Zachary Tringali's Blog, page 4

Cú Chulainn of the Beautiful Appearance

Cú Chulainn riding into battle.

With vacation over and done with, life has once again become consumed with work-work and writing work, but I’ve been making time to reread The Tain (one of Ireland’s books of mythology) and thought I’d share (and maybe poke fun at) a part of the book with you.

Now, let me set the scene for you: Cú Chulainn, our hero, has been holding off an entire army by himself for a while now, mostly by challenging the men to single combat and defeating them handily–even when they try to gang up on him. After taking grievous wounds in one battle, Cú Chulainn sleeps for three days and wakes to find that a group of his friends have all been killed by the enemy. He goes into a battle rage, transforming into a hideous creature and killing countless numbers of soldiers.

We come back to our hero the next morning, waking up after a night of slaughter:

Cú Chulainn emerged the next morning to survey the enemy and to display his elegant figure to matrons and maidens and young girls and poets and practitioners of verse, for he deemed neither dignified nor seemly the nightmarish form in which he had appeared the night before.

All right, so Cú Chulainn wakes up and says to himself: “Boy, I shouldn’t have done that, it wasn’t proper for me to go out there looking so weird.” — Never mind the bloodbath. Okay, sure.

So he came to them by day to let them see his true beauty. Gorgeous indeed was Cu Chulainn Mac Sualdaim as he paraded himself before what was left of the army. His hair was arranged in three layers: dark next to the scalp, blood-red in the middle, and yellow at the ends, which were set like a gold crown on his head, falling to the nape of the neck in a braid of three coils, with little ringlets and gold-shiny strands combed out in artful disarray about his shoulders.

This is kind of weird, but still mostly all right, right? I mean… okay, his hair is apparently three colors, but maybe it’s got that stylized sheen going on and he’s really nailing it. It sounds like he is. Now, here’s where it gets… weird.

A hundred curls of purple gold shone round his neck; a hudnred amber-beaded ribbons bedecked his head. He had four dimples in each cheek — yellow, green, blue and purple.

What? Uhm. Why are his dimples colored that way? That’s a little strange.

Seven brilliant gems gleamed in each regal eye. Each foot had seven toes and each hand seven fingers…

What?! He has gems in his eyes and a total of TWENTY-EIGHT fingers and toes?

…the nails or claws or talons of each with the grip of a hawk or a griffin.

WHAT?! And this looks BETTER than the thing he transformed into last night! The women of the opposing army climb onto the shoulders of men just so they can get a glimpse of him! Cú Chulainn was BASICALLY the Justin Bieber of ancient Ireland! Just don’t let him sign that album, because it could get messy with all of those extra fingers that are apparently maybe also claws or talons?

All said, appearance is an important factor in The Tain. It’s made clear throughout the book that one doesn’t want to go into battle looking disheveled, and that a warrior ought to take care of their appearance and take measures to beautify themselves, as seen in this scene a little later on in the book:

“What have you planned for tonight?” said Laeg.

“What do you mean?” said Cú Chulainn.

“When Fer Diad comes looking for you, he’ll be freshly beautified, washed and bathed, his hair nicely trimmed and plaited, and the four provinces of Ireland will assemble to watch the contest. It seems to me you should go where you’ll get the same treatment, to Emer of the Beautiful Hair, who’s waiting for you in the Two Oxen Meadow at Cairthenn near Sliab Fuait.”

So let this be a lesson to you: before you enter any battle, make sure your clothes are freshly pressed, your hair has received the L’Oreal treatment, and your claw-talon-demon-hands are manicured.

The Tain is a strange book, but it’s also fantastic and something I would recommend reading to anyone who enjoys mythology. Let’s face it, mythology is always a little weird,The Tain just embraces it.

Adventures in Anniversaries

This weekend, I celebrated my eight year anniversary with my girlfriend by heading south, back to Orlando, to experience the magic of Disney.

And the terror of a certain tower at Hollywood studios. The scoop: A year ago, we went to Disney with 3-day passes and I was treated to ominous quips about how on the third day of the ticket we’d go to Hollywood studios and she’d make me ride the Tower of Terror, her favorite ride. I’d never been to Hollywood Studios, but I’d heard of the ride. Enough to know I should fear it, anyway.

I don’t mind heights, but the idea of slowly climbing however-many-stories (seriously, I don’t want to know how many stories. The less information the better!) with the knowledge that eventually the cord would cut and you’d be dropped to your almost certain death went a little bit beyond not minding heights.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I let out a little sigh of relief when we spent the third day at Animal Kingdom instead. Fate, it seemed, had sided with me!

Of course, fate just isn’t that kind and knew that it would be better if I waited a little. I knew eventually I’d have to get on that ride, and when we ended up at Disney for our anniversary, well… how do you say no, then?

I’m told that the ride is less frightening than it used to be, but it was plenty for me. My only comfort was that we plunged however-many-stories (still with the not knowing) down into pitch blackness instead of having to watch the entire thing like I’d originally thought. Small comfort, but I take what I can get.

Terrorizing tower aside, we had a great time and even got to spend that night listening to Irish musicians playing at one of our favorite restaurants and after the second Guinness I’m pretty sure I would have gone on the Tower again without complaint.

A good, happy weekend spent with someone I love very much. You can’t ask for more than that.

- – -

Back on the writing front, I’ve taken the opportunity of having a little bit of a breather between book work to write up some short stories and work on some For Fun things. Soon, I’ll be jumping back into work on the untitled Sherlock Holmes in Fantasy Land book, as it needs some more tuning up, still.

Where the gods go

A hot sun beat down upon flowering gorse and flowerless heather; and on every side except the east, where there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level horizon and brown boglands with a few green places and here and there the glitter of water. One could imagine that had it been twilight and not early afternoon, and had there been vapours drifting and frothing where there were now but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring in one, as few places even in Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar to Celtic romance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as with Gothic nations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great spaces and windy light.

– W.B. Yeats

Statue of Celtic hero Cuchulainn by Oliver Sheppard in the window of the GPO, Dublin – commemorating the 1916 rising.

Yeats introduced the book of Celtic mythology Gods and Fighting Men this way, depicting how he saw Ireland and showing us why these myths of fairies and otherworldly creatures have been so popular for so long.

He goes on to talk about the change of mythology over time, particularly the changes to Celtic mythology. As with all things, stories change over time. With the oncoming of Christianity, Celtic gods were transformed by word of mouth into kings. During a time when all stories were oral stories and no one was writing anything down, the myths were so fundamentally changed that it’s difficult to look back and see what they had been before. There’s too much fog, now, for us to see.

But you can still see the hint of the other-world in these stories. These kings who aren’t quite kings, ruling over people in the mist shrouded hills. Folk tales and mythology from Ireland have a special quality to them, a source–as Yeats said–in great spaces and windy light, where the veil between god, fey creatures and human kind is thin and anyone could  just trip through it one day.

Reading the myths now, I’m reminded of popular historical fictions that take characters of myth and present them in a realistic way, the way Miller’s The Song of Achilles does, or Renault’s The King Must Die does. We take these figures that are larger than life and we find a way to fit them into what we know, and what we believe the parameters of our are, and in doing so a part of that magic is brought into our world with them.

I’m reminded, too, of the popularity of Urban Fantasy today and the way we long to contextualize these magical things and bring them through the veil and into our world.

These myths and stories never leave us. We’re constantly reinventing them to fit in our lives, to try to poke and see where that supposed veil is at its thinnest so we can pull some of that old magic back through.

An Escape

The hard part about doing a large chunk of work (writing and otherwise) at home is the nagging feeling that I can always be doing something more. I just finished the second draft of a big project I’m working on, but up until then my days had pretty much been work-edit-work-edit, and stopping usually just made me feel bad.

There’s always a little more work to do, or a few more words to edit.

But I finished the second draft of The Current WIP, which coincided perfectly with a weekend trip away! Down to Orlando to visit a friend. Sometimes you just need to get away for a little while. We enjoyed reruns on TV, good food, and wine, proving that the simple things in life are the best things.

The girlfriend and I ended up getting a little turned around on the way home (as turned around as you can get with three GPS’ going on at the same time, anyway), which took us over the bridge pictured above. I wouldn’t have thought to find a view like that in that part of the state, but it was unexpectedly beautiful, made even better by the fact that it was a surprise.

Now I’m back home and ready to kick butt again.

Lois & Clark: Adventures in TV Land

My parents have one of those cable packages that has virtually every channel under the sun. It even has the West coast feeds of certain stations so, I guess, if you miss a program you can catch it 3 hours later? Home for the holidays, stumbling through the mess of channels, there was a pleasant surprise airing somewhere in the upper thousands: Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

Which is, let’s face it, the best superhero show ever on television, even beating out animated classics like Batman: The Animated Series. It might even be my favorite representation of Superman ever.

Superman is a character a lot of people find issue with. He has pretty much every power under the sun (depending, I guess, on when he’s being written and who has the creative reins) and can do anything, so I can kind of see where these people are coming from. It becomes a problem seeing who you can pit Superman against that actually creates a threat.

But on the other hand, I kind of like that approach. It makes me think of the problem a lot of Fantasy authors talk about with regards to their characters over the progression of a series. Namely, if the character gets too strong too quickly or accomplishes too much too soon, how can you possibly make the next installment more interesting? What can their possibly be to do once you’ve taken do Sauron and defeated the greatest evil in the land?

Superman lets you skip all of that and say: Look, he’s not going to have a challenge in that typical sense, he’s just not, so you’re going to have to find other ways to tell a compelling story. It’s something that I think requires that we see a bigger slice of Clark than of Superman to make the story compelling. We absolutely need to see that side of him that’s vulnerable, that’s very human, because maybe bullets can’t hurt him but moral and social problems definitely can.

Watching Lois & Clark years ago probably informed a lot of what I want out of heroic fantasy. I like the trappings, the powers, the feats, as much as the next guy, but what I really want–crave–out of these kinds of stories is the human core at the center of it all. I really wish we had a series that was just about Bruce Wayne, too. Batman is fun and all, but I want to see how he deals with his non-suit hours, how he manages that split in personality, and I want to see more about his relationship with the other people in the bat-family.

Most of the time all we get is flashes in the pan from comics and movies. A scene or two with the hero unmasked, a backdrop to show us what they’re doing outside the costume, a means to set up the inevitable actions. When deciding which superhero thing to watch, I’ll pick Lois & Clark every time.

Winter with Palm Trees

This is what Christmas vacation in South Florida looks like, in case you were wondering. Hot and humid weather, a cool breeze, a hammock and a good book. I got a new phone, which means I can do things my old phone couldn’t, like take pictures that don’t look like they were shot in a photobooth in the 60′s and then apply these neat filters to them to make them look like they were taken in the 50′s instead.

I have a feeling I’m a little behind on this particular trend.

So far it’s been a really quiet vacation, which has been a refreshing change. Aside from the quietness, all of the usual traditions held: I’ve had way too much candy (in the form of kettle-cooked popcorn covered in chocolate and peppermint), way too much eggnog, and I read a zombie book.

I don’t really like zombies–at all–but around the holidays I always find myself craving scary games or novels, for some reason. There’s something really appealing about reading about monsters around the darkest days of the year.

For what it’s worth, I did end up really enjoying this particular zombie novel, but more on that later.

Just thought I would check in. I’m still trying to stick to my no-new-projects-until-after-the-holidays thing, but some days it goes better than others. I confess, I’ve opened a few Word files and put in a few words because I just couldn’t help myself, but mostly I’ve spent my time enjoying friends, family, and the holidays.

Hope everyone in the blogoverse is doing well!

Friday Reads: Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta (AND MORE!)

Okay, so we’ve talked a little before about Fantasy genre novels featuring young characters, Young Adult Fantasy as a genre, and what the difference is between the two. Finnikin of the Rock is a prime example of a book that crosses over between the two and does it in a fantastic way.

Marketed as a YA novel, Finnikin doesn’t shy away from discussing and dealing with tough subjects from the harsh culture formed by exiles in the book to the evils that can be done during times of war. Marchetta builds a stunning world–a world that defines its people and is in turn defined by them, and she does it with brevity and without ever letting the pace slacken.

The first thing that will make me put any Fantasy book down is if I start to feel like I’m being told things as if I’m in a school lesson. When the book starts to lecture me about the world–about why things are laid out the way they are, about things I have no reason to be invested in yet, it becomes difficult to press on. The  difficulty is in developing this sense of world while making it completely about the characters and their journey, and in that way it becomes relatable, interesting, and important.

Marchetta hits that target head on by presenting us with a world she’s very clearly fleshed out and by not tipping her hand too much or feeling the need to pin us down and explain her world to it. She knows we’ll get it–we’ll see it through Finnikin’s eyes. And we do. And it’s a heartbreaking picture of a people turned out of their home, forced to live in little more than camps set up in enemy territory where they’ll be treated without any kindness. They die to disease, malnourishment, and mistreatment.

But they still live, and they still go on.

And that’s what the story is about. Finding the strength to go on, to rebuild, and what kind of sacrifices need to be made to make that happen. I think it does this excellently.

If I needed to poke out some kind of weakness, I would say that part of the ending felt condensed. A lot of emphasis is put on a fight that seems to get glossed over, but in the scheme of things, I’d rather have that time–and those words–put to other things. Like the extended wrap-up we’re given, letting us see past the end and into how the characters deal with that ending.

Overall: Loved the mythology, loved the world building, loved the book. Can’t wait to read the next one, Froi of the Exiles.

Learn More: Finnikin of the Road on Amazon; Melina Marchetta’s webpage

If you liked this book you might also like: Fire by Kristin Cashore; Bone Doll’s Twin by Lynn Flewelling

Other reading this week: So, somehow, I ended up alternating between three books this week. On a week when I had a lot of work-work to catch up on. I don’t know what happened, except that I started three books and I loved them all and couldn’t put any one of them aside to read the other.

You might think Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins is something I wouldn’t normally read, but that’s not really true!

Little known fact: I really love books like these. Simple love stories told well, with a lightheartedness that doesn’t get mired in too much drama or for too long.

Anna felt a little bit like reading a great RomCom movie, but I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. Perkins writes like no one else. I’d first heard about this book from my friend Amalia, and then I couldn’t stop hearing about it from people. And there’s a reason. Perkins’ writing is so effortlessly funny, smart, and real that it’s endlessly readable.

Plus, it’s a NaNoWriMo novel, which I just find incredibly cool!

The other novel I read this week was A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. Which, I know, I’m like 15 years too late on when I should have read that one.

I actually listened to it on audiobook. Audiobooks are fantastic! They let me turn mundane tasks like cooking, cleaning, and even going into the gym into adventures where I can lose myself in a story and somehow still get things done.

Well, good audiobooks are fantastic, anyway. The not-so-good ones can leave you feeling like you’re trapped in the back of a class in high school with that one teacher who’s become disenchanted with teaching and just plans to read the textbook as flatly as possible. But the good ones–and A Wizard of Earthsea is one of the good ones–make you feel like you’re hearing a story told over a camp fire.

That’s enough babbling about audiobooks, though. It’s a good book! And I could go on and on about how, reading it now, I can see how it has touched so many modern fantasy books, but I won’t. It’s one of those books that stays in you for a long time after, lingering. It’s one of those books that helps build the genre and shape it, and anyone who likes Fantasy should definitely read it.

 

Well, that wraps up what I’ve been reading. Usually I would just pick ONE book to talk about, but I loved all three so much and all three had me thinking about stories in different ways. Finnikin has me thinking about how such a complex, rich story is developed and told so simply (and I don’t use simply in a bad way, here); Anna has me thinking about style, fun, and a sense of personality; Earthsea has me thinking about the genre as a whole, and about magic and new worlds.

It was a good week for reading!

 

Tomorrow I leave to visit my family in South Florida for the holidays! First stop when I get off the road is my grandmother’s house where we’re having a bit of a gathering and I’ll be getting to see family I haven’t gotten to in far too long.

I’ll maybe be blogging from my tablet or a borrowed PC over the break, but if I don’t get a chance to, I’ll see you guys in the new year! HAPPY HOLIDAYS! I hope your holidays are filled with family, friends, good books, and a lot of cookies. Too many cookies. Infinite cookies.

See ya!

End of the Year… END OF THE WORLD?! Dun dun dun!

The weather here is crazy right now. One day it’s 80, the next it’s 60. In the end, I guess it’s just Florida, but it still doesn’t feel like the holidays when it’s hot out!

In two weeks it’ll be the new year (or we’ll have gone the way of the dinosaurs by Friday, but we’ll be in good company at least. I’ve always wanted to see a T-Rex!), and that is absolutely crazy. I still can’t figure out if this year felt incredibly long or blisteringly fast. Trying to think back to January requires a nose-bleeding amount of mental effort, but it feels like just yesterday it was July.

2012 in review:

We started growing tomatoes, green beans, and sweet peppers! And they’re still alive after more than a week! It’s a Christmas miracle. Of course, the only thing that’s actually bore fruit (er… crossed metaphor?) is the green beans, so far. The tomatoes were looking promising until some wild beast came and ate the plant while we were away for the weekend. Wild beast: I don’t know who or WHAT you are, but I’ve got my eye on you!

I actually wrote two books and a novella. I’m not entirely sure how that happened, but there you go! I also started a couple of projects that never quite got off the ground, but the way I figure, I’ve now got the start to several stories hanging around and waiting for me. I’ll get to those in 2013.

Disney World and Islands of Adventure! And we saw The Lion King musical when it came to Orlando! Plus a lot of other things. It’s been a pretty crazy (and fun) year for events like this.

I’ve read a lot of good books this year, some of which I blogged about here! The Farseer Trilogy and the Tawny Man Trilogy (of which I wrote about here) by Robin Hobb are definitely at the top. Most recently, A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (mini review over here on GoodReads) became one of the stand-out books I read (or, rather, listened to) this year. There was also The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, which had to be one of the books I had the most out-and-out fun reading, and I caught up on Bernard Cornwell’s The Saxon Tales series, which is one of my favorites. A good year for reading!

The apartment is now a Gluten Free Household as of 2012, and it’s been a fun and kind of crazy adventure. Specifically when it comes to baking. The most recent attempt at gluten free baking has led to a batch of cookies that weren’t quite feeling like they wanted to be cookies and instead tried to become just like the sheet of parchment paper they were baked on. Trial and error!

A lot more happened this year, of course, but that’s where I’ll leave things for now. I’ve finished up most of the work that needed doing before the holidays and this Saturday I’ll be making the trek home to South Florida to spend Christmas and New Years with the family, drinking much eggnog and eating many (okay, all) cookies.

I’ll probably be posting a Friday Reads at the end of the week (because I’m reading a few books now that need to be talked about. So good!), but until then, happy holidays!

Food Plus Heat: Simple!

It’s the middle of the week, it’s rainy, and there’s a chill in the air. We’re going to talk about something a little different today!

Next to writing, cooking might be one of my favorite things.

Actually, I’m going to go with food instead of just cooking. Food is definitely my favorite thing, but cooking results in food, so here we are. Good food and good stories aren’t even all that different, really. When you get down to it, the best of both happen when something simple is done well. I’ll remember the really complex, unique story the same way I’ll remember eating at the ultra-pricey small-plate restaurant while on a trip up the east coast (dinner is served: three scallops on a giant plate. Enjoy!), — good, and interesting, but at the end of the day a really good macaroni and cheese would have been better.

The holidays always make me think about food, and especially about comfort food. This week we’re making three of my favorites.

One: Roast chicken. Simple. Probably one of the simplest things you can think of, even. I mean, it’s just one (1) chicken plus heat. But if you put a roast chicken in front of me (maybe with asparagus? Or mashed potatoes?) I will be happy for the rest of the night/day/week. We make Thomas Keller’s roast chicken recipe and, if you haven’t tried it, you need to. I think in the book he described it as the thing he would be happy having as his last meal on earth, and after trying it I can see why.

The chicken stock from this actually went into the next two dishes!

Two: Risotto. Specifically, pumpkin risotto! Okay, so it’s a little intensive. You have to stand there at the stove for around half an hour stirring, but I mean, stirring isn’t hard. And there’s wine in this, which means you can stir while drinking a glass of wine! I like to think of risotto as a sort of grown up mac and cheese and it’s just as comforting.

Plus, I put on an audiobook and had a story read to me while I made dinner. I mean, come on, it doesn’t get more enjoyable than that. (I was listening to the audiobook of A Wizard of Earthsea, which is the perfect kind of story for comfort. It makes me feel like someone is telling me a really good story near a camp fire.)

Three: Split pea soup. This is one of those things, for me, where it gets cold out and my mind just immediately goes to split pea soup! Until this year, though, it was just something I always ate at other places. At home, some rainy days, or at my girlfriend’s house sometimes. Before it even really got cold this year, I was already thinking about split pea soup. So, I made it, and I’ve made it several times since then. It’s one of those things I’ll never get tired of.

It’s been a good week for food, guys. And this weekend, I’m determined to make cookies for the holidays!

Friday Reads: Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo

It’s not every day you see a fantasy novel drawing its cultural inspiration from Russia, and after reading Shadow and Bone, you might start to wonder why that is.

Bardugo draws on a mix of history and imagination mingled with the atmosphere of a dark fairy tale in order to create the world of Shadow and Bone. The book is a very personal sort of take on  the usual high fantasy story. Sure, there’s a school that teaches magic and the main character has a gift that sets her apart from everyone else, but where the novel really shines is in its portrayal of its characters.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is a quote we’ve all probably seen again and again, and it’s one that’s really taken to task here. Shadow and Bone, at its heart, is a novel about power. What it does to the people with it and to those without it. One of the strongest elements of the novel might be its characterization of its lead villain. A lot of books these days, especially fantasy, are trying to humanize their antagonists, but even still most of them don’t give us the kind of up-close view that Bardugo does.

In fact, I’d say more time is spent developing the antagonist than anyone else. And I’m all right with that. For the most part, we already know what the heroes are like. They do have their own journeys and they’re all very interesting, but it’s the way in which they react to the antagonist and the temptation of power that really creates interesting situations within the book.

Overall: One part fantasy, one part character drama, with a strong dose of romance.  At turns haunting and beautiful, Shadow and Bone presents a unique, bleak landscape that makes the perfect backdrop for its story. I’m eagerly awaiting the sequel.

Learn More: Find Shadow and Bone on Amazon; Leigh Bardugo’s Tumblr

If you liked this book you might also like: The Green Rider by Kristen Britain; Graceling by Kristin Cashore