Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 265
November 11, 2010
Internet Group Dynamics
I have a feeling that this is going to be one of those I Never Could Get The Hang of Thursdays days. There's a front coming in, and I seem to be able to feel it in my head. Meanwhile, a writing organization I belong to has chosen this time to blow up completely, and conflict bothers me. It's an argument that can't really be resolved because there isn't a lot of middle ground, and it seems to come up in every writing organization I've belonged to. When the group's e-mail list is allowed to be a free-for-all, you get a nice, tight-knit group among the people who participate, which creates an atmosphere that encourages people to ask on-topic questions and share valuable business information. But you also get tons of cute pet/kid/husband stories. Tons and tons of them. The moment that anyone suggests that it would be nice if posts were more on-topic, the people who post the cute pet/kid/husband stories throw a fit and claim that the friendly atmosphere is the only reason they're in the group, they like reading other people's pet/kid/husband stories, and if they aren't allowed to share cute pet/kid/husband stories, then they'll flounce off and play elsewhere, and besides, it's because of all the off-topic posts that we have such a great atmosphere. And they're kind of right because in every group I've been in that has cracked down on posting rules, the list has degenerated into nothing more than re-posts of announcements and "I'm blogging at whatever site today, come and comment and win a prize!" posts. So now this organization seems to have come up with a reasonable solution that creates the opportunity to allow the people who want to talk about their pets to do so without annoying the people who don't care, and meanwhile the ones who want to talk business can do so elsewhere. And still the cute personal story people are flouncing and saying that will RUIN EVERYTHING and it won't be the organization they joined and the world is coming to an end, and so they're going to leave the group. The cynical part of me suspects that they're not going to be happy unless everyone is FORCED to read about Fluffy's latest adventures.
I think it's just basic group dynamics, cranked up to Eleven because of the sometimes overly emotional and dramatic writer personality. This group is the last thing keeping me in Romance Writers of America, since I no longer write things that could be shelved as "romance." I'm certainly not in the in crowd in this particular organization, possibly because I don't have kids, husband or pets to share stories about. Silly me, I only post when I have a business matter to discuss.
Still I find it strange that I'm so conflict-averse that this is upsetting me enough to throw off my morning schedule. I think I'm getting enough conflict in the book these days. Mind you, that didn't stop me from putting my two cents into the discussion, since Someone On The Internet Was Wrong and because any time I feel like a faction of a group is ganging up and making some kind of public statement that We All feel a particular way with the not-so-subtle peer pressure that all reasonable people would naturally feel that way and you're not really one of us if you don't, it tends to make me be contrary and leap to side with the people who aren't included in that We All (see the Great HOA War played out at a City Council meeting of 2004 -- I didn't even care about the issue, but ended up speaking before the city council in opposition to my HOA's view on a neighborhood matter, just because the We All attitude pissed me off).
Which, come to think of it, is exactly what's going on with my heroine in the part of the book I'm currently working on, which may be why I'm overly sensitive about it right now. Real life and the story are merging, but the stakes are much, much higher in the story, and I'm then applying that to real life. I'd probably better disconnect from the Internet for a while before I start a revolution, or something.
I think it's just basic group dynamics, cranked up to Eleven because of the sometimes overly emotional and dramatic writer personality. This group is the last thing keeping me in Romance Writers of America, since I no longer write things that could be shelved as "romance." I'm certainly not in the in crowd in this particular organization, possibly because I don't have kids, husband or pets to share stories about. Silly me, I only post when I have a business matter to discuss.
Still I find it strange that I'm so conflict-averse that this is upsetting me enough to throw off my morning schedule. I think I'm getting enough conflict in the book these days. Mind you, that didn't stop me from putting my two cents into the discussion, since Someone On The Internet Was Wrong and because any time I feel like a faction of a group is ganging up and making some kind of public statement that We All feel a particular way with the not-so-subtle peer pressure that all reasonable people would naturally feel that way and you're not really one of us if you don't, it tends to make me be contrary and leap to side with the people who aren't included in that We All (see the Great HOA War played out at a City Council meeting of 2004 -- I didn't even care about the issue, but ended up speaking before the city council in opposition to my HOA's view on a neighborhood matter, just because the We All attitude pissed me off).
Which, come to think of it, is exactly what's going on with my heroine in the part of the book I'm currently working on, which may be why I'm overly sensitive about it right now. Real life and the story are merging, but the stakes are much, much higher in the story, and I'm then applying that to real life. I'd probably better disconnect from the Internet for a while before I start a revolution, or something.
November 10, 2010
Magical Locations
I think I broke free of the event horizon yesterday and have now reached my target page count. At least, until I start tinkering with things and cutting out parts I decide are unnecessary. There's one scene that I'm not sure of. I think I'm setting up something for later, but I'm not yet entirely sure what that is. I've got a long mental list of things that I think justify the inclusion of the scene, but it still comes down to the fact that the story as it's going so far could go on without it. Today I'm going to revisit the new parts of the book and do all that tinkering. That is, between getting a few errands done and dealing with a couple of business-related tasks.
I'm continuing to address questions related to the Enchanted, Inc. series. I'm down to one more after this one, so if you've got questions other than when the next book is coming (I don't know -- that's a publisher issue that I have little to no control over), let me know.
I was asked about the location issues related to magic in my series -- there's a lot of magic and magical stuff in New York, but little in Texas, so where else might magic be strong?
I won't say where else magic might be strong or weak because I don't know since it hasn't come up yet and I don't want to commit myself until I need it for a book. I came up with the idea of having strong and weak magical places in part because I wanted to contrast my heroine's home to the city. If she was immune to magic so that she saw all the magical stuff, then why hadn't she noticed it already? I decided that was because there wasn't any magic where she came from, so all this is new to her. I think that also worked on another level that I could identify with. I'm from a small town that doesn't feel at all magical, and I felt like New York was the magic kingdom the first time I went there.
But then I developed the idea further as I developed my magical system. I like the idea of magic having a cost. You can't just zap things willy-nilly. Some places have more natural magical power available, and there you have more power at your disposal. Some places have less magical power, so it takes more personal energy to do magic and more effort to draw upon the power. It's kind of like the way a weak cell signal will drain your phone's battery faster because it has to work harder to send a signal to the tower.
As I worked further into the series and did some research into folklore related to magic, I came across the concept of leylines, and I liked that idea, so I worked it into the fourth book, where the characters went to a place low on magic. The magic centers are the places with stronger lines or an intersection of lines. Magical people settle around those places, like the way settlements tended to spring up around sources of water. Magical people tend to get entrenched in those places in their communities, so they don't really spread out much. They hung in around the east coast after coming to America. Out west, not only is civilization more spread out, but so are the leylines, and therefore the magical community, which is mostly limited to native creatures who were there before mankind.
Magical settlements may appear if I decide I need them for plot purposes, such as if the characters have to go to Europe or the west coast, but for now I'm leaving my options open instead of committing to anything.
I'm continuing to address questions related to the Enchanted, Inc. series. I'm down to one more after this one, so if you've got questions other than when the next book is coming (I don't know -- that's a publisher issue that I have little to no control over), let me know.
I was asked about the location issues related to magic in my series -- there's a lot of magic and magical stuff in New York, but little in Texas, so where else might magic be strong?
I won't say where else magic might be strong or weak because I don't know since it hasn't come up yet and I don't want to commit myself until I need it for a book. I came up with the idea of having strong and weak magical places in part because I wanted to contrast my heroine's home to the city. If she was immune to magic so that she saw all the magical stuff, then why hadn't she noticed it already? I decided that was because there wasn't any magic where she came from, so all this is new to her. I think that also worked on another level that I could identify with. I'm from a small town that doesn't feel at all magical, and I felt like New York was the magic kingdom the first time I went there.
But then I developed the idea further as I developed my magical system. I like the idea of magic having a cost. You can't just zap things willy-nilly. Some places have more natural magical power available, and there you have more power at your disposal. Some places have less magical power, so it takes more personal energy to do magic and more effort to draw upon the power. It's kind of like the way a weak cell signal will drain your phone's battery faster because it has to work harder to send a signal to the tower.
As I worked further into the series and did some research into folklore related to magic, I came across the concept of leylines, and I liked that idea, so I worked it into the fourth book, where the characters went to a place low on magic. The magic centers are the places with stronger lines or an intersection of lines. Magical people settle around those places, like the way settlements tended to spring up around sources of water. Magical people tend to get entrenched in those places in their communities, so they don't really spread out much. They hung in around the east coast after coming to America. Out west, not only is civilization more spread out, but so are the leylines, and therefore the magical community, which is mostly limited to native creatures who were there before mankind.
Magical settlements may appear if I decide I need them for plot purposes, such as if the characters have to go to Europe or the west coast, but for now I'm leaving my options open instead of committing to anything.
November 9, 2010
The Event Horizon Goal
I seem to have reached some kind of event horizon situation on this book, where I can see my goal but can never quite reach it, no matter how much I do. My agent would like to have 100 pages of the novel to submit, but she uses a different font/format for submissions than I write with. I like to stick to my old way of formatting for writing because that's how I calculate pacing, and then when I'm doing my last round of revisions/proofreading, I change the font and format to my agent's preference, which then makes it look different, and that makes it easier to spot errors instead of going on automatic and reading what I think should be there. The problem is that it makes it difficult to tell how many pages I actually have. The way I'd calculated, based on the differences at other points in the story, I should have reached 100 pages by the other format, but when I reached my goal last night, I changed the font and found that I was only on page 89. So it looks like I have twenty more (or so) pages to write. I think. At least that should allow me to finish a chapter, which I was planning to do anyway. Then I'll change the font again and see where I am.
It's at least another day's work, which puts me a little behind my target schedule, but if I'm good and diligent and work as many hours as I did yesterday, I can do it. However, I've got dance class tonight (I may skip the jazz class and do that one next week) and then choir tomorrow, with a section rehearsal between children's choir and chancel choir, so I can't even brainstorm in the down time.
One thing I did yesterday that was a lot of fun was make up a slang vocabulary for one group of people in the story. I tried thinking about the things they might reference and how technical terms from their work might sneak into other usage. I had the good sense to write down my terms as I came up with them, so I'm gradually building a slang dictionary for this world. The trick will be to not incorporate these terms into my own vocabulary once I start using them in writing -- at least, not until I'm actively promoting the book. Then maybe I'll let it go viral by using these terms.
It's at least another day's work, which puts me a little behind my target schedule, but if I'm good and diligent and work as many hours as I did yesterday, I can do it. However, I've got dance class tonight (I may skip the jazz class and do that one next week) and then choir tomorrow, with a section rehearsal between children's choir and chancel choir, so I can't even brainstorm in the down time.
One thing I did yesterday that was a lot of fun was make up a slang vocabulary for one group of people in the story. I tried thinking about the things they might reference and how technical terms from their work might sneak into other usage. I had the good sense to write down my terms as I came up with them, so I'm gradually building a slang dictionary for this world. The trick will be to not incorporate these terms into my own vocabulary once I start using them in writing -- at least, not until I'm actively promoting the book. Then maybe I'll let it go viral by using these terms.
November 8, 2010
A Weekendy Weekend
I had a pretty full and varied weekend. Friday night, there was a wine-tasting party, where I felt so very grown-up and sophisticated as I sipped wine and talked about wine, food, travel and books. Saturday was a work day. Or, it was supposed to be a work day. I got about four pages written before I realized that while I knew the setting of the scene and how it would end, I didn't actually know the events of the scene. Then for some strange reason I got it into my head that I needed to knit a cozy for my new cell phone. Mind you, I'm not a knitter. My grand total of lifetime knitting output has been five scarves. It took me three tries to remember how to cast on. The result was kind of sad. I overestimated the size of the phone (you'd think I would have thought about actually getting it out to look at it before knitting for it, but no), plus I forgot that the first row of stitches looks a lot smaller than the finished item will be, so I ended something that wraps around the phone a couple of times (I guess it's extra cushiony), and then it's too long, as well, but that's because I also forgot how to bind off, and I kept panicking and knitting one more row, sure I'd figure it out the next time. I finally used the phone to look up knitting instructions online so I could end. The finished cozy is kind of like that sweater your aunt lovingly hand-knit for you that would fit perfectly if only your wrists came down to your knees. I'm picturing my poor phone encountering a bunch of iPhones wearing slick, store-bought leather cases and feeling all embarrassed because of his badly fitting, weirdly knit case. I did do another one last night that looks better, but I think the ugly one might actually be more protective.
I guess the reason I thought about making a case for the phone was that I'd planned on going hiking Sunday, and while my purses have nice little cell phone pockets inside, my backpack doesn't, and with that smartphone screen, I was worried about it just rattling around in there. Now my phone is all snug and safe. We did make a brief hiking trip on Sunday afternoon. There's a lake about fifteen minutes from my house that has some good hiking trails around it, and the weather was perfect -- warm enough for short sleeves while we were hiking, but with a hint of a chill. It felt great to be outdoors and moving. It reminded me of when I was a kid. When we lived in Germany, we lived on the edge of a forest, and there were all these walking trails leading through the woods. Just about every weekend, we'd load up a backpack with drinks and sandwiches and spend the day walking. Those were fairly even paths, though, while this was a little more rugged (it's also a popular trail with mountain bikers). My knees are a little creaky this morning, and my thighs are grumbly, but it was so worth it, and I should do that sort of thing more often. I could happily spend all my fall weekends hiking. Or even weekdays, but the problem is that it's not entirely safe for a woman alone when the trails aren't as busy, so I need to walk during busy times or drag friends with me. I guess I could get a dog to walk with me, but I'm limited in the size of dog I can have where I live now (theoretically, since my neighbor is on the board of directors of the HOA and has a big dog), and the little yappy things aren't necessarily great hiking companions nor good for much protection other than making a racket.
But since I had a weekend that actually felt like a weekend (aside from a couple of hours working on Saturday), I have a Monday that feels like a Monday, with a lot of work to get done.
But first, one more memory from Sunday's hike:
I guess the reason I thought about making a case for the phone was that I'd planned on going hiking Sunday, and while my purses have nice little cell phone pockets inside, my backpack doesn't, and with that smartphone screen, I was worried about it just rattling around in there. Now my phone is all snug and safe. We did make a brief hiking trip on Sunday afternoon. There's a lake about fifteen minutes from my house that has some good hiking trails around it, and the weather was perfect -- warm enough for short sleeves while we were hiking, but with a hint of a chill. It felt great to be outdoors and moving. It reminded me of when I was a kid. When we lived in Germany, we lived on the edge of a forest, and there were all these walking trails leading through the woods. Just about every weekend, we'd load up a backpack with drinks and sandwiches and spend the day walking. Those were fairly even paths, though, while this was a little more rugged (it's also a popular trail with mountain bikers). My knees are a little creaky this morning, and my thighs are grumbly, but it was so worth it, and I should do that sort of thing more often. I could happily spend all my fall weekends hiking. Or even weekdays, but the problem is that it's not entirely safe for a woman alone when the trails aren't as busy, so I need to walk during busy times or drag friends with me. I guess I could get a dog to walk with me, but I'm limited in the size of dog I can have where I live now (theoretically, since my neighbor is on the board of directors of the HOA and has a big dog), and the little yappy things aren't necessarily great hiking companions nor good for much protection other than making a racket.
But since I had a weekend that actually felt like a weekend (aside from a couple of hours working on Saturday), I have a Monday that feels like a Monday, with a lot of work to get done.
But first, one more memory from Sunday's hike:
November 5, 2010
Genre TV Today
I think I finally, finally got the pivotal scene to work and can now move forward. Yay. And I only have to write about 20 pages to get to the length I need for submission, which I can probably do today and tomorrow. Normally, that would be one day's work, but I'm going to a party tonight that requires some cooking in preparation, and then one of my neighbors mentioned coming by this weekend to talk about writing, so I need to do a little house cleaning.
One of the panels I was on at MileHiCon a couple of weeks ago (wow, that long already? It feels like I just got home) was about the current state of genre (science fiction/fantasy) shows on TV, and during the panel, I had the disturbing realization that, thanks to various hiatuses, I'm watching almost nothing genre at the moment. I used to joke that I didn't watch anything that didn't have spaceships or monsters in it.
There's Chuck, which I think falls into the science fiction category with all that Intersect stuff. Plus, it seems to be written with an awareness of genre tropes. And then there's Supernatural. I stretched a bit to include Phineas and Ferb on the Disney Channel because it's clearly written by geeks, plus the idea of two ten-year-old boys and their friends doing stuff in their backyard like building a tower so tall it reaches the moon has to fall into the realm of either science fiction or fantasy.
I'm not currently watching anything on the Sci Fi Channel. I love their summer lineup of Warehouse 13, Eureka and Haven. Their fall/winter lineup hasn't caught my attention. I tried watching Stargate Universe, watched about half a season just to snark about it, and then turned it off in the middle of an episode when I decided that these people were Too Stupid To Live and I didn't want them to live. I only made it through half of the Caprica pilot, and I only made it that far because I liked the music. I keep being told that it got better, but the bits I saw when an episode came on before something else I was going to watch didn't exactly thrill me. I'm not entirely sure why I never tried Sanctuary, but there's something about the promos that makes me cringe badly enough that I never wanted to watch the series. For all I know, I'm missing something great, but if characters and dialogue in the promos are extremely annoying, that's not a good sign.
I tried Fringe but got so bored that I turned it off in the middle of the second episode when I realized I'd lost track of what was going on after I got bored enough that I started sorting my mail. I've tried watching a few episodes of The Vampire Diaries, but it comes across as the kind of overwrought teen soap opera that sets my teeth on edge. I suspect it's also the kind of thing you have to watch from the beginning because I've been completely lost in the episodes I tried, like I needed a scorecard to know who these people were and what their relationships were supposed to be. I watched the first season of True Blood before admitting to myself that I found watching it to be an extremely unpleasant experience.
So I've had to resort to mentally turning other things into genre shows, mostly by deciding which characters are Cylons or Terminators. House is already a science fiction show, just on the basis of the medicine (or maybe it's fantasy, since science fiction is supposed to be based at least loosely on actual science). The new Hawaii Five-O is a lot more fun when you watch with the idea that Kono is a Cylon (naturally) and that Chin is an evil zombie lawyer (as we last saw him on Angel). Then there's my theory that on CSI New York there's a robot police force that allows the same homicide detective to investigate every crime in the entire city, since there's a copy of that particular Cylon model in each precinct. You just think it's the same guy in every episode. On Original Recipe NCIS, Gibbs is clearly a Terminator. I haven't figured out the LA version, especially since they seem to have decided to completely retool the concept and have thrown out the idea of long-term deep cover. They've added the Poochie character, so maybe he really is an alien who will be called back to his home planet soon. And it's possible that Hetty really is Edna Mode from The Incredibles, and the whole NCIS operation is merely her cover for her real work in outfitting superheroes. (They've really genericized that whole series, making it more of a Lite version of the original. Maybe I can hope for another spinoff where we get to see whatever mission they sent Nate the Freakishly Tall Psychologist on, because it's got to be more interesting than stretching jurisdictional boundaries to the breaking point in investigating crimes involving people who once walked past a Navy or Marine recruiting station.)
It's really sad that most of my viewing these days is CBS procedurals, when I used to avoid that kind of thing like the plague. However, most of them, I just watch because they're readily available OnDemand and therefore handy for random times when I'm bored and there's nothing else on or for background noise while I do other stuff. I wouldn't watch most of them if I had to record them or watch them live.
There are a few upcoming series that look interesting. They've just announced yet another Battlestar Galactica prequel, but this one is about the first Cylon war, so it should offer more space battles, fewer bratty teenage girls and longwinded philosophical discussions. They've been talking about that Song of Ice and Fire series on HBO for ages, so maybe it will actually come on one day (I have to admit I've tried several times to read the first book in that series but never managed to get into it. Maybe seeing the TV version will make it easier to get into). And then there will be Christmas episodes of Warehouse 13, Eureka and Doctor Who.
One of the panels I was on at MileHiCon a couple of weeks ago (wow, that long already? It feels like I just got home) was about the current state of genre (science fiction/fantasy) shows on TV, and during the panel, I had the disturbing realization that, thanks to various hiatuses, I'm watching almost nothing genre at the moment. I used to joke that I didn't watch anything that didn't have spaceships or monsters in it.
There's Chuck, which I think falls into the science fiction category with all that Intersect stuff. Plus, it seems to be written with an awareness of genre tropes. And then there's Supernatural. I stretched a bit to include Phineas and Ferb on the Disney Channel because it's clearly written by geeks, plus the idea of two ten-year-old boys and their friends doing stuff in their backyard like building a tower so tall it reaches the moon has to fall into the realm of either science fiction or fantasy.
I'm not currently watching anything on the Sci Fi Channel. I love their summer lineup of Warehouse 13, Eureka and Haven. Their fall/winter lineup hasn't caught my attention. I tried watching Stargate Universe, watched about half a season just to snark about it, and then turned it off in the middle of an episode when I decided that these people were Too Stupid To Live and I didn't want them to live. I only made it through half of the Caprica pilot, and I only made it that far because I liked the music. I keep being told that it got better, but the bits I saw when an episode came on before something else I was going to watch didn't exactly thrill me. I'm not entirely sure why I never tried Sanctuary, but there's something about the promos that makes me cringe badly enough that I never wanted to watch the series. For all I know, I'm missing something great, but if characters and dialogue in the promos are extremely annoying, that's not a good sign.
I tried Fringe but got so bored that I turned it off in the middle of the second episode when I realized I'd lost track of what was going on after I got bored enough that I started sorting my mail. I've tried watching a few episodes of The Vampire Diaries, but it comes across as the kind of overwrought teen soap opera that sets my teeth on edge. I suspect it's also the kind of thing you have to watch from the beginning because I've been completely lost in the episodes I tried, like I needed a scorecard to know who these people were and what their relationships were supposed to be. I watched the first season of True Blood before admitting to myself that I found watching it to be an extremely unpleasant experience.
So I've had to resort to mentally turning other things into genre shows, mostly by deciding which characters are Cylons or Terminators. House is already a science fiction show, just on the basis of the medicine (or maybe it's fantasy, since science fiction is supposed to be based at least loosely on actual science). The new Hawaii Five-O is a lot more fun when you watch with the idea that Kono is a Cylon (naturally) and that Chin is an evil zombie lawyer (as we last saw him on Angel). Then there's my theory that on CSI New York there's a robot police force that allows the same homicide detective to investigate every crime in the entire city, since there's a copy of that particular Cylon model in each precinct. You just think it's the same guy in every episode. On Original Recipe NCIS, Gibbs is clearly a Terminator. I haven't figured out the LA version, especially since they seem to have decided to completely retool the concept and have thrown out the idea of long-term deep cover. They've added the Poochie character, so maybe he really is an alien who will be called back to his home planet soon. And it's possible that Hetty really is Edna Mode from The Incredibles, and the whole NCIS operation is merely her cover for her real work in outfitting superheroes. (They've really genericized that whole series, making it more of a Lite version of the original. Maybe I can hope for another spinoff where we get to see whatever mission they sent Nate the Freakishly Tall Psychologist on, because it's got to be more interesting than stretching jurisdictional boundaries to the breaking point in investigating crimes involving people who once walked past a Navy or Marine recruiting station.)
It's really sad that most of my viewing these days is CBS procedurals, when I used to avoid that kind of thing like the plague. However, most of them, I just watch because they're readily available OnDemand and therefore handy for random times when I'm bored and there's nothing else on or for background noise while I do other stuff. I wouldn't watch most of them if I had to record them or watch them live.
There are a few upcoming series that look interesting. They've just announced yet another Battlestar Galactica prequel, but this one is about the first Cylon war, so it should offer more space battles, fewer bratty teenage girls and longwinded philosophical discussions. They've been talking about that Song of Ice and Fire series on HBO for ages, so maybe it will actually come on one day (I have to admit I've tried several times to read the first book in that series but never managed to get into it. Maybe seeing the TV version will make it easier to get into). And then there will be Christmas episodes of Warehouse 13, Eureka and Doctor Who.
November 4, 2010
The Fight for Focus
So, I'm working on this book proposal to get it ready for submission, and things are taking odd turns. I'd sent the first 60 or so pages to my agent, and she loved it, but said it would be a stronger submission if I could have the first 100 pages ready. I said that would be easy because since I sent it to her, I'd kept writing, and I had that much written already. I'd just need to finish a big scene and do some overall polishing on it. Then I mentioned that I had it planned as a trilogy, and she asked me to write a short synopsis for each of the next two books. No problem, I thought.
Then I re-read what I'd written, and I've ended up cutting huge sections from what I'd written after sending the beginning to her. Some of that was kind of a relief. I suppose it's a bad sign if I can't make myself get into a scene and if it feels good to decide I don't have to write it. If you can't make it interesting and if it isn't essential to the plot, then it probably doesn't need to be there. But I've found it hard to move forward, and yesterday I diagnosed the problem. There was this one scene earlier that wasn't quite right, and it set the tone for the rest. Until I got that right, nothing that came after it would work. That meant a lot of pen-and-paper work to get into the narrator character's head and consider how she really would think and react and how the other characters would act in response to what she did. I think I've got it figured out, so now I need to actually write it.
Unfortunately, yesterday seemed to be a non-functioning day. My subconscious was probably busy because the oddest things seemed to distract me. At one point in the afternoon, I was sitting on my dining room floor, listening to a "great moments in opera" CD. I'm not entirely sure how that came about. I think I was going to the kitchen to refill my mug of tea, saw the CD along the way and stopped to put it in the player that's in the dining room. Fifteen minutes later, I realized I never got that tea. I had a similar problem when I was getting dressed to go to choir. I'd start doing one thing, then get sidetracked until I remembered the time and what I was supposed to be doing. Usually when I get like that, it means there's something cooking in my head that's keeping the mental squirrels preoccupied, and it's siphoning off power from my conscious brain. You should have seen the fight for focus when I was trying to direct five-year-olds in playing handbells, and then when we had one group playing handbells and the other playing jingle bells (we're practicing Christmas music). I'm not sure I'm mentally coordinated enough to pull that off even when functioning on all cylinders.
One of the challenges for the book I'm working on is that the heroine/narrator is extremely intelligent but also extremely naive, at least at the beginning. It's interesting trying to convey her innocence without making her look too stupid to live. She knows a lot of stuff and learns quickly, but she's also been very sheltered, so she doesn't know how the world really works. Then there are times when I'm trying to fit in clues that I hope the reader might catch but that the heroine doesn't yet see the significance of. She lacks cynicism, so she doesn't tend to be suspicious of things, unless it's the kind of thing that might happen in either classic literature or dime novels. So she'll think to ask what became of the previous governess when interviewing for a position (just to rule out "driven mad by a ghost," since that seems to happen all the time in books) but she can't tell when someone is setting her up or using her when they act like they have her best interests at heart. It's a very fine line to walk, and if I end up on the wrong side of the line, the scene goes wrong in such a way that it affects everything that comes after it. What I realized I needed to do in this critical scene was work through the progression of her thought process. She might not know what's going on from the start, but she does begin to put two and two together along the way. Doing that means killing another entire scene later.
I'm hoping the subconscious squirrels will have done their jobs and everything will just flow when I get to work today. I have a lot to write now that I've laid waste to so many pages.
Then I re-read what I'd written, and I've ended up cutting huge sections from what I'd written after sending the beginning to her. Some of that was kind of a relief. I suppose it's a bad sign if I can't make myself get into a scene and if it feels good to decide I don't have to write it. If you can't make it interesting and if it isn't essential to the plot, then it probably doesn't need to be there. But I've found it hard to move forward, and yesterday I diagnosed the problem. There was this one scene earlier that wasn't quite right, and it set the tone for the rest. Until I got that right, nothing that came after it would work. That meant a lot of pen-and-paper work to get into the narrator character's head and consider how she really would think and react and how the other characters would act in response to what she did. I think I've got it figured out, so now I need to actually write it.
Unfortunately, yesterday seemed to be a non-functioning day. My subconscious was probably busy because the oddest things seemed to distract me. At one point in the afternoon, I was sitting on my dining room floor, listening to a "great moments in opera" CD. I'm not entirely sure how that came about. I think I was going to the kitchen to refill my mug of tea, saw the CD along the way and stopped to put it in the player that's in the dining room. Fifteen minutes later, I realized I never got that tea. I had a similar problem when I was getting dressed to go to choir. I'd start doing one thing, then get sidetracked until I remembered the time and what I was supposed to be doing. Usually when I get like that, it means there's something cooking in my head that's keeping the mental squirrels preoccupied, and it's siphoning off power from my conscious brain. You should have seen the fight for focus when I was trying to direct five-year-olds in playing handbells, and then when we had one group playing handbells and the other playing jingle bells (we're practicing Christmas music). I'm not sure I'm mentally coordinated enough to pull that off even when functioning on all cylinders.
One of the challenges for the book I'm working on is that the heroine/narrator is extremely intelligent but also extremely naive, at least at the beginning. It's interesting trying to convey her innocence without making her look too stupid to live. She knows a lot of stuff and learns quickly, but she's also been very sheltered, so she doesn't know how the world really works. Then there are times when I'm trying to fit in clues that I hope the reader might catch but that the heroine doesn't yet see the significance of. She lacks cynicism, so she doesn't tend to be suspicious of things, unless it's the kind of thing that might happen in either classic literature or dime novels. So she'll think to ask what became of the previous governess when interviewing for a position (just to rule out "driven mad by a ghost," since that seems to happen all the time in books) but she can't tell when someone is setting her up or using her when they act like they have her best interests at heart. It's a very fine line to walk, and if I end up on the wrong side of the line, the scene goes wrong in such a way that it affects everything that comes after it. What I realized I needed to do in this critical scene was work through the progression of her thought process. She might not know what's going on from the start, but she does begin to put two and two together along the way. Doing that means killing another entire scene later.
I'm hoping the subconscious squirrels will have done their jobs and everything will just flow when I get to work today. I have a lot to write now that I've laid waste to so many pages.
November 3, 2010
The Hero's Journey: Tests, Allies and Enemies
My body is currently angry at me because, in a fit of masochism, I decided last night to stay after my ballet class and take the jazz class as a make-up for the week I was gone (since I ended up not dragging myself out on Saturday). It was just what I needed to work the knots out, with all the stretching and isolation movements, but it also involved a lot of strenuous dancing. Coming right after ballet, it reminded me of the part of the movie Center Stage where the ballerina heroine gets fed up with the regimented ballet program and sneaks off to take a jazz class. This class was a lot like the jazz class in the movie, only without the hot guys (or any guys at all). We did have a guy in our ballet class, though. A guy who dances with the company took our class as a warmup, and it was kind of disconcerting because he looked a lot like LL Cool J (only with a slightly different body type, since this guy is a dancer). It was a little weird to look in the mirror and see LL Cool J dancing ballet, because that's not something that's easy to imagine. I did restrain myself from asking him what the heck they were doing to his show, and were they trying to make it suck. I have one more class to make up from when I was sick, so I may do jazz again next week. It's really different, and I'm awful at it right now, but it's a great workout, and I'm kind of tempted to register for it next semester.
Now for a writing post, after skipping a week. I'm continuing the discussion of the stages of the hero's journey, as distilled from Joseph Campbell's research by Christopher Vogler in The Writer's Journey. We've made it past the first turning point of the story as the hero has accepted the Call to Adventure and crossed the threshold into the special world of the story. The next phase is Tests, Allies and Enemies. In the classic three-act story structure, this is the start of the second act.
This is the phase where the hero explores and gets to know the special world and learns the differences between this world and his ordinary world. He learns the rules of the world and finds out who's on his side and who's against him. He may also run into some initial tests and trials that lead up to the major ordeals of the story. In the classic fairy tale structure, he may run into a series of tests (usually three) that put him into position to go through a more serious trial (where he then benefits from the friends he made or the magical devices he gained while passing the earlier tests). In a caper-type story, this is where the hero assembles the team of specialists that will help him reach his goal. In a quest-type story, this is where the questing party comes together. The "training montage" usually comes during this stage. If the hero learned he has special powers during the Call to Adventure, this is where he learns to use them. This is the part of the story where Dorothy encounters the scarecrow, tin man and cowardly lion on the way to the Emerald City. It's where Luke Skywalker meets up with Han Solo and Chewbacca and starts to learn how to use a lightsaber. It's where Harry Potter goes off to Hogwarts, becomes friends with Ron, meets Hermione, figures out that he doesn't like Draco, goes to classes and starts to learn about Voldemort.
If an encounter with the villain wasn't what sent the hero off on the quest, this may be when the hero learns precisely who the villain is and who the villain's minions are. He might start to encounter the villain or the villain's minions during this phase. Or he could learn exactly what the villain is doing to the world -- like seeing a planet destroyed by the Death Star. This may intensify his motivation. Discernment is a big part of this phase, as the hero has to be able to tell good from bad so he doesn't fall in with the wrong crowd that will move him away from his goal. The hero may make false moves and mistakes during this phase, but he learns from those mistakes before he gets to a real crisis. The crisis often includes elements from the various lessons and tests from this phase.
In his screenwriting book Save the Cat, Blake Snyder calls this part of the story "Fun and Games" or "The Promise of the Premise" because this is where the writer can play with the situation of the story and explore the possibilities inherent in the situation. In a fish-out-of-water story, this is when the hero clashes with her environment. In a romantic comedy, this is when we see what happens when fate throws together a woman like that and a man like that. In a buddy cop story, this is where we see all the things that happen with the clash of styles. In a high-concept story, this is when we see some of the implications of the concept. In Speed, which is about a bus that will explode if it slows down, this is when we see how difficult it is to keep the bus at the right speed by running into all the potential obstacles you might imagine. In the first Harry Potter book, this is when we explore what it might be like to go to a magical school. In the James Bond movies, this is when we see Bond using his latest gadgets in various encounters with the villain's minions and having adventures that take advantage of that film's exotic setting. These things should all have some tie to the main plot, but this phase is your chance to let your characters see and do cool stuff.
One thing Vogler mentions about this section is that it often involves a "watering hole." In the traditional stories studied by Joseph Campbell, the heroes were often hunters who needed to head to a watering hole to find game. In other kinds of stories, it's generally the more metaphorical watering hole. It's amazing how often the hero ends up in some kind of bar, tavern, inn or restaurant in this part of the story. There's the alien cantina in Star Wars, the Prancing Pony in The Lord of the Rings, the welcoming feast in the Harry Potter books, Rick's Cafe in Casablanca, Marian's bar in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it goes on and on. In fact, when skimming over my DVD shelves and bookcases, I had a hard time finding examples of stories where the hero didn't end up in some kind of metaphorical watering hole during this part of the story. I suppose in part that's because people do need to eat and drink, and bars, taverns and restaurants are places where you might get a cross-section of society, where the hero can get information, clash with some people and encounter potential allies. There's something about sharing food and drink that brings people together.
Then after this, things start to get serious.
Now for a writing post, after skipping a week. I'm continuing the discussion of the stages of the hero's journey, as distilled from Joseph Campbell's research by Christopher Vogler in The Writer's Journey. We've made it past the first turning point of the story as the hero has accepted the Call to Adventure and crossed the threshold into the special world of the story. The next phase is Tests, Allies and Enemies. In the classic three-act story structure, this is the start of the second act.
This is the phase where the hero explores and gets to know the special world and learns the differences between this world and his ordinary world. He learns the rules of the world and finds out who's on his side and who's against him. He may also run into some initial tests and trials that lead up to the major ordeals of the story. In the classic fairy tale structure, he may run into a series of tests (usually three) that put him into position to go through a more serious trial (where he then benefits from the friends he made or the magical devices he gained while passing the earlier tests). In a caper-type story, this is where the hero assembles the team of specialists that will help him reach his goal. In a quest-type story, this is where the questing party comes together. The "training montage" usually comes during this stage. If the hero learned he has special powers during the Call to Adventure, this is where he learns to use them. This is the part of the story where Dorothy encounters the scarecrow, tin man and cowardly lion on the way to the Emerald City. It's where Luke Skywalker meets up with Han Solo and Chewbacca and starts to learn how to use a lightsaber. It's where Harry Potter goes off to Hogwarts, becomes friends with Ron, meets Hermione, figures out that he doesn't like Draco, goes to classes and starts to learn about Voldemort.
If an encounter with the villain wasn't what sent the hero off on the quest, this may be when the hero learns precisely who the villain is and who the villain's minions are. He might start to encounter the villain or the villain's minions during this phase. Or he could learn exactly what the villain is doing to the world -- like seeing a planet destroyed by the Death Star. This may intensify his motivation. Discernment is a big part of this phase, as the hero has to be able to tell good from bad so he doesn't fall in with the wrong crowd that will move him away from his goal. The hero may make false moves and mistakes during this phase, but he learns from those mistakes before he gets to a real crisis. The crisis often includes elements from the various lessons and tests from this phase.
In his screenwriting book Save the Cat, Blake Snyder calls this part of the story "Fun and Games" or "The Promise of the Premise" because this is where the writer can play with the situation of the story and explore the possibilities inherent in the situation. In a fish-out-of-water story, this is when the hero clashes with her environment. In a romantic comedy, this is when we see what happens when fate throws together a woman like that and a man like that. In a buddy cop story, this is where we see all the things that happen with the clash of styles. In a high-concept story, this is when we see some of the implications of the concept. In Speed, which is about a bus that will explode if it slows down, this is when we see how difficult it is to keep the bus at the right speed by running into all the potential obstacles you might imagine. In the first Harry Potter book, this is when we explore what it might be like to go to a magical school. In the James Bond movies, this is when we see Bond using his latest gadgets in various encounters with the villain's minions and having adventures that take advantage of that film's exotic setting. These things should all have some tie to the main plot, but this phase is your chance to let your characters see and do cool stuff.
One thing Vogler mentions about this section is that it often involves a "watering hole." In the traditional stories studied by Joseph Campbell, the heroes were often hunters who needed to head to a watering hole to find game. In other kinds of stories, it's generally the more metaphorical watering hole. It's amazing how often the hero ends up in some kind of bar, tavern, inn or restaurant in this part of the story. There's the alien cantina in Star Wars, the Prancing Pony in The Lord of the Rings, the welcoming feast in the Harry Potter books, Rick's Cafe in Casablanca, Marian's bar in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it goes on and on. In fact, when skimming over my DVD shelves and bookcases, I had a hard time finding examples of stories where the hero didn't end up in some kind of metaphorical watering hole during this part of the story. I suppose in part that's because people do need to eat and drink, and bars, taverns and restaurants are places where you might get a cross-section of society, where the hero can get information, clash with some people and encounter potential allies. There's something about sharing food and drink that brings people together.
Then after this, things start to get serious.
November 2, 2010
A Catch-up Book Report
It's election day, otherwise known as the last day of ads that go along the lines of "My opponent sold his soul to Satan and is going to personally come to your house to take your money away from you and do vile things to your family" and the last day of the phone ringing off the hook with all the campaign messages. I swear, there's one candidate whose campaign has called me so often, in spite of me telling her real, live campaign workers repeatedly that I do not want to be called, that if an ex-boyfriend called me that often, I might be able to get a restraining order on grounds of harassment. Do they really think that disturbing people at mealtimes is going to make them favorably inclined?
On a happier note, I'm behind on book discussion, so here's an all-over-the-map Book Report.
First, I do have a bit of a theme because I was reading things that might fall into the historical fiction category. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe deals with the Salem witch trials with the idea of what if one of them really was a witch. A graduate student at Harvard in 1991 (important because if it had been today, one Google search could have cut out half the plot) stumbles upon something while clearing out her grandmother's old home in a village outside Salem, and her research indicates that the name she finds might have been a previously undocumented victim of the witch trials, and this woman seemed to own some kind of spell book that was passed on through generations before being lost. The book cuts back and forth between the "present" and some of the events of the past, but the past events are more like interludes rather than being directly tied to any discovery in the "present." And then some strange things start happening, and the student realizes that to save the day, she'll have to find that spell book.
I'm a sucker for books that involve someone researching the past, and then the stuff in the past being its own story. I also spent a day in Salem when I was on a business trip to Boston about ten years ago, and I enjoy reading books that take place in locations I've visited. I admit to giving a cheer when a character in the book asks the question that comes to mind when I see the current focus on witchcraft in Salem: the witch trials weren't actually about witchcraft, but rather were more Mean Girls: Colonial Edition, with none of the victims (in reality) being actual witches, as far as anyone can tell, so why do they act like Salem has some grand heritage in witchcraft? (Simple answer: tourist money.) This is certainly an interesting book if you're into that period of history.
The Postmistress by Sarah Blake is a World War II book with intersecting story lines. During the Blitz, an American radio reporter is trying to make sense of it all and trying to convey what's going on to an American public that's still focused on trying to stay out of the war. Then there are the people in the small Cape Cod town who listen to her broadcasts. And then the town's doctor goes to London to help in the Blitz. I liked a lot about this book and it was close to the kind of WWII book I might write if I were to write one that didn't have magic in it, but it does veer more to the literary side of things.
Then I switched over to science fiction and fantasy. I finally read Flinx Transcendent, the final book in the Flinx series by Alan Dean Foster. This series had a lot to do with me becoming a science fiction reader, and I think this was a nice wrap-up, though I'll probably have to re-read some of the older books because it really does draw from the entire series to wrap things up, and there were a few things that I didn't quite recall. I wouldn't be surprised to see more Flinx books because while this one answered all the questions and resolved all the ongoing plot lines, the impression was left that Flinx wouldn't be happy for long without adventures, so maybe now that the series is wrapped there might be standalones, unless Alan has other things he wants to write.
And then I found a new lightish, quirky fantasy series by Rachel Aaron. The first book is The Spirit Thief, and the next one is out this week. This had one of the more interesting magical systems I've seen. Many objects, both living and inanimate, have their own spirits, some of which are fully awakened and some of which are dormant. The wizards in this world are those that can hear and communicate with these spirits. The good ones develop a kind of symbiotic relationship with certain spirits that then mediate with all the other spirits, while the bad ones enslave spirits. And then there's the guy who just seems to flirt with the spirits so that they then want to bend over backwards to help him. He's the greatest thief around, possibly because he can persuade the wood in locked doors that it would feel a lot better without those irritating nails sticking through it. But he's not nearly as famous as he'd like to be, and he sets out to get the biggest bounty ever on his head. To do that, he decides to steal something really big. Like, say, a king. Only he neglected to do his research on the royal family dynamics, so he doesn't realize that leaving the throne vacant long enough to make his ransom demands will cause all sorts of problems that he'll then have to set right. Oops. This one was a ton of fun. I felt like the first book was just starting to get into the characters, and the excerpts from the second that are at the back make it look like they'll really be explored in more depth now that they're established.
This series is coming from Orbit, and they seem to be on my wavelength because they're putting out a lot of stuff I like lately. The editor for this book is actually a fan of mine, so I guess it makes sense that I might like what she likes enough to throw money at it. They're currently my dream publisher, so maybe she'll be throwing money at me soon. And now I'd better get to work to give them something they might want to publish.
On a happier note, I'm behind on book discussion, so here's an all-over-the-map Book Report.
First, I do have a bit of a theme because I was reading things that might fall into the historical fiction category. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe deals with the Salem witch trials with the idea of what if one of them really was a witch. A graduate student at Harvard in 1991 (important because if it had been today, one Google search could have cut out half the plot) stumbles upon something while clearing out her grandmother's old home in a village outside Salem, and her research indicates that the name she finds might have been a previously undocumented victim of the witch trials, and this woman seemed to own some kind of spell book that was passed on through generations before being lost. The book cuts back and forth between the "present" and some of the events of the past, but the past events are more like interludes rather than being directly tied to any discovery in the "present." And then some strange things start happening, and the student realizes that to save the day, she'll have to find that spell book.
I'm a sucker for books that involve someone researching the past, and then the stuff in the past being its own story. I also spent a day in Salem when I was on a business trip to Boston about ten years ago, and I enjoy reading books that take place in locations I've visited. I admit to giving a cheer when a character in the book asks the question that comes to mind when I see the current focus on witchcraft in Salem: the witch trials weren't actually about witchcraft, but rather were more Mean Girls: Colonial Edition, with none of the victims (in reality) being actual witches, as far as anyone can tell, so why do they act like Salem has some grand heritage in witchcraft? (Simple answer: tourist money.) This is certainly an interesting book if you're into that period of history.
The Postmistress by Sarah Blake is a World War II book with intersecting story lines. During the Blitz, an American radio reporter is trying to make sense of it all and trying to convey what's going on to an American public that's still focused on trying to stay out of the war. Then there are the people in the small Cape Cod town who listen to her broadcasts. And then the town's doctor goes to London to help in the Blitz. I liked a lot about this book and it was close to the kind of WWII book I might write if I were to write one that didn't have magic in it, but it does veer more to the literary side of things.
Then I switched over to science fiction and fantasy. I finally read Flinx Transcendent, the final book in the Flinx series by Alan Dean Foster. This series had a lot to do with me becoming a science fiction reader, and I think this was a nice wrap-up, though I'll probably have to re-read some of the older books because it really does draw from the entire series to wrap things up, and there were a few things that I didn't quite recall. I wouldn't be surprised to see more Flinx books because while this one answered all the questions and resolved all the ongoing plot lines, the impression was left that Flinx wouldn't be happy for long without adventures, so maybe now that the series is wrapped there might be standalones, unless Alan has other things he wants to write.
And then I found a new lightish, quirky fantasy series by Rachel Aaron. The first book is The Spirit Thief, and the next one is out this week. This had one of the more interesting magical systems I've seen. Many objects, both living and inanimate, have their own spirits, some of which are fully awakened and some of which are dormant. The wizards in this world are those that can hear and communicate with these spirits. The good ones develop a kind of symbiotic relationship with certain spirits that then mediate with all the other spirits, while the bad ones enslave spirits. And then there's the guy who just seems to flirt with the spirits so that they then want to bend over backwards to help him. He's the greatest thief around, possibly because he can persuade the wood in locked doors that it would feel a lot better without those irritating nails sticking through it. But he's not nearly as famous as he'd like to be, and he sets out to get the biggest bounty ever on his head. To do that, he decides to steal something really big. Like, say, a king. Only he neglected to do his research on the royal family dynamics, so he doesn't realize that leaving the throne vacant long enough to make his ransom demands will cause all sorts of problems that he'll then have to set right. Oops. This one was a ton of fun. I felt like the first book was just starting to get into the characters, and the excerpts from the second that are at the back make it look like they'll really be explored in more depth now that they're established.
This series is coming from Orbit, and they seem to be on my wavelength because they're putting out a lot of stuff I like lately. The editor for this book is actually a fan of mine, so I guess it makes sense that I might like what she likes enough to throw money at it. They're currently my dream publisher, so maybe she'll be throwing money at me soon. And now I'd better get to work to give them something they might want to publish.
November 1, 2010
Jekyll and Hyde Movies
I thought I'd recovered from the travel, but then last night I was lights-out at ten and just barely started waking up at eight this morning, so I must have been still a bit tired. I've come to the conclusion that my personal power source is inside my house, so if I'm away from home for any length of time, I will be tired, no matter what I'm doing while I'm away or what mode of travel I use (maybe I should try to find the source of my power so I can take it with me. And I think I just invented a new magical system that I will have to use in a book). I think I am recharged now, so I can get down to some serious work.
For the Monday after Halloween, I've got some Movie Monday discussions of Jekyll and Hyde movies. Not actual movies about the Jekyll and Hyde story, but rather movies that seem to have a split personality. It's weird how many movies like that I've stumbled upon lately.
First, I watched Up in the Air on HBO OnDemand not long before I left town. With this one, the problem wasn't so much with the movie itself as it was with me and my expectations. The movie seemed to be building into one kind of story, and then they did a huge reversal that made it something else, and that something else was less satisfying for me. I can't really get into it without spoiling it, and this was a major plot twist, so I don't want to spoil it. I can see that it was a perfectly valid creative choice and maybe they wanted to leave people unsettled and dissatisfied because that fit with the theme of the movie, but the cynic in me was thinking that they thought they had a far better chance of being treated like an Important Film by making that choice, and that says a lot about what gets valued in our society. It doesn't help that I don't find George Clooney at all attractive. He just radiates smug, and I get the feeling that I could never be as into him as he is into himself. Plus, I don't think he's that great an actor. He's pretty much the same in everything, unless he's doing an over-the-top caricature.
Since that movie left me with this unsettled sense of dismay, I grabbed onto the next thing that was coming on one of the HBO channels, Love Happens. It's a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Anniston, so I figured it couldn't leave me that unsettled, even if it wasn't any good. This one didn't have the one big Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation. Instead, it kept switching back and forth. It seemed to be two things that don't go together. It wasn't "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" but rather "you got your chocolate in my Dijon mustard." It seemed to be two entirely different movies spliced together in the editing room. The story is about a widower who has made a career out of dealing with his wife's death. He wrote a bestselling self-help book about dealing with grief and travels around the country doing grief seminars. Except, he really hasn't dealt with his own grief, and he's lying to himself and to everyone else about that. Meanwhile, he runs into a standard issue romantic comedy kooky free spirit and starts to fall for her, except, of course, he can't really get into a relationship until he truly deals with the death of his wife. I actually liked the parts of the movie that were about his seminars and the dealing with grief. The romantic comedy parts were totally unnecessary and so generic, and ultimately, how do you believe in the big romantic happy ending for a relationship that starts before the man deals with his grief over the death of his wife? It would have been a better film if it forgot about the romance and just focused on the relationships he was building with the participants in his seminars, and how they forced him into honesty.
But the movie still left me unsettled over one thing. I love animals, but I'm not an extremist about it. I'm not one of those people who is okay with a high human body count but who has a meltdown if one dog dies during a movie. But this movie did something that pissed me off royally. While he's starting to realize he isn't as okay as he says he is, this guy admits that his wife wanted him to take care of her pet bird, but he left it with his in-laws. He steals the bird from their house, takes it out to the woods, opens the cage, and lets it go. The soaring music and the imagery of the soaring bird give the impression that this is supposed to be some positive cathartic moment. But this bird is a pet, brought up in captivity (it even talks!). This act is the equivalent of taking your family dog out to the country and dumping it on the side of the road. It won't know how to find food or deal with predators. Not to mention that it's a tropical bird, so in Seattle it's in the wrong climate and may not have the right food appearing naturally. And it's introducing a non-native species into the ecosystem. I was seething through the rest of the movie because this struck me as incredibly irresponsible and cruel.
Then while I was in Denver, one afternoon I was taking a mid-afternoon tea break in my room and flipping through channels and came across something that had Paul Rudd in Nice Guy Romantic Comedy Mode (as differentiated from Frat Pack Jerk Mode). The woman he was with seemed nice and funny, and I was surprised that I couldn't place the movie at all. Then Eva Longoria showed up and I realized that it was Over Her Dead Body and then I knew why I hadn't seen it. I had to leave then, but then Sunday night when I realized that the Denver public television station was even worse than the one in Dallas and wasn't going to show the first episode of Sherlock because they were in pledge drive mode and first showed a ten-year-old Gordon Lightfoot concert and then started an infomercial about diabetes, I looked for something else to watch and caught the beginning of this movie, then watched just to see if it was as bad as I'd heard. It really had a bad case of Jekyll and Hyde. The scenes between Paul Rudd and the heroine were cute and funny, but then the movie went straight to hell when Eva Longoria showed up. It wasn't really her fault, just that they wrote a terrible character for her.
The movie is about the Bridezilla from Hell who gets her just desserts when an ice sculpture falls on her and kills her as she's micromanaging the set-up for her wedding reception. A year later, her finace seems to have given up on love, so his sister drags him to a psychic, hoping a message from beyond the grave encouraging him to move on will help. When something distracts the reading and he refuses to go back, the sister gives the psychic the dead finacee's diary and some inside scoop and begs her to use it to convince him it's real, then tell him his dead fiancee said to move on. She doesn't even have to try that hard with the psychic stuff because the two of them just hit it off and start dating. Meanwhile, the dead fiancee was such a bitch to the afterlife greeter that she didn't get her assignment of what to set right so that she can move on, so she assumes she's supposed to keep her fiance away from this fraud of a psychic, though that's just her rationalization because she really doesn't want him to move on and sees him dating someone else as cheating on her. Except that the psychic isn't a fraud and can actually see and hear her. Soon, the ghost and the living woman are fighting over the guy and the ghost is making the woman's life hell.
The main problem with the movie to me was that they seemed to entirely forget that the dead woman was a raging bitch, even while writing her as a raging bitch. She was killed because she was a raging bitch and missed her afterlife assignment because she was a raging bitch. And yet no one who knew her seemed to notice this. For one thing, it was hard to imagine her with her fiance. Unless it happened in the minute or so of the very beginning that I missed, we never saw them together in life. I know that nice guys do sometimes end up with bitches, but there's usually some kind of issue at work and until they deal with that issue and realize the mistakes they're making, they usually end up choosing the same type, not going for a down-to-earth free spirit. However, I can't imagine what a woman like that saw in him, other than that he was played by Paul Rudd. He was the kind of guy a woman like that would try to make over while dictating every aspect of his life. And yet he truly seemed to think that he'd lost the love of his life. There was no sense that maybe his holding back from trying to love again came from the guilt that came from his secret relief at being free from the bitch from hell. Meanwhile, his sister didn't hint, even behind his back, that the dead fiancee had been no prize and it really made no sense for him to be putting the rest of his life on hold because of her. It seemed like it was written this way to be "funny" and to play on Eva Longoria's Desperate Housewives persona rather than because anyone involved with the movie actually thought about it for five seconds. It might have worked better to have had the dead fiance just be a normal woman who really had loved the guy and who really did think that the psychic was lying to him for selfish reasons. Or else let her be a bitch, but then have that be a factor in the situation, where he feels guilty about being relieved and the sister sets up the scam because she doesn't want the bitch dictating the rest of his life. I'm ashamed to admit that I actually lay in bed the next morning after waking up, thinking of ways to rewrite the movie to make it make sense. And then to see if I could rewrite it enough to file off the serial numbers and make it look original. Now I kind of want to try to write a jealous ex ghost story.
For the Monday after Halloween, I've got some Movie Monday discussions of Jekyll and Hyde movies. Not actual movies about the Jekyll and Hyde story, but rather movies that seem to have a split personality. It's weird how many movies like that I've stumbled upon lately.
First, I watched Up in the Air on HBO OnDemand not long before I left town. With this one, the problem wasn't so much with the movie itself as it was with me and my expectations. The movie seemed to be building into one kind of story, and then they did a huge reversal that made it something else, and that something else was less satisfying for me. I can't really get into it without spoiling it, and this was a major plot twist, so I don't want to spoil it. I can see that it was a perfectly valid creative choice and maybe they wanted to leave people unsettled and dissatisfied because that fit with the theme of the movie, but the cynic in me was thinking that they thought they had a far better chance of being treated like an Important Film by making that choice, and that says a lot about what gets valued in our society. It doesn't help that I don't find George Clooney at all attractive. He just radiates smug, and I get the feeling that I could never be as into him as he is into himself. Plus, I don't think he's that great an actor. He's pretty much the same in everything, unless he's doing an over-the-top caricature.
Since that movie left me with this unsettled sense of dismay, I grabbed onto the next thing that was coming on one of the HBO channels, Love Happens. It's a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Anniston, so I figured it couldn't leave me that unsettled, even if it wasn't any good. This one didn't have the one big Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation. Instead, it kept switching back and forth. It seemed to be two things that don't go together. It wasn't "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" but rather "you got your chocolate in my Dijon mustard." It seemed to be two entirely different movies spliced together in the editing room. The story is about a widower who has made a career out of dealing with his wife's death. He wrote a bestselling self-help book about dealing with grief and travels around the country doing grief seminars. Except, he really hasn't dealt with his own grief, and he's lying to himself and to everyone else about that. Meanwhile, he runs into a standard issue romantic comedy kooky free spirit and starts to fall for her, except, of course, he can't really get into a relationship until he truly deals with the death of his wife. I actually liked the parts of the movie that were about his seminars and the dealing with grief. The romantic comedy parts were totally unnecessary and so generic, and ultimately, how do you believe in the big romantic happy ending for a relationship that starts before the man deals with his grief over the death of his wife? It would have been a better film if it forgot about the romance and just focused on the relationships he was building with the participants in his seminars, and how they forced him into honesty.
But the movie still left me unsettled over one thing. I love animals, but I'm not an extremist about it. I'm not one of those people who is okay with a high human body count but who has a meltdown if one dog dies during a movie. But this movie did something that pissed me off royally. While he's starting to realize he isn't as okay as he says he is, this guy admits that his wife wanted him to take care of her pet bird, but he left it with his in-laws. He steals the bird from their house, takes it out to the woods, opens the cage, and lets it go. The soaring music and the imagery of the soaring bird give the impression that this is supposed to be some positive cathartic moment. But this bird is a pet, brought up in captivity (it even talks!). This act is the equivalent of taking your family dog out to the country and dumping it on the side of the road. It won't know how to find food or deal with predators. Not to mention that it's a tropical bird, so in Seattle it's in the wrong climate and may not have the right food appearing naturally. And it's introducing a non-native species into the ecosystem. I was seething through the rest of the movie because this struck me as incredibly irresponsible and cruel.
Then while I was in Denver, one afternoon I was taking a mid-afternoon tea break in my room and flipping through channels and came across something that had Paul Rudd in Nice Guy Romantic Comedy Mode (as differentiated from Frat Pack Jerk Mode). The woman he was with seemed nice and funny, and I was surprised that I couldn't place the movie at all. Then Eva Longoria showed up and I realized that it was Over Her Dead Body and then I knew why I hadn't seen it. I had to leave then, but then Sunday night when I realized that the Denver public television station was even worse than the one in Dallas and wasn't going to show the first episode of Sherlock because they were in pledge drive mode and first showed a ten-year-old Gordon Lightfoot concert and then started an infomercial about diabetes, I looked for something else to watch and caught the beginning of this movie, then watched just to see if it was as bad as I'd heard. It really had a bad case of Jekyll and Hyde. The scenes between Paul Rudd and the heroine were cute and funny, but then the movie went straight to hell when Eva Longoria showed up. It wasn't really her fault, just that they wrote a terrible character for her.
The movie is about the Bridezilla from Hell who gets her just desserts when an ice sculpture falls on her and kills her as she's micromanaging the set-up for her wedding reception. A year later, her finace seems to have given up on love, so his sister drags him to a psychic, hoping a message from beyond the grave encouraging him to move on will help. When something distracts the reading and he refuses to go back, the sister gives the psychic the dead finacee's diary and some inside scoop and begs her to use it to convince him it's real, then tell him his dead fiancee said to move on. She doesn't even have to try that hard with the psychic stuff because the two of them just hit it off and start dating. Meanwhile, the dead fiancee was such a bitch to the afterlife greeter that she didn't get her assignment of what to set right so that she can move on, so she assumes she's supposed to keep her fiance away from this fraud of a psychic, though that's just her rationalization because she really doesn't want him to move on and sees him dating someone else as cheating on her. Except that the psychic isn't a fraud and can actually see and hear her. Soon, the ghost and the living woman are fighting over the guy and the ghost is making the woman's life hell.
The main problem with the movie to me was that they seemed to entirely forget that the dead woman was a raging bitch, even while writing her as a raging bitch. She was killed because she was a raging bitch and missed her afterlife assignment because she was a raging bitch. And yet no one who knew her seemed to notice this. For one thing, it was hard to imagine her with her fiance. Unless it happened in the minute or so of the very beginning that I missed, we never saw them together in life. I know that nice guys do sometimes end up with bitches, but there's usually some kind of issue at work and until they deal with that issue and realize the mistakes they're making, they usually end up choosing the same type, not going for a down-to-earth free spirit. However, I can't imagine what a woman like that saw in him, other than that he was played by Paul Rudd. He was the kind of guy a woman like that would try to make over while dictating every aspect of his life. And yet he truly seemed to think that he'd lost the love of his life. There was no sense that maybe his holding back from trying to love again came from the guilt that came from his secret relief at being free from the bitch from hell. Meanwhile, his sister didn't hint, even behind his back, that the dead fiancee had been no prize and it really made no sense for him to be putting the rest of his life on hold because of her. It seemed like it was written this way to be "funny" and to play on Eva Longoria's Desperate Housewives persona rather than because anyone involved with the movie actually thought about it for five seconds. It might have worked better to have had the dead fiance just be a normal woman who really had loved the guy and who really did think that the psychic was lying to him for selfish reasons. Or else let her be a bitch, but then have that be a factor in the situation, where he feels guilty about being relieved and the sister sets up the scam because she doesn't want the bitch dictating the rest of his life. I'm ashamed to admit that I actually lay in bed the next morning after waking up, thinking of ways to rewrite the movie to make it make sense. And then to see if I could rewrite it enough to file off the serial numbers and make it look original. Now I kind of want to try to write a jealous ex ghost story.
October 29, 2010
The Traveler Returns
I am now home from my travels and trying to get caught up. This was the longest I've been away from home in more than ten years. I do love to travel and see new places, but I also love my home and am quite the homebody. When I get home, I just want to hug my house. It was so lovely last night to use my own shower and sleep in my own bed, to have my sofa and my TV and my kitchen. It was probably more intense this time because I'd just spent more than 24 hours on a train, so not only did I have all of the above, but those things weren't constantly moving and shaking. It was several hours after I got home before it stopped feeling like I was still on a train.
So, first the convention. I don't think I acted too much like a raving fangirl when I met Katherine Kurtz, and I think I played it moderately cool when I ended up sitting next to her at the big, mass booksigning. I got her autograph on a book I'd brought, and then she actually picked up one of my books and flipped through it, which caused a major internal meltdown, of the "Yikes! Katherine Kurtz is reading one of my books!" variety. Wouldn't you know, it didn't occur to me to get a photo with her. After the signing, I did hang out with her a bit because we went together to watch the boat races at the hotel pool. They had a competition for building a working, self-propelled boat out of a milk carton. Mostly though, I ended up spending a lot of the convention chatting with her husband, who was very interesting. We had some similar things in our background, and we'd read some of the same books, so there was a lot of conversational fodder. One fun bit of news: Deryni Rising is under development for film (which I think means it's at about the same status level as the Enchanted, Inc. movie -- option and script).
I was surprised by how many people I knew at the con, but there were people I knew from Worldcon a couple of years ago and others who seem to overlap with the regional cons I usually attend. I also met some interesting new people. For instance, I spent much of Sunday afternoon chatting with Carol Berg.
I got to do some sightseeing around Denver on Monday and even got to go up into the mountains a little, where it was very cold. Then it was off to Chicago by train. The thing I liked most about the train trip, aside from seeing the country in a different way than you do by car, was that for meals in the dining car, they put you at tables with other people, so you meet some really interesting people along the way. I thought Iowa, at least the part we went through, was absolutely beautiful. The fall colors were going strong, and there were all these farms with the white farmhouses and red barns, like a picture on one of those scenic jigsaw puzzles. And then all the little towns we went through were very picturesque.
We missed the storms in Chicago, thanks to the train being a couple of hours behind schedule (I think for some of it, they deliberately slowed down to miss the storms), then after a night at a hotel (a bed that didn't move and shake!), it was time for the train back home. We saw St. Louis at night and got a great view of the arch. Then the next morning, my favorite part of the trip was a part that was unscheduled. There was a problem on the tracks ahead, so we got a detour on a freight line through northeast Texas, on a track that was pretty far from the road a lot of the way. It was like we were tunneling through a forest. I sat in the observation car and just stared out the window. Then it was fun for me to be on the train tracks that parallel the highway I drive to visit my parents because I was seeing a lot of the familiar landmarks, but from a different perspective. The area near where my parents live was probably my favorite scenery of the entire trip. It really is a beautiful part of the country.
While I was in Denver, I met with my agent, and she really liked the project I'd been putting together. Now I have some work to do to get it ready for submission, so I have an excuse to hide in my cave for a while. I've already talked myself out of going grocery shopping today because I can survive until tomorrow, when I have to go out for a dance class, anyway, but I do need to go to the library to get a reference book for all this work I have to do, so I can't be a total recluse, even if I do love my house.
So, first the convention. I don't think I acted too much like a raving fangirl when I met Katherine Kurtz, and I think I played it moderately cool when I ended up sitting next to her at the big, mass booksigning. I got her autograph on a book I'd brought, and then she actually picked up one of my books and flipped through it, which caused a major internal meltdown, of the "Yikes! Katherine Kurtz is reading one of my books!" variety. Wouldn't you know, it didn't occur to me to get a photo with her. After the signing, I did hang out with her a bit because we went together to watch the boat races at the hotel pool. They had a competition for building a working, self-propelled boat out of a milk carton. Mostly though, I ended up spending a lot of the convention chatting with her husband, who was very interesting. We had some similar things in our background, and we'd read some of the same books, so there was a lot of conversational fodder. One fun bit of news: Deryni Rising is under development for film (which I think means it's at about the same status level as the Enchanted, Inc. movie -- option and script).
I was surprised by how many people I knew at the con, but there were people I knew from Worldcon a couple of years ago and others who seem to overlap with the regional cons I usually attend. I also met some interesting new people. For instance, I spent much of Sunday afternoon chatting with Carol Berg.
I got to do some sightseeing around Denver on Monday and even got to go up into the mountains a little, where it was very cold. Then it was off to Chicago by train. The thing I liked most about the train trip, aside from seeing the country in a different way than you do by car, was that for meals in the dining car, they put you at tables with other people, so you meet some really interesting people along the way. I thought Iowa, at least the part we went through, was absolutely beautiful. The fall colors were going strong, and there were all these farms with the white farmhouses and red barns, like a picture on one of those scenic jigsaw puzzles. And then all the little towns we went through were very picturesque.
We missed the storms in Chicago, thanks to the train being a couple of hours behind schedule (I think for some of it, they deliberately slowed down to miss the storms), then after a night at a hotel (a bed that didn't move and shake!), it was time for the train back home. We saw St. Louis at night and got a great view of the arch. Then the next morning, my favorite part of the trip was a part that was unscheduled. There was a problem on the tracks ahead, so we got a detour on a freight line through northeast Texas, on a track that was pretty far from the road a lot of the way. It was like we were tunneling through a forest. I sat in the observation car and just stared out the window. Then it was fun for me to be on the train tracks that parallel the highway I drive to visit my parents because I was seeing a lot of the familiar landmarks, but from a different perspective. The area near where my parents live was probably my favorite scenery of the entire trip. It really is a beautiful part of the country.
While I was in Denver, I met with my agent, and she really liked the project I'd been putting together. Now I have some work to do to get it ready for submission, so I have an excuse to hide in my cave for a while. I've already talked myself out of going grocery shopping today because I can survive until tomorrow, when I have to go out for a dance class, anyway, but I do need to go to the library to get a reference book for all this work I have to do, so I can't be a total recluse, even if I do love my house.
