Monday Morning Cornerbacking

I always wondered exactly what a cornerback does.  According to Wikipedia, "a cornerback is a member of the defensive backfield or secondary in American and Canadian football.^[1] Cornerbacks cover receivers, to defend against pass offenses and make tackles".

That really has nothing at all to with today's post, I just thought we'd probably had enough of the monday morning quarterbacking.  And it's well into afternoon at this point, but it's morning somewhere. 

I did a little bit of writing over the weekend. I realized that I used one of the biggest cliches possible by having my hero wake up with no memory of the previous night in my opening scene.  So I just backed up a few hours and had my heroine drag him out of the river.  I was going to forego the waking up thing altogether and use it as flashbacky backstory, but I am just not that good at sprinking that sort of thing in.  So...cliches or info dumps...what's your perspective? 

In other news, I took my daughter to see Country Strong yesterday.  I had to bribe her with candy and threaten her with death if she made fun of me for crying.  We made it through unscathed.  I cried a little, she didn't make fun of me. 
I really liked the movie. It wasn't anything great, there were more than a few cliches, but there was a lot to like about it.  There was Garret Hedlund, my new boyfriend, and Tim McGraw, my other boyfriend. 


TMcG was totally hot with his salt and peppery beard and hair, longer than he wears it in real life. 

Gwyneth Paltrow was wonderful, as was the supporting female actress, whose name escapes me at the moment and I'm too lazy to look her up.  There were a few too many dramatic close ups, but when they were of my boyfriends, I didn't mind too much.  There were love triangles galore...maybe love quadrangles?  The music was good, I'll be downloading the score.  It was kind of The Rose meets Coal Miner's Daughter meets A Star Is Born. 

The guys chose to see True Grit, which was probably a good choice for them.  This is a good date movie, there were lots of guys there, just not my guys. 

Anyway, I give it a thumbs up and 2 kleenexes (out of five.  Five would be Terms of Endearment or Beaches)

Imaginary Heroes

I was browsing along through this month's Vanity Fair at lunch time (thanks Jessica), about to admire pictures of my boyfriend, Johnny Depp,

When I came across this guy:  

His name is Garrett Hedlund, and he's in the new Tron movie, as well as Country Strong, and THEN he's going to be playing Dean Moriarty in the film adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On The Road, which so totally appeals to my once-upon-a-time-hippie-wanna-be nature that I might just have to go home and get my Birkenstocks and socks on.

Yeah, I know.  It was bad, I did it, but I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen.  I will also confess that while I do know who Neal Cassady is/was (the real life Dean Moriarty), it's only because I like the Grateful Dead song.

  I tried to read On the Road, but it was kind of like Moby Dick to me at the time.  I had to wait 25 years for the movie, but if Garrett's in it, I'm glad I waited.

Anyway.  I saw that Garrett guy, and I thought, Oh!  He could totally be Comatose Dave in WIP3!  I generally try to stay away from choosing real people to model my heroes after because once I start to learn sutff about them, I feel like I have to make that part of the story, and real people can be a little too human.  I'm still not over the whole Mel Gibson debacle.

  On the other hand, I have a tough time imagining imaginary people.  So my plan here is to avoid any and all information about my boy Garrett until after I've written about him, so that his sordid interactions with underaged girls or attacks on paparazzi dont't play into his profile.

How do the rest of you do it?  How do you come up with a face without getting sucked into a personality?