Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 4

Reading Slump

I’ve been in a weird reading slump since I started the moving process. I’ve only read about two novels (I’m almost done with the second) since I started packing back in early April, and that’s slow for me. I might manage to read a few pages at night before I go to sleep, but if I sit down to just read, I get distracted and restless and end up getting up to do something.

I checked a bunch of books on gardening out of the library, but I couldn’t even focus on those other than flipping through and looking at the pictures. I realized I’m nowhere near being ready for that, and what I need now isn’t a book that tells me what to plant but rather a book that tells me what to kill. I gave up and returned them all to the library.

Now that I’m finishing that second novel, I need to find something new to read. I have plenty of books on the to-be-read shelf, but if it’s languishing there, I’m probably not super interested in it. I need to make a library trip to find something that makes me want to sit down and just read.

Fortunately, I don’t seem to be in the kind of slump where I’m not interested in any books. It’s mostly been a distraction issue. But I probably need something that really captivates me and that isn’t too complicated to get over the distraction. Summer tends to be my chick lit/romcom phase, and I can usually tear through one of those pretty quickly. That might make a good thing to get for a starter book for getting back in reading mode. I have a few more curtains to hang and a piece of furniture to put together, and then there’s that crazy yard, but otherwise I’m getting to a point where I should be able to allow myself to sit and read and relax on a Sunday afternoon instead of working around the house.

I don’t think I have anything particular on the schedule for the weekend unless my next-door neighbors throw another spontaneous party like they did last weekend, other than church Sunday morning and an outing Sunday evening, so I think I’ll hit the library on Friday when I go out to run errands and then plan to spend some time during the weekend just sitting and reading and see if I can get back into the swing of things.

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Revising and Weeding

I’ve realized that the two main things I’m focusing on right now, gardening and revising a book, are actually somewhat similar. Both involve nurturing good things to make them better and killing and getting rid of bad things.

Or, as I’ve joked, gardening is satisfying because you get the joy of nurturing the life of beautiful things and the catharsis of killing things you don’t like.

In dealing with my crazy yard, I’m digging through all the mess to find the good things hidden among the weeds and invasive plants. Removing or killing the bad plants reveals the good, pretty plants and makes them healthier. It opens up the space and makes the flowers “pop.”

Sometimes, a plant that needs to be removed isn’t necessarily bad. It’s just excessive or in the wrong place. I have raspberry plants all over the yard. They may produce fruit, which would be nice, but in the flowerbeds they’re ugly and thorny. Meanwhile, all the trees in the yard have been allowed to seed offspring. I love redbuds and maples, but I don’t want that many of them, and I don’t want them in places where they’d cast shade on all the flowers. There are plenty of trees on this lot, enough to make me feel like I live in the woods. I can do “forest bathing” in my backyard. I’ve joked that I’m one of the missing Entwives from The Lord of the Rings, I love trees so much. The trees were one of the reasons I wanted this house. But I need to kill some of them and remove them so all the other plants can thrive and so that the trees themselves can be healthy.

Revising a book works the same way. You have to get rid of the stuff that doesn’t belong so that the good parts can shine. There are parts that keep the good bits from standing out or making sense. Sometimes meaning can be distorted or clouded by not using exactly the right word or by using too many words.

And there may be stuff that’s good — fun details, vivid writing, beautiful prose — that doesn’t belong. It’s good on its own, but it’s in the wrong place, where it slows down the pacing or changes the tone of the scene. It needs to be moved to a better place or even eliminated.

I’m not sure whether it’s good for me to be doing similar kinds of work in the two main areas I’m working on right now because it keeps me in the same mindset or if I need to maybe mix it up and not be having to make the same kinds of decisions all day. But this is the work that needs to be done now, so maybe I should just add some other kind of work that’s different.

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The Abandoned Garden

I may have vastly underestimated what a garden that had been abandoned for years would be like when I wrote Tea and Empathy. I’m facing the same thing, and it’s absolutely crazy.

From what I understand, the person who used to live in this house had done a lot of work on the yard, planting a lot of trees and flowers. Then he had some kind of mental health issues and stopped maintaining the house and yard, becoming a hoarder, so the house and yard were full of junk. Then he abandoned the house entirely. A few years later, the people I bought it from bought it, cleared out the junk and restored and remodeled the house. They took down some trees that were too close to the house and must have cut down everything in the lawn because it was just about bare when I looked at the place, with only a few daffodils coming up around the shrubs and trees that were left.

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The yard the day I looked at the house and decided to buy it.

I first saw the house in late March, then started moving in early April. And then the lawn exploded. So much stuff sprang up. A lot of it was weeds, but a lot of it was good plants, and the trick has been telling the difference. I figure that any of the good stuff that’s survived on its own all this time is a good plant to keep around because it means I won’t have to baby it. I’ve tried using the identification feature on my phone, with mixed results. There are some things I know it’s right about, some things I know it’s wrong about, and different photos of the same plant will be identified as different things. Then there are things I thought it was wrong about that it turns out to be right about.

There are masses of daylilies all over the front, side, and back yard, in huge clumps. I understand they need to be divided and spread out more at the end of the growing season. These have been on their own for a long time and seem to be doing okay, so I don’t know if I’ll bother doing anything to them.

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The yard this morning. It’s a bit overwhelming.

There are hostas everywhere, a number of varieties, up under trees and in flowerbeds. There’s a big lilac bush, a couple of dogwood trees of a variety that keeps blooms for a long time, and a huge redbud tree. There’s a mass of spirea that the bees and butterflies are loving. There’s a bunch of plants that may be milkweed. Whatever it is, the bees and butterflies are all over it. I’m generally keeping anything the bees and butterflies like.

One thing the phone may have been right about, after all, is this ugly, thorny thing I was sure was a weed but that the phone said was raspberry plants. I found some back against the fence that may not have been cut down that are producing berries. I met someone who knew the man who used to live here, and she said he did grow raspberries. But they’ve spread. They’re all over both the front and back yards. I’d pondered leaving them alone until the fall and then transplanting them to a better place, but there’s a whole thicket farther up the hill, and that should be enough raspberries. I don’t want them all over the yard because they’re thorny and ugly. And, to be honest, I’m not a huge fan of raspberries. They have gritty little seeds and not a lot of flavor (though that may be because I’ve only had supermarket raspberries. I don’t know what these will be like). I doubt I’ll get enough for jam, but we’ll see.

There are some plants that I know are invasive. They’re the first things local gardeners warn me about. One is a plant called garlic mustard, and it’s all over the yard. Pulling it up is a massive undertaking. I got the plants from last year that were going to seed, and now I have to get this year’s plants before they can go to seed. The trick is that they look similar to other plants that are growing in the yard, so I have to be careful what I pull, and there’s so much of it that it leaves the ground bare when I dig them all up. I’m throwing wildflower seeds into the bare spots.

Then there’s something called tree of heaven, which is apparently very invasive, very aggressive, and even spreads a substance that’s toxic to other plants, plus it’s the host plant for the spotted lanternfly, another invasive species that’s a threat to the local grape growers at the wineries. There must have been a big one growing here that got cut down because another was trying to grow from the stump. I normally try to avoid much use of chemicals in gardening, but this is one where you cut it down and then poison the heck out of it. I’ve been cutting these down and pulling up seedlings when I find them.

I’ve got a lot of something that’s either catalpa or an invasive called princess tree. Either way, they’re very fast-growing because there was nothing there in late March and now they’re taller than I am. I’m killing the ones close to the house because I don’t want trees right against the house.

The previous owner didn’t leave any herbs that I’ve found. The raspberries seem to be the only edible plants (well, supposedly you can cook and eat the garlic mustard, but I’m not going to try, and there are some wild strawberries, but apparently they’re not edible). So that’s different from Elwyn’s garden.

Unfortunately for me, the garden isn’t at all related to my work and earns me no money, unlike Elwyn, so I’m fitting in that work around my writing work. I’m spending about an hour a day pulling weeds and cutting things back. Right now, I’m just trying to keep it from being an eyesore. I may have to wait until next spring to actually plan what I want to do with the lot. I’m hoping to keep it mostly natural with ground cover and flowers instead of grass. And preferably fewer weeds.

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Resting the Book

In addition to finding that I’d written my new next-door neighbor, name and all, into the book I’m revising more than two years before I met her, this review of the book has taught me a lot of things. One of them is that the advice to let a draft rest before you go back to work on it is really sound. You discover so many things when the book isn’t fresh in your mind, when you don’t remember why you wrote something a certain way.

One thing I’ve discovered because of this is the way that story elements can linger, even after you’ve removed them. In my earliest draft of this book, I’d given my hero a flaw, a fear that he’d have to overcome in order to prevail and achieve his goals. I ended up cutting this fear in later drafts because I never could come up with a way to make it relevant in the climax of the book. There were other things the hero learned, but this fear wasn’t an issue for him. I tried to keep this fear as just a character trait, a quirk like Indiana Jones and his fear of snakes — it doesn’t really affect the plot, and there’s never something he doesn’t manage to do because of snakes, but the fear raises the stakes because we know just how much he’s struggling. And then I realized I was devoting way too much time to something that ended up being less and less relevant as I worked through the story (he didn’t have to face his fear to get to the thing he wanted, unlike Indy finding that the Ark was surrounded by snakes).

But traces of it remained even when I cut the direct references. I’d structured the opening scene in a way that would ramp up the tension because of this fear, and that structure remained. Without the fear, I realized there was no point to this structure. It was only when I let the book rest for a while that this became obvious to me. When I didn’t remember why I did it that way, I was able to look at the structure objectively and wonder why I had that extra step in the scene that didn’t need to be there.

There are a few other parts in the book where the hero is reluctant to do the thing he used to fear. I’d deleted the reference to the fear, but I’d left in the reluctance and the internal conflict about it.

It was only through thinking about all this that I finally realized why I was never able to make the fear work in the climax of the story: He overcomes this fear in the opening scene. This is a fear he has to face down all the time, and he does the thing even though it’s unpleasant (again, like Indy and the snakes). There’s no suspense at the end whether he’ll be able to do that thing in the climax of the story. We know he can do it, even if he hates it. But there would have been no story at all if he hadn’t been able to overcome the fear in the opening scene. He wouldn’t even have been in the opening scene if he hadn’t overcome that fear previously.

I think it would have been a fun character quirk, but there were a lot of other things that were more important to incorporate into the story and it was already way too long, so I didn’t have room to weave in something that ended up not mattering, and there’s not even a critical moment where that fear raises the stakes for something the hero has to do, where his goal and his fear are in conflict and we know he’ll go for the goal, but it’s going to be unpleasant (like the snakes around the Ark).

The other thing letting something rest is good for is spotting jokes that don’t work. I’ll come across a line that makes no sense, and only after reading it a few times do I remember that I put that in as a joke. If I don’t get my own joke, it has to go.

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Life Meets Art Again

I’ve mentioned before that my life seems to be reflecting my books. After creating my idealized small town in my mystery series, I ended up moving to a town that has a lot in common with the one I created. After writing about a woman stumbling into a hidden village, I moved to a town tucked into a valley.

The trend has continued. I wrote about Elwyn moving into an abandoned cottage with an overgrown abandoned garden. Well, the house I bought (which is somewhat cottage-like) had been abandoned for years before the person I bought it from bought it at auction and restored it. The yard had been very carefully landscaped by the former resident, but it’s been allowed to run wild, so I’m having to gradually dig out all the weeds to find the good plants. I don’t think I wrote nearly enough work to get the garden back under control in the books. In my case, it mostly seems to be flowering plants and trees, not herbs. I haven’t run across any herbs. I have one tree that might be a fruit tree, but I’m not sure, and there are some plants my phone’s photo identification software tells me are raspberries, but I’m really doubtful.

And then there’s the fact that I seem to have moved next door to one of my characters. I’ve been re-reading a book I’ve been working on off and on for years, preparing to do another round of revisions. And then I realized that one of the secondary characters who appears later in the book, a character I created when I still lived in Texas, has the same rather unusual name as my next-door neighbor for the house I just moved into. Then the other evening when I ran into this neighbor and was chatting, I realized that the neighbor actually looks a lot like I imagine this character to look. She even has a similar personality. It’s eerie. I’m going to have to rename the character. The description on its own is common enough that I don’t think anyone would read the book and think I was writing about my neighbor (she’s well-known in town), but with the name, it would make it a bit creepy.

With the town, it’s clear in my writing that this was something I was looking for, even if it was unconscious at the time, and I found what I wanted. I had no idea how crazy the yard was going to be because the person who restored the house had cut everything back, and it was late winter when I looked at the house. The yard didn’t explode until after I moved in. But moving next door to a character I wrote years ago, with the same name, is a little unsettling. Now I’m going to have to try not to think about the character when I see my neighbor. Changing the name should help.

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The New Normal

I have decided that June will be back to “normal” routine and establishing a new normal routine that works for my current situation. I’ve been living kind of like in vacation mode during the move, and now that I’m mostly settled in, I need to figure out what normal life will be like here. I can’t spend the days mostly goofing off and occasionally putting something away and call it “moving” anymore. I have been doing some writing work this week, but I need some structure and routine.

That means the weekend will be spent doing the last arranging and organizing. I won’t be entirely done, and there will be some fine tuning, but I want to be where it doesn’t look so much like I’m moving. No boxes or stacks in my main living space. Things I use regularly unpacked and put away.

I also need to get back into an exercise habit. While I was actively moving and hauling boxes around, that sufficed, but now I need to be more deliberate about it. I’m more active in the house than I was in the apartment, since there are stairs and I have work to do in the yard, but I’ve been a bit of a slug in between. I have been walking to church on Sundays, but I need to walk more regularly than that. I can easily walk downtown, and I rather enjoy that on weekday mornings when it’s quiet. There’s also a huge historic cemetery a couple of streets away (that’s the view from one of my office windows when the tree in my front yard isn’t fully leafed out) that’s like a park. It has walking paths and hills. Once I get the last of the boxes cleared out from my spare room, I want to be able to use that as exercise space. I’ll be able to spread out my yoga mat.

I got out of the habit of working in an office while I was in the apartment, so I’m trying to get back to that. I’m typing this at my desk. But this week, my main work has been re-reading a book prior to doing a round of revisions, and I find that my posture gets weird at a desk when I’m just reading, so my back and shoulders hurt. I finally got my den set up this week when my sofa was delivered, and it’s been rainy, so I’ve spent the rainy days sitting on my sofa, reading my book, and looking up to watch it rain. One of the big reasons I decided to buy this house was a vivid mental image of sitting on a sofa in the den and watching it rain, so I decided I needed to do that.

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My den, now mostly set up and ready for a day of drinking tea, reading, and watching the rain.

The other routine I need to develop is housework. I’ve been so busy setting up and organizing that I’ve neglected the maintenance work, and I need to figure out what to do and when to do it. I need to also factor in lawn and garden work and schedule time for that. And I need to do more menu planning and get back to cooking. I relied pretty heavily on frozen meals and convenience food during the move. I’ve done some cooking, but I need to plan enough to make sure I have the ingredients, since I tried to use up as much as possible before I moved and now I need to start from scratch in stocking my pantry, especially since I now have a lot more storage space around the kitchen.

I often resist scheduling, but I find it really helps me because it not only means I get stuff done, but it also means I’m more likely to do fun stuff. If I don’t plan and schedule, the whole day can go by, and then I realize that not only did I not do anything productive, but I also didn’t use the time to enjoy myself.

I’m not even the newest person on the street anymore, so I have to get out of “I just moved” mode. While I was moving in, the house on one side of me was being remodeled to sell, and the new buyers closed on it this week. I haven’t met them yet, but I hope they fit into our quirky little street full of artsy and creative types. The neighbor on the other side is a fashion designer/textile artist, and there’s a radio DJ at the end of the street. The person across from me is very counter-culture (in a fun way), and then there’s me, the novelist. Supposedly there’s another writer around the corner, but I haven’t met him yet.

Now I need to unpack a few boxes and set up a couple more bookcases.

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20 Years of Enchanted, Inc.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of the first Enchanted, Inc. book. I think yesterday is actually the anniversary of the first time I saw it in a bookstore. The big books may have strict “don’t open this box until this date” policies, but with books like mine, no one cares when it goes on the shelf. I remember stopping by a bookstore on the Sunday before the book’s Tuesday release date and being surprised to find it there on the New Releases table at a Borders (yes, the book is so old that it was sold at Borders).

But then when I went around to area bookstores on the actual release date, when it was supposed to be on shelves, it wasn’t at half the stores I went to. I don’t know if there was a delay in unboxing the books and getting them on the shelves, since the Monday of that week was a holiday, or if they just didn’t plan to stock the book at all in those stores. It was a huge emotional roller coaster as I drove around to bookstores. When I found it in a store, I’d chat with the staff and sign their copies and leave the store feeling like a famous author. When I didn’t, I’d slink out, hoping no one noticed me. It tells you something about how much turnover my wardrobe gets that I still have the top I bought for those release day visits hanging in my closet. Hey, it was cute, and it’s fairly classic, so I don’t think it’s out of style. If it ever gets warm here this summer, I’ll have to wear it.

I guess because it was shelved early in some places, I was already getting e-mail from readers who wanted more books, which was exciting. I was also getting “I heard about this book but I can’t find it in stores” e-mails, which was encouraging that people wanted it, but frustrating that people who wanted it couldn’t find it, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I just had to tell people to ask for it, and the stores could order it (and maybe if people were asking for it, they might get copies to put on the shelf).

The book wasn’t considered a particular success. It got great reviews and had really good sell-through, but it wasn’t a bestseller. Still, it just keeps plugging along and is still in print all these years later, when some of the books the publisher actually pushed at that time have gone out of print. They did do a little more promo with the next book and they bought two more books (the first contract was for two books), so it did well enough to get that. The book launched that phase of my career and brought me a lot of recognition. The book has been published around the world. I have translations in Dutch, German, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, and Indonesian (or some language from that area — not sure exactly). It’s been optioned for film by Universal Studios and had a screenplay written by the same writer who wrote I, Tonya and Hope Floats, but the movie never got made and the option lapsed. There was a team including a writer who worked on Angel as showrunner trying to get networks interested in a series, with no bites. More recently, it was optioned by Disney+ for a streaming series, but they let the option lapse. Really, my whole experience with this book has been a roller coaster, with lots of exciting highs followed by letdowns, but it just keeps plugging as more people continue to discover that universe and those characters.

Thanks to all who’ve been with me along the way, whether you found these books (and me) back in 2005 and have been following my work since then or whether you just found me recently. It’s the readers who keep me writing (literally, because if people weren’t buying books, I’d have to quit writing and get a real job).

I wonder what the next twenty years will bring.

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Shelving

With the new storage stuff I bought this week, I’ve managed to finally get all my books, DVDs, and CDs shelved. I was surprised to find that I even had room left over. I guess I really purged the books before I moved from Texas.

Putting things on shelves forced me to look at what I have, and it’s an effort not to get sidetracked. When I’m putting books on shelves, I catch myself thinking about how much I enjoyed a particular book, and the temptation is to open it and start reading. If I’m not careful, I’ll find myself a couple of hours later sitting on the floor with a book, still surrounded by the books that need to be shelved. CDs work the same way, with being reminded of everything I have and how long it’s been since I listened to that music, but at least there I can put a CD on to play while I continue to work. It’s not like reading, where I have to stop what I’m doing to read.

I’ve noticed that it was good for my budget when the movie theaters and music stores stopped being so common in malls. I seemed to have had a habit of seeing a movie, then going straight to the music store to buy the soundtrack. I listened to the soundtrack a lot for a couple of weeks, then totally forgot about it (and sometimes about the movie). I found soundtracks for movies I hardly remember. For a lot of them, it wasn’t so much that I loved the movie as it was that the soundtrack functioned like a mix tape, combining songs I liked in a way I wouldn’t have been able to buy together otherwise. Romantic comedies tend to use jazzy standards on their soundtracks, so that was a good way to buy that kind of music, whether or not the movies were memorable. Still, there are one or two CDs I found that had me wondering why I felt compelled to buy them. Now that most of the music stores have closed and most theaters don’t seem to be in malls anymore, at least I have time to calm down after seeing a movie before I’m in a place to buy a soundtrack rather than having a music store right there while I’m still on the emotional high from the end of the movie.

I need to organize my CDs better so I can find what I want right away instead of going through all the shelves in two rooms. I’ll need to move most of the CDs I use as writing music to the office and keep out the CDs I tend to sing along with, since those are a distraction. Then again, the writing music tends to be good reading music, but the den is only a few steps away from the office, so it’s not a major effort to move a CD from one place to another, but I want to shelve them where I’ll know I can find them.

Shelving the To Be Read books reminded me of things that have been lingering there a long time. My recent reading has been the Timothy Zahn follow ups to his early 90s Star Wars trilogy. I wasn’t crazy about all the Star Wars books that came out during that time, but I liked those, and I bought his other ones, but for some reason never got to them. I’ve been doing a project to rewatch all the Star Wars movies and TV shows in storyline order, so I guess I had Star Wars on the mind when I was packing and I pulled out those books to read during the move. Of course, that whole timeline has been erased by the sequel films and the new continuity created around them, including all the TV series that take place at around the same time that these books would have, but it’s interesting seeing where it was all going. I was a guest of honor at a convention with Timothy Zahn and had a chance to get to know him. Oddly, when I think of him now, I think of knitting because I was frantically working on a baby shower gift during that convention, and he helped me search for my cable needle when I dropped it. He was fascinated with what I was making and how it all worked, since the blanket I was making had a lot of fancy stitches. It’s weird reading Star Wars while thinking about knitting.

My next task is getting all the clothes put away. I’m getting new ideas for outfits, since I’m seeing pieces in different contexts, next to things I wouldn’t have normally put with them. I have to put together a couple of portable wardrobes that will go in the basement for off-season and rarely worn things, and then I should have room in the closet for clothes I wear regularly.

I hope to be done with the bulk of the setting up by the end of the month. There will be fine-tuning as I adjust to living in this space, but I won’t be spending the bulk of my time on it, and I can get back into a work routine. I’ve fallen into some really bad habits while normal life has been suspended.

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The Epic Shopping Excursion

My adventure this week was a road trip to buy things for my house. One downside to the place I’m living now is that it’s a smallish, fairly remote town without a lot of the big stores. And one downside to my house is that the rooms are small and the doors are narrow, which limits the furniture I can get. I haven’t been able to find a loveseat or chair for my den that I can get through the door, whether the sliding door from the deck or the interior door (and the interior stairs are narrow). So I had to resort to something like Ikea, where you can assemble the furniture inside the house. I didn’t want to buy a loveseat without trying it out, which meant a road trip to the nearest Ikea, which is in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., more than two hours away (more or less depending on traffic). There were also decorative items that I wanted from another store they don’t have here but that’s near the Ikea.

The weather yesterday was good for a trip, so I loaded up with road snacks and headed out to drive across northern Virginia. It was actually a lovely drive, following the Blue Ridge Mountains much of the way, then crossing the mountains. I was surprised by how little traffic I ran into. The route my phone sent me on had me mostly driving through the woods, even after I got off the freeway, and suddenly I was at the mall where Ikea was. The traffic was a little worse on the way home because it was the beginning of rush hour, but it still wasn’t as bad as I feared for the D.C. area. The drive from my house in Texas to the Ikea there was shorter, but this longer drive was much less stressful.

I have a loveseat on order — the one I liked was the one people seemed to gravitate toward to sit on while the people they were with were shopping, which is a good sign — and after a break to have a Swedish meatball lunch I bought a bunch of organizational things. After that (and picking up some cinnamon rolls), I headed to the other store to get throw pillows, kitchen canisters, and a footstool. Now I have just about everything I need to set up my house, and it’ll be a lot more homey once the loveseat is delivered (I could have fit it in my car, but even if I opened the boxes and moved pieces one at a time, I didn’t think I could get the main piece up the stairs by myself, and I didn’t want to count on drafting a neighbor to help without checking with him first, so I had it delivered).

My living room color scheme is navy and ivory. I’ve already got a navy and ivory patterned rug. The sofa is a sort of ivory color, and I’ve got navy velvet throw pillows, footstool, and curtains. With all that velvet, it should be nice and cozy.

But today I’m giving myself permission to not do any work on the house (unless I really want to). I’m doing some writing work and putting my feet up because yesterday was a long, tiring day, not just the driving, but also pushing a very full cart through an Ikea, then loading and later unloading the car. I am looking forward to having it all done so I don’t have to think about the house, though then it will be time to focus on the yard. Today it’s a month since I started living in the house, so I figure I’ve done pretty well. I’m the sort of person who likes to be settled within a week or so, but I had to get so much furniture and organizational stuff, and I had to figure out where things would go, which took me longer.

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Revived Obsession

In addition to being distracted by trying to get my house set up to the point that it’s a livable space I can actually work in, I’ve had an additional distraction because the final season of Andor has been on, starting the day after I moved in. It ended this week, and I haven’t quite recovered because it’s reawakened and re-energized my Star Wars obsession that started when I saw the first movie in the theater when I was 9. It’s waxed and waned over the years since then, but this series is hitting me where I am now in a big way. It’s very much Star Wars for grown-ups.

There’s been a belief, promoted by George Lucas himself, ever since the prequel movies came out that “Star Wars is for kids,” but that’s as much of a retcon (retroactive continuity, when you decide something and claim that it was always true) as the fact that Darth Vader was Luke’s father and Leia was his sister (the idea that Darth Vader was Luke’s father was initially brought up as a joke by a friend at a dinner party when Lucas was outlining The Empire Strikes Back, then once they brainstormed it a bit, they decided it worked. The fact that Leia was Luke’s sister came up when outlining Return of the Jedi when they needed a reason Luke would drop his refusal to fight Vader, and protecting a sister was what they decided on).

The original movie was pure Boomer (and Silent Generation) bait. It drew on all the space adventure serials that played before Saturday matinees when those generations were kids, as well as tropes from the Westerns that were popular for those generations. It wasn’t kids clamoring to see that first movie. They were brought by their parents (like me — my family will never let me forget that I emphatically did not want to go see it). It was very kid-friendly in that the violence was fairly sanitized (in spite of having one of the highest body counts in all of movie history, given that an entire planet is destroyed). There’s no on-screen blood or gore. When Obi-Wan Kenobi is killed, we don’t see a decapitated body. He just vanishes. There’s comic relief from the droids, and Luke is young enough to be relatable and aspirational to kids without being an annoying kid character. But the main appeal to kids was that it was an adult movie we could see and enjoy and feel grown-up about seeing. It didn’t pander to kids. In today’s entertainment language, it’s “four quadrant entertainment,” which means that all the demographic groups can enjoy it together — fun for the whole family!

It wasn’t until later that they realized they had something kids loved. It took them nearly a year after the original release of the movie before they started making Star Wars toys. The Empire Strikes Back was even more mature and actually less kid-friendly. There was more on-screen violence that wasn’t the sanitized “pew, pew, pew” of blaster fire. Characters got injured and bloody. Han was tortured. Lucas was criticized for the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi for being ready-made merchandising, but I believe his rationale that it was about the story, that he wanted something small, primitive, and innocent helping bring down the Empire (and bonus if they’d make good toys). Even if there was a cute factor seemingly aimed at kids, the thematic issues in that movie are pretty deep.

It was only when they came back more than a decade after the original movies with the prequels that they went all-in with that “Star Wars is for kids” line, with elements that were deliberately aimed at child interest, and they then made animated series that were clearly targeted toward kids (even though they ended up going rather dark and with some heavy themes).

But when we got to Rogue One, there was nothing child-friendly about it. The funny droid sidekick is a snarky killer, and that’s really the only comic relief. I’ve called it the Saving Private Ryan of Star Wars. It’s serious, dark, violent, and brilliant. It stood to reason that the prequel series leading up to it would be similarly serious. It’s about surviving under an autocratic regime, the stirrings of rebellion, and just how hard and dangerous revolution is, requiring great personal sacrifice by some so that all can live free. It’s very heavy, and the deep political themes probably wouldn’t be of much interest to most kids. I doubt it would have caught my imagination the way the original movie did when I was a kid. It’s about sneaking around and conversations rather than space battles and the action sequences are riots that turn into massacres.

But it’s an in-depth look at the Star Wars universe and the ordinary people who live there, not just the princesses, politicians, and Jedi Knights that we’ve seen in other movies. It’s the mechanics, shopkeepers, farmers, bureaucrats, and other people trying to get by in an increasingly hostile galaxy, and it’s about the people who have to keep to the shadows to try to build their movement. We get a sense of daily life in that galaxy. We see their homes, their kitchens and bedrooms, where they go on vacation. It’s a chance to really wallow in that universe and see multiple aspects of it.

And that’s made the rest of that universe more interesting. It all has more depth and texture, and that’s why I’m getting back into it the way I was when I was 9-14 and the original movies were coming out, and it was all fresh and new to me. After this week’s Andor finale, I’ve rewatched Rogue One, which is even more heartbreaking now, and tonight I’ll go back to that original movie that started it all, knowing what happened to set up that whole situation and just what was sacrificed along the way.

Now we’ll see if this current wave of obsession has the same effect the first wave had, since that was what kicked off my wanting to be a writer and tell stories. Maybe it’ll inspire even more story ideas.

 

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