Theodora Goss's Blog, page 73

On Blogging

Yesterday, after I posted my blog post, I started to worry.

Did it really have anything to do with writing? Because I had promised myself, and promised you, that this blog would be about writing. And was it too personal? Because after all, I had shown you the contents of my closet. Or half my closet. (The other half of that closet is filled with books.)

What did my clothes have to do with writing? Or my shoes? Or the fact that I had bought a pair of shoes for $7.49 at a thrift store?

And then I thought, my life has become about writing. That's the change I'm making this year, that's the commitment I have made to myself. And so everything in my life has also become about writing, and it either enables my writing or – gets in the way of it.

For example, those (adorable pale pink) shoes. If I had actually bought them at Anne Klein, they would have cost closer to $74.90. And that's part of a plane ticket to a con, or how much I would pay to have a hundred copies of a booklet printed up, or my SFWA dues.

As it is, those shoes cost less than what I was paid for the two poems in Mythic Delirium 23. (So thanks for the shoes, Mike Allen!)

I would still pay a great deal to go to Nepal. But that trip would become part of who I am as a writer. And because I'm a writer, I think I would go to Nepal in a particular way, not staying in the tourist centers, wanting to see as much of the country as I could. Looking for authenticity. Thinking all the time about what I could write about, writing stories in my head, because that's what I do. That's the way I live.

And I would probably blog about it. If I could get an internet connection in Nepal?

Traveling Light

Yesterday, I had the following conversation.

Friend: I'd like to go to Nepal.

Me: Let's go trekking in Nepal!

That night I thought, could I actually go trekking in Nepal? After all, I do have a sort of cat-like appreciation for comfort. I like to curl up with a blanket and read Calvino, or watch Cold Comfort Farm one more time. I like going to the Museum of Fine Arts and having a banana split. (You've never tasted a banana split like the ones they make in the new café, in the American Wing. It is the apotheosis of banana splits. There are caramelized bits in there, and the cherries are steeped in brandy. It's most definitely a banana split for adults.)

But that appreciation for comfort comes from the same place as an instinct that is almost opposite to it: the instinct to travel light. The place is Soviet-era Hungary. I think friends of mine who were born in the Soviet Union or any of the Soviet bloc countries will agree with this: even after you left, it infused your childhood. You were taught certain things ways of looking at the world that you could either accept or rebel against, but either way they became a fundamental part of who you are. So for example, I was taught that comfort was not important. I rebelled against that particular lesson. I decided that comfort was important to me, that I was going to be comfortable when I could. But I was also taught to travel light, not to have too many possessions, not to care too much about the ones I had, because possessions could be lost. At any moment, one might have to flee the country.

So I think I would actually do rather well, trekking in Nepal. I would be comfortable when I could, but I would travel light, sleep where I had to, eat what I was given, carrying what I needed. And taking it all in, because the greatest luxuries are new experiences.

The notion of traveling light made me think about my Christmas presents. This was the only one I asked for:

It's a bracelet from the Museum of Fine Arts, and as you've probably already guessed, it's based on Monet's waterlily paintings. There's a pair of earrings that go with it, but the museum store was out of those, so they will come later to join the bracelet in my jewelry drawer. In addition to the bracelet, I also received these adorable notebooks to write in:

And I bought myself a present as well. It was a membership to the Museum of Fine Arts:

Now I can go whenever I want to without worrying about the entrance fee. (And I can bring a guest. So if you're coming to Boston, let me know and I'll take you.)

It also made me think about my stuff, what those Christmas presents were being added to. And I thought, I don't have a lot of stuff, really. Here's my jewelry drawer:

Note to thieves: there is absolutely nothing in here worth stealing. I love beautiful things, and all the things I have here, the strings of coral and pearls, the silver broaches, the earrings and rings with marcasite, are beautiful. But what's the point of having expensive jewelry? I'd rather go to Nepal.

Most of my clothes fit into one side of a closet:

And one chest of drawers:

Although I have to admit that there are a few boxes in a linen closet downstairs with the really fine stuff, the silk scarves, the art deco purse made all of silver chains, the fan with Imelda Marcos written on it that my secretary from the New York law firm gave me. (She had been a model in the Philippines, and had once traveled as part of a cultural troupe with Imelda Marcos, who had given out such fans to foreign dignitaries.)

And speaking of Imelda Marcos, that includes shoes:

My most recent purchase is this adorable pair, which I will have to wait until the summer to show off:

They were $7.49 at a thrift store. That's because I'm saving for my trip to Nepal!  Or wherever else I go next . . .

The Portrait

Yesterday, I received an email from Duncan Long with the following portrait attached. Duncan told me that he had seen my blog post on Resolutions and had decided to take the first picture I posted as his daily exercise. And he created the portrait I'm including here.

I was, of course, absolutely blown away to receive something like that. My grandmother was a painter, so I've lived with art, and among artists, my whole life. When I go to conventions, I always come home with limited edition prints or, if I can splurge, something original.

And I've always loved being painted, much more than being photographed. My grandmother's painted me of course, and my husband has drawn me. (He was trained as an artist, and is a talented cartoonist as well.) When I was in college and needed money, I worked as an artist's model, both for classes and for a professional artist who lived in the area. A friend of mine was startled to walk into the senior art show and see me on the wall, in a fairly large lithograph.

Paintings have a perspective and focus that I think photographs lack. For example, to me, Duncan's painting isn't really a painting of me. It's a painting of light. I'm the object (or in this case subject) on which light falls.  (Although I'm amazed by the hands, which are so completely my hands.  I think I would recognize them anywhere.)

What a wonderful present to receive on the last day of the year, so I could post it on the first . . .

Resolutions

I don't make New Year's resolutions.

They don't seem particularly useful. If there's something I should be doing that I'm not already doing, the solution isn't to make a resolution, but to figure out why. When we don't do something we think we want to, or think we should, it's usually because we lack the motivation. We don't really want to. When we're motivated, I believe, we do whatever it is – we accomplish, no resolution necessary.

But I think I might make one this year. Not because it's something I feel the need to do, but because it's a way of expressing something that I think has been happening over the course of the past year, and that I want to express.

My resolution for the next year is to become myself.

We spend so much of our lives accreting. As we grow up, we gain knowledge, qualifications, traits we think we ought to have. Sort of like rocks in the ocean that slowly, over time, are covered with seaweed, barnacles. We gain all those things, and yet underneath, our shapes disappear.

I think there's a time in your life when you need to start getting rid of the accretions that obscure your natural outlines. When you need to start figuring out who you are under all the things you've been taught, and have adopted without necessarily thinking about whether they're authentically your own.

Particularly when you are an artist. We have all been trained in so many ways, and training is important. It can give us tools. But it can also obscure who we actually are, and if you are creating art as anything other than your self, you are creating art that is inauthentic and probably not worth creating in the first place. (I do look back at stories of mine and think, that was worth writing because I learned something from it, but it's not my voice.)

I know I'm not explaining this very well. It's because I'm stumbling, not entirely sure what I'm talking about. I'm writing out of an instinct that this is the time when I need to do that, figure out who I am and become it. When I need to find my own voice.

I was looking back through some photographs from this past year, and a few from Thanksgiving, when I was in Virginia, seemed to express where I've been this year, and where I'm going.

Looking out the window. What possibilities are out there? This is where I started.

Going outside. The world suddenly seemed so much larger than I had thought. And so I sat for a while, looking around, trying to get a sense for which way to go.

Across the fields. I was heading somewhere, although I wasn't exactly sure where or why.

And this is where I am now, I think. On some sort of fence, some sort of boundary. Headed toward the woods? I don't know. But it's me, and it's my journey, and I'm making it. That's my resolution for the year.

Solitude and Silence

I decided to start anew – to strip away what I had been taught, to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing, no one interested, no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown – no one to satisfy but myself. I began with charcoal and paper and decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white. I believe it was June before I needed blue.

– Georgia O'Keeffe

Reading this quotation, I started thinking about what I was doing, and what I wanted to be doing, with my writing. In it, Georgia O'Keeffe is describing a process she went through relatively early in her career, when she decided to stop imitating the art she had been studying and try to find her own style. She restricted herself to drawing in order to find the essence of what she was doing – of what she was doing, as opposed to anyone else.

I wish I had the time, the solitude and silence, to do that.

I have a fantasy of being able to go somewhere, maybe even the Southwest where O'Keeffe painted, so different from the forested Northeast where I live now. For a week, I say when thinking conservatively, but in my fantasy for more than that – perhaps a month? Of staying somewhere alone, or with friends nearby that I see in the evenings, so that the days are my own. And of reading. I would read, and I would write, and I would try to figure out who I am as a writer, what my own style is. I would write poetry, prose, whatever came to mind, and try to get to the essence of it.

I do feel that the more I write, the closer I come to understanding both myself and my own writing. But I have a craving, just now, for solitude and silence, for time by myself to discover who I am, what I think. I would particularly like to read books that I have not read, more by Vladimir Nabokov for instance, or some of the modern novels I just can't keep up with, to see what I think about them, where I say "yes, that's good," where I say "no, I don't think so." Because those judgments inform my own writing.

I would like some time to do nothing but work on short stories, one after the other. And then I would like to write personal essays, one after the other. And then I would like to find a new way to write poetry, a way I think I'm reaching toward but never have time to develop, because poetry is more time-consuming than anything else I write. I can write most of an essay, or most of a short story, in one day. Or most of a poem. A poem is a particularly inefficient form of writing, alas. And when I'm finished with it, I have – something to put in a drawer.

Solitude and silence, a great deal of sunlight on a cushion where I can curl up. Tea in a mug. A large stack of books and a brand new notebook, every page lined but blank. A brand new pen.

That's what I want, universe. Are you listening?

I'm concluding with some other quotations from Georgia O'Keeffe. They helped me, and perhaps they'll help you as well. Here they are:

I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.

To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.

I think it's so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary – you're happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.

Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.

Writing My Column

Yesterday night, I worked on my Folkroots column, which is due on January 5th. I thought you might be interested in how I went about it. It's a bit of a random process, working on a column. Not like working on a story.

For me, writing a story is a linear process. I have an idea of what the story is about, of its arc, in my head. And I start at the beginning, and go from there.

That's not how a column happens. I've known what this column is going to be about for some time: vampires. I've also known the first line: "I don't like sparkly vampires." That first line gives you, in a sense, the thesis of the column. It's going to be about bloodthirsty vampires, the kind that actually suck blood, that try to invade England and form a vampire army. The kind you decapitate. And I've known the basic organization of the column: first I want to talk about vampire folklore, and then I want to talk about literary vampires.

I have about 3000-4000 words to do it in. That includes notes and suggested readings.

The first thing I did was assemble my sources. I have on my desk beside me The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories, the Penguin edition of Dracula, and Walter Pater's The Renaissance, which contains a description of the Mona Lisa as a vampire. I'm going to quote from those. I also have the Bedford edition of Dracula, because I was the research assistant for that book and it contains contextual material that I want to look at. I also took another look at a website called Dracula's Homepage, which looks appropriately lurid but is actually a reliable scholarly site created by Dr. Elizabeth Miller, who is an expert on Dracula. In addition to assembling my sources, I went to the Boston University library website and identified several reliable texts on vampire legends that I should be checking out later this week.

See, this is Folkroots. It's not some random website. When I say something, no matter how casual my tone, it needs to be backed up by research. If you research vampires on the internet, you will find plenty of websites that tell you there have been vampires, or creatures resembling vampires, in all cultures. (And they will provide little or no documentation. Sometimes I think they're all repeating each other.) That may be true, if you have a fairly broad definition of what a vampire is. But the vampire as we have inherited it comes from the 18th century, and it is primarily a literary creation. The vampire of folklore, which is an Eastern European phenomenon, is quite different from the literary vampire, closer in some ways to the zombie. It is most emphatically not a seductive aristocrat.

Where was I? Oh yes, describing my process. While I was doing all this, I was also identifying images that could be used for the column. I'm responsible for identifying 3-5 images for the column, which need to be out of copyright. Once I find my images, I have a better sense of what I'm going to write about.

Then I started writing. I wrote the introductory section, which should both draw you into the column and provide a basic sense of what the column is about. The drawing you in part is especially important to me. I think it's important for the column to be scholarly and accurate, but also to appeal to the reader, to say, "Hey, here's something you may not have thought about, but that I think you'll fine interesting. And by the way, I have a perspective on this, which you may or may not agree with." That perspective – it's something columns often lack, but aren't columns more interesting with it? I'm not just giving you information. I'm also giving you my thoughts about that information, how I relate to the material I'm presenting. You may agree or disagree with me, but at least you won't have the illusion that you've simply being given a list of facts. Because that is always an illusion: behind the blandest facts is a columnist, selecting them. And that columnist has a perspective. I want to make sure that perspective comes through in my columns.

I wrote about as much of my column as I've written of this post, about the same number of words. I did not write it in a linear way: there are bits and pieces I will eventually connect to one another. It's easier to write that way when you're taking material from sources. You get down the material first, and then you work on creating a linear narrative.

I'll be working on it again tonight, and every night until it's all put together and sent to the editor. I hope he'll like it – and I hope you'll eventually like it when it comes out in Realms of Fantasy, the April dark fantasy issue.

By Train to Boston

When we left Stone Gap, the mist was still curling around the houses. There was the general store, the gas station, the Methodist Church, the Baptist Church, the library. The high school where I was not going to go, because I was going to Miss Lavender's. I remember that morning very clearly. I was almost thirteen.

Martha Harrington, who had been my guardian and my family's lawyer for many years, was driving me in her old Volkswagen. She was a former hippie who had moved to Randolph, the closest large town, to practice law in the 1960s, when Randolph had never seen a female lawyer. She was retired now, but she still did our legal work, although that consisted mostly in administering my parents' will and making sure that the house where we had both lived since my parents had died was kept up. So she was sort of the housekeeper and groundskeeper as well.

"Are you sure you have everything you need?" she asked.

"I guess so. I have no idea what I need," I told her.

"For Boston? Warm coat, boots, scarf, gloves. It's not going to get cold for a couple of months, but then! Just wait." Martha had gone to law school up there. She told me she still dreamed, sometimes, of the cold.

I would get my books and school supplies up there. I had an allowance of sorts, from the estate. (Such a grand term! It really just meant that there was a Graves family trust, and four times a year I got some money from it. Not a lot, but enough for Stone Gap. Hopefully enough for Miss Lavender's.)

"Do I really have to room with a Gaunt? She's going to be a snob."

"Sweetie, freshman room assignments are made by Mrs. Moth. But you are going to have a fellow Southerner. One of your roommates is from North Carolina. Her name is Matilda Tillinghast."

"A Gaunt and a Tillinghast! It's going be to completely ghastly," I said.

"Very funny. Can you check and make sure you have your ticket?"

I caught my train in Richmond. And then it was twelve hours – twelve hours! – through Washington and New York and finally into the train station in Boston. By then I had won fifty dollars in a poker game in the dining car, and I had the telephone numbers of a cute sophomore from Groton and a boy who said if I ever needed anything in Boston, a motorcycle or computer equipment or cell phones, to just call him.

I got out at the station and splurged on a cab. It was almost dark, and I was too tired to figure out the subway system.

I got out at the common, paid the driver with part of my poker winnings, saw an ice cream shop and bought myself some ice cream (heath bar crunch with extra heath bar topping) because I didn't know what school food would be like, and made a note to self: ice cream shop, right by the common. I assumed I would be able to sneak out to get ice cream. I had been very good at sneaking out of school in Stone Gap.

And then, I went to the address on the admission letter and said to the cat that was lounging on a doorstep, "Hecate Lane, please."

"Follow me," she said. "There hasn't been a Graves at Miss Lavender's for a long time."

"My Mom went here," I said.

She stopped in the middle of the lane, turned back, and said, "You must be Thea. My condolences," then walked on.

I followed her, tears prickling my eyes. I hadn't expected that. In Stone Gap, we had been the eccentric Graveses. I had been Thea Weirdo Graves. Here, we – I – would be something else.

That was clear to me as soon as the door opened. I knew who it was immediately – everyone knows about Hyacinth. "Hi, Thea. Can you go right into Mrs. Moth's office? It's late and I want to get you some dinner, and then have you meet your roomates. Everyone's here except Matilda Tillinghast, who's arriving tomorrow."

And as soon as the office door opened. "Thea Graves. I'm so glad you decided to enroll. Your mother was one of my favorite pupils." So this was Mrs. Moth. She didn't look particularly scary. For who she is, you know. And then she said, "I like Rancatore's too, but no sneaking out for ice cream, please. Freshmen need permission to leave campus. Besides, if you try to leave, you may not end up where you intended. Wait until after you've had Transportation to try the front gate."

So much for that. Whatever the middle school teachers had told me, I disbelieved on principle. But you can't exactly disbelieve Mrs. Moth.

Dinner was better than I expected, some sort of soup with meatballs in it. And then Hyacinth took me upstairs. Let's just say Emma Gaunt was not exactly what I expected. I mean, my cat at home is snobbier than she is. And Mouse was awesome. Can you imagine? I was definitely not going to be the room weirdo. (I mean that in the best way, of course. But Mouse is weird. I mean, how can you not be, when your Dad is an evil warlock and your mother is a sort of tree?)

The Glamorous Life

Today, I spent about five hours going through the second chapter of my dissertation. This is what that looks like (spectacles, hair everywhere, surrounded by papers):

After a break for dinner (organic hot dog and steamed broccoli, while writing this blog post), I'm planning to work on a column that is due in early January.

This is the glamorous life of a writer. I wonder if Margaret Atwood's or Joyce Carol Oates' looks any different. I rather suspect they don't. We are the story tellers, and we are the dreamers of dreams, but our own lives tend to be rather pedestrian.

Of course, I could tell you the story of my life in a way that doesn't sound pedestrian at all. The flight from a communist country. The moving around Europe, catching frogs in Italian marshes, seeing parrots and parrot tulips in the marketplace in Belgium. Memories of taking trains through tunnels under the Alps. Coming to America, seeing the lights of New York through the airplane window. Growing up near Washington, going every weekend to the café in the National Gallery. First loves: the guy from reform school, the guy who thought he was Jim Morrison. Going to the University of Virginia, wearing pearls (even to the gym). The Washington Literary Society and Debating Union (being president, and I still remember the motto: quam fluctus diversi, quam mare conjuncti). Where preppy was not a fashion trend but simply what one wore. Riding through the streets of Charlottesville on a motorcyle behind a guy in a leather jacket (wearing an evening dress and, of course, pearls). Harvard Law School, cutting classes to read in Schlesinger Library. Working as a corporate lawyer on the 42nd floor of the MetLife building, wearing a suit and heels. Cocktail party with Katie Couric, and the strange day when a billionaire threw a pen at me. Leaving it all to go back to graduate school, the graduate student life (second hand bookshops and azuki creams at the Café Japonaise). Free tickets to the Museum of Fine Arts, where I spent afternoons writing beneath the John Singer Sargents.  And then becoming a writer, the workshops, the conventions, the readings and signings, the dancing boys.

All right, I made up the dancing boys.

There are no dancing boys. Unless you hire your own. (Which may not be such a bad idea.)

The glamorous life of a writer consists of sitting in front of a computer and writing. Unless it consists of sitting in front of a notebook and writing. My life consists of both. There has been a great deal of that in my life. And I have to admit, many of my happiest moments have tended to be just that: sitting and writing. When the writing is going well, when I'm completely engaged in the story I'm telling, there's nothing better.

It's as though I have a life inside me that is so rich and strange, it makes what is on the outside seem pedestrian. I bring all sorts of things from the outside world into it: the streets of Charlottesville, the halls of Harvard, girls riding motorcycles behind guys in leather jackets. And then I mix them all up, so those girls marry bears and the guys on the motorcycles are aliens although they don't know it. (I haven't written that story yet.)

When I started this post, I was going to write about the supposedly glamorous life of a writer, how it is always a life of work, often a life of solitude.  And it involves a lot of sitting. But now that I've gotten to this point, I realize that I do, after all, live a glamorous life. It just happens to be the one inside my head.

Think about it. Miss Emily Gray, the sorrow that blankets Budapest like snowfall, the rediscovery of Cimmeria in modern Ukraine (I haven't written that one yet either), all have to exist inside my head before they can exist outside it, on a computer screen or sheet of paper. I get to live in the stories I create, as they are being created.  I get to meet all my characters before I send them into the world.  I get to walk down the streets of Cimmeria, hearing the calls of the pecan roasters, the sellers of candied dates and carpets woven by hill tribes.  I get to see the red valleys of Mars, hear the poems of Elah Gal, make my curtsy to the Child-Empress.  I get to hear what Mrs. Moth and Hyacinth are saying to one another, quietly over the files spread on a mahogany desk, determining fates.  I get to answer directly to Mother Night.

That is, if you think about it, a glamorous life indeed.  A lot more glamorous that Katie Couric's.

The Writer's Child

Sometimes I wonder how it will affect Ophelia, growing up with a mother who is a writer, and specifically a fantasy writer.

It already means a couple of things. It means that her room is filled with books. They're mostly the books I grew up with, which means they're too old for her. She'll read them someday. Right now she's fascinated by the Magic Treehouse series, although she's more than halfway through the first Harry Potter. (Should I mention at this point that she's six?) But since she was quite young, she's been surrounded by fantasy movies as well. She has all the best Miyazaki DVDs, and has been watching My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Spirited Away, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, and Castle in the Sky for years. (She thinks Howl's Moving Castle is too scary.) She's watched both sets of Narnia movies, and of course the Harry Potter movies.

Perhaps it's appropriate, thinking of the female characters she's been exposed to, that she's completely against anything "girlish" (her word). To play with, she always chooses horses, knights, swords and suits of armor, robots, dinosaurs (and yes, she has all those things, including a plastic sword and suit of armor). She has emphatically rejected anything pink or with ruffles. I know because I buy her clothes, and thank goodness for preppy catalogs like Land's End, where I can buy girls' clothes in navy blue, red, yellow, and green. Because if she won't wear something, she really emphatically won't wear it.

She's spend her childhood in museums: the Museum of Fine Arts, the Harvard Natural History Museum, the MIT Museum of Science. She's idolized female astronauts and robot makers. Because her father is a scientist, she's made DNA out of split peas. She's made robots herself. She's been to Boston, New York (where she went to MoMA and the Met), Denver, Charlottesville, and various cities in Hungary. She's slept and played giant chess in a real, actual European castle. She's ridden horses. She has a favorite horse (whose name is Little Man).

What she has not done is gone to Disney World, or any other amusement park. I don't think we've ever gone to McDonald's. We went to the Children's Museum once, and never again. I tried for a while, when she was young, to be the mother I thought mothers were supposed to be. After I while I decided that if something bored me to tears, I would not do it. I could not help it, I simply could not endure baby gym classes. Mommy and me yoga classes. The Children's Museum on an average weekday. These are all, I'm sure, my failings as a mother. The PTA is very important. I will never bake cookies for it. Sorry.

When we were deciding what to have for Christmas dinner, we asked Ophelia whether she would prefer pizza or Thai food. She looked at us as though the answer were obvious: Thai food of course, with plenty of shumai.

Not all of this has to do with being a writer's child. But quite a lot of it does. She has a mother who, given a choice, will always choose romance, in the sense of narrative. There is a romance, an incongruity, to Thai food at Christmas. In comparison, pizza seems ordinary. There is a romance to being in New York and going to MoMA. It engages the imagination. One can tell stories about it. And I realize that I choose to do things one can tell stories about. And I choose to surround myself with stories, whether on bookshelves or DVDs or in the things I do every day. My clothes have stories. I write stories about my cats.  And so she too tells stories and has that instinct for romance, for narrative.

She gets all sorts of things from me: my compulsiveness and desire to master disciplines, and her imagination is just out of bounds. (Here she is beside me, telling me that she has made a machine from a lego kit she was given for Christmas. It's an annoy-o-matic. And it is, indeed, annoying. She is correcting me as I write, telling me how to write annoy-o-matic, with the hyphens.) Some of those traits are genetic, some of them no doubt the result of having grown up in a household where, if you ask how robots are made, you are shown how. If you ask for art supplies, you are given them.

My daughter has had a book dedicated to her, by one of her godparents. (Who are both writers.)

On the other hand, if you look for her on the internet, you will find almost nothing. The other side to being a writer's child is that to the extent I have a public life, and she is a part of it, she will have a public life as well. And I don't want that. Whatever life she has, I want her to create for herself. She can have a web presence as soon as she designs her own website.

Once, she asked me if I was famous. She had seen my books on the shelf, and had seen that if she put my name into the google search box, pictures came up. I told her, a teeny-tiny bit. She told a friend at school that her mother was famous, and her friend told her that meant she was famous as well. I wasn't quite sure what to say about that, except to emphasize the teeny-tiny part.

Since she is standing here beside me, having come up to show me her annoy-o-matic, I ask her: do you mind that I'm writing about you? She laughs and says no. But this is most likely the only time I will.

The Dawn Treader Movie

Today I saw The Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie.

Below, I will be discussing various parts of the movie, including the conclusion.  So there will be what you might call spoilers.  But then, if you're reading this blog, I'm guessing that you know how the novel ends. Right?

The movie was all right, I suppose. There were parts of it where I felt the Narnian magic, particularly at the beginning where Edmund, Lucy, and Eustace are all taken into the painting and find themselves in Narnia, on board the Dawn Treader. And then Caspian introduces Edmund and Lucy as their Narnian selves, and all the Narnians bow. That's a magical moment, a moment of transformation: you are not the ordinary selves you were, you have become extraordinary. That's the transformation Narnia allows.

(I should say here that the Narnia books were absolutely central to me, both personally when I was around ten to twelve and in terms of my development as a writer. When I was in law school, I started to write my first fantasy novel. It was, I later realized, a sort of response to the Narnia novels, about a girl named Flora who has the power to bring summer again to a land trapped in winter. So it matters to me, whether the movies are good adaptations or not.)

The parts of the movie that worked least for me were the parts where C.S. Lewis' original plot was replaced by Standard Epic Fantasy Plot. For example, instead of the elaborate plot involving Caspian's abolition of the slave trade on the Lone Islands, we get a series of sword fights. But that plot shows us what Caspian is actually like as a king, using cleverness and subterfuge when he doesn't have might on his side. It shows, right at the beginning of the novel, that he is worthy to be king, and what it means to have proper, legitimate rule of law. The Narnia books are really Lewis' treatise on how the world should function. He goes into all sorts of details: what sorts of clothes people should wear, what education should be like, how the natural world should be treated. The movie leaves all of those ideas out, except to the extent that Reepicheep articulates them. If you took that out, Reepicheep would have no dialog, because he really is, in the novel as well as the movie, a walking exemplar of the sort of courtesy and bravery that Lewis believes makes the perfect gentleman.

The green mist plot, that was rather dull. The man whose wife is stolen by the green mist and then he has to go save her by joining the journey plot, that was also rather dull. The daughter who stows away on the ship to join her father, that was excruciating. It was a plot out of late night television fantasy, not out of Lewis, who never, ever did anything cute. He abhorred the cute, and when he had something cute, like a mouse, he gave it courage so that it was no longer cute but something lovely and profound.

My least favorite part was the conclusion, or rather the part right before the conclusion where everyone is fighting the sea serpent. For one thing, that sea serpent looked an awful lot like Cthulhu, and suddenly I wondered whether I was in a Lewis-Lovecraft mashup. But I think this particular scene in the novel highlights what it is that makes Lewis so effective and what the movie lacks. Lewis is not Tolkien. The Narnia novels do not have epic sweep, which makes them more difficult to film. They are about a series of small, domestic moments. Think about the meal with the Beavers in the first novel. If you're trying to save the world, Lewis tells us, you still have to eat. The actual scene with the sea serpent in the novel goes something like this: a sea serpent wraps its coils around the Dawn Treader, and everyone has to push together to get the ship out of those coils. In the end, when the ship is saved and sailing on, the sea serpent looks confusedly over itself, trying to figure out what happened to the ship he thought he was crushing. That's not an epic battle. It's everyone working together to save the ship, each in her or her own role, and then we get the sea serpent's perspective. It's small and individual and charming.

Another example. In the movie, Eustace is transformed back from a dragon to a boy when his skin comes off, in a highly dramatic, CGI sort of way. We can tell that Aslan's magical power is at work. But in the novel, Aslan claws his skin off. It's painful, much more powerful, and much more meaningful. Eustace is losing the skin he has built up over the years, all the traits that allowed him to become a dragon in the first place, and what is uncovered is his genuine human self.

Do I hope there will be another movie? I would love to see The Silver Chair filmed. It's one of my favorite Narnia novels, and Puddleglum is one of my favorite Narnian characters. But what would they do to it? I don't want to see it transformed in the way The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is transformed in the movie. I don't want to see my Puddleglum become some sort of action hero.

I will say that the movie was visually beautiful: the Dawn Treader was the ship I imagined as a child, the costumes were exactly what I would want to wear in Narnia, the characters looked just right, even the computer-generated ones.  And I was still, despite the passage of many years, completely in love with Reepicheep.  One final quibble. Those flowers in the ocean at the end. They looked like Casablanca lilies. Since when do Casablanca lilies grow in the ocean? Couldn't they have made the lilies look more – aquatic?