1.

If I were really clever, I’d call this post something like “Sailing into the New Year” or something, I dunno, adventury. But I don’t feel up to building that sort of extended metaphor right now. Feel free to imagine it for yourself.

So, I got the Lego Pirates of the Caribbean game for Wii* this Christmas, which inspired me to force my children** to watch the original movie with me in the break between Christmas and New Years. The next day, I kid you not, I saw on the news that one of the ships used in the movie was going to be tied up in Newport Beach for a few weeks, and open for tours. My mom inherited a love for tall ships from my dad, so it was no great effort to convince her to come along. So Saturday, we all piled into the car and headed for Newport.

The Lady Washington, which played the Intrepid in the movie (the ship that Jack and Will stole), was tied up alongside the Hawaiian Chieftain at the Newport Sea Base—literally side-by-side, so that you had to walk across the one to get on the other.

It surprised me how crowded the ships were, though I’m sure the effect was intensified by how small the ships actually are. It’s kind of amazing to think about people actually crossing oceans on these tiny matchboxes. The original Lady Washington (of which this is a modern replica) was the first American ship to round the Horn, and it would take me all of thirty steps to walk from end to end.***

But even though the visitors were packed in elbow-to-elbow on deck, it was in a way reassuring to see so many people with an interest in history. Maybe it was the appeal of the “movie star” ship that brought them to the dock, but they must of have nevertheless been inspired by the adventuring spirit of long ago.

2.

The top photo is mostly the Hawaiian Chieftain, though you can see masts and spars and rigging from the Lady Washington behind her.

These pictures kind of suck, because it was so crowded it was hard to position myself for good shots, let alone people-free shots. Plus, since I haven’t been using my camera a lot lately, I totally forgot to check the ISO and ended up shooting them at 800, which is way to sensitive for noon-time photography. Even the good shots are full of noise that I don’t have the post-processing mojo to get rid of. I filtered and actioned the heck out of them in order to disguise the imperfections.

Still, it feels good to start the new year off with some new photos. Next ones will be better.

* The Lego games for Wii are my favorites, as they don’t require an excessive amount of manual dexterity, it doesn’t really matter if you die a lot, and bashing up the scenery is an excellent stress reliever. The complete Star Wars remains my favorite, though POTC was fun until it developed a glitch. I am keeping my fingers desperately crossed that the recent deal to produce Lord of the Rings Lego means there will be a video game down the line, too.
** I only force my kids to do things I know they’ll enjoy, and of course they did.
*** Of course who would walk? They all swung on the rigging naturally! Swash and buckle!

Keeping up with the Joneses. Natasha, my baby sister (who has five babies of her own), blogs about her parenting joys and challenges and about how her faith helps her through. Personally, I don’t know how she finds time to write, let alone write so well.

Excellent Mistakes! My oldest sister, Stephanie, shares some thoughts about education, from her long experience as a teacher and school administrator in the private school arena. She’s only posted a few times, so go encourage her to write more!

…In Transition. And finally there’s Maureen, Stephanie’s wife, who has recently completed seminary studies and is awaiting ordination in the UCC. She’s really one of the most eloquent writers out there, and it’s always a treat to read her posts about her journey.

My sister Melissa also kept a blog for a short while…until she discovered Facebook! Ah, the allure of the status update, death to all coherent thought. I’m sure my blog suffers from this too!

And while I’m on the subject, my daughter Anna has a blog of her own, where she hopes to share her writing efforts. (She has not, as yet, completed any posts.) Is 10 years old too young for a blog? Well, I’ve put my foot down about Facebook: not until she’s 16! Of course, by that time something new will have come around, and Facebook will have become the new MySpace. I just hope they still have Castleville…

But first, since it’s the holiday season (and one that will be very tight around my household this year) I thought it was time to point to the places I’ve got stuff for sale online.

In my CafePress shop, you can find cards, ornaments, and stockings printed with my original Holiday Tree design. There are also t-shirts and sweatshirts with the Mythic Firebrid—maybe a gift for someone you know?

And at RedBubble, there are cards and prints available from some of my photos, including this lovely holiday image:

In fact, if there are any photos on this site, on my deviantArt account, or in my Flickr stream that you’d like to purchase as a print or card, I can make it available. Just ping me with what you want and I’ll set it up for you to order. Framed art photos make great gifts! And personally I think these gerbera pictures would make a neat set of note cards.

Unfortunately, I don’t have anything new to offer this year. The last six months in particular have been a creative dud. In fact, I noticed the other day that there is actually dust on my camera, which distresses me to no end. It turns out I may have a little extra time next week, so I’m resolved to head out…somewhere. Anywhere. Got to recapture that creative spirit.

At any rate, I have had a lot of odd jobs through the years, many of which don’t make it onto my professional resume because they don’t directly contribute to my intended career path. I decided to make a list of them here and (to make it a little more interesting) to try to determine one constructive lesson I’ve carried away from each job. In fact, I have listed them in order of “most useful”—at least as far as I got. Towards the bottom of the list it got darn near impossible to come up with anything practical I learned.

1. presser at dry cleaner - how to properly iron a shirt or pair of pants
2. card store clerk – how to do the tissue right in a gift bag
3. babysitter – basic kid care (this might be higher, except that I never took care of babies, so was clueless when it came to diapers, etc.)
4. cafeteria food worker/dishwasher – how to cut up a tomato
5. daycamp counselor – more basic kid care, plus CPR/first aid basics, plus butt ball
6. slide projectionist – the value of thank you gifts
7. university extension office admin – the value of a good work environment
8. heraldry salesperson – how to make a sales pitch (even if I’m not very good at it still)
9. amusement park photographer – tell people, don’t ask; don’t give them the opportunity to say no*
10. bookstore clerk – how to be pleasant even when they’re not
11. film company intern – why the hell would anyone want to work in Hollywood?
12. amusement park ride operator – thank god this was only a summer job
13. probation department transcriptionist – the importance of ergonomics
14. library assistant (various locations) – um, Dewey Decimal vs. Library of Congress?
15. census worker – I’ve got nothing
16. public guardian office receptionist – …
17. corporate admin assistant (various locations) – nope, nothing
18. mall office receptionist – I don’t even remember what I did here
19. Jaguar dealership service secretary – I still like Jaguars**
20. video store clerk – yup, nothing

So that’s me, going back before high school even. What about you? What odd jobs have you had, and what lessons have they taught? Share!
* Actually, I could stand to ponder the extension of this lesson into other realms more thoroughly.
** Not a practical lesson at all.

(Comment there, if you please!)

A Dance with Dragons
George R.R. Martin
After a five year wait, my enthusiasm for this book was sharpened to a fine point by the HBO series that finished airing just weeks before its release.* I reread the first four books in the intervening weeks and plunged into the new one as soon as it was available.

Sadly, the book was a huge letdown. While Martin is skilled at creating compelling characters and dramatically interesting scenes that keep you locked in the moment, there was a lot of wheel spinning here. 1000+ pages of wheel spinning. People going a lot of places, but never getting there. Waiting for things to happen, but they never do. Gratuitious violence, sex and death that just doesn’t make sense to the plot. And as a feminist I have some serious issues with the increasing sexism and misogyny in the series, which I plan on addressing more fully later.

I’ve been reading Martin’s blog for the past few years, and I recall him mentioning frequently, as he was finishing this book, that he just had to work out the “Meernese knot.” If I had a time machine I’d go back in time, shake him by the shoulders and tell him, “Nobody gives a dam about what’s happening in Meer! Take us back to Westeros!”

Martin’s fantasy world has gotten too big, and while I appreciate that every detail of it is dear to him, it’s Creator, he’s lost the focus of the story that captivated readers of the first three books: the titular “game of thrones” and the struggle between two powerful families (and their allies) to control the destiny of a kingdom in the face of a growing threat of doom from the North. He’s gone from one story with many sides, to many interconnected stories being told simultaneously—an interesting storytelling technique in it’s own right, but it doesn’t work when presented as a novel, which requires a more cohesive structure, from beginning to end. I cannot even imagine how he is going to possibly conclude this story with any degree of satisfaction for the reader.**

Frankly, I think Martin’s experience as a tv writer is showing through, spinning out storylines from episode to episode instead of thinking about the overall plot arc. It reminds me a bit of LOST, which started with such a great premise and characters, but had to keep sticking things in because they didn’t know how long they needed to make the series last. A Dance with Dragons feels a lot like one of those middle years of LOST, filled with things just because the space had to be filled.

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This is one of those books you need to read when you get confused and think that “magical realism” just means “fantasy set in the real world.” Here’s the big difference: Magical realism doesn’t have to make sense.

I don’t have a lot to say about this seminal work by Marquez. His prose was lovely, as much as I can appreciate it in translation, and I recognize that deeper levels of interpretation, as a metaphor for the history of Colombia, are lost on me, as I don’t have much knowledge of South American history.

It’s filled with strange characters, many of whom aren’t very likeable or who have fates that just left me scratching my head. Things happen that are never explained, and only at the very end is any really effort made to draw out a thread that connects the seven generations of history the book relates, and provide a conclusion that wraps things up. I’m not saying it’s bad storytelling…just not the kind of storytelling I generally prefer.

It’s literary. Which I guess is why I tend to prefer genre.

The Whitefire Crossing
Courtney Schafer
This is the first book by a new author, which is not something I tend to experiment with lately***. But as I won this from an online contest, I figured it was worth a shot, and was rewarded for my barvery. While not a break out or a stand out, it’s perfectly entertaining, and should earn the author the right to a second shot at publication. Its setting is inspired by the Sierra Nevada mountains, and it’s plot by the author’s own love of mountain climbing. But it’s got a clever magic system and characters you want to root for. The villain is maybe a little too over-the-top evil, but I can live with that. I’ll be happy to support the author by buying her next book when it comes out.

The Cloud Roads
by Martha Wells
Martha Wells has been a favorite of mine since I first picked up The Wheel of the Infinite more then 10 years ago. What Wells does best is non-traditional fantasy (bordering on SF, a lot of the time) without the sense of estrangement that comes with so much of the so-called “New Weird” movement. In this case, she’s created a world filled with completely original non-human species but told their story in a way that doesn’t feel at all alienating. I admit I’m partial to the worldbuilding here because it’s filled with hints of civilizations long dead and forgotten, something I personally find fascinating. Wells is an author that deserves more attention than she’s gotten in the past ten years, and I’m definitely looking forward to the next book in this series.

Wizard Squared
K.E. Mills
Pure fluff, this one, which I picked up at a Borders close-out. I’d read the first two volumes in this “Rogue Enchanter” series, and found them amusing (much more so than the author’s more “serious” fantasy published under another name****). This book was a little bit of a let down, as I think it took itself too seriously, and the author seems to have confused the “conflict on every page” writer’s maxim with “have your characters squabble a lot because it’s funny!” But it’s not funny, it’s just annoying. My guess is that this will be the end of the series, which is kind of a shame, because I think it would have worked as a sort of cozy mystery series set in a fatasy-cognate of early 20th century England.

* Very clever marketing on the Publisher’s part!
** With my personal marker of reader satisfaction being set to the point where I may not have predicted everything that’s going to happen, but what does happen, it makes complete and utter sense, because it’s all been set up properly in the earlier parts of the story.
*** Too many bad experiences! I need a pile of good reviews from people whose opinions I respect before I’ll jump on board with a new writer. I’m a terrifically snobby reader.
****One of the afore-footnoted bad experiences, I’m afraid.

When you re-read, you avoid all those questions. You know what to expect. It’s all very comforting.

I haven’t kept a list of all the books I’ve revisited since January. It started with Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings and The Simarillion.* I’ve read most of the Patricia McKillip I’ve got on my shelf**—The Bell at Sealy Head, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, the Cygnet books, the Riddlemaster*** trilogy—and Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown. Guy Gavriel Kay, of course, Tigana and Ysabel and Under Heaven. At the start of summer, on the heels of watching the Game of Thrones television series, I plunged into a re-read of the first four books of the series, followed by the fifth when it came out.

A Dance with Dragons touched off a brief spurt of new-book-reading, though it only lasted a few weeks.**** Since autumn began, I’ve been back to the old favorites again. Dunsany. Yolen. Nix. I’m trying to pick between The Name of the Wind, The Shadow of the Wind and (unthematically) Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell for my next book. Or maybe I’ll reach for the ever-so-familiar Chronicles of the Deryni.

It’s hard to decide between them. They’re all good choices. I know. Because I’ve read them, and I’m looking forward to reading them again.

What favorite books do you like to return to from time to time?

* I’m halfway through The Hobbit with Anna, but we’re stuck on the chapter in Mirkwood, with the spiders. She doesn’t like spiders.

** More are in storage, or I’m sure I would have read them too.

*** Riddlemaster! It still stuns me that I only read that book for the first time a couple years ago. How did I miss this for so, so many years?

**** I think I’ll save those titles and thoughts about them for a later post.

All right, I can be a little more articulate than that. The show actually has some potential, if only because it has the vast resevoir of fairy tale and myth from which to draw the essence of story stuff. If they can get past a couple stumbling blocks, it might actually turn into some enjoyable family fare.

The first thing it has to do is shed the notion that they’re doing anything new by playing with fairy tale tropes. Granted, I’m probably more well-versed in contemporary fairy-tale literature* than the average TV viewer (especially kids, and it is rated PG), so it’s going to take more than a twisting a few tales together in order to impress me.

But so far, it looks as if the writers are letting the “novelty” of playing with fairy tales in the real world take the place of compelling writing. “Look what we did,” they say, sniggering behind their hands, “we made Jiminy Cricket a psychiatrist! And his umbrella is his good luck charm! Aren’t we clever?” Only, they’re not so clever, because Dr. Jiminy doesn’t have any good dialog, just a bunch of stereotypical shrink-like platitudes with a dash of cricketish wisdom tossed in.

It’s worse with the more prominent characters (particularly the Evil Queen/mayor of Storybrook). The characters are flat, the conflict overly simple (Snow White good, Queen bad), and the structure of each episode (which includes LOST-like flashbacks) and the story on the whole just seems to be ambling around without any greater purpose. It’s just kind of…there. Not bad enough to make me turn it off, but not enough to have me eagerly turning in each week.**

The other problem is larger (and encapsulates the uninspired writing to some degree). Everything is so plastic. Visually, you can see a lot of money was spent designing sets and costumes***, but it comes off looking like a ride at Disneyland — intricate, yes, but so obviously fake. I suppose this might have been a deliberate design choice, but it just ends up looking like every other fairy tale movie that’s ever been made. Even the Evil Queen looks like a replica of Susan Sarandon from Enchanted. After the lush, imagined realities of shows like The Tudors and Game of Thrones, I’d like to see a fairy tale world as carefully created.

And then there’s the acting. The real world stuff is fine, I suppose…but once they flashback to the magical kingdom, everyone slips into that faux high speech, “I am in a fantasy so I must speak grandly” patter and cadence of language that plagues so much fantasy on tv and film. Combined with weak dialog, it can only spell doom.

But here’s a secret: bad dialog can totally be saved by a good performance (and good direction). If you doubt me, just take a look at some of the dialog from the Lord of the Rings movies. Those actors have to spout off some of the cheesiest, corniest lines in the history of movie-dom, but you never notice because the actors are fully invested in the reality of their characters, and in the truth of what their characters are saying (in the way their character speaks). The importance of the words is intrinsic in the delivery, not because the actor decides he or she needs to say it With Importance, but because the character knows it’s important.

This sense of investment is the crucial thing missing from Once Upon a Time, and from so much fantasy produced for the screen, and really even many fantasy books and stories. It’s as if the label “fantasy” magically lowers the expectations of all involved, so that they fail to strive for the same depth and sense of reality that they would expect from non-fantasy productions and literature. Maybe it’s the ol’ “fantasy is kids’ stuff” prejudice rearing its head — kids don’t need depth, after all.

But reality is the secret ingredient of the best fantasy. If we can’t believe the characters are real, we won’t care about them. If the settings feel fake, and the situations contrived, we’ll dismiss the story as inconsequential. If you want me to love your story, your movie, your show, if you want me to come back to it again and again, then you need to prove to me that you love it too, and you’re not just putting on a show for the kids, or playing with tropes because you think it’s clever.

Because, really, it’s not.

For fun, share you’re favorite cheesy Lord of the Rings movie quote in the comments!

* Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Jane Yolen, Tanith Lee, Robin McKinley, the graphic novel series Fables, etc. etc. etc. But really, people have been remixing old stories into new ones since…well, the beginning of stories, I bet.

** I recorded it, and watched (while folding laundry) when there was nothing else on to watch.

*** In the flashbacks to the fairy tale kingdom. Modern Storybrook is just…modern.