Countdown to Halloween!

James Bond will return!

But first, we have some Halloween to take care of.

So, my James Bond project hit a giant speed bump. More of a speed mountain, really.

I blame a couple of things. First, the end of August got super busy with End of Summer activities and I slowed down my reading of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. But probably more impactful was finally hitting the Dr. No movie in my schedule. I started the Bond project because I wanted to blog through the movies, but I wanted to do that after a fresh look at the books since those have always informed my opinions of the films. When I discovered what looked like an actual character arc through the book series, I got excited about that and was looking forward to OHMSS, which I imagined to be the top of that arc. When I got to it, I was raring to go. But then I watched Dr. No and had such a ball blogging about it that I suddenly got bored with the idea of going back to the novels again.

Don't worry. I'm still reading OHMSS and I'll finish blogging through the Fleming novels and all of the films. But the scope of the project has changed and I'm not going to make myself do a bunch of stuff that I'd planned to do. I feel like I've said what I want to say about the newspaper strips, for instance. I'm still planning to read those, but I'm not going to force myself to write about them if I don't notice anything new. I'm also not going to blog through the non-Fleming novels. I'd still like to read those too, but I know that when I finish Man with the Golden Gun I'm gonna want a break. I made a trip to our local mystery bookstore a few weeks ago and picked up a bunch of stuff I can't wait to dig into, so I'm not going to put that off while I force myself to endure Q'ute. Not having to blog all that relaxes my schedule so that I won't get burned out and leaves me extra time to do some things I want to do like the Countdown to Halloween.

I'm doing this year's Countdown a little differently from the last few years. Instead of picking a monster and writing about various iterations of it over the next 31 days, I'm going to watch a ton of horror movies and write about those. The plan is to do that for 31 movies, but I'm not going to beat myself up if I miss a day or two. There's some awesome Kill All Monsters stuff brewing that I shouldn't talk about yet, but it involves deadlines and I need to make sure I hit those. There should be plenty of time to do that and watch/blog about 31 horror movies, but if I ever end up in a spot where I have to make a choice... well, you know.

One way or the other though, this blog's about to get a lot busier. Hope you're up for some Halloween, then we'll get back to Bond in November and take another break in December for the next installment of the Christmas Carol project. We've also got new posts scheduled from GW Thomas, who's guest-blogged here about space pulp a few times and has lots more to say. Fun times ahead.