Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 142

If You're in a Holiday Movie

So, after going through the day yesterday unable to start anything that required water, even though I seemed to have water the whole time, I got an e-mail saying they didn't get the repairs done, so we wouldn't have water today. I did about four loads of laundry last night, and I got up this morning and cleaned the bathroom, so I'm not in a crisis situation, but it's still annoying. I haven't checked yet to see whether or not I actually have water. I'm thinking of going shopping just to get out of the house and not have to worry about it, and then I have my last choir session of the year tonight. I don't think I'll try to do any real teaching with the kids. We have to practice our song for Sunday, which will take up most of the time, and then I think we'll sing some Christmas songs and then go caroling to the people setting up for dinner. If I get desperate, we'll get out crayons and make Christmas cards.

I'm continuing my blitz of holiday movies from the DVR, and I've noticed some trends of things to happen in you're in a holiday movie:

There's a good chance you work in a creative profession, or would like to -- if you have a regular job, you're an aspiring painter or photographer in your spare time, but you gave up pursuing your dream professionally because of responsibilities. Or you work at an ad agency. I decided I might as well go with the flow in the one I wrote, in which the heroine is an aspiring singer who works at a public relations agency.

If you're in a relationship, the other person is terribly, horribly wrong for you, to the point that this person could qualify as a villain. But somehow, you don't notice this until you meet the right person and can see the contrast. You seldom figure it out yourself from the mustache twirling and sneering.

If you're a man already in a relationship when you meet Miss Right, you'll know your existing significant other is evil when she starts talking about her plans to totally redecorate your home once you're married. Her plans will always be for something really stark and modern that will require you to get rid of all your cherished family keepsakes. So, basically, if you're dating someone who starts talking about redecorating your place, you should probably run right away and skip the step of someone having to change their mind on the day of the wedding.

If you buy an artificial Christmas tree, you're probably some unholy combination of Scrooge and Satan. You can tell that someone's a good person if they insist on a real tree and prefer the ones that are less than perfect.

Putting work ahead of friends or family is always wrong, no exceptions. It doesn't matter if it's a meeting on which your entire career and the future of your whole company (and the employment of everyone else who works there) hinges, it should come in lower on your priority list than your niece or nephew's third-grade Christmas program. If you make the wrong choice, you'll probably have to suffer some kind of supernatural intervention to make you learn to be a better person.

You probably have an older person in your life who bears a remarkable resemblance to someone who was really famous and maybe had a hit TV show about 20-30 years ago but who isn't seen much these days.

Cozy Cup of Tea Books

I still haven't finished putting up my Christmas decorations. I had yet another bit of hook adhesive fail last night, and I even used a more heavy-duty one that should have been able to hold the whole thing on its own. So there's something about that spot that makes the Command hooks not work there. I really do think it might be too cold next to the window to stick. I wonder if hitting it with a hair dryer initially might make a difference. But that might damage the paint and it's not worth it. So, I guess I'll be rearranging the mantel to put on the garland like I've done just about every year.

I was planning an epic day of dish washing, laundry, and cooking to get ahead of my busy weekend, but they announced that the water would be off at least part of, possibly most or even all of the time between 9 and 3 today. As of 10, I still had water, but with the announcement, I don't dare start doing anything involving water. I suppose instead I could tidy up, or I could get really radical and write. Last week it was no power, this week, no water. It's like living in pioneer days! Except not.

I haven't done a book report in a while, but I've been in a weird reading mode that's affecting my enjoyment of books. I'm weirdly suspense-averse right now. If there's any kind of tension or suspense in what I'm reading, I have to flip to the back to make sure it works out okay before I can go on. There have been books I might have enjoyed at other times but that really bothered me because the outcomes disturbed me. Even when things work out okay and the bad guys are defeated, there are bad consequences for the good guys that I find unsettling. So I should probably switch to cozy mysteries for a while. That may be why I'm finding the TV Christmas movies so appealing. I know that nothing really bad is going to happen to the characters. This is hampering my writing right now, as well, because I can't make even mildly bad things happen to my characters, and I know I can't get away with a whole book of people sipping tea and having pleasant conversations. There needs to be at least some drama and angst, but I don't want to hurt anyone right now.

Since I'm still waiting for feedback from my agent on the book proposal, maybe this is a good time to put that book aside and work on that holiday movie script. I can write action and suspense after the holidays when maybe my life is a little more settled and less hectic.

In the meantime, any recommendations for good cozy cup of tea books that aren't full of angst and that will be comforting and reassuring?

Busy Weekend #1

I made it through busy holiday weekend #1. I took a day off work Friday to join the church women's group for an excursion to tour a display of Nativity scenes. There's a church near here that gets something like 700 Nativities lent to them for a weekend event. They're from all over the world, from all different kinds of materials, all different kinds of interpretations. It was interesting seeing some of the different cultural interpretations from other countries. There were cute scenes, artistic scenes, modern and traditional. One I found particularly interesting was from Liberia and made from spent AK-47 shell casings from the civil wars in that country. Metalworkers scavenge the casings and sculpt them into Nativity scenes that are then sold around the world to raise money for the people displaced by the civil wars. It was a real "swords into plowshares" thing.

And then after that, we all went to lunch. I made it home to do some baking before going to a party. Saturday was a day out and a walk through the mall, so now I have done my Christmas mall experience for the year. It was a rather high-end mall, so purely window shopping, though I think the sales person at Tiffany's took the browsing a little too seriously and made me try on a necklace I looked at from a distance. When she first approached us, she asked if we'd met because I looked really familiar. I couldn't help but wonder if maybe she'd seen my book cover photo and was recognizing me from that without the context to put it together, but I didn't want to bring that up. I did like the necklace, but it was something like $975 (I looked it up later on their web site), so that's not gonna happen unless something huge happens that I want to celebrate. Maybe if I make a big movie deal or make one of the big bestseller lists. But I don't often wear jewelry, and for that kind of money I could buy a nice piece of furniture.

I got part of my decorations up in the house yesterday. The garland is on the loft and stair railing and the wreath is on the door. I got a start on the mantel garland, but one of the Command hooks I use refuses to stick. I've put it up again four times, following the directions each time, and then I barely touch the garland to it and it pops off. It's the one closest to the exterior wall, so I wonder if it's too cold there to stick properly. I may have to give up and just set it on the mantel, but the mantel is so narrow that it's rather precarious.

I need to do some cleaning before I can put up the tree, though I've been pondering whether to do that at all or to just go with the decorated garlands all over the house.

Today and tomorrow are my "quiet" days, and then starting Wednesday I have a really busy stretch. But then after Sunday night, I'll have most of the rest of next week free to recover.

Fairy Tales vs. Tales About Fairies

In case you weren't online much during the holiday week and missed it, my latest book in the Fairy Tale series came out last week, and it now seems to be available in all formats in all the usual spots.

The name of the series is a deliberate double entendre because in this series I'm using both the folklore about the fae and some of the elements of fairy tales. These are generally two entirely different things. There are very few fairies in most of the well-known fairy tales. There's a complicated etymology reason why "fairy tales" are called fairy tales, but I like J.R.R. Tolkien's reasoning in his essay "On Fairy Tales." He considers "Faerie" a place -- a magical realm -- and the fairy tales are stories that take place in this realm.

That was a big jumping-off point for the idea behind this series. I like playing with fairy tales. I like updating them, twisting them, fleshing them out. I like the structure and the patterns. But if you do much reading on fairies themselves, or the fae, they have very little in common with what we think of today. The Victorians had a lot to do with turning them into something cute for kids, but the folklore is about beautiful and dangerous creatures. There's no absolute consensus on who they are, where they came from, or where they live. Some stories consider them fallen angels who fell past earth but didn't quite make it to hell -- which may have something to do with reasons why religious elements are often considered good ways to fight them. Some folklore considers them to be like ghosts. They're the dead living in their own realm and occasionally crossing into ours. I went with the idea that they're a different kind of being that lives in a kind of parallel universe that intersects ours. To go there physically, without going through a magical portal, you have to go underground -- most of the folklore on the subject mentions going under hills -- but once you're past the Borderlands, you're basically in another dimension.

One common theme of stories about the fae is that they're something that used to be a lot more common but that is currently fading. Even stories told in the Middle Ages refer to a past time when they were more common. They're seen as something incompatible with modern society, whatever "modern" happens to be at that point in time. One of my reference books, by a scholar who's researched fairy folklore, is called The Vanishing People, because they were always said to be on their way out. This was a theme I went with in the latest book -- was there a reason they seemed to fade from view, could they make a comeback, and what would happen if they did? There may still be a few places in the world where they'd know exactly what to do if fairies made a reappearance -- Iceland, some rural areas in the British Isles -- but the rest of the world would be defenseless, if they were even able to make themselves believe. On the other hand, our world might be poisonous to them. For both sides to survive, it takes a balance. Have the things our heroes have done recently to stabilize the fairy Realm made things more dangerous or less? And what can they do on this side of the border to keep the world safe?

I find the old stories of the scary kind of fae far more interesting than the cutesy Disney creations -- though the original Tinkerbell actually has a lot in common with traditional fae, and she's not nearly as sweet and cute as the Disney version. There's a lot of material there for me to work with.

Preparing to Write

This will be my last "official" writing post of the year because things are about to get crazy for the holidays. I may discuss story, characters, and stuff like that at random times in my blog, because that's stuff I talk about.

If you didn't do National Novel Writing Month but are thinking about making a New Year's resolution to write a book next year, now's the time to start preparing yourself for success. What do you need to do to get ready to write a book?

A lot of that depends on the kind of writer you are. There are people who work best by just sitting down and writing, letting the story come on the spur of the moment. But I think most of us work a little better by doing some preparation, and how much and how formal the preparation is depends on the way you work. Here are some things you might want to think about before you write your book.

Characters
Who is your protagonist? What does this person want? Why does he/she want it or need it? What is keeping him/her from getting it? Those are the main things you need to know about your main character, and it's possible to start writing once you know these things. Or you may want to figure out more. It's not necessary to know where your hero went to elementary school or what his favorite subject was, but it helps to know what he does for a living, something about his level of education, and what he cares about. What does he really need, deep down inside, that drives his actions?

Then you need to figure out who your antagonist is, who may or may not be a villain, depending on the kind of story you're writing. An antagonist is basically the person (or force) getting in the way of the hero getting what she wants. The hero may also have internal issues getting in the way, but in genre fiction, you generally also need an outside force causing problems. The antagonist may be directly opposing the hero, or they may just be competing to get the same thing.

You can figure out who the other people in the protagonist's life are ahead of time or they may pop up as you write.

Setting
Where/when does your story take place? This is going to affect the plot and the characters. It has a lot to do with who your characters are and what they can do. It also will dictate how events play out -- the story is going to be very different depending on whether immediate, constant communication is possible, for instance. If you're using a setting different from your everyday experiences, you may want to do some research before you start writing. Read books about the time or place. Watch videos of that place. Look at photos. This would be good stuff to do during the holiday season when you're too distracted to start writing but want to feel like you're doing prep work. I think even total seat-of-the-pants writers who feel hampered by outlines can benefit from immersing themselves in the setting of the book they plan to write.

Story
This is where writers really differ. The sit-down-and-write people often lose all enthusiasm for a project once they've outlined it. They need to surprise themselves. On the other extreme are those who not only have a plot outline but also storyboard each scene. Then there's everything in between. You can have a rough outline with major turning points. You can have the protagonist's and antagonist's goals and conflicts and nothing more. You can have a rough outline that you add to in more detail as you go, so that you plan each section or scene before you write it. You can do this work on paper, on a spreadsheet, in a flow chart, or just in your head. I do find that the more I think about a project before I write it, whether or not I write anything down, the easier it is for me to write it. I can do this kind of thinking while I do other things, like housework, exercise, or driving. That makes it ideal writing "work" to do during the busy holidays. You can think about your book as you bake, shop, wrap presents, clean house, or travel. Then on January 2 when you sit down to write that novel, you'll be ready to go.

Have a happy holiday season, and remember that books make great gifts. If you want seasonal reading, my latest release, A Kind of Magic, is set around the holiday season.

Knitting in the Dark

Yesterday I came to realize just how much I rely upon electricity. There was a loud boom nearby mid-afternoon, the power went out, then there were sirens. Soon, there was a fire truck at the intersection behind my house and three police cars with the cops directing traffic, since the signal lights were out. It was pretty localized, as the lights a block away were working. I'd been planning to wash dishes, but I didn't want to use up the hot water. I could use the laptop, but there was no Internet. I ended up collecting and taking out the trash, cutting up a pineapple, and then practicing some of my choir music because the keyboard is battery-operated. Fortunately, my house gets a lot of natural light, so the lack of lights was only an issue in the bathroom, which has no windows.

About 30-45 minutes later, the power was back on. It went off again soon after five, right when I was getting ready to make dinner. But with no electricity, there was no cooking. I'd just made a pot of tea, so I had some in the thermos, and it was still mostly daylight, but getting dark. I opened the blinds and lit some candles and did some knitting. About half an hour later, the power was back, and I was able to make dinner.

The power went out again soon after nine, and this time it was pitch black, since the streetlights were also out (though the traffic signals were working). Normally, I get enough light from streetlights that my house is never entirely dark at night. I can find my way around pretty well, but it was shocking just how dark it was. I was very lucky that I'd become paranoid after all the power failures and was carrying a flashlight with me from room to room. I was glad I'd bought a solar-powered lantern on clearance at Target, and it still had a good charge, so that got me some light. I lit the candles in the fireplace candelabra, which cast a good light on the whole living room. I also had a few flameless LED candles in the frosted glass globes I salvaged from my old ceiling fan, and a few other candles (I like candles, and people keep giving them to me as gifts). By the time I had everything lit, my house almost looked like I had a light on from outside, and it was the only light showing. My neighbors must think I either have a backup generator or a special deal with the power company. Still, though it was enough light to move around, it wasn't enough to do much of anything. I did some knitting on a simple project that doesn't require following a pattern and that uses fat enough yarn that I can feel each stitch. I did a little online browsing with my phone. When we were approaching ten, I decided I might as well go to bed. I could get some rest and stay warm.

And of course, right as I got in bed, the power came back on. I still went to bed early, since I was already there. But I can see where the early to bed, early to rise ethic came from. You may as well arrange your life around access to light.

I guess I could have done some writing, since the laptop was charged and doesn't require light, but I was pretty distracted by the "why don't I have power, will it come back, when will it come back?" issue. However, when I went to bed early, I dreamed the next scene to write, so I might get that done today.

Reading for Fun

I'm back from the Thanksgiving holiday and determined to get at least some things accomplished before the Christmas holiday. I got home Thanksgiving night (leaving early to beat the bad weather), then spent a cold, rainy weekend huddled on the sofa, watching Hallmark movies. Which inspired me to re-read that screenplay I wrote a couple of years ago. I was surprised by how good most of it was, but the ending needs work. I realized I was coming up against the time limit and just wrapped things up. Then again, that seems to be the way most of these movies end. I'm going to give it another pass and then I may ask my agent for advice. She doesn't handle film, but she has contacts and might be able to point me toward someone who does. Hallmark alone is going to start doing something like 20 new movies a year, and I think what I've written is at least as good as some of these, so I may as well give it a shot.

But that wasn't the big news of the holiday week and weekend. The big news was that Rebel Mechanics was named to the Lonestar List by the Texas Library Association. This list is books recommended to encourage reading for pleasure in young teens/preteens, and that's a cause near and dear to my heart. I hate that a love for reading tends to get driven out of kids in school unless they're getting outside support to encourage reading for fun. If your only exposure to books is what you're forced to read in school, you probably won't learn to love to read, and reading for pleasure has so many benefits. It makes people better readers for being able to read school stuff and anything else in life. It makes people more empathetic, because being able to put yourself in the shoes of characters in a novel gives you skills you can use to see the world through other people's eyes. It opens up other areas of knowledge if things in books encourage readers to look things up, like vocabulary words or historical or geographical details. I write books with the primary hope that they'll be fun to read, so it's a great honor to have my book on a list librarians will be using to help kids find books that are fun to read.

And it's really nice to be honored. I do spend a lot of time whining about not getting recognition, even though I seem to be doing at least as well as authors who do get recognized. I don't know how big this will be and if it will translate into sales or other honors, but making a list like this is really cool.

Pre-Thanksgiving Book Update

The new book is showing up in a few more places. The audio is up, as is the Nook version at Barnes & Noble. Still waiting for the paperback to be available. I guess things are slower during a holiday week. I'm afraid I'm not even doing my usual halfhearted stab at book publicity this week. Maybe I should have declined that holiday week release date, but then I'm not that worried about making all the sales this week. I'm more interested in long term, and then it doesn't matter when the book comes out.

I'm hanging out with my brother at my parents' house while my parents are off at medical appointments. I may turn back into a teenager at any moment.

Meanwhile, I've got the pastry for the chocolate pecan pie chilling in the refrigerator. Darn, I forgot to bring my blue ribbon from the church bake-off to display with it.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, and remember that books are a great way to relax after the big meal.

New Book Day!

It's release day for Fairy Tale, book 3, A Kind of Magic, theoretically, though it's not necessarily showing up yet in all the formats at all the sites. I guess we'll have to be patient.

I'm taking an early and long Thanksgiving holiday. I went to my parents' house yesterday, and I'm hanging out with them for the week. That means I may not be quite as on top of all the promotional stuff as I probably should be. I won't be as tied to my desk as I usually am. I'm currently borrowing their Internet connection.

I updated my web site slightly to give info about the new book. I'll add buy links there as I get them.

This may be one of the few times when the book comes out at about the time when it's set, since it's set just before Thanksgiving, when Christmas stuff is already happening but it's not technically the Christmas season. Decorations are going up, and productions of The Nutcracker have started. There's the occasional snowflake in New York, but is that weather or something else?

I hope everyone enjoys it!

Tell your friends! Leave reviews!

Geeky TV Woes

I can't believe it's already Friday and that it's the Friday before Thanksgiving. I think mentally I'm still back in July. I still have my summer clothes in the downstairs closet and need to do a closet switch because it's supposed to get cold this weekend and my warm clothes are all still upstairs. We're also getting close to the winter finales of a lot of TV shows, and I'm still wrapping my head around the fact that the fall season has started.

Unfortunately, most of my geeky TV pleasures seem to be failing me this year. I complained at the end of the last season that it was like all the TV writers had some kind of suicide pact going to try to destroy their own shows, and it still feels that way to me. Spoilers ahead, but I'll try to keep things as vague as possible, since if you watch, you'll know what I mean and if you don't, you won't care.

Strangely enough, although I'm not that excited about Doctor Who this season, I also don't have a lot of complaints about it. The semi-serialized nature, with two-parters, gets like the old-school series (though I've never watched it in serialized form, as it seems like in the US it was always put together in a "movie" for each story). I don't have anything I actually dislike about it. I'm just afraid that Peter Capaldi will not be one of "my" Doctors. I've had more fun with the Classic era reruns from PBS and BBCAmerica than with the new episodes. But at least they don't seem to be actively attempting to destroy all that's good about the series. Unlike other shows.

I'm a bit behind on Sleepy Hollow because I'm generally out on Thursday nights and then I forget to catch up with it later, and while this season has been better than last season, the previous season just about killed it, and it's all starting to feel like a stretch with the way Ichabod seems to have had a connection to every single element of the American Revolution. I'm hoping that the two episodes I need to watch will make the arc make some kind of sense or give it some kind of purpose. Maybe they'd be better off with a Monster of the Week instead of trying to do a grand arc about the latest impending apocalypse. I'm just not sure I can forgive them going to the trope of literally demonizing the existing significant other of the male lead last season.

Speaking of which, there's Grimm. I can understand the desire to shake things up in a long-running series, but there's shaking things up and then there's removing the stuff that made it fun. For me, a big part of the enjoyment of the series came from how very ordinary the hero seemed. He's the boy next door, the nice guy with his nice girlfriend living in a cozy house -- and yet the monsters take one look at him and flee in terror. This very ordinary-seeming guy who is in no way large or menacing, who would best be described as "cute," is the monster the monsters tell horror stories about. Now they've removed all the "ordinary" from him, though I guess he's still cute and not particularly physically imposing. They demonized (again, literally) the existing girlfriend and then killed her off, and now he's moved out of the cozy house -- and in with his enemy, in one of the biggest "seriously?" moves in TV history. This woman did a shape-shifting spell to get him to think she was his girlfriend and sleep with her in order to take his powers away, which nearly got him killed, and then the spell they had to do to get his powers back was what turned his girlfriend into a monster, which was what got her killed, and then it turns out that the enemy got pregnant (their way of dealing with the actress's real-life pregnancy) and had his baby, so now he feels responsible for looking after her and the kid. So, yeah, he's having to live with his rapist who's largely responsible for the death of his girlfriend, and they seem to be setting it up for a relationship to develop, and no, just no. That happens, and I have to quit. I know the girlfriend wasn't wildly popular (that character never is) and there were some complaints about lack of "chemistry" between them (ironic, given that the actors are involved in real life), but it wasn't like they needed to get the existing significant other out of the way to make room for the relationship fans were clamoring for. This is where you want to say to the writers, "Have you actually looked at what you're writing here?" I just hope someone has noticed the ratings nosedive and maybe figured it out.

And speaking of not noticing what they're writing … I'm withholding a lot of judgment on Once Upon a Time until I see how they finish the current arc, but I'm very, very worried based on their track record and extremely screwy morality. I'm already iffy with their idea to turn the heroine into a kind of villain, not because of her actually doing anything villainous but because she sacrificed herself to take on the disembodied darkness that was going to consume everything. Strange how that sacrifice is being treated somewhat like yet another bit of "proof" that heroes aren't all that great, after all, even though she hasn't actually done anything bad under influence of the darkness that wasn't for some kind of greater good or at least out of love. Some of the supposedly reformed villains have done far worse while still being considered heroes. And then there's the fact that each thing she did that supposedly brought her closer to darkness has been to save a life. Only on this should would saving lives count as a step closer to darkness. We won't even get into how they've shown us twice in this arc that apparently the real path to villainy is being angry at a person who slaughtered your entire village. But now they've pulled off a plot development that makes very little sense in terms of a magical system or worldbuilding, even by this show's "Calvinball" standards of rules for magic. It actually has all the potential pieces to be a wonderful character arc, but the writers of this show are idiot savants who have a great talent for coming up with brilliant situations without recognizing or actually doing anything with what they've created, so I'm worried. If they screw this up, I may have to be done.

The Muppets seems to be getting better and is apparently going to be retooled during the winter hiatus. The main thing they need to remember there is that the point of Fozzie Bear is that he isn't funny. The humor comes in the way other people react to the fact that he's entirely unfunny, so giving him his own story lines doesn't work. But they did find a way to get Kermit to unironically sing "The Rainbow Connection" and still put a funny new twist on it, so there's hope.

Haven has been okay, but has lost some of its spark. Some of that comes from some offscreen issues, like having to change shooting locations mid-stream, which means the town is no longer such a character in the show. They're giving answers and wrapping things up, but it's going to be hard to evaluate this season until we see how it wraps up. Some of the episodes have been blah, while others have been deliciously tense and weird.

And I think that's all the geeky stuff I'm following right now.