Nothing Gratuitous

God damn you, Joss Whedon!

So, I saw Serenity today. I punched out of work and went while the boys were napping (and Quin will go tomorrow and we'll talk about it tomorrow night. It's almost a Bill Gates kind of date).

It doesn't really say anything to say that I liked it. That doesn't begin to cover it. It's not just a "make you laugh/make you cry" kind of thing. It's a "make you feel everything little thing" kind of thing.

This is exactly what I want to write. Or perhaps more correctly how I want to write. There is nothing gratuitous. The jokes aren't just for laughs, they tell you more about the characters. The same goes for the violence. How often can you say that about an action film? That the violence tells you something deep about the character?

Of course what slipped from my mind when I went to the movies today is that this is a Joss Whedon story, and that means all bets are off. You know how you see a James Bond movie and there is never any doubt in your mind that Bond is going to make it through everything unscathed? This is the opposite of that. There was a point in the movie when I actually thought they were all going to die. No kidding. Joss can do that to you.

And Joss knows the power of the soundtrack, especially when to shut it off and let the actors act. Like editing, it's easier to notice when this is done badly than when it is done well. If you've seen The Mummy 2 then you've seen the scene when Rachel Weisz's character dies (she gets better). Brendan Frazer is probably doing an amazing job in that scene, but it's hard to judge because the MUSIC SWELLS and you can't hardly hear him over the REALLY SAD MUSIC TELLING YOU THIS IS A MOMENT OF INTENSE GRIEF. Hate the all caps? Think it lacks subtlety? That's how I feel about movie soundtracks.

On the down side, with no sound everyone in the theater can hear you snuffling away. And I seemed to have picked the showing just for fanboys.

I went to the show sort of expecting to be disappointed. How could a two-hour movie give me a sense of closure? This was clearly a TV series like Buffy, where Joss started out with a multiyear arc in his head. I didn't get closure, that is true. But I sure as hell wasn't disappointed.

Seagull and Raven

The WOTF short story is done. Well, mostly done. I'm going to let it simmer in its own juices over the weekend and give it a final polish on Tuesday before I send it out. It will be the shortest thing I've ever subbed to WOTF at barely 15 pages. It's also the first thing I've written that fell into the "correct" Fleish-Kinkaid ranges. I don't know if this will bode well or not, but those are interestingly developments. I don't think there is a semicolon in the entire piece!

Someone who was critting this for me mentioned that it reminded her of Fast Runner. A quick search later, this turned out to be a movie that came out a year or two ago about the Inuit (in their own language to boot). So of course I had to track it down, to make sure my story wasn't a dim retelling of something I hadn't even seen. Luckily, the Inuit thing is the only real connection. It's a very interesting movie, shot with digital cameras it looks like, and it's just gorgeous. Particularly if you, like me, love snow. It's filled with culture tidbits, but it's also a really great story about two brothers. I highly recommend it, but I'm sure it's hard to track down for rental. I bought my copy from Amazon.com (of course).

So once this is off on it's way to sunny LA, I'll be turning my attention back to the last story, "Of Tapestries and Daemons" and seeing what I can do with that. I think it needs to lose about 2000 words just to start, but we'll see.

Anger

Have you ever been angry? I mean really angry? So angry your hands shook? So angry your heart beats - not faster but harder. So hard it hurts. Have you been so angry your chest is filled with a liquid heat, decidedly icky and unnatural. Time doesn't flow: it's a series of snapshots. I imagine that last one would come in very handy in a fight. Not so much in sending an angry e-mail.

I've only been that angry twice. The first time was when my little weenie of an ex-boyfriend thought he'd give stalking a try and took the keys out of my car while I was making the night drop at the bank at 2 a.m. after work. I didn't kill him, but I did get my keys back. I don't know what he was thinking. I was bigger than he was.

The other time was last night. It's not a pleasant feeling, ballistic rage. I don't enjoy it at all. If I were in an Icelandic saga I imagine I would have come to my senses surrounded by the bloody bits of my former neighbors and hightailed it to Greenland. Being in the 21st century as I am, I sent an e-mail.

It's all work-related and not worth going into for oh-so-many reasons. Have you ever read Atlas Shrugged? (Kim has. Hi Kim!) Somewhere in the middle of this enormous book someone describes a company that changed management and was run like a communist collective where all decisions were made in committee and everyone found reasons why they couldn't be the ones doing any of the work. I've been thinking of that lately. A lot. I'm an American: I want to work hard and I want to be compensated based on how hard I worked.

The problem with the adrenal surge of a ballistic rage (aside from the very frightening feeling of not being in control of your own responses) is that empty feeling when the hormones drop out. Both times it's happened to me the anger gave way to weeping. That's not exactly a ball either. It tends to freak out the children too. I was still crying when the UPS man dropped off my package: Anansi Boys. Both boys were doing their best comforting, "Look mom! Your Neil Gaiman book came. Doesn't that make you happy?" I wasn't a complete mess, by the way, I was getting dinner made and all that. My kids are just intuitive. That and I don't hide my feelings well. Too much Scots-Irish in me for that.

I haven't had the chance to read Anansi Boys yet, what with updating the resume and researching companies who hire for what I want to do and all, but I've been carrying it with me from room to room, like a security blanket.

I have read the inscription. He dedicated the book to me! Wasn't that sweet? Well, technically he dedicated the book to you too, but I think it was mostly to me.

Random Musings

So The Corpse Bride is out on Friday. The boys are very excited; they've been watching trailer at Apple QuickTime for months. I asked Oliver last night whether he thought it might be too scary for him. He said, "Well, the Corpse Bride has an eyeball that just pops right out of her head!"
"Is that too scary for you?"
"It makes my guts hurt."
"Is that scary?"
"No! It's funny!"
He really likes The Nightmare Before Christmas so I'm sure he'll be okay. He's hugely interested in vampires, but that's the only movie we have with vampires in it that he can see. I'm not even really sure how he found out what a vampire is; I only showed him The Nightmare Before Christmas because he was already talking about them. He has a Lego minifigure vampire; maybe it came from that. I know when his brother was building the Empire State Building out of Legos, he was calling it the "Vampire State Building", mostly because it irritated his brother to no end.


On a completely unrelated note, I've been mucking about with some of the features on this blog. I figured out how to put a picture on the top, and once I get an actual photo of me I like I'll put it up there. I kind of like the South Park me, but the colors clash with the rest of the page. Also, I figured out how to add links on the side, but since my blog template didn't have that feature I had to put it in the HTML myself. Intimidating. Yet exhilirating. I love that feeling of "Wow! I almost know what I'm doing!" I can't get the script to match, but I'm not done noodling around yet.

The Neil Gaiman post

To celebrate the release of Anansi Boys this week, here are a few Neil Gaiman memories.

First of all, I came to the party late. I have an obsessive personality. I never like things just a little bit; they pretty much consume me, at least for a while. So I have a tendency to avoid things I think I might like too much, fighting the pull of the tide as it were. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I purposely didn' watch the show becaused I knew I would obsess on it (and Aidan was a newborn when the show came out, and I didn't have much time for TV anyway). I gave in at season 4, simultaneously watching new eps once a week and reruns on one of the cable networks to catch up.

But I was talking about Neil Gaiman here. My husband listens to MPR at work, and he was always telling me about this comic book guy that they were interviewing whom I'd really like if I would just listen. Well, I can't listen to public radio and homeschool at the same time, so I was always missing these things. But he kept insisting I would really, really like this guy, he was just my sort of thing, and I should pick up some of his books.

Now I knew what Sandman was, of course, but being a loyal Marvel fan I'd never read it. Someone had shown me the Ramadan issue once but it was at a party when I couldn't just sit down and read it. But I knew this was something that would suck me in once I started it.

Then on one of the homeschool e-loops I subscribe to one of the mothers made some disparaging remarks about comic books and two of us posted pro-comic arguments pretty much simultaneously. The other mom was a huge Gaiman fan; she said I simply had to read him.

Then I was dusting bookshelves one day and the name "Gaiman" caught my eye. I had a Neil Gaiman book already and didn't even know it (he wrote a biography on Douglas Adams, which was what I had). I actually believe that Douglas Adams bio was the second Gaiman book I read; he also wrote a book about Duran Duran which I believe I read (I had a friend with more than 20 books on Duran Duran and at one point or another I read all of them).

So. I have this rule about threes. Something that comes at me from three different places is trying to get my attention. So I pooled together all of the book store gift cards I had gotten for my birthday and Christmas and bought all of the Sandman collections, plus all of his novels (American Gods had just come out in paperback). Yep, that was over $200 spent all at once. Good thing I liked it, eh?

My other memory was the first time I read The Wolves in the Walls to Aidan and Oliver. Aidan was 6, Oliver was 3. I read stories to them while they eat their lunch, usually longer books like Harry Potter, but I made an exception for this one since it had just come in the mail and I was anxious to read it. I was so engrossed in the story I was halfway through the book before I realized that no one was eating. Oliver had a fork hovering in front of his mouth. Both of them were wide-eyed, way freaked out. I couldn't stop reading now; they would never know how things came out all right in the end. I finished it, but for days after Aidan told everyone about this really scary book that his mother had read to him that she must never, ever read again.

You know, they still haven't come around on that one. But this will be the book from their childhood that they will remember for the rest of their lives.

Writing Update

I finished the story for WOTF, formerly referrred to as the "weird" story, now officially called Seagull and Raven. It was my first official submission to the only crit group I joined recently. Up until this point, I've only had one person reading my stuff (thanks, Jenny!). She still reads, but I wanted to try getting more opinions. Also I'll be reading other people's stuff and critting them, which I understand is very helpful with your own writing. I posted the story Friday night and by Sunday morning I already had three really good, well thought out crits, so this is pretty cool. This is the first time I've gotten opinions from complete strangers who aren't familiar with me or my style, so that was interesting as well, seeing what comes across strongly.

I was going to let it sit for a few days before revising anyway, but now I'll have to as I realized that this is the week that Anansi Boys comes out. I undersand it's shorter than American Gods, but I know I won't be doing anything else until I've finished that book.

I hit the dartboard again!

Finally got my letter back from WOTF for "Of Tapestries and Daemons". I was a quarter-finalist... again. Partly, this is good news since that means I was in the top 10-15% of entries. On the other hand, it's frustrating. I keep hitting the dartboard, but I have no way of knowing if I'm getting any closer to the bullseye or not.

The story I'm finishing up is so weird I don't know what to think of its chances. It's a departure from my usual style, but it remains to be seen whether this is a good thing or not. It's been demoralizing work because I'm so bad at judging whether what I write is good or not. I was pretty down yesterday (ummm, did you notice?). Then at dinner Aidan and Oliver told me their new knock-knock joke that they came up with themselves:

Knock-knock.

Who's there?

Jenny.

Jenny who?

Pkew (exploding noise).

So I'm just staring at Aidan because of course this makes no sense when he volunteers this crucial bit of information: "It also works if you say Dennis."

Well, maybe you had to be there. It was the most surreal thing he could have said, and he was completely serious. I haven't laughed that hard in quite some time.

Writing is like...

Do you remember that seen from the movie Fight Club when the recruits are standing on the porch, and every so often Brad Pitt will go out there and kick their bag down the steps and tell them to go home, they'll never make the cut, they're too fat, thin, blond, whatever. I think that's what writing is like. And no one tells you how long you have to stay on the porch before they let you in.



Wasn't Meatloaf good in that movie? Is it Meatloaf or Meat Loaf? I think I've officially digressed...

Cave painting

We restarted history.

We have been using Story of the World for nearly three years, but Aidan was getting more and more bored with it. It's supposed to be written for third graders, but it's so dull! So we stopped doing history about a month ago so I could figure out what to do next.

My final decision: start all over. So here we are: prehistory. The Ice Age. Cave painting.

Of course this was 10+ minutes of set up, and nearly half an hour of clean-up, for something that took fifteen minutes to do. Typical.

The cave painting 

Bloggity Blog Blog Music Blog

I love the itunes on my computer. I've always wanted a jukebox for my CDs, but now I don't even need one. I've never been a big reader of liner notes, so downloading music is cool for me too. My two latest acquisitions are the newest discs from the Backstreet Boys and Nine Inch Nails. I feel fairly confident I'm the only one buying that combination.

The Backstreet Boys was more of the usual, middle of the road but well sung. They always talk about how they are all so different, one likes hard rock, one wants to do more Latin, another wants to get into Christian music. They should do what the Beatles did on the White Album; divide up the tracks and have at it. That would be a disc worth listening to. The lowest common denominator of their combined passions does not have much zest.

But it did come with a free QuickTime video. And a booklet which I've honestly haven't looked at yet (see above, liner notes).

The Nine Inch Nails, With Teeth, I'm really enjoying. In my opinion, it's the best NIN front-to-back listen since Pretty Hate Machine. I know, I know, Downward Spiral is supposed to be the masterpiece, but I found most of the songs went on too long. I realize as I say this that I am being the Emperor in the movie Amadeus ("There are too many notes. Just cut a few and it will be perfect!"). I wonder how many other suburban work-at-home moms listen to NIN. Probably not as many as listen to the Backstreet Boys.

I just got a new book on my all-time favorite band, a-ha. It starts out like this: "When a pop song makes you wonder if it's written by an idiot or a genius, it is almost certainly a hit. Take on Me is a song like that." This is probably the most positive thing the whole book has to say, but it was a very interesting read. Apparently they were hoping to have a career track like the Beatles - one big hit and the record company would give them total autonomy. So they wrote that one big hit... and never got out from under it. Their new disc comes out sometime this fall, but I don't know yet if Amazon.com will carry it as an import or if I'll have to pay steep eBay prices. They say it will be "dance music for the soul" which already has me intrigued.

I'm warning you...

Don't click on this link.

Addendum to previous post

As it turns out, the service station guys replaced the wrong tire. I drove all the way home on that madly hissing iffy tire and didn't even realize it. In a way I had sort of noticed, because the completely wrecked tire was gone from the back of the car, and the new Dunlop tire was on the front. I mean, I looked at it before I got in the car to drove home and noticed this and was feeling stupid because I thought I really should understand why they had to swap all the tires around, like this was something normal people know and are not confused by. When we got home I looked again, but had that same confused, I wish I wasn't so dumb about cars feeling.

It never occurred to me that the tire guys had apparently not been listening to me when I explained what I needed done and just did the most obvious thing. Perhaps I should be been clearer. Passenger, rear seems pretty clear. At any rate, by the time Quin got home it was completely flat. He doesn't trust anything, not the job the tire guys did or my word that I didn't hear anything clanging across the bottom of the car, so on Monday he's going to have it towed to the Subaru dealership to get it thoroughly looked over. It needed its first routine maintenance visit anyway.

So we're back to one car for the next few days. I went a year without leaving the house during the day, but just today - and it's not like I had anywhere to go - I felt really trapped. Still, it's not like my house just got washed away or anything. Trying to keep it in perspective.

I have the world's best kids (although I may be biased)

Today was Lego Club day for the boys. This is a once-a-month thing they do with other homeschoolers. It's mostly boys (some sisters tag along), and they are all rabid Lego builders. For the summer months, the club meets in Stark, which is a little bit beyond Cambridge. Actually, it's Fishlake Township, but Stark is the closest... Not a city or town... The closest place where the 50 mph goes down to 30 mph for about a quarter of a mile. It takes over an hour to get there. In all honesty, Lego Club was the reason we bought the Subaru Forester. The Chevy wasn't going to hold up for that long haul.

Well, today was the last Lego Club in Stark; we'll be back in the Hennepin County Libraries in the fall. All of the other trips had been uneventful. From weather reports I was expecting to be driving in the rain today, but the storms had blown past by 9 a.m. when we left the house, so the trip out there was fine.

On the way home, I was driving behind a minivan when something fell out of (or off of, not really sure) the truck in front of the mini van. It was a pipe, maybe the truck's exhaust pipe because that's what it looked like. The minivan tried to swerve, but we were against one of those road construction concrete walls so there was no where to go. He had to go over the pipe. I tried to take it between the wheels but I nicked the passenger tires. Both of them.

So there we are on the side of the road somewhere in the vicinity of Forest Lake (almost made it back to civilization) (that's a joke, those towns are practically suburbs nowadays). AAA says it will be an hour before anyone will be out to get us. When we had left the house, it had just finished raining and was maybe 60, but now it's full sun and getting over 80 sitting in the car. Aidan was a little freaked out a first because you can feel the car move when trucks go by (and because he really doesn't think Mom can deal with these situations on her own, there was a lot of "when are you going to call Dad? You need to call Dad!"). Aidan being Aidan, though, once I got him involved in a conversation about wind resistance and car design he forgot to be scared. Also, since we were on our way home from Lego Club that had brand new Legos with them (Dinosaurs this month), so that helped.

We sat there for more than 45 minutes before a man stopped to ask if we needed any help. I have stranger fear in a big way, and this guy clearly wasn't from AAA. He had two bumperstickers on his truck. One was really faded and ended with GUNS, the other said "I (heart) Minnesota". I decided to attach him to the second one and think of him as the "I (heart) Minnesota" guy. He had a jack in the truck and changed the front tire, which was completely flat. He was one of those guys who does this and that (he talked the whole time he was changing the tire) and had seen us on the side of the road when he was heading North to do a job. When he saw us again going South after finishing his job he knew we'd been there awhile, which was why he stopped.

So now I had the spare in place of the completely flat tire, but the back tire was barely holding on, so we limped up to the next exit, only that was just a gas station. If we wanted to patch the tire, we would have to go back to Forest Lake where the service station was.

Aidan wasn't happy to see us heading North again. He wanted to be home, and we were going the wrong way. Not to mention it was pretty nervewracking driving on an iffy tire. I had inflated it as much as possible at the gas station, but it was hissing like mad. I was scarcely surprised when the service station said it wasn't patchable; it would have to be replaced.

So we spent another 20 minutes waiting at the station, only this time we were waiting in the cool indoors with cold water and M&Ms. And Aidan finally got to talk to Dad on the cellphone.

All told, it took three hours to get home, and we missed half of naptime, but they were both very good about it. I would have expected sitting confined in a nonmoving car for nearly an hour would drive them bonkers. It drove me bonkers. But, you know, they're just really cool.

So this is addicting...

This is a website for a company that does photo retouching:

http://glennferon.com.nyud.net:8090/portfolio1/index.html

You can click on a picture and when you hover your mouse over it, it becomes the original, raw photo. Take the mouse away and it's retouched again. There aren't too many tummy tucks or breast enhancements (although there are some). What I mostly noticed was super-skinny chicks like Halle Berry were losing protruding bones like ribs, hip bones, and clavicles so they look smooth all over.

Now that is nefarious.

Comments

I realized a while ago that my comments setting was wrong. It was only allowing comments from people who also had blogs through blogger.com. Very small crowd, actually. Now anyone can leave a comment.

I hope this doesn't create a spike in spam comments, but we'll see.

To leave a comment, click on the comment count at the end of the post after the time (for instance 0 comments). Then, umm, follow the instructions? I'm not sure what happens after that if you're not a blogger (blogger knows I'm me on both my computers so I can't see what it would look like to an outsider). It's supposed to ask you to verify a word to screen for spammers, but I'm not sure what that's going to look like either.

Not much help, am I?

My week's vacation

I've been coasting in neutral for about a week now, writing wise. It's distracting; I know the WOTF preliminary judging is done, but I haven't gotten a letter yet. I have a hard time focusing on new writing when I'm sweating through these last few days of knowing how things went. Thankfully I no longer sweat through the whole 10-12 weeks of judging doing nothing new because that's just inefficient.

I finished the outline for the novel and had another emotional struggle with the size of the thing. I debated setting it aside and coming up with something shorter to write first. The general advice is shorter is better for first-time novels (more likely to be picked up, I mean). But I think I sort of have to write this first. Just to get it out of my head. Then I can move on. You know, two years from now.

But I took a week off to come to that decision. I've done this before; it's almost a joke. Since no one but me is affected by whether I choose to spend all my spare time writing or not, when I have trouble with the writing I usually say to myself, "Why don't you try not writing?" And then about a week later I'm writing again, because when I try not writing, I find that I can't not write.

But what really brought me back this time was William Gibson. I recently got a DVD documentary, really just him talking, called No Maps for These Territories. It took forever to watch it because Quin wanted to see it too so I had to wait. The director's style is annoying; he apparently believes we all have zero attention span to just listening to a really interesting man talk and keeps putting up weird visuals and music cues. Since I usually listen to the TV rather than watch it this annoyed Quin more than me. For my part, it was really cool to hear him talk about what he went through to write his first novel Neuromancer. Just listening him talk about what excited him about it got me excited about my own work again.

So, vacation over. Back to the writing. On one last Gibson note, he hadn't blogged for several months but just a few weeks ago he came back to post "I am. I am writing." Ahh, the waves on the beach. I'm so there. I had the same response I had when Neil Gaiman griped about his characters stopping the action to discuss the story so far when working on his novel.

First I say, "Thank god, it's not just me!"

Followed very quickly by, "Wait a minute, this never goes away?"

I don't usually do this, but...

The neatest thing happened last week. I've written about the sci-fi writer Tobias Buckell before (here). I mentioned I have his first novel on preorder from Amazon (although it won't be out until next February). I also read his blog; he always has cool links and just in general lots of advice for spec. fiction writers just starting out. He mentioned last week that he has a ton of refrigerator magnets with his book cover on them (with his web page, etc, because it's a marketing thing) and if you sent him your address, he'd send you a magnet.

See the pic below. I love that book cover.

Still, just sending my address seemed a little demanding and impersonal, so I sent a brief (4 sentence) note about how I found him. That was through his story in All-Star Zeppelin Adventures, although I had read "In Orbite Medievali" first. It wasn't until I found his blog that I realized he had written both.

That's technically too short to be a "fan letter" right? But the cool thing was he sent back an e-mail longer than mine, talking about the stories I had mentioned and about his novel coming up, and wishing me luck with my own writing. What a cool guy!

Here's the book cover. 

I'm Chevy Chase, and You're Not

I have no idea where he got it from, but the younger son, Oliver, has taken to lip-syncing along when people are talking. Just now my husband was telling me about how LeeAnn Chin's was bought out by another company. I don't remember why. I certainly didn't ask. But it was hard to keep a straight face during his Cliff Clavin, way too many details speech with a 4-year-old standing behind him just out of his view, pretending to talk.

Where did he ever pick this up? And he's so animated when he does it, it's hard not to laugh. Even if you were just trying to send him to his room for tormenting his brother and you really, really don't want to crack a smile. Sends the wrong message, you know.

But perhaps I shouldn't worry too much. The two of them were talking to someone else's grandmother at the park the other day and Adain was explaining at length why Johnny Depp was now his favorite actor and not Jim Carey with Oliver adding his little shout-outs.

I guess they're too young for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But hey, Corpse Bride is out next month, as I know because I've seen the trailer about a hundred times by now.

I Love Keanu Reeves

Just going to put that out there. We'll circle back to it.

Tao of Troth was rejected this week. It only took eight days! I understand the preliminary judging for WOTF is done and I should either something or not here something in the next week or so. Not hearing something would be good news here since that would mean that Of Tapestries and Daemons had moved up to the next level. But having Tao rejected twice in two weeks has me in the duldrums, so I decided to take time off of "writing" (since at this point it was mostly self-loathing in front of a computer) and watch a movie instead.

So I picked up Constantine. See how we circled back?

I was expecting to be unimpressed. The reviews had been mostly tepid, and I understand the fans of the comic really hated it. I'm familiar with the character from Swamp Thing and the issue of Sandman he was in, but the only issue of his own title I've ever read is the one Gaiman wrote. I have a Hellblazer graphic novel, but it's buried under a bunch of Dr. Strange and Robert E. Howard books in the stack of things I totally intend to read when I have the time (come on, Powerball!). So you can say I went into the movie knowing the basic facts but without a real emotional investment in the character.

It needed more humor. There was a some in there, but they should have kicked it up a notch. I know that much about John Constatine; he has a smart mouth. Otherwise I was pleasantly surprised; I really liked it. I would like to thank the director for making a movie with a dark theme without feeling the need to shoot it so dark I can't watch it at 2:30 in the afternoon. It's such a rare treat to be able to see the action. Also, it was violent but not gory. Well, the scene were Lucifer puts his hands into Constantine's chest was a little intense, but no gushing spouts of gore.

I understand the chief comic-book-fan complaint was that Keanu doesn't look the part. John Constantine is blond/blue-eyed in the comic. I can only assume this is to make him look angelic, but that's a stereotype that bugs on so many levels I (personally) am happy they deep-sixed it.

I watched this movie alone because my husband won't watch anything with Keanu in it. Or at least he won't watch them with me (he's seen Hard Ball and I haven't). Part of what I like about Keanu is I can always see what appealed to him in the scripts he chooses. Not every movie works, but I usually enjoy them on some level. Something else that drives Quin crazy, I can like a movie that he thinks sucks just because I can see what they were going for and enjoy it for that. Which is why I don't usually recommend movies to other people. They just get mad.

Examples? Johnny Mnenomic. Cool idea, not executed really well. A different director might have helped. Another actress in the role of Molly. It's hard not to think of Carrie-Ann Moss now since Trinity was clearly modeled on Molly on some level. She would have been great. But I can say I liked Johnny Mnemonic just on the basis of the scene where they are on the trash heap and he is listing the things he wants: Laundered shirts! Room service!

Worse than Johnny Mnemonic was The Watcher. I don't like serial killer movies (or books or TV shows), but I liked the idea of making James Spader the good guy and Keanu evil. That pretty much tapped out the film's cleverness, and the visual effects were distactingly bad. Still, there's this one scene where the two meet up in a cemetary and Spader hands Keanu his gun. At the end of the scene as they are walking off Keanu fires the gun into the ground and says something like "Shit! That was loaded?" Which just struck me as completely hilarous. It was so out of context with the rest of this super-serious movie it was like an outtake they just left in there. Well, it's never a good sign if the part of the movie that I really liked didn't seem to belong. Don't see The Watcher.

The thing is, I don't like that school of acting where it's all about the shouting, going over the top. Overacting. Al Pacino. The only thing I liked him in was Insomnia. So when people tell me they don't like Keanu because he underacts, well there's not much I can say to that. My spectrum is cranked down and he's right where he should be. Part of the problem is half his movies are special effects extravaganzas (not meant to be acting showcases), and half are independent films the general public doesn't see. If you watched a bunch of Keanu movies, you'd see the real range. Try this:

Permanent Record. Not a particularly good movie; the ending is really bad. Offensive bad. Singing a song makes everything OK? But Keanu is great as the best friend of the boy who commits suicide, dealing with the survivor guilt. He's a pup in this one; it predates Bill and Ted.

My Own Private Idaho. I didn't really get this movie when I first saw it. What was I, 18 or 19? I picked it up again a few months back when the DVD came out, and wow. It also has River Phoenix in it. It's hard not to think what he'd be doing now if only.

The Last Time I Committed Suicide. He's not the main character in this, and having read Kerouac's On the Road is probably crucial to getting the movie, but I liked it.

The Gift. Keanu is a redneck wifebeater. See it.

Something's Gotta Give. In which Diane Keaton makes the wrong choice.

In which I rant (and you have been warned)

The new Asimov's has a short story by Frederik Pohl called "Generations". I liked it enough to read it all the way through. I particularly liked the way it was structured, the narrative flow if you will. But I have some problems with it that are bugging the hell out of me.

Synopsis: Scientists discover that the constants like the speed of light are changing. They decide it is the work of some Experimenter (who needed a model the size of his universe to study, which is our universe). This leads people all over the world to abandon their religions.

My problems: First off, if more than 200 years of science cannot convince half of Americans that evolution is true, I don't believe they'll be trusting the scientists on this one either. As for the scientists themselves, they'd be scrambling to explain what they've found rationally, not writing it off as the work of an Experiementer whose existence cannot be proven.

Not to mention, wouldn't changing the constants be catastrophic? I don't really know, honestly; my knowledge of science is smallish. But I read that Lee Smolin book that postulated that universes evolve, and it certaintly sounded like life as we know it required our constants to fall within a very small range. I can let this one go since I don't really know, but a paragraph in the story explaining why changing the constants had no effect on anything would have been nice. He mentions the measurement of the distance to the moon was considerably short since c had changed, but not that anyone was perceiving it as being larger in the sky. No visible effects brings me back to point 1, the general population not believing the scientists.

Now I'm getting into the nitty-gritty. For background, I would consider myself a nonchristian univeral unitarian, a pagan, and a pantheist. I don't like labels, but that should give you the general idea. And I do not forsee myself ever taking part in an organized religion, pagan or otherwise. So keep that in mind when I say I'm a little tired of the condescension being delivered to people who are religious, portraying them as unthinking, gullible sheep. At the very least it's lazy writing.

Say everyone in the world took the scientists at their word, all the way down to believing that some cosmic Eperimenter was changing our universal constants. It does not follow that there is no god. The story concludes with a very Dark Ages church taking over with the idea that the Experimenter created god too as part of his model of the universe. I think that would be the last thing a religious person would believe. At the very least, the idea that the Experimenter was god would come before it. I imagine most people would believe that god stood over the Experimenter, and for pantheists like me, god would include the Experimenter.

The novel

I've set the short stories aside for a while so I can focus on the rewrite of the novel. The first draft was 454 pages, 130,000 words, but I decided the scope wasn't large enough. No really. I've added characters and done more research on places, so I expect the rewrite to be 500+ pages easy. (Then I'll revise and pull out the Stephen King 10%).

At any rate, the rewrite is not going well. I write 30 pages, delete them, write 40 pages, delete them, write 50... This is apparently how JRR Tolkein wrote LOTR, like waves on the beach. But since LOTR wasn't published until he was 62, I'm looking for a more effective approach. There are two things at work here. Problem number 1: editors and agents only request the first three chapters (and I seriously doubt they read that much of every submission). so the opening has to be strong. No pressure! Just be brilliant.

Solution: Forget about the opening. Just keep going, you can always revise it later.

So that would be okay except for problem number 2: I'm convinced I'm missing crucial details as I go. Well, I'm convinced of this mostly because I keep noticing that I am missing crucial details as I go. So, as much as nearly every writer extolls the "organic" method of just letting the story flow, I just can't do it that way.

Solution: An outline. A very, very specific outline.

I started work on that yesterday. First just charting out physically where the action moves, then filling in what the characters need to be doing. There are seven main characters (two are more important than the others since they share the POV), three important secondary characters (one of whom never physically appears but his presence is felt everywhere), and about ten less important secondary characters. Did I mention I had widened the scope?

But this is fun, charting out the arcs for each character. Now when I sit down to write, I'll know what needs to be accomplished by the end of the chapter. I hope it will kill the panic factor.

It's like storyboarding a movie. Nearly every filmmaker does it these days, but Spielberg was one of the first. He said once that storyboarding allowed him to be more spontaneous on the set, not less, because he had worked ahead of time exactly what he needed. With that knowledge, he was free to use what was available to meet that need; he wasn't chained to the preconception. I've taken this as my philosophy for homeschooling. I schedule each schoolyear out to the day, which most homeschool moms think is nuts, but I find this allows us to be more spontaneous. I know when I need to have certain things done by, so on any given day I can feel comfortable moving things around or making it a halfday.

Well, I hope it will be true of writing too. So I went to bed last night still thinking about the characters and their arcs, since I've only got the bare bones of an outline so far (when you have something less than 2 hours a day to write, things move slow).

Then I had this dream, and it wasn't about my book. It was about Harry Potter. What's up with that? Can't my subconscious stay on task? No, it says, "here's a cool ending for a book you didn't write". It was weird. Harry's head split open, specifically his scar did, and a baby brother came out of his head, like a Zeus/Athena thing (it didn't kill him; it was magic). The spell Lily did to protect him involved his unborn baby brother (in my dream). Must be my subconscious mind's interpretation of the older magic Voldemort doesn't use, the love thing. Or perhaps my fond wish for Harry to have a family of his own.

So you can see why I don't use my own dreams for my writing, cause that's just creepy. Of course Voldemort's face coming out of the back of Quirrel's head was creepy too. You be the judge.

Juggling Cats

Oliver is slowly easing into kindergarten. He's only four, but I'm following the same plan I used for Aidan, skipping preschool entirely and doing two years of kindergarten. Most preschool curriculums are designed for kids going to some sort of group school, public or private, and the emphasis is on tying your own shoes, buttoning your own coat, standing in line, raising your hand when you want to talk, etc. etc. Really, it's all about making life easier for the kindergarten teachers of the world, which is very useful if you're going that route but of no use for our family. Hence, we spread kindergarten out over two years.

I slip subjects in one at a time (both with Aidan and now with Oliver). This serves two purposes: it's such a gradual process there is very little rebellion (I can't imagine going from 0 hours school one day to 3 or more the next), and it gives me time to adjust my own schedule. When Aidan started kindergarten, Oliver was a baby, so I had to fit Aidan's school in around naps and feeding times. Now I have to fit Oliver's school time around Aidan's school time.

So, juggling cats.

Oliver only does phonics and math. He has a preschool workbook from Target that has other activities, but that's mostly for fun. 10 minutes of phonics, 10 minutes of math. Sounds easy, right? Well, the minute I start Oliver school, Aidan immediately forgets everything he ever knew and is incapable of finishing his task without my help. I re-explain the concept to Aidan while Oliver shouts, "What about the number five! What about the number five!" (The things Oliver shouts about don't necessarily need to have a corrollary in the real world. He just likes to shout). I turn back to Oliver to resume discussion of the number five, but Aidan needs me to explain the concept he's working on one more time.

And so on and so on.

And there are homeschoolers with ten or more kids! I don't know how they do it.

On the upside, Oliver has mastered all the short vowels sounds and is moving on to consonants now. His phonics program is all rhymes: "A is the first vowel that we say, /a/ is the short vowel sound of A." So guess what's on the permanent loop in my head?

At long last, rejection

I got my rejection from Asimov's today. They say the main reason they have for rejecting things is that they've seen it before. So they've already seen too many stories about futuristic Chinese magicians who team up with little black girls with chips in their heads to move 12th century Norsemen into the future so they can voyage to the stars.

I'm being facetious of course. It was a form letter, so who knows what really the problem was. It just didn't stand out enough to make the cut. It's already on its way to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Hoping for better luck this time (or at least a faster rejection).

Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka, the Amazing Chocolateer

So, we took the boys to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory today at the Imax. We tried to go yesterday, but Aidan suddenly got very ill just as we got to the theater (a 30 minute drive on a Sunday) so we turned around and came back home. Luckily, we got passes for our non-refundable tickets ($60 for the four of us!). It took over an hour to get there today (Monday), and he started to feel ill again just as we got there. The going theory is that he was just too excited to see the movie, but it was a tough situation to deal with. After an hour of stop-and-go traffic I was not prepared to turn back around and go without seeing the movie for the second time. Luckily, as we figured, he felt better by the time the previews started (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire can make anyone feel better). I love a teaser trailer, they are always cooler than the "here's the entire plot to the movie" trailer that comes out later. My all-time favorite teaser was the one for Strange Days that was just Ralph Fiennes doing the hard-sell for playback (being Lenny, his character from the movie). No scenes from the movie at all; it was brilliant.

But anyway, Willy Wonka. First off, I love an Elfman score. This one was Elfman genius. It used the oompah-loompah songs from the book (it always bugged me that the first movie didn't seem to find them worthy). Oliver and I sat through all the credits because he's a music nut too. Secondly, Johnny Depp is the bomb. He knows just how far to go to make the character really interesting, then pushes it just a bit farther. One of the reviews I've read was comparing a Depp comedic performance, which is always in character, to someone like Jim Carey, where it's anything for the laugh. I like both kinds of performances, actually, but each kind tends to work in a very different type of movie. Anyway, as much as I loved Gene Wilder in the first movie, Depp goes in a completely different direction. What can I say, he's brilliant (and he apparently had a lot of fans in the theater tonight).

It's an all-around very cool movie, faithful to the book to an almost LOTR degree. There was an added spin about the meaning of family, but it's not cheesy. Tim Burton vies for the number one spot on my list of all-time favorite directors, and so far I've seen all of his films in the theater except Planet of the Apes (yeah, I know; I have the DVD but only watched it once) and Big Fish (which is really excellent; Ewan MacGregor does a Southern accent that is to die for). Tim has gotten a lot of mileage out of his own emotionally traumatic childhood (he has a book of poems I quite like that is particularly clear on this theme). I think it's really cool that he made a movie where the main character realizes the importance of his own family, rather than the sort of vogue thing these days of finding a circle of friends and making them "like family". I reckon it's because Tim just started his own family. Everything changes when you have kids, right?

Allow me to recommend Imax presentations of Hollywood movies. This is the third for the boys, second for me (I couldn't bring myself to go see Robots; I hated Ice Age and can't take anymore of Robin Williams, whom I used to find very funny). The tickets are quite a bit more ($60 for the four of us), but that tends to keep out the riff-raff; you have to make a commitment to the movie to drive all the way to Apple Valley and pay that much to see it. Still, best sound, best picture (by a long shot; no chewed-up prints here). They even let you bring in your own food (and they ought to at these prices). We're already planning to go there to see Harry Potter in November, just in time for Aidan's birthday.

Please, Severus...WHAT?

"Please, Severus, kill me" or "Please, Severus, don't kill me." I'm thinking he meant the former. I don't think Snape is really evil. My personal theory is that Snape in his school days was in love with Lily, Harry's mother. He reported what he heard of the prophecy, but when Voldemort followed up on that by killing Lily (and James, but I don't think Snape cared about that), Snape switched sides.
Also, I think Dumbledore is really dead (despite the possible phoenix connection), but in an Obiwan Kenobi "I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine" sort of way.
Oh, did I mention I finished reading a certain book?

A couple links

For those who like my South Park pictures, here is a link to where you can make your own:
http://spstudio.elena.hosting-friends.de/spstudio.html

Also, while I previously thought that surely I was the only one who loved both James Joyce and J.K. Rowling, this link proves me wrong:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/harrypotter/story/0,10761,1521834,00.html

Although I should say it's probably only really funny if you are familiar with Joyce. Then it's hilarous, it is so spot-on. It's from a contest, write the death of Dumbledore in the style of some author. You can see others here:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/potter/page/0,13381,1521782,00.html

Probably up for a limited time only, so check it out. Hemingway is also very well done, as is Jasper Fforde (and if you haven't read anything by Jasper Fforde, what are you waiting for? He's books are terrific, and they get funnier as you go).

South Park Quin 

South Park Oliver 

South Park Aidan 

South Park Me! 

Bored Now

My employer's computer network is down, the boys are at swimming, and I have nothing to do while I wait for IT to fix the problem. So here I am. Let's talk short stories (if I can get my kitty with the ponytail fetish OFF MY NECK! Down, Spike! Sure, it's all fun and games until you start to feel like your falling...)

I mostly hate them. What I lovely thing for me to say, I know, being a writer myself, but it's true. My curve isn't even 10% good for 90% crap (which is supposed to be like the Golden Rule of any genre). I like quite a bit less than 5%, I would guess. For instance: I have about five volumes of WOTF compilations, to check out the competition. The overwhelming majority of them I never get past the third or fourth paragraph. Out of all of them the only one I genuinely liked was In Orbite Medievali from Volume XVI. I've read it twice, and that's high praise from me. It's a really cool idea and the prose is very engaging. I'll name names here, that was Tobias Buckell (Toby in this anthology), and I already preordered his first novel on Amazon.

Other than that, the only story that made an impression was Beautiful Singer by Steve Bein. I could see someone making a really creepy movie out of this one. Or perhaps not; many really good Stephen King stories have ended up as deeply bad films. Imagine a really cool director with a great sense of visuals, particularly of color. Hmm, M. Knight Shyamalan?

At any rate, I also subscribe to Asimovs, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Realms of Fantasy. ROF prints way too many myth and folklore retreads for my taste. I like them when they're brilliant like Gaiman's Snow Glass Apples, but few are brilliant. To be fair, I've read so much mythology and folklore myself I've probably burned out on it; there is nothing new to be said here for me. They are probably very interesting stories for people who don't know the source material so well. Wait, that sounds really conceited. You realize that mythology obsession is unhealthy and socially disruptive. Umm, like a Star Trek thing only without the social element of having other Trekers to share your obsession with. I'd have more friends if I read less books, right? OK...

Asimov's tends to run a little dry for my tastes, but there have been two good ones recently: Shadow Twin by Gardner Dozois, George R. R. Martin, and Daniel Abraham was really good. I kept thinking I knew where the story was going, but then it took a 90 degree turn. And it did this a couple of times! Very well crafted. The other I really liked was The Little Goddess by Ian McDonald. It had a mythology/religion back drop but used it to tell a really interesting story about a girl. I liked it immensely.

Mailman came. No SASE. Grrrr. Waiting...

Where was I? With FSF I usually make it through more of the stories, but there hasn't been much I think back on later. Nothing haunts me, and I like to be haunted. Spell by Bruce McAllister was pretty good, but I just read it last night so we cannot yet assess the long-term effects.

You know, I'm probably just way too picky, but it came to me recently that life is short, which is a cliche but you know what I mean. When I was 15 I used to read the same books over and over, and now I realize that even books I really like I might never get a chance to read again because there is so much else out there to be read. I don't have the patience for B-grade stuff when there are A's waiting for me (and yes we are grading on a curve here). The problem is finding the A's. They could be anywhere. I try to solicit recommendations from other readers, but that's often an iffy proposition, individual tastes widely vary.

But the next person to tell me I simply have to read The DaVinci Code is losing a limb. I swear. Amazon should do one of their redirects, "If you liked The Davince Code, you'll love Foucault's Pendulum!" And we could watch people's heads explode. Or something.

Ahh, Umberto Eco.

11 Days to Go

On Friday I started re-reading Order of the Phoenix. I was figuring it would take me most of the two weeks before HPB to read it, but I blew through it over the weekend (granted it was a long weekend). So now I'm just waiting and wondering. I haven't heard many advanced hinting on this one compared to OOP, and I freely admit I have no idea who the Halfblood Prince is. I suspect it isn't anyone we've met yet. I suspect Harry will be Quidditch captain. That's the only prediction I can make.

OOP is my favorite Harry Potter book so far. I'm partial to long books, especially long books like this one that don't feel the need to go over and over the same territory (that means you, Robert Jordan). Neville Longbottom has been my favorite character since the first book, and I was happy to see he had a much more prominent role to play in OOP; I hope he doesn't disappear again. But for me, Fred and George made the book.

So now I have nearly two weeks to kill. I suppose I could get some writing of my own done. The second draft calls...

A Wee Bit More Live 8

I didn’t stop watching after a-ha. I saw Pet Shop Boys playing from Moscow; that was pretty cool. They did “Go West”. I guess they're the only band playing in Moscow. I'm not sure what even happened to Tokyo. For a PSB live show it was pretty sedate; they usually do impressive, operatic things (Neil in an electric chair is a memorable image from Performance).

I don’t know what I was seeing in Rome. It looked like a hill-billy trucker rapping in Italian. ??

Sting seemed to be sticking to old Police songs, but he redid the lyrics to “Every Breath You Take” to address the world leaders. I didn’t catch most of it (I always have a hard time understanding the words of songs on the first go-round), but I liked “Every smile you fake, we’ll be watching you.”

Robbie Williams was fun, even though I don’t really know his songs. He has enough personality for two people, I swear.

Then there was the Who, another one of my faves (this concert is a lot like the random mix of my iTunes, only without Shonen Knife). They’re looking really old, but still rock like they're kids.

The Cure looks older than the Who.

In which I am Fulfilled

I was watching Madonna and almost missed them! I heard three songs, "Hunting High and Low", "Take On Me", and "Summer Moves On". I may have missed one at the beginning, I'm not sure, but at least I got to see them. I'm always amazed by Morton Harket, the man never hits a sour note, and he has an incredible range. Come to find he couldn't hear himself over his earpiece and I'm even more impressed.

I should amend my earlier post, in point of fact a-ha will be performing in NYC in September. Too bad there is now way I can go. They were my first concert ever (second row!), and I have two live DVDs of theirs. They are an excellent live band and I'd love to see them perform again. Perhaps in another 20 years they'll play the Twin Cities again. One can hope!

OK, back to work.

Still in pursuit of a-ha on Live 8

Still in pursuit of a-ha on Live 8.

I was originally planning on recording VH1 all day and watching it tomorrow, but my DVD recorder picked today of all days to go completely bat-shit. It’s says all my blank disks are “available for playback only” (hello! They’re completely blank!), then the message screen alternates “open” and “close” for about ten minutes, which would normally mean the little disk tray would be going in and out only nothing is happening. It also locks up and gives me the much more honest, if vague, “error” message.

After being accused of acting like Oliver (whose 4 and has some excuse for low temper control) I went back to my office and sulked. Then I started monkeying around on the internet and found the live feeds that AOL is playing. This is actually much cooler. I can see all the cities and who is playing or about to play and pick what I listen to (technically I’m working, so I’m not watching, but I’ll punch out when my guys perform, guarantee it). On the downside, I won’t be able to watch it again like I would if my recorder were actually working. On the upside, I get to pick what I hear, not VH1.

I heard Brian Wilson in Berlin. He did all Beach Boys songs, which is cool but I was hoping he’d do something from Smile. I love the guy, he’s such a terrible singer. I mean that in a good-natured ribbing sort of way. His back-up singers were fantastic, but he’s a warbler. It must be frustrating for him. His songs are so beautiful, I can see why he wants to sing them himself, but whoa.

Grrrrrrr

So, the Live 8 concerts are today. Lots of cool bands, tons of cities. Didn't they only do 3 last time? I remember Philly, NY, and London, but it was a long time ago and my memory may be wrong. I remember watching it. It was a weird time for me. We had just moved to MN from TN, and I was still adjusting to the idea that rock and pop were not from the devil. I'm not joking, by the way, that was really what I believed up to the age of 12. I remember watching LiveAid and really enjoying it, although I had no idea who most of the bands were. Here's a good bench mark: I recognized Lionel Ritchie and Tina Turner. That's how hip I was!

But back to the Grrrr. The paper did one of their very insightful articles which is just a bunch of blurbs that are supposed to be hip or witty or whatever. The kind of thing where you can tell the writers read a lot of Entertainment Weekly, know what I'm saying? And they listed my all-time fave band a-ha under head-scratchers. If they were performing in NY I suppose that would be a head-scratcher, but they're playing in Berlin. They never lost their popularity in Europe (or South America, or other large chunks of the globe which are not the US). They play arenas, people, and not just in Norway.

If a tree falls in the woods, and the woods aren't in America, does it even count? Or to paraphrase Mike Myers, "If it's not American, it's crap!!"

Grrrrrr.

I'm working today but will be taping as much as they show on TV. Who wants to bet I never see my guys? Luckily, there are a lot of cool acts. I'm sure I'll see something I like. But I'm still pissed.

Writing Update

Of Tapestries and Daemons is on its way to WOTF as we speak. My local post office has a new automated postage machine in the vestibule which is open 24/7, so my mailing woes are over. Of course, we have two cars now and I can drive to the post office anytime, but it's nice to have options. As far as the story goes, I think I fixed the ending. It seems to work for me. I'm not in love with it, like I was with Saga, but since Saga broke my heart, this is probably a good thing.

Still waiting to hear back from Asimov's on Tao of Troth. I found a website that tracks how long various magazines take to respond, which is comforting on two levels. 1) I have a better idea of when to expect to hear something and 2) I know I'm not alone in really obsessing about this. It's been longer than their average response time as reported by writers making submissions (which is longer than Asimov's says it will be), but not the maximum time reported (which is waaaaay out there). I'm still trying to decide if the long wait is a good sign or a bad sign.

"You're no Richie Rich, but you have a good heart."

Yesterday I watched Pyromaniac: A Love Story, a movie I haven't seen in years. It had a small theatrical release and I remember having to hunt through video stores to find a copy before I finally got to see it. I highly recommend it if you're in the mood for a small, sweet story (as opposed to a sweeping epic).

The main character is Sergio, played by John Leguizamo, whose always cool but very young here. I had forgotten how old this movie is; he looks like such a pup! But a digress. Sergio is the sort of character I have a fondness for, but is very rare in movies (or any other media for that matter): the sweet guy. I suppose there are two reasons for this: 1) most chics like edgy guys and 2) they are really hard to do in a believable way. It's too easy to make them come across as pushovers or way too sappy. Sergio is an example of this type of character done well. I also love the guy characters in Hayao Miyazaki movies, like Potsu in Castle in the Sky or Tombo in Kiki's Delivery Service. They are good, decent guys with big hearts and lots of affection for the girls they're playing second fiddle to. Lloyd Dobbler in Say Anything is another good example, but I understand that John Cusack wanted to play him angrier, which goes with what I was saying about these characters being hard to do.

Just in case you've stayed with me so far, let me piss off a bunch of people and say I always thought Buffy's best relationship was with Riley. She and Angel were always too dramatic for me (and I never liked his character until he moved over to his own show, where he got to grow in non-Buffy ways and became quite interesting). Spike was always one of my favorite characters (isn't he everyone's?) but that relationship was doomed from the start. Listen to Tara discuss the Hunchback of Notre Dame; that's every reason they weren't going to be a couple.

Riley, on the other hand, had open and obvious affection for Buffy. He wasn't afraid to disagree with her but always backed her up in the end. He just had the misfortune of turning up after Angel. I appreciated that he went to a dark place, but when he came back to Sunnydale he seemed to be an older and wiser version of his own self. Still an optimistic do-gooder, still with affection for Buffy for who she was. Spike got to make the big speech at the end of season seven, but you can't make me believe that Riley didn't feel the same way.

Apropos nothing

My sons are big Beatles fans. They've been listening to it since birth, but it really clicked for them when I picked up the movie Yellow Submarine. The weird thing is, I always found that movie unspeakably dull. It's slow with lots of "psychedelic" animation. I freely admit I am part of the MTV generation. But my boys just love it.

My mother was a teenager when the Beatles invaded. She regretted throwing all of her memorabilia away when she left home; she had no idea that when I was fifteen I would be mad about the Beatles too. I had all their records and Beatle posters all over my room. The idea that her grandchildren love the Beatles too is amazing. The music just never sounds old.

So I was thinking back and there is a definite pattern to my love of the Beatles. When I was a teenager, John was my favorite Beatle. He is the god of angry teenagers, though, isn't it? But after I had read every book about the Beatles I could get my hands on, I quickly realized that John was a bit of a prick. I've mellowed with age, I would now say John had a truckload of issues, but I've never gotten around to forgiving him for the way he treated his son Julian. With everything he went through, he should have known better. I'm not judging or blaming really, I've never met the man, but he was no longer my favorite Beatle.

So my twenties were all about Paul. From talking to people, one almost gets the impression one would get more respect for saying Ringo was your favorite Beatle. John was edgy, Paul is milquetoast (is the usual argument), to which I say: Helter Skelter. The guy has a gift for melody, and I love that his love songs seem to be all about his wife. Writing about the unatainable, unrequited love is easy. Writing about love in a decades-long monogamous relationship? That takes talent.

So far, my thirties have been about George. His last album, made after he knew he was dying, is one of the most beautiful, most optimistic things I've heard. It's so cool and so George. I don't listen to whole records back-to-front much anymore, I usually randomize my iTunes and listen to whatever, but George's record is a back-to-front listen.

Which leaves me wondering, are my forties going to be the decade of Ringo? I saw him on tour with his All-Starr Band. I think my forties are going to be a lot of fun.

Spike the cat

This is the newest addition to our family, an orange tabby kitten we've named Spike. We got him from the Humane Society; he was a teeny-tiny stray. Molly and Joey were both left at the Humane Society after someone's cat had kittens the owner didn't want. Spike is our first kitty from the mean streets (of Golden Valley?)

At any rate, he breaks our tradition of cats with literary names (Valentine Michael Smith and Molly Bloom) (And Joey is for Joseph Campbell, so not fictional). He's named for Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop, although the Japanese creators of the show always pronounce it "Spike-u". It can also refer to Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but let's keep that between us (my husband does not need to know)!

Spike the cat 

Headed, I fear, toward a most useless place. The Waiting Place.

I am, I fear, in the Waiting Place right now. I'm not enjoying it very much. Well, I did some revisions to Saga, which failed to make quarter finals in WOTF, but I'm reluctant to send it out until I hear back from Asimov's on Tao of Troth. The two are sort of companion pieces. And yes, WHAT WAS I THINKING? Oh well, I should be hearing from Asimov's any day now. Yep.

I think I'm starting to scare the mailman.

This quarter's deadline is June 30. I have a story, but I'm waiting to get some notes on it from my Faithful Reader. I'm not sure if I like it. The ending isn't satisfactory for me, but I'm not sure what the problem is. Of course, I loved Saga so much it is quite possible I'm not qualified to judge. I have some thoughts for a story with a dragon in it, but that's very pre-birth. I have some words on paper but the voice isn't there yet.

I'm reluctant to make a big plunge into the second draft of the novel Omphalos, horribly because I'm waiting to read other people's books! It's a big three months coming up for me with new stuff from J.K. Rowling, Jasper Fforde, George R.R. Martin, and Neil Gaiman. Horrible, horrible. Can't I find time to both read and write?

Hmm, the Waiting Place is a very Negative Place. I need to move on, to find the bright places where Boom Bands are playing.

Save Everything!

While I consider myself to be politically moderate, most of my charitable giving goes to more liberal organizations, so I end up on some really liberal mailing lists. Every other day comes with an impassioned plea for me to send money in order to help some organization I've never heard of do something.

When I was shuffling through the mail today I found what I thought was a rather thick phamplet commanding me to SAVE EVERYTHING! Well, that sums it up, doesn't it? Someone finally got fed up with only saving this animal or that ocean and decided we should pool our efforts and SAVE EVERYTHING! "Sounds expensive," I thought, somewhat wearily (I've been down in the dumps since my story got rejected by WOTF, and a trip to the mailbox is like walking to my execution. Will the Asimov's rejection come today?).

I did eventually realize that what I was holding was in fact a catalog, entitled SAVE ON EVERYTHING only the kid in rollerskates on the cover was covering up the "ON" with his head. Now I feel a bit silly about my earlier guilt that I wasn't doing enough to save the world.

Well, back to eating ice cream and watching the Chappelle Show. I need to nurse my hurt feelings for a few days before I get back to the writing (I really liked that story!).

Women should be seen but not heard, even when they're Jedi (apparently)

Sadly, I have to correct something I said earlier. I was so happy that Lucas had come up with cool female Jedi, but my husband just saw Ep. III and reports there is no Shaak Ti, no Luminara Unduli, no Aayla Secura. Some women stand around in crowd scenes, but they don't talk and they certainly don't kick butt. I guess Kit Fisto and Ki-Adi Mundi aren't there either, so it's not just the women.

At any rate, credit for cool Jedi women probably goes to Genndy Tartakovksy (whom I already love for Samurai Jack) who seems to have come up with great characters out of a collection of Jedi standing in the background at the end of Ep. II when he made the Clone Wars cartoons. It's just as well, that's as much of Ep. III as my boys will be seeing for a few more years anyway.

Writing update

I've started the next draft of the novel, which would be the second if we're only counting versions that go all the way from beginning to end (I managed a half-length version we can call Version 1.5, but it was going the wrong direction so I scrapped it). This is going deceptively well. I've been writing every day, over 1000 words and today over 2000! I'm starting to flinch; I sense a great big brick wall in the future and I think I might be about to hit it at full speed. Of course I've been living with some version of this story for more than seven years now, and have been in full stew mode for the better part of a year. The actual committing to paper should be easy. Alas, it never quite is.

On the short story front, I won't here back about Saga... until probably mid July, and another WOTF deadline will pass before then, but I have a story almost ready to go. I also sent Tao of Troth off to Asimov's. I realized that while it was not perfect, it wasn't changing much from tinker to tinker. It was time to cut the umbilical. Besides, I need to start collecting rejection letters. I only have three!

Another short post

Two of my great musical loves converge: Yusuf Islam has done a single for tsunami relief and one of the other musicians involved is Magne Furuholmen from the band a-ha. The word "favorite" doesn't really describe my feelings for this band. They were crucial to getting me through the teen years, and just got better in my twenties and thirties when the rest of America forgot about them (oh, there are a few other fans here and there, but we're a rare breed).

At any rate, the song is called "Indian Ocean" and because its from Yusuf, whose not hip with the kids, and because it is 6+ minutes long you'll probably never hear it on the radio. I got it from iTunes. I'm sure the single is findable in the better music stores. Check it out. It's beautiful and sad and enchanting and really makes me wish Yusuf would record more music again.

It was at the library!

I read those Teen Titan comics at the library. The covers were all plasticked over (so not a word), I remember it all so clearly now. Phew! Mystery solved.

Cool things

It's a tough time to be a parent of young boys. The full media blitz has been unleashed for Star Wars Episode III, working them up into a lather of longing, and of course they can't see it. I hear the PG-13 is the MPAA being generous; it could just as easily be an R. I presume it's just because they kept the language clean. On the upside, they have new episodes of the Clone Wars on the Cartoon Network to tide them over, and perhaps when the DVD comes out we can play an edited version. That's the true beauty of DVD. When Aidan was three, he was mad about Moulin Rouge, although the version he was familiar with was only about an hour long.

I'm excited to see the movie anyway, although I'll feel a little weird dropping the boys off with a babysitter to see a film they're so excited about. It's not as bad as when Aidan was just past one and we left him with a babysitter to go see Disney's Mulan, or maybe it's worse because it's not like he knew then that he was missing anything. Mostly I'm excited because it seems like someone finally tipped Lucas off that a certain demographic likes to see women in movies. Honestly, when I was a kid it was always irritating that the only woman in the first three films was Princess Leia. If you were playing Star Wars and there was more than one girl there, someone had to be Mon Mothma. Now there are Jedi women, and they're cool! Oliver even likes them. His favorite character to play on the Lego Star Wars is Shaak Ti.

On a not-very-related note, I found another movie they both quite like called Shaolin Soccer. It's from Stephen Chow who made Kung Fu Hustle (rated R, of course). Aidan and I saw a trailer for Shaolin Soccer when we went to see Spy Kids 3D, and Aidan and I both agreed it was something we really wanted to see, but it never came in theaters and I eventually forgot about it. I only remembered about it when Kung Fu Hustle came out. I found the DVD on Amazon.com and it was waiting for us when we got back from Arizona. It is such a cool movie; we all really enjoyed it. The main character in the movie wants to teach people that kung fu isn't just for fighting, it can help you do just about anything, and he ends up using soccer as a way to prove this to people. It's very warm-hearted, which seems to be a quality in short supply these days.

I am not Steve Irwin

The family and I have returned from our annual trip to Arizona. This one was a bit more eventful than trips past in that I nearly stepped on a rattlesnake that was sunning itself in the middle of the path we were hiking on.

We had been on this trail before in years past, but there were no other hikers that day, I reckon because it was cold for AZ (we Minnesotans were wearing shorts; my mother had on a sweatshirt). I suppose the cold temperature and lack of the usual people tromping about were what drew the snake out. I had just taken a picture of my boys who had run ahead of us to look at the pictures on a plaque, vaguely wondering if it was a good idea to let them run like that (mostly worried about the steep fall off the mountain, not even thinking about what they might step on), but mostly fussing with the settings on the camera when I saw the weirdest-looking brownish gray rock. The rock twitched and I jumped back with a shriek even before it got its rattle going.

In retrospect it seems I stood there forever looking at that "weird rock", contemplating it. It seems stupid of me now, there was nothing very rock-like about it and everything snake-like. I'm sure it was only a split second at the time and my memory is warped by the subsequent adrenal surge. The next few seconds are all a blur. I think a teleported several feet back, I don't remember the jumping part. I remember regretting screaming because of course both boys came back to see what Mom was going on about. Luckily the snake had already had enough of us loud people and was retreating back into the densest patch of prickly pear I've ever seen.

Quin snapped me out of my daze by insisting I take a picture of the snake then asking for the camera. He decided not to follow the rattler, since that patch of prickly pear could be a snake condo for all we knew.

The rest of the trip was spent with my mother retelling this story to Arizona residents, all of whom came back with, "I've been living in Arizona for ___ years and I've never seen a rattlesnake!" My husband was also excited; seening a rattlesnake in the wild had apparently been on his list of things to do while we were in Arizona. My other favorite line was, "Well, you know rattlesnakes have a bad reputation, but they won't bother you if you don't bother them." Which is all well and good but I think stepping on a rattlesnake falls under the heading of "bothered".

So I still prefer living in Minnesota, even if it snows in May.

Cat Stevens memories

Both of my boys when they were babies had particular musical tastes about what they found calming. I like to listen to lots of different music, which is to say what I listen to today I probably won't want to listen to again tomorrow (so listening to the radio is straight out). But babies are the opposite; they like the familiarity. I can't really say how Quin and I figured out which music the boys preferred; it just at some point became obvious that certain CDs were better than others for calming them down and soothing them to sleep. As much as I pushed the Mamas and the Papas or Simon and Garfunkel, for Aidan his CD of choice was Madonna's Ray of Light. Aidan always went down for bed really easy, but he would also almost always wake up again four hours later and be completely incapable of getting back to sleep. So when I hear the tracks of that CD now, I instantly get that bone-tired, "do I have to carry him the entire time or can I sit down- Nope! Have to be standing!" feeling all over again.

Oliver slept okay, but he was (and is) prone to these periods of irrational derangement. There is no reasoning with a preverbal baby who has stripped himself naked and is throwing himself at the walls and even foaming at the mouth, screaming and crying. Then you can understand how people in the Middle Ages could sometimes believe that fairies stole their baby and left something else in it's place. At any rate, when Oliver was in one of these places, it was Cat Stevens that brought him out.

I have a specific memory of a day we took him to the park. He was walking but not talking, so I'd say he was just over a year. He didn't want to be in the stroller, didn't want to walk, didn't want to be carried... you see the picture forming here. Then he got into something muddy. Quin and Aidan stayed at the park, but I got to push my screaming little changling home in his Cadillac of strollers that he never willing sat in. That's always good for some glances and outright stares. Then I got to try to bathe him. Ever try to give a cat a bath? Just like that but bigger and stronger and much louder. Without the claws though; I'll give him that.

So then I bring him out to the living room where Cat Stevens is playing. He doesn't want the towel wrapped around him, just loosely draped over him to keep him warm, so his naked wet body is soaking me but that's okay since I'm already drenched from that bath. Eventually he stops fighting and calms down, probably at about the time "Trouble" comes on. "Trouble" is the one that usually does it. He's not sleeping, just zoning out, looking out the window.

I look out the window too and see a very pregnant woman walking by. She can hear the music and see us in the window. She smiles a dreamy smile and runs her hands over her belly. I want to bang the window and yell, "No, this is not what it looks like! This is just one minute of quiet cuddling. The last two hours have been hell!"

I only mention this because I was listening to Cat Stevens again today and it occurred to me I don't really remember the hell parts too clearly anymore, but everytime I hear Cat Stevens, it's like cuddling my little guy all over again.

Ahh, food poisoning

I'm the only meat-eater in my vegetarian family, so like Sam Jackson says in Pulp Fiction, that pretty much makes me a vegetarian too. But from time to time I crave a hamburger. Not McDonald's, a real hamburger. So on Sunday when Quin picked up take out from Chilis he and the boys ate black bean burgers, but I had a real hamburger.
So, three days later...
It's a different kind of experience to be sick as a dog and yet still trying to be a caretaker to two boys who will do all sorts of things when they sense they are not being watched. Saying "knock it off" from the far end of the house really never exudes the sort of authority you think it does.
Oliver was very sweet. Everyone should have a 3-year-old for a nurse; what they lack in actual skills they make up for in genuine warmth. While I do believe that moral behavior is mostly taught, I think kids are born with a sense of the Golden Rule (every society has a version of it, so this can't be a coincidence). Oliver, seeing I wasn't feeling well (in that I was only half-conscious) brought me all of his favorite things because they always make him feel better. Then he thought a little deeper and scrounged up some of my favorite things too. I woke up from a nap I didn't realize I was taking under a mountain of security blankets, pillows, teddy bears, and basketballs. And he'd been telling me stories the entire time, not put off at all by the fact that I was asleep.
Aidan on the second day I didn't get out of bed much, "you're sick again? That's weird. Maybe you need to eat more healthy food." Because he's like his dad, no sympathy but lots of unsolicited advice.
So today I can finally move around without wanting to die, which is a good thing since the WOTF deadline is tomorrow. Luckily I had already done my revisions on Thordis, but they were handwritten on the manuscript so I still had to go over it all on the computer and print a clean copy. Then I find I have no envelopes, no postage, and the post office is only open for the incredibly inconvenient hours of 9 to 5. What are they thinking? Who goes to the post office anymore? 9 to 5, so one can neither stop off on the way to work or on the way home? Quin says he can take care of it, I presume on his lunch break, which is good since unlike most people we only have the one car these days. Our second car only runs about 10 days out of the year, and those ten days are never in a row.
On a higher note, I feel better about the shape this story is in than the last one that went out. I probably won't want to have it back the minute it is gone. It might take a day or two.

...and we're back

Louisa May Alcott, by why of the Jo March character, described it as "a vortex". I don't think I'm quite that bad, but I have been in a very writerly place the last month. I finished the short story I am looking to submit to WOTF, which is called The Saga of Thordis Thorgilsdottir, am nearly finished with another which is more fantasy than SF but there is an element of string theory in it (although none of the characters calls it that, of course) called Of Tapestries and Daemons. I'm also polishing off the... well it's really more of a novella than a short story, but the one that was a finalist in the last WOTF. What I've realized, now that there is some distance from when I first wrote it, is that I chickened out in the end and backed away from what I wanted to do. So I've lopped off the last 20+ pages and trying not to venture back into the realm of silliness. Ah yes, and that is called The Tao of Troth, which I thought was a very cool title until I realized it I would be required to, you know, explain it. Well, my next story title will have no T's in it whatsoever, I've decided.