Life

Homebody Woes

I learned this week that today’s cars with their fancy touchscreens and electronic everything aren’t compatible with the homebody lifestyle. I didn’t go anywhere last week because I was focused on writing and didn’t need anything from the grocery store, so it had been nearly two weeks since I’d last driven when I went to head to the grocery store on Wednesday. And that meant my battery was dead.

After roadside assistance jumped it, I drove around for a while to recharge. It’s bluebonnet season, so I looked at flowers, then went out to the lake and drove around it, then followed the advice of the roadside assistance guy and when a wrong turn took me right to an auto parts store, I stopped and asked them to check the battery. The battery registered as good, as did the other electrical system stuff, but the guy at the store was a Subaru fanatic/expert, and he noticed that the battery was the factory original. Batteries have a short life span around here because of the summer heat, and with the mileage on the car when I bought it, the former owner probably had driving habits about like mine. For peace of mind, I just bought a new battery. I figured it was good to have someone who was enthusiastic and knowledgeable about my kind of car while I was there.

But now I know that I need to get out more. I’ll confess to being a bit of (a lot of, to be honest) a homebody. It’s a major effort for me to leave the house, and the longer it’s been since I went out, the harder it is for me to force myself. If I don’t have a reason to go somewhere, I don’t go, especially if I have to drive.

I live in a pretty walkable neighborhood, so I like to walk for as many errands as I can. I would be happy living without a car, though that would be pretty inconvenient around here. Another reason I like my neighborhood is that everything I need is right nearby. I don’t have to get on freeways. Most of my driving is the two miles to the grocery store and back.

I don’t know if I’ve got full-blown agoraphobia, but I did have a great aunt who apparently got weird and never left the house at all, so I guess it runs in the family. Pre-pandemic, I made sure I had several activities to force me out of the house a couple of times a week so that it got easier to go out. Most of those activities ended with the pandemic.

I guess this is kind of like how having a dog forces you to go out on a walk every day. My car is going to force me to leave the house at least once a week and drive for more than five minutes at a stretch, and I probably will need to get on a freeway a couple of times a month. I’ll have to come up with a list of driving outings I can do. There are parks where I can go walking, and I can make more of an effort to meet up with friends. The afternoon spent driving this week was probably good for me, though it would have been more fun without the stress of worrying about the battery.

Oh, and with the unexpected bill, this would be a good time to tell someone about my books!

My Books, TV

Time-Traveling Historians

My latest TV obsession is the series of historical farming documentaries from the BBC. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was watching one set in the 1600s (Tales from the Green Valley). I’d already watched the Tudor Monastery Farm series. Then the YouTube algorithm started serving me more. Last week, I watched the Wartime Farm series about World War II. I’m currently watching Victorian Farm.

The basic format of these is that a group of historians and archaeologists spend a year living as though they’re farmers in a particular era, using technology of the time, to see how it all works and whether they could have survived. They go from planting a crop to harvesting the crop and everything in between, eating the food, wearing the clothes, and living the life, in general. They’ll bring in subject matter experts to learn about a particular task or craft of the time. The cast sometimes varies, but there are some regulars who pop up, and that means my brain starts creating narratives about all this.

It started when I watched the Wartime Farm series right after the one set in the 1620s. The historians were talking about how their experience couldn’t replicate exactly what people of the time experienced, since they knew when and how it would end, and that was uncertain for the people of the time. They were going through all this with high expectations, trying to increase food production since most of their imports had been cut off, and they didn’t know when or if they might be invaded. Although the scholars were spending one year, they kept adjusting conditions based on different years of the war to show how things changed, like the availability of some things. They were talking about having to go back to some of the older ways that had been more or less lost because they were having to make do, and since I’d just watched some of these same people living in the 1620s, I thought they had an unfair advantage over actual 1940s farmers because they’d done things like make medicinal preparations out of foraged herbs, had made their own cheese, had thatched a roof, had worked a field using horses instead of a tractor.

And that’s when it struck me: They’re time travelers! These people are bringing knowledge from the past and from the future. I would say it’s a fun story idea, but Connie Willis has already written the books about the time-traveling historians. I guess this is the next best thing to getting a movie or TV series made from those books. One thing I’m enjoying is that while there is a bit of a story line — will they have a successful harvest? — there’s not a lot of drama. There are no villains or antagonists. It’s just people trying to learn things and make things work. That makes for engaging but relaxing viewing.

I’m also getting really curious about the behind-the-scenes stuff, wondering whether they really are living like this or just when the cameras are on. They tend to do a couple of months in a single episode, so it’s just a day or two that gets shown. Are they wearing these clothes and living in these places all the time with the cameras only on them for a day or two every month, on camera all the time but it gets edited down, or just showing up when they’re doing something the camera will record? They did mention for the 1600s one that they wouldn’t actually be living in the farmhouse for health and safety reasons but would be living nearby, which implies they’re living on-site, even if they are living in trailers or something like that. They also mentioned during the Victorian one that they’re not actually sleeping in the cottage but rather elsewhere on the estate. I’ve read the books by one of the historians, and she mentioned trying the Tudor-era hygiene protocol when they were doing that series and that even the camera crew that wasn’t around all the time didn’t notice any body odor, which also implies that they’re living this way all the time. Do these people have families? Do they get weekend visits?

We had a small farm when I was a teenager, but we mostly just raised a few cows, so I didn’t get the full farm experience, and I don’t romanticize it at all, but these are still fun to watch. I started watching these as research for the Rydding Village books, when I was looking up info on how people were cooking and baking, and this was what the search results brought up. Then I connected them to some books I’d read for research when I realized it was the same historian. The shows are great for being able to visualize what she discussed in the books.

Just staying alive before all the modern conveniences was a lot of work, which was why I came up with the house spirit to help the local healer. I’m not sure how a single woman who needed to keep house would have any time left in the day to earn a living. Laundry would take about as long for a single as for a family, and most people wouldn’t have owned enough clothes to go longer between loads of laundry. That may be why so many people made extra money by taking in laundry. It would free a lot of time to hire someone else to do the wash, and adding a few items to the load of a single person or small family wouldn’t require a lot of extra effort, so it would be monetizing something they had to do anyway. A healer-type person who had to maintain a garden for herbs, prepare medicines, and see patients wouldn’t have much time to also cook, keep the house reasonably clean, and do laundry. And so we have Gladys in my books.

writing

The Potato Problem

I’m getting close to being halfway through with book 2 in the Rydding Village series, and I’m having to make some decisions about how to handle the worldbuilding. There’s a balance between realism and fantasy in any secondary-world fantasy — that is, fantasy that’s not set on our earth. I’ve come to think of this as the Potato Problem.

There’s something about a potato that makes it seem like it should fit in an old-fashioned world. Potatoes roasted in an open fire are so simple and basic and the kind of thing you might eat while on a fantasy quest. Except potatoes didn’t become common in Europe until the late 1500s because they’re originally from South America. Your medieval peasant wouldn’t have been roasting potatoes in the fire or having potatoes in a hearty stew, even if Medieval Times (a sort of dinner theater in which you eat a Ye Olde Meal while watching jousting) serves roasted potatoes.

But can your characters in a fantasy world based on medieval Europe eat potatoes? That’s a tricky question. The really pedantic people who know history (like me) are likely to get thrown out of the story by a mention of potatoes. But your world could be one in which potatoes grow in the continent where your characters live, since it’s not our earth. Or people from the continent where your characters live could have traveled to the place where the potatoes are earlier than they did in our world. The big question is whether this detail will add to your world or detract from it. There’s something cozy and homey about a potato that just seems to fit, but you also don’t want to sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

It’s an issue that has come up even for Tolkien, who was a medievalist who probably should have known about this, but the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings books eat potatoes. I actually think the hobbits don’t seem all that medieval. Their costuming in the films seems sort of 18th century, when potatoes would have been in England, and that costuming fits the descriptions in the books, which refer to things like waistcoats and buttons. In behavior, the hobbits strike me as Edwardian gentlemen. It’s only the other societies in that world that seem medieval. The hobbits did have to explain “taters” to the others, so maybe they hadn’t spread that far.

I’m going with a roughly 17th-18th century level of technology in my world (aside from gunpowder, which I don’t think they have), so potatoes would be a possibility, even for Europe in our world. I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to use them. This actually came up when I was thinking about how I would make a particular pastry mentioned in the book, and the dough that would be most suitable for it contains potato flour (or potato flakes). I’d probably not mention the ingredient in the book, but if I provided a recipe it would have potatoes, and would that be a problem?

There are similar issues relating to tomatoes, which come from the same place and came to Europe at about the same time. You might find tomatoes in Italian food starting around the 1600s. Tobacco and corn also came from the Americas.

Then there’s the issue of language. Can you use words based on proper nouns from our world in your fantasy world? Can you put your feet up on an ottoman (named for the empire) or eat a sandwich (named for the earl) when those people and places don’t exist in your world? Or do we assume that the whole book is being translated to modern English, and those words are the nearest approximation in our language to what they’re saying in the language of that world?

And this is probably getting way too nerdy. Most readers only notice if the world seems real and believable to them. Only a few weirdoes are going, “Ha! Potatoes!”

movies

The Little Mermaid Comes to Life

Last weekend I finally got around to watching the live-action The Little Mermaid remake. I hadn’t been particularly opposed to it. I just wasn’t really in the mood for that sort of thing, and it was nearly two and a half hours long, so it seemed daunting when I was in the mood for something light. I mostly didn’t see how it was necessary. I have to say that I found it delightful, but it reinforced the issues I have with the live-action remakes loaded with CGI.

The human cast was great. Any scene involving actors with human faces was lovely. The actress playing Ariel was wonderful, and she brought tears to my eyes several times because she conveyed that sense of longing so well. It was nice that Eric got more of a personality, a song, and even a backstory. I’ve seen some quibbles about the changes they made to fix some perceived plot holes in the original, but I thought they worked. But this is all story stuff that could have happened without changing the medium to live action, other than maybe you get more realism and emotion from human actors than from cartoons.

But the non-human parts didn’t come across so well. The animation to create all the sea creatures was gorgeous and created absolutely real-looking sea creatures. The problem came when these real-looking creatures started talking, dancing, and singing. It was weird. It seems you can either have cartoony creatures who have somewhat human facial features that convey human emotion or you can have realistic creatures who don’t convey human emotions because they don’t have human faces. I think it might have worked better if they’d just let the characters with human faces have the speaking parts and let the sea creatures be sea creatures.

That would have required a rewrite, but then I wouldn’t mind if they’d done more like Cinderella and just made a new version of the same story using some elements from the animated version. I wouldn’t necessarily want to get rid of “Under the Sea” or “Kiss the Girl,” but maybe let Ariel have merpeople friends to talk to who could sing. I don’t know. It’s just weird seeing a realistic-looking crab singing.

I’ve found most of the Disney animated sequels (the direct to video ones they did in the 90s) to be blah, but this movie is just about begging for a sequel, with the characters setting off on an adventure and with a mystery to Eric’s backstory.

And I still want a good live-action version of Sleeping Beauty. Maybe not a musical because the songs weren’t pivotal in that one, and go full-on fantasy movie, given that we get a battle between a prince and a dragon. I’m not sure how to give Aurora a bigger role (I believe I read somewhere that she had 27 lines in the whole movie), considering that her being in a coma is a big part of the story. Maybe beef up what she does earlier in the movie, or else borrow from the ballet, in which the prince dreams of her while she’s asleep. In the ballet, they go with the 100 years asleep thing that they skipped with this one, so the prince had never met her, and he goes to try to wake her because of a dream he had about her (in the ballet, it’s an excuse to get in a big romantic pas de deux before the finale), but Philip could dream about her while Malificent has him locked up.

Oh, and I need Emma Thompson to play one of the fairies. Thanks. Maybe we could get Judi Dench while we’re at it.

Life

Tea-Powered

It’s possible that I might be a tea-powered life form. I’ve seen a meme about coffee saying something to the effect of turning magic beans into stories, but with me it’s magic leaves.

This realization came courtesy of a book I read recently, The Busy Brain Cure. A neurologist found that there seems to be a link between lack of focus, anxiety, and insomnia, and she calls this “busy brain.” It’s the result of chronic or recurring stress. Since lack of focus, anxiety, and insomnia are pretty much my life, I found it interesting. The book offers an eight-week protocol for addressing it, and since there wasn’t anything in it that looked potentially harmful, I thought it might be worth giving it a shot.

The first couple of things were common insomnia recommendations. There was setting a consistent bedtime and wake time. I generally do this anyway, other than weekends, when I let myself sleep a little later (and then I usually wake at the same time, but then let myself go back to sleep). It’s not a major lifestyle change to set an alarm on weekends, especially since I use a light-up alarm, so I don’t have sound that startles me awake, just a light that comes on gradually so I feel like I’m waking up naturally.

The next thing was a digital detox, with no screens or devices thirty minutes to an hour before bedtime. Again, that’s something I usually do anyway, unless the book I’m currently reading is an e-book (she includes e-readers and tablets as screen and devices). I seldom watch TV that late, and while I’m tempted by e-mail and social media while I’m at my computer, once I leave my office I don’t think about checking it, and I ignore my phone most of the time. So, no major lifestyle change other than trying to start my weekend movies early enough for them to be over an hour before bedtime.

Then we got to the diet week. It’s not a huge shift, since the focus is mostly on adding healthy fats and low-glycemic index foods rather than on cutting anything out, and that’s mostly the way I eat, anyway.

But the real issue there was with caffeine. She recommends not having caffeine first thing in the morning because that’s when cortisol levels are naturally higher. You get more benefit from the caffeine by waiting to have caffeine a few hours after you wake up. The best time to have caffeine is between about 9:30 and 11 a.m., and none after 1 p.m. Also, no caffeine within an hour of having sugar or things made with white flour. There was something sciencey that I didn’t take notes on about the interaction of sugar and caffeine that does something about inflammation.

This is a major lifestyle change, as I drink tea with breakfast, which is a double whammy, as it’s first thing in the morning and usually involves sugar and flour (I usually eat whole wheat toast, but with cinnamon sugar or some kind of jam or fruit butter). Then there’s some kind of baked good with tea in the afternoon. But I thought I’d give it a shot. I know that a lot of what I like about tea is the warm liquid, so I made herbal tea with breakfast. I did find that it didn’t make a huge difference in alertness, but the taste of herbal tea (I tried a couple of different kinds) didn’t go well with my breakfast food. It was later in the day when I had a hard time focusing, and I found that my sleep was actually worse when I was limiting tea to late morning.

I am not addicted to tea. We are just in a very committed relationship.

By the third day, I dug some decaf teabags out of the cabinet because I just couldn’t seem to write without actual tea. I got a lot more focused after drinking it, and I slept better that night. I made decaf tea for breakfast yesterday and I was doing much better. Then I pretty much gave up on trying to limit tea in any way and went back to my usual routine, having tea in the afternoon with some bread I’d baked. Last night, I had the best sleep I’ve had all week and I topped my word count goal in writing yesterday.

I don’t think I’m the kind of person the doctor was targeting with this. I make a whole pot (about 4 cups) using two teaspoons of tea leaves, which is supposed to make two cups, and brewed only a short time, so my tea isn’t very strong. I don’t think two cups of tea make all that much difference, caffeine-wise. The people she was talking about in the book were the sort who have multiple cups of coffee, energy drinks, or colas throughout the day, the kind of people who use caffeine to get going during the day but then are so wired that they need alcohol to unwind at night.

It didn’t even seem to be the caffeine. It was the tea, which had the same effect on me even when it was decaf (though the decaf doesn’t taste as good). Food definitely tastes better with tea — especially baked goods. I figure the author of the book isn’t going to reach through the Internet to scold me for breaking the rules, and I already returned the book to the library, so she can’t reach through the book to get me. If something that’s supposed to make you focus and sleep better makes you focus and sleep worse, then it’s not a good idea. Maybe I should have given it more than a few days, but tea is one of my few indulgences and seems to be essential to my work, so I’m keeping it.

writing

Group Projects

One good bit of writing advice I’ve heard is to pay attention to your own likes and dislikes. What are the story elements that catch your eye if you see them in a movie description or book blurb? Is there something that makes you think, “Ooh, yummy!” when you come across it? Pay attention to that feeling when you get it and try to figure out what it is that makes you feel that way, then try to determine why it gives you that feeling.

These are the elements you should use in your own writing. For one thing, that will make you more interested and invested in your own work. It’s more fun to write your own catnip. But it will also likely resonate more with others, since there are few things that are so specific that you’re the only person who likes them. That’s why you figure out the why, since nailing the reason you like a thing can allow you to use the reason even if you don’t use the specific thing.

This week I noticed a new one for me that I hadn’t realized before. I was watching a British documentary series in which a group of historians and archaeologists were spending a year on a 17th century English farm, trying to go through a year doing the things people would have done then, using the technology and techniques they would have used. They were taking things that they’d found in their studies and putting them to the test. The same people (mostly, the members of the group vary from series to series) have done similar series set in other time periods. There’s one in which they join that project in France where they’re building a medieval castle using period technology, one in which they live on a Tudor-era farm, a Victorian farm, an Edwardian farm, etc.

While I’m mostly interested in the history of it, I found myself getting caught up in the teamwork aspect. These people are having to do some really difficult things, often figuring them out as they go, but they all seem to be getting along, encouraging each other, and helping each other. I was fascinated by the dynamic, and seeing them working together was giving me warm fuzzy feelings. I found myself really hoping that this wasn’t just for the cameras, that they were becoming friends from working together. I’ve learned that when something really catches my interest like I should think about it, and I’m having to add “teamwork” to my list of things I like.

Which is weird because I dreaded group projects in school. But still, I seem to really enjoy team/group stories in which a group works together toward a common goal and becomes friends along the way. I think that’s probably because this is the fantasy of a group project, where everyone’s equally invested in the process and the outcome and really does work together and come to like each other, unlike almost any group project I’ve ever been a part of. In fiction, you can make it work that way (or when you only see the parts that are edited into the finished program — they’re probably not going to show these archaeologists cursing at each other because the way one of them thought something should have worked based on things found in digs turned out to be wrong).

My favorite part of The Lord of the Rings is The Fellowship of the Ring — the part before the party splits up, when they’re all working together. In fact, in just about any group/questing party/team fantasy series, I’ll lose interest when the party splits up. I loved the prison arc in season one of Andor because I liked that the prisoners all worked together on an escape plan. It wasn’t like your usual story in which the falsely accused hero is thrown into prison and has to survive against the vicious prisoners. These guys all worked together well and looked after each other. I guess this is connected to the “found family” trope in which a group of random people thrown together come to function like a family.

I haven’t written much of this in my books, mostly because it’s really hard to write a good team/group/ensemble cast in a novel. It’s like juggling, and I’ve never gotten the hang of juggling. I can’t toss and catch two balls at once, let alone keep a bunch of plates in the air and moving without dropping one. It’s a lot easier to focus on one or two characters than to keep a team moving.

This is also connected to that “community” thing I noticed when I was watching Christmas movies, where I was more interested in the characters finding and building communities than I was in romantic plot lines. I think I’m doing that with the Rydding Village books. I may focus on one character at a time, but I’m gradually building a community that will get bigger as I address more of the characters, and they’re all going to have to work together eventually.

I just started writing book 2 yesterday, so I can be conscious of using this element as I write it.

writing, movies

Main Character or Protagonist

One of my movies last weekend was 10 Things I Hate About You, the modern (well, 1999) teen retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. I saw it at the theater when it first came out, but I don’t think I’ve seen it since then. In part, it served as a time capsule for things that were happening around that time. For instance, the fashion. I remember those platform flip-flops one character wore because that kind of shoe caused a minor drama in my office. Some of the women were wearing those for work (they were expensive, designer platform flip-flops), and our boss sent out a memo banning them from the office, saying they weren’t appropriate office attire and the sound they made when people walked up and down the halls in them was distracting. Except the boss was Australian, so he used the word “thongs” instead of “flip-flops,” and thong underwear was a big thing at that time, so a lot of people in the office thought he was banning a certain kind of underwear, and it was none of his business what underwear anyone wore. I thought they could have figured it out from context because if your underwear makes “slap, slap” noises as you walk down the hall, you’ve got problems, and the memo could have served as an intelligence test. I hadn’t thought about that in years, but seeing the way people dressed in the movie took me right back to the job I had at that time.

Anyway, in case you aren’t familiar with the movie … The new kid in school falls for a pretty, popular girl, but she’s not allowed to date until her older sister, a notorious shrew, does, so he and his friend cook up a scheme to con a rich guy who’s also into the popular girl into paying the school bad boy to woo the shrew.

It’s a fun teen rom-com that’s very cleverly written. You don’t have to know Shakespeare to follow the story, but there are a ton of Easter eggs related to Shakespeare. The characters are pretty well-rounded, and the cast is a good collection of people who went on to bigger things as they grew up. It’s laugh-out-loud funny at times but also made me cry a bit.

But the thing that struck me on this viewing was a structural thing and the way the character roles were handled. Normally, we use the terms “main character,” “protagonist,” and “hero/heroine” interchangeably because they’re usually the same characters, though there are differences in what each of these terms means. A main character is the character who has the most focus, gets the most screen/page/stage time, and is generally the one we sympathize with. A protagonist is the character with the goal, and their pursuit of this goal is what drives the plot. The term “hero” depends on the context. It can mean the good guy, as opposed to the villain. Or it can be the one who’s on the hero’s journey, the one who is growing and changing and undergoes a transformation. In a romance, the hero and heroine are the main romantic couple (and are often both protagonists).

But this movie is the rare story in which these aren’t the same person. The main character is Kat, our “shrew,” played by Julia Stiles. She gets most of the screen time and is the person most of the other characters are focusing on. In hero’s journey terms, she’s the hero because she’s the one who has the transformation arc and goes on a journey. Her life is upended when Patrick starts pursuing her and she has to learn to let herself be vulnerable instead of pushing everyone away. Her sister grows a bit and has a realization and their father also learns something, but none of the others really change or grow.

But Kat isn’t the protagonist. She’s acted upon by the story, but she doesn’t drive the story. The protagonist is Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). He’s the one with the goal — date Bianca — who drives the story with each of his schemes to be able to reach his goal, and it’s a really good example of the structure with the intermediate goal that doesn’t work, requiring a new approach, with each one escalating. His first tactic when he learns Bianca is looking for a French tutor is to cram his way through the French textbook and quickly learn enough to tutor her and get close to her so he can ask her out to a French restaurant so they can practice, but then he learns that she’s not allowed to date unless her sister does (since their father knows Kat’s unlikely to date). His next plan is to find someone to ask Kat out, but none of the guys are brave enough. The next plan is to get Patrick, who seems unafraid of anything, to try, but he doesn’t even dignify that with a response. Then the friend comes up with the idea of conning the rich jerk into paying Patrick. Then they have to help Patrick deal with Kat when she’s unimpressed. And so forth.

As far as I can tell, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was the big name among the younger cast at that time. He was something of a tween/teen heartthrob on the Third Rock from the Sun TV series, while Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles were relative unknowns (he’d been on a short-lived TV series but had mostly worked in Australia and she’d had bit parts on TV while mostly working on the stage), so he may have been meant as the main character, but he’s mostly a catalyst character. His actions change other people, but he doesn’t really change. His love interest, Bianca, was played by Larisa Oleynik, who at the time was on a popular TV series targeted at tween viewers, but they aren’t the main couple. The main romance is between Kat and Patrick. The Cameron and Bianca relationship is resolved at the midpoint. Their only conflict from that point is helping get Kat and Patrick to go to the prom together so Bianca can go to the prom with Cameron. The romantic conflict is between Kat and Patrick, with her main issue being that she’s afraid to trust and that making the fact that he was hired to ask her out a ticking time bomb (even though he’s come to actually like her and he’s mostly just scamming the jerk for the money).

It all works, though, and I applaud the filmmakers and the actors involved for going with what the story needed. From what I’ve heard about Gordon-Levitt, he’s a nice guy and must not have had a major ego attack about wanting more screentime or focus in spite of being the biggest star. It would have been a less interesting story if it had focused on his character instead of the hot mess that Kat was, and if they’d made him flawed enough that he needed to grow, then his scheming would have looked creepy. It only worked because we could tell that he was a good guy and we wanted Bianca to choose him over the jerk.

Another interesting thing about this odd bit of structure is that I don’t think Kat would be a viewpoint character if you wrote a novel based on this movie. I think there was one scene in which we saw her alone. Otherwise, she’s always with someone else or being watched by someone else, even if she might think she’s alone. It seems like you’d have to write it with her being perceived by other people rather than ever getting into her head — probably because she would be entirely different from the inside than she seems from the outside and the point of the story is that it takes time for that to come out and it takes Patrick, who’s also got a reputation and is different than people think, to see that.

Anyway, it’s a movie that holds up really well, aside from the belly shirts and platform flip-flops, and a lot of fun.

Books

After the Forest

I love fairytale retellings, novels that take familiar tales and flesh them out and give them context and twists. When you read the original tales (or as original as they were when collected and put in books), the stories are actually pretty thin, the characters are mostly archetypes, and there’s little context. Books that take the basics of these stories and turn them into novels or books that tell us what happened after the happily ever after are high on my list of favorite things. I wrote my own with Spindled, and I’ve written a draft of one involving Cinderella that I haven’t revised and published because I’m still not happy with it and am not yet sure how to fix it. I really love it when the book twists up multiple stories or implies that all the tales take place in the same universe.

I recently found another one of these, After the Forest by Kell Woods. This is a retelling/sequel of the Hansel and Gretel story, with elements of the Snow White and Rose Red story, as well as bits from the other, more familiar, Snow White story and a few others that are pretty deep cuts from the Grimm collection. It’s a sequel in that it takes place after the events of the Hansel and Gretel story, when they’re adults, but it’s also a retelling because it puts that story into a new context, adds elements, and has some of the events happen in a different way.

In the aftermath of the Thirty Years War in a village in the Black Forest, Greta earns a living for herself and her somewhat lazy, gambling-addicted brother by baking gingerbread using the recipe in the book she swiped from the witch’s cottage. But then she learns that her brother is so deeply in debt that they may lose their home, an old friend has finally returned from the war, some wandering mercenaries have come to town, there’s a mysterious stranger living in the woods, the baron has a beautiful new wife, and there have been bodies found in the woods that people think were killed by a bear. All of these things mean Greta’s life is about to change as she learns more about her heritage and the events that happened when she was a child.

I really liked this book. It hit a lot of my buttons. I’ve been reading history of the Thirty Years War in the past few years, so I’m intrigued about that. I’ve visited the Black Forest and lived not too far from where the book takes place. Putting the story into that particular place and time gives it a lot more weight than with the generic “once upon a time.” A lot of the theme is about a woman coming to realize what her power really is, which is a storyline that I enjoy. And there’s a subtle romance that gradually grows and builds. Plus all those fairy tales. It makes me want to re-read the Grimm collection to see which other stories are in there. I think I’ve spotted elements from a few, but I don’t know if my memory is playing tricks on me. I also like that most of these are less commonly retold tales. Snow White does come up a lot, but the bits used here are mostly the ones that didn’t make it into the Disney movie.

I’d definitely recommend this one if you like fairytale retellings but want to get beyond the Disneyfied stuff.

Books, movies

Good Endings

Last weekend, I rewatched the movie Stardust for about the zillionth time. That’s one of my all-time favorites, a “comfort” watch that never fails to make me feel good. There’s something about that movie that makes me sigh with satisfaction when it ends.

And that got me started thinking, what makes for a satisfying ending? What is it about this story (I have a similar reaction to the book, though the ending is a bit different) that gives me that happy sigh?

In this case, I think one thing is that it feels like everything is neatly tied up. The villains are taken down in satisfying ways, and even the irritants (not really villains, not really antagonists in the sense of being obstacles to the hero, just people who bother him) get taken down a peg. The woman who rejected him and used him early in the story gets to see what she gave up, and the one she rejected him for may not be as into her as she thought. A couple that was separated gets reunited. We even get the narrator telling us the long-term outcome. All of that comes together to give you that “yes, all is right with the world” feeling. I know a lot of people sneer at stories in which all the ends are neatly tied up, but there’s also something nice about that if it’s done well.

One thing that I think helps is if the “neatly tied up” doesn’t necessarily work the way you expected it to — it’s a way you like, but not what you thought would happen. I don’t know for sure if that’s the case with Stardust because it’s so familiar by now that I don’t even remember what I thought would happen. But I do know I love it when I’m expecting something to happen and what does happen is even better than I expected, or it happens, but in a better way, maybe with a fun twist. Of course, I can’t think of any good examples now, and I suppose it would be a major spoiler to give an example. That’s the challenge in talking about endings.

Tying everything up doesn’t necessarily make for a good ending, though. As much as I love The Lord of the Rings, I’m not crazy about the ending in either book or movie. It goes on and on after what should have been the climactic moment. The movie did help by tightening and cutting a lot. I know that all the stuff going on in the Shire when they got back was thematic, and I suppose it showed how much the Hobbits had changed in the way they handled it, but it still felt like “but I thought it was all over, and now there’s more?” I also have very mixed feelings about the very ending and the fate of Frodo and the elves. Again, I know it’s thematic, but I don’t really like the idea. There’s something about the way that saga is resolved that leaves me feeling not entirely satisfied, like there’s both too much and not enough. There’s practically material for an entire sequel in what’s supposed to be the resolution.

Another kind of good ending is the one that makes you want to read/watch the thing again, right away. I loved the end of the book To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis so much that as soon as I finished reading it, I flipped to the beginning and immediately re-read it. I’m not sure I’d say there were twists, but it was one of those things where you learn some of what really happened and what was really going on behind the scenes, so the end was a big “aha!” moment, and it was fun to re-read with that knowledge.

I’ve written before about what I termed the “Lucas ending” that showed up in a lot of the Star Wars films and one of the Indiana Jones movies — the cathartic victory, reunion with hugs, celebration. That can work really well as an ending pattern.

I find that I like it when the villain has a lot to do with his own destruction rather than the hero actually defeating him. There’s a lot of talk about how you could remove Indiana Jones from Raiders of the Lost Ark and the outcome wouldn’t change much, but I think a lot of it is about the fact that he’s trying, and then I like that the bad guys defeat themselves because they don’t understand or respect what they’re really dealing with, and Indy prevails because he does and he knows what to do, and then his presence means the Ark doesn’t stay in the bad guys’ hands.

On the opposite side of the coin from the “everything tied up neatly” ending is the “leave them wanting more” ending in a series, where it’s just satisfying enough to make you happy but there are enough loose threads to make you eager for the next book/movie. You want to know what will happen next, how the characters will function with a new status quo. I’m not a huge fan of cliffhangers, though. I want there to be some kind of conclusion to each installment. I like the way that the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Deep Space Nine tended to do season finales. The end of the season would wrap up the latest arc in a satisfying way, and then there’d be one thing coming up at the very end that hinted at what the next problem would be. The good guys would get their celebration after defeating the enemy, and then in a kind of coda, we’d see a new villain or problem emerging. You wanted to know what would happen next, but it wasn’t leaving anyone in immediate peril. It was more of a teaser for the next arc following the conclusion of the last one, so things were wrapped up but you wanted to know what happens next.

Another factor in a satisfying ending is the feeling that the main characters are in a better place than they were at the beginning, both physically and mentally. I like seeing that they’ve grown and learned something. That may be why “full circle” endings work so well, where they may return to something that reflects or echoes the beginning, and that makes it clear what’s changed.

I have to admit that I struggle with endings. That’s usually what I end up revising first because my first attempt at an ending is never good. I’m so eager to be done with the book by that point that my first draft ending is usually along the lines of “and then they beat the bad guys, the end.” Once I’ve recovered from writing the draft, I go back and write something a little more detailed. And then I rewrite it again after revising the whole book.

What kinds of endings do you like best? What’s your favorite book or movie ending?

 

Books

More From the TBR Shelf

One of the books that languished on my To Be Read bookcase, in advance copy form, until after the third book came out was A Plague of Giants by Kevin Hearne. I think when I started reading it, back when it was still ahead of publication, I was afraid it was more intense than I was up for at that time. So it went on the shelf until I decided I really needed to read it a few weeks ago. I suppose it is intense in places, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It’s definitely not cozy, but it’s not grimdark, either.

This book has a really interesting narrative structure. There’s a framing story about the aftermath of a barely averted invasion of a city by a strange race of giant-like creatures. The city is now full of refugees from places where the invasion wasn’t averted. A bard from a nearby land shows up, saying he has news that may be able to explain something about the invasion and he has reports from other lands. Our first-person narrator is a scholar who gets assigned to work with the bard to help him and record his stories (and also figure out if he’s a spy or enemy agent). Each night, the bard regales the crowd with stories of what happened in the other lands, and he has magic that allows him to “become” the people whose stories he’s telling, looking and sounding like them. Most of the book is these other people’s first-hand accounts. To keep the audience eager to come back each night, he tends to stop each person’s story on a cliffhanger and move on to a different person’s story. We get bits and pieces of a greater story that eventually comes together. In between these stories, our narrator tries to figure out what’s going on with the bard while also dealing with the impact of living in the aftermath of the attempted invasion.

I love it when a story is told a bit out of order, limited to the perceptions of just one person at a time when those people don’t have the big picture, and it’s up to me to put the pieces together and find the patterns, so I found this to be really engaging reading. Writing something like that is on my literary bucket list, but I don’t yet have the right story to tell that way. The magic in this world is also interesting. Each of the lands has its own “kenning” or form of magic that allows some people to manipulate a particular part of nature. To get this power, a person has to go through a particular ordeal that will either kill them or give them power, and there’s no way of knowing which one it will be. But then using the power drains the person’s life force. In small amounts, it’s barely noticeable, but if they have to go all-out, they may age decades. That means that there are real stakes in the use of magic.

Now that I’ve finally read the first book, I’m going to have to read the rest of the series, as we don’t yet know everything about what’s going on with these giants, and the threat isn’t over yet.