Archive for Books

Books

Adorkable Wizard Romance

I seem to have overcome my reading slump. I’ve read several books since I started doing more pleasure reading a couple of weeks ago. Some weren’t the best, but were easy, fun reads. I did bail on a couple because I could tell I wasn’t going to enjoy them, for reasons related more to me than to the books themselves. One I really enjoyed sits right at the intersection of fantasy and romance, being both a good fantasy and a good romance. This book is Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis.

It’s the story of a young archduke who’s been under the control of his “advisors” since he took the throne as a child. Even as an adult, he’s essentially a prisoner and a puppet ruler with things done in his name that he would actually oppose. His only hope is to escape and throw himself on the mercy of the queen of a neighboring kingdom, a powerful witch. But there’s a bit of a mix-up when he arrives at her castle because she’s expecting a new librarian to come organize her library for her. He can do that, so he settles in. She really likes the new librarian, who’s sweet and a bit geeky, but good at what he does, and he finds that a lot of the stories about the dreaded witch queen are exaggerated, other than the extent of her power. There’s just the problem that she’s sworn to kill the archduke she believes is a threat to her kingdom, and then there are internal threats she’s battling, as well, as she tries to secure her throne after taking it back from a usurper. And his “advisors” who really run his land are gearing up for a terrible war.

This is more of an intimate fantasy than an epic fantasy, as it focuses mostly on a few characters and one location, but it digs deep into those characters. I loved the hero of this book. He’s exactly my “adorkable wizard” type. It’s so nice to read a romantic hero who’s kind, smart, and gentle, not a blustering jerk. The relationship developed not just based on physical attraction but also because these two people had common goals and values at heart, and they both had overcome trauma in their pasts.

There are fun little touches of humor, especially in the interactions with the sidekicks. It’s not quite a romantic comedy, but there are elements of that, and it’s not too dark. This really is the perfect book for a relaxing weekend when you want to escape to a magical world.

Books

The Rightful Heir

A few weeks ago, one of the things going around social media was discussion on the terrible novel you wrote when you were fourteen.

I didn’t really write a novel at fourteen. I scribbled a lot in spiral notebooks, but it was more story ideas and character development, with very little actual writing. Most of what I worked on during my teens was an epic fantasy novel a long-distance friend and I were “writing” together. Again, there was little actual writing. We made and mailed each other cassette tapes (talking into a tape recorder like we were talking to each other) brainstorming characters, situations, and scenarios, but I don’t think we actually wrote very much. I guess you could say it was kind of like a roleplaying game, but without the rules and dice. The main characters were two princesses forced to flee the palace for some reason (I’m now fuzzy on the details). She had her character and I had mine, and they split up to have separate adventures, so it ended up being basically two books that might weave in and out with each other. I came up with ideas for my character’s adventures and she came up with her character’s adventures.

The only thing I really remember about my part of the story was that my fugitive princess ended up in the woods (I guess I’ve always had a thing for forests) where she ran into a mysterious young man who took her home to where he lived with his mother, who was a kind of sorceress who lived in a cottage in the forest. Somewhere along the way we learned that he was actually the twin brother of the enemy king. The mother had been worried what her husband would do with a twin who might complicate the succession, so she had one of her advisors, a sorceress, smuggle him out of the palace and raise him in hiding. He was basically a male Briar Rose (from Sleeping Beauty), only there was still a prince at the palace. I think part of the resolution of the plot involved this princess marrying him, and it ended the war when he took his place as king (maybe they got rid of the other king and he pretended to be his brother?). I don’t know that we ever got as far as figuring out the actual ending because I didn’t learn how to plot a book until years later. I’d come up with characters, situations, and maybe an inciting incident and some scenes, but then it all fell apart.

But thinking about this long-abandoned story during the week in which we in America celebrate our break from being ruled by a king made me think about how royalist the old-school fantasy that influenced and inspired this story idea was. Fantasy authors seemed to take the concept of the divine right of kings and the belief that there was actually something different and special about royalty to extremes, making kings somehow magically ordained for their position so that having the rightful king would fix everything. That’s where we got all those farmboy who turns out to be the rightful heir stories, and it was better for a farmboy who had no experience in running a kingdom to be on the throne if he had the right bloodline than for someone without the bloodline but who was experienced in administration. The villains were often the viziers or royal advisors who seized power, then everything fell apart because they weren’t the rightful heirs, but the kingdom could be healed if the guy with the right bloodline showed up, even if he had no clue what he was doing.

Some of that might come down to the idea that anyone who actually wants power isn’t suited to have it, so the power-grabbing vizier is bad but the innocent farmboy who’d have been content herding pigs is good, but it still has to be the right farmboy who has the magical bloodline. They can’t just grab a clerk who knows how the kingdom is run but who doesn’t want to be in charge and make him king.

I suspect some of this comes from fairy tales, where there’s often something magical that sets royalty apart, like The Princess and the Pea, where only a true princess would be so delicate that she’d feel the pea under piles of mattresses. There’s also the Authurian mythology, where only the rightful king can pull the sword out of the stone. The British class system probably also plays a role. There seemed to really be a belief that the upper class was actually physically different from the lower classes. Even writers who were progressive for their time have hints of that showing up. In a couple of her books, Charlotte Bronte has her teacher heroine be surprised that the coarse peasant girls she teaches are actually capable of learning (instead of realizing that peasants were only ignorant because they were denied the kind of education the upper classes got and had to spend their days working in order to survive, so didn’t have time to sit around reading poetry and history and translating things from French and Latin).

Tolkien gets into the rightful king story with Aragorn, and how things are going to be better now that he’s shown up and the right bloodline is on the throne, and I suspect that was a huge influence on the fantasy of the 70s and 80s that influenced my teenaged self. In the very early 80s there was also the big royal wedding and Princess Di, so royalty was on the brain. Americans may have broken away from having a king but a lot of Americans are still fascinated with royalty and bloodlines, so it found its way into even American-written fantasy. Maybe there’s some fantasy to the idea that instead of having messy elections, there would be a way to know for certain that someone was the proper leader who could make everything better.

I think more recent fantasy has veered away from the idea of the rightful king who makes everything better because he’s meant to be on the throne. If there is a ruler who makes things better, it’s because he’s a good person who makes good policy (like The Goblin Emperor). Terry Pratchett had fun with the trope by having the rightful king who has all the usual signs not want to be king, and the people who could put him in power don’t want a king. He just steps up when there’s a crisis and provides leadership, then goes back to being a member of the guards. Still more recent fantasy focuses on people away from the throne. It’s ordinary people or people who have trained for a role having adventures, and the goal isn’t about putting the right king on the throne. Writers are also exploring forms of government other than monarchies in fantasy worlds.

I have to admit that there’s still something fun about the idea that the person nobody would notice is actually the person destined for greatness. That’s where a lot of the story my friend and I worked on as teenagers came from. In fact, it started as a portal fantasy in which her character was whisked away from her high school to a fantasy world where it turned out she was a princess, and only as we worked more on the story did we remove that part of it. When you’re feeling overlooked and outcast in high school, it’s fun to pretend that you’re royalty and no one knows about it.

This realization has made me think about my own fantasy worlds. The more history I read, the more it seems like European royalty was actually genetically inferior rather than superior. There was way too much inbreeding going on.

Books

Dickens With Magic?

Due to a random chain of events, I ended up rewatching the Bleak House miniseries over the last couple of weeks. There was an article in the paper about a man who learned that his ancestors were involved in one of the legal cases that inspired the book. Meanwhile I was reading a Star Wars book set nearly 20 years after Return of the Jedi, in which Wedge Antilles was a major character, and it occurred to me that the actor who played Wedge had one of the leading roles in Bleak House, though I think he’s older in that than Wedge was in the book. Anyway, I was in the mood for that sort of thing and it made for good background noise while I measured and pinned up some curtains I’m hemming.

But watching that made me wonder if anyone has used the works of Dickens as an inspiration or basis for a fantasy novel. There are a number of fantasy retellings based on the works of Shakespeare, whether directly and obviously or more subtly. For instance, Rachel Caine’s Prince of Shadows is Romeo and Juliet told from the perspective of one of the secondary characters, giving background info that doesn’t appear in the play, like the fact that Romeo and Juliet were under the influence of a love spell (which would explain a lot). On the other hand, the Kingfountain series by Jeff Wheeler draws upon some Shakespeare plays, but set in a fantasy world. I don’t think he hides the inspiration, but it’s not too obvious. I remember reading one, getting midway through it and going, “Oh, he’s doing Richard III.”

But has the same thing been done with Dickens? It would seem particularly suited for epic fantasy, given that his books often cover long stretches of time and have large casts of characters. The setting is so much a part of the story that it’s practically a character, so it has tons of worldbuilding (even if the books were set in the real world, the details chosen to convey that world so that it’s vivid even to people who never saw that setting require the same sort of effort as portraying an imaginary world). The plots would translate easily into court intrigue. There are several of his books that fit the “farmboy with destiny” type trope of fantasy, with obscure young men who rise in the world and turn out to have some kind of inheritance. Fantasy might even make some of his plots make more sense, like his fondness for entirely unrelated people who look so much alike that people mistake them for each other.

I’ve learned that a fantasy retelling of A Tale of Two Cities has just come out, which uses changelings as the explanation for the two unrelated people who look the same. I’ll have to find that one. But is there a fantasy Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend? I could have fun figuring out how to put Our Mutual Friend in a fantasy world, with the inheritance being a crown instead of the proceeds from a dust heap. Bleak House is just made for a gothic retelling with sorcery.

And now I want to rewatch the miniseries of Our Mutual Friend. I don’t think I’m going to try to delve into reading Dickens right now. I’ve managed to ease my way out of my reading slump by reading shorter, more straightforward books without a lot of subplots. Trying to read Dickens right now would probably be a lost cause. That may be my winter project.

Books

Reading Slump

I’ve been in a weird reading slump since I started the moving process. I’ve only read about two novels (I’m almost done with the second) since I started packing back in early April, and that’s slow for me. I might manage to read a few pages at night before I go to sleep, but if I sit down to just read, I get distracted and restless and end up getting up to do something.

I checked a bunch of books on gardening out of the library, but I couldn’t even focus on those other than flipping through and looking at the pictures. I realized I’m nowhere near being ready for that, and what I need now isn’t a book that tells me what to plant but rather a book that tells me what to kill. I gave up and returned them all to the library.

Now that I’m finishing that second novel, I need to find something new to read. I have plenty of books on the to-be-read shelf, but if it’s languishing there, I’m probably not super interested in it. I need to make a library trip to find something that makes me want to sit down and just read.

Fortunately, I don’t seem to be in the kind of slump where I’m not interested in any books. It’s mostly been a distraction issue. But I probably need something that really captivates me and that isn’t too complicated to get over the distraction. Summer tends to be my chick lit/romcom phase, and I can usually tear through one of those pretty quickly. That might make a good thing to get for a starter book for getting back in reading mode. I have a few more curtains to hang and a piece of furniture to put together, and then there’s that crazy yard, but otherwise I’m getting to a point where I should be able to allow myself to sit and read and relax on a Sunday afternoon instead of working around the house.

I don’t think I have anything particular on the schedule for the weekend unless my next-door neighbors throw another spontaneous party like they did last weekend, other than church Sunday morning and an outing Sunday evening, so I think I’ll hit the library on Friday when I go out to run errands and then plan to spend some time during the weekend just sitting and reading and see if I can get back into the swing of things.

Books

Regency Magic

Before my life became consumed with moving and getting my house set up, I read a book that was a fun mix of two things I like, the Regency/Victorian house party comedy of manners and fantasy. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher is what you get if you love Jane Austen type books but think they could use more magic.

An evil sorceress whose previous benefactor has proven unsatisfactory is on the hunt for a husband, and she settles on a wealthy squire, contriving a situation that gets her and her browbeaten teenage daughter invited to come stay with him and his spinster sister. The daughter, experiencing the kindness of good people for perhaps the first time in her life, can’t bear to let her mother hurt these people, and she joins forces with the squire’s sister to try to thwart her mother. And part of the scheme is a house party, as the sister invites her friends to come meet their new friends (and have backup).

The book reminds me of the movie Love and Friendship, which was (loosely) based on some of Jane Austen’s short fiction that wasn’t published in her lifetime. In fact, I kept picturing the villain as Lady Susan from that movie, as played by Kate Beckinsale. Just give that bitchy, manipulative woman magical powers that allow her to control others, and you have a similar situation.

A lot of the Regency romance tropes are present, including the awkward teen with the marriage-minded mother, the handsome old flame of the older woman, and lots of drawing room intrigue, but all with the awareness of magic at work and non-magical people having to figure out how they can stand against powerful magic. The book was both fun (and funny) and scary, and it was rather moving at times. It held my interest at a time when my brain was beginning to spiral with distraction.

I haven’t been able to read much since then because I get very easily sidetracked by things I feel like I should do, or else I get an idea for solving a problem in the house and get lost in online research to see if the products I need exist. I try to read a little bit before bed, but I fall asleep within a few pages. It seems that a day full of physical activity is good for your sleep.

I have my downstairs great room (kitchen, living/dining room) more or less set up, though there are some things in there that will need to be put away elsewhere when I have the way cleared for them. My new office furniture is supposed to be delivered tomorrow, so I can get my office set up. Then next week I’m going to make a road trip to the D.C. suburbs to hit Ikea and see if the loveseat I like online will actually work, plus I’ll pick up some organizing and storage stuff for my clothes and some pantry shelving. That will make it easier to finish unpacking. I’m hoping once everything is more or less where it belongs and there aren’t piles and boxes everywhere it’ll be easier for me to focus on both reading and writing.

Books, writing

Tired of Tropes?

One of the hot topics in the writing world lately has been tropes. These are familiar story elements that you see in many works. They’re the sort of thing you look at as a reader and say, “Oh, I like that.”

Some examples include things like friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, marriage of convenience, grump/sunshine (in which one member of the couple is kind of a grouch and the other is more sunny, often bringing about emotional healing for the grump).

Most of the more common examples come from the romance world, but some fantasy ones I can think of include the Chosen One (the hero is the subject of some sort of destiny or prophecy), the Lost Heir (the farmboy/kitchen assistant who’s the rightful heir to the throne, sometimes also a Chosen One), the Unlikely Hero (ordinary person is in the wrong place at the wrong time and has to carry out some heroic task), You’re a Wizard! (person discovers they have magical powers), and Portal to a Magical World (people from our world visit a fantasy world — think Narnia).

There’s been a lot of discourse among writers about whether this emphasis on tropes is good or bad. They’re a big part of “writing to market,” in which you find out what things are popular and write that, and in marketing. Letting readers know that the things they like are in your books helps them know what books they might want. Tropes are a big element in what’s hot on TikTok, but book graphics showing the tropes in a book have been popular all over social media, like this one I did for Tea and Empathy:

Shows book cover for Tea and Empathy on the screen of an e-reader being held by hands. Text around it with arrows pointing to book reads "Amnesia, Found Family, Mysterious Village, Grump/Sunshine"

On the other hand, there are starting to be complaints about books that feel like they’re basically a bunch of tropes stuck together without any depth and about readers who treat the trope list as a checklist, so they only read the books with their chosen trope. There are writers who focus their writing one one popular trope, since that’s what their readers want.

I like the idea of getting information to help me find books that have things in them that I like, but the things I’d look for tend to be a lot more complicated than you can get in one of those trope graphics. For instance:

  • The road trip/quest adventure in which characters gradually become friends or fall in love as they face adversity together.A
  • December-set romantic comedy that’s not explicitly a Christmas book, but that just happens to have some of those vibes as a backdrop to the story.
  • The Worst/Best Thing — the worst thing that can happen in a person’s life may also be the best because they wouldn’t have reached their full potential otherwise (think the movie Titanic. Being on the Titanic was probably the worst thing that could happen to Rose, but if it hadn’t happened, her life would have been very different)
  • In Another Time/Place — people meet in different timelines/realities and are always drawn to each other, though in some of these there are complications (this isn’t the same as Fated Mates because it’s not really about fate or destiny in which they have no choice about being together, but rather that they’re so perfectly suited for each other that no matter when or where they meet, they’ll fall in love)
  • So Bad at It That They’re Actually Good — when someone who seems like a failure at something (usually magic) turns out to actually be really good at some related thing, and they were only failing because they were trying to do something that didn’t fit their abilities. In fantasy, it’s usually the failed student wizard who turns out to be able to do a rare kind of magic no one else can do that uses a different kind of power and skill than regular magic.

Try fitting those into a hashtag!

I don’t think there’s any harm in fitting things you and readers love into your books, in letting readers know about the elements that are in your books, or in looking for elements you love when choosing what to read. I just worry about readers who only want to read one thing or writers who feel constrained into writing only one thing because that’s what their readers want. I can barely write one subgenre for more than a few books without going stir crazy. That may be why I’m only moderately successful rather than making the big bucks. Of course, people are free to read what they want to read, but it seems weird to me to not only limit yourself to one genre, but to one kind of story in one genre. That would be like reading the same book over and over again. I’m also not fond of the idea of boiling a whole story down to one element. I have a list of things I look for and get excited about when I find them (sometimes it’s a pleasant surprise when they come up in a book and I wasn’t expecting them), but that’s not all I read.

Books

Tea and Fortunes

I recently read a book that was absolutely warm and delightful, perfect for if you need something that makes you feel good and believe that humanity may be worthwhile after all. I think a lot of my readers might want to check out The Teller of Small Fortunes, by Julie Leong.

The book is about an immigrant fortuneteller who travels with her mule and wagon, telling only small fortunes—not major events or big futures, but little things that might affect individuals in small ways. She’s been fine being alone, but then she finds herself traveling with others as they join up with her. There’s a former thief and his former warrior friend who’s searching for his lost daughter, then later an aspiring baker seeking adventure. They all team up to travel in search of the lost child, but then the fortuneteller catches the attention of the mages, who believe anyone with any power has to work for them.

This book has a lot of things I love in a story. There are great arcs for all the characters. There’s a lovely sense of found family, with strangers coming to form bonds and look after each other. People make good decisions. The ending is so satisfying. I got this from the library, but I think I’ll be buying a keeper copy because this is very much a comfort read kind of book. There is some tension, but it’s not uncomfortably stressful.

You may want to have baked goods and tea handy for reading, though. All the talk about the tea the fortuneteller serves and all the talk about baked goods will make you hungry for tea and rolls. You find yourself wanting to drink tea, eat baked goods, and hang out with these people.

This is essentially a standalone novel. Everything is wrapped up for these characters, but it looks like there’s another book set in this world coming later in the year. I’ll definitely be looking out for that.

Books, movies, TV, writing

Heroes and Villains

Some of the recent author discourse online this week has involved the nature of heroes and villains and the author’s responsibility in writing them. This stemmed from a statement from one of the writers of the TV series Breaking Bad about how maybe writers needed to think of the implications of what they wrote, after viewers seemed to have missed the point of that series. I didn’t watch it because it’s very much not my sort of thing, but I understand it’s a series about a high school chemistry teacher who finds out he has cancer and to provide for his family (possibly because insurance is bad and he won’t get good benefits?), he starts making and selling meth. Since he knows chemistry, his meth is superior to that made by trailer park junkies, and he becomes a sort of drug kingpin. This writer talked about how audiences saw him as a sympathetic figure who was doing what he needed to do to care for his family in an unjust system, but the writers thought they made it clear that this was just an excuse he used, while he actually ended up doing it for the power and money.

I have to say that this writer sounds pretty naive. You have a character in a respected profession that’s often seen as an underdog in society, dealing with something a lot of people can relate to (struggling with health insurance and finances), so people are going to sympathize with him and relate to him and try to justify his actions.

However, it doesn’t take a teacher with cancer dealing with health insurance for audiences to sympathize with bad guys. I’ve been around online discussion of various fictional things (TV, movies, books) since the mid-90s, and I’ve seen that it doesn’t take much for certain members of the audience to like and sympathize with the villain, even if they have to make up reasons to do so. You could have an unrepentant puppy murderer, and there would be people claiming he’s really just a softy, and he only murders puppies because the good guys were mean to him about his puppy murdering (especially if he’s attractive or charismatic). He could be saved and changed if only someone treated him right.

There’s what I call the hero/villain double standard. A villain doesn’t have to do much to be hailed as heroic. He just has to do one good thing, or sometimes even refrain from doing something bad one time. On the other hand, it sometimes seems like the most evil thing a hero can do is try to be a good person, so that even the slightest failure to live up to that ideal is worse than any evil the villain does. And yet, actually succeeding in being good makes him holier than thou and boring, and audiences want him cut down. The puppy murdering villain can be hailed as a hero for letting one puppy go, while the hero will be vilified for taking the largest brownie (but also criticized as holier than thou and too good to be true if he takes the smallest brownie).

But you can’t write for that audience because they’ll never be happy. They’re suspicious of people who try to be good and they think they can save villains.

I think writers may unintentionally feed into and encourage these views, though. While a villain redemption story can be satisfying under some circumstances, too many of them and you start to perpetuate the myth that all villains are actually good inside or doing their evil for selfless, good reasons. Writers like to redeem villains because it makes for a big, dramatic character arc — from selfish and evil to heroic. Meanwhile, the arc for a good guy usually isn’t so dramatic. At best, you get the farmboy to hero arc, where he’s not so bad at the beginning and all he really does is level up to deal with the situation he finds himself in. The way you get more drama is to tear down the hero and find his flaws.

In the world of series, especially long-running types of series like on TV, the structure of a series encourages the villain redemption arc. The villain is probably one of the more popular characters, but if you keep the same individual as the foe for too long, both the hero and the villain start to look incompetent if neither manages to defeat the other. You really can’t permanently defeat the hero of a series, but you don’t want to get rid of your most popular character. The answer is that you redeem the villain and bring on a new villain, so in later installments, the original villain is at first a reluctant ally with the heroes against the new villain, and gradually turns into a full-on hero. Viewers learn to look for the reasons that any villain will eventually become a hero, and as the villains and former villains remain popular characters among outspoken viewers, writers start focusing on them, sidelining the original heroes and not writing for them, so the heroes become more boring.

I’ve also seen people theorizing that Americans tend to go for underdogs who fight the system and challenge the status quo, but most of the heroes are defending the status quo, while the villains are the ones fighting the system (never mind that they’re often doing so for selfish reasons). I’m not sure I entirely agree with that, since there are way too many examples that go the other way around. In the Captain America movies, the most upright, pure of heart Marvel superhero is fighting the system and going rogue. He’s going against orders to do what he thinks is right, going against what he believes to be a corrupted organization, and even going against the other superheroes when he thinks they’ve sold out. (And, of course, a lot of fans vilified him when he finally made a selfish choice for his own happiness.)

Most of the Star Wars movies and shows have the heroes being rebels or resistance fighters against an evil system. The exception would be the prequel series, which was odd because the real villain was controlling both sides to undermine the system while the heroes were fighting to defend a system that they didn’t know had been corrupted. The least successful series so far, The Acolyte, was the one with the villains rebelling against the “good guy” Jedi system that was questionable. They find a middle ground in the shows centered around the Mandalorian, where the good guys aren’t really a part of the establishment and are sometimes in opposition to it while they’re also fighting outright villains, which puts them on the same side as the establishment.

And people still sided with the bad guys when they were the ones representing “the system.” I remember 1977, before Darth Vader had a sympathetic backstory, long before anyone imagined he’d be redeemed. In that first movie, he was mostly just a henchman supporting an evil bureaucrat, and he was an extremely popular character. There were “Darth Vader Lives!” t-shirts. Really, he was a cool costume and an awesome voice, and he had power he wasn’t afraid to use. Who hasn’t wanted to Force choke someone during a staff meeting? But none of the usual rationales for why people side with villains applied to this character in the original movie. He was mostly just intriguing and looked cool.

I think the answer isn’t to stop writing cool villains, lest audiences sympathize with them. It’s to write better heroes. Push audiences to sympathize with them. Don’t be afraid to make them human or flawed, but highlight where they’re good and heroic. Make them cool enough that people might want to be them. The writer has to like the good guys before the audience will.

movies, Books

Out of Order

Last Friday, I figured I should celebrate Valentine’s Day with something somewhat romantic, but I wasn’t in a very romantic mood, so I ended up watching 500 Days of Summer, a somewhat anti-romantic romantic comedy. I’m not super-strict about my definition of “romantic,” so I’m okay with a hopeful ending, even if it doesn’t involve the main couple in the movie.

This is a rather unconventional romcom that questions a lot of the premises common to the genre. It’s told in a non-linear way, starting with a breakup and bouncing back to a first meeting, then ahead to an established relationship, then back to starting to get together, etc. Tom is a hopeless romantic who’s looking for “The One” who’ll complete him. Summer is a free spirit who doesn’t believe in love and doesn’t want to be tied down. Tom meets Summer and is sure she’s The One when he learns she likes his favorite band. They argue over the issue of love, and his hopes are dashed when she tells him she doesn’t believe in it, but then she kisses him, they start dating, and everything is perfect, until it isn’t and he doesn’t know what to do.

I recently saw some online discourse about the movie (which is probably why it caught my eye). Apparently there’s some debate over which of them is in the wrong and the bad guy. Is she bad for telling him she didn’t believe in love, then dating him anyway, or is he bad for expecting her to fall in love with him when she told him she wouldn’t? Is she a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or is he trying to cast her in that role? I would say they’re both at fault. She sent seriously mixed signals, saying one thing and then acting another way, but he was in love with an idea, and she happened to be the person he cast in that role.

But the main thing I like is the nonlinear structure that makes the audience have to piece things together, where we don’t see how it all fits together until toward the end. I love stories that do that sort of thing or that play with narrative structure in fun ways.

In the romantic comedy space, there’s Sliding Doors, which has parallel timelines — we see the heroine miss a train after losing her job, leading to her getting mugged, then because of that she gets home late enough that she doesn’t catch her boyfriend cheating on her, and her life becomes a struggle. But then we also see the heroine barely catch the train, so she gets home in time to catch her boyfriend, which leads to her starting her life over, starting a business, and starting a new romance. We cut back and forth between the timelines. Which one is the “good” one and which is the “bad” one, and how will it work out?

Or there’s The Very Thought of You, which plays with perspective. We see the same events multiple times through the perspectives of three friends who all meet the same woman on the same day, and we only realize what’s really happening when we put them all together and know what’s happening in the background of each of the scenes.

I’m With Lucy starts with the ending — the heroine is on her way to her wedding. She got there after a time when she said yes to every blind date. We go back to these dates and the relationships that came from them, jumping around a bit in time. Which of these guys is she marrying?

Getting away from romcoms, there are movies like Memento, which is told in reverse order, and Inception, with the lines between dream and reality blurred. The first season of Once Upon a Time had dual timelines, with flashbacks going mostly in reverse chronological order gradually showing how the present-day situation came to be, while the characters worked to resolve the situation in the present (the flashback format continued through the series, but it mostly became thematic, showing an incident in a character’s past that reflected the character’s present).

I haven’t seen it done so often in books, but there’s a time travel book by Connie Willis that plays with this, Blackout/All Clear. It’s a story in which time traveling historians from the future go to the time of World War II to study it, but something goes wrong, and they’re stuck there as the Blitz begins. But there were other previous missions involving some of the same people to different times in the war, and since they took on cover identities and the story is told using the cover name, we don’t know which characters are the same people at different times until later. There’s also the mix of what’s happening chronologically within the war era and what the timeline is in the “present,” which can mean that a person from earlier in the present might be later in the war than they are in the current mission that started later in the present. This is a kind of storytelling that would be less effective in a movie because it would be more obvious that they’re the same person. In the book, there are a lot of “ohhhh” moments of realization.

I have ambitions of writing something like this, either out of order or otherwise nonlinear. The closest I’ve come was my Christmas novella, which was similar to Sliding Doors, except the heroine was living both timelines and aware of both of them, so she had to figure out which life she wanted and how to stick with that one instead of living both of them. I have an idea that might fit into the nonlinear category, with flashbacks where you don’t know which present character is the person in the flashback, but the whole idea hasn’t really come together yet, and the concept is more ambitious than I feel up to tackling right now.

writing, movies, TV, Books

Shipper Bait

Happy Valentine’s Day! I should probably talk about something romantic, but I’ve come to realize that both as a reader/audience member and as a writer, I’m more of a shipper than a romantic.

For those who aren’t up on Internet talk, “shipper” is short for “relationshipper.” As far as I can tell, the term originated in the X-Files Usenet newsgroup back in the mid-90s. If you wanted Mulder and Scully to get together, you were a relationshipper, or shipper. (The other faction was the No-Romos, who wanted them to stay friends and partners but not get involved romantically.) From there, the term spread. “Shipping” is wanting two characters to get together, looking for evidence that they might be developing feelings, imagining how they might get together and what it would look like if they did, sometimes even writing fan fiction about the characters being romantically involved. If you say you ship a couple, you want them to be romantically involved.

While some shippers really do want to see the couple get together, the real fun is in looking at the subtext and trying to figure out where things might be going. I think this is why I prefer to get my love stories in genres other than romance (and now romantasy). I have the most fun trying to read between the lines and figure out what the characters feel based on their actions. Romance novels are a lot more up front about the attraction. Even if the characters are denying it, you know where it’s going and it’s still pretty obvious. I think a lot of the “Moonlighting Curse” is due to this. Once the couple is together, you know where things stand and there’s no more room for imagination. (Though there were other things going on with Moonlighting, so it wasn’t just them getting together that killed the show.) This also makes it a lot harder to do in a book than in movies/TV. When you can get inside the characters’ heads, there’s little guessing, unless they’re utterly oblivious.

As an example, I’ve always said, not entirely jokingly, that Aliens is one of my favorite romantic movies. It’s fun to analyze the way Ripley and Hicks interact and see the way he looks at her and figure that they were falling for each other, and later they’d get together (the third movie Does Not Exist, so there). I was vindicated in this when I heard Michael Biehn say on a convention panel that he played the whole movie as though Hicks had a huge crush on Ripley.

I like to say that I write shipper bait instead of romance because the romantic relationships in my books tend to be fairly subtle and leave the impression of there being a lot more romance than there is because there’s so much material for the reader’s imagination. I’ve even had a book that didn’t have a kiss in it rejected by a fantasy publisher with the recommendation to send it to a romance publisher because it was too much of a romance.

I’ve been trying to think of my favorite fictional romances, or at least some that I think were handled well. I’ve got more from movies and TV than from books. Connie Willis probably does my favorite book romances, though she writes science fiction. Ned and Verity’s relationship in To Say Nothing of the Dog is quite lovely and has a swoonworthy conclusion. There’s also something pretty epic in the Blackout/All Clear duology that involves time travel and an outcome worth cheering out loud for. Lately, she’s been writing all-out science fiction romcoms, and they have just the right mix of romance and action. You want the couple to get together, but it’s not super obvious where things are going.

I think Jim and Pam’s relationship on The Office worked pretty well (aside from some iffy stuff in the final season). It helped there that the mockumentary format meant that we only saw what the camera crews were there to see, so even when they started dating it wasn’t entirely obvious what their status was and there was still room to guess and imagine.

Possibly my favorite TV romance was Nathan and Audrey on Haven, which had all kinds of supernatural stuff going on, plus one of my favorite paranormal tropes, the “in another life” thing in which the same people keep running into each other in different timelines, sometimes not knowing each other, but always falling in love when they meet.

Shipping isn’t limited to couples that actually do end up getting together or who are on that trajectory. I’ve even seen people ship characters from different fictional universes. It’s really common to ship non-canon relationships, sort of an amusing what if. My personal favorite there is that I figure things would have gone very differently for the galaxy if Obi Wan had ever turned to Padme and belted, “My gift is my song, and this one’s for you.” Seriously, an Obi Wan who looked like Ewan McGregor was right there, and she went for the whiny kid? I’ve seen some unhinged fan theories that this is what happened (well, maybe without him acting out Moulin Rouge), and Obi Wan was Luke and Leia’s real father. Anakin does get really jealous of Obi Wan having anything to do with her toward the end.

Somewhat closer to possibility is Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso in Rogue One. That lost opportunity is even sadder after the Andor series, which makes it look even more like she’s just the person he always needed, and they found each other just a bit too late. There are some pretty loaded looks they exchange. In my mental happy place, the Enterprise flies by and beams them out right before things go boom.

There’s a lot more room for romance in fantasy now that romantasy is the hot thing in the market, but I’m not sure I write enough outright romance for that. My shipper bait is too much for fantasy but not enough for romantasy.