Marian Allen's Blog, page 476

Thing That Goes Under the Sea in a Primary Color

I don't care how many people are doing this for the letter Y, I have to do it too. It's in my blood. It's part of my youth. It's myffic, style of fing.

In addition to finding a video of the song, I was delighted to find one done in Lego. Please forgive me if everyone else in the challenge has posted the same one.

I'm not quite sure why this song is and was such a touchstone to happiness for so many people. Part of it is surely the bouncy beat, part of it is the repetitiveness, which makes it easy to sing even when one is … shall we say … chemically distracted. But there's also something in the mere combination of "yellow" and "submarine" that appeals. Maybe it's the similarity in shape of a submarine to a banana that makes a yellow submarine seem both appropriate and funny.

At any rate, here's to the dear, dead days, and to The Dear Boys who gave us such joy. I refer, of course, to The Beatles, who were not Paul McCartney's first back-up band.

WRITING PROMPT: What song from your youth makes you happy and why? Apply this to a character.

MA

Xylem, Mon Amour

I love xylem. Why do I love xylem? Well, I'll tell you: I love xylem because it's one of the few little memory fish left in the pool of my plant biology studies. Xylem and phloem. And pith. I remember pith. ~MA waves at the little memory fish~

Xylem transports moisture and some nutrients up into plants and phloem transports organic materials, and that's all I know. They always sound like moral examples in some Victorian nursery rhyme:

Xylem and phloem were two bad boys.

On Sabbath Day they made loud noise.

They dirtied their faces and tore their pants

And died and came back as parts of plants.

WRITING PROMPT: What bits of things does your main character vaguely remember from school?

MA

Wee Willie Winkie

It doesn't seem right to go into heavy breathing over this silly phrase. After all, it's a child's nursery rhyme:

Wee Willie Winkie

Runs through the town

Upstairs and downstairs

In his nightgown.

The tiresome busybody pokes in where he isn't invited, telling everybody to lock their doors and put out their lights and go to bed because he thinks it's time they did.

That isn't what raises my pulse.

It's also the title of a Shirley Temple movie, and now we're coming closer to the point. First, though, I have to say Shirley's army poem from that film:

Fear God

Honor the Queen

Shoot straight

And keep clean.

Cracks me up, for some reason.

And now we come to the part where my pupils dilate. Wee Willie Winkie also stars Cesar Romero. Children, long before he was Joker on the Adam West campy Batman show, he was … how shall I put this delicately … hot.

'Nuff said.

WRITING PROMPT: Give a character a crush on an entertainer of a bygone time. What comes of it?

MA

Very Best Villain

My favorite villain wears armor, a helmet and a cape, and his last name starts with a V. And it isn't Darth Vader.

No, my candidate for Best Villain of All Time is the illustrious Victor Von Doom. Dr. Doom is ruler of the kingdomlet of Doomania — I mean Latveria. He's the sworn nemesis of The Fantastic Four and The Silver Surfer and just about any good guy who comes along.

I sing you of Victor Von Doom,

Who escapes from both prison and tomb.

He can best gods and man

And stay fresh in his can

'Cause he's simply too cool for the room.

WRITING PROMPT: Who's your favorite villain, and why?

MA

p.s. It's Tuesday, and I'm posting at Fatal Foodies today, on the subject of Vegetarianism through the eyes of one who considered it a Danger to Health.

Unexpectedly Upended

[image error]When I heard about the April A-to-Z Blog Challenge (blog every day in April except Sundays, basing each post on subsequent letters of the alphabet), I was like, "Piece of cake!" Fans of Labyrinth know better than to say that, right?

So I signed up and have had:

edits of new novel, FORCE OF HABIT
edits of short story written to promote FoH, "By the Book"
a cold
my mom with a pulled muscle
my mom with esophageal spasms (originally thought to be a heart attack)
multiple tornadic and thunderstormic activities
power outage
the bad judgment to join Second Life when I have little time to spare (I love it!!)

So far, I haven't missed a post but the month isn't over yet. Oh, yeah–and OVER A THOUSAND other bloggers signed up for the challenge, and I want to visit all of them.

Here's a tree in my Mom's side yard. Fortunately, it fell AWAY from the house. An unexpected upending. Just days earlier, the electric company came through and took down a couple of trees that, if they had fallen, would probably have fallen toward and onto her.

WRITING PROMPT: A character has difficulty fulfilling a pledge. That isn't a prompt; it's a plot!

MA

Sample Sunday – Aunt Libby Meets Blennie

In this scene from — Yes, EEL'S REVERENCE — Aunt Libby, octogenarian priest of Micah, meets Blennie, mermayd member of the mercenary band called the Fortunatos.

My capture exhilarated me. No wonder I'd been so angry with Clare and her plan; she'd brought me back to a place where a true priest belonged—into the thick of a wrong situation—and then had stored me safely away from it. Now I'd been dragged out where I should be, smack in the middle of something nasty. The blood sang in my veins.

We trotted, single file, along a wolf track. We made quite a bit of noise; it wasn't until I caught a flash of sunlight reflected off a moving eye that I realized we were being monitored. Naturally, I should have known we would be. Did the Fortunatos see the wolf? Did they expect it? Did they care? On the chance I was being rescued from Uncle Phineas, I should have pointed out the animal. On the chance my abductors would kill it, I kept quiet.

We reached some sort of boundary; suddenly, the undergrowth became low ground cover. The wolf didn't accompany us into the cleared woods, confirming my suspicion that it and the Fortunatos were not in league.

"Let me see this true priest," the tenor voice said. A horse moved up on our left. "It must be eight years or more since I've seen a true priest; they've been through, I suppose, but I haven't paid any attention to them."

"Paid a lot of attention to them before, Blennie?" someone asked.

The horse pulled along next to us now, and I could see the rider: a mermayd, with skin as pearly as Loach's, a dark blue tail, and "salt-and-pepper" hair done up in the Fortunato topknot. His skin showed no sign of age, of course, no more than a landsman's

would, if he spent his life covered in either water or salve. Only his hands showed age: ridged and veined with blue, red, and silvery gray. He must've been at least fifty—old for a mercenary.

His saddle and tack looked old, too, gleaming with the soft patina of much use and good care. His gillband was covered with sharkskin and metal mesh.

I looked around and counted four other Fortunatos, none of them mermayds.

"Yes, I'm the only one," Blennie said. "Why the surprise? You've seen mermayds before."

"Not on horseback. I've never seen a mermayd on horseback anywhere in the world but here. Is it normal in the Eel, like the Coalition, or this game of pass-the-priest all you Eelites seem to be playing, with me for a marker?"

"Blennie's one of a kind, Auntie," said the woman on whose horse I rode. "Don't worry about that."

There was some rough-humored laughter, Blennie joining in with a touch of bitterness.

"I heard you were brought into Port Novo by a mermayd," Blennie said. "And followed out by the same one, somewhat the worse for wear. Some of your best friends…"

"Are somewhat the worse for wear, yes."

For more posts about EEL'S REVERENCE, including more excerpts, click here. There's more about the book on the Novels page and the EEL'S REVERENCE page. EEL'S REVERENCE is available for the low, low price of $2.99  in eBook formats only, from Amazon, B&N, OmniLit and who knows where else. I also have a free short story set in the same world, available in a variety of eBook formats at Smashwords, or in PDF here.

WRITING PROMPT: Do you remember your first meeting with someone who turned out to be very important to you? Write such a meeting for one of your characters, or invent two characters and give them a first meeting that implies a future relationship, positive or negative.

MA

Thalendri, Terrorism and Tolerance

Theology in space! Or, as the blurb for the second anthology in the INFINITE SPACE, INFINITE GOD series puts it, "Twelve science fiction stories featuring great adventure with a twist of faith."

I've been lucky enough to get an interview with authors Ken Pick and Alan Loewen, who collaborated on "Dyads". They gave me a lovely long interview which, in the interest of posting short for the A-to-Z Challenge, I'm placing on a separate page for now. I'll leave you with an excerpt and a link to the whole interview (well worth reading!) and buy links for the book. After reading their answers to my questions, I not only bought ISIG II, but ISIG I as well.

Q: Can you say how your main character first occurred to you and how he or she evolved from that first spark to a full character?

ALAN: When I first met Ken, he had a character looking for a story, and I had a story that was in search of a character, a typical "haunted house in space" scenario that eventually became "Mask of the Ferret." I have always been attracted to stories that feature a group of people trapped in a restricted space and forced to fight for their lives.

Ken's only further instruction to me was that he would like to see a Roman Catholic character in the story and that he was to be displayed realistically and respectfully. The result was Father Eric Heidler, a Roman Catholic priest high in the fictitious Order of Saint Dismas and a man working out his penance for his work before he joined Mother Church which explains his appearing fascination with Jill.

The story did so well, we wrote "Dyads" as a sequel for ISIGII.

KEN: The main character in "Dyads" is Father Heidler, whom Alan came up with for the initial story "Mask of the Ferret". Originally a clergyman covert operative, he became fixed as a Catholic priest (fictional order) when "Mask of the Ferret" was tweaked for ISIG1 and took off from there.

This Fr Heidler is never physically described, other than being human and getting on in years, a common convention allowing the reader to insert their own – these days, probably Shepherd Book…. Especially since his milieu has some of the gritty retro-future feel of Firefly.

Q: Did you choose your subject, or did your subject choose you?

KEN: Both. It began with "Mask of the Ferret" in ISIG1, with a character who does not appear in "Dyads" – a chain-smoking Goth ferret-woman named Jill Noir.

The "furry" angle (aka "The Cold Wet Nose school of non-human design") has always been a constant thread through my fantasy. In this context, I think of it as following an old space-opera tradition: basing alien races on animals or composites thereof. Main difference in "Dyads" is the alien cosmic archetype is Fox instead of the more usual Cat.

If that doesn't whet your appetite, I don't know what would. Read the rest of the interview with Ken Pick and Alan Loewen here. I mean, anything that wrests a penny from my unrelenting grip has got to sound good.

INFINITE SPACE, INFINITE GOD is available from the Publisher

From Barnes and Noble

From Amazon in paperback and for Kindle

and in other E-book formats at Fictionwise

WRITING PROMPT: Go to the American Catholic Patron Saints page ("Saint of the Day now available for the iPhone) and pick one. Read about him/her on the site and come up with a three-sentence story arc for a character that has some connection with the saint.

MA

What Is This Sample Sunday Thing?

Sample Sunday (or #SampleSunday in Twitterspeak) is … well … putting samples of your work on your blog every Sunday. Participants can post whole short stories or excerpts of stories or novels or works in progress. It's a good way for readers to try you out. The idea is that if you like my work, you might like it enough to buy some.

Or not.

To sample my stuff, you can look in the sidebar and select the category Sample Sunday. You can also look at the top of my blog at the navigation bar and click on Hot Flashes, Novels or Stories.

I hope you find my samples spectacular! (Or, at least, satisfactory.)

Oh, and, because I can't resist, I hereby present you with a link to Ruth Brown explaining simple economics to a customer wanting a free chair.

WRITING PROMPT: What would your main character give as a free sample?

MA

Bear With Me

I'm trying out a new theme, 'cause I really needed something else to do this month.

WRITING PROMPT: Have a character bite off more than he or she can chew. Who suffers?

MA

R = Cuban Pete

It does so too! Because "Cuban Pete" is … wait for it … a rhumba! Rhumba or rumba is a group of Afro-Cuban percussive patterns and the songs and dances based on them. The word rhumba comes from the Cuban Spanish word for party, and hearing one playing makes you want to dance, so that makes sense.

The only scene in The Mask that I thought was genuinely funny (had me rolling on the floor, helpless with laughter) was the Cuban Pete scene. I was going to embed the video, but embedding was disabled, so here's the link to the Cuban Pete scene from The Mask.

I was, however, able to get the embed code for a clip from an old I Love Lucy episode, so here are Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo doing the rhumba.

WRITING PROMPT: Write a character who doesn't like to dance suddenly hear a song or rhythm that makes him or her want to dance! Right here! Right now!

MA

p.s. Since this is the 21st, I'm posting at The Write Type, today on the subject of Rewrites.