Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 253

Revisiting Older Work (or "Who wrote this nonsense?")

I'm rather enjoying the May cold snap, though I know it will be shortlived, and my body will be disappointed when summer really arrives, since it seems to have decided that the 85-degree days we had last week were summer and fall is now here. Cold, damp weather tends to bring out my inner Betty Crocker. Yesterday, I baked scones for breakfast, baked shortbread in the afternoon and had grand plans to make pizza for dinner, with a new mix of toppings based on what I had on hand. I was going to do pesto (made with home-grown basil), chicken breast and roasted red pepper. But the one packet of yeast I scavenged from the cabinet turned out to be a dud (it was only six months past the expiration date), so I turned it into a pasta dish instead. I think the pizza would need some goat cheese, so I shall have to get some when I buy more yeast and make another go at it. I normally do a fairly thick-crust pizza, but I think this needs a much thinner crust, so I'll be trying a new recipe there.

I did discover that not only had I put away my cool-weather clothes, blankets, etc., but I also didn't have any cool-weather food supplies. I had no soup or ingredients to make soup and I had no cocoa mix. I do have regular cocoa powder and could have made cocoa the old-fashioned way, but time was a factor. I did finally find a gift packet of mix that was in the gift bag one of my choir kids gave me for Christmas, so that saved the day for drinking with the shortbread while watching Doctor Who OnDemand late at night.

Meanwhile, I started re-reading the previous project, which turned out to be pretty painful. There's a reason why it's good to let something rest a while so you can detach yourself from the fact that you wrote it. I was having a serious "who wrote this nonsense?" reaction. Actually, I don't think it's that bad, but my subconscious seems to have been rethinking the approach and rewriting it in the background while I was working on the other book, and what's actually there is very different from what my subconscious has already done with it. I'm having to force myself to read straight through to get the flow of the story instead of stopping to edit. Now what I need is a direct link between my subconscious and the computer so I can upload the version my subconscious has rewritten without all that pesky thinking and typing.

Normally I talk about books on Tuesdays, but lately I've been reading books for market research purposes, and I can't honestly recommend any of them. I wouldn't have read these books if it hadn't been work-related, and I had to force myself to finish them. Not that they were bad. They just weren't my thing, which I think proved that this wasn't the right market for me to go after. If you don't like reading it, then you're probably not going to be successful in writing it.

Another Book Done!

I finished the book on Friday afternoon, then "celebrated" by going to volunteer as a parking lot greeter for a fundraising concert, though the concert was really nice once I was off-duty. Saturday was house-cleaning day. Friends offering to bring over the new Doctor Who episode to watch on my widescreen TV was a good incentive. And then Sunday was delightfully cold and rainy, so I did some napping and reading.

Now it's time to get to work on something else while this one "rests." I'm going back to the book I finished in January to do some revisions. It's had a chance to ripen and develop in my subconscious. I have a few options for directions I can take with it, so I'll have to have a conversation with my agent about it, but today is for re-reading it and refreshing myself. As it's still cold and rainy, it should be a good reading-for-work day.

I think the cold weather may be my fault, as part of my house cleaning on Saturday included putting away the electric blanket and washing my sweatshirts (the kind worn as jackets) to put them away for the summer. I had to dig out things to wear today and may even need to get out the electric blanket because I don't want to turn on the heater again.

There's a blanket, a book and a pot of tea calling my name ...

After the Wedding

Well, the wedding was lovely, and I was delighted that they went with more classical-style music, with no cheesy pop intrusions. I got a good British sacred choral music fix. My real reward for getting up so early was getting to hear the premiere of a brand new John Rutter anthem that was commissioned for the event. I wonder how long it will be before the sheet music is available because I'm going to campaign for our choir to do it, starting tonight when I see the choir director at an event. Unfortunately, the TV can't convey the true acoustics of the abbey and the way a choir sounds in there, though I suspect the large number of people and all the red carpeting and other decor would have dampened the sound significantly from what I heard in a sparsely attended Evensong service.

I loved the dress, which was simple and elegant. The bride didn't look nearly as terrified as Diana did, which is probably a good sign. I also consider it a good sign when a couple has to avoid making eye contact during the more solemn parts of a ceremony because they can't help but grin or crack up if they look at each other.

I watched the BBC feed via PBS, so I avoided some of the worst American journalistic excesses. I was subjected to a few British journalistic excesses, but at least they don't sound as obnoxious when they come in a charming accent. I liked that they had Simon Schama on to give the historical perspective.

Now I think my morning tea is wearing off and I need a nap after not sleeping very well before the 3:30 a.m. wakeup. I finished the next-to-last chapter last night, which went in a different direction than I planned. I just need to do the final chapter, with the "whew, we made it" scene and some assorted mopping up and tying up loose ends. I think I have a good sense of how it will go. I may even be able to finish it today, but I won't push myself, as I'm volunteering at a fundraiser tonight and I do have important napping to do and must return some books to the library, so it will be a short work day for me.

Royal Weddings and Fairy Tales

Yay, I have cable again. It would seem that the cable box I got last summer to replace the glitchy one I had was messed up all along. I had to go through so much drama with that one, since when I got it connected all the channels were mixed up and it took a long service call and a technician visit to get it configured. With the one I got yesterday, I asked what I needed to do to configure and activate it, and the guy said I should just need to connect it and plug it in. Lo and behold, that was all it took. The one that finally went out on me seemed to keep resetting itself, and maybe that was what happened when they thought it was set up properly. This one seems to respond more quickly, and it may be my imagination, but I think the picture is better. We'll see if it doesn't keep eating my favorites lists. I may have been falsely accusing Stan the ghost of re-doing all my lists. I must say that while the technical part of the TimeWarner service (the converter boxes, the actual cable service and especially their OnDemand service) is terrible, their people are awesome. I always get great service in the interacting-with-their-staff sense, even if their cable service sucks. Then again, in this area they did inherit an existing network that was pretty awful. It was a small tin-cans-and-strings level service that got bought by AT&T, which then sold all their cable service to Comcast, which then did a big swap-out with TWC, and my account goes all the way back to the Joe's Bait, Tackle and Cable Service days.

But I have full service in time for the royal wedding. Yes, I plan to go to bed early tonight so I can get up freakishly early in the morning to make tea and scones and then put on my tiara and watch the wedding. Although I will watch the wedding, I am sick of the hype. I want to watch the event, but I don't care about all the stuff around it. I don't think this is a fairy tale at all. For one thing, although Cinderella seems to be the story seared on the public consciousness, most of the fairy tales were about commoner men who went through trials in order to marry a princess. There were relatively few stories about common girls marrying princes. I suppose this does come close to the Cinderella pattern, as Cinderella's father was a prosperous merchant. This is just Cinderella without the horrendous abuse and being made to work as a servant in her own home. Without all that, Cinderella and the prince probably would have met at the ball anyway, but without the drama of the glass slipper and the wicked stepsisters. There's not much story to it without the bad stuff, but it's probably far healthier for real life.

I certainly don't want to dwell on the life history of the two people involved, I figure I'll see the dress when she walks down the aisle, so I don't care to speculate. I did cut the recipe for the groom's cake out of the newspaper, but that was more because it involves large amounts of chocolate than because it has anything to do with the royal wedding.

So, if I don't actually care all that much, why will I be getting up at o-dark-thirty to watch? For a lot of little reasons.

1) I'm a history buff, and this sort of falls into the category of potentially historical event. I'm not a royal watcher in the sense of following their daily lives in the tabloids, but I do find the whole family tree stemming from Victoria fascinating, with all the interconnections throughout Europe and the way those connections influenced history.

2) I'm something of a completist. My best friend at the time was a huge royalty fan and insisted that I watch the Charles and Diana wedding and the Andrew and Fergie wedding. Since I'd watched the Charles and Diana wedding, I felt obligated to watch Diana's funeral. And then I watched the Edward and Sophie wedding out of the sense of completion and because I really liked his historical documentaries (did he fall off the face of the earth after having kids, or are they just not showing those on American TV anymore now that A&E has become true crime instead of BBC-lite?). So now I feel like I should keep the pattern going.

3) On my first trip to England, I attended a service at Westminster Abbey, and it's cool to watch important things happening in a place where I've been.

4) The Westminster Abbey choir is fabulous, and there's a chance of hearing British sacred choral music. I just hope they don't "Elton John" the service too much (like with Diana's funeral).

5) All the pageantry is kind of fun -- carriages, soldiers, and all that. I'm a fantasy novelist. How could I resist something that does have a few fairy tale elements, even if I don't consider the relationship itself to be very fairy tale (and I think that's a good thing)? In other words, ooooh, pretty!

Motivation

My cable company really is out to get me. Not only did it take until yesterday to get the new Doctor Who OnDemand and I still don't know if they've fixed the Friday Night Lights situation, but my converter box went on the blink yesterday. I'd planned to watch Doctor Who when I got home from ballet, but couldn't do that without the box. I still had a cable signal when I bypassed the box, and I still had all the digital menus on the box. I just didn't get a TV picture or sound. After a chat with customer service this morning, I'll have to pick up a new box today and see if I can get it set up without the drama that the last box required (now I know the key questions to ask and the key words to use).

I've figured out why I snapped midway through the current chapter. I was approaching it the wrong way, going with funny when this is the scene that needs real tension and a sense of threat. I need to rethink the antagonist in this scene, since he's sort of the ultimate villain of the piece who makes all the previous villains look lame. I needed to step away from the book for a while to process this, so I cleaned out my refrigerator, destroying all my science projects, some of which may have achieved sentience, but since they didn't try to communicate with me, I threw them out.

So, now it's time for another writing post, and the topic for the week is motivation. In journalism terms, motivation is the "why" part of the "who, what, when, where, why and how" that are essential to every story. With a strong enough motivation, you can make a character do just about anything. A weak motivation will sap your story of all energy. The more extreme the actions you need your character to take, the stronger the motivation has to be.

How do you strengthen the motivation? One thing you can do is look at what drives it. Is there some deep, inner need the character is trying to fill? The stronger that need is, the more motivated the character will be. I think a good example of this is found in the movie While You Were Sleeping, in which the main character pretends to be the fiancee of a man in a coma so she can spend time -- including Christmas -- with his family. That's a pretty extreme, even crazy, thing to do, not something most people would even consider. But the movie sets up the situation by showing how utterly alone in the world she is. She lost her mother when she was young, then her father got sick and she's spent her adult years taking care of him, putting her own dreams on hold, and now he's dead, so she's left with nothing. She's working on Christmas because she has no family to be with. That establishes her as being deeply lonely and isolated, to the point where you could imagine that she'd be tempted by the invitation to spend Christmas with a big, loving family. The initial posing as the fiancee started as a misunderstanding that would have caused more problems if she tried to explain, and her plan was to just disappear, but when she made the decision to continue the deception, it was over the opportunity to be treated like part of a family.

Survival is another deep, primal need that can drive motivation. If a killer robot from the future, a non-sexy vampire or a serial killer is after you, you'll do just about anything to survive. You don't even need to give backstory on that motivation. When something scary is coming after the character, we'll believe in the need to survive. Money isn't really a primal need, but you can connect it to survival -- without money, it is hard to get by, and the more desperate the situation, the more someone is willing to do to get it. We're more likely to sympathize with characters who are desperate for money for someone else's sake -- it's iffy if the hero is stealing because he needs money, but we might accept it if he's stealing to feed his starving children.

You may need backstory to establish motivations like loneliness, fear of commitment or fear of needing someone else, but you don't want that backstory to provide a pat, simplistic reason. I've seen way too many books and TV movies about someone who hates Christmas and wants to destroy Christmas for others because of one bad thing that happened on Christmas in the past. You need to make readers believe that if that thing had happened to them, then they'd feel the same way. You don't want them to roll their eyes and say, "Oh, grow up and get over it, already."

Another way to strengthen motivation is to look at the consequences. Yes, the hero has a strong drive to go after this thing that he wants or to do these things, but what happens if he fails? You have a stronger motivation if the consequences are truly dire -- if he doesn't do this, then the world comes to an end, people he loves will die, the bad guys will win and enslave everyone, he'll lose everything he owns and the person he loves, etc. I once critiqued a manuscript in which the heroine had inherited a house from a relative she'd hated, and the terms of the will were that she had to live in it for a certain amount of time to inherit it. That meant she had to come back to the hometown she'd fled and face her past. I had to ask the author why she'd bother -- she didn't know she was going to inherit the house, so it wasn't like her life plans were built around it, she didn't want the house, she didn't need the money from selling it and was planning to sell the house and give the money to charity after she inherited it -- and the house would go to charity if she didn't inherit it. So why not just ignore the will and let the house go to charity? I didn't see any consequences to her not jumping through the hoops to inherit the house, which meant the motivation was weak. Either something really bad has to happen if the hero fails, or the hero has to have the hope of something really good that he desperately wants happening if he succeeds. If the hero can fail and say, "Ah, well, at least I tried. No harm done," you've got weak motivation. I'd have fixed this book by maybe having someone she hated more than her relative be in line to get the house if she didn't, or it was going to be sold to developers who would tear it down and build something she was morally opposed to if she didn't take the steps to inherit it. There needed to be some reason beyond "I might not inherit this house I didn't want if I don't do this thing that will be very unpleasant for me."

To strengthen the motivation further, make sure you remove all other options for achieving the goal. If readers can see the hero going through all sorts of torment to achieve his goal and think of several other, easier ways to do it, then that weakens the sense of motivation. We need to feel like he absolutely has to achieve this because the consequences of doing so are dire, and there is absolutely no easier or better way to do this. That's one reason that The Devil Wears Prada didn't work for me. The heroine's goal is to be a serious magazine journalist, and the story makes it sound like the only way she can achieve this is to be an assistant to an evil fashion magazine editor, who tortures her and ruins her life with all her petty demands. Well, I went to journalism school, so I know that not only is that not the only way to achieve that goal, it's not even the best way. She'd have been better off working for a smaller-market newspaper or magazine or freelancing. Picking up a fashion magazine editor's dry cleaning isn't going to get her a job with Time or Newsweek and isn't teaching her to do anything that would put her on the right path, so every time her boss made her do something horrible, I would think "or you could freelance or work for a smaller magazine or newspaper." The book was a bestseller and the movie was very successful, so I suppose that wasn't a kiss of death, but that probably had more to do with the insider look at the fashion magazine industry and a thinly veiled portrayal of working for a famous person than it did with having clear-cut, strong motivation.

In other words, if you're making your hero swim across piranha-infested waters to get to his goal, there shouldn't be a bridge right there, unless maybe the bridge is guarded by trolls. It would take something pretty dire with no other way to do it to make someone do something so extreme.

A good exercise to learn to work with motivation is to think of some things your characters would never do, and then come up with reasons to motivate them to do those things. Those will likely be some really strong motivations if you can make characters do things they would have thought they'd never do and make it so that readers would believe they'd do them. You may have noticed that whenever a character in a book or a movie says near the beginning that he'd never do a particular thing, he'll be doing that thing by the end because the story will be set up in such a way that he has no choice.

To sum up, if you want a really strong motivation, have it come from some deep-seated need, make sure the consequences of not achieving the goal are dire (or make the outcome of achieving it be really, really good), and narrow the characters' options so that the thing they're doing is the only way they can achieve their goal. To make readers more sympathetic of actions that might otherwise be distasteful, make the motivation be about helping or saving someone else.

Book Report: More Victoriana

I guess I was more tired from the weekend than I realized because yesterday wasn't as productive as I hoped it would be. I did some freelance work and a lot of laundry, then did some editing on the book and planned how to fix the current chapter, but actual writing didn't happen and then I was in bed by 10 because I couldn't stay awake. Today, though, there will be writing.

I mentioned last week that I was on a Victoriana kick, and it continues with this week's book report, Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede. This is an alt-history fantasy set in an American frontier where the west is dangerous because it's inhabited by mammoths, dragons, and various magical creatures. There's a big magical shield along the Mammoth River (I think it's our Mississippi), and settlement beyond the shield is very risky. The settlements have to put up their own magical shields, and there are circuit-riding magicians who visit the settlements to maintain the shields.

Into this world is born Eff, short for Francine. Her father is a seventh son, which makes him a powerful magician, and her twin brother is the seventh son of a seventh son, which makes him extra-powerful and lucky. But Eff is the thirteenth child in the family, which tradition says is unlucky, and people generally believe she's doomed to go bad or become evil. In part because of the way Eff is viewed, her father takes a job as professor at a land grant college in a town on the banks of the river, on the edge of the settled territory, where he'll be training magicians to help with the settlement efforts. Because the older children in the family have already married and are out on their own, no one in this new place should realize that Eff is a thirteenth child, though she's acutely self-conscious of it and afraid of what it will mean for her and for her family.

I would classify this as a "girl grows up" book, since much of it is slice-of-life stuff about growing up on the edge of the frontier. It follows Eff from age six to eighteen as we get snapshots of major events along the way while skimming over some years entirely. Since it's from a child's perspective, the major events happen on the periphery, and she only gradually becomes aware of what's really going on. The real "action" of the book comes at the end when she's nearly an adult and has to overcome all her fears about herself and put everything she's learned into practice in order to save the people she loves. This book is the first in a planned series, and it looks like it's mostly the set-up, while the series will follow her adventures now that she's grown up.

When I was a kid living in Oklahoma, I loved those "growing up on the prairie" books. I would have called this "Little House on the Prairie with Magic" except I didn't like those books (mostly because the TV show was popular when I was a kid, and I hated it). The book I would most compare this to from my childhood is so obscure it stretched my search engine skills to find it, it's not available at Project Gutenberg or any other book repository I've found, there were two used copies at Amazon (at a really high price), and other online used bookstores had only a "notify me if this book becomes available" button. This book was called Cricket, so you can imagine that searching for it got me a lot of books about bugs or sports. The author, Forestine Hooker, had grown up at Fort Sill, where I lived, and the book was about a girl growing up there during the 1800s, so it was very popular on base. There were story times on the Old Post Square where a woman in period dress would read excerpts from the book, there were multiple copies of the book in the school library, every girl read it, and we all knew which house on the square was Cricket's house. I could have sworn that you could buy copies at the base museum, but it seems like if those were still available, they'd have found their way to Amazon or Gutenberg (and a quick search found the museum shop, but they don't have this book. But now I kind of want to re-visit the post, as I'm feeling very nostalgic). Apparently, this wasn't this author's most famous book, as there's another one of hers that shows up everywhere.

Anyway, that's what this book reminds me of, a story about living on a settlement on the edge of the frontier, where life was relatively safe but surrounded by potential danger, and being a more or less ordinary kid in that situation. The magical system is interesting, and the book spends a lot of time on the magical education. Meanwhile there are chores to do and there's mischief with her brother and friends. I enjoyed reading it, but I'm really looking forward to the sequel because now that the situation is established, there's a lot of interesting stuff that can happen.

This does seem to validate my belief that magic makes everything better in fiction. Now I need to find a Jane Eyre-style governess story with magic and a Madeleine Brent plucky orphan with exotic skills story with magic and I'll be deliriously happy.

Time Traveling Football Players (and other OnDemand woes)

This was definitely a weekend that requires a weekend for recovery. I'm not planning to leave the house today, and I'm looking forward to enjoying that. But it was a good Easter weekend, with lots of singing (lots and lots of singing) and I got to spend a lot of time with friends.

It was a good thing I went to a friend's house for Doctor Who viewing, as my cable company really messed up the OnDemand stuff for the weekend. As of last night, they still didn't have the new Doctor Who episode posted, and when I went to watch Friday's Friday Night Lights, I didn't recognize any of the events in the "previously" recap and was totally lost when the episode started. Apparently, they were channeling a previous Kyle Chandler series and showing us next week's episode this week. Fortunately, I'd taped the episode while I was at the Good Friday service, since my initial plan was to watch it when I got home, so I still got to watch the right one, which was definitely different, and it seems that the one they put up as the second episode of the season for NBC OnDemand was even further into the season than I thought, as most of the "previously" clips for that episode weren't even in the one I watched.

As unreliable as TimeWarner is when it comes to OnDemand viewing, it looks like I'll have to find a viewing location for next week's Doctor Who, as I don't want to wait too long for the resolution of that cliffhanger.

Now I mostly want to sleep, but I'm closing in on the end of the book. Today I'll be dealing with the part where I pretty much snapped before. I think the bits I've fixed up to this point will help make the next part easier. I'm ready to be done with this one and on to the next, though there may be a break for housework while I do some prep-work on the next project. I need a palate cleanser.

Friday

I ended up shopping in my closet for an Easter outfit after looking at dresses at two different stores. At one store, all the dresses would have been appropriate either for the prom in 1986 or a cocktail party in 1963 (but without the kind of tailoring you'd have had in 1963). If I wanted a 1986 prom dress, I have an authentic one I can still wear, though I don't have any shoes that work with it anymore. Then at the other store, all the dresses had belts, but the belts were attached so they fell midway down my rib cage, which made me look dumpy. I didn't have the energy to shop elsewhere, so I dug around in the closet until I found a top that goes with a skirt I haven't previously worn for Easter. I've never worn that particular top with that skirt, so it's a new outfit, and it should be relatively comfortable under the polyester choir robe that creates a lovely sauna effect.

I may have to start sewing if I want dresses with waistbands that fall anywhere near my waistline without also having skirts that drag on the floor. I'm short, but my body is long, which means I need a "tall" dress if I want it to fit well in the body, but then the skirt will be way too long on my short legs. Then there's the fact that being small does not necessarily mean you have no curves, but the smaller sizes seem to be made for women with stick figures. No wonder I haven't bought clothes other than Target t-shirts in years.

I'm continuing with the tinkering on the trouble chapters and doing the thing where I think I have a chapter finished and am working on the next one, but then realize that something in the previous one needs to be fixed. It's slow going, but I'm so close to the end. I don't know how much I'll get done today, though, and the weekend will be too busy for work.

I'm way too excited about the premiere of a new Doctor Who season, and this time around, it's happening on the same day in the US and UK. I'm going to a premiere party for the first one, and after that I'll have to hope that the TimeWarner OnDemand service isn't as unreliable as it's been lately. They have a bad habit of just never getting around to putting up anything that airs between Friday and Tuesday until maybe Wednesday or Thursday, and then it's always the BBCAmerica stuff that gets skipped and is never posted. I don't actually get BBCAmerica, only their OnDemand channel.

In sadder TV news, CBS has already pulled Chaos from the schedule. That makes my life a little easier since I'm out the next couple of Friday nights, but I do hope we eventually get to see the episodes they've filmed.

Meanwhile, I'm doing some reading related to another project that I'll turn to once I'm done with the current one. There are two possible directions I could take with it. My agent suggested one and I suggested the other. I'm not sure about what she suggested, she isn't sure about what I suggested. So, I'm reading similar books from both sides. I've found myself plowing through the books similar to my suggested direction and plodding through the books similar to my agent's suggested direction. I think that's a pretty good sign. If I don't like reading something, I probably won't be able to write it well, but I think it was important for me to keep an open mind and do the homework and at least seriously consider the other option. The thing is, I would love it if I could do it on that side of things, but I don't believe the market will be open to the way I would do it, and my reading pretty much backs me up. I do still have a few more books to read before I come to a definite conclusion, though I think I should be allowed to put a book aside and conclude that I couldn't write something like that if I've rolled my eyes more than five times in the first hundred pages -- and these are the most successful examples of this kind of book, the bestsellers.

It's a Thursday

The soreness from Tuesday night's dance class binge hit during children's choir last night. We were sitting on the floor, and suddenly it was very difficult for me to get up because my thighs went into total rebellion. The kindergarteners were too small to provide much leverage for pulling me up, so I had to struggle to my feet on my own, with much groaning. We combined classes with the preschool choir since my co-teacher was out of town and we've been having so few kids in our class (in this town, the kindergarteners are over-programmed with extracurricular activities). All those kids together was a little overwhelming. I think it was even getting to my kids because I noticed that my kids tended to migrate over to me and hover on the edges (I was guarding the door so we could keep it open without any kids escaping and so I could keep an eye out for any of my kids heading to the wrong room). I did utterly terrify one of the preschoolers who refused to enter the room while I was in there. Normally I just frighten adults who know what they're dealing with. Kids usually like me. Apparently this one is going through a phase of stranger issues, so I left the room until they got her in and settled.

I think after that, today will be a quiet day. It's delightfully gray and off-and-on rainy, so it's a perfect writing day. I've been going back over the last bits I wrote on the current project, around the time I snapped. It's not as bad as I thought, but it is a bit underdeveloped and rushed. I only need to do a little bit of tinkering with the chapter I'm on, but the next two are the ones that will need a lot of work.

That's about all I'll be up to as the dance soreness has really hit with a vengeance. I have spots that are sore to the touch. That probably means I need to do more strenuous workouts more often. This career is not good for physical fitness. I've heard of writers who set up a desk on a treadmill and walk while they write, but I can barely walk and think at the same time, so that would be asking for a disaster of Lucille Ball comic proportions. I've been known to almost fall down the stairs when I get a good idea while going up or down the stairs because I get too sidetracked to properly place my feet on the next step.

Speaking of exercise and fitness, I may bake my chocolate chip cookies for the weekend's Doctor Who party today, since it's good baking weather. I wonder how many will survive until Saturday. I do need to properly test the batch to ensure that it's worthy of serving to my friends.

Dance as Mental Exercise

It appears that I've answered all the questions anyone has about the Enchanted, Inc. series, so I guess that's it for that feature, unless questions come up. And I am not saying that in a passive-aggressive "nobody loves me, so I'll sit over here in the corner until someone begs me to come back" sense. I'm merely stating a fact that no questions have been asked, so I am drawing the conclusion that I have answered everything that anyone cares to know, for the time being. I can't even think of any random factoid to share today, so maybe I have said everything that needs to be said.

I took two dance classes last night, so my body is mad at me and my brain is tired. The jazz class is mostly learning choreography, so it works like a mental exercise, and unlike ballet, there aren't a lot of standard moves we practice over and over again so that when it comes time to put them together in choreography, it's merely a case of putting puzzle pieces together. Jazz does use a lot of moves and steps from ballet, as well as some unique to jazz and some the teacher makes up on the fly, but the class isn't structured to teach and repeat those usual moves, so learning the dance involves both learning the moves and putting them together, and then remembering it all and doing it at the tempo that goes with the music. Supposedly, ballet is good "anti-aging" work because it strengthens all the muscles needed for balance and works on balance, which lessens the chances of falling and breaking a hip when you get older (the leading cause of death in the elderly -- since complications like blood clots and pneumonia tend to follow broken hips). Then jazz must be good for keeping the brain going and working on the brain-body connection. It's just the immediate aftereffects that are rough. By tonight, I may be barely mobile.

One of the books I have backburnered involves a dancer. I wonder if that means I can write off the dance classes as a research expense. Forget all those sword-wielding urban fantasy heroines. If you want to find someone who can really kick ass, find someone who has survived years of ballet training. You'll get leg muscles to die for and an impressive tolerance for pain.

As a Doctor Who fan, I would be remiss not to note the passing of Elisabeth Sladen, our lovely Sarah Jane Smith. When I was younger, I saw Sarah Jane as a role model because she was a universe-trotting journalist. When she returned through the revival of the series and then went on into her own spinoff series, I still saw her as a role model as an independent single woman whose life wasn't awful because she never found a husband. Do you know how rare that is in entertainment? I think when I get home from choir tonight I'll have to re-watch "School Reunion" in tribute.