Life

Curtains

I have spent this week getting really sidetracked about curtains, blinds, and window treatments. I think some of it has to do with my brain loving to solve problems, and it won’t let go until I have a solution.

The issue is my bedroom windows. While the actual windows—the glass in the metal frames—are a standard size, the window frames in the house that the windows are set into are not at all standard. They’re the kind you often see in old houses, with really thick woodwork framing the windows. When I was buying shades for the bedroom windows before I moved in, I found that the window frame was about half an inch too small for one size of shades. The smaller size would cover the glass part, and I figured that would work. What I hadn’t counted on was the fact that the lower window pane, the one that raises to open the window, sits out about 2 inches in front of the upper pane, which meant that while the shades covered the lower pane perfectly, there’s a big gap on the upper pane that lets a lot of light through from behind the blackout shades. From May through August, this is pretty important because the sun rises very early. It starts getting light before 5 a.m. around the summer solstice.

I put up some lace curtains and concentrated the gathers on the sides, which helped some, and then I resorted to a solution I used in my old house, throwing some lined curtains I had from my previous apartment over the curtain rods to help block light. I did this in the old house when they put a super-bright bulb in the street lamp right in front of my bedroom window. This solution has worked pretty well. The curtains block a lot of light but let enough in that I can let the sun wake me up. It doesn’t start getting too bright until the sun is more fully up. The problem is that throwing curtains over the rods holding the lace curtains is kind of tacky. The initial idea was to just put them up at night, but then I end up just leaving them there. I have to move them if I open the windows so that air can actually come in.

So I’ve been brainstorming ideas to solve this problem. Getting blinds cut to fit the window frame would be expensive, and I suspect there would still be light coming in around the edges. Another idea I had was to get roller blinds to fit up under the lace curtains. When rolled up they wouldn’t show, but I could pull them down at night. Then it occurred to me that I could just get larger curtain rods and hang the lined curtains over the lace curtains. I have tie backs to pull them aside during the day. It turned out that I’d bought the wrong size of curtain rod for one of the windows, so I already had the 3-inch deep one for one window, and I had an extra 2-inch deep one to put the lace curtain on. I just needed to buy one more 3-inch deep rod.

But then when I was buying that one, I saw that they had roller blinds that you can get cut to fit, so now I’m wondering it that might be a better idea. Put the lace curtains on the deeper rods, then fit roller blinds under the curtains to pull down at night. The room darkening ones aren’t that expensive, and I’m not sure I want total blackout. Between these and the blackout shades I already have, it should cut the light. Or maybe that’s a project for next summer. If I situate the rods for the lined curtains right, all I’d have to do is take out the smaller rods and move the lace curtains to the big ones. Then I found some other blinds you can adjust to fit yourself that aren’t that expensive and that I can get locally. So I ended up deciding to go that way and am just going to put up the deeper rods to use the lace curtains to cover the blind roller. I figured out that because the curtains are behind furniture, the curtains wouldn’t go back in place after I pulled them back, so I’d end up where I am now, with the curtains just hanging all the time. With blinds behind the lace curtains, I could at least see the lace and I might actually get around to raising the blinds occasionally.

I had to go through the process of planning to hang the curtains to come around to this conclusion, so the time spent thinking about how to hang the curtains wasn’t wasted. It merely consumed a lot of brain space.

But then during all this I started pondering the kitchen window, which is awkward because it’s behind the air fryer oven, so I don’t want curtains that hang down, but it’s on the front of the house, so I want some privacy. I have tall hedges along the street in front of the yard so you can’t see directly into my house, but you can kind of see into the kitchen from down the road. I currently have some faux stained glass privacy film on the lower part of the window, so you can’t see me from the neck down, but while researching various blinds options I found a really pretty valance that matches some placemats I already have. I’d have to replace the privacy film because it would clash, but the film I’ve got wasn’t great and I’ve been meaning to replace it. I found one that’s colorless, so it looks like etched glass. That would make the window look finished, leave me a spot to look out, but also block more from view outside.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about putting my last set of lace curtains on the front window because when I walk around town I love the look of lace curtains in the front windows. I’d been thinking of putting those curtains in the spare room but they’d be prettier in the front window. I wanted something on the spare room window because it’s right across from my neighbors’ front porch, where they spend a lot of time, and because of that same size issue there’s a slight gap around the edges of the miniblinds I have in that window. I do yoga in that room, and I feel like I’m giving the neighbors a lovely view when I do downward dog in front of that window. I don’t know how much they can actually see, and maybe you’d have to get close to the window to really see into that room (it’s on the second floor), but I feel self-conscious. That room will also be the guest room, so I want to give guests some privacy and block some light. But then the last set of lace curtains has different dimensions, and I don’t think it would fit in any of my windows. I may get a set of Roman shades like I have on my front door to go on that window, and I’ve found new lace curtains that would be pretty in my front room windows. The smaller curtain rods currently on the bedroom windows can go there.

See, curtain and blind obsession. I have managed to get work done in spite of all this, but mostly because I use curtain research as a reward for getting writing done. When I write for a certain amount of time, I’m allowed to get on Wayfair or Ikea and browse curtains. Having made all these decisions, my brain has finally let the subject go. I’m going to start with picking up the shades the next time I go out, and then putting those up and putting up the new curtain rods will be my weekend project. I’ll roll out the rest of the window projects over time.

writing

Character Change

Doing that ID List exercise I mentioned in my last post has already paid off. One item I came up with was “the ditz goes steely,” which is when a frivolous or comic relief character gets serious. I noticed how much I liked this kind of thing when I was watching Wicked: For Good and got such a thrill out of the moment when Glinda took charge. That movie has a two-fer, with Fiyero doing something similar (though he was already getting serious in the first movie, so it wasn’t so abrupt). You also see that in Legally Blonde, and it’s what the whole Barbie movie was building to. There’s just something about a seemingly shallow goofball getting serious and putting the startled villain in his place that makes you want to cheer.

And what that boils down to is a character transformation. It’s really satisfying when you can see a character change, and it’s more dramatic when a character makes a big change, like from ditz to badass. It’s even better when it’s not just the audience who sees the change, but the other characters are also taken aback when the fluffy lap dog growls and bites them.

Then I realized that I don’t really write this. My main characters usually have it more or less together even at the beginning of the book, and their growth is more subtle, bringing out hidden parts of them or just a bit of increased awareness. I seem to resist or be afraid of letting a character be a bit of a mess at the beginning of a book. But the book I’m currently working on is one where it fits. The heroine isn’t actually a ditz. She’s quite brainy, but she is naive. She’s also a big chicken who wants to be braver but hasn’t figured out that to get braver you have to be in situations that require bravery, and she recoils from those. Only I wasn’t really writing her this way. She and other people accuse her of playing it safe, but the first moment she’s required to be brave, she has no problems with it. I’m writing her at the beginning the way she should be at the end.

So I’m regrouping and doing some rewriting, and I can already see that this is lighting a spark to the story. It’s funnier and it’s more interesting with more internal and external conflict, and I suspect that the moment when she finds her courage and takes a risk is going to be even more satisfying when I get there.

But this does mean going back to the start and doing a fair amount of rewriting because it changes most of the scenes, and each change means more changes later. It’s good that I figured this out before I got halfway into the book.

writing

What Lights My Fire

I attended an online conference a couple of weeks ago at which someone brought up the concept of the ID List. This is a term coined by author/psychology professor Jennifer Lynn Barnes (those who’ve followed me since the early Enchanted, Inc. days may remember me featuring her as part of the Girlfriends Cyber Circuit blog tours), and it refers to the list of things that your brain wants, whether or not they’re good. In fiction, these are the things that make something an autobuy/read/watch if you see them in a book, TV show, or movie description. Or they’re the little elements that make your brain light up as you’re reading or watching.

The idea is that you as a writer can maintain and convey your passion for your work by being sure to include items from your list in everything you write. Jennifer also says she finds she gets better response from her marketing when she lists these things than when she gives a description of the book. The people who also love those things have a gut reaction to hearing about them. They can be tropes, but they can also be plot elements, settings, moments, character types, and activities.

So, I started playing around with making my list the other night when I was at a band concert in the park (I noticed the number of people playing on their phones during these concerts and decided it wouldn’t be any more rude for me to bring a pen and notebook and journal, brainstorm, or do other work during the concert).

The first item on my list had to be that romantic road trip thing I’m always talking about, in which two people have to travel together, usually because of some mutually beneficial arrangement that forces them to overcome their reluctance to get stuck with each other. Along the way they develop respect, then friendship, then maybe love as they face obstacles together. I first realized how strongly I react to this sort of thing when I was watching a Fantasy Cheese movie, and the moment they made an agreement to travel together I stopped the movie and went to make popcorn because I knew I was going to love it, even if it was cheesy and had terrible special effects.

I realized while making my list that the Rydding Village books are pretty much pure ID List for me. To a large extent, that was why I started writing them. I was a bit burned out and maybe even in a very minor depression, so I started throwing a lot of things I love into a story idea. There’s tea, for one thing. Friends sitting around and having tea. Conversations around a kitchen table. Bread and cheese. Town festivals. Bonfires. Dancing. On more of a trope level, I love stories about starting over and rebuilding a life, and I love the particular flavor of amnesia story that I call “who would you be if you didn’t know who you were?” There are a few more, but they’re spoilery for the book or the series.

Bonfires seem to show up a lot. I love a good bonfire or camp fire. I love the smell of wood smoke, and I’m mesmerized by watching the flames. The main reason I have any desire to go camping is to sit by a campfire. I was excited when I bought this house and found that there’s a campfire ring in the back yard, so I could get what I want out of camping while having indoor plumbing and sleeping in my own bed. I haven’t used it yet (at the moment, it’s full of tall grass, raspberry bushes, and English ivy, plus we’re in a drought, so fires are restricted), but I hope to get it cleared out enough to use at least once this fall (I found a stash of firewood in the shed). I have a small tabletop fire pit/stove that I also haven’t used. I just need to find an evening when it’s nice outside, not too windy, and I have the time to just sit outside. In the meantime, I have a big wooden wick candle in a campfire scent, so it crackles and flickers like a fire and gives a hint of the smell. But I definitely write fires into my books and incorporate them into the rituals of the village.

I have actually started a book using that journey trope. I’m just not happy with it yet. I love the first half, but then it seems to fall apart at the midpoint, and I definitely don’t stick the landing, so that book is resting until I can look at it with fresh eyes and maybe replot it.

Making that list has given me ideas for more things to throw into my books to make them more fun for me to write, and maybe more fun for readers.

writing life

Marketing in the 80s

I may have discovered the secret to getting administrative and promotional work done: 80s music.

I love the writing part of a writing career. Making up stories is my comfort zone. It’s fun.

The business part of it, on the other hand, is less fun. I put off doing work like bookkeeping, responding to e-mails, and updating my website. Promotion and marketing is even worse. There are aspects of it that can be fun, but because the rest of it isn’t as much fun, I often don’t get any of it done. Part of it is that I’ve worked so hard to prioritize writing so that I don’t get sidetracked in meta-work — procrastination that feels like work but that doesn’t actually lead to a book being published — that I feel weird spending time on other things. And part of it was that my day job career was in public relations, and I hated it. Writing was my escape from my hated day job, both in giving me something else to focus on and in it being my escape plan to eventually have a career I enjoyed. I didn’t realize how much of a part of a writing career marketing and PR would be.

My promo efforts have been mostly haphazard and scattered. I do things when I absolutely have to do them, and I still let a lot slide. I complained about how little my publishers did to promote my books, but I’m just as bad. I keep saying I’m going to do more, and then it just doesn’t happen.

Supposedly, one good way to add a new habit is to combine it with either something you’re already doing or something you enjoy. That’s the “spoonful of sugar” approach. Make the thing you need to do more fun by adding it to something you look forward to.

Which brings me to 80s music. I was an 80s teenager (yes, I’m old). While I didn’t have the best time in high school, I still have a lot of fond memories associated with 80s music. I remember having the radio on in my bedroom when I was scribbling parts of stories in spiral notebooks or reading. Or I listened to the radio while driving the country roads when I finally got my driver’s license and was practicing. There are the songs on the soundtracks of the 80s movies I watched with friends in college. Besides, most of the music from that era is very happy-sounding (even if a large part of it boiled down to being peppy songs about fear of nuclear apocalypse).

The town where I live now doesn’t have much in the way of radio, since we’re surrounded by mountains. There is a local community radio station. It’s volunteer-run, and just about anyone in town can have a radio show. Half the people on my street have shows. This is the station I keep on in my car for when I’m running errands around town and it would be too much trouble to connect my phone each time I get in the car. It’s so random that you never know what you’re going to hear. You can go from old-school country to reggae to blues to French music, to jazz, to current alternative, but I discovered while running errands that on Friday mornings they have an 80s show from 10 to noon. I enjoy driving around town, bopping to songs I remember from high school and college, as well as some more obscure stuff they didn’t play on the radio in East Texas.

I can’t really write to music with lyrics, so I couldn’t listen to this music while writing, but it occurred to me that I could use this for admin/promo time. It’s something fun that I can’t listen to while writing fiction but that makes good background music for doing other work, and it means I have a scheduled, dedicated time for doing my promo work.

I’ve only been doing this for a few weeks, and I’ve had some other stuff going on most of those times (including today), so I don’t have hard numbers yet, but I’ve done a bit more promo stuff than I have in a long time. I’ve even gotten back to occasionally posting on Instagram, and I’ve done website updates. I’m actually looking forward to my admin time instead of putting it off and dreading it. After a few more weeks, if I don’t end up with more Friday funerals I have to sing for (not people I knew, but they need choir members), I may start seeing real results.

If you need the 80s power, you can actually stream this show at the station’s website (live and archived on demand). The list of shows is here, and this show is “Up in the Attic.” You can see how eclectic the lineup is at this station. “Big Pappy Turtleneck” is my next-door neighbor, and the hosts of Native America and The Horseshoe Lounge live at the end of the block, across the street from each other.

writing life

Beating Book Brain

I’m about a quarter way into a first draft, and I’m being remarkably sane about it. This is usually when I have no brainpower or energy for anything else (I call it Book Brain), but I’ve managed to get my writing done and I’ve managed to do other things. Yesterday in my mid-morning writing break, I Swiffered the floors and pulled some weeds in the back yard, and I still hit my targeted word count before lunch. I cooked dinner. Though I will confess that I resorted to a frozen entree on Monday, but that’s what they’re there for, and needing the frozen entree was more because I was doing stuff in the yard and lost track of time to the point that I didn’t have time to cook than because my brain was devoured by the writing.

I’m trying to figure out what’s different so I can do it again. One thing is that I’m making a strong effort to start work earlier in the morning, before I get distracted by other things. That allows me to hit my goals before lunch, so anything else I do is a bonus. It also helps, oddly enough, that my back has been a bit stiff. Last week I was doing the writing while also attending an online conference, so I didn’t move around as much as I usually do, and then Sunday morning there was a lot of standing for choir, and during all the standing my back got stiff. So this week I’ve been making more of an effort to take breaks and get up and move. That’s how I did the sweeping and yard work. Instead of falling down the usual social media rabbit hole while I was taking a break, I got up and did housework and yard work, and that seemed to make me more productive for writing, possibly because those breaks were shorter and were a total change of pace.

In general, I think having so much yard work to do helps because it gets me away from the computer, but it also gives me thinking time, which makes the writing go better. It also gives me a sense of accomplishment. I can look out the window and see a difference, even if there’s still more work to do. I’m getting the giant grass under control and clearing out weeds. Seeds that I’ve planted are sprouting. I bought a cherry tomato plant at the beginning of the month, and I already have four baby tomatoes starting to form, plus lots of blossoms. It’s a good balance from writing, plus it’s a good way to get exercise so my back doesn’t feel so stiff.

I also think all the time I spent preparing this book helped. I was starting to feel like I was procrastinating, but spending so much time thinking about the book ahead of time means it’s not quite so draining now that I’m writing. I’m still getting surprises along the way, which is fun. For instance, I realized that I may be writing a WWII resistance thriller set in a fantasy world. That element was always there, since an underground movement was part of the story, but I didn’t realize it would have quite that same flavor until I started writing, and then I decided to go with it. But the structure and the world I set up earlier are still more or less the same and I don’t have to think so much about what happens next, so I feel less drained at the end of a writing session.

It’s nice to get my writing done and also be a functional human being.

TV, movies

Appreciating The Mandalorian

For more than a year, I’ve been working on rewatching all the Star Wars shows and movies in chronological order. I got a bit stalled on Andor because I finished the first season just in time for the second season, but then I wanted to go back and rewatch the whole series after that before moving on, but that took me a while because of all the stuff going on in my life. I finally got through that and on to the original trilogy of movies earlier this year, and I just finished The Mandalorian.

While Andor remains my favorite Star Wars thing, aside from the original movie, I’ve got a lot of appreciation for The Mandalorian, especially after rewatching.

For one thing, it was an interesting execution of the “big, strong man becomes responsible for something smaller and weaker” trope because it avoided a lot of the annoying cliches that tend to come with that trope. One big one was the sexist message that big, strong men aren’t expected to be competent at childcare. In most of the stories involving a man stuck with a baby, there’s humor milked from the man struggling with things like diapers and feeding. Usually, a woman (often the love interest) has to step in and help. But Din Djarin never seems to struggle with caring for Grogu. He just deals with it. He sometimes gets frustrated with the toddler-like behavior, but there’s never a sense of “oh dear, what am I, a man, supposed to do, since this is women’s work?” We even see other Mandalorian men as caregivers with their own foundling adopted kids. There’s also a good variety of reactions to Grogu. Yes, there are some women who go all gooey over him and coo over him, but there are also men who react that way. There are women who get protective of him and there are women who treat him like any other person, seemingly oblivious to the cuteness.

It also helps that we learn very early that Grogu isn’t at all helpless. He may not be extremely mobile and he’s pre-verbal, but he’s quite powerful in using the Force and can tame great beasts with the power of his mind. He protects Din almost as often as Din protects him.

That means we get the fun imagery of the big warrior dude looking after the small, cute creature without a lot of the questionable baggage that often goes with the trope.

Speaking of women, one thing I love about all the Star Wars TV series has been the dramatic expansion of the roles for women. I was a kid when the original movie came out, and it made for some heated neighborhood arguments about who got to be Leia when we played Star Wars, since she was the only girl who got to do anything. In rewatching the original trilogy recently, I was tracking the female characters, and in those movies there was Leia and one other woman who got to actually speak. The worst was The Empire Strikes Back, in which the other woman who got to speak was a flight controller who got one line. There was a slightly larger role for women in Return of the Jedi, since we had Leia, Mon Mothma, and then the slave girl in Jabba’s palace got to speak, but she spoke another language that wasn’t subtitled, so it doesn’t entirely count, as what she had to say was apparently so unimportant that it didn’t get translated for us. The special edition version also has the female-coded alien singer. But I doubt that girls playing Star Wars would have been happy with being the slave girl or Mon Mothma instead of Leia. There were barely any women even visible in the backgrounds. They just weren’t part of the fabric of the universe.

It was only slightly better in the prequels that came nearly two decades later. Padme had the Leia role as the woman who got to do something. Then there might be two more women who got to talk, but they still didn’t get to do much.

We got the big leap forward with the sequels that came a decade after that, with a female main character, plus Leia, plus a female villain for the first couple of movies, but it still wasn’t until the second sequel that there were more female characters who actually did something that mattered to the story.

As much as I love Rogue One, we were back to the woman who does something plus Mon Mothma for major characters, but at least we got some female pilots as part of the background (and some of them even had lines!). They had to do some finessing to fit with the original movie, so the female pilots all had to die to explain why there were none in the original movie, but enough men also died so that it wasn’t so obvious they were picking off the women.

But in the TV series, we finally have multiple women who actually get to do stuff. That really struck me in the season two finale of The Mandalorian, in which Din gathers his allies to rescue Grogu. The raid on the command ship involves Din and a crew of women. Most of the recurring characters who have names and get to do stuff are women. If you were playing The Mandalorian on the playground, it would be the girls who have plenty of roles to choose from while the boys would fight over who got to be Din and the rest would have to choose among the background Mandalorians or maybe Boba Fett (though at least there were male background Mandalorians, while there weren’t even any female background characters in the original trilogy).

I guess I shouldn’t complain too much about the role of women in Star Wars because that was the seed to my writing career. Since Leia was the only girl, I had to make up my own character to play when we were riding our bikes around the neighborhood, pretending they were X-wings and TIE fighters, and that led to me making up stories in my head about her, to the point those stories no longer had anything to do with Star Wars, and eventually I realized that if I wrote down those stories, I’d have a book, which led to me realizing that I could write a book (though it took me a while to actually finish one).

I also enjoy the worldbuilding the TV series format allows. It’s hard to fit in much detail about ordinary life and the people of the universe in a two-hour movie, but the series format allows us to visit different worlds and meet more people, including ordinary people, so that we can see what their lives are like. It’s funny how much lore they’ve spun out of Boba Fett, who was more a costume than a character in the original trilogy. He didn’t do much and barely spoke. But out of that costume they got the entire complex Mandalorian culture, as well as the backstory of the clones.

I don’t know when I’ll get around to seeing the new movie. It’s cold and rainy today (the heat wave didn’t last long), so not a day for either walking downtown to the vintage theater or driving to the nearby town that has a regular movie theater, plus it’s been a busy week and I’m catching up on work. Maybe I’ll have time during the week next week.

Books, fantasy

Fantasy Beach Reads

We’ve been in a bit of a heat wave. For Texas, this would have been moderate summer weather but would have been excessive for May. For here, having high temperatures in the mid-90s in May is extreme. At least it gets cool at night. As soon as the sun goes down, the temperature drops a lot, and it stays pretty cool until mid-morning. I’ve had to turn my air conditioner on, but it doesn’t kick in until late afternoon. Supposedly, a front will come through tonight and it will be a lot cooler tomorrow.

But this early taste of summer has had me thinking about summer reading. I tend to read by mood and by season. Fantasy is my fall and winter reading. Those big, fat fantasy books about magical worlds are perfect for long nights and the kind of weather that has you snuggling under a blanket with a warm beverage. I don’t tend to think of fantasy for beach reads. Not that I spend a lot of time on beaches, as I am not really a fan of sun or sand. But you can still get the beach read vibe from sitting on the deck under the patio umbrella or under a tree in the back yard (if I can manage to get rid of the poison ivy growing in the best shady part of the yard). It seems harder to immerse myself in another world and keep track of all the factions and characters of an epic story when I’m immersed in my own world instead of shutting it out.

In the past, I’ve tended to switch over to romantic comedy/chick lit and science fiction for summer reading. But with the rise of romantasy and fantasy rom coms, it looks like I may be able to keep reading fantasy for my summer reading.

It seems I was decades ahead of the curve with the Enchanted, Inc. books. They were fantasy “beach reads” published when nothing like that really existed. Fantasy publishers were violently opposed to anything that remotely looked like romance. In fact, when my agent submitted Rebel Mechanics to fantasy publishers, they suggested I send it to romance publishers. Never mind that there wasn’t even a kiss between the romantic leads. Enchanted, Inc. got published as “chick lit.” Now there are books along the same lines and with even more romance getting published by the fantasy publishers who used to reject anything that hinted at romance.

A beach scene showing a copy of Enchanted, Inc. sitting on a beach next to a frozen daquiri. The text reads "A fantasy beach read."

That means that I can finally find the kinds of books I was looking for to read when I first came up with the idea for Enchanted, Inc. more as something I wanted to find to read than as something I wanted to write. I had to write it because it didn’t exist then.

I’ve got a book from the library along those lines and there’s one in the stack of books I picked up in that box of books I walked past a few months ago, so I’m ready for some deck time this holiday weekend.

Books, fantasy

Kindness Wins Stories

A few weeks ago, the instructor in a workshop I was watching mentioned a character in Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones as an example, and it had been so long since I read the book that I checked it out of the library to revisit it.

This is a book that’s hard to describe without telling the whole plot and giving away too much. A witch curses a young woman to turn her into an old woman, and she then realizes it just made her outside match her inside because she was old before her time, so she sets out to find the Wizard Howl, whose castle roams the country, to get help. Once there, she makes herself at home and takes over as the wizard’s housekeeper, gradually discovering her own abilities along the way while also learning the truth about the wizard. I’m not sure why, but this was published as young adult, although the main characters are functionally adults. The heroine may possibly be in her late teens, but she’s essentially running the family business while her younger sisters are of an age to get married. The male main character is in his 20s. Their problems are all adult problems.

I loved this book the first time I read it, years ago, and I still love it. The heroine is a great character who can be snarky and stubborn but who is good at heart. The fantasy elements are so much fun (there’s even a bit of reverse portal fantasy). I know there’s a much-loved movie based on it, but the clips I’ve seen are so different from my mental images that it bothers me, so I haven’t watched the movie.

I didn’t know that there were sequels until I went looking for this book in the library and found two more books, conveniently labeled by the library as a series. I would say they’re very loose sequels. They take place in the same “universe” and the main characters from the first book make appearances in the later books, but the main characters in each of the sequels are entirely new and their adventures just happen to make them cross paths with the characters from the first book.

The second book is Castle in the Air, in which a young man dreams of a life different from being a rug merchant — and then when he buys a magic carpet he starts finding that life coming true, as the rug brings him to a wondrous garden where a lonely princess waits. When the princess is captured by a djinn and taken to his cloud castle, our hero sets out to rescue her. This book is very different in tone and style from the first book, so if you’re reading them as a series it takes a little time to shift gears, but the main character is utterly delightful, and it’s satisfying seeing how everything is set up and pays off. This is very much a “kindness wins” story, which is heartwarming to read. Like the first book, this one is published as young adult, even though the main character is functioning as an adult. He runs his own business and is concerned with marriage.

The third book, House of Many Ways, is the one that actually does feel more like young adult. In it, a teenage girl gets sent to take care of a distant relative’s home while he’s away for medical treatment, but she also wants to use this as an opportunity to get out from under her controlling family so she can apply for a job in the king’s library. Things get complicated because the relative is a wizard, his house is magical, and his would-be apprentice shows up, so she has to share the house, and then the two of them have to help deal with a potential invasion of the kingdom. This book is a lot more whimsical than the other books, although they’re also up against some serious obstacles. I particularly like the concept of the magical house that changes depending on which path you take through it. I could use a few hidden rooms.

If you’re looking for some gentle fantasy based mostly on kindness, without it being too treacly, these are a good option, even for adults.

writing

Diving In

I took a dive into a new project yesterday, so I’ll be in first draft mode for the next month or so. That means I will have little brain for anything else. I’d actually already written the opening scene. I got an idea for how it should go a couple of months ago and wrote it to get it out of my head. Today I revisited it and revised it to fit the outline I eventually came up with, then moved on and wrote more of the scene.

That worked pretty well. Usually, starting a book is kind of scary. It feels like standing on the high dive, knowing you’re going to have to jump and plunge in. But when I wrote out that opening scene months ago, it didn’t feel like I was starting a book because I didn’t even really have a plot yet. I was just playing around. But then when I started working on it today, that didn’t feel like I was starting a book, either, because I was editing something I’d already written. It took all the scary out of it. It was more like easing in via the pool steps after sitting on the edge of the pool with my feet in the water than like jumping off the high dive.

There’s still a lot of unknown ahead of me, even though I have a detailed outline and synopsis. My synopsis is more than 4,000 words, which would be about 20 pages in manuscript format. I was worried I had too much story for a book. But then when I started breaking it out into scenes to outline the scenes, I worried that I didn’t have enough scenes. It’s likely that some of these scenes will be broken down into multiple scenes, and I may come up with ideas along the way that will be inserted. My outline isn’t so rigid that it doesn’t have room to adjust as I write. It’s more of a framework to make sure I have everything I need to cover the story and character arcs.

I’m not going to try to do a full writing schedule for the rest of this week with the kind of word count I usually expect. I’m still testing the waters and getting a feel for the characters. I also need to do some prep work around the house so I have less to worry about once I get into the book. I need to do some cooking to have meals ready to go and I want to do a good house cleaning so it’ll be easier to maintain while I’m focused on writing. Starting this week without considering it official writing time should give me some momentum to get on a good pace next week.

movies

Off to Oz

I guess I was in an Oz mood lately, since I watched Wicked: For Good a few weeks ago, then found Oz the Great and Powerful last weekend. Now I want to go back to the original books.

I’m in the generation that grew up with the 1939 movie being on TV around Easter every year. We didn’t get a color TV until I was seven, so you can imagine the shock the first time I watched it on a color TV when Dorothy arrived in Oz and everything turned Technicolor. I hadn’t realized that the whole movie wasn’t black-and-white until then. My main memory of watching the movie as a very small child was being afraid of the tornado. I don’t recall being afraid of the witch, but I’d hide during the tornado scene, probably because I’d experienced real tornadoes (though, fortunately, not enough to have been close to more damage than our backyard fence getting clipped while the house remained unharmed).

I started reading the books in elementary school and was surprised and delighted to find that in the books it wasn’t just a dream. Oz was a real place, Dorothy really went there, and she went back, then eventually moved there with her family permanently. This was my first real experience with portal fantasy — though it’s vague as to whether Oz exists in some other realm or if it’s a place on our world that’s hidden and that has its own rules. It does seem to require some magic to get in and out, though it’s also possible to get blown there by winds.

After reading the books, I was less enchanted by the movie, in part because they changed the timeline (the movie made it contemporary while the books were contemporary for the time they were written, in the early 1900s) and largely because of the “it was just a dream” ending, which turned the story into Fake Fantasy, which I hate.

Oddly, I didn’t like Wicked the first time I saw the musical on stage. I tend to dislike stories that make the villain into the real victim and the good guys into the real bad guys. In the Oz stories, the witch really did bad things that hurt people. I read the book and disliked it enough that I sold my copy to a used bookstore. When the musical came back through town, I almost didn’t go (I had season tickets to the musical touring shows series) but went and ended up loving it. I’m not sure what changed my perspective, though it’s possible the cast helped. I recall that Glinda pretty much stopped the show a few times from being so hilarious. I don’t still have that Playbill to see who it was, but I’ve looked up who was in the touring cast at that time, and there’s a good chance that Megan Hilty was playing Glinda then, which would explain it. I ended up buying the cast recording. I treat the musical as being in its own universe and disconnect it from the other versions of the story and then it becomes more about how those who are different get treated like villains and less of a “the villain is the real victim” story. I enjoyed both movies and plan to get them on Blu-Ray if I can find a place that still sells physical media.

As for Oz the Great and Powerful, this is a prequel/origin story that’s entirely different from Wicked’s take, and I’m not sure it entirely works. This one centers the wizard, showing how a carnival conman ended up becoming the Wizard of Oz and also how the Wicked Witch of the West became what she was. The witch part was less successful than the rest of the story, since it boils down to jealousy over a man (ugh).

The other thing that doesn’t really work is the way it doesn’t appear to take place in the 1939 movie universe — which would be difficult because Oz was a dream there, and it would be weird to give a backstory for events that were a dream, plus there’s no indication that the wizard’s adventures are a dream in this movie — and incorporates some elements from the books, but it also contains a lot of nods to the 1939 movie. It does the Kansas in sepia, Oz in color thing, and it has the same actors playing roles in both Kansas and Oz.

That’s the part that broke my brain. The dual roles in the 1939 movie were because of the “it was just a dream” narrative — the “you were there, and you and you.” The idea was that Dorothy put the people from her life into the dream. But if it’s not a dream, there’s no reason for the same people to be in different guises in both Kansas and Oz. The Oz characters represent Kansas characters the wizard let down, and he essentially gets a do-over once he gets to Oz, but they’re different people played by the same actors. With two of them, it’s just the voices with CGI characters, but then there’s the woman who loves him whom he rejects because he doesn’t want to be tied down (there’s a hint that she’ll end up being Dorothy’s mother) who is also Glinda, and he even comments on the resemblance, asking if she’s ever been to Kansas. It’s one of those things that’s a way of winking at the 1939 movie without doing anything that would get into a copyright/trademark issue with that movie (the concept of Oz is fair game because the books are public domain, but anything created specifically for the 1939 is still protected, so no ruby slippers because they were silver in the book and changed for the movie to take advantage of color film). It was something purely for viewers that doesn’t track within the story.

For a totally different take on the Oz story, there was a one-season TV series (now available on Peacock) called Emerald City, which is a modern, rather freaky, somewhat steampunky take on the story. Dorothy is a nurse in modern Kansas (played by Adria Arjona from Andor), Toto is a German shepherd police dog who gets sent to Oz with her because a cop is with her with the tornado hits, the scarecrow is a badly injured amnesiac soldier, and the wizard is trying to control all magic in the realm. It incorporates a lot of book elements, including some from later books, and it can be a bit on the disturbing side of things, but if you’re an Oz completist and like weird fiction, it’s worth a look.