Kay Keppler's Blog, page 10

Happy birthday, Susan B. Anthony!

I missed wishing everyone a happy Valentine's Day, so I looked up holidays for February 15. Check it out! Some good ones. First off, Susan B. Anthony's birthday.

Susan B. Anthony was born to Quaker parents with long activist traditions on February 15, 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts. She campaigned for the abolition of slavery, women's right to their own property and earnings, and women's labor organizations. In 1900, Anthony persuaded  the University of Rochester to admit women. She was a tireless supporter of women's suffrage and was arrested in 1872 for voting, but legal maneuvering meant that her case never went to the Supreme Court. Women did not win the vote until fourteen years after her death.

Also celebrated on February 15: Galileo's birthday. Born in 1564 (or so), Galileo was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher. His achievements include improvements to the telescope; his astronomical observations advanced the Copernican theory that the earth and other planets revolved around the sun, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter (named the Galilean moons in his honour), and the analysis of sunspots. The Inquisition tried him for heresy and found him guilty, and he spent the rest of his life imprisoned in his house.

John Sutter was born on February 15, 1803, in Baden, Germany, came to the United States, and settled in California. He qualified for a land grant and was given 48,000 acres to farm. He established a town, set up a trading fort, and propered—until 1848, when James Marshall saw gold in his stream, launching the gold rush. Squatters came by the thousands, destroying his crops and butchering his herds. By 1852, the town was devastated and Sutter was bankrupt.

February 15 is National Gumdrop Day! (Possibly also known as Happy Dentist Day.) Gumdrops were invented in the 1800s, and although Congress has never sanctioned National Gumdrop Day and no president has honored it with a proclamation, Milton-Bradley did immortalize the confection in its Candyland board game. First introduced in 1949, the game includes Gumdrop Mountain and Gumdrop Pass. Chew on that, my friends!

The lost weekend

Yeah, not the way Ray Milland lost it in the 1945 movie. In the movie, Milland goes on a four-day bender and sees how he screwed up his life. Generally speaking, a right jolly film and a mention just in time for this year's Oscar season. For those who want to know, The Lost Weekend was based on a semi-autobiographical novel written by Charles R. Jackson and won four golden statues: for best actor Milland, director Billy Wilder, best picture, and best screenplay (Wilder and Charles Brackett). In the movie, the Ray Milland character is also a writer, and he pawns his typewriter (1945, remember) for a drink.

My lost weekend was not exactly lost, certainly not this way, just sort of misplaced. I wanted to work on my own book, but my characters are stuck in a car half-way across Nevada. What are they supposed to do now?

So instead I worked on other people's books. And it was a very productive time, peaceful and sometimes needing a bit of a push, like hatching an egg, I suppose. I felt happy. Except I just don't know how to get those people out of the car and out of Nevada.

Expect more of the same!

Hanna gave me a great idea today–do a monthly notice/review of a book (maybe a free book, if I can find enough that I like enough, otherwise maybe paid but obscure, or paid and best seller, we'll see how it goes). And–I just did that yesterday! So consider that post the first of a series. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm open. I'm partial to genre fiction and literary fiction where the characters do things. I read other stuff, too.

This book here is available on Amazon for $9.72 at the current time. It has stellar reviews. I don't happen to be reading it; I just like the cover and the concept. So that's the story there.

Dreaming of summer

I just finished reading The Villa Dante by Elizabeth Edmondson. Four emotionally damaged English strangers are summoned to an Italian villa to learn what an unknown woman has left to them in her will. Sounds like it could be the plotline for a Twilight Zone episode, right? Instead, it's a lyrical, magical book about love and friendship. I loved the characters, and I loved the Italian climate–these people were all thrilled to be leaving the cold, foggy winter of England for the warm, soft Italian spring. Which could say a lot for their emotional state, too.

Edmondson must have Spanish publishers; the only English edition I saw was the digital version. She's very international: born in Chile, educated in Calcutta and London, she then went to Oxford. She lives in Oxford half-time and Rome half-time, so it's no wonder she gets the Italy part so spot-on.

For those of you who are sick of cold and rainy or snowy winters, this might be the very thing to make you forget the weather for a few hours.

And speaking of characters…

For anybody interested in writing craft, Beth Barany over at the Writer's Fun Zone, has invited me to write a monthly column. My first posted today. It's about character and motivation. But I didn't talk about pretty faces.

Not just another pretty face

While I was sick last fall and then over the holiday break I caught up on old TV shows. Well, "catching up" is the nice way to put it. I was glued to the set. One of my all-time favorites: Perry Mason. This show has run seemingly continuously with different actors from the 1930s (in movies back then, starring first Warren William and then Ricardo Cortez and Donald Woods), and then in the 1960s TV series with playing Perry, and then the 1970s, with Monte Markham, then back to Raymond Burr in the 1980s and 1990s again.

The show often featured well-known guest stars (Bette Davis, Jackie Coogan, Dick Clarke, Cloris Leachman, Fay Wray, and many others), which is always fun. Another thing I like about the show is that although all the lead actors are attractive, most of the supporting cast is…not necessarily. Maybe the casting falls into stereotypes sometimes. You've got a Rancher, an Insurance Agent, a Shopkeeper, a Businessman, a Housewife. They all look like people you might know. Usually none of them is anything remarkable in the looks department.

Only when the plot calls for a "pretty girl" (you can practically hear them call Central Casting: "Hey, Joe! We need a looker on the set!") do you actually get a conventionally attractive young woman on the screen. And she might be a Good Girl or a Bad Girl, but her looks often have something to do with the plot. The character's looks often helped propel her into the action for one reason or another, good or bad.

This is also true for another show I watched: Police Story, which originally ran for six years from 1973 through 1978 and starred at least briefly at least every working actor in Hollywood. In the case of Police Story, it's less about pretty girls than good-looking guys: some of them are, but plenty of them–maybe most of them–aren't. The show is gritty. Watching these tough, tired guys at work, you feel like you're watching real cops, which is not something I think when I watch the current batch of police shows.

Perry Mason was a character that the lawyer and crime writer Erle Stanley Gardner created. Gardner wrote many books before the movies or TV ever beckoned. Police Story was created by Joseph Wambaugh, a 14-year veteran of the Los Angeles police department, who wrote crime fiction and nonfiction before he became involved with television and wrote 95 episodes for the show and consulted on its development.

Perhaps it was a consequence of my feverish flu, but I've been wondering why these old shows didn't employ more drop-dead handsome actors. Hollywood certainly had plenty of them. Today, you can't turn on the tube without finding zillions of shows full of people who, despite their many professional acting talents, could also win beauty pageants by the score. Some of these new shows I like to watch, because the writing is good and the acting is fun. But many times I find these shows really depressing. Whose lives look like that? Who knows these people? It seems like the producers look for two or five pretty faces and think, Let's put on a show! And the story can come afterwards.

Maybe I like Perry Mason and Police Story so much because with these shows, the writing came first. The writers created those characters, and those characters didn't have to be gorgeous to get you to watch. They just had to be interesting.

Reading between the holidays

The week between Christmas and New Year's has always been one of my favorites: the big gift-dinner-family time is over, time slows down, and it really feels like a holiday. I got a Kindle from my mom this year, who does not get technology and has trouble even with her cable TV remote. She says she can't figure out a computer and she doesn't need a smartphone, but she's happy with her microwave. She might be tech challenged, but Mom gets that ereaders–like hardcovers and paperbacks–are one more way to deliver books, and she knows I've always really loved to read. So she got me a Kindle.

I added a few books to read on the plane: two (Wish List and Vegas Moon) by John Locke, who's made it big in the self-published ebook world. His books are fast and furious mystery-suspense type stories full of cheeky dialogue. And then I got Far from the Madding Crowd, written in 1874 by Thomas Hardy, not exactly who I'd call a light read.

However, Laura thinks Far… is ripe for a romantic comedy redo because the story is about a woman and her three romantic interests. As it turns out, by 1967 Hollywood decided that Hardy and Far… were indeed ready for a contemporary treatment, so they got Julie Christie to play in the film adaptation along with Terence Stamp, Alan Bates, and Peter Finch as the suitors. I haven't seen the movie yet, but catch the cover for the DVD! Thomas Hardy: I hardly knew ye.

Hop on down! Win fabulous prizes! Offer good Dec. 16-23

The Mistletoe Madness Blog Hop is now closed. Winners will be notified and prizes sent Dec. 26. Thank you for dropping by!  And may your holidays have madness only of the good kind.

If you like contests, and who doesn't, here's one that's easy to enter and the prizes are many. Join the Mistletoe Madness blog hop, sponsored by 50 writers including yours truly, and you have a chance to win 50 prizes, including the grand prize: a color  Nook preloaded with many fine books that you can enjoy during the upcoming joyous holidays while your Uncle Al is yelling at the TV and your Aunt Myrtle is telling you how well her other niece is doing.

I can hear you now: what is a blog hop? I need that color Nook!

Here's how it works. Each participating blog (that's me) hosts a giveaway. All the blogs are linked up so blog hoppers can zip from one giveaway to the next, with the chance to win 50 fabulous prizes. (But not all of them. I think they've fixed it so you can't do that.)

Except my blog doesn't link up. The tech setup here means that you actually have to go to the sponsoring blog (the Mistletoe Madness link) to link in and get into the mix for the grand prize. An entrance form will go live there on Dec 16, and the grand prize winner will be chosen at random after the contest closes on Dec 23. (Because of various restrictions, this contest is open to U.S. residents only. Sorry!)

But if you register on this blog (no purchase necessary), or okay, even leave a comment, you are entered into my portion of the grand giveaway. The lucky winner will receive a paper copy of  Beth Barany's The Writer's Adventure Guide: 12 Stages to Writing Your Book. Beth is a creativity coach for writers, and if anybody can help you get that manuscript out the door, it is she. I know; I've read the book.

I'll choose a winner at random after Dec 26 and ship the book out shortly thereafter–right after I get back from that annual visit to Uncle Al and Aunt Myrtle. Happy holidays!

Feeling the weather, under and otherwise

I caught a cold. I have all the usual symptoms, plus an earache and dizziness. I'm feeling massively sorry for myself, I'm out of soup, winter's arrived, it gets dark too early, and the apartment is cold, too. To cheer myself up, I'm reading Dead Lagoon by Michael Dibdin, he of the Aurelio Zen mystery series, fairly recently made into a three-part BBC/Italian TV miniseries. The miniseries was very beautiful to watch but hopelessly confusing. The book–this one anyway–is a lot better. I'm enjoying it. It's fitting my mood. In Dibdin's world, Venice is dark, dank, narrow, smelly, dying, corrupt, fascist, and poor. And it doesn't have any soup, either, except the kind of nasty stuff you'd find in a canal. Yup, perfect.

Blogging, blogging everywhere

I've accepted some invitations to guest blog. I know, it's ironic–I'm not putting up anything here, but I can put stuff up elsewhere. Don't blame me, it's the economy.

So first up, I'm blogging over at Shawna Thomas's place next week Friday, Nov. 4, about what I'm thankful for. For the sake of her readers, I wanted to be thoughtful, but instead I ripped off a cultural icon. If you have time next week, drop on by. She made this lovely image for us to post on our own blogs, which color coordinates accidentally but beautifully with my background theme. It's that tawny notice just over there to the right in the sidebar. Maybe you recognize some of the other writers who will be participating.

Then on Nov. 25 I'm guest blogging with PJ Schnyder. She's got a bunch of people talking about NaNoWriMo, the November writing month phenomenon that Chris Baty started in 1999 with 20 friends. Their goal was to write 50,000 words, or a complete book. Six of them made it. Last year 200,500 people participated, and 37,500 got to the 50,000-words mark. On PJ's blog, I'll be discussing why I will never be one of these people. If you want to become one of the 200,500, check out NaNoWriMo here.