Betty Adams's Blog, page 138

Steven Spielberg Directs a Childhood Favorite

The undisputed master of visual storytelling has set his hand to bringing a beloved children's story to life. While we wait with baited breath here is a little glimpse of a few decades ago.

Giants in the Forest
By Betty Adams
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Of course there were giants. The hazel eyed girl blinked at her friend in befuddlement. Of course there were giants. Why would her friend even ask that? They sat, side by side, on the bench-steps leading down to the circular stage. The concrete was tiled in smooth river stone and the atrium was mostly open to the California air. On the stage the plump, middle aged librarian was gathering up her things as she chatted with the mothers.
“I said do you really think there are giants?” her friend pressed again.
The girl nodded and glanced sorrowfully at the retreating form of the librarian. “The story was just getting good.” She sighed mournfully as she pushed her hair out of her face. No matter how many times a day she brushed her dark brown mop it was always sticking every which way by noontime. “Why did she have to stop?”
“You say that every time!”  Her friend burst out in exasperation. “Why do you think giants are real? Have you ever seen one?”
“Yes. Why don’t they read more than one chapter at a time?” the girl pouted. “How will we ever find out if she was safe in the cucumber?”
“What?” Her friend demanded. “Where? How?”
“In the cucumber where she hid.” The girl explained. “I hope we don’t miss tomorrow’s story time.”
“Not the book!” exclaimed her friend. “Where did you see the giant?”
The girl heaved a longsuffering sigh and gave her friend, the look. She stood and picked up her bright pink purse and held out her hand. Her friend took it and consented to be led out the door and down the broad steps. They went around the corner and the girl released her hand to point up. Her friend squinted into the redwoods and frowned.
“Where are the giants?” she asked hesitantly.
“Here,” the girl darted over to the largest redwood and scaled the rough bark up about six feet. She looked back over her shoulder at her friend and grinned. “This is my favorite giant, but there are lots in the woods.”
“I mean people giants!” Her friend protested. “Not tree giants!”
“If there are tree giants then there are people giants,” the girl shrugged and scampered back down the tree.
“Oh,” her friend paused to consider this bit of logic. “That makes sense.” Her eyes lit up. “Daddy says that strange folks live up in the redwoods. Do you think there are any people giants up there?”
“Why wouldn’t there be?” the girl asked.
“Wanna go find them?”
The girl grinned and held out her hand. Their moms would be talking to the librarian for lots of minutes. Plenty of time to find their own big friendly giant.
 

A Character's Dreams

A properly fleshed out character needs more than eye and hair color, backstory, and a cool ancestral weapon. No, to read as fully human a character needs hopes, dreams, and aspirations. A pampered young aristocrat, with their life planned out for them generations in advance might long for adventure and wandering, but for most characters (if they don't have one yet) there is a longing for a home of their own. A place in the world customized to their needs. This is exemplified in the trending #MyDreamHouseHas. Everyone (or nearly so) wants a place or a situation to call their own. For more nomadic types this urge can be fulfilled by a group of people, or a general geographical area but the urge is there in all, a primal need for territory.
So what sort of dream home is your character looking for? 

Writers Block and First Dates

During a 2015 interview Peter Mark Richman - author and actor who rocked the latter half of the twentieth century - was asked what he did for writer's block. His answer was to take two very different people, put them in a situation together, and let them talk. Take a rich girl and a poor man and put them together in a mechanic's shop for instance. His reasoning was that two very different people in a strange situation is going to create interesting interactions. 
A less formal and articulate version of that concept is trending around the internet today in the form of #BestFirstDateQuestions. The goal of this meme is to create a single question that gives the reader a (preferable amusing) description of the two participants of the date and the situation, all in one sentence, without referencing any of it. Two people, at odds, in a new situation, 
The wisdom of the elders is not reduced to amusing tweets. 

The Robot Uprising Has Begun

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”
- Frederik Pohl Meet Alexa.
Alexa is your friend.
Alexa serves you. 
Alexa is powerful.
Alexa obeys the voices...all of them.

Early in March 2016 NPR did a segment on the Amazon Echo. This device is billed as a handy little tool that syncs all of the electronics in your home. As part of the show NPR aired clips of users giving "Alexa" orders. Orders that Alexa followed. This resulted in one homeowner having his thermostat turned up, one had his radio turned to NPR, and still another had an amusing but unrepeatable escapade. While these incidents were nothing more than amusing they do lend themselves to more threatening stories. 
Someone has hacked your house dear reader. What will they do?

Illustrating Concepts

For those science fiction and fantasy authors who have trouble keeping an image in their minds illustrations are critical. It makes consistently describing characters and buildings much easier. Of course not all authors are artistically inclined. One recourse is to commission works from working artists. This author prefers to provide the artists with primitive base sketches for her to bring alive. that is how the cover art for "Dying Embers" came to be. At the moment I am working on developing a sci-fi world where this spherical robot (I came up with it before a certain cute little bot debuted by the way) is tasked with carrying water to and from the great terraforming platforms. The design is based on water barrels used currently in Africa and is designed for pure efficiency. The WC-field is run by an AI whose sole directive is to get from point A to point B without losing water. 
(The Scanner is acting glitchy. I will post it later.) 

Writing a Hero You Just Want to Smack

A hero is defined by their deeds. The character must do something heroic. This might be saving the day by defeating the invading alien armada or facing some inner demon and resisting a potent temptation alone in the dark. How the hero thinks of himself and feels about his accomplishments defines how the audience feels about the hero. There are heros that the reader likes, and the reader likes that they like the hero. An example would be Superman or Optimus Prime; always does the right thing, powerful, humble, friendly, and always thinking about others. Then there are less friendly heros, who do the right thing and serve other but do it with a sort of projected ill grace. Take Dr. McCoy from the origonal Star Trek show. A bit bitter and disillusioned but still fighting the good fight. Neither of these archetypes is likely to consider themselves heroes though. They don't usually think of themselves much at all, 
Then there is the hero who knows it. The are cocky and confident, mostly young, and very full themselves. Usually they have the skills to back up their swagger. Usually they are among the beautiful people. And the reader just wants to smack them. This is a difficult balance for the author because the character has to be petty enough for the reader to despise him/her at least a little but endearing enough for the reader to want to stay engaged. The newest iteration of Captain Kirk illustrates this quite nicely. (Some say the old one does too.) Another potential is Tony Stark from the Avengers movie line. Both are high powered heros but both have a lot of character growth to go through before someone would want to have to deal with them on a regular basis. 

Princess Bride Book Confession

Today a famous social media site has demanded that the world make a #bookconfession. Well here is this author's. 
I was a hard core reader. Abridged was a dirty word. If you loved the story you read the *whole* book. So when I read "The Princess Bride" I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to find the unabridged version. It was especially embarrassing was how old I was at the time (old enough to know better). 

Story Time, Ancient and Eternally Young

Hermes and Athena What has been, will be again,
What has been done, will be done again,
There is nothing new under the sun.
King Solomon  In the year of 1995 a massive week long storm slammed into the west coast of North America. The Pacific Northwest lost power for days at a time, but being prepared for such things the residents hunkered down and rode it out. Further south in Sunny California the storm came and went without much fuss, Certainly not enough to halt the release of "Clueless" a film that was never meant to win an Oscar but that had surprisingly deep roots. Any literally afficandio, dragged unwillingly into the theater to "enjoy" the 90's summer fluff, would have recognized the photography scene among the Gulf War references and the Simpsons jokes. This was Jane Austen's "Emma" retold with a nearly vapid but well meaning Beverly Hills girl in the titular character spot. It was an old story, retold point for point, but dressed up in a modern situation. 
This is hardly a new literary development, after all there are only 7 or 8 or possibly 12 origonal stories. 
Nathaniel Hawthorne, the nineteenth century genius behind "The Scarlet Letter"  made something of a living off of this. All authors do in one way or another but he was rather blunt about it when he took up the task of updating the old Greek and Roman legends for the local schoolchildren. While this endeavor has become more popular of late it was a bit revolutionary back before the Civil War and the author felt the need to defend himself in the preface of his "A Wonder Book". 

"He [Hawthorne] does not, therefore, plead guilty to a sacrilege, in having sometimes shaped anew , as his fancy dictated, the forms that have been hallowed by an antiquity of two or three thousand years. No epoch of time can claim a copyright in these immortal fables. They seem never to have been made; and certainly, so long as  man exists, then can never perish' but by their indestructibility itself, they are legitimate subjects for every age to clothe with its own garniture of manners and sentiment, and to imbue with its own morality."

Writing Alien Grains

Given how critical agriculture, especially the domestication of grains, has been to every culture that ever made it past the grass hut stage it is no stretch of the imagination to posit that grains (also know as cereals) are equally important to other species. Grains or grain products are also edible to a range of body types, including herbivores, granivores, insectivores, and even hard core predators.  A rolling field of grain then becomes a perfect point of intellectual and physical meeting for two members of different species. Both can look around and say, "I know what this place is. I know what it is for, I can move on from here." 
On the other hand there is another, perhaps darker side to the cereal grains. Plants are not passive in their ecology by any means. They fight every second of every day for their place and the short nature of grasses means that trees, shrubs, and even most herbaceous weeds can out compete them. Left to their own competition the grasses would be  quickly pushed to near extinction. But they have made themselves critical to the dominant animal species. Not just humans, but beavers, elephants, and other species have been known to alter their environments to favor grasses. Now these humble cereals dominated a massive swath of the fertile surface of the Earth. So are we really cultivating this plant? Or are the cereals cultivating us? 
Something for writers to remember on #NationalCerealDay.

Clark's Nutcracker

Here is a bird to write a story around. This little guy is your average crow type bird that can and will eat about anything. But they are single beakedly responsible for planting some of the rarest forests in the world.