Or was it people that just happened to have seven super special awesome chocolate-covered habits? Oh well.
You've probably noticed that the blog's slowed down a bit lately (sorry! Lion King 1/2 is coming in the next couple days, I swear!). That's because my life has been crazy, in the family and friends lovingly asking, "When are you going to relax because I am going to kill you and hide the body in the woods if you don't chill out," kind of way.
I have a book that I'm editing that should be coming out soon, and a book that I was supposed to be Nano-ing. So far I win the Least Successful Nano award, with a grand total of 0 words. See my might and tremble.
Part of the busy-ness is that I'm still working on Giraffe the Wonder Horse. He can now canter mostly without incident, and I can leave the stall door open while I go about my business and he knows that isn't an invitation to wander. He also enjoys crowding in on my selfies.
The other much bigger part is that B and I are buying a house. And goooooood lord people. I've worked for the Army and I'm in finance, so I'm no stranger to legalese and needlessly complicated paperwork. But seriously, this crap is so complicated and overwrought, how do most people ever manage to buy a house?!
House Hunters makes home buying look fun (and yes, I am addicted, I'm answering my millions of emails and voicemails with it permanently playing in the background). And while in my head I like to imagine myself as an intrepid adventurer, in reality I loathe change and uncertainty with the passion of a thousand dying suns.
But we found a condo that we really like, we've had an offer accepted, and now we're just waiting on everyone to get finished shopping around our loans and all those other lovely (imagine intense air quotes here) things. So fingers crossed that this all finishes soon so I can stop fussing with house nonsense and start being able to focus on other things... and also get to decorate my own place for Christmas. CHRISTMAAAAAAAASSSSS!
Finding the best time to write... also known as just finding TIME to write.
Insanity is supposed to be doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. In that case... uh... I definitely don't keep expecting to write a ton of words on weekends. Nope! Not me. Because that would make me insane, apparently. Whoops.
The problem with time off is that you tend to use it to get other things done: errands, laundry, getting married. You know, normal stuff. Plus even if you make Butt-in-Chair plans, nobody else knows that, and feels free to invite you out to do fun stuff. Or does wanting to see the new Riddick movie instead of write make me a bad author?
Some people work well with consistent word count goals every single day, and some people write on and off in huge spurts. I'm somewhere in between; I've been known to churn out 5 or even 10k in a single night, but I wrote Detect Me by writing 3k every single day for a couple months.
I'm a work-in-progress when it comes to this. Maybe someday I'll have a set routine that enables me to be like that woman I read about who writes 5k every single day. Right now it seems like I have every distraction in the world, with mixed results. A week ago I wrote 3k in a day... I think I've totaled 300 words for the rest of the week.
I have today off. Maybe I'll write a ton tonight! Hope springs eternal, apparently.
Horseback riding is one of those things that forces life lessons on you even when you don't want them. It's like philosophy punching you down the throat. Via a half-ton animal.
I went out to the stables last night hoping for an easy ride. I've been a little worked up and tense about things in my day to day life: book release, wedding stuff, work stuff. The temperature was perfect and it was a glorious blue-sky day, so I figured I'd pull out Giraffe and do some fun, easy fieldwork.
Well, I did fieldwork, but it was neither easy nor fun.
Writing's like that too sometimes. Even when you come up with a stellar idea, you have days (or weeks) where you sit down in front of a blank page and just stare at it. Like all creative ventures, it's not enough to have all the right parts of the equation. Idea + Motivation + Skill = Good Book in theory, but in practice, there's another variable in there. You need that extra something; spark or inspiration or what have you.
It's more like this: Idea + Motivation + Skill + X = Good Book. And you spend all your time solving for X.
Last night I went out on horseback hoping for a fun ride, and instead the horse freaked out at everything. We did a bucking/rearing tour of, let's see... a tractor (MONSTER), a creek (WATER MONSTER), a bush (ALSO MONSTER), and as far as I could tell, empty air (MONSTER MONSTER MONSTER).
I've been riding for a long time, and my specialty is problem horses, so I never actually came off in the field - it happens to me, of course, just not very often. But when I dismounted and went to run up the stirrups before heading in, the horse swung his head around to nuzzle me and jammed the bone of his nose into my finger.
To clarify, the last time a horse full-on clocked me with its nose, it broke my nose.
Talk about adding insult to injury. I came out of a fairly harrowing hour of riding completely unscathed, only to have the horse mess me up by accident on the ground.
Like with writing, there is no getting around it: occasionally the things you love just aren't any fun. Occasionally all your efforts just blow up in your face. Sometimes you ride the tiger; sometimes the tiger rides you.
How well you can roll with the punches is what makes or breaks you, I guess. Nobody really wants to spend an evening debating whether or not their finger is broken, but it is what it is. You either suck it up, let it go, and move on, or you don't come back.
What, you don't love research as much as I do? And here I thought this would be the most exciting post of the week.
Because Protect Me is about a female bodyguard, I had to do a lot of data gathering. I knew a small amount about personal security because of my dad, whose life has been a lot more exciting than mine. But executive protection (aka bodyguard-ing) and dealing with the threat of violence every day was by no means my area of expertise, so...
You may notice that three of these are by Rory Miller. Look, he writes good stuff! I'm not a fangirl or anything...
Books
I
also
own
Aha. Ahahahaha... Okay shut up.
But seriously, Rory Miller is that rare person with both experience and enough writing talent to convey the things he's learned effectively. If you're at all interested in personal security, violence theory, or the practicalities of dealing with violence, I can't recommend Meditations on Violence highly enough. I've fobbed it off on all my family and friends, if that tells you anything. He has a blog (here's an entry on martial arts/violence misinformation) that's on the flow-of-consciousness side, but in his case, that's still worth reading. I'd just read one of his books first so you have a framework for it.
A fantastic online resource I found was the blog Zen Traveler, about a guy who's both a bodyguard and a Buddhist. Unfortunately the site is closed - I actually emailed to thank him for the info on the site and he graciously replied telling me that he'd moved on from the blog, but would be happy to answer any questions - but the info is no less worth reading now than it was a year ago.
Another day, another novel... This might give you a clue about the book I'm working on now.
NO WAIT COME BACK WHERE ARE YOU GOING
So, anybody out there got any good research stories for me? Are you researching anything interesting? Hit me! It's not like my nonfiction list is full to bursting already...
Today, I have a super special awesome chocolate-covered extra-long snip of Protect Me for you!
~
"And here..." Rick took hold of both handles of the double doors, and threw them open with admirable dramatic flair, "is the library!"
Hope stared into a huge, airy room with a floor-to-ceiling windows and bookcases that stretched up to cover every wall entirely. They were crammed with everything from obvious textbooks to what looked like the Harry Potter novels. A tasteful arrangement of sofas and chairs decorated the middle of the room. It looked at once pristine and well-loved; the long white sofas appeared to be new, but the brown leather chairs looked like they were often used. There was a spiral sprawl of books on the coffee table in the middle that somehow managed to look like it was actually in use rather than a feature in a magazine.
“Um. Wow. It's... lovely,” she said, feeling Rick's eyes on her.
The nice thing about Rick was that you didn't have to worry about figuring out what he thought. He had no problems letting you know.
Rick frowned and stared at her quizzically. "I was going for a Beauty and the Beast moment here," he said, which meant nothing to her. "I thought you'd be a little more excited."
She stepped inside the room, because Rick seemed to want her to, and gazed around at the shelves stacked with books.
"I'm not really a big reader," she said, hating the hesitation in her voice. "I wasn't very good at school, and now I'm busy." She'd had more important things to worry about at fourteen than homework. And her mother certainly hadn't cared. Hope reminded herself of those things, but it felt hollow. She stared helplessly at the thousands upon thousands of books filled with wisdom and enjoyment that she couldn't understand.
"That right?" Hope glanced back at Rick; he was watching her with a soft look in his eyes. "That's a shame. You're too smart not to read."
Hope blinked. Smart? That phrase didn't sound familiar to her ears. Strong, yes. Capable, absolutely. But she couldn’t remember a time anyone had described her as intelligent before. Not ever.
Pride bit her tongue and held her back from saying so. She stared at the calm confidence on Rick's handsome face. Something in his expression gave her courage.
"So… what do you recommend?" she asked quietly.
Rick's eyes lit up and he darted forward into the room. He went to one bookshelf first and then hesitated, moved over to another. He poked around in the shelves in the familiar way of a frequent visitor.
"Here." He pulled an old, worn hardback off the shelf and handed it to her.
Hope took it gently. She stared at it for a second and burst out laughing. Even she recognized this one.
"Jane Eyre? Really”
Rick cocked an eyebrow at her. "Yes?”
"Isn't that a romance?" Hope wasn't sure if she was protesting him giving a romance to her, or him knowing a romance well enough to recommend it. But it was easier to make a case for the latter. "You like romance novels?"
Rick didn't look put off in the least. He just grinned a little, his eyes catching the sparkle of the afternoon sun filtering in through the huge windows.
"I like good books. And Jane Eyre is a damn good book." His grin widened. "Besides, it seemed appropriate. An over-large mansion, a bright young woman, a dashing, handsome, charming, clever..."
"Alright!" Hope actually laughed a little and Rick joined in, the rich sound of his deep, rolling laugh filling up the room that had seemed intimidatingly large a moment ago.
Everybody's talking about Stephenie Meyer's Variety interview. I've seen a range of reactions from relief that she doesn't intend on continuing the series, to people upset that she's distancing herself from the franchise that brought her such success. Here's the relevant part:
DM: What about a return to “Twilight?”SM: I get further away every day. I am so over it. For me, it’s not a happy place to be. DM: Is the door completely closed on that?SM: Not completely. What I would probably do is three paragraphs on my blog saying which of the characters died. I’m interested in spending time in other worlds, like Middle-Earth.
I can't find it within myself to be surprised at this, personally. Maybe I'm a little surprised that it didn't come sooner.
For all intents and purposes, Stephenie Meyer has been held up as a cultural pariah, a herald of ZE END TIMES, because she wrote a book about teen vampire love that got super super popular. From a Sundance 2013 interview:
SM: There are a lot of people who think that the Twilight books should have never been written. I even saw something with Doctor Who going back in time to stop me.
There's no denying that the world hasn't treated Stephenie Meyer with respect. This is what Robert Pattinson - the guy who owes his worldwide fame and approximately twelve gazillion dollars to Twilight - had to say about the books and the woman who wrote them:
"...when I read [Twilight], it seemed like... I was convinced Stephenie was convinced she was Bella and it was like it was a book that wasn't supposed to be published. It was like reading her sexual fantasy, especially when she said it was based on a dream and it was like, 'Oh I've had this dream about this really sexy guy,' and she just writes this book about it. Some things about Edward are so specific, I was just convinced - I was like, 'This woman is mad. She's completely mad and she's in love with her own fictional creation.'"
Classy!
I've never been a Twilight fan - I'm not a paranormal romance fan in general, particularly for YA. The whole Angel thing didn't work for me in Buffy, and it doesn't work for me now. And there are definitely some problematic elements to Twilight, particularly in the way that Bella allows herself to be treated and how she seems to derive all of her self-worth from being with Edward.
But on the other hand, those are issues I see a lot of other places as well. I certainly don't think we should condone the issues in Twilight, but holding up Stephenie Meyer as the Harbringer of All Literary Doom rather than as a symptom of a larger problem seems disingenuous at best.
Although the majority of consumers loved Twilight enough to make Stephenie Meyer rich many times over (and enough to make a whooooole lot of people rich off her coattails), anyone in any sort of position of power uniformly mocked it: talk show hosts, film critics, other writers. Twilight might not be a masterpiece of philosophical thought, but it's about as realistic and well-written as your average Tom Clancy or Clive Cussler novel. The only difference is, Twilight is an example of the consumer power of women and young girls who like romance rather than of men who like books about international nuclear threats.
I can think of a lot of reasons that Stephenie Meyer would want to leave behind the memory of being universally mocked for the sin of writing a romance that got too popular.
When I was four years old, the riding instructor told my parents, "If you let her ride now, she'll get bored with it and stop. I've seen it a million times. Better to wait a couple years and then give her lessons." But I'd wanted to ride since the first time my Dad set me on a horse's back at eighteen months old, so my parents put me in lessons anyway and led a dozing pony with me aboard in endless loops over uneven sawdust.
Someone asked me once why I wanted to ride in the first place, and I was totally stumped. Like with writing, I started doing it long before I thought about why I wanted to do it, or what I wanted out of it. I just knew what felt right and went for it.
At four and six and ten, going for what's right is as easy as red light or green light. You canter the horse or you don't. You finish ten pages even though your hands are cramping or you don't. You get back up after you fall or you don't.
When I got my first horse, it wasn't a My Friend Flicka decision. He was a powerful, well-bred Thoroughbred, very sweet-natured, and very cheap. Unfortunately there's no such thing as a free lunch, and he was also half-crazy due to some extremely poor previous treatment. I went in with both eyes wide open, fully aware of the fact that nobody else would even go near him. I called him Whirl, which only became ironic in retrospect. But in spite of the fact that sometimes I spent more time on the ground than on his back, I was positive that this would work out best for both of us. I had the patience to work him through his issues, and in return I would eventually get a strong, well-trained horse.
And it pretty much worked out that way! Pretty much.
After about five years of solid training, Whirl had put his fear behind him. He was bright-eyed and eager to please. He didn't bolt in panic at the first hint of confusion or surprise. Carrying a crop didn't make him blink an eye. He let me cross-tie him. We even went swimming, me on his back and him vaguely disgruntled about the whole venture.
But he never, ever lost his fear of jumping.
Even today I don't know exactly what the problem was. Jumping is a risk on the horse's part, yes, but so is swimming, or going down a steep hill, and Whirl never had issues with either of those things.
Oh, he would do it - we were jumping four feet by the time I stopped. But he was on edge and panicky every single time, with never the slightest hint of enjoyment. I'm not a starry-eyed believer in the loving bond between a horse and a rider acting as one yadda yadda, but most animals do appear to get a certain level of satisfaction out of performing a task well. They enjoy it the way that we enjoy going to the gym or playing an instrument. It's an effort, but a worthwhile one.
But no matter what I tried, Whirl never stopped being afraid of jumping.
The day I stopped was the day that I jumped a friend's horse and had the thought: "Wow, this is actually fun!" I realized that after years of work it wasn't improving for Whirl, and it was starting to ruin jumping for me. I never jumped him again.
For the past year I've been training a ginormous, totally green horse that I've nicknamed Giraffe because seriously, ginormous. At first he acted out, used to riders that he could push around by bucking and rearing and generally being a pain in the arse, but once I established myself as the one in command, he settled right down into a surprisingly good nature. (And no, for the record, establishing myself as the one in command doesn't involve lassos or spurs or whatever. It does involve a lot of transitions between gaits to muscle him up, and an awful lot of time patiently pushing him back into place every single time he moves in the stall once I've told him to stay.)
Since I gained his trust, Giraffe's come so much farther so much faster than I could have imagined. He went from running in circles in his stall and bucking when asked for just a walk, to me being able to walk away for minutes at a time with his stall door open without him moving a muscle. A few weeks ago he walked up onto a raised platform just because I told him it's okay.
And then tonight he went and blew past all my expectations again.
He's definitely old enough and strong enough to jump by now, but nobody had tried it yet. We were doing exercises in the ring and I thought... hey. Why not just try?
(I have that thought a lot, truthfully. Sometimes it works out better than others.)
So I dragged out a line of light plastic boxes - much bulkier than the normal poles, but I figured if were gonna do this, we might as well do it by getting Giraffe used to the idea of going over something substantial. Just a foot in height; short enough to walk over with ease, but as with many things, it's all mental.
I let Giraffe have a sniff at the jump, and then hopped on board after tightening the girth and raising the stirrups. I could feel some of that old tension rising up. Whirl would hate this.
Why not just try?
I walked Giraffe up to the jump without rushing; I let him pause in front of it but then urged him onward. Yes, this is what I want.
And I kinda wish there had been someone there with a camera, because damned if he didn't raise up one leg and lift a single hoof out and over the barrier, hovering it there in a silent question. Really?
I bit back laughter and urged him onward. Yes, really.
Bless his soul, Giraffe set that hoof down and stepped awkwardly over the jump. I praised him the whole time. (Some horses are praise-sensitive; some aren't. This one definitely is.)
We did the same thing a second time with more confidence, and then another time in each direction. Then we trotted at it; no big deal. Then we cantered at it - more of a challenge to time correctly, but I've been doing this for a long while, so Giraffe never even realized I was setting him up to go over the jump right.
All of this without a single refusal or attempt to shy away. It was beyond anything I could've hoped for. After we'd cantered the jump in both directions I stood there and stared at it thoughtfully. If he could do this...
Why not just try?
I got off and went to the jump and reorganized it so that now it stood 18" high. Still a joke; something a horse can easily walk over. But it's all about perspective, and this was a test of Giraffe's. The average person can, with extremely rudimentary instruction, dive off a 10m platform with extremely low risk of injury. It doesn't mean those 10 meters don't look awfully high.
I got back on, shoved away the part of me that was waiting for Whirl to bolt, and aimed Giraffe at the jump.
As far as I can tell, he didn't even notice the height had changed. I told him to jump, and he did. After so many years of it being so hard, it was suddenly that simple.
I leaned back to attempt a decent picture, and Giraffe
attempted a thorough investigation of my Coke.
Sometimes things don't come to us the way we think they will, but it doesn't mean they'll never come at all. I never in a million years would've guessed that a green problem child like Giraffe would unquestioningly hand over something I'd been wanting for so long.
I'm going to try to remember this, and try not to panic when I don't get what I want or work for. Not every setback is a roadblock. Sometimes you're just going the long way around.
CASE FILE: DA VINCI CODE
I know I'm supposed to be an adult and all, but my Dad is the cheapest god in the universe.
Still can't find a job that isn't working for my parents, so I went out on another assignment as a muse. This muse thing is really not all it's cracked up to be - look, people should never paint in blood, and if they do, I should never have to see it. Especially not old people. Naked old people.
Why is this my life?
I swooped in on the scene and honestly, I was mad as hell. This woman Sophie, she's a policewoman and a cryptographer - people sure seem to hire her! But there's this mystery in full swing (a gross mystery with blood and old people, but still) and she's just following around after this guy who's droning on about codes and people getting married. He was quite the lecturer. If you can get a job lecturing, he would have it.
"Why don't you start cryptographing things?" I asked Sophie. I would have nudged her shoulder but I was worried about bloodstains. They do not come out of white togas, let me tell you. And I have to wash all my own clothes, which is very annoying when you have to wash them in the river. Ghosts are always popping out of the Styx and whining about their deadness level, which is definitely not my problem.
"I'd love to," Sophie said with a shrug. "But I'm only allotted one cool action for the entire plot, so I've gotta help this guy escape. Then I'll get rescued a bunch."
Reader, I facepalmed. "You're a policewoman! Go police things!"
"Sorry, what was that?"she said, her steely gazed tempered by an everything else as soft and sweet as fluffy kittens. "I was listening to this guy decipher all the codes. Doing that while looking feminine but not wearing makeup is taking up all my attention."
At that point I was very annoyed so I stole her cell phone and left. What?! It's department-issued for her. She'll get another.
I, on the other hand, am stuck with a cell phone bill that my Dad won't pay, and I don't have any future French dollars. Life sucks.
The only thing worse than being unemployed is working for your dad.
This should never have happened to me. I've got capability up to my ears! I had the best tutors in Olympus - first I had Chiron neighing at me for like twelve years, and then Daddy said that if Aristotle was good enough for Alexander, he was good enough for me. Even back then I thought I had spent enough time in school, but Daddy was like, twelve years studying under a guy with hooves does not a well-rounded education make. Whatever.
Anyway, I FINALLY get out from under my parents thumb, right? And it was beyond necessary because they fight so much that they ought to sell tickets. Blah blah cheating, blah blah encouraging cultists, blah blah please just let the Titans escape because I cannot take this another second.
I was so excited to finally be out on my own. An adult! I go wandering around Greece thinking that maybe I could be a philosopher, or a senator, or even scribing would be okay...
And then I find out that the unemployment rate for educated women in ancient Greece is like, ALL OF THE PERCENTS.
Eventually I ran out of mortal money and had to come home with my toga tucked between my legs, and don't think my sisters have let it go for a single second. "Oh, the family business not good enough for you? Don't want to inspire great works of art? Have to live on Mount Olympus and eat ambrosia? Thalia, have you gotten any messenger pigeons back from those resume tablets you sent out?"
I'm gonna make Puck turn them all into the asses they are.
What I'm saying is, it's not like I wanted to be a muse. I never claimed to be all that good at it. So what happened next is not even my fault.
I did my whole little [TRADE SECRET OF THE GODS] thing and next thing I know I'm in Thornfield on my very first assignment going, "Jane, honey, have you thought about this? Because gotta tell you, this guy is kind of sketch."
Jane was super cute in that way where she wasn't exactly beautiful, but she had urnfuls of personality. She could have used some fashion advice, but I kept that to myself.
"I believe you may exaggerate a little. Mr. Rochester is somewhat... unique, it is true, but I do not believe he means any harm. It is simply his way."
"Girl, his house has caught fire like eight times in three months, and he flirts by dressing up like an old gypsy woman. That is not the behavior of a normal person. He's real hot tho."
"You see?!"
Erato and Melpomene have been harping on me ever since I got back, but to Hades with them. I think Jane's gonna be fine.
I've seen The Hobbit about four times now, and I squealed out loud in the theater when the dwarves sang and the Wargs showed up.
So please, nobody come after me with an axe when I tell you that The Hobbit is a terrible adaptation.
Is it a terrible *movie*? Well... I like it, and not in an ironic or snarky way. I genuinely enjoy the movie. But does that make it good? Not really.
See, the problem with The Hobbit is that all of its good parts come directly from the book that it adapts. Which makes me think that it would've been a great movie IF THEY'D JUST STOPPED PADDING THE DAMN THING.
The Lord of the Rings was a cultural phenomenon that changed the way movie franchises were created, sold, and marketed. You could argue that Harry Potter also helped, but I think the main way that Harry Potter contributed was as backup, to confirm that LOTR wasn't a fluke. Because the Harry Potter movies suck (sorry people who like them, they do!). LOTR is a series of skillful, masterful movies that are both fun and emotionally effective. It's hard to argue with their merit.
The Hobbit is their successor in a whole lot of bad ways.
Right now we're living in the age of the superhero. We've mined so much material from comic books that we've actually created a hydra of Marvel movies that operate together as well as separately (at least you brought me Jeremy Renner, Avengers).
Superhero movies are a testament to brand name recognition and the hesitance of investors in uncertain economic times. New scripts are unknowns, you have to take a gamble that they'll catch audience eyes. But known franchises? Hey, you've got a built in audience! Why would you pass that up?
And so we come to The Hobbit, which has been stretched out of a relatively simple, jovial children's book into the bastard son of LOTR, the Silmarilion, and studio executives hissing, "MOOOOOOAAAAAARRRRR."
Here's the plot of The Hobbit: Dwarves want gold, so Gandalf helps them put together a team and they traipse across Middle Earth to find it.
Here's the plot of the first Hobbit movie: Dwarves want gold, so Gandalf helps them put together a team, but Thorin's whole family fell to gold-lust and got involved in a blood feud with this one bigass orc who comes after them right now because shut up he was busy for the last 50 years, but also The Dark Is Rising in the forest of this wizard so he's coming after Gandalf to get help with the Necromancer and *pant pant pant*
The best parts of The Hobbit movie are taken straight out of the book, and that's not just the nostalgia goggles talking. The problem with adding in Bigass Revenge Orc and Necromancer and Totally Not Evil Saruman is that these things distract from the goal of the journey, which is to reclaim the homeland of the dwarves. In LOTR, the goal is to kill the ring. We split our focus and follow the plight of the peoples of Middle Earth in order to understand WHY this ring has to be destroyed. The split focus is necessary in order to give Frodo's quest weight.
In The Hobbit, why is our focus divided? Well, you could say that Bigass Revenge Orc helps develop the characterization of Thorin. But why? Thorin is the leader. He wants to get his home back because he's king. We don't need another reason. We understand the quest for a rightful throne.
And as for the Necromancer, Radagast, and the Not Evil Council, they affect the company of Thorin and Co. not at all. Their sole result is to act as a prequel to films that have already been released. They serve no narrative purpose whatsoever.
Peter Jackson split The Hobbit into three films for the sole purpose of making money, and possibly to add some bonus geekery, and the film is infinitely weaker for it. There was no narrative purpose to the changes they made. So yes, The Hobbit is a bad adaptation, because it is not an adaptation of the The Hobbit! It's an adaptation of The Hobbit + The Silmarilion + Some Shit We Added About Dwarf Wars and Single Revenge Orcs + Studio Greed.
The Seeker is the DOA nominal adaptation of Susan Cooper's famous The Dark Is Rising young adult fantasy novels. The screenwriter they hired "didn't like fantasy". The story was immediately changed both for reasons (to make it more like Harry Potter) and for ...reasons (she mentions Vikings! Let's add in a ton of Vikings! The kids love Vikings, right?). The main characters were changed from English to American (even though the movie takes place in an English village), the plot was torn apart for no clear reason, and even the name was changed.
Odds are pretty good you've never heard of it, and there's a reason for that. The author hated it, the movie bombed immediately upon release, and it proudly holds a 14% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes.
As much as it pains me to use it as a (slightly) more positive example, while Transformers is also a bad adaptation, Transformers is aided by the fact that there had already been several different incarnations of the source material. It operated in a state of flux, so nobody was too surprised when Michael Bay took what he wanted and threw out the rest. But I ask you this: why did Michael Bay make a Transformers movie and turn it into a PG-13 CGI actionfest? Was it because he loved the source material? Hell no. It was to cash in on that sweet, sweet brand name recognition.
Probably some people can change things purely for Teh Profit and reap the rewards ( in fact, Jim Butcher stated about his hugely successful Dresden Files series that, "When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files."). But generally speaking, I think it's almost a guarantee that if you change something solely because you want to cash in on a trend or stretch out the material, it's going to fail, or at the very least be unrecognizable as an adaptation.
I think that we can all agree that when you adapt something, you don't want the adaptation to be identical. That would be purposeless. You want to make slight changes in order to further explore the source material (the different interpretation of the central relationship in The Eagle book and movie) or open understanding of the material to a wider audience (Lord of the Rings).
It's really difficult to succeed at this in a way that will both delight fans of the source material and draw in new fans of your adaptation. Luckily, there's thousands of ways to fail!
Most books or movies have a few key themes or ideas. For instance, The Chronicles of Narnia = Jesus is Awesome and His Dark Materials = Atheism is Awesome.
Hello, boring children. I think I'd rather just sit through
a sermon than have to follow you lot.
Both of these movies fail in similar ways. Love it or hate it, both of these books are all about their respective messages, and both of their movie adaptations were afraid of treading too heavily. So they softened the messages, focused on the characters, and thereby weakened the story. In a story that's all about a theme or idea, the characters tend to be more symbols than actual personalities. If you try to tread lightly on the message, then you darn well better beef up the characters.
If Narnia had tried to give its characters personalities past "young and nice", "older and nice", "boy and nice", "sulking wonder", it might have worked. But they chose to stick with the book "personalities", when those characters are basically symbols. Susan is simply not as nuanced or interesting as a crownless king who spends 80 years playing in the mud rather than trying to get his throne back.
Then there's movies that try to explore different aspects of the source material, like Tim Burton's adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Yeah... this poster is pretty accurate.
While the book and the 1971 movie are Charlie's story, the 2005 movie focuses on Willy Wonka himself. Rather than being an entertainingly vicious morality tale about the boy equivalent of Cinderella, the 2005 movie focuses on... Willy Wonka's daddy issues.
(P.S. Tim Burton, you should get those looked at.)
It's too bad, because it's clear that a lot of time and money and love went into the 2005 movie - the sets are gorgeous, the actors are carefully directed, and there's a lot of neat twists like having each musical number come from a different decade. But unfortunately, the film fails, because the movie simply does not work as Willy Wonka's story.
Part of the problem is that Johnny Depp's stammering, serial-killer-grin performance just isn't all that likable. But a bigger issue is that the mechanism for the story is Charlie going through all these tests to see if he's worthy. So now we've divided our focus for the movie - we've got a saintly kid going through tests to determine his worthiness, and a cheshire smile weirdo freaking out over his daddy issues. The tension in the movie is divided in half: will Charlie prevail, and will Wonka spank his inner muppet? This wouldn't necessarily be a huge problem if we liked or cared about both characters; unfortunately, we care about neither.
The original movie/book worked so well because we had interestingly awful characters failing the tests around Charlie while Wonka was fascinatingly menacing in the background. The 2005 movie zooms the lens in on Wonka, but strips him of his interest by making him quirky instead of menacing, and delving into a past in a way we never wanted to. Less is more, filmmakers, when are ya gonna learn that? After you've remade every horror movie ever, I'm guessing.
And then there's movies that try hard, but completely miss the boat in every direction. So how about that John Carter? Aka, the biggest box office disaster since Cutthroat Island (another movie you've likely never heard of, that looks like a Pirates of the Caribbean knock-off but was made almost a decade earlier).
John Carter is interesting, because it doesn't fail so much as an adaptation as it just fails as a movie.
How interesting. A dude on a thing.
There's definitely a marketing element to the "where did we go wrong" - - John Carter? Who? Release a show named Sherlock and we get it, but John Carter doesn't have the same cultural resonance that it had 60 years ago, and Disney, you should have known that. I know that non-horror science fiction movies are generally about as successful as The Host, but at least John Carter of Mars TELLS us something. Hell, you couldn't go with A Confederate on Mars? Something, anything!
But I think the real problem is that A Princess of Mars (the book this movie was adapted from) simply was never a very compelling story to begin with. It got popular because it was in the right place at the right time. It was one of the first planetary romances (that term, uh, doesn't mean exactly what it sounds like) and had the proper "swashbuckling":"cool space shit" ratio to keep audiences happy. It didn't get famous for being good, it got famous for being first-ish. So as a movie, well, it's another "white guy stumbles into a war and wins it for the natives" story. And, uh, we have a lot of those.
And then there's movies that fail completely to have any understanding at all of their source material. Let's look at Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging, an adaptation of a YA novel. Here's a quote from the source material:
“Looking out of the window at the infinite sky, I prayed out, 'Dear Baby Jesus, I am sorry for my sin, even though I do not know what they are, which seems a bit unfair if it is going to be held against me. But that is your way. And I am not questioning your wisdomosity. In future, however, would it be possible for my life to be not so entirely crap? Thank you.”
Now here's a scene from the movie:
Oh. Oh, wow. Oh... ow, actually.That was physically painful.
The book barely has a plot; it's the diary entries of a boy-crazy and completely self-centered teen girl. It follows her for a year... and that's pretty much it. The book's strength is in its absolutely hysterical prose. The main character's observations on life are hilarious and memorable.
The main characters do fairly closely
resemble their literary counterparts.
That's about the highest praise
I'm able to give this movie.
The movie is... I don't even know what this is. It's like a Disney made-for-TV movie where even Disney said, "We have too much shame to air this." The movie is true to the plot of the book (such as it is), but instead of expanding on or even using the hilarious source material, attempts to amuse us through humiliation. The girls in the books embarrass themselves occasionally, yes, but the humor comes from what they learn (or choose not to learn) from their experiences.
Love can't always win the day, and it certainly doesn't always make a good movie. (Try again, Tim Burton, there's always Alice in Wonder... oh.) Complete disinterest towards your source material probably won't, either. The thing is, it's always easier to fail than it is to succeed.
I think the key may be in understanding what makes the source material work. We love endless incarnations of Sherlock Holmes because that relationship between a cold, brilliant man and his loyal companion is so very compelling. You can interpret this any number of ways and we'll be interested. Sherlock Holmes is a fairly easy hook to get right, and so you see a lot of at least decent interpretations of it. But then there's movies like The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen that overload on empty plot and CGI rather than delving into our characters, which were the whole hook to begin with!
Adaptations are like any art: you have to understand the rules in order to break them. Understand how a story works, and you'll be able to rearrange it into something captivating. Fail to understand that, and you get...
If a story is good, why re-tell it? We've already read the story of Jane Eyre: why make not just one, but literally dozens of movies re-telling the same story?
For that matter, why take a concept and move it around in space or time so that you can re-tell it that way, a la the zillion and one Pride and Prejudice re-tellings? Why not just tell your own story, if you're going to change things anyway? Why tread old ground, when people could just read the original?
This is a gross generalization (as all generalizations are), but I think we can generally group adaptations into one of three groups:
1) Did it for the love - Wanted to explore different aspects of the story, or wanted to help it reach a broader audience.
2) Did it for the money - MAKE IT RAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN
3) I love money, and I... money love? This thing I love is fantastic, but I'm willing to futz with it a bit to get butts in seats. I'll get this thing out there, and they can go read the source material later.
Is there anything wrong with wanting to make money off an endeavor? Of course not! Some really fantastic books and movies and art have come out of somebody who really wants to make a buck and happens to have a story to tell.
But when it comes to adaptation, the intent of the creator is going to necessarily transform the approach that creator takes. Lord of the Rings is a perfect example - while everyone involved with the project clearly loved the material, they were willing to make changes to adapt the material to the perceived needs of the audience, rather than stay as faithful as possible and expect the audience to keep up. The story sprang from a desire to put Tolkien's work on film, but a number of issues that the creators struggled with had nothing at all to do with the source material - look at Arwen, Warrior Princess getting put in... taken out... put in again... taken out...
We almost had this instead of Fainting Couch Arwen.
The focus of your storytelling matters, which is why we're looking at them this way. But these aren't judgments. Passion is no guarantee of a good movie.
Oh Will, you and your
questionable career
choices.
During this little miniseries I'm going to refer mainly to movies as examples because any given movie I mention is going to have been seen by more of you than any one book I want to talk about. So! What should I start with - the good, the bad, or alien robots from outer space with inexplicable bodily functions? Tell me in the comments!
When I was very, very young, my father handed me a copy of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit. I looked at the relatively thick book in my hands, and then back at him.
"You cut up the cover," I said in mild horror. (It would take me until college to become halfways comfortable with marking my books.)
He nodded. "I want you to imagine the characters on your own. I don't want you to just look at the picture, I want you to do the work," he said, and left me to my reading.
I shrugged it off and carried on as kids do, but in a lot of ways that set the tone for my future as a reader.
From that time forward, my dad would give me books and expect me to discuss my thoughts with him. He gave me classics - Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Thoreau - but also more recent books from the likes of Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, and Madeleine L'Engle, just to name a few. After the first book, he never cut the cover out again. He set a high standard and expected me to reach it. So I did.
Because of the breadth of material I was exposed to, I developed a passion for material I most likely never would have picked up on my own. My opinions didn't always align with my dad's (I ate up Heinlein, Card, and Twain, but couldn't stand Dickens, Thoreau, or L'Engle). When I was a teenager he grumbled that the only real fantasy was Tolkien and everything else was just derivative as he got out his wallet to pay for my copies of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Anne Rice. We occasionally found common ground over books like Black Hawk Down and The Iliad.
So when I see a desperate attempt to keep scifi/fantasy as an old boys' club, I know the truth about what literary discourse can be. There's simply no reason that men can't choose to be considerate and welcoming of female science fiction fans. A Y chromosome doesn't imbue you with the analysis gene, and it's not a get out of jail free card. The men that endlessly defend their own sexism could choose not to defend it. They could choose to focus on women's opinions, rather than their appearances.
A lot of the time, we tend to write narrators whose experiences roughly mirror our own. That's why there's so many "I thought I was ordinary but then found out I was THE CHOSEN ONE alllll along" narratives. It's intuitive to the point that sometimes we end up doing it by accident - lookin' at you, Ian Fleming, because James Bond is about as Scottish as a kangaroo.
But what happens when you want to write about someone whose experiences don't resemble yours in the slightest?
I actually think sometimes this isn't as big a deal in fantasy and sci-fi. Because, sure, your MC might be a bipedal green half-cat-half-human (or, more commonly, a nominally middle class human used to hanging out with bipedal green half-cat-half-humans). But you get to make up the whole of that world, so you can make up circumstances that feel right to you.
Then there's contemporary fiction with not even a hint of the speculative. And that, to me, is where things get really tricky.
Because I can yodel on all day about the malfunctioning magic of my half-sprite hero, but when you're talking about a person who has experiences that real people will relate to and be able to verify or dismiss as outrageous... that's scary.
I prefer to sit at the keyboard and smile as the words stream out of my fingers like those zoom lines in Tron.
But my last novel (coming soooooon...) has not been like that. It's been a lot more of sitting and agonizing over each. 500. Word. Increment. Because this heroine whose experiences and character are so different from mine, what would she think? What would she do?
There's nothing wrong with writing what you know. I'll be back to it shortly and gratefully. But, as difficult as this has been, I'm glad I did it. I think I'm a better writer for it.
P.S. The Hard and the Easy is also the name of an album by Great Big Sea! Have a song that iTunes tells me I have replayed an embarrassing amount of times.
Let's get this weekend started right! I have here a short story of the Arthurian sort for your amusement. Something just for fun. If you like (or hate) Lancelot and/or Merlin and/or Elaine of Astolat, you may get a kick out of it. Or if you just like strong, tricksy ladies (inspired by historically strong, tricksy ladies) and stalwart knights!
Not quite so much of this, though it is very pretty.
And now we come to the end of this extended cut of sacrificial kingship as a concept, what happened this got so out of control. It's just... I just love this theme so much, and, and, I got carried away, and...
Hokay, so. When last we left off, we'd established that the idea of a king as a noble leader willing to sacrifice himself for his people is fundamentally rooted in our worldwide mythology. That's why we all love characters like Aragorn, who are willing to sacrifice not only their lives but also their personal happiness for their people.
That's all fine and well in a fantasy setting where you have pure evil and pure good, but is it really relevant in a modern-day context? Does the divine right of kingship have a place in the modern world?
Let's talk about Tom Bombadil for a hot second.
He's of the jolly, beardy sort.
In case you've forgotten him, or never read The Lord of the Rings (since they wisely left him out of the movies), Tom Bombadil is the most powerful character in LOTR. Gandalf and Elrond and everybody says so. He could hold the One Ring forever and never be corrupted by it. And if Middle Earth fell to Sauron, he would be the very last to fall.
But none of that matters, because it's not in his nature to fight. He will not take a stand against Sauron, and therefore all the power in the world doesn't matter. Lesser men are forced to do the things he technically could do - but won't.
In ye oldeny days and even now, leadership and goodness are often conflated with genealogy. There's a few reasons for this - one is that when kings were running things you needed justification for their rule and you wanted to be reassured that the right guy was in power. And also, it's just easy. Heyyy, this guy is awesome because God made him born into this family, therefore he was MEANT to do this job. Abracadabra.
I like to think we've made a bit of progress. Leadership abilities are not restricted to a particular gene pool - or a particular gender, for that matter.
Instead, I propose the notion of sacrificial leadership. Where the strength of character to lead others and be willing to sacrifice yourself (or at least a part of yourself) for them comes from within whatever you are.
A really great example of this is Katniss in The Hunger Games. Don't worry, no spoilers, although it applies to later events in the series too... But all we really need to look at is the very beginning.
They’re not our kids, of course. But they might as well be. Gale’s two little brothers and a sister. Prim. And you may as well throw in our mothers, too, because how would they live without us? Who would fill those mouths that are always asking for more? With both of us hunting daily, there are still nights when game has to be swapped for lard or shoelaces or wool, still nights when we go to bed with our stomachs growling.
When her father dies, twelve-year-old Katniss chooses not to give up. She chooses to provide for the sister she loves and the mother she doesn't. She puts their welfare ahead of her own, feeds them when she can't feed herself. And of course, we all know that she makes the ultimate sacrifice for Prim.
“Prim!” The strangled cry comes out of my throat, and my muscles begin to move again. “Prim!” I don’t need to shove through the crowd. The other kids make way immediately allowing me a straight path to the stage. I reach her just as she is about to mount the steps. With one sweep of my arm, I push her behind me.
“I volunteer!” I gasp. “I volunteer as tribute!”
This doesn't only apply to life-or-death situations. In my upcoming book, the hero is a rich CEO who runs the family business out of duty. He knows that he has the means to employ a large number of people and to make positive changes in the world, so he feels that it would be irresponsible to step down and just dabble in hobbies and have fun for the rest of his life.
So yes, as much as I have always loved the theme of sacrificial kingship in literature/film, I think we've moved past the idea of divine right. Nobody deserves anything because they happened to be born in a certain situation. But life isn't about what we deserve. Life isn't fair. We have to make the best of what we have and the best of what's inside us. We can use the term sacrificial leadership to encompass heroes and heroines both past and present. Some people are born leaders, and (at least in literature) in order to complete their character arc they need to embrace that ability in themselves and be willing to sacrifice themselves (or part of themselves) for the greater good.
Like Aragorn.
Tolkien once killed a man in an outlining contest.
So! Now that we've gone into the background of modern thinking about mythologic archetypes, we can talk about two particular concepts: the sacred king and the maimed king.
The sacred king was the cornerstone of Frazer's theories about ancient civilizations. In his work, he postulated that in the past, the life and eventual death of kings represented and growth and death of the vegetation, a "dying and reviving god". This human king provided for his people for a time and then eventually was sacrificed back to the earth. (I have some problems with this theory... namely that back in ye oldeny times most people were nomadic and didn't do a ton of agriculture... but this is about lit theory and therefore my historical issues with it really aren't relevant.) In any case, this connects to the fact that both in ancient and far more modern history, some kings are viewed as sacred beings. This could mean that the king was credited with good fortune. Or it could mean that your people view you as responsible for their well-being and sacrifice you in order to get a better harvest next year.
The maimed king (also known as the Fisher King, as he was referred to in T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land) seems to come from Arthurian legend. In the tales, this king was wounded so that he suffered from impotence, and his lack of fertility affected the earth around him and turned it into a barren wasteland. This legend is super freaking weird in all of its incarnations (there's a version where this king asks his followers to cut off his head and then his head keeps talking and keeps them all company on their trip back to Britain idk idk guys the Celts were weird). In any case, when purehearted people eventually come fetch the Grail he was hanging onto and this somehow heals him, his restoration represents the growth of vegetation in spring. Rebirth, if you like.
SO. These are cool and all, but not terribly interesting concepts unless you're super into agriculture and ye olde civilizations that may or may not have been nomadic. So why talk about them at all?
Because I think that these are necessary concepts if you want to understand what sacrificial kingship is and why it works. The idea of a king being responsible for the fate of his people, and being willing to lay down his life for their good, is deeply embedded in not just one culture, but essentially every culture. While history tells us that kings are flawed and often corrupt, our legends and mythology tell us a very different tale. Belief in the goodness and rightness of our kings is practically part of our DNA.
It's why characters like Aragorn work in fiction. We see from his introduction in The Fellowship of the Ring that although Aragorn is a good leader and has royal blood, he has no desire to be king and happily plays around in the mud while the stewards of Gondor do their thing. (Yes, I know that the films gave him all this inner conflict about being Isildur's heir, because of course if your great-great-great-great-great-whatever was susceptible to corruption, so are you, because that is totally how ancestry works. This isn't in the books and it was stupid anyway so I don't care.)
The books aren't overt about it because they aren't nearly as focused on Aragorn as the movies are, but we see clearly that Aragorn is happy in his current circumstances and views kingship as a burden. There is nothing kingship could give him that he wants. He's used to living as free as it's possible for a man to be, as a nomad following whims of the moment. Kingship is a cage - as Eowyn later notes.
In fact, in the books Aragorn proposes to Arwen and she accepts, but Elrond forbids them to marry until Aragorn is king of Gondor. And Aragorn does nothing. He loves Arwen, but he loves his freedom more. You could argue that he doesn't want to upset the political situation with things being kinda shaky in Middle Earth, but know who's on the throne as steward? Denethor.
This guy is definitely a savvy political player; I foresee no problems at all.
While in the movies Aragorn has to achieve self-actualization and gives himself lots of hugs, in the books Aragorn's arc is him eventually deciding to put the needs of others before his own needs and becoming king despite his own wishes. We get a bunch of lines like, "I have come because Gandalf begs me to do so." and, The hobbits still remained in Minas Tirith, with Legolas and Gimli; for Aragorn was loth for the fellowship to be dissolved. "At last all such things must end, but I would have you wait a little while longer." Also this: "I have," said Strider. "I dwelt there once, and still I return when I may. There my heart is; but it is not my fate to sit in peace, even in the fair house of Elrond."
And while in the movies Boromir is all tetchy about GONDOR HAS NO KING; GONDOR NEEDS NO KING; EFF YOU ASSATHORN, in the books Boromir flat-out begs Aragorn to come fight for Gondor as its king. "I was not sent to beg any boon, but to seek only the meaning of a riddle," answered Boromir proudly. "Yet we are hard pressed, and the Sword of Elendil would be a help beyond our hope - if such a thing could indeed return out of the shadows of the past."
And later... "Mayhap the Sword-that-was-Broken may still stem the tide - if the hand that wields it has inherited not an heirloom only, but the sinews of the Kings of Men."
"Who can tell?" said Aragorn. "But we will put it to the test one day."
"May the day not be too long delayed," said Boromir. "For though I do not ask for aid, we need it. It would comfort us to know that others fought also with all the means that they have."
The ending in the book is not a happy one for Aragorn. He is forced to take up his right of kingship and do his best by the people of Gondor, no matter what he would rather his fate be (and, just to rub it in, Gondor does have peace under his reign as he sits on the throne - just like he claimed his fate wasn't). It's not a tragedy of course, but his happiness is qualified by the fact that he'd rather be somewhere else doing something else. BUT he's a good king doing right by his people, which takes precedence over personal happiness.
But what about divine right of kingship and that whole ickyness, you may ask? Does blood (either through ancestry or sometimes trial by combat) really justify kingship? Does it matter?
