D-Plus

While glancing over the Entertainment Weekly movie scorecard (basically, it rounds up a select few films now playing in theaters in a grid and shows us the letter rating they received from various critics around the country) I found myself fascinated by the D+ rating.  Seriously, what's the point of a D+?  What could possibly make a movie a D+ rather than a flat out D?  To me, once you assign a movie a D rating of any stripe, you've pretty much said the movie is awful.  A D+ does not soften that blow.  "Wow, that movie was horrible, but not quite D level bad- I'm going to go, eh, D+."

Cave Monster Dude

To kick off my little blog, here's a sketch by Shawn Leader, which is a drawing of one of the evil cave creatures that pop up about midway through my novel.  The character idea came from the deep sea creatures known as anglerfish that project their own light- you may have seen them in Finding Nemo.  I read about them on wikipedia to do a little homework and they are fascinating creatures, but gross- the fish that look like fish as we know them are all females, while the males attach themselves to a female early in their short lives with no other purpose but to procreate with them.  Like most males (kidding), they only have on thing on their mind, as they are reduced almost entirely to gonads.  But don't take my word for it, read the wiki.

Anyway, I agree with Shawn that the guy on the left is too alien-y (though well drawn) and the look on the right is 100% what I had in mind!