My Books

Introducing a New Series

Those of you who subscribe to my newsletter have already seen this news, but I’m about to launch a new book that I hope will be the start of a totally new series.

It’s something I’m calling cottagecore cozy romantic fantasy, and it’s a story I wrote largely to amuse myself, as it was the sort of thing I wanted to read, and like Enchanted, Inc. was a mashup of chick lit and fantasy, this book is a mash-up of women’s fiction and fantasy.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been less interested in the old-school chick lit books of the sort I was reading when I first came up with the idea for Enchanted, Inc. Instead, I find myself reading the sort of women’s fiction books in which a woman’s life has fallen apart — she’s lost her job and/or her relationship — and she ends up in some village, where she works in or runs a coffee shop/bakery/candy shop/bookstore. Of course, I want to add magic. But I didn’t want to do it in a more straightforward way, just adding magic to these contemporary books. I wanted to be in a fantasy world. I find that I’m not too interested in the real world these days. I want to escape to a magical world in a simpler time, a place where I don’t have to deal with real-world problems and current events.

Fortunately, this time around I don’t feel like I’m essentially inventing a new subgenre. “Cozy fantasy” has become a huge trend, with books set in traditional fantasy worlds but without the traditional fantasy stakes. Thers are books about the kinds of characters you’d find in a fantasy world, but instead of saving the world from a great evil, they’re opening coffee shops, working in bookstores, or running inns. The stakes are more personal than global. My story idea fits right in with this. I’m actually on-trend, for once!

And so, I present Tea and Empathy, which will be available next week (and is ready for pre-order from a lot of the online booksellers). This is the story of a healer with a magical empathic talent who’s on the run after she lost a patient and was accused of murder. She stumbles into a hidden village, where she takes refuge in a cottage that turned out to once belong to a magical healer. She uses her knowledge of herbs and her gift for reading what people want to open a tea shop. Everything’s going well until she finds a wounded man unconscious in her garden. Although she doesn’t trust herself as a healer, she has no choice but to help him. She doesn’t know who he is or how he got there — but neither does he. He doesn’t remember his past and she’s running from hers.

I threw in a lot of tropes I happen to love in a book. I guess you could say this one is both genre Fantasy and personal fantasy. For one thing, there’s the perfect little village. There’s a house that does the housework for itself (I want one of those). Why not have the perfect guy just land in your garden? I’ve always been fascinated by amnesia stories and the idea of figuring out what you’d be if you didn’t know who you were. All of that is in this book.

There is a little peril, but the stakes aren’t really life-or-death. If you’re looking for a page turner with lots of excitement, this isn’t that book, but if you just want to spend time in a fantasy world, soak up the vibes, and have some feelings without being too stressed about it, this may be what you want.

I’m planning for this to be a series, as there are a lot of people in the village who could have their stories told. There’s a mystery behind the village itself, and that will gradually unfold. But more books will depend on sales. My threshold for that is lower than it would be for a traditional publisher, but I can’t afford to spend the time it takes to write a book and only make what amounts to minimum wage. So, if you like this book and want more, please tell people about it, write reviews, post on Goodreads or social media, etc. Every little bit helps. Just ten more readers finding me can make a big difference.

Books, movies

Not Like the Book

I didn’t have a good movie theme last weekend, aside from “fantasy movies based on books.” But I guess that is a good common thread.

First, I decided to rewatch The Black Cauldron. I remembered being very disappointed in it when I saw it soon after it was released, but I’d read all the books in that series not long before I saw the movie, so there was a chance that a lot of my disappointment was of the “that’s not how it happened in the book” variety.

Nope. I don’t remember much about the books at all now, and I still didn’t like this movie. The main problem seems to have been that they had no idea what kind of movie they were making. Yes, the books were aimed at children and included humor and some comic relief sidekick characters, but they were still fairly dark fantasy. This movie tried to be a typical Disney animated movie for kids, complete with wacky sidekick characters suitable for toys while also being about a villain raising an army of the dead to take over the world. The tonal shifts were jarring. It looked like a fun cartoon movie for kids, using the same kind of character design they’d used in other films aimed at kids (actually, they seemed to have done a lot of copying and pasting from The Sword in the Stone), but it wasn’t that kind of story.

Plus, they made the main character too stupid to live and the leading lady a twit with a weird baby voice. I don’t own the whole series of books, but I checked the first one out of the library to get the right story back into my head. The main character does have some dumb ideas at the beginning, but the story isn’t kicked off by him doing something really dumb.

This one’s high on my list for candidates for a live-action remake — but only if what they do is make a series of movies actually based on the books, not remake the animated film. They have the effects technology to tackle this story now, and since the books are relatively short, they should fit nicely into a film running time without mangling the story too badly.

Then I watched Peter Pan and Wendy, which I suppose counts as one of the live-action remakes, except it’s more like Cinderella than like all the others, in that it’s a new telling based on the same source material rather than an actual remake of the animated film. There are a few nods to the animated film, like incorporating the tune for the “You Can Fly” song into the score and doing some of the same moves with the crocodile, but otherwise it goes in some very different directions while still hitting all the major plot beats of the standard Peter Pan story.

This one is more Wendy’s story. She’s struggling with growing up (though her issue is going off to boarding school rather than having to get her own room), so going to Neverland seems like the perfect way to escape her problems, until she sees what happens when someone doesn’t ever grow up. In this story they manage to fix a lot of the things from the animated movie that made me cringe. The main thing is the treatment of the female characters. They don’t all hate each other because they’re jealous over Peter. The girls become friends and work together. The racism is also gone, with the Native Americans treated with respect (Tiger Lily is awesome). They did some odd things with Peter and Hook’s backstory that are very different from the book but that I think work. Jude Law plays Hook, but I don’t think his portrayal falls into the “hot Hook” subgenre that’s come up in books, TV, and movies recently. He’s pretty much unrecognizable.

I’ve seen some pretty bad reviews, but I found it delightful. It’s a fun little adventure movie with a dash of magic, and the cast is excellent. It might even make it onto a list of “comfort food” movies, the kind of thing you watch when you just want something fun and pretty.

Life

Fake Fall

Fall is my favorite time of year. I love so much about it, mostly to do with cooler weather — blankets, hot drinks, sweaters, being able to go outdoors without bursting into flames. But we don’t really get fall here. We get a day or two of fall-like weather. I’ve joked that it’s like the Ray Bradbury short story “All Summer in a Day” in which the sun only comes out once every seven years. We may get one day that really feels like fall, so we have to cram all the fall stuff into one day.

This year, that day was last Saturday. We had the crisp, cool morning and pleasantly just barely warm afternoon (alas, no colorful leaves yet, but that won’t happen until late November). I tried to take full advantage of it. My neighborhood association had a pollinator garden tour that morning, so I had something fun to do outdoors, and we had some monarch butterfly sightings (they migrate through here in early October). Then I baked pumpkin muffins in the afternoon and made chili for dinner and spent as much time as possible outdoors.

It was already warmer by Sunday, so we’re back to summer weather. I tried going to the park for lunch on Monday, but I got too hot in the direct sun and had to come back inside. It’s a lot more pleasant than it was this summer in that it’s not actually dangerous to be outside, but it’s still a bit warm for me.

We might get another fall day on Saturday, just in time for the partial eclipse, so I’ll be outdoors again. I’ll have to think of something to bake, and I need to get some ingredients for making soup. It might not even get too hot again, but that’s what they said the last time.

One thing that gets awkward at this time of year is wardrobe. My sweatshirts and sweaters are still put away for the summer, since it’s still tank top and shorts weather, but there are some mornings when I need a sweater. My uniform at this time of year is yoga pants, a tank top, and a hoodie for the morning when I’m eating breakfast on the patio, and then when I come inside to work I usually end up shedding the sweater and switching the yoga pants to shorts. In the evening, I may put the layers back on again to sit outside (mostly to attempt to block the mosquitoes).

On cool (ish) nights, I like doing what I call “fake bonfire night.” Where I live, I can’t have a firepit, so I can’t have a real fire, but I’ve figured out that the mosquito coils you burn to maybe discourage the mosquitoes smell a lot like a campfire. I light one of those, and then I have a wooden wick candle that crackles like a fire. I make s’mores in the air fryer oven — tear a marshmallow in half, stick each half to a graham cracker square, air fry for a few minutes until the marshmallow is toasted, then stick a piece of chocolate between the two crackers with marshmallows — and sit outside, smelling the scent of campfire and looking at the crackling candle flame. It’s not quite a real firepit experience of roasting marshmallows, but it gives me some of the ambience and sensations.

But for now, I’m wearing shorts and drinking cool drinks and waiting for the next cold front to cram in a little more fall.

movies

Making Connections

My unintentional movie theme last weekend turned out to be connections, as both movies I chose were about making connections in unexpected places.

First up, Pixar’s latest, Elemental, which was absolutely lovely and moving, in typical Pixar fashion. It’s set in a world in which the elements — earth, air, fire, water — are personified. A Fire family that resettled in Elemental City after a disaster in their homeland opens a shop that they plan to hand over to their daughter. She thinks that’s what she wants, but she’s never quite ready to take it over, since she has issues with customers. But then she has to team up with a Water city inspector in order to save her father’s business. Fire and Water aren’t supposed to be able to mix, but they form a powerful connection that makes her reconsider a lot of things. It’s essentially a rom-com fantasy Romeo and Juliet story (but Pixar, so not a tragedy).

There’s a documentary feature about this, Good Chemistry, that explains a lot of the background of the story. The writer/director is the son of immigrants who opened a store they planned to pass on to him, but he wanted to be an animator, much to their dismay. A lot of that makes it into the story. It’s essentially a story about the experience of being the child of immigrants. But it’s also about assumptions we make about people, including those close to us, and having to be true to ourselves. I’m not a daughter of immigrants (I’m something like fourth generation, and all we really retain is the name), but I related to a lot of things in this movie. My parents are very practical people, and the only things I was ever really interested in involved the arts, the sorts of fields where there aren’t clear entry-level jobs and career paths, so there was a lot of clashing over what I wanted to do vs. “get a degree you can get a job in” (and I ended up not getting a job with the degree that I was supposed to be able to get a job in and instead working in one of those fields without a clear career path). So, yeah, this one hit.

Then there was Flora and Son on Apple. It’s from the same filmmaker who did Once, and it’s another slice-of-life Dublin music story. Flora is a struggling single mom with a rebellious teen son. In an attempt to connect with him and give him a positive outlet, she gives him a guitar, but when he rejects it, she signs up for online guitar lessons for herself from a guy in Los Angeles. What she learns about music and songs from him helps her connect with her son, who’s into rap and electronic music, and helps her rediscover herself, something she’d lost. The promos make it look like a romance, and while there is a romantic element, it really isn’t a romance. The main relationship is between the mother and the son.

The movie is pretty much a love letter to the power of music. The lead actress (the daughter of Bono from U2, so I guess she came by the musical talent honestly) has a beautifully expressive face. There’s one scene in which her guitar teacher has sent her a link to a video of Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now.” She starts it playing and starts doing other stuff with that in the background, but you can see on her face when the words of the song hit her and she just freezes to listen to it. Every emotion the song brings out flickers across her face.

I may have lost a little of the impact of the movie because just as it was building to the climactic scene, that was when I had to deal with the stolen car crashing into my garage, and now I’m afraid that incident will be forever linked to this movie in my mind. It’s not normally my sort of thing (way too few wizards), but I still quite enjoyed it. I did have to turn on the subtitles because the Dublin accents are really heavy.

Now I have to decide what to watch this weekend. We’re finally getting something like real fall weather, so I want something with good autumn vibes.

Life

Exciting Weekend

I had a rather exciting Saturday night. It started out rather mellow. I was tired, so I took a shower early and put on my nightgown, then settled in to watch a movie. The movie was reaching the climactic scene when my doorbell rang, repeatedly, like it was something urgent. That usually means the teenage girls who live nearby have lost their volleyball over my patio fence while playing in the yard near it, so I got up and went to the door, but not very quickly. Instead of the girls, it was a man who stepped back off my porch as I opened the door, asked me if I was at home alone, then hurried to add that there had been an accident with my garage. Both of us seemed to realize at the same time that I was in my nightgown, and he said the police were on the way, but would probably be about ten minutes.

I put on the first clothes I had handy and went outside to find a car in front of my garage door, with the garage door bashed in. A group of my neighbors that I refer to as the Council of Indian Dads was out there, including the man who’d come to my door. My neighborhood is mostly Indian right now, and there’s this group of men who hangs out in the drive in the evenings, either talking to each other or on the cell phone to India (I guess the time zones line up that way), with kids and wives coming and going. I live in a townhome complex, so the garages are in different buildings from the actual houses and open right onto the driveway through the complex.

I eventually was able to get the story as they all tried to tell it, interrupting each other and translating for each other. Apparently, they were doing their nightly hang-out when a car came speeding down the drive. It tried to park in a narrow parking space next to a garage, then backed up, scraping the side of that building, and backed right into my garage, smashing the door in. They ran to see if the driver was okay. He told them he’d just done drugs, said he was out of gas and asked for $20, then said the garage belonged to his mom, got out of the car, and ran. That’s why the man who rang my doorbell had asked if I was alone. He was making sure the kid wasn’t telling the truth, but it was pretty obvious when he saw me that I wasn’t his mom.

I checked inside my garage through the side door, and fortunately my car is small and was pulled far forward, so it wasn’t hit, but the garage door tracks were busted out of the wall. Then the police arrived, quite frantic, and started searching the abandoned car, asking where “the child” was. Eventually, we figured out that this was a translation issue. The Indian Dad who’d called the police had referred to the driver as a child, since he was a teenager, but the police thought that meant there was a child in the car. It turned out that the car had just been reported stolen, so they were worried it was one of those times when someone stole a car with a kid in the backseat. The cop kept saying, “So a teenager?” and the Indian Dad would say, “Yes, a child.” This was turning into a “Who’s on First?” routine by this point until they clarified it as the driver being 15-17 years old and there being no other child involved.

Then another cop arrived with the owner of the car, who had been looking for it. I’m not sure what happened there, but it kind of sounded like she’d left it running when running into a convenience store. She said she does that all the time, and I just have to ask why. Does it really save that much time not to turn off the car and take the keys? And she was almost out of gas, so that seems even dumber. She’d also left her phone in the car, which the thief took when he fled. They were hoping they could use “find my iPhone” to track it and see if that led them to the thief, but she’d have to get home to get to her computer to do it.

The cops took lots of pictures and got statements from the witnesses, plus got the video that one of the Indian Dads took. They had to get my contact info and gave me the incident report number that I could use for insurance. If they catch the thief, then he’ll be liable for the damage, but I’m sure that will take a while even if they do find him.

When all this was over, I realized that the t-shirt I’d grabbed was my “Warning: What You Do May Appear in My Next Book” shirt, which would have been rather apt if I were currently working on mysteries. I’m just sad no one commented on it or asked me about it.

Now I need to get my garage door fixed. The HOA seems to be handling it, but their insurance company is now wanting the insurance info for the car’s driver, which is delaying things. In the meantime, I can’t open my garage to get my car out. If I don’t get something done soon, I’ll have to take the bus to go grocery shopping.

To add insult to injury, I was eaten alive by mosquitoes while outside for all of this, and in the past couple of days I’ve had symptoms of West Nile virus. We have had recorded cases nearby. It’s not severe, just a low-grade fever, headache and upset stomach. If it weren’t for the fever, I’d say it was just stress.

Books

Comfort Reading

My reading has really slowed down this year. I’m behind on my usual pace of books read, and I’ve been in the odd position of having to renew novels at the library because it takes me more than three weeks to read them. But I did have one book that took me less than two weeks to read recently, Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson. I haven’t read Sanderson’s main series (though I have been on convention panels with him), but this book was a lot of fun. It’s one of the ones he wrote just to entertain himself, as a gift for his wife, during the pandemic.

He said the spark of the idea came from watching The Princess Bride and thinking about what would have happened if Buttercup had gone out looking for Westley when she heard he was attacked by pirates instead of just sitting at home and mourning. That’s basically the story of this book: A young woman’s best friend (who she’s realized she loves) goes missing while on a voyage, and she stows away on a ship to go out and find and rescue him. She ends up attacked by pirates, then joining a pirate crew, where she has to figure out how to save the crew (and herself) from the captain’s schemes before she can even begin to come up with a plan to rescue the man she loves from the sorceress holding him captive.

I enjoyed this book enough that I’ll need to buy a copy to keep because it makes for a good “comfort food” book, the sort of thing you read when you need something to make you smile and feel good. The heroine is utterly delightful, the kind of person who succeeds by being good and clever and kind (I also relate to the descriptions of her unruly hair, which makes me wonder if Sanderson remembers those convention panels …). The characters have excellent growth arcs, which makes for a satisfying read because you feel like they’re all ending up better than they were before. The narrative style is interesting because it’s first-person narration, but by a secondary character who’s witness to the events, but who also seems to have omniscient knowledge of all these events (I get the impression that he’s a character from Sanderson’s other series. This book apparently takes place in the universe of those books but is unconnected). The narrator is sarcastic, funny, and maybe a bit nuts. The tone of the narrative kind of reminds me of Terry Pratchett. The book is a nice mix of exciting, romantic, and funny. It’s also reasonably short, but I think I would have read it fairly quickly even if it wasn’t.

movies

Animated Adventures

My movie theme last weekend turned out to be Animated Adventures. I guess I was in a certain mood.

First up, Disney’s Treasure Planet. It’s basically the Treasure Island story, but in a steampunky space setting, with ships flying through the aether on solar sails, cyborgs, robots, and aliens, but still with a late Georgian/early Victorian aesthetic. This one was an interesting combination of hand-drawn characters in a lush computer-animated setting that allows us to fly along with the characters. Rebellious young Jim Hawkins is getting in trouble for riding his rocket hoverboard around the spaceport where his mother runs an inn, but then he gets a mysterious map from an old spacer and sets off with a scientist who hires a ship and crew to find the legendary Treasure Planet. The voice cast is excellent, with Emma Thompson as a prim ship’s captain as possibly my favorite (of course, she’s my favorite in just about everything). The relationship between Jim and a cyborg Long John Silver is quite touching. There’s a good mix of tense action and comic relief.

I’m not sure how I missed this one at the theater. I understand it was a bit of a flop and one of the nails in the coffin of the traditional style of animation at Disney. There were apparently sequels that didn’t get made. While they’re remaking everything in “live action,” this might be an interesting one for them to tackle. The effects would probably be expensive, but they could do a lot with the story and make it into a legit action film.

Then I watched The Road to El Dorado on Prime. It’s leaving this month, so I figured I’d watch it, and I needed something short. Also, I like the voice cast. The very idea of Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh doing a buddy adventure movie fills me with glee. They made for a fun pair in this movie that takes the old Bob Hope and Bing Crosby “Road” films and puts it in Mesoamerica, during the Spanish conquest. A couple of con men get a map to the mythical city of El Dorado, then through a chain of misadventures end up on a Spanish ship sailing to the New World and then eventually shipwrecked, where they spot some landmarks from the map. El Dorado isn’t quite what they expected, and they have to up their con game when the natives hail them as gods — and then they have to make some tough decisions.

Like the “Road” movies, any cultural accuracy pretty much flies out the window. The native people who’ve never seen white men can communicate perfectly with them (in modern English, but since our heroes are Spaniards, maybe we can assume it’s Spanish being translated into English for us). There are lots of comic anachronisms. It’s basically up there with The Emperor’s New Groove for accuracy, but that’s a lot of the point. It’s all about the wacky adventures of these two guys and how their different approaches to the situation threaten their friendship.

It’s a Dreamworks Animation movie, but they seem to be trying to do Disney. It’s not quite a musical, though there is one musical number the two leads perform. Otherwise, it’s more narration songs in the background, sung by Elton John. I found it to be a lot of fun and enjoyed the character arc, but the ending was rather unsatisfying. Yes, we resolved the big issue and the characters completed their growth arcs, but the final resolution struck me as more “now how do we get out of this?” than “whew, now everything’s okay.” They were very obviously setting up a sequel that ended up not getting made, and I’d probably feel different about the ending if we picked up on where the characters went next in a sequel. With no sequel, it felt a little unresolved to me.

Mostly, it’s worth it just to enjoy Branagh and Kline having fun. It seems they worked together in that Wild, Wild West remake, but I’d love to see them working together in something else in live action because it’s like a battle of the hams.

I like the animated adventure movies because there’s all the fun of an adventure story, but since kids are the primary audience, they’re a bit less intense. I’m not really up for super intense stuff right now, so it’s nice to have a little, but not too much, excitement without having to worry about truly bad things happening to the characters.

movies

Beauty and the Beast Movies

I ended up unintentionally doing a themed movie weekend, and didn’t realize one of the themes until I was thinking about it later. The theme was fantasy romantic comedies with a beauty and the beast theme. Yeah, pretty specific.

The first one was Strange Magic, something I stumbled upon on Disney+. I’d never heard of it, but it was about fairies and was a musical, so I figured why not. It turns out that it’s not Disney or Pixar animation, but rather Lucasfilm. They seem to have turned the people at Industrial Light and Magic who do those animated creatures that get inserted into regular movies loose to do a fully animated movie. Lucas himself was executive producer and has the story credit, so this must have been in the works pre-Disney buyout (and it was released after the buyout, which makes me wonder if Disney maybe buried it and that’s why I never heard of it). It’s an odd little film, kind of A Midsummer Night’s Dream meets Much Ado About Nothing meets Beauty and the Beast meets Moulin Rouge. Like Moulin Rouge, it’s a jukebox musical, with existing pop/rock songs instead of original songs. Oddly for a Lucas story, it’s hard to sum up the plot and really give the sense of it. Basically, a fairy princess has to brave the Dark Forest to rescue her sister from the Bog King who’s trying to eradicate love. But it’s not really about that.

The voice cast has a lot of Broadway cred, though Evan Rachel Wood plays the lead, and I don’t know that she’s done Broadway musicals (she is the voice of the mom in the Frozen movies, where she gets to sing), but she’s got serious chops and holds her own with all the Broadway people. As you can imagine when it’s ILM, the animation is gorgeous. The more humanoid fairies have a weird uncanny valley animated quality to them, but everything else is basically photorealistic. I’m not sure it’s a great movie, but I have to say that it made me rather happy. My face hurt from grinning all the way through it, and I’ll probably watch it again. If you want a sense of what this is like, here’s a clip of the heroine confronting the Bog King (Alan Cumming):

Then the next night, since I was in the mood for fantasy rom-coms, I watched Penelope on Amazon Prime (leaving at the end of the month). This is another one I didn’t hear of when it came out, but I had seen it before when it was the recommended viewing for a writing workshop I was taking. This is essentially a gender-flipped beauty and the beast story. A wealthy family has been cursed so that any girls born into the family will have the face of a pig until someone of their own kind loves them as they are, til death they do part. When a girl is finally born into the family after more than a century, the family sets out to find a man from their class who’ll be willing to marry her. Meanwhile, a reporter is scheming to get a photo of her, and he finds a black sheep from a prominent family who’s down enough on his luck to be bribed to present himself as a suitor. But Penelope has other ideas about her own fate and is tired of being locked away.

Actually, I’m not entirely sure I’d call it a full-on romance, as the main plot is more about Penelope figuring things out for herself, and she’s only with the guy a bit at the beginning and end, but it’s still romantic. It’s also sweet and heartwarming. It’s got a surprisingly A-list class for a movie that seems to have been mostly forgotten, with Christina Ricci and James McAvoy as the leads and people like Peter Dinklage and Reese Witherspoon in supporting roles.

I found the production design interesting in that it’s sort of modern retro, which gives it a fairy tale aura. It was made in 2006, so that would be pre-iPhone, but there are no cell phones, the cameras are all film cameras, they’re using typewriters instead of computers, the cars look maybe 1980s, and a lot of the clothes are more 1930s-1950s. So it’s an indeterminate not now, but still sort of present-day. Add to this the fact that it was filmed in London, so it has an old-world sense to it, but seems to be set in America. Most of the British cast members are doing American accents. The style reminds me of the original Willie Wonka movie, which was filmed mostly in Germany, but most of the characters were American, so it had this weird fairytale sense to it.

This is definitely a feel-good movie, one I think I may want to get on DVD so it’ll be handy for when I need a pick-me-up.

writing life

Book Brain

I have a bad case of what I call Book Brain, when I’m so caught up in writing that I have a hard time focusing on anything other than the book. Other thoughts fly out of my head. In fact, this morning, I was trying to make a to-do list, and I thought of something that needed to go on the list, but in between thinking about it and moving my pen to write it down, I forgot what it was. I’m still not sure what it was. I hope it wasn’t too important.

The Book Brain this week is mostly because I’m so close to finishing this draft. I’m in the middle of writing the big, climactic confrontation with the bad guys, so it’s very painstaking work. Sometimes, I stop to think for so long about what needs to happen next and how it should go that the computer goes to sleep.

Now I’m within 6,000 words of hitting my word count goal for this book. That’s maybe two days of writing, if all goes well. I’m not sure I have enough story left to fill all that up, but I already know of some things I need to go back and add, like entire characters who have shown up at the climax and who turn out to be critical to the plot, but who haven’t appeared before. I need to go back and add them to the story and then weave them in throughout so they’re set up properly to play their role at the end.

I’ll share more details about this book once I’m done and starting the process of getting it ready for publication. It’s something new for me, but I think it has a lot of the elements my fans like about my books, so although it’s in a different kind of setting, it’s still very much a Shanna Swendson book.

The thing that I needed to put on my to-do list just came to me, and this time I managed to write it down.

Now back to my book …

movies

Recent (ish) Disney

I picked up on the Disney animation again, hitting a couple of the somewhat more recent films that I missed at the theater.

First, Moana. I’m not sure why I didn’t see it at the theater, since I’m usually all about the musicals. I think the Thanksgiving release date may have been the challenge, since it came at a busy time of year, and Rogue One came out not long afterward, so I would have been distracted. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It’s another one of those “no villains” movies. There isn’t really anyone truly evil who’s working to thwart our heroes, other than maybe the crab, but he’s not a movie-long villain, just a minor obstacle. Otherwise, there’s conflict between Moana and Maui and Maui has to get over himself, but he’s not a villain.

The animation is beautiful and vivid and makes the islands and ocean look inviting, even though I’m very much not a beach person. As a bonus for me, a tiny bit from this movie sparked an idea that was the answer to a problem I was having with the book I’m working on, so watching it counted as work. The music is catchy, with a few songs I’ve caught myself singing around the house.

There’s a trend in some of the modern-era Disney movies that I think I’m picking up on, so I’ll have to watch more and see if my theory holds together.

Then I was in the mood for an adventure story, so I went with Atlantis: The Lost Empire. This should have been right up my alley, with an adorkable hero and a steampunky aesthetic, but I didn’t find it very engaging. I may have just been tired. This was a last-second selection when I was planning to watch the live-action Little Mermaid but found out that it was two hours and twenty minutes long, and I wanted something a lot shorter. It was a sharp contrast to the no-villain Moana, with a very obvious mustache-twirling evil villain who had to be defeated.

I couldn’t tell you what about it didn’t fully engage me, but I kept drifting off and thinking about other things, then I’d snap out of a daydream and realize I’d missed a chunk of the movie. Lots of stuff happened and it had a lot of action, so maybe it was just the frame of mind I was in. I think perhaps it was just uninspired and I didn’t connect with any of the characters. It did have an impressive voice cast and it looked great.

I’m not sure what I’ll watch this weekend. I spotted something I’d never heard of that looks interesting, so I may try that. But then they’ve also added a lot of the DC superhero movies to Prime Video and I never saw the second Wonder Woman film. I’ll have to see what mood I’m in and what my focus level is. I had my flu shot this morning, so I probably won’t be at my best this weekend.