Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 248

The End of the Harry Potter Saga

(I made the beaded bag icon after reading the book and went with the white evening bag, since that was the way I imagined it. The bag in the movie is very different, so now my icon is pretty much unrecognizable. I may have to retire it. But that bag may be the one thing from that world I want most. If I can't have a TARDIS, I want Hermione's purse.)

So, I've now seen all the Harry Potter movies. I probably should have written up my thoughts on part one of the seventh movie before part two overshadowed them, but I finished rewatching it late last night, and then there was a Haven marathon on this morning, with the earlier episodes that I didn't record, and then it was time to go to the theater.

For part one, I think this film was a victim of (and highlighted) the somewhat odd pacing of all the books. Because they're tied to the school year, they all seem to follow the pattern of a few adventures early in the term, something big at Christmas, a few more adventures and mishaps and then the big showdown just before the end of the school year. Since the kids weren't in school this year, this book shouldn't have been tied to the school calendar. The big showdown could have come at any time, and yet, it still followed the same pattern, with some muddling around, something big at Christmas, more muddling around, something big around Easter and then finally the big showdown near the end of the school year. I'd actually enjoyed all the months of camping in the book because it was a chance to just see these characters interacting, but in a way it amounted to what I call "doing laundry" scenes that are rewarding if you love the characters but which are fatal to pacing. It was like the characters had to stay in a holding pattern because nothing could happen until Christmas. Cutting this movie off near the book's midpoint only highlighted this issue, since Harry only achieves the first two parts of his goal (find the locket and destroy it) during this film. Otherwise, it's mostly a lot of wandering, with the characters not knowing what they should do next or how to find out what to do next.

One thing I think the movie improved upon is not dwelling on the lack of food the way the book did. I'm sorry, but a girl like Hermione who is so hyper-prepared that she has her escape bag already packed with all the books she thinks she'll need, clothes for everyone, and a tent, would totally have also filled that bag with non-perishable foods. Perhaps not enough to sustain three teenagers for months, but she'd have had something handy. The movie doesn't address the food issue at all, so it allows us to assume she was prepared. One thing the movie does almost too well, to the point it keeps the sequence from having the right emotional impact, is doing way too good a makeup job on Ron when he's been injured and is still weak and ill. I hadn't thought it possible to make a British redhead look even paler, but they gave him a sickly pallor with those dark hollows under his eyes, so he looked like death warmed over. If the guy I liked looked like that -- heck, even if a friend looked like that -- I'd have been fussing over him like crazy. He wouldn't have had the chance to get insecure about his importance in my life. But the way the other two were acting in the movie, practically ignoring him while he looked like walking death, he wouldn't have had to have a bad case of raging insecurity and magically induced paranoia to suspect that they'd prefer that he wasn't there at all. It makes Ron's leaving a lot more sympathetic, but it makes the other two look like jerks, and I think we'd have had a different impression if they hadn't made him look quite so ill.

Otherwise, seeing part two made it very clear that this movie was just set-up. Which brings me to part two. At this point, I'd have to say this is the best film in the entire series, but it has the unfair advantage of being able to offload the entire set-up and deal only with the book's climax, the part where Our Heroes are finally taking action instead of waiting for things to happen. Instead of having to follow an entire school year, this movie covers only a few days, at most, and that automatically tightens the pacing. There were a few things where I wished they'd done them like the book, but that would have been impossible because they involved subplots or elements that had been left out of the movies. A few of the Moments of Awesome were made even more awesome, and giving the book's climax an entire movie allowed them to let those parts really develop. Maggie Smith is even more awesome than ever, and Alan Rickman totally made me cry (an achievement because I've always mostly felt that Snape needed to grow the hell up and get over it). Actually, there were several moments that brought me to tears, and there were sniffs echoing loudly through the theater.

I'd mentioned in my revisiting of the first film that they were lucky that the kids they cast then mostly grew up to be the way they were supposed to be, but there is one exception. Neville in the first film was exactly the way he was described in the book, the short, pudgy, nerdy kid. Who'd have guessed that he'd be the one who grew up to be the tallest and the hottest of them all (yeah, they still give him bad teeth and make his ears stick out, but it's so very obvious they're working overtime to mask serious hotness)? On the one hand, that takes away some from his Moment of Awesome in this film, as I think it was supposed to be even more symbolic that the short, pudgy, nerdy kid did what he did, but on the other hand, it made the Moment of Awesome (one of the ones that got extended excellently in the film) look even more awesome on film.

I'm not sure that the epilogue worked. On a couple of the characters, the aging worked. On the others, they looked like teenagers dressed up in their parents' clothes. I think they might have done better recasting with age-appropriate actors, but then would you want to end the entire series of films on anyone other than the ones we've been following all along? I'm not one of those people who hated the epilogue in the book, but I'm not sure about it in the movie. I think I'd have been okay with leaving it out and ending where we leave off with the kids in the aftermath. At the very end, for the beginning of the closing credits, we get a nice bit of nostalgia with them using part of the John Williams score from the first movie. That was a very nice touch.

And now that the movie's out of the way, I'm ready to move on to the rest of the day's big events. We've got the series finale of Friday Night Lights, and I'll have the tissue box ready, since a normal episode of that show makes me cry. I will say that although I've loved the series, I'm glad it's ending. It was bad enough moving on from the first set of characters, but we were about to lose even more of the kids. Plus, they'd developed a lot of continuity issues, and the longer the series went on, the more troublesome they would have become. This is the right time to end it.

Then there's the season premiere of Haven, which was probably my favorite new show last year and one of the best season finales, one that has teased my brain for ages. I can't wait to see what happens next and the aftermath of everything that happened in the finale.

Now I must go marinate my fajitas because tonight's television is worthy of a celebration.

Harry Potter Revisited: Number Six

I've been reviewing the book I'm about to rewrite, and I think I've figured out how to fix it. I'll let it stew a bit and then start the rewrite next week. Today, though, I have to write a song. There's a song that plays a role in the story, and in the earlier draft, I talked around it, but I think I need to actually know the song. There's a folk song melody I think I'll use as a basis and give it new words that fit the book.

I've been continuing my Harry Potter movie rewatch, and last night was the sixth film. I remember calling this one "Harry Potter and the Teenage Hormones" or "Harry Potter and the Story Where Nothing Actually Happens," but I still found myself pretty captivated by this movie. I was trying to read while watching it, but kept ignoring the book. There are three big exceptions, but otherwise, I think this film works. There's not a lot of action in this story, but there's still a lot of tension and suspense. I think the human side of the story is also interesting here and enough to sustain a lot of the film. That part is helped by the fact that by this time, there's a real comfort zone among the kids so that they really do feel like best friends. Some of the better moments in the film are rather quiet ones where they're getting a rare chance to just be kids.

One thing that I think helps this story is the fact that, for a change, Harry has very clear-cut goals from the beginning and he's active in pursuing the goals (instead of him just stumbling into things). Dumbledore gives him orders to get close to Slughorn and then later to get the crucial memory from him. Meanwhile, Harry has his own goal. He's sure that Malfoy is on some kind of mission from Voldemort and is behind the near-fatal attacks on classmates, and he's determined to prove this. The problem is that Harry thinks his own goal is more important than the goal Dumbledore set for him -- after all, people, including his best friend, have almost died -- and that's distracting him from carrying out his mission for Dumbledore, which is what's actually more important in the grand scheme of things. Dumbledore does have his ongoing tendency of withholding information from Harry, and in this case, I'm inclined to think he was right because if Harry had known for certain that Malfoy was on a mission for Voldemort, he'd have been even more distracted and would have thought that was all that mattered. Dumbledore didn't know what the memory was about, exactly, so there wasn't much more he could have told Harry about that.

Visually, this film is lovely. There's a sense of looming darkness and an atmosphere that permeates everything, with the twins' store being the lone bright spot.

But there are three major things that irk me about the screenplay:
1) The big blow-up between Ron and Hermione was so perfectly developed in the book, and the screenplay missed the point entirely. In the book, Ron heard Hermione accuse Harry of giving him the luck potion before the Quidditch game, and he heard Harry explain that he'd just pretended so Ron would have confidence. Ron was deeply wounded that she'd believed he couldn't have been that good without the potion and angry that she'd ruined his moment of triumph. That was what eventually led to him going off with Lavender (with some stuff in between, including Ginny revealing that Hermione had kissed Krum). Considering that the conversation between Harry and Hermione was in the movie, it makes no sense that it was changed so that Ron didn't hear it, which meant he went off with Lavender for no good reason. It wouldn't have taken any extra time to have given some motivation to the whole meltdown. In the movie, there's no good reason for Ron to run off with some other girl when he so clearly is into Hermione. In the book, the fact that he likes her is the reason, since that made her lack of faith in him hurt even more.

2) The attack on the Burrow didn't need to be there. This scene wasn't in the book. On first viewing, I said that it must have been added to put some action in the middle, but now it really bugs me because it was gratuitous action just for the point of having action. This attack meant nothing to the story and has no lasting impact (the Burrow seems perfectly fine in the next film). If you can cut a scene without changing the story at all, then it doesn't need to be there. Ron's near death not long afterward makes a better midpoint because it is a big turning point that matters to the story in both the big-picture plot (it's part of Malfoy's activity) and in the personal plot (it brings Ron and Hermione back together). The time dedicated to this pointless scene would have been better used for the climax of the story. Which brings me to ...

3) Why did they minimize the climax of the story? In the book, there was a big running battle through Hogwarts, with some of the students and with Order of the Phoenix members joining in. In the movie, it looks like Death Eaters can just wander into Hogwarts, kill the headmaster, trash the place and then leave without anyone doing anything. If they'd included at least a bit of the fight, then it would have given the other characters something to do (Ron and Hermione pretty much vanished for the last 45 minutes of the movie, aside from the ending wrap-up scene). It might even have made the endless drinking water scene less tedious if they'd cut back and forth between that and Harry's friends keeping an eye on Malfoy in his absence. I also thought it was important that Dumbledore froze Harry when Malfoy arrived on the tower, so he really was helpless during all that and he knew Dumbledore was dead when the spell broke and, again, I can't see the point in changing that. It changes the meaning of the whole scene and it doesn't take any less time.

I'll discuss the seventh film as a whole after I've seen part 2 tomorrow morning. Rewatching these films plus also rewatching some episodes of Haven in preparation for the season premiere and my usual indulgence in CSI reruns gave me some weird dreams last night. I dreamed what I was sure was a scene from one of the books that was left out of the movie, and it involved the characters going to a very haunted town to investigate something. It took me about an hour of thinking about it after I woke up before I was absolutely certain that it was just a dream and that it wasn't in any of the books. Though I guess the dream that Maggie Smith was in my church choir should have been a clue.

Researching Publishers

I've had a lot of questions and comments coming up on a post I wrote about three years ago on finding legitimate publishers (it must be coming up in searches), so I think it may be time to revisit that topic. People have been asking me for a list of legitimate publishers, but I won't do that for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it's not my job to do all the work and research. If you want to be a writer, you can do your own research and educate yourself. Don't expect everything to be handed to you. For another thing, the Internet is forever but publishing changes. I'm always seeing alerts about the various professional organizations investigating publishers that had been considered legitimate, and then new publishers come along all the time. I don't want to put out a definitive list that will come up in searches but that may be outdated.

What I will do is tell you what to look for and how to do the research so you can figure out the legitimate publishers for yourself. The first thing you need to do before beginning this process is get over yourself. Publishing scams work by preying on writers' egos. For scams to work, writers have to believe so strongly in their own genius that they'll believe what the scammers tell them about how brilliant their books are and do anything it takes to achieve the prestige of being a published author. What generally happens when an aspiring author crows about getting a great publishing offer that more experienced authors or other knowledgeable people recognize as a scam is that the aspiring author goes into defensive mode, all "You don't know anything, you're just a stupid stupidhead trying to destroy my dream. You're just jealous because I got this great offer and I'm going to be a bestseller, and you can't handle the competition." The scammers are counting on that response because if people listened when others warned them about a shifty publisher, the shifty publishers would make no money. So, don't play into their hands. Put your ego aside, lower your defenses and take time to consider.

Ideally, you'd do all this research BEFORE you submit anything. It's a lot easier to be objective about a publisher when you're making decisions about where to submit a manuscript than when you're evaluating an offer. If you don't submit a book to a scammer, you won't have to worry about being willing to turn down an offer that probably isn't legitimate. Before you send a query letter or a manuscript, you should go through these steps to come up with your submission list:

1) Go to a bookstore -- preferably at least one outpost of each major chain operating in your area, a major general retailer that sells books (Target, Walmart, etc.) and any independent stores in your area that sell the kind of book you write. Go to the section where you think your book would fit (NOT the local author/local interest section, where some store managers may take pity on local authors with a garage full of books). Look at who publishes those books. Those are most likely to be your legitimate publishers. If you don't find books from a publisher in any of the stores you check, that's a bad sign. It's harder to judge electronic-only publishers this way since many of them only sell through their own web sites and don't have books in stores, and Amazon will generally let anyone sell through them. That's where you'll have to do more research.

2) Check the organizations representing your genre. Most professional writing organizations have some way of vetting publishers. Membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is limited to people who have been published by approved publishers, so the list of approved publishers is a good place to find legitimate science fiction and fantasy publishers. Romance Writers of America maintains a list of approved publishers, though you have to join the organization to access it (if you're writing romance, you owe it to yourself to join this organization to learn about the industry). Mystery Writers of America also maintains a list of approved publishers. Active membership in the International Thriller Writers is limited to commercially published authors, and they have a list of recognized publishers. And the Horror Writers Association has a list of recognized publishers.

3) Check the alert/warning sites like Preditors and Editors and Writer Beware. These list legitimate publishers and alerts about possible scams. While you're at it, Google the name of the publisher and see what comes up beyond the publisher's own site. If you get a lot of message board discussion about it being a scam, that's a bad sign. Try Googling the name of the publisher plus "scam" to see if anything comes up. One or two complaints may mean embittered writers stinging from rejection. A pattern of complaints or complaints from writing organizations is a big red flag. Joe Writer claiming that a publisher is a scam because they didn't recognize his genius or didn't make him a bestseller can be ignored. SFWA investigating a publisher for irregularities should be taken seriously. A lot of agents discuss real publishers that have engaged in questionable business practices on their blogs, and that should come up in searches. By this point, I figure that anyone who gets taken in by Publish America probably deserves it because there's so much information out there that anyone scammed by them either didn't do any research at all before submitting or accepting an offer or was willfully blind to what they did learn (that "you're stupid and want to destroy my dream and are just jealous" effect). A Google search just for "Publish America," without the "scam," still brought up several warning sites on the first page of results. The bare minimum of research would have raised red flags.

4) Do an Amazon search for the publisher's titles. Go to "Advanced Search" and put the publisher's name in the "publisher" field. Be wary if most of the titles that come up aren't actually sold through Amazon but rather through outside sellers. Look at the reviews. Are there any reviews for books from that publisher? What do the reviews say? A small number of five-star reviews can actually be a bad sign because it might mean that the reviewers are just the author's friends and family -- and they're the only ones who've bought the book. Real books tend to get slightly mixed reviews. Look out for reviews that mention bad editing or lots of typos. You can't judge by just one book. Look for a pattern from that publisher. If most of their books have no reviews or just a few rave reviews or if most of their books are criticized for bad editing or a lot of typos, that's a bad sign.

5) Remember that a legitimate publisher makes money by selling books to readers, not by selling books, publishing services or marketing services to authors. I've found that legitimate publishers advertise their awesome list of books, even in publications aimed at writers. I worry about publishers that focus more on what a great place they are to publish your book in their ads. Legitimate publishers are bombarded with submissions. They don't have to advertise for them. I'd also be concerned with any publisher whose acceptance letter contains a menu of optional services, like editing, enhanced cover treatment, publicity services, etc. An acceptance letter should only talk about what the publisher will pay the author, and editing, cover and publicity are all the publisher's responsibility. Authors may do a lot of their own publicity, but they make their own decisions about who to hire and what to pay. They don't pay their publishers for publicity, for sending books to Hollywood, for sending books to Oprah (or whoever's filling her shoes) or to the Today show.
NOTE: Some legitimate small publishers are starting separate editing and formatting services for people who are self-publishing e-books, and this is different. They should be up-front that this isn't a publishing deal, that they're merely providing a service to format and edit a book for self-publication.

6) This is where you really have to put your ego aside, but a response that's wildly different from what you've heard from other publishers can be a bad sign. Not always -- most major bestsellers seem to have been rejected by a lot of publishers before one publisher took a chance -- but if you're being rejected everywhere by editors and agents and if your rejections tend to be form letters or if they mention problems with the writing itself rather than the "not for me" or "doesn't fit our list" kind of reasons, and then you get a very quick response praising your book to the heavens, then you'd be wise to be suspicious. That's why I recommend doing all this research before you submit because when you've been rejected everywhere, it can be really hard to walk away when you get an offer. If you only submit to real publishers, you won't have to worry about this. But sometimes a scam can slip through the cracks of your research, so if this sort of thing happens to you, you need to do even more research. This is when you should tell the publisher that you're going to seek representation before accepting their offer. A real publisher will accept that because it's a standard procedure, while a scammer will pressure you to accept immediately or may threaten to withdraw the offer if you don't accept it immediately. Agents tend to be receptive if you've got a legitimate offer on the table. If you can't get an agent in spite of this offer, then it's probably bogus. Meanwhile, you should ask more experienced authors about the publisher, and you should consider what they tell you instead of getting defensive.

In summary, don't submit to a publisher without at least checking the alert sites and doing an Internet search. That will weed out most of the known scams or publishers with shaky finances or questionable ethics. There are "legitimate" publishers that aren't thinly disguised vanity presses that are engaging in poor business practices like selling e-books after the rights have reverted to the author or that have a record of not paying authors on schedule.

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Book Report: Historical Romance without Bodice Ripping

The fairies must have left me alone last night, or else I was a wallflower at their big revel because I feel a lot more rested today. I still wouldn't mind a nap, but I feel less like I fought a war in my sleep. It probably doesn't help that it's so hot even at night. I'm almost at the point of being willing to sacrifice Houston to a small tropical storm if it could bring rain and cooler temperatures up here. This week's Target newspaper circular had "back to school" stuff in it, and I wouldn't mind stereotypical (not Texas) September weather.

The channel formerly known as Sci Fi premiered the new show Alphas last night, and I'll give it another shot, but I still don't know how much I'm going to end up liking it. It seems like a slightly more interesting take on the Heroes concept, only instead of the people with odd abilities wandering randomly, they've already been found and gathered by some organization, where their abilities are put to use while they're also receiving psychological help for dealing with the impact of their abilities. I like the "found family" sense of the team and the way they look after each other, but I'm not sure how crazy I am about the characters themselves. In particular, the spastic geeky techno boy could get irritating, mostly because I run into way too many people just like that (minus the superpowers) at science fiction conventions. Every time he's onscreen, I have this urge to duck into the women's restroom to escape from him before he can tell me all about the epic fantasy novel he's trying to write, in excruciating, page-by-page detail. My biggest grin, though, came from the fact that there's a character named Cameron Hicks. Someone was an Aliens fan.

Now for a book report ...

Someone in the Television Without Pity Downton Abbey forum recommended Eva Ibbotson's A Countess Below Stairs, and I found it in my neighborhood library. I'd describe it as Anastasia meets Downton Abbey. A young Russian countess flees Russia after the revolution with her mother, brother and English governess, and they end up living nearly penniless in England with the governess. To help her family, our heroine sets out to find a job, and the only position she can get is as a housemaid at a great estate (very Downton Abbey), where they're preparing the house for the return of the new young earl from a hospital following WWI (he's an aviator who was shot down). He surprises the staff and his mother by bringing home a fiancee, but things get complicated when the bride-to-be starts revealing her true colors and the earl finds himself strangely drawn to the new housemaid. I devoured this book in one sitting. It was a good old-fashioned romance with a few twists and a glamorous setting. There isn't a lot of nuance, though. The good characters practically have halos, while the bad characters practically have horns. Grey areas can be nice for depth and complexity, but sometimes it's very satisfying to read something where the good people get thoroughly rewarded and the bad people are thoroughly punished. This book was published by a teen imprint but my library had it shelved as adult fiction. The main characters are in their 20s, but the romance is too chaste for it to be accepted as an adult historical romance (although I can't think of a way to add sex while keeping this plot or these characters), so it's definitely teen (or younger) safe. I'd recommend it for fans of Downton Abby who are occupying themselves while waiting for the next season or for people who like historical romance but who could do without all the bodice ripping.

I also re-read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. The last time, I had the book from the library and the due date was rapidly approaching, so I tore through it and barely remembered how it worked out. This time, I have my own copy, so I had plenty of time, but I may have read it faster. I did force myself to slow down and pay attention near the end, and I'm still not entirely sure how it ends. It's like there's a spell on the ending of that book that confuses me. It makes perfect sense while I'm reading it, but then it gets muddled in my memory afterward.

Potter Rewatch: 4-5

In the fairy folklore, one of the ways fairies mess with mortals is to steal them out of their beds at night and take them to the fairy realm, where they dance all night at a great revel, and then they take them back to their beds, where they wake remembering nothing except maybe something they think was a dream, but they're weary, as though they spent the night dancing instead of sleeping. Well, I must have been at a truly epic party last night.

I am proud to report that I successfully repaired my faucet. I'd been planning to replace the whole faucet because it was hard to shut off and tended to drip, but replacing the handle seems to have fixed that. I'd thought there might be problems because when I turned the water back on it only came back as a trickle. But then an hour or so later it was back to normal. The handle feels looser than it was, but since it works better, I'm going to assume it was wrong before.

Tonight starts the channel formerly known as Sci Fi's summer season, with the return of Eureka and Warehouse 13 and the start of a new show. This is a pretty packed week with all the new TV (including the return of Haven on Friday), the end of Friday Night Lights (if you don't have satellite or the DVDs) and the premiere of the final Harry Potter movie.

I've been rewatching the Harry Potter movies in preparation for the final one. This weekend, I got through movies 4 and 5.

The fourth film is one of my least favorites, although that book is one of my favorites in the series. I didn't dislike it as much this time around as I recalled, but there's still some disappointment there, and I've been trying to figure out why. For one thing, there are the truly awful hairstyles sported by most of the boys. They look like they're trying to do a drag production of the 70s version of Charlie's Angels. One of the twins pretty much has the Farrah do. That alone is enough to make the movie very distracting to watch. Another thing may just be me. What I like about that book is the "human" side of the story, and those parts of the movie actually do work pretty well. I'm not sure that I've ever been that crazy about the "plot" parts, and I think those are the weaker parts of the movie. It's easier to skim past the less interesting parts in a book than it is in the movie, and I might not like the book so much if I had to read every word every time I read it.

But I think another problem is something that lingers from the first two movies but that is made worse by the fact that this book is so much longer. It tries to be a fairly literal translation of the book, just cutting out a few subplots, but that means that many of the scenes are just touched on, like they're just there to be there, and then they're gone. And yet some of the scenes are extended far beyond the way they are in the book. The dragon fight, in particular, gets tedious.

The real reason that I don't think this movie works as well as it should is that subplots were cut without following through on the ripple effects, which meant scenes that didn't really need to be in the movie and a bunch of logic problems. One case in point: the way Barty Crouch Jr. was handled. The way he got out of Azkaban and then escaped to pull off his scheme was pretty complicated, and I could see why they wouldn't want to deal with all that in the film because it would have meant a long exposition scene after the story climax (one of the weaknesses in the books is that they tend to come down to a scene in which the villain explains what he's been doing through the whole book to Harry), and it doesn't really matter HOW Junior escaped, only that he did. EXCEPT ... we'd just had an entire film about how horrible and unprecedented it was for someone to escape from Azkaban and how they did this huge manhunt that everyone knew about, with Wanted posters everywhere. So, without the explanation about how his parents smuggled him out in a way that made everyone think he died in prison, we're left with the question of how he got out and why no one has been looking for him. Meanwhile, the main plot reason for the whole World Cup segment (aside from the spectacle of the magical world) was because that created the circumstances for Junior to escape his father's house arrest. But in the movie, he's already escaped and reported to Voldemort before the World Cup, so then there's no real point in that whole segment in the film, other than the spectacle of the magical world, and we barely touch on it. It's like "look, here's the World Cup!" just so the fans won't riot over not seeing it at all.

On the other hand, Order of the Phoenix is my least favorite book in the series, and yet I love the movie. Most of that comes down to Imelda Staunton. Umbridge in the book is so loathsome that the book is unpleasant to read. But Imelda Staunton manages to be just as loathsome as in the book while also being hysterically funny in the role, so what's unpleasant to read becomes fun to watch. It's also a little less unpleasant to see Harry in PTSD mode than to read the pages of PTSD Harry shouting at everyone. Really, everyone seems to have brought their A game and seems to be having tons of fun working on this movie. I think this script works pretty well because it got away from being so literal, so that a lot of similar scenes were combined or plot elements were covered in montage form (like the way they got through all the training scenes and Umbridge tightening her hold on the school, summing up a few hundred tedious pages of the book in just a few entertaining minutes). I can barely make myself re-read this book, but I found myself actually watching this film instead of reading and using it as background noise.

I'll get to the next two films later this week.

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Revisiting the Harry Potter Films

I finally felt well enough to leave the house and journey to the Home Depot (which is just up the hill, maybe a mile away, but it's the opening of the front door that's the hard part), and it looks like I may be able to replace just the faucet handle instead of the entire faucet. The entire faucet probably does need to be replaced eventually, but there's work that needs to be done in the bathroom in general, and I may as well do it all at once and get a faucet that would fit the new decor. It's possible that Home Depot has improved their customer service after getting a lot of negative feedback, but I suspect that the slightly low-cut Texas Rangers t-shirt, nearly waist-length curls worn loose and red lip gloss may have also had something to do with the instant offer of assistance before I even had a chance to pretend to look around and look helpless. The talk about my complete set of Allen wrenches may have brought me close to getting a marriage proposal. Now we'll have to see if I can handle this repair.

I've been rewatching the Harry Potter movies from the beginning, in preparation for the upcoming release of the last one (sniff). I haven't done a complete rewatch since the summer when the fifth movie and the last book came within a few weeks of each other, so it's been interesting to revisit the older movies with the outcome of the series in mind. After getting used to seeing these kids as young adults, it is rather striking to see them as children again. There are glimpses of the people they'll grow up to be, and the movie producers were lucky that, for the most part, the kids didn't go through drastic changes as they grew up. They're still recognizable. It would have been funny if, say, Daniel Radcliffe had gone through a big growth spurt and turned out to be a beanpole so that Harry towered over Ron. In general, the casting was sheer genius, with a few quibbles.

Emma Watson perfectly conjured up the essence of Hermione from the start and I have no complaints about her performance, but I think she's a bit too pretty for the role. The cool thing about Hermione in the books is that she is the heroine and even becomes sort of a romantic lead, and yet she's not conventionally gorgeous. She was definitely someone I could relate to with her bushy hair and braces on her teeth (until she managed to "accidentally" magically fix them). There are far too few curly girl heroines, especially not many who have true curly hair and not the perfect ringlets. Most of us can achieve the perfect ringlets for short periods of time with copious amounts of styling products and effort, but most of the time, there's some serious frizz going on. Even Rowling let us down a little by having Hermione straighten her hair for the ball in the fourth book, when the guys finally saw her as a girl and were shocked that she could be pretty. But movie Hermione loses that element entirely. They seem to have tried crimping her hair in the first movie (crimping? really?), and I'm not sure what that was supposed to be in the second movie, but they just gave up on that aspect of the character starting with the third movie. Ah well, at least I now have River Song for a curly-haired heroine.

Then there's the previous generation. Alan Rickman perfectly embodies the essence of Snape, but he's more than twenty years too old for the part. He could be his character's father. In the first movie, Snape is supposed to be in his early 30s. He's still not 40 by the end of the series, and I think he works much better as a character when you think of him as a rather young man instead of as a middle-aged man. After all, he's still nursing grudges from high school. That's one thing when high school wasn't much more than ten years ago. It's another when it was more than 30 years ago. Then because he's so much older, all the other previous generation characters are also too old for their parts when they show up. Most ridiculous is the way Harry's parents are portrayed in photos. We see them as middle-aged, but they died in their early 20s.

The first film is mostly world building, and I think that has a lot to do with why it doesn't hold up to rewatching as well as some of the others. I first saw this one at the theater with my mom, and she got a grin out of the little boy sitting on her other side who was staring up at the screen in awe and whispering, "It's just like I imagined!" It was cool to see that world come to life, but once you get that cool over with, the movie kind of plots along and is very episodic. It's mostly an origins story, and the main plot, where Harry actually has a goal, doesn't kick in until midway through the movie. The second movie doesn't have that initial burst of cool, and so it really suffers from the very plodding, literal pace. It does have some fun moments, such as the flying car and Kenneth Branagh having way too much fun.

The third movie gets a lot of praise as one of the best of the series, but I think it's helped by the fact that the book itself is a little more cinematic. For a change, we learn very close to the start of the story what the threat is, and Harry has something of a goal from fairly early in the story. On the other hand, it's actually a pretty passive story, when you think about it, as Harry reacts to things rather than doing things, and I think a lot of that is the screenplay rather than the book because all the actions and a lot of the conflict got taken out of the screenplay, and I really hated the ending -- it was like they didn't know how to wrap it up, so they took a plot element from early in the story, removed its significance and just threw it in. This is where the casting for the previous generation also really fails. I like the actors, and I think they do a good job, but they're just miscast. Gary Oldman is sexy and compelling, but Sirius, in addition to being in his early/mid thirties, is supposed to be Hollywood handsome and well aware of it, and Gary Oldman has never been conventionally handsome. Meanwhile, the casting for Lupin is probably my biggest disappointment in all the films. Lupin is supposed to be the cool young teacher who captures his students' imaginations, even as he does seem to be prematurely aging a bit. In the films, though, he's more of a fussy middle-aged professor type, and yet he still doesn't have the weary gravitas of the character in the books. This is a young man who's been beaten down by the world, who's lost his closest friends either to death or to treachery and who lives on the fringes of society, barely getting by and not accepted by anyone, plus there's the physical strain of his condition, and I don't think we see any of that in the film version.

The third movie probably has the best score of all of them, and one of the best in John Williams's career, as it seems like they just turned him loose, and so he gets a lot of variety in there, from a classical waltz to atonal modern music to early music (with period instruments), to a bit of jazz and then all the more usual film score stuff. It's a soundtrack that I listen to just to listen, and along with the soundtrack from the first movie is one of my writing music stand-bys. It immediately makes me think "magic."

I read a review elsewhere, where someone else was doing a rewatch, that mentioned that the movies were very "shippy" for Harry and Hermione, regardless of the actual outcome of the series, and to that I have to say, REALLY? Because when I saw the first film I'd only read the first book, and in the car on the way home from that one I said to my mom that they were totally pulling a Han Solo and Princess Leia thing on us (where the main hero doesn't get the girl and she ends up with his buddy that she spends most of her time bickering with), and I bet that it would be Ron and Hermione who ended up together. The scenes were more or less the same as in the book, but on film it was way more obvious that Hermione's focus was on Ron. He was the one she noticed first, and he was the one who had the power to send her into tears with an offhand remark. They'd said that Rowling did share some future developments with the screenwriter and directors, and I figured that was one of them because the movies are always framing Ron and Hermione together or depicting scenes of adolescent awkwardness between them. She runs and hugs Harry at the end of the second film, but then she and Ron self-consciously flinch away from a hug. When you're twelve, that's exactly the way you act with the person you like (and some of us never outgrow it).

Tonight I'll rewatch the fourth movie, which may be something of an ordeal, as it's my least favorite of the series, while that book is one of my favorites, so the disappointment is magnified. But first I'm going to try to repair my faucet.

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Summer Doldrums

I have two books off with my agent, so now it's time to really get going on the next one. It's a complete manuscript, as in there's an end, but there's something not quite right about it that needs fixing before it's ready to go. I think I know what's not right, but I'm still figuring out how to fix it. I like this book, though, so I don't mind wallowing in it to explore possibilities.

It didn't work out for me to get on Worldcon programming, which is my fault for dithering so long. I'm sure my ego will get a few stings from not being special and important, but on the other hand, it will be nice to go to a convention and have zero obligations. I often joke about the Law of Convention Programming, which states that the events you most want to attend will be scheduled directly opposite the events you're obligated to attend. This way, I can do what I want, when I want to. I'll probably help out some in the SFWA suite, which will allow for good networking, and I know enough people that I can probably end up hanging out with the cool kids. I can spend the days learning and the evenings networking.

Reno is currently cooler than Dallas, but I'm still wishing that the convention could be somewhere even cooler because summer is really getting to me. I was reading a book earlier this week that involved the Year Without a Summer from the 1800s, when things were extremely unseasonably cool in Europe and northeastern America (in large part due to a volcanic eruption), and I found myself sighing wistfully at the thought. I know it was actually quite a calamity because of the crop failures, but it was also a big period creatively because of the authors trapped indoors by the bad weather, not to mention the spectacular sunsets that inspired a lot of paintings. I could go for a cool, rainy spell. It probably doesn't help that I've had a bit of a bug all week, so I've been running a low-grade fever. It's just enough to make hot weather even more miserable while making the air conditioning give me chills. On the bright side, I've been doing a lot of reading, which is what I needed to do right now, anyway.

Maybe this would be a good time to try those rainy day classical music CDs. I just need to find a way to black out the living room windows, which I probably need to do anyway because the drawback of the LCD TV is that it gets murky in dark scenes when the room is bright. That's made my Harry Potter rewatch difficult because so much of those movies takes place in the dark and my living room is very, very bright, with three walls of windows.

And I have about two and a half months of this kind of weather to go. If I ever get super-wealthy, I may become one of those people who summers in the mountains.

What Else to Read

I've had a reader question that wasn't directly about the Enchanted, Inc. series but that I'll address here (in the absence of other questions). The reader asked what I'd recommend for fans of the series who want something else like that.

It's hard for me to answer this question because so far I haven't found anything else that perfectly fills that precise niche for me. That's why I had to write the series. That doesn't mean there aren't other books like mine, just that they don't work for me for the reasons I write this series. I've seen my books compared to a lot of the sexy vampire and chick lit style paranormal romance/urban fantasy series, but I don't like vampires in general and a lot of these other books are too sexy, too edgy, too romancey, too witchy or otherwise aren't quite what I want. That doesn't mean these books are bad or that my readers might not like them, but I can't recommend something that doesn't work for me, for whatever reason. That's where readers come in. If you can recommend something you think other fans will like, then please do so.

The books that do work for me aren't necessarily similar to my series, but there's some essence to them that gives me a similar mental/emotional reward that I get from my books.

I have to start with the Harry Potter series. Yeah, people are far more likely to have read these than to have read my books, but you never know. There are still people who haven't read them, for whatever reason, whether because they're too popular (I've never understood that reasoning -- what do other people's opinions have to do with whether or not you'll like something?) or because of the impression that they're for kids. But this was what sparked my idea because I hadn't yet run across fantasy like that when I read them. I'd read the first three books when I got my idea, and those earlier books were more focused on the whimsical blend of the real world and the magical world, with Harry still a bit of an outsider who was continuing to learn about the magical world. But the thing that really struck me and that started the thinking that led to my idea was the fact that I didn't recall ever reading a fantasy novel where I could relate so closely to the characters. I could be sympathetic to them, but it wasn't like they were going through things I'd experienced. In these books, though, the "human" part of the story, the school stuff, was so familiar. I had been there and gone through things very much like that. That made me want something that did that with adult things -- a fantasy where the characters were dealing with real-world things I could relate to, like work, friends and dating. I remain amazed that publishers have focused their "find the next Harry Potter" efforts strictly on the young adult and children's market and haven't tried to go after the adult readership with something that's like that, but for grown-ups.

Then there's Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I read this after I had the first germs of my idea and was looking for something like that (and not finding anything). That was before urban fantasy became a thing, so any fantasy in a contemporary setting was pretty rare. This book is a lot darker and grittier than my series, but it still was one of the first adult books I found that mixed a magical world and the real modern world. In spite of the darkness, this book is still very funny in places, there is a touch of whimsy, and there's the ordinary guy hero who gets thrown into the magical world and has to rise to the occasion. I think I like this book more each time I re-read it. One thing that impresses me is that it uses the folklore about the fairy world without drawing attention to it. London Below seems to draw a lot on the British fairy lore, but there's never anything that outright says "this is what fairies are doing in the modern world!" I didn't even notice this the first time I read it, but then re-read it after doing a lot of reading on fairy lore and it added a layer to the story.

It's science fiction rather than fantasy, but To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis gives me the same feeling I wanted from my series. It's got that screwball comedy feel, there's lots of wit, a fish-out-of-water hero, and a touch of slowly developing romance. This is probably my all-time favorite book, one I can re-read over and over, and I still want to crawl inside it. I'd also recommend her Bellwether, which might be considered chick lit built around science. It's got all the work, crazy co-workers, friends and romance, but it uses all that to explore chaos theory. A lot of her short stories also give me the same feeling. I just wish I could write like that.

This one is a bit more of a stretch because there really aren't any similarities between it and my books, but I do get a lot of the same reading sensations from it as I get from my books, so I'll go ahead and include the Rogue Agent series by KE Mills. They get a lot darker than I go, but there's still a lot of whimsy and the ordinary guy hero. The one that's closest to my books would be the second in the series, Witches Incorporated, which is how I found the series in the first place, since that title caught my eye, for obvious reasons. Now that I think about it, this may be a degrees of separation connection to my books. This may be the closest equivalent to the Harry Potter series for adults that I've found. There's the unassuming hero who's a bit of an outsider, and then there's his close-knit group of friends who team up to fight the bad guys in sometimes unorthodox ways. Our unassuming hero goes through all kinds of hell in each book and often feels like he's got the whole world against him. So I guess I could say that if you like the Harry Potter books you might like my books and you might like these books rather than there being a direct connection that if you like my books you'll like these books.

There are also a few chick lit books that give me the kind of thing I'm looking for in the human side of the story but that don't have the fantasy elements, but those are mostly out of print and difficult to find these days, and I get the impression that it's the fantasy elements that are most important to most of my readers.

Since LJ is now offering various "like" buttons, I figured I might as well give it a try. "Like" if you feel so inclined.

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Movie Classics

I decided to actually take a holiday and not follow my usual routine, so no blogging Monday. I celebrated Independence Day Sunday night by going with my friends to the patriotic concert at their church, and then I saw a few fireworks displays on my drive home. Monday was mostly resting and reading, though I did watch A Capitol Fourth on PBS. Now it's back to work in catchup mode because I have something due tomorrow that I usually do on Mondays.

I'd planned to enjoy my post-book time by watching some movies, but TCM obliged me by showing some good stuff, so I ended up not using my DVD player until Monday, when I decided that the upcoming release of the final Harry Potter movie was an occasion for rewatching the whole series and went back to the first one.

Last week TCM showed I Know Where I'm Going, which a friend had recommended to me years ago, but they always seemed to show it overnight. I think I even recorded it once but never got around to watching it and neglected to label the tape. But finally they showed it during prime time when I was home and there was nothing else on, and it really was a delightful film. It's about a headstrong young woman who'd like to develop a taste for the finer things. She's sure she knows exactly what she wants and how to get it -- she's engaged to marry a wealthy industrialist, and she's on her way to the remote Scottish island where he's been based during the war to marry him. It's a complicated journey involving a lot of changes of trains and boats, but when she gets to the final leg, a boat ride to the island, everything comes to a stop because the fog is too dense. A young naval officer on his way home to the same island on leave is also stranded, but he has friends in the village and gets her a place to stay. The next day, the wind has blown away the fog, but the gale is too fierce for safe boating. As the bad weather continues, she becomes increasingly frantic about missing her own wedding and becoming more and more drawn to the young officer, and that leads her to question what she really wants. One thing I found interesting was that although it was one of those "which guy should I choose?" plots, it didn't make Mr. Wrong a villain. In fact, Mr. Wrong doesn't even appear. We only hear his voice on the radio. The choice all comes down to her evaluating her own priorities, not Mr. Wrong doing anything to prove that he's wrong.

While watching this movie, I couldn't help but think of the more recent film Leap Year. The setting is different (Ireland instead of Scotland), the focus is on the elaborate journey rather than on the waiting during the last leg, and the specific reason for the fate-of-the-relationship deadline is different, but there are still a lot of similarities. There's the young woman who has her perfect life all planned and who is in a hurry to make that happen, there's the weather delay that threatens her plan, which then throws her together with someone else who doesn't fit in with her plan. In the older movie, the event that has her really thinking about the other guy is a wedding anniversary party, and in the newer movie it's a wedding. It's not quite close enough to be a real remake, but there has to be some inspiration there (or else the plot elements from the older movies have since become romantic comedy cliches, so all newer movies are likely to look derivative). It would be kind of cool to see the setting using modern cinematography because the scenery would be gorgeous and it would really play up that sense of being trapped, but I suspect modern filmmakers wouldn't be able to resist making the story edgier, so I won't wish for a real remake.

Then on Saturday night they showed Pygmalion. I'd resisted watching this movie because My Fair Lady (the musical version) has been one of my favorite movies since I was a very small child. I remember once when I was maybe in kindergarten that a friend suggested we play movie stars, and my idea of a movie star was Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. I'd read the original play, but I couldn't imagine seeing it without music. Since it was on TV Saturday night, I decided to watch it, and now I have to confess that I may like the non-musical movie better as a depiction of that story. I do love the music, but I think the non-musical is funnier, the casting is better, and the acting is better. Plus, while the musical is set in Edwardian times, the non-musical seems contemporary to the time of release, so it's one of those glamorous Art Deco 30s movies. As familiar as that story is (and the musical is very faithful to the original play, aside from the bursting into song), I still kept laughing out loud. I also finally saw why Freddy was supposed to be a bad choice. In the musical, he's got a glorious tenor voice and sings this lovely, romantic song. But in the non-musical, he's portrayed as a weak-chinned dolt, someone you know she'd never be happy with. I guess it also helps that Higgins is played by Leslie Howard, who's far sexier than Rex Harrison. This movie just sparkles.

With these two movies, I have now become a Wendy Hiller fan. She's absolutely wonderful, and I think she was a far better Eliza Doolittle than Audrey Hepburn. Let's face it, Audrey was always too regal to be a truly believable guttersnipe, but Hiller's version comes across more as the spunky girl from the bad part of town who's trying to pull herself up. She would have made a great Katie, but I'm afraid that casting her in the Enchanted, Inc. movie would require time travel, as she was the right age back in the 30s and early 40s. I now need to keep an eye out for more of her movies.

I'll address my Harry Potter rewatch later as we count down to the final movie.

A New Perspective on Old Work

I finished the book yesterday, and I think it's pretty much in final shape (at least, until my agent points out something I totally missed). That makes two complete books I'll be sending my agent next week when she gets back from RWA. She's going to love me, but she knew this was coming. I think it's a good sign that instead of goofing off for the rest of the day, I immediately moved on to the next project. It was something I was working on early last year, until I decided it needed to rest a while because there was something about it that wasn't working and I needed to think more about it. I loaded it onto my phone to re-read that way because it's a bit more like reading a book than reading on the computer is, and I can't make changes or corrections to it, so I get out of editing mode and just read for story.

And I discovered that I really like this book. The parts that will need work are mostly toward the end, but the opening chapters work for me in a big way. The thing that surprised me was that this could possibly work as a romance novel. I recall working very hard to make it not seem too romancey, and I didn't want it to be published as a romance because there was no way for that to happen with the main characters. But as I was reading, I realized there is a kind of subtle romance happening with what I'd thought of as the secondary characters -- and they're the characters we meet first. It wouldn't change my vision of the story for there to be a real romance between these characters, and in fact it would really amp up the emotion, while that would allow the subtle things going on with the other set of characters to remain at a slow simmer, and they could become the main characters in a sequel. I also realized that I seem to be writing a fantasy version of Sense and Sensibility, which I totally didn't plan or do consciously. Not the situation of suddenly being impoverished and having to move away, but the characters have a lot of Elinor and Marianne in them -- the steady, rational older sister who falls in love with the nice guy who's committed to someone else and the impetuous, emotional younger sister who falls in love with the dangerous guy (though here, I seem to have combined Willoughby and Colonel Brandon into one character, so that he grows from being dangerous to being someone she can depend on). I suppose this means I'll have to talk with my agent about positioning and what's going on in the market. Yeah, there's staying true to my vision and all that, but then there's selling a book, and if I can slightly adjust my vision and improve the chances of selling a book, then I can deal with that.

On a tangential note, I've had a question from a reader who's looking for something else like the Enchanted, Inc. series. It's hard for me to answer because I haven't really found anything else that scratches the reading itch that this series does, which was why I had to write it in the first place. I've found that I don't much like a lot of the other things that are compared to my series. There may be similarities in style, tone or subject matter, but they're wrong in the ways that matter to me. Meanwhile, the other things that do kind of fulfill the same needs for me are actually pretty strikingly different. I'm rather surprised by the kinds of things I got sent by publishers to provide endorsement blurbs for. With one, all the sales and marketing materials compared the book to my series -- by name -- and said it would appeal to my readers. And yet, I couldn't get past the third chapter and literally threw the book across the room. Either I'm a terrible judge of what would appeal to my readers or the publisher was horribly wrong. So, I thought I'd throw the question out to my readers: What books, authors or series would you recommend to someone looking for something else like the Enchanted, Inc. series?

And then, finally, because I am actually thinking about this (and was even before the suggestions started coming in), if there were to be a collection of Enchanted, Inc. universe short stories, are there any particular characters or events that you'd like to read about? I already have one written and a couple in the works (it's fun to write noir-style detective stories in Sam's voice). One is a one-off and two are prequels to the first book. But I figured it wouldn't hurt to hear what readers are dying to know, as that might trigger story ideas so I could come up with enough for a collection. I don't really want to get into the realm of the kind of material generally covered in fanfic. The idea would be that this would be something that someone who hadn't read the series at all might be able to get into as an introduction to the series, while it would also enhance the series for existing fans.

And now I must go run errands while resisting the temptation to drop by Home Depot to just look at plumbing supplies. I have twin sinks in the upstairs bathroom that I never use, and maybe I could take one of them apart for practice without creating a crisis that would require an emergency plumber visit on a holiday weekend ...