Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 246

Friday Wrap-Up

Our hot streak broke yesterday. We were two days away from breaking the record for consecutive days over 100 degrees when a front came through, so we only got up to 97. However, there was a brief time in the afternoon when it was in the 80s. I went outside and just reveled in it. We'd had 40 days of 100+ degree temperatures, which is rather Biblical. And now we're back to the heat, as today is supposed to go over 100. There may be another break tomorrow, and then the streak apparently will start over, but they doubt it will be as long a streak, since 40 days from Sunday would be late September.

And it turns out that all the exercise I've been doing has been GREAT for my performance in ballet. I have a little jogging trampoline (a mini, low-to-the-ground trampoline you use for jogging in place) that I got when I was rehabbing after knee surgery, but it's been living in my office, where unsightly things go to die (probably bad feng shui for a space where I'm supposed to be creative or efficient). I got the bright idea of dragging it downstairs and putting it in front of the TV. I try to do about 45 minutes a day, mixing jogging, marching and some ballet-type leg raises. At first I was doing it in intervals, with the various leg exercises and marching during the show itself and then jogging during commercials, but in the last couple of weeks I've started warming up with the marching and leg raises, then jogging for about 25 minutes straight. I found last night that I could raise my legs higher and hold them steadier, and then I wasn't at all winded after doing jumps or doing leaps across the floor. I even stayed for jazz class, since I'll miss a class next week and need to make up, and wasn't too tired after two classes in a row. I did something to my hip in jazz, though. It's almost like a punchline to a "you know you're old" joke, since we were using a Ray Charles song and doing steps that are mostly from swing dancing, so I may have been a trifle overenthusiastic. You know you're getting old when you throw out your hip while dancing to oldies. In my defense, Ray Charles is my mom's music, and I grew up listening to him because of her, not because I'm in that generation. Still, usually jazz class is more semi-hip hop to current music I've never heard of. Doing something closer to what I consider "jazz" and with steps used to dance to real jazz was much closer to my speed. If the class were like that all the time, I might actually register for it and do it full-time, but I pretty much loathe most of the music in that class. I did get my hip back in line, but it's a bit stiff today. I think I'm up for gentle exercise to keep it moving, but I'm definitely motivated to keep this up, since it made such a big difference.

I should finish the current draft of the current book today. I just have to rewrite the ending, which has been a trouble spot. And I came up with a title yesterday (see, the temperature drops and my brain starts working). I've been totally blank on a title for this book for two years, and a very obvious one struck me yesterday. In fact, it was so obvious I was sure it's been used to death, but I didn't come up with a single match in an Amazon search.

And now it's Friday. I'm pretty much going to be crazy busy from now until the time I get on the bus for the airport on Tuesday. On nights like this, I really miss having a real "Sci Fi Friday" because I'll need the break to just veg out in front of the TV (and maybe do my nails or some mending). There's Haven (yay), but that's late and there's just wrestling before it. I may marathon the previous Haven episodes OnDemand.

But I think I've figured out one of the reasons I love that show: It may be as close as I can get to seeing Katie and Owen on TV unless someone makes Enchanted, Inc., the TV series. The main character, Audrey, has a unique ability: she seems to be immune to the weird abilities of others. In this town, a lot of people have what they call "afflictions" or "Troubles," that affect other people, but they don't affect her. They may or may not be something the people can control. For instance, there was a young woman who couldn't look at someone without them seeing their worst fears come to life, so instead of seeing her, they saw what they feared the most. But Audrey saw her normally. That's fairly similar to Katie's magical immunity, and it's Audrey's big strength that helps her deal with the crazy stuff in the town. Plus, she's extremely practical, has a lot of common sense and has the ability to see what's really there, though in her case that's more metaphorical than it is with Katie. It just means that when she notices that the weather in the immediate vicinity gets weird whenever a particular woman is really upset, she's willing to consider that the woman is affecting the weather instead of trying to rationalize some far-fetched scientific explanation. And she's got a dry, snarky sense of humor, to the point that I now seem to hear her voice in my head when I read Katie (the actress might actually make a decent Katie -- wrong hair color and no Texas accent, but that can be dealt with and I think she could nail the personality). She's not exactly like Katie, though. Instead of being the small-town girl in the big city, there's more of a Northern Exposure thing going on, with the big-city FBI agent in the small, remote town. And instead of coming from a big, loving (and kind of infuriating) family, she has a background more like Owen's, not knowing who her parents were or where she came from after growing up in foster homes.

Nathan is a little less like Owen than Audrey is like Katie, but he has a pretty similar personality. He's rather shy in social settings but is perfectly fine -- and even kind of good at -- dealing with people professionally. He also has the dry, understated sense of humor, though less snarky than his partner. He's the really nice guy who doesn't seem to realize how good-looking he is. He's also good with babies (though with Owen, it's more that the babies like him, while Nathan loves babies and can go from tough cop to puddle of goo in about two seconds in the presence of an infant). He's not supernaturally powerful the way Owen is, but he is now the town's police chief, so he has that kind of power, and he's more or less in charge of dealing with the weird things happening in town in the way that Owen is on the front lines for all the magical mayhem. Plus, dark hair and blue eyes, though Nathan is tall and Owen is not.

Incidentally, although I've described Owen as fairly short, my mental picture of him is around five-nine to five-ten, which isn't that short. I guess I tend to go for tall, so when I was trying to give him some physical flaw to make him not entirely my perfect man, I made him shorter than my usual "type," which skews the perception of "short" since my type is over six feet. Nathan on Haven is pretty much my ideal physical type.

So, I guess if you want to watch Enchanted, Inc., the TV series, watch Haven and kind of blur your vision to make Audrey's hair darker, Nathan shorter, and the surroundings Manhattan instead of a small coastal town in Maine. Add a few gargoyles, and then you're there! It's like an alternate universe fanfic in which Owen is a police chief, Katie is an FBI agent, and they're in Maine. Ooh, idea for future book, where they're all under a spell …

And now to continue the epic loads of laundry while moving around enough that my hip won't stiffen.

Fun with Technology

Sometimes, I think technology senses stress. This week I'm trying to fit in two weeks of work, doubling up on medical school writing, trying to finish a draft, and then I had an additional thing come up that I needed to write this week. That's in addition to all the other little to-do items for getting ready to leave town. So when I took a brief break yesterday afternoon to check my e-mail and look up a couple of things for the med school, it had to turn into an epic adventure. Suddenly, every web site I tried to go to, it bumped me back to my ISP, which told me I had the wrong password for my DSL modem. I've got a password for e-mail, but in all the time I've had this service, I haven't had a password for the modem. When I got the new computer, I just had to plug it in, and it went straight to work. The notice page told me to call tech support, where I learned that "I don't know, you moron machine, I'm calling because you told me to" is apparently not a valid response on the voice recognition system. It took forever on the phone with customer support to deal with it, which took an hour out of my workday. And, would you believe, the same thing happened again this morning? But I still had all the codes from the nice Indian tech support guy I got to yesterday when I stopped yelling at the automated system and zeroed out, so I was able to re-set it all again myself. Then I had to do it again. My modem may be dying. I've only had it since 2004.

This was after my toaster oven bit the dust over the weekend. The bottom of anything put in it was burning, while the top was untouched. And in this weather, you really don't want to turn on the big oven. So that had to be replaced.

This means I've been deleting still more items from the to-do list. Things that seemed vitally important are now in the "I'll live without it" category. I'm focusing on the must-do work stuff. I know the book will need one more draft because there are some things I need to go back and work in, but on this draft I'm focusing on straightening out the plot. I may start the next round of revisions at the end, since I can tell I'm getting a little impatient with the sense of having a deadline. There really isn't any time pressure here because I think my agent would kill me if I sent her one more project before she gets the two she's already got off her plate.

I guess my real time pressure is that I hope to take a "vacation" in October when (I hope!) it finally gets cool, and I want everything done by then. I'll have completed three books this year (one start to finish, one the second half of a first draft and then a major rewrite, and one a major rewrite on a completed book), so I've been very diligent this year. I think I need to take a break, and I've been trapped inside by the heat for so long. When it becomes nice out, I want to spend some time getting out and about, going on long walks, walking to restaurants in my neighborhood, eating on the patio, exploring the city and generally enjoying my favorite time of year before I plunge back into the same level of diligence in writing. I have a side project I want to play with while I'm starting the extensive research that the next project in the queue will require.

Ballet starts again tonight, and I'm excited to see if all the exercise I've been doing has any impact on the dancing.

Beyond the First Draft

I'm giving up on adjusting my body clock to Pacific time because staying up later and sleeping later left me groggy all day, and I ended up going to bed even earlier the next night. I think the hotel has an indoor pool, so maybe I'll do my "vacation" stuff in the mornings before the convention starts.

One of the most important parts of the writing process is rewriting. In fact, I'd say that rewriting and/or revision is what separates aspiring authors from published authors and the unsuccessful self-published authors from the successful ones. There may be some authors who can write one draft and be done, but generally those authors do a lot of revising and tinkering as they write, so that one draft is actually more like three, and/or their plotting process is so extensive that it counts as a draft.

The first draft is usually the stuff that initially comes to mind -- the easy ideas. In revision you can add complexity and raise the stakes by delving beyond the initial idea. The first draft may include some of what I call "plotting on paper," where I work out what needs to happen in the story by having the characters talk or think about what they should do, or where I develop characters' backstories by having them ask each other personal questions. I usually end up incorporating that information into the story in another way, so I don't need those talking or thinking scenes in the book. On the other hand, sometimes there are new scenes that may be needed to set up additional plot points or do the stake-raising. I often find that I don't see the patterns in some of my plots until I've written the first draft. I think it's a subconscious thing going on, where I have events, characters or subplots that come up for no obvious reason at the time, but when I look at the draft as a whole, I can see how they actually play into the bigger picture, and it takes some rewriting to tie it all into the pattern. There's what my mom calls "Bill and Tedding," which is when you have to make changes to the earlier part of the book to properly set up ideas that come to you later in the book. You'll also need to check on continuity -- do descriptions, events and names remain consistent? You'll need to keep an eye on continuity in each draft, to make sure any changes are carried throughout the rest of the book or that you don't have mentions to events or characters you've cut.

The first draft is also usually more cursory, getting the plot down. After fixing the plot, it's time to make the writing better. Dialogue in a first draft tends to be rather "on the nose," with people asking direct questions and giving direct answers. In a later draft, you can add tension and subtext to conversations by making them more oblique. Most people who aren't cops or reporters don't ask direct questions about personal matters. They hint or talk around the subject. The closer the question comes to hitting home, the less likely someone is to give a direct answer. They'll make a joke, deflect the question or answer only part of it. You can also look for places where action or body language can replace thoughts or dialogue. You may need to work in emotions (or actions that show emotions) and description.

And then there's all the word work. Have you used the perfect word in each situation? Have you repeated a particular word too frequently? Are there any unnecessary words, phrases or sentences that you can cut without changing the meaning? Is there one vivid word you could use to replace a phrase? Are your sentences clearly structured? Do you have a variety of sentence structures? What about grammar, spelling and punctuation? This is when I usually read the book out loud to myself because it forces me to look at each word instead of skimming, and it means I hear rhythms and repetitions.

The book isn't done until you've dealt with all these things, and sometimes this is more difficult than writing the initial story. There have been times when I've written the first draft in six weeks, then spent four months on the revisions. You may need outside help seeing the things that need to be fixed, like with a critique partner or group. The people who never achieve their publication dreams are often the ones who won't do the rewriting. They insist that their first draft is the way they want the book to be and refuse to listen to criticism that requires them to make changes, or else they're too impatient to get it out there and skip a step or two.

Conquering the To-Do List

I made a little progress in adjusting the body clock by staying up late writing last night. I was still awake early but fell back asleep. And now I feel like a slug for sleeping so late. I guess I've bought into those cultural expectations.

I just talked myself out of getting a haircut before I go to WorldCon. My hair has reached my waist (when it's stretched out instead of all curly), but I mostly wear it up, so the length doesn't matter that much. I'm about haircuts the way some people are about going to the dentist. I need to find a new stylist, since I didn't like the last one (the one who insisted on straightening my hair over my objections -- a good way to piss me off) and the one before that blew me off when I tried to make an appointment and then never followed up when I left a message requesting an appointment. The one before that vanished, leaving the salon and not telling anyone where she was going. I wouldn't think that in today's economy it would be wise to ignore or alienate customers. I don't have time this week to find a new stylist, so I guess I'll just keep wearing my hair up. I can say I'm being steampunk by having Victorian hair.

There's your tip for the day: the key to getting through a long to-do list is removing items from the list.

I think part of my reluctance to go out and find someone to cut my hair is also to do with needing a bit of an introvert retreat. I had a very busy and social weekend, which was fun, but it left me drained. I've got a busy/social weekend ahead of me, followed by a week of being "on." Getting a haircut can be an uncomfortable social situation, especially with a new stylist. It's like a cocktail party where you're trapped in a chair, talking to the same near-stranger. And then there's the stress about what will happen with your hair. So, yeah, probably best to let myself stay in the cave for a day instead of pushing myself. Besides, I have tons of work to do at home.

The Birthday Weekend

I'm starting to have a little more sympathy for morning people. I often gripe that being a morning person is generally considered to be more virtuous than being a night person. Stay up working until 1 a.m. and then sleep until ten a.m. and all anyone notices is that you're still in bed at ten, so you must be a lazy sloth. But you're virtuous and diligent if you get up and get started on your day before six, regardless of how long you actually work. I'm still not what a real morning person would consider a morning person, but my body clock tends to shift earlier in the summer, and during the evil heat wave, I've been trying to deal with stuff like errands before it hits 100 degrees, which means before noon, at the latest. That can be a challenge. The bank opens at 9, it's nearly impossible to get a haircut before 11 a.m. (and that's when the salon opens, so the haircut starts later and probably isn't over by noon) and today I was at the grocery store trying to buy tortillas so I could make fajitas, and they said they don't make tortillas until after noon. Trying to get stuff done in the morning is difficult.

Then again, that might come back around to discrimination against night people. Morning people would do these kinds of errands after they've done a full day's work. It's night people who do this kind of stuff early before settling down to work.

But enough griping. I had a terrific birthday weekend, and I managed to spread the celebration throughout the whole weekend. First, on Friday night, a gathering of my friends to watch the Phineas & Ferb movie turned into a bit of a birthday party when one of my friends brought a dark chocolate with dark chocolate icing (YUM!) cake. You can't possibly be old when you have a Phineas & Ferb birthday party. I've never really liked the idea of actually having a birthday party, since I don't want people to feel obligated to bring presents. I just enjoy celebrating with friends, so this was perfect. Then on Saturday night I went out to dinner with friends, and we did some wandering at Target (where I found season one of Parks & Recreation and a cheap DVD of Secondhand Lions) before spending a little time at the lake just before sunset. And then on Sunday, my actual birthday, someone from church took me out to lunch with a mutual friend, and we got cupcakes with a candle (and the real joy of watching a two-year-old eating a cupcake, which is true entertainment, almost as good as eating the cupcake yourself). Then I had tons of birthday wishes via Facebook and even got a phone call from my brother. I think all that counts as "something good happening to me," which I was whining about needing a couple of weeks ago.

I didn't get much fuss for my birthdays when I was a kid. Having a summer birthday meant I didn't get a party at school (there was one school that had a "summer birthday" party, but it was shared by every other kid who had a birthday in June, July or August) and I only had a couple of parties during childhood since being away from school made it difficult to invite school friends. Plus, in the military world, there's a lot of moving going on during the summer. If I hadn't just moved to a new place so that I didn't yet know anyone (or if we weren't in the middle of moving), then often my friends had just moved away and I didn't yet know the new people who'd moved in. A birthday party for me was dinner with my family. One nice thing about adulthood has been making up for that. In my office job days, there were office parties, and then I was actually able to do stuff with friends for my birthday.

This is going to be a busy week. Choir and ballet start again, and WorldCon is next week, so I have lots of getting ready to do, and I'd like to finish this draft of the current project before I go so I can let it rest.

Book to TV Series: The Colorado Kid/Haven

I do a lot of comparisons of books to movies because it's like a writing exercise to me -- seeing what a screenwriter does to adapt a novelist's work for another medium can sometimes point out things that maybe should have been there all along. In the best adaptations, it's like seeing the result of a really good editor working on a manuscript. Some of the changes are made because of the shift from one medium to another. A book can include internal things like thoughts while a movie must be solely external. On the other hand, a movie can show in a split second things that take pages to describe in a book. In a movie, lots of dialogue slows the pace, and it's preferable to convey as much of the story as possible through action, while in a book, dialogue speeds the pace and too much narration -- even if the narration is describing action -- slows things down. But I've found that a lot of times in good adaptations the screenwriter will raise the stakes in a way that would have made the novel better, or the screenplay will find ways to make things from the novel into events with actions.

Then there's the book-to-TV series transition, which is trickier because a book usually has a beginning, middle and end, while a series is usually ongoing. There are a lot of ways to do this. There's the relatively faithful dramatization of the book, which seems to be what they've done with A Game of Thrones, where I was able to practically follow along in the book. With True Blood, the first season was mostly based on the first book, and apparently the TV series is more or less following the books, but veers away from the books along the way to tell its own story. Then there's using the book to provide the situation for a TV series, but not really basing the plot on the book, like they did with the series based on The Dead Zone. In that case, the book's initiating incident kicked off the series, and they used incidents in the book as the basis for some episode plots. Ultimately, the series did use the book's main plot as the basis for an ongoing arc. The series was very faithful to the book while not being a direct dramatization of the book.

I found a copy of The Colorado Kid by Stephen King, which is the basis for the series Haven, at the library, and it may be the most unique book-to-series transition I've seen. For one thing, the book is a straight mystery without any of the elements we usually associate with Stephen King, while the series is paranormal/supernatural, with those elements seemingly inspired by other King works. For another, the book mostly serves as the backstory for the series.

The book has a framing story set in the present (in 2005, which was "present" when the book was published) in which a big-city newspaper reporter has come to a small town in Maine to talk to the local newspaper editors about any unsolved mysteries in the area, for a book he's working on. Once the reporter is gone, the two old men who run the local newspaper tell their intern that there was one mystery they didn't tell him about because it was theirs. It's truly unsolved, with no real hope for resolution, and a reporter like that would try to tie it up into a neat bow and make sense of it all, when the point of it is that it's a mystery. Then the rest of the book is mostly one long conversation between the newspapermen and the intern as they tell the story of a mysterious death that happened in 1980 and what they did to try to solve the case. A man was found dead on a beach, and while his death seemed to be what I guess you'd call a natural accident (not really natural causes, but no foul play), who he was and how he got there and what the various clues meant were the real mysteries, and some of those clues hinted that his death might not have been an accident, after all, though they can't figure out how it could have been murder.

On TV, the series itself would be the equivalent of the book's framing story, but with an FBI agent who comes to town on a case and ends up staying and joining the local police department so she can investigate this old case instead of a newspaper intern. This old case that has remained unsolved is shrouded in a lot more mystery in the series, and it seems to be a major clue for other strange things going on in the town. For instance, the newspaper photo from when the body was found has in it a woman who looks almost exactly like the FBI agent the age she is now, even though the photo was taken 27 years ago. Most of the people in the photo don't remember the events of that day. And the death happened during a phase the town goes through that locals call the Troubles, which is when many of the town's residents start manifesting strange abilities or qualities (none of that is in the book). And now the Troubles are back.

In the book, the town is on an island instead of being a coastal town, and it has a different name. The main characters are the two newspaper guys, Vince and Dave, who are in the TV series (and they really capture their voices in the series because I could hear them in my head as I read). But in the book they're older and they're not brothers, the way they are on TV. The local bar/restaurant is called the Grey Gull in both book and series. The local cop who investigates the death is named Wournos (I think they spell it differently in the series), though he has a different first name, and he barely appears in the book, so we don't know if he's a widower with a young son (who'll grow up to be a detective). They have built an episode around one of those local unsolved mysteries the newspapermen are willing to share with the reporter, and now I'm wondering if we'll see any of the others. It looks like tonight's episode draws somewhat from another one, or at least includes some of that imagery.

The book is a short read, which is good because it's impossible to put down. I think I got through it in about an hour and a half. I must say, though, that never in a million years would I have read this book and thought, "You know, this would make a great basis for a paranormal TV series." There is an afterword to the book written by King and explaining that it was actually based on a real case, which makes it even more chilling. But I think the bit that probably has a lot to do with the idea of the series is where King talks about what he calls the "contrasting yet oddly complementary atmospheres of community and solitariness. There are few places in America where the line between the little world Inside and all the great world Outside is so firmly and deeply drawn. Islanders are full of warmth for those who belong, but they keep their secrets well from those who do not." And that seems to be the series in a nutshell, that there is a town with that many huge secrets that just about everyone in town is aware of but that they can keep hidden from outsiders. I noticed that the book's editor gets credited in the book, and he also gets screen credit on the series as a consulting producer.

And now to brave the world outside before they turn on the broiler for the afternoon.

Spam! The Movie!

Our sojourn in hell continues, but now they're saying our temperatures will drop by about a degree a day for a few days, though we're still breaking records. Going out to the library at noon yesterday was like stepping into an oven. I've been keeping an eye on temperatures in Reno, where I'll be the week after next, and their highs have been in the low 90s, and they seem to be heading into a phase of upper 80s, with lows in the low 60s at night (compared to our mid-80s). I may need to take a parka to WorldCon.

I also probably need to adjust to the time difference. At the Denver WorldCon, I was up way too early, before anything was happening, and that was only one hour difference. This will be two hours. It seems like I'm always going to writing conferences in the east, where they tend to start events early in the morning, so it's even earlier for me. Science fiction conventions start later, and the events go later at night, but I seem to keep heading west for those. I'm falling asleep by 11 these days, so I'll be ready for bed before the Reno parties really get started, and that's where all the good networking happens. I'm hoping it's mostly the heat, so I'll be more lively in a slightly different climate.

After dreaming up all those board game movie ideas, I was thinking about finding other sources of unoriginal movie ideas, but it's hard to go lower than board games. Video games at least have some visuals, and many of them involve narrative. A theme park ride worked pretty well for the Pirates franchise. They seem to have made a movie out of every superhero comic book ever, and they've even taken Saturday-morning cartoons to the big screen. There have been lots of movies based on Saturday Night Live sketches. I guess we're down to ad campaigns, which I know they've tried to turn into TV series, but I'm not sure about movies. During the 70s there were a few movies based on pop songs.

I know! Movies based on Internet spam! And the best part is, you don't have to pay royalties or option fees because if anyone tries to claim credit and demand payment, then they could be prosecuted for the spam and/or scam. There's all sorts of movie potential in the story of the relative of a foreign dignitary desperate to find a safe way to get the royal family's money out of the country. And then all those "male enhancement" spams could be made into a gross-out guy comedy in the vein of The Hangover.

I've got a conference call with my movie agent tomorrow. I'll have to bring up these ideas.

I'm Melting!

I'm about to wilt from the heat. We're on track to have the worst summer on record, and I'm not a summer person in the best of circumstances. Yesterday we hit 110 degrees, and it was still 100 at 10 p.m. It's supposed to be worse today. Since my Internet connection is upstairs in the office in a space that gets very warm in the afternoon, I'm doing all my online stuff in the morning, then shutting off the office and staying downstairs the rest of the day. On the upside, that means I'm getting more work done since I can't get sidetracked by playing online. Today I may move from my sofa to my bedroom, since the bedroom is the darkest, coolest room in the house and they're encouraging people to save electricity because the power grid is being strained. I can bump up the thermostat a few degrees by working downstairs, and I can bump it up even further and feel just as cool by working in the bedroom. Or I may give up on working in the afternoon and instead work tonight, since it's my last free Wednesday before choir starts again. I do have to venture out briefly to return some library books and pick up one that's on hold, but I'm definitely driving, not walking.

I'm remembering why I've written most of my books in the fall/winter.

The book I'm currently working on is a departure for me because instead of it being a single, first-person point of view, it's multiple points of view in third person. That means I have to deal with different perspectives. One thing that's been particularly interesting to work with is the way a particular character appears depending on the perspective. First, we see how one character who knows her well thinks about her. Then we meet her from another character's point of view. He knows the first character and has heard what she has to say about this other character, so he's viewing her through that lens. And then finally we see things from her perspective and what she thinks about things and about herself. She's someone who puts up a very conscious and deliberate front and tries to make people see her a certain way, and while it's not really fake, it's not not the whole story, and there are chinks in her armor.

It's tricky, and I guess that's one reason why I'm in the sixth draft of this book, and each draft has involved several passes. I'm mostly in the "fixing the plot" pass now, and I know I'll have more work to do on it. I hope it turns out to be worth it.

Board Game Movie Ideas

I'm up for a post about the Enchanted, Inc. universe tomorrow, but as far as I can recall, the only questions I haven't answered have been spoilery. So, if you've got a question about the stories, characters or world that isn't about what will happen in future books, ask away.

That unintentionally hilarious Battleship trailer and the response to my musings about making a movie out of the board game Candyland got me started thinking that there's a whole franchise of board game movies out there. I had a ton of these games as a kid, mostly because I was rather susceptible to TV ads, in which the kids playing these games seemed to be having so much fun that they were about to pop. And then I'd get these games and realize that I didn't really like playing games of any kind and I didn't really have anyone to play games with. My friends and I did more active things during the daytime. We were too busy running around the neighborhood acting out TV shows and other let's pretend games, riding bikes, riding skateboards, roller skating or playing on the playground. We didn't often go to anyone else's house at times when we couldn't play outside. When we did, we played with Barbies or did smaller-scale versions of let's pretend games. Although I had these games and there were plenty of other kids in the neighborhood, I don't remember ever playing board games with my friends.

So, I don't recall the rules to most of these games. I tended to make up my own games with the bits and pieces of the games, and they were more narrative-style games rather than competitions. Which makes me the perfect person to come up with storylines to turn these games into movies.

Here are a few of my ideas:

I already discussed Candyland as a trippy but twisted Tim Burton film starring Johnny Depp. I don't remember the exact elements of Candyland (I never had that one), but there could be a kind of Hansel and Gretl thing going on, with kids sucked through a portal into the candy world and trying to survive.

The game of Life could be an ensemble romantic comedy of the Love Actually variety, with interwoven stories about various couples and singles at different phases of life. Are they really in control of the way things work out, or is it all just a roll of the dice?

Then there's Trivial Pursuit, which could be a wacky college comedy in which groups of students (fraternities, dorms, clubs, or the like) split along the usual college comedy demographic lines (nerds, jocks, preppy rich kids, artsy types) try to succeed in the classroom and in life while competing in an ongoing trivia contest in the student union. The trivia contest could be a metaphor for the college experience, implying that most of the work done toward a modern college degree is truly a trivial pursuit.

I don't remember much about Dungeon Dice other than there was something about rolling the dice and having to match runes of some sort, and that could be the making of a fantasy quest type story in which a group of prisoners in an evil wizard's dungeon realize that the small bag of rune-covered dice they discover in a niche in the wall is their key to escape, as they have to match the runes on the dice with symbols on the dungeon walls that point the way to the secret passage. Little do they know that these dice are also the secret to the wizard's power, and he'll stop at nothing to keep them from escaping with the dice.

I think they already made a Mousetrap movie. Payday was essentially Life-lite, so it could be handled like Life, but maybe as more of a workplace comedy, with everyone working toward that all-important paycheck. Risk is pretty much tailor-made to be a geopolitical thriller.

Hey, with all these, no one needs to come up with another original idea for a film! Are there any other board games that would make good movies?

Monday Movies: Cowboys and Dragons

I went with some friends this weekend to see Cowboys and Aliens, and I must say that it was a fun movie that merges two genres. There was room for improvement, but it was the perfect summer Saturday matinee. I would describe it as starting as the classic cowboys and Indians movie, but with aliens instead of Indians (Indians/aliens raid small Western town and kidnap residents, then the townspeople overcome their individual differences to put together a posse and go get their people back). Then it morphs into Independence Day in the Old West, with disparate groups teaming up to kick the aliens off their planet. It hits all the story and character beats you expect in a classic Western. Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford make a great Western duo. I'm just not sure what Olivia Wilde was doing in this movie or why she keeps getting cast in stuff. I would think that an ability to express emotion would be a plus for an actress, but her face and eyes remain totally blank and her voice is flat. I'm not male, so maybe I can't judge, but I don't even think she's that gorgeous. She looks like a store mannequin, but maybe men are into that sort of thing. At any rate, she came across as something of an anachronism, and her perfect eyeliner that remained perfect after being out in the rain and then under water kept distracting me. Fortunately, Daniel Craig's eyes were also on screen, which distracted me from the distraction of Miss Anachronism. I don't actually find him all that attractive as a whole, but some of the parts are rather pleasing to the eye.

I will say that this movie made me miss Firefly. Some of the music even sounded straight out of Serenity. I'd almost bet that they used parts of the Serenity score as a temp track when editing the film.

Then on Saturday night there was a truly epic bad movie on the Channel Formerly Known as Sci Fi. I think the title was something like Age of the Dragons, but it was essentially Moby Dick with dragons (Herman Melville actually got screen credit). They moved the story into a quasi-medieval, quasi-European (but mostly American/Canadian accented) fantasy world, and instead of hunting whales for their oil, they were hunting dragons for their "vitriol," which was used in lamps. Instead of whaling ships on the ocean, they used a vehicle on land that looked like a metal-plated boat on wooden wheels. One thing that kept bugging me was that there was no means of propulsion. There were no sails, there was no mention of magic in this fantasy world, there were no signs of combustion engine or any sort -- no smokestacks, no mention of needing fuel, no gathering fuel or stockpiled fuel. I guess maybe there were a bunch of unseen galley slaves powering the vessel Fred Flintstone style. What was really hilarious was that large portions of the script seemed to involve taking the actual text of the novel and doing a search and replace to change every use of the word "whale" to "dragon." But, of course, they couldn't do a word-for-word adaptation of that novel in two hours, so there were bridging scenes, transitions and the like that were written at about the level of your usual SyFy Saturday-night movie. To make matters even more fun, the actor playing Ishmael was essentially Keanu Reeves-lite, so his delivery of the Melville language was reminiscent of Keanu Reeves being horribly miscast in the Branagh version of Much Ado About Nothing, while his delivery of the non-Melville parts of the script was more like Keanu Reeves in the Bill and Ted movies. I was pretty much collapsing in hysterical laughter through the whole thing, either because of the obvious dragon/whale substitutions, the Keanu delivery of the Melville language and the ridiculous transitions between the Melville language and the very non-Melville parts of the script. Aside from Keanu-lite, we had Danny Glover playing Ahab, and they must have kept him away from the catering truck so he was forced to subsist on an all-scenery diet during the shoot, and then there was the supporting cast that mostly seemed to have been recruited from various Shakespeare festivals because that archaic language just rolled easily off their tongues and they really seemed to embody those characters. In other words, this movie was awesome.

It did bring up one of my pet peeves about this kind of movie. I don't believe that the only strong female character is Rambo in drag and that for a female character to be a kick-ass chick she has to be capable of singlehandedly taking out an entire platoon of armed Marines using only her awesome martial arts skills, but if you're going to write this sort of character, if you introduce her by showing her beating up a group of large, armed men while Our Hero looks on in admiration, you can't turn her into a damsel in distress later in the story. Anyone, male or female, no matter how skilled, may find themselves in a tough situation where they're momentarily at a disadvantage and need a hand, but let her at least participate in the fight once the hero comes to the rescue instead of having her stand on the sidelines looking helpless.

But that movie wasn't my biggest laugh of the day. That came from one of the trailers before Cowboys and Aliens. It was for a movie that looked like it was going to be a Top Gun sort of thing, only in the water instead of in the air -- hot-shot young naval officer who apparently isn't living up to his potential, which is made worse by the fact that he's in love with his commanding officer's daughter. There's all sorts of yelling by commanding officer (Liam Neeson) about young officer needing to prove himself, and then their ship goes out to sea on a mission, where they encounter something mysterious. It was looking all Top Gun meets Independence Day, but very, very serious and portentious, until they finally showed the name of the movie as they zoomed out for an aerial view of the sea battle. The movie was Battleship, and the ships are lined up like on the board game. I totally lost it at that point because it was like something in a comedy spoof trailer, with this over-the-top fake-serious looking movie that turns out to be based on some silly premise, like a board game. Or like those trailers for the upcoming Muppets movie where they spoof trailers for other kinds of movies, playing it totally serious until the Muppets show up. Giving the title of this film was essentially the Muppets showing up. It was the last trailer before the movie started, so I was still shaking helplessly with laughter five minutes into the movie.

Now I want to see Candyland, the movie, which should probably be directed by Tim Burton as some trippy but dark and twisted fantasy (starring Johnny Depp, of course).