A Tale of Two Musicals

So, I've seen two musicals recently. One blew me away, and one didn't. I'll start with the one that didn't (since I feel pretty confident you know already what blew me away).

Once upon a time in high school Spanish class our teacher showed us two slides. The first was a painting Picasso had done that was nearly identical with Velázquez's Las Meninas. I love the original painting, and it's technically impressive to see one master artist duplicating another. But then came the next slide: Picasso painting Las Meninas in the cubist style:

My point? As impressive as it is to paint like Velázquez, it's more impressive to go somewhere new with it, and Picasso was way new. Watching Across the Universe was a lot like that first Picasso painting: technically brilliant but not really new. It is a very well done film, gorgeous to look at and wonderfully performed by mostly unknowns. But I found it pretty pointless. Picasso painted like Velázquez to learn from his style, not with the idea of presenting his copy to the world as a work of great art (and I guess he did 58 different versions of Las Meninas, so those above are only two). I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from overly literal interpretation of the Beatles songs. "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite" as a circus? Duh. Although Eddie Izzard is always cool. Bono and Joe Cocker are clearly having fun as well. But like I said, it was well done, just pointless.

Perhaps the real thing is that this very much a Beatles in the 60s film, and I was listening to the Beatles in the 80s. The Beatles to me aren't about Vietnam or psychedelic drugs or any of that. Also, as I referenced when talking about Walk Hard, this movie was far too reverent of the Beatles for my taste (and so are most Beatle covers, frankly. They sound like church music). The Beatles always had a great sense of humor, which this movie doesn't even touch on. But mostly, what with this and Mamma Mia (which I'll certainly see what it's out on DVD) - yes it's great music and all, but what I really want is something new.

Which brings me to what I did enjoy the hell out of: Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog. This was done on the cheap by Joss Whedon, his two brothers, one of their girlfriends, and a bunch of friends (geeks like me who can recognize Buffy writers will particularly enjoy act 3). It's nowhere near as visually slick as Across the Universe, it's not quite 45 minutes long, and it's only ever appeared on the internet. Still, one of my main gripes of Across the Universe is that not only was it obvious where the story was going, you could even predict with stunning accuracy which song was coming next. Dr. Horrible, like all Whedon endeavors, is comedy and tragedy all at once and you never know which you're going to get next, or where it will all end up. I certainly wasn't expecting the way it all ended here. But then the other cool aspect: you look back and it all seems rather inevitable. It had to end this way, didn't it? It's led to some great dinner time conversations here, as the boys have watched it half a dozen times already (although they've been told that "we do the weird stuff" will have to remain in the realm of things they will understand when they're older). And we have a CD of the songs in the car and all know all the words.

I would love, love, love to see a real musical in the theaters, the kind where it's all surprising and new and takes me on a ride that I can't see the end of. I was hoping after Moulin Rouge (which didn't have new music, but did use old music in new and surprising ways, my fave being the tango "Roxanne") that we'd have a musical resurgence, but alas, that never came to be. My fondest wish would be for a feature-length Dr. Horrible sequel (come on, the story totally doesn't end there).

Of course Joss may be busy...

(And fellow MST3K fans, TV's Frank has a cool blog entry about it over here. I didn't really touch on the larger significance of Dr. Horrible as artist-controlled, although that was the whole reason they got together and made this thing during the SAG strike. Well, read Frank; he's got it covered).

OK, technically not done with those things that needed doing, so I'm back at it.

Gon Out Backson, Bisy Backson

Ow! Ow! Ow!

That's the sound of things falling out of the sky and pegging me on the head. My planned writing break is suddenly getting very writing-busy. Damn muse, can't keep a scheduled to save her life. Going to take a few days to do some stuff. Bisy Backson, indeed.

Movies in August

First off, I think I burned my brain. It's been a few days now since I typed "The End", but I seemed to have lost all ability to summon words. If you try to have a conversation with me, it will be a lot of "you need to do that thing with the thing. You know, the thing, the thing in the freezer? That goes in the back of the whats-it? The yard?" and fifteen minutes later, in the middle of doing something completely unrelated, will finally burst out with "you need to take the compost out!" Sheesh!

So, let's see if I can remember the movies I watched last month and find something intelligent to say about them...

Since I was spending every possible moment writing, most of my movie watching was with Quin, and hence in English. The first was a heist film called Flawless, set in the 60s with Michael Caine as a janitor nearing retirement age and Demi Moore as a woman butting her head against the glass ceiling of the diamond company she works for. After she gets passed up yet again in favor of a younger man with less experience than she, Caine convinces her to help him pull off the heist he's been planning forever. He's not forthcoming about his reason for wanting to do this, but he has a very, very good one. I don't remember hearing anything about this movie when it was in theaters, but I do recommend it. Good story, good acting, and wonderfully plotted.

I can't really say any of those things about In the Name of the King. It is, in fact, a film based on a video game. But it does star Jason Statham and is tons of unpretentious fun. The film makers take every opportunity to rip off stuff we've already seen in The Lord of the Rings, and Ray Liotta as the bad guy is just one goofy hat away from being Jack Palance; clearly this is not a film that was ever aspiring to greatness.

In the category of fantasy films that do aspire to greatness is Beowulf, which I liked better than I thought I would. This style of animation has progressed since the zombie kids of Polar Express (that movie still gives me the willies), and the low lighting through most of it help to sell it. The monsters are really well done. It was intended as 3D, which is a bit distracting when you watch it in 2D, but storywise I liked this retelling of the old tale. But then, I also liked The 13th Warrior's retelling, so...

Because Quin insisted I had to see it: Priscilla Queen of the Desert. I was actually supposed to see this movie lots of times back in the day, it played as a midnight show at the Uptown for years. But everytime my friend and I would go to see it, we'd always end up at Bryant Lake Bowl, hanging with his friends, a diverse group that even included a Korean Elvis impersonator. This movie made me nostalgic for those days; that particular friend of mine tended to fall for guys faste and drop everything to follow them to far-off cities. This was in the days before mobile phones, and I wouldn't hear from him for months. Then out of the blue he'd call, back in Minneapolis with a long tale to tell. I haven't heard from him since just before I got married; I like to think he found someone he could settle down with. But I'm still here, same house, same phone number. Perhaps someday I'll get another call out of the blue. (Also, Hugo Weaving is the bomb).

So after setting up my super-PC I got rid of my TV and DVD player in my office/work-out room. So of course the DVD player in the PC promptly kacked. Now I read on walking days, but on walk/run days I like to watch movies. Otherwise I get bored; running is very, very dull (my husband, who runs 5-6 miles at a time, says otherwise, but I think that's just because he has a cat-brain that lets him think about nothing for great tracks of time. If I'm running and thinking, I'm mostly thinking about all the things I have to get done when I get off the treadmill. Which is mostly conducive to getting off the treadmill). I have a program that lets me record from my satellite receiver onto my hard drive, so I tried that out. My test run was with a movie from the same director as Marigold, something called (very generically) Playing By Heart. I remember when this movie was still in the works it was meant to be titled Dancing about Architecture, and I think they should have stuck with it. It comes from a line Angelina Jolie says, "talking about love makes as much sense as dancing about architecture", which fits the movie better; it's a whole series of scenes of people talking about love. There's an old couple, a young couple, a married couple, a middle-aged couple just starting to date. It was a quiet sort of movie but had lots of great dialogue. I'm not sure exactly how old it is, but Angelina Jolie looked like she was barely more than 20. It also had Gillian Anderson, Jon Stewart, Dennis Quaid, Sean Connery, and Madeline Stowe (and a few more, this is off the top of my head a month later).

I was less impressed with Notting Hill. I confess that, for no discernible reason, I just don't like Julia Roberts. I don't hate her, I don't avoid movies just because she's in them, but I always find her very cold and never feel like she has any chemistry with the guy she's playing opposite to. I did like the secondary characters in this one, particularly the roommate, but unlike Four Weddings and a Funeral, this wasn't a film primarily about a group of friends.

Something borrowed: Walk Hard, the musical biopic parody film. Not only was it funny, the music was good enough to stand on its own; they sounded like real country songs, real Brian Wilson songs. My favorite scene was the one when Dewey Cox goes to India and hangs with the Maharishi and the Beatles. The Beatles are played by a bunch of familiar actors (you'll probably know two right off, and the other two will be naggingly familiar - thank you, Wikipedia, who that was playing George was going to drive me nuts) with great love but no reverence whatsoever. Which is in my book ideal. I love the Beatles, but I love them as human beings with lovable flaws, not as near-saints of musical perfection. (Keep this in the back of your mind, being overly reverent of the Beatles is going to come up again next month...)

OK, I did squeeze in three Hindi films. Silsila is a film Amitabh Bacchan did with his wife Jaya in I think the early 80s, about a man who marries his dead brother's fiance because she's pregnant with his nephew/niece and then regrets it after she loses the baby when he drives their car into a tree. As the movie progresses and he continues to pursue the woman he wanted before his brother died, even though she's also now married, you will want to smack Amit with a brick (I'm not saying I found him unsympathetic or anything).

Eklavya is a more recent film starring Amitabh Bacchan, and this one was nearly perfect. There are no musical numbers, so it clocks in pretty short for a Hindi film. I found it very Shakespearean in terms of plot, with the assassination attempts and concealed parentage of children. I thought at first it was a period piece, the clothing and palace are so ornate, but Saif Ali Khan as the young prince returns in a helicopter, clearly modern. Part of the story is past vs. present, tradition versus new ways. Most of the story, though, is about dharma. I've read a lot of books that have mentioned dharma, but there is nothing like a good story with a memorable character like Amit's palace guard to make you really feel it in your bones.

(I did think the ending needed one or two more scenes; some characters went through major changes that needed to be set up a bit more. They weren't unbelievable in themselves, they just happened a bit too fast. Minor gripe, though).

The last movie was so old it was colorized back and white: Mughal-e-Azam. I had to see it; both Saawariya and Om Shanti Om referenced it. It was way, way cool. The colorization was an enhancement; it gave the movie a sort of fairy tale feel. And it was old school, casts-of-thousands for the fight scenes. It's weird watching those in these days of everything-done-by-computer; you see elephants charging and you realize someone had to actually make that happen, and control it, and film it. This film is based on an old story about Akbar, the Mughal emperor, and his son the prince who falls in love with a dancing girl. The sets were amazing; it reminded me a lot of Aleksandr Ptushko, especially Ruslan and Ludmila (a very cool movie with mindblowing visuals, highly recommend).

So my clip this month comes from Mughal-e-Azam. The director originally intended to shoot in color but the budget wouldn't allow it, so only this scene was shot in color. Watching it on YouTube probably won't do it justice, but the part where her dancing is reflected off the facets of all the jewels set into the ceiling is to die for:

Act 3, here I come!

Because I've finished my fourth novel (rather, I've finished a draft of my fourth novel, there is still work left to do). How engrossed was I while finishing this up? So engrossed I didn't even notice I didn't have any phone service. Luckily I noticed that today, before I have to go back to work. Kinda need a phone to work, you know.

So the whole family is going out to dinner tonight (to the Olive Garden, which just goes to show my boys are two susceptible to the lure of commercials on television), and then we'll all gather on our new sofa to watch all three acts of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

I do feel like a ran a marathon, then got up the next day and ran another marathon, over and over for seven days. Except I was running with my brain and not my legs. I'm sort of twitchy and exhausted. But hey! First draft done. Yay me!

Oh So True

“I hate being in the final stages of a story. It's like trying to run programs on a computer with 100% CPU use. I'm left with just about enough native intelligence to walk, talk monosyllabically, and tie my shoelaces. I assume that I'm off figuring out the end of the story I'm writing, because the alternative, in terms of sudden-onset mental decay, is too dreadful to think about. Meanwhile I walk around aimlessly, cannot remember where I put things, or the names of the things that I can't remember where I put them. And I say "er..." a lot, and pick things up and look at them.” – Neil Gaiman 01/10/03

On the upside, it seems more likely that I will actually finish before Friday (for certain definitions of "finish").

Writing update

So here's where we're at:



Just a hair under 20,000 words to go. Which means if I want to be done by Friday, I have to crank out 4000 words a day all week. I did 4500 each on Saturday and Sunday, which is pretty damn productive for me, but of course I wasn't also doing school those days. Well, we'll see how it goes.

I pushed hard to pass the 40,000 word mark last night so I could hit my goal and finally watch Act 2 of Dr. Horrible with the boys. They are enjoying this almost as much as I am. Quin is going to wait to watch all three acts together, hopefully on Friday, because he doesn't dig the incremental thing. Of course we've thoroughly ruined the experience for him, as the other three of us can't stop singing the songs and quoting the jokes.

Books in August

Most of August was spent finishing off the John Carter of Mars books. Namely Thuvia, Maid of Mars, The Chessmen of Mars, The Master Mind of Mars, A Fighting Man of Mars, Swords of Mars, Synthetic Men of Mars, Llana of Gathol and John Carter of Mars. Phew! Pulp fiction makes perfect treadmill reading, though. These are fun books, and I'm very intrigued to see what Pixar is going to do in bringing these stories to film (I hope they do them all). Burroughs wrote the first book in 1917 and the last in 1964 and I did get a sense of how the world around him was changing as he wrote. I mean, Dejah Thoris may be Incomparable in terms of beauty, but she's a huge liability in a fight. She's constantly getting kidnapped, nearly killed in airship crashes, used as leverage to make John Carter do things... She always struggles against her captors, of course, but completely uselessly. But as the books progress we are introduced to other female characters who can fight. It's nice that John Carter saw the value in teaching his daughter and granddaughter how to defend themselves. And I particularly liked The Swords of Mars, where the fighter thinks he's in love with the beauty but slowly realizes he's actually in love with the girl he thought was a boy a first, the one he can talk to and who has his back in a fight. But The Chessmen of Mars is my favorite, because the Kaldanes are so cool. (Did I mention I'm hoping Pixar makes movies out of all of these?)

After reading all eleven of those books, though, I was in deep need of a little Opposite of That. I was just browsing my shelves before hopping on the treadmill when I saw Learning to Play Gin by Ally Carter, the sequel to Cheating at Solitaire. I bought this the week it came out but somewhere along the line it got shelved instead of staying in the To Be Read stack on my end table where it belonged. Which is just as well, a book about smart, emotionally complex women was just what I needed. I like Ally, she has wit and is often laugh-out-loud funny. I particularly identified with the pants-shopping scene: "I have a waist! And hips! And my waist is smaller than my hips!" I don't know why fashion designers assume that because size zeros tend to be built like boys that all of us are, we're just proportionately bigger. If I find pants that fit my hips I end up with way too much hanging around my waist. Not a good look. Thank the gods for Lands End custom-made jeans.

The last book was Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Aidan is reading an abridged version for history, so I finally plunged into the unabridged version I've had hanging around here forever. Not particularly good treadmill reading, I'll tell you. More cuddle up with a cat and an afghan reading, although what with the heat wave that wouldn't have been pleasant either. It's hard to knock a classic, but I will say this isn't as good as his later stuff. I'm guessing Dickens was a pantser, as this story started out doing one thing and then went all over the place. Still, I like his dry humor and observation of character. I just liked it better in, say, Great Expectations.

On the writing front, I did nothing all week. Seriously. We had painters working on our house, which involved lots of guys working around all my windows all day long. I felt like I was an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History: Life of a Homeschooler or something. They were completely professional, of course, they weren't actually looking in the windows, but still. I'm a recluse; it was traumatic for me.

So that leaves me with half a novel to write in a week. Which I'm going to try to do. Because I'm nuts. Well, wish me luck!

In brief...

I didn't get as much done last week as I wanted to. The combination of needing to work longer, later hours to help cover for illnesses, having to get up early pretty much every day last week for couch deliveries and a few different home repair things, and what my husband assures me has to be the last heat wave of the summer had me falling into comas every afternoon. (I know a nap when I take one, these were definitely comas).

I'm hoping to catch up a bit this week, but since two of those three things are still going on, plus school again... well, I'm not too hopeful. Which is a shame as I'm still a few chapters short of my Dr. Horrible Sing-along Blog Act 2 mark. And I let the boys watch Act 1. They're anxious to see Act 2. Very anxious. To the point of trying to roust Mom out of her coma. I'm afraid next week when I'm finally fully alert I'll find everything I've written since last Monday will read as if it were written by someone in a coma.

I did get some good news this week, though; another grocery company bought SimonDelivers and will be making deliveries starting in October. Going to the grocery store with the whole family has been surprisingly fun (particularly for my husband, who really really likes it. No, I don't get it either). Still, I only get two nights off in a week and I'd rather spend that time doing other things.

So, try to get more writing done this week, polish off my book and movie posts for August, and post some pics of the new couch and my freshly painted walls. I might be able to get a couple of those things done...

This week's goal

Update on last week: I ended up at 28,155 words, not quite halfway between my original goal of 27,500 and my Phelpsian goal of 30,000. That's actually pretty good since I completely rewrote chapter 1 (about 2500 words worth of work which didn't affect the total word count) and I also got the flu that's been running through our household and spent a day teaching school from the couch. It's a bit like being a Roman in a movie, reclining while people fetch you stuff, only I'm being fetched math homework and science reports and not peeled grapes and wine. It would have been more fun if my body hadn't hurt all over. I'm glad that bug is gone.

So for this week, the original plan calls for me to be at 37,500 words at the end of the week. Again I'm going to try to top my goal; that goal would only have me through chapter fifteen, and I have to finish chapter sixteen before I can watch Act 2 of Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog. Having watched Act 1 many, many times (man, Neil Patrick Harris is the coolest*), I'm very anxious to earn my right to watch Act 2. This might be a little tough; it's a vacation week from school, but I have a ton of prep work to do on top of working the paying job, particularly as I got no prep done on our last vacation week. So, we'll see how it goes. Wish me luck!

I think I'll wrap up my Mitwa musical sharing with this one, from my favorite Karan Johar movie. As much as I loved Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna still edges it out as my fave. KKHH succeeds admirably, but in KANK Johar was trying something tougher. This is a movie about two marriages where you can see both why these people got together in the first place and why things are not going well now. Which is tougher than it would seem, apparently; so many movies fall down on one or the other score (usually the first, but I've already griped about Serendipity, haven't I?). Johar has such a light touch in KANK, you can see how ShahRukh's character is a bitter jerk, but being around Rani calms him, and how Rani's character is a bit of a nervous wreck (and compulsive cleaner), but being around SRK calms her. And they aren't even trying to do this to each other, exactly the opposite, but they just fit. They start out as friends advising each other on how to get along with their spouses, and the song "Mitwa" comes at the point where they are both beginning to realize their feelings aren't just friendly anymore.

Johar is very much of the "I must make my characters suffer" school of writing (my favorite kind of writer; when you get a happy ending, it's a thoroughly earned one). These two have a very tough time and the ending is a low-key kind of happy. Plus there's another musical number where colors are used to absolutely amazing effect. Highly recommend.

* After the fifth or sixth time I got geeked out to NPH's Old Spice commercial, Quin asked if we couldn't go back to the place where Salman Khan was the coolest, as he thinks he prefers that to Neil Patrick Harris.

"Yes, but when Salman was the coolest, you wanted to go back to the place where Justin Timberlake was the coolest, remember?"

"Can we?"

"As soon as Justin does something new, he will totally go back to being the coolest. Promise."

On the one hand, this is the creepiest gift I've ever been given...

... on the other hand, I really like it. It's been a bit frustrating around here, not being able to find more than 5 minutes to write between 8 a.m. and 1 a.m. I've been... frustrated. Palpably frustrated. So on Friday Quin brought this home for me:


Yep, that's Mola Ram from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, bleeding heart in hand. Creepy and cute, not a common mix. I have a think for dolls from movies, in case you didn't know. I actually have too many to have out at one time, so they have rotating shifts guarding my books. Mola Ram has the current dream spot, next to Raven from Teen Titans in front of Gibson and Scalzi.

My original goal for Friday was 27,500, but I'm kicking it up a notch and setting it to 30,000. I'm not sure if I can do it, especially as part of this week's work will involve rewriting Chapter One before I submit it to my critique goup, which will be a quality and not quantity move, but I feel inclined to try for a more Phelpsian goal this week. Wish me luck!

Writing update

The writing progresses. My goal was 500 words a day, 2500 a week. I haven't been remotely capable of writing every day (how dearly I wish I could, this constantly losing momentum is beyond frustrating), but when I do find the time I'm making progress. I expect to be at 27500 by next Friday, and given my current status that seems pretty doable:



Takashi's chapters are still coming the hardest. Part of it is that his character still isn't really defined (I've encountered his type before, where I have to reach THE END before I even get a hold of him), but I think it's also because his story arc touches the most on my theme, and balancing what the novel is really about without making it any sort of allegory is tricky. Storytelling, character, those should come first. Theme should be a quiet background, safely ignored if you're the sort of reader who doesn't like deeper meanings. (Well, I don't think that's always true, or even mostly true, but it is what I'm trying to do with this particular piece).

You know, I could get more writing time in if I didn't spend an hour a day on the treadmill, but I don't think I'd be any more productive. I tend to slow down when I'm sedentary too long. This is something I've noticed in my paying job, where I also sit and type for hours on end. I am much more alert and productive if I make a point of getting up and moving around periodically. So I always write after I walk (and usually follow that up with Tai Chi, although if there's a time crunch that's the most skippable part of the day). I write to music, usually something I find atmospheric or evocative of mood, but I always throw one uptempo number in the Party Shuffle and when it comes up I get up and move around for five minutes. Keeps the mind sharp, plus it's fun.

Here's my current "get up and move" song, which even Oliver likes, because it goes dwoop-dwoop. (As I mentioned in my review of Tere Naam, I hate that haircut - ugh! - but it's a great song).

Movies in July

First off was The Spiderwick Chronicles, which I of course watched with the boys. This movie was neither exceptionally bad nor exceptionally good. Although Aidan loves the books I suspect he's not really going to watch this movie again. There was one aspect of it that I was outstanding, though: Freddie Highmore, the kid who played Charlie in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory plays two roles here, both of the twin brothers. Not only does he portray two very different characters, he does it all acting against empty space (since he can't be in two places at once), and with an American accent. This boy is a child actor with real chops, and I expect to see cool stuff from him in the future.

If you look up "cool" in my dictionary, you'll see a picture of Jason Statham. Because he's the coolest. And if he's in a heist movie, you know we'll have to get it. Hence The Bank Job. Pretty standard rob-a-bank fare, although this is apparently based on a true story.

Next up are two oldies I picked up on Blu-Ray, both of which I know I've seen but it was so long ago it was like seeing them for the first time. The first was Bullitt, of which I only recalled the car chase. Because who could forget that? I actually found this movie pretty surprising. These days every cop movie involves a break-all-the-rules maverick cop, it was palpably weird watching a movie about a cop who does his job without breaking any rules at all. It was nearly torture at the end: how many times is he going to let the bad guy shoot at him before he shoots back? As many as it takes until he can get a clear shot, or until people are in danger. Because spraying the scene with random fire is not good police work. I kind of admire this film.

The second oldie was Patton, which Quin had never seen. My memories of it were thoroughly mixed with the other WWII film of my early childhood: The Big Red One. So many great lines in Patton, I kept poking Quin - surely you've heard that before! All he would admit to was "Rommel, you magnificent bastard. I've read your book!"

In the Bollywood arena, I watched a lot of Aamir Khan movies. Mangal Pandey: The Rising is a film about the first Indian war of independence, when they got the East India Company out (and England took over, a bit of a lateral move independence-wise). This movie doesn't touch too much on the actual war, more on the circumstances that led to the Indians finally saying enough is enough. The script was based on source material, which was interesting. If they didn't know the motivation someone had for something, they left it open-ended (did the Company make ammunition casings out of cow and pig fat because it was cheaper, or just to irritate their Hindu and Muslim soldiers? The movie hints at both). Not as good as Lagaan, but beautifully shot with the usual top-notch music from A.R. Rahman.

Dil Chahta Hai was almost exactly the opposite: from lush period film to quiet indy-type film about three friends who have just graduated from college and what they do next. This is the sort of movie that I would catch on an afternoon playing on cable and leave it on because I've never heard of it but it has so-and-so in it. Then I'd get sucked in by the story and there's a whole afternoon gone. (You know, if this were in English and on cable. And this was before I had kids, when I used to have afternoons with nothing to do but surf channels). The music fit the story, sort of Indian college rock.

The last movie, Fanaa, started out as something I was really going to love. Kajol is a blind girl from high up in the mountains of Kashmir who goes to Delhi with her dance group for a performance. She falls in love with their tour guide (Aamir Khan). It was wonderful, her parents were loving and supportive, not smothering, her friends were distinct characters. She and Aamir traded extemporaneous poetry with each other. As Quin headed out for his run that night I assured him this was going to be one of my favorites.

Then terrorists hijacked my movie. Nothing on the box anywhere said this was going to turn into a Jennifer Lopez "I have to kill my husband" kind of thriller, but that's just what happened. Aamir Khan blows up part of Delhi (killing Jolly Good Singh among others, and I had liked Jolly Good) then leaves. Kajol gets her sight back (gah) and has a son which she raises up in the mountains with her dad. Then Aamir is doing more terrorist stuff and ends up half-dead on her doorstep. She of course doesn't recognize him (and to be fair, his voice in the two different halves of the movie is very different, and it's been about ten years, and she only knew him for a few days. So that was believable.) So the rest of the movie she figures who he is, then who he really is, while he keeps accidently or on purpose killing people because he really wants to go straight or whatever, but he just has to finish this one last job first.

Now Dil Se was also about love and terrorism, but I think that worked better. At the point Shah Rukh Khan encounters the woman who is intending to be a suicide bomber, she hasn't really killed anyone yet. So there is hope of redemption to drive the story. But in Fanaa we already know that Aamir Khan has killed lots of people. If they had tried to wrestle a happy ending out of that, I would have really hated it. But that left only one ending, and no real tension to drive the story. It was an interesting performance from Aamir, bouncing from scary terrorist to almost boyish fear of his own father and grandfather. I think if they would have dug deeper into his psyche I would have found this movie more interesting. As it was... well, there is a reason I don't watch these "I have to kill my husband/ex-husband/crazy stalker boyfriend" movies. Blah.

Kaante was actually Quin's pick. Shikha's husband had recommended it to him as a good heist film. The first half is The Usual Suspects and the second half is Reservoir Dogs. Some aspects of this were pretty cool. "The usual suspects" has a different meaning when it's the LA cops rounding up every Indian everytime something gets stolen. And once you figure out who's playing which TUS character, it was fun guessing which RD character they'd end up being. There were flaws, though. Their plan involved robbing the bank where all the cops do their banking, so that none of them would get paid. They walk right past the FDIC sign in the bank window a couple of times but apparently didn't realize what it meant. Quin thought that giving Malaika Arora Khan dialogues was a bad sign (she plays one of the thieves' girlfriend). I thought she handled acting fine, I just couldn't believe she was pole-dancing.

Salaam Namaste had no pole-dancing, but it did have a lot of kissing on the mouth, a Bollywood rarity. Quin said it was just like the Hugh Grant movie Nine Months. I don't remember that film at all, but I would guess he's right. Still, I found this funny with sharp dialogue.

To wrap up the Hindi films: Judwaa, whose box said it had subtitles but alas, there were none. I did watch the whole thing. On the one hand, I was only catching about one word in five. On the other hand, this was a broad comedy so one word in five was enough to follow the story. Salman Khan plays twins who can control each other. If one swings a punch, the other does too. Like Amitabh Bacchan's ghost movie, this irked my fantasist side. It was horribly inconsistent as to when it happened, clearly it wasn't all the time, or who was the controller and who the controllee. I don't need to know why something happens (and sometimes it's better not to explain the why, see Groundhog's Day, a film that works mainly because we never know why he's living the same day over and over), but the "how" should have rules. Of course this was all about comedy, so perhaps I shouldn't be too hard on it. One brother pounding a glass of milk causes the other to pound a bottle of brandy and they're both drunk (and dancing): OK, that was funny.

Alas, none of the musical numbers this month really blew me away, so for my YouTube fix I'm going with the best film I saw, a Japanese movie called Shinobi: Heart Under Blade. It's Romeo and Juliet, if the warring families were both ninja clans. And yes, it rocks. We got this on BluRay and it was particularly gorgeous. Not just the scenery, which was gorgeous enough for ten films (ooh, the falling leaves. The snow! Large chunks looked like scenes out of Hiroshige prints). The texture popped so much, I just wanted to reach into the TV screen and touch their clothes. It felt like I almost could.

Now, I have a certain person who critiques my writing who always complains about all the talking my characters do when they are meant to be fighting. This movie is so not for him. Two ninjas meet in the woods and gab at each other for a good ten minutes, and when they finally come to blows it's all over in a matter of seconds. Which is my kind of fighting, actually. I always liked the story of the two samurai who meet on a bridge and stare each other down until the lesser samurai turns and walks away. The actual trading of blows was superfluous; they both already knew who would be the victor.

(And as much as I liked this film, Quin was in raptures. This is his favorite since Marie Antionette. Although perhaps he would thank me for not mentioning that again...)

So here's the trailer (in English, this movie comes subtitled and dubbed both) for Shinobi. Highly, highly recommend.

Books in July

Still crunching away at the WIP, so this will be pretty brief.

First up: Midnight Never Come by Marie Brennan. I liked her previous novels, Doppleganger and Warrior and Witch. This novel is very different, more alternate history less sword and sorcery. The writing is gorgeous, and the story is steeped in Elizabethan history. One gets the sense that when a chase is on through London, one could go to London and recreate it exactly, that every street and turning is exactly right. The idea that there were two queens, and that Queen Elizabeth's fate was tied to this other, darker queen is a cool one, and is handled well. If you like faerie stories, definitely check this out.

Catching up on some more of the Christmas books, I plunged into Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu. I've read some of her short fiction before, and last year I checked Zahrah the Windseeker out of the library, read the first third and added it to my must buy list (you know, the list I keep going through the year so I know what to get with my gift cards in December). Cool concept, with the plant-based technology, although the writing was a touch too exclamation pointy for me. The Shadow Speaker goes deeper, darker, and is written with a defter hand. Zahrah was a fun read, but The Shadow Speaker was much cooler.

Having whetted my appetite for YA, I dove into Diana Wynne Jones next. I started with Eight Days of Luke, about a boy who accidently frees Loki from his prison. It was about the Norse gods, which are my favorite pantheon, so of course I loved it. (It also features a boy whose parents have died and he lives with his relatives who don't treat him particularly well, always trying to get him to stay at school over the holidays, and dressing him in much-too-big cast-offs. Sound familiar? Only this book was written in 1975...)

The other Jones I had on hand were all the books in the Chrestomanci series (individually: Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, Conrad’s Fate, Witch Week, The Magicians of Caprona, Mixed Magic and The Pinhoe Egg). All very cool. Jones writes magic really well: it has a framework and rules, but there are different styles and a lot of individuality between magic-users. And it's a series that gets more interesting as it goes, which is always a good thing.

At that point I needed something less engrossing, something I could read on the treadmill but wouldn't feel compelled to give up writing time to finish. So I finally caved to my husband's pestering and plunged into Edgar Rice Burroughs. I read the first three: A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars and The Warlord of Mars. Very cool settings and creatures, I can' believe no one has made a film of this yet (although nearly everyone cool in Hollywood has been just about to try it. I believe Pixar has the hot potato at the moment). It did make me appreciate that my first experience with pulps was Star Wars, though. I mean, John Carter is very much like Farnham with his lifeboat rules; Dejah Thoris may be a princess but she is going to do exactly what he tells her to do without asking any questions. And she meekly agrees. Can you imagine someone trying to pull that act on Princess Leia?

OK, off to eat my very cold lunch now...

A very disjointed post, written in 30 second snatches while the boy does math...

I saw The Mummy 3 last night. What a fun movie! This one has a new director: Rob Cohen, who always makes good popcorn. The use of ancient China was much more reverent than the use of Egypt was in the first two movies. Serious Egyptology would have been misplaced in a popcorn movie, I know, but an Egyptian magician whose magic is the plagues of a Hebrew god? It still makes me grit my teeth, and I liked that movie. There isn't more than a touch of Taoist alchemy in this movie, but at least what's there jives with what I've read. But I think it'd have to, or you wouldn't have Jet Li in your movie.

Plus there are yeti, and Shangra-La. And a three-headed dragon, and Michelle Yeoh, and Russell Wong. (Man, Russell Wong just isn't in enough stuff. I know I'm not the only one who remembers Vanishing Son.)

Originally The Mummy was supposed to be my trade-off with my husband, where we each take a night out alone to watch a movie, but I invited the whole family along for my night out, because popcorn is best when it's shared. Quin went out Friday to see the new Batman movie. I'll happily wait for the DVD on that one, partly because I think I'll find it too upsetting to watch right now, but mostly because I think it will be the sort of mind-twist movie where I spend days stewing about it after, which wouldn't be good when I'm supposed to be stewing on my own story just now.

And stewing I am; I woke up in the middle of the night early, early Sunday morning, suddenly realizing why chapter four didn't work. Then I couldn't get back to sleep until I fixed it, and then I was too keyed up to get back to sleep (so I blogged in the middle of the night; haven't done that before).

School and work week, so the goal is lower. 500 words a day should be doable, I hope. And that should have me at the end of chapter 8 by Friday, which of course means Dr. Horrible.

It was about this time last summer...

...when I first saw the trailer for Marigold. My response was pretty much mah. I finally got the DVD and watched it this weekend.

First off, this is a movie made with much love, which I greatly appreciated. Apparently the director, Willard Carroll, caught the movie Chori Chori Chupke Chupke while vacationing in India and was sucked in by the first song, "Number 1 Punjabi". He subsequently ordered Bollywood DVDs by the boxload until he'd seen over 150 movies, including everything Salman Khan had ever done. He relates all this in the bonus features, and my husband found it quite amusing, as it's pretty much what happened to me. Substitute Andaz Apna Apna for CCCC, and I've not quite hit the century mark yet and have only seen about 2/3 of Salman's movies. But yeah, Willard and I share a love.

It's also not the fish-out-of-water story I feared. No "whacky" encounters with strange customs or weird food. Again, much appreciated.

It's also not really what the marketing claims it is, which is an east meets west, Hollywood girl meets Bollywood guy. Sure, that's what's going on superficially, but there is even a scene in the movie that pretty clearly spells out that she's just Marigold, not Every American Girl, and he's just Prem, not Every Indian Boy. It's a smaller but more interesting story than the marketers would have you believe.

I don't think it was a rousing success; I'd have to put in the category of films that try for something interesting but don't quite follow through (for comparison, I also put Stranger Than Fiction and Feeling Minnesota in this category). It's really the story of how an overgrown adolescent learns to set aside childish things and be a grown-up. And despite the marketing spin, it's not all of Bollywood that does this for her, it's just one guy who makes her feel safe enough to let up on her defense mechanisms. These two characters and how they draw each other out was really very well written.

It was an interesting story, particularly when her semi-fiance enters the picture and is neither a villainous jerk nor some dope you know she'd never end up with (like the flute player in Serendipity - was it ever remotely believable that Kate Beckinsale would marry that guy?).

Still, flawed. Too many characters appear all at the end of the film, and it all feels rushed (which is one way in which it was not a real Bollywood movie, not even two hours long???). Plus Prem's parents go through a drastic change in motivation that really needed a lot more set-up to feel real. And I would have made Marigold's arc a bit less neat. She pretty effectively stops being a bitch; if I had been writing it, it would have been a much tougher transition for her, and at the point when the Big Secret is revealed, I would have had her really fight not to lose all the grace and self-control she's just learned to have.

Still, it was far better than I had expected.

This Week's Progress

Just a hair under this week's goal:



This is coming out a tad longer than expected. I'm a third of the way through 60,000 words, but not quite a third of the way through my outline. This is not a bad thing, the 60,000 is just a guess after all, and once I go through it all and tighten up the prose it will shorten up by about 10%. Still, it does mean that I should probably gauge my progress by chapters written rather than by word count for the purpose of doling out my rewards. My outline is for 24 chapters, so when I've finished chapter 8, I'll get my first Dr. Horrible installment. I've just finished chapter 7, but the pace slows down from here as I head into three weeks of both work and school. It could be a week or more before I earn my first reward.

As far as the writing itself goes, well, Neil Gaiman said it best when he was working on American Gods:

Feb 13th -- wrote some stuff. It was crap...
Feb 14th -- wrote some brilliant stuff. This is going to be such a good novel. Honest it is...
Feb 15th -- No, it's crap...

And to think I do this for fun.

A very good week!

My goal for this week was 10,000. So, here's were I'm at:



Yea me! I've got a reward system in effect. My reward: I get to watch Dr. Horrible's Singalong blog. Cause, you know, Joss Whedon and Neil Patrick Harris is something I just have to see. Since I expect this novel to be 60,000 words, and Dr. Horrible is a three act thing, every 20,000 words I get to watch one act of Dr. Horrible. So if I make 20,000 next Friday (which is my goal), I'll get to watch act one. I already have it all downloaded from iTunes and everything.

Of course it's going to take the whole month of August before I get to watch act two...

The writing is going pretty well in terms of quality as well as quantity, I think. Some writers do what's called a SFD (Shitty First Draft). I am not such a writer. I can't leave a "insert something funny here" note in a chaper and move on. I just can't. This isn't last-draft polished to perfection, but it's about 80% what I want it to be.

I have three POVs characters in this one, and they rotate chapters. Omesh's chapters are the most clearly outlined, as he drives the plot more than the others. Rabiya I've found pretty much writes her chapters herself. She's a little... strong-willed. But Takashi is the tough one so far. I know him, but I'm not yet feeling him (if that's not to writery, wishy-washy for you). At this point it's his nemesis that is the more full-dimensional character, which is a problem, but as I've said, this is only 80% there. It's easier to work out some of these issues after you've typed THE END.

In unrelated matters, my movie posts are hands-down my most popular hit-generators. Speaking to movie fans: I have the perfect blog for you. It's called The Wilhelm Scream. If we're playing the Kevin Bacon game: Kumail Ali went to college with a guy named Fred that used to work with the guy I'm married to. So Kumail doesn't know me from Adam, frankly. But his blog is the bomb, and we share a least favorite genre.

Let's see how this goes

This week I have school but no work, and next week I have work but no school (this is as close as I get to actual time off unless I'm leaving town, in which case I'm not writing). I polished off my outline over the weekend and I'm ready to start from word 0 today. My goal is to write at least 10,000 words this week and 10,000 more next week to give myself a nice headstart before August, when I'm back to working and schooling both. So here's my handy little progress meter:



And I'll be updating it on Friday.

In the meantime, a little music. I already posted the song that inspired me to use MITWA as a working title, but any word meaning dear friend or beloved is going to come up in lots of songs. Here's my second favorite, "Yeh Mausam Ka Jadoo Hai, Mitwa" from the movie Hum Aapke Hain Kaun. I can't embed it here, perhaps because the movie producers are the ones who put it up on Youtube (so it's probably legal - cool! You think the resolution would be better when it's official, though). Link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=EMOEjA6UMsQ. This was the first thing I saw Madhuri Dixit in, and about my fifth or sixth Salman Khan movie. One of my favorites to let run in the background when I'm doing other stuff, the songs are all so singable.

OK, first school and then MITWA. Wish me luck!

Movies in June

By language seems the easiest way to sort this. Let's start with English...

First up: Inside Man. When I first got the soundtrack to Dil Se, the song Chaiya Chaiya (the one with Malaika Arora on the train in the movie) sounded vaguely familiar. Which was odd, this was only Bollywood movie #10 or 12 for me, where would I have heard this Hindi song before? Finally in the car much, much later I heard it remixed with an added rap bit on one of my husband's mix CDs that he had gotten from a coworker. Turns out this remix was used as the opening of a Spike Lee movie, which my husband promptly insisted I pick up for him (he really likes this song, and not just on account of Malaika). Inside Man is a pretty well done heist film (Quin's favorite kind of movie) with Denzel Washington and Clive Owen. It was a fun watch, but like most heist films it didn't leave me with any great desire to watch it again.

The other English movie was a family film night for us: National Treasure 2. I suppose it must be a guilty pleasure; I feel a bit sheepish admitting I really liked this. It is a much better film version of Tomb Raider than the Tomb Raider movies, for one, and the interactions between the characters are just plain fun. Clearly there is going to be a National Treasure 3.

Chinese: Warriors of Heaven and Earth. I got this on Blu-Ray, and it is a gorgeous film with some stunning canyons and deserts (it takes place on the Silk Road, where China ends and Afghanistan begins, although this is set in the past). Alas, I found this a bit of a disappointment. The fights weren't particularly good, the characters didn't do it for me, and the plot just sort of plodded along. Still, pretty to look at. And I haven't watch a movie in Mandarin in a while; I love the sound of that language.

I saw my first Pakistani film in June as well. Most Pakistani films come from the film studios of Lahore, so they are called "Lollywood" (similarly India actually has several different film industries. Bollywood from Bombai/Mumbai is the biggest, but there is also Tollywood which are in Telegu, Kollywood which are in Tamil, and others without the cute names. India has some 21 official languages, after all). The movie I saw, Khuda Kay Liye, is actually an independent film, so I haven't seen an actual Lollywood movie yet. The official language of Pakistan is Urdu, which when spoken is pretty much Hindi (there was only one character I had a hard time understanding, and he was probably putting a lot more Arabic words in his speech, given that he was meant to be an Islamic fundamentalist, but that's just a guess). The film centers around two brothers who are aspiring musicians and their cousin in London. One brother falls under the influence of said fundamentalist and leaves music entirely to join the Taliban, the other has the misfortune of being in the US studying music on 09/11 and is arrested under suspicion of being a terrorist. The cousin's father panics when she is about to marry a white boy and lures her to Pakistan only to leave her in a remote village over the border into Afghanistan where she is forced to marry her Taliban cousin.

So yeah, it was a bit of a heartbreaker of a film. Very well done, though. It reminded me a bit of American History X, another film dealing with how one charismatic talker can lead a whole bunch of young men astray simply because they don't have the life experience to realise the talker is spouting absolute nonsense. And when the Taliban boy listens to the scholar called to testify during the court case at the end of the film and realizes how wrong everything he had been lead to believe really was... Oh yeah, heartbreaker.

OK, Bollywood. Khullam Khulla Pyaar Karen stars Preity Zinta and Govinda. I picked it up for 99 cents. 'Nuff said.

Insan had the same plot as last month's Garv - Hindu cop versus Muslim terrorists, but was much better done. The line between good guys and bad guys is not so clear here, with a lot of people clearly floundering and trying to find their direction. The guy who played the terrorist I've never seen in anything before, but there was something so haunted in his eyes you just know he had seen terrible things (he had disappeared during a riot and his family had been waiting for years for news of whether he was alive or dead). Not that anyone accepts that as an excuse, even his own brother (Akshay Kumar), a rickshaw driver who is not trying to be a hero he's just trying to do the right thing. In Hollywood, he would be played by Bruce Willis.

I Proud to be Indian didn't really work for me. I liked the idea of skin heads versus Indians, both having some claim to the "Aryan" name. But the main character's back story was only ever hinted at, never explained, and his motivations were not particularly clear.

Two more Salim-Javed films, both starring Amitabh Bacchan: Zanjeer and Deewaar. Zanjeer had some very colorful characters. Amit falls in with a red-headed Muslim named Sher Khan (king of the lions, hence the mane-like hair and beard) and a tough-talking girl who sharpens knives, who in the end shows that she's just as proficient at throwing them. Even Quin liked that one. The second, Deewaar, was about two brothers, one who becomes a cop and the other becomes a gangster, and their mother is stuck between them. Both very well written, and worth a see (although they were made in the 70s and look it. Actually that's kind of a plus for me...)

Bhootnath stars a much older Amitabh Bacchan as a ghost who befriends a boy. As a fantasist this movie disappointed me; there were no clear rules for what the ghost could or could not do, what he could touch or not, who could see him or not. It was frustrating. Also, this was one I borrowed from Shikha. She gets her movies from her grocer, whom I believe wears an eyepatch and maybe has a peg leg. I'm just saying, the movies I get from her always have quirky subtitles. In this one when the boy's father confronts the son of the ghost who went away to America to study and never came back and tells him he should "make prays", the man says "In America we don't make prays, but even we still find peach." I puzzled that one out for a while. Is peach a metaphor? Was he saying preach? (In America we don't pray but we get preached at a lot, perhaps). Actually he meant "find peace", as it became clear later. Not a great film, but the only one I've seen where Amitabh Bacchan raps. Oh yes, he raps.

Last film, best film. I mentioned a while back how much I loved Farah Khan's Main Hoon Na. Her second film, Om Shanti Om, came out on Blu-Ray (finally!), and I'm still in raptures. Again, this is so much just my kind of thing. Shah Rukh Khan is Om, a junior artist in 1970s Bollywood (which means he is an actor employed by the studio to be in the background of scenes, never a hero). He is completely in love with Shanti, a huge star (he talks to her billboard that looms over his neighborhood). Alas, she is already secretly married to a producer who kills her when she becomes pregnant. Om tries and fails to save her and dies himself, reborn as the son of his acting idol. Growing up in the lap of luxury has made him into quite a jerk, but his memories start coming back and he hatches a plan to make sure the producer who got away with murder is outed.

This is probably not the best entry into the world of Bollywood, as it's very referential to other films (although there were only a few things I knew I was missing, and in the big Deewangi number which featured some 30 stars of Bollywood past and present there were only 4 or 5 I didn't recognize). Still I loved Om's message, that life really is like a Bollywood movie, and if it doesn't seem like you're getting a happy ending, that just means your film isn't over yet.

This month's song clip is from Om Shanti Om. This is another one where I had the soundtrack for a year now, awaiting the subtitles to know what I'm singing along with. Aidan likes this song in particular, and I tried to parse out what the title meant but it didn't make any sense. "dard" means pain, and "disco" is self-explanatory. What on earth could "Dard-e-Disco" mean?

I pretty much had it, actually. Young spoiled Om is supposed to be playing a scene which is complicated by the fact that his character is blind, deaf, in a wheelchair and has no hands. How to show his anguish at his beloved's wedding to another? (Tough call, and when he finally realizes what's in the script he never bothered to read, Om says, "What the fish?" What the fish, indeed.) Om decides what's needed to convey this anguish is an item song, a dream sequence so he can dance, only the heroine (played by the producer's girlfriend) is not hot enough for this number, better get 10 or so item girls. But what sort of music to show the emotion? A trance number? A rock song? No, it has to be disco. Dard-e-disco.

It all makes sense now...

Books in June

I only read three books in June, but two were monstrous door stops so that skews things a bit.

The first was Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I've been meaning to read this one for a while, at the very least to put Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors into context. I really got swept up into it, but it also messed with me quite a bit. It's a very disturbing book. The end of my edition has a series of quotes from other authors, and I found Robert Louis Stevenson summed it up pretty nicely for me:

Many find it dull: Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me. It was like having an illness. James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikoff was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and, on further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of today, which prevents them from living in a book or a character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purified. - Robert Louis Stevenson

I actually enjoyed it more than the second book I read last month, Dostoevsky's considered masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov. That one I read more as an outsider observing. I liked the way it was structured, it seemed a sort of precursor to James Joyce's Ulysses in some ways. But it didn't consume me the way Crime and Punishment did. Also, when I reached the not-ending, I was as baffled and disappointed as the girls who sat behind me in the theater for The Fellowship of the Ring. What sort of ending is that? Apparently Dostoevsky had planned a trilogy he hadn't lived to write, so we only get a single volume. Since just that book is the size of all of The Lord of the Rings, I admire his ambition.

The last book I read in June was lighter fare: Passage by Lois McMaster Bujold. This is the third book in her Sharing Knife series. I found the first two books a little underwhelming (engaging enough, but no where near the level of her other work), but in this book things start to get interesting as her characters begin to explore the mechanics of how their magic works. I like a book where magic is just another sort of science with rules to be discovered and applied. The setting on a river boat on a fantasy version of the Mississippi I liked as well. This series is looking up for me, I'll be interested to see where she takes this next.

In non-book-related news, my grocery delivery service just went out of business. They had been making a lot of little adjustments in the last few months to compensate for the rising costs of food and fuel, but they've given up. This is a bit of a blow to me; I don't actually have time in the week to go to the grocery store. Honestly, none. What used to take ten minutes on the computer on Tuesday and ten minutes putting food away on Wednesday is now going to involve at least an hour at a time I'm neither working or homeschooling. Which means it has to come out of my writing time. We're going to make it a family activity, partly so that the boys can be involved in it and get a sense of what things cost and how we make food decisions, but mostly because it's a huge drag going out to stores and I'm not doing it on my own.

I hate shopping in stores in general. I had to get clothes for all of us for one of last week's parties so we went to Kohls. Now I love Kohls.com. I can search just for three-quarter sleeve tunic cotton shirts, and that's all I see on the screen, and I can pick what I want in five minutes. I spent nearly an hour walking in circles before I found anything remotely like what I was looking for among racks and racks of not-what-I-was-looking-for. Man, I hate shopping.

OK, rant done. I have to finish cleaning my house so I can get back to the outline. I think I figured something out while I was half-asleep this morning that will resolve something that was nagging at the back of my mind...