That’s a good sign, right?

I wish I was a telepath so I could look in people’s heads and see if they were haunted by these people that I made up, if they care what happens to them, if… okay, if I could do that I’d probably be looking to see what coffee tasted like to them and see what the back of my head looks like. But after that…

 

* And by the way, I don’t think I will ever quite forgive First Class for making me watch X-3. That is a terrible movie. But now it’s the completion of the cycle telling the story of their friendship. So I had to watch it. But it made my brain kind of sad.

** You know, in the good way, not in the hilariously bad way. Although if it’s Wizards it seems more likely to be ‘giggle ludicrously and then slide of their chair’ but I’m okay with that too.