More Anime Musing

Okay, so I've written at length about Fullmetal Alchemist before, but I have another tidbit to share. Since I know that my wishes concerning the DVD collection will probably not come to pass, I've been thinking of compiling all the episodes on my media center PC. I've got four episodes collected so far, and Cartoon Network has recently started over from Episode One, so I was really excited to get the entire series collected.

So Saturday night, I set the computer to record Episode Two, and what happened? Saturday was April Fool's Day, so for some asinine reason, Cartoon Network added fart noises to the soundtrack. The entire freaking episode, after almost every single line of dialogue:

*"So you're the alchemist they call Fullmetal." *thp*

"That's right." *phrp*

"You don't look like much to me." *braaaaap*

*not actual dialogue

They were scheduled to air the episode a second time later that night, but then, of course, Daylight Savings Time happened, so they ran Chuck Norris's Karate Kommandos or something instead. So I deleted the recording, because watching the episode with non-stop fart noises was just too offensive. Although, if it had happened with, say, Neon Genesis Evangelion, that might have hilarious.

Speaking of which, I was sure I had talked about Neon Genesis Evangelion before, but I can't find an entry, so I guess I haven't. Before Fullmetal Alchemist came along, Neon Genesis Evangelion was just about my favorite anime. Which is weird, because I find the anime very uneven and depressing. But I'll talk more in-depth about that tomorrow.

I'm maybe halfway through the big Act II climax. Word count is 45,000, so I'll actually come out closer to 50,000 when it's all completed. So I'm feeling a little better about that, plus I realize that publishers count words differently than MS Word does, which means my word count may be at a publishable level by the time it's all finished up.

I had exactly the opposite problem with Blue Falcon. The manuscript for that was pretty big, something like 550 pages. I read an article about estimating word count for publishers, and tried it with Blue Falcon, for which I'd been using the MS Word counter. The count came out way higher, which was disturbing, because the manuscript was already in the high range of what was publishable by a first-time author (something like 125,000 words). So I kept using the MS Word calculation, hoping no one would call my bluff.

Of course, it didn't matter, because not only did I end up not selling it, but I also cut out something like 50 pages on the final editing pass before turning it in to iUniverse. I hated to lose some of the details I'd written in, but I think the book benefited greatly by it. It had always been kind of flabby and ponderous, and it ended up pretty tight.