Do open letters undo closure?

(Alternate) Heart of my Heart clocked in at more than 5000 words. The font looks appallingly tiny on my screen, but I suppose I can deal with it? I can make the font bold or larger type, but that just makes the blog taller with fewer words per line. I need a wider format.

The earlier entry was an exploratory piece that I decided to abandon entirely. It was a story that I intended to be my November is National Novel Writing Month project. It would have been fun to write, but the C-cannon Star Wars Universe is complex, and someone has already written stories about Piett surviving the collision. And the clone of Palpatine. So yeah, I don't have any interest in re-visiting ground that someone else exhausted.

So then I thought that I'd write a prequel to the film 'Escape from New York.' I always thought the film was intriguing - but it really missed... something. I think that John Carpenter had meant for the idea of a walled-in NYC prison to be creepier (like the scene where all those guys emerge from manhole covers). Well, of course, the best monster movies are the ones where you make your own suspense because you don't see the monster for a long time. But when you do see these 'monsters', they're extras wearing Chuck Taylor sneakers. And they mostly run past in the shadows during eerie sound effects. Wooo. So it pretty much missed the horror bus, and all that was left was half of what could have been a decent action movie.

But we never learn much about S.D. Plissken either, and this makes it a little difficult for the audience to connect with the I-don't-give-a-fuck tough guy. Who is 'Snake' Plissken? Why do people think he was dead? There should be plenty off room there for a story. So I did some brain storming and I came up with some really good story ideas, including the origin of the eye-patch. [I had him as a younger man falling out of a tree after trying to put the moves on some girl - resulting in single-eye double vision] Then last week I suddenly realized that it wasn't enough to watch the film to see where a prequel novel should end. If there is a movie, there is probably a book out there, right? Well there is a book. And it starts before the film. And it includes the origin of the eyepatch. And it includes the story of the robbery of the Federal Reserve Depository. So it basically covers all the bases before the film begins.

Well shit. 

Scratch that idea then. It does save me the trouble of how a one-eyed guy could get into Special Forces. A one eyed man flying a plane isn't a big deal though; see Wiley Post. It would have been fun to write though. Dammit. I do have a fallback idea for NaNo, but I'll hang onto that one for now.