Update: June 2023
Reminder that this is cross posted from Patreon.
Welcome to June! It’s been a strange but good year so far. The trend looks to continue. Buckle up!
This month’s lesson: I’m going to save the continuation of my discussion about voice for next month, because I’ve started a revision project that’s totally different than anything I’ve done before and is kicking my ass in all the best ways, so I’m going to talk about that.
Keeping the tally: I’ve written eight stories since December. Five have sold. I’m ridiculously happy about this. Apparently, I can still write. In what may be the fastest turnaround I’ve ever had from first draft to publication, one of those stories, “Vast and Trunkless Legs of Stone” is available in the June issue of Clarkesworld.
Announcement: I’ll be at San Diego Comic Con this year, promoting my first graphic novel, Wild Cards: Now and Then. I haven’t been at SDCC since 2011, and I’m very excited to tackle the mayhem once more, and see lots of folks face to face. I’m still kind of feral after pandemic times so we’ll see how that goes.
TV/Movies: I’m starting to get back into watching new things. It’s nice. But I’m also on my third or fourth viewing of The Old Guard so clearly I still need some found family comfort viewing, too.
American Born Chinese: I’ve only seen three episodes so far but I like it. It makes me so glad I’m not in high school. Yeah, 32 years on and I still think about how glad I am that I’m not in high school. This is a Monkey King story, and I’m a big fan of Sun Wukong. I wrote about him myself in Kitty’s Big Trouble.
The English. I have a rant about this one. I wanted to see this because the previews made it look like “Emily Blunt kicking ass in a western,” which sounded great. But…it’s not really that. The character only occasionally kicks ass, and the rest of the time is kind of a mess. It has some good moments but is terribly inconsistent. I really liked the other main character, Eli, a Pawnee tracker for the US army, played by Chaske Spencer. He was a delight.
It’s a pretty standard western. Our characters move through the desolate landscape of the Great Plains, where life is cheap, honor rare, and only the strong survive by their guns. They ride across unmarred expanses of grass. No roads, no towns, just lonely buildings stuck in isolation, trying to survive.
The problem is we’re told this takes place in 1890.
In the first episode, the characters are in the middle of nowhere, the Kansas Oklahoma border I think? She says she’s going to Wyoming. He says it’ll take her a month to ride there. And I’m thinking: Or…you could just go back to St. Louis and take the train and be there in a couple of days? The transcontinental railroad was finished in 1869. Telegraph lines were finished in 1861. But this show that takes place in 1890 would have us believe that there’s absolutely nothing—no roads, no telegraph poles, no towns, no nothing west of the Mississippi. Guys, the University of Wyoming was founded in 1886. Four years before the desolate barely inhabited Wyoming depicted in this show.
This happens a lot: the mythological Old West ended a lot earlier than a lot of people realize. But the imagery of the classic western: desolate, living by the gun, yadda yadda, is so pervasive, it gets used without any thought. Argh, it makes me mad.
I was still in the mood for westerns so I watched a movie on Netflix that it turns out is not a western because it takes place in Ireland, but has some of the mood of a western. This one, I really liked. The Wonder starring Florence Pugh. I have to warn you: there’s a point in the film where you’re sure that everything is going to turn out very badly. 19th century gothic bingo is in play, and some terrible stuff happens along those lines. But y’all, it ends well. I was crying, the shred of hope the film gives us at the end is so unexpected and welcome.
I can’t recommend The English but I’ll recommend The Wonder. Weirdly, both things had Toby Jones and Ciarán Hinds in bit parts. I can’t explain it.
Meanwhile, it’s high summer and I gotta figure out how I’m going to get out of the house and enjoy it.
