The two most surprising notifications in recent months have led me to the New York Times website. The first is this reference to my Filmography. Exciting, no? No, not really — it seems that they’ve only gotten around to putting names up there, and haven’t added my actual film credit. Yes, singular. My internship with a small production company one summer while I was in college was pretty short, and I only worked on the one film. If you’re interested, you can read more about it on Yahoo! TV, but I promise you it’s nothing you’ve ever heard of before.

The second link — and I hesitate to show this to you because it’s a little bit embarrassing, but it’s also sort of cool — also dates back to my college years. I barely remember getting interviewed for this, and I don’t think I ever saw the article in print. I wonder if I would have agreed to be interviewed if I knew it would be so publicly accessible nearly 20 years later. Hooray for the Internet? So anyway, I give you … The Lunar Howling Society. Oh, just to clarify, the reporter got my major confused with that of the also-quoted Susan (who was my roommate, and who will get a kick out of this when she reads this) — I was the Medieval Studies major, while she was in American Studies. My faith in the reliability of the American Press is shattered! (/sarcasm).

So, there you go. Have you ever found yourself popping up in unexpected places online? Share!

ETA: PS: My sister has started a blog. Go give her some love!

Like, you know, blogging.

I figured I could make up for some of my negligence here by posting some of the links that I’ve been collecting for a while, intending to share here. Only I’ve discovered that most of them really weren’t all that interesting anymore, so I’ve only got a few. Enjoy.

A Peter S. Beagle interview, where he talks about the sequel to The Last Unicorn and the possibility of an MMORPG set in his Innkeeper’s World. *Historical footnote: I once signed a petition to keep Borders out of Davis, CA, largely because Mr. Beagle had signed on the top line, and I figured it was the only way he and I would ever be mentioned on the same page. *Footnote to the historical footnote: We moved from Davis before the Borders went in, so I don’t know if all the wonderful independent bookstores survived or not.

Part of Locus Magazine’s interview with Mr. Beagle, and then one with Guy Gavriel Kay.

Some advice to writers from Kurt Vonnegut. Common sense stuff, really, but well put and easy to digest.

A couple of different posts on the popularity of fantasy versus sciene fiction. Seems to be a hot topic.

FYI, I’m not participating in NaNoWriMo this year, and upon consideration I’ve decided to abstain from Sweating with Sven (a longer, leaner challenge than NaNo). I know how much writing I have to do in the next few months, and I don’t think being part of a community is going to change my ability or inability to reach my self-set goals. The drive to write (and finish what I’m writing) is coming from a much deeper place then externally defined daily word counts and cheerleading groups. And I just don’t want the additional responsibility of having to report and cheer on everyone else, which is part of the whole social contract of such a community project. Not that I’m discouraging anyone else from doing it; it’s just not the right thing for me, right now. Anyone who is participating has my fondest good wishes for success!

Where was I? Oh yes, it’s hard to concentrate on stuff sometimes, when you’re tired. Even something as seemingly simple as a blog entry.

So while I have a partially written post all about “Story Values” waiting in the wings, and I ought to be filling your ears with all sorts of happy glee about how fabulous my magazine looks all printed and bound, all I’ve got for you right now is a couple of links and, yes…yes, I think I can manage to list a few recent books I’ve read.

We’ll start with the books, in fact, before I sending you off around the internet following my links. In reverse order:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling. (spoiler free, I promise!) While I did not attend any midnight parties, I did collect my copy (Target: $17.99) before noon on Saturday and spent the next 14 hours or so reading (counting interruptions to take care of those pesky kids and dogs). I finished at 2:08 in the morning, which is proof that Rowling has en enviable talent of being to drag a reader in and keep them engrossed in the story despite it’s length (759 pages — big type though). While I was totally caught up in the story while reading, and enjoyed a lot of moments on an individual basis, as a whole I have to say that it doesn’t bear a lot of close examination after the fact. It’s not a great piece of fiction, but it’s fun and ultimately that’s all that really matters.

I have to admit that my need to read the book the first weekend was for all the wrong reasons. I’m not an avid Harry Potter fan, and I’ve read fantasy fiction for so long that I can be infinitely patient when it comes to finding out what happens in the next book (Dance of Dragons, anyone?). I simply couldn’t stand not knowing what happens when sooooo many other people would know. Part of it was fear that I would inadvertently have the ending revealed before I got to read it for myself, but mostly it was a simple case of wanting to be on the inside of the circle of knowledge. Ending Envy, I suppose?

Title, by Someone. I mentioned previously a duology I was reading that sucked the creativity right out of my brain. I’m still protecting my karma by not mentioning that book by name in my blog, but if you want to know what it is I’ll be happy to share with you via email or IM. I’ll say this much — the first book was bad, the second was just boring.

The Privilege of the Sword, by Ellen Kushner. Now, THAT is a piece of writing. My only complaint about this book is that it is too short — the ending comes a little abruptly, and I would have liked to see the main character have more to do with the resolution. But seriously, one doesn’t read Kushner’s books for the plots; it’s all about character and dialog. Tasty stuff here (and no, I don’t just mean Alec and Richard!). This fired my writing mind like crazy, and I should probably go read it again just to shake the last vestiges of cobwebs caused by the previously unnamed book from my brain.

The Hallowed Hunt, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Set in the same world as her previous two fantasies (The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls) which I just love, love, love, but unfortunately this is not quite of the same caliber. Mind you, it’s a good book, just not quite as good as the other two. Still looking forward to the next in The Sharing Knife series, which I’ll buy on the next trip to the bookstore if I don’t opt to replace my copy of Kay’s A Song for Arbonne first.

Now, links. Really nothing spectacular here. First, a post from Storytellers Unplugged, which is titled Syllogistic Vs. Situational and while I thought it was interesting enough to save the link I honestly don’t remember (thanks to my week of brain fog) what it was about. I’ll have to go reread it myself.

Also, my new favorite castle. An awesome place — I’m not sure if I’d rather live there myself or just make up stories about the people who live here. Heck, why not both? Chris….?

That is about all I’ve got for you tonight. Which is probably enough because I can go on and on even when I don’t have much to say. Thank you for not complaining about that! And yes, an early bed is in the cards for tonight, so that I will be clear-headed enough on the morrow to polish up the draft of the 10Q post I’ve been working on, and maybe even smoosh together the poem that I stupidly put into the scene. You can bet that if the post doesn’t show up in the next two or three days, it’s that poem that’s holding me up…

And that, folks, is really all for right now.

Curious and curiouser:
The Storytellers: This link popped up in the G-mail ad sidebar and I had to click. It’s a business that uses storytelling models to help strengthen other businesses. The power of story knows no bounds. Though I do have to wonder that they can register “The Storytellers” as a trademark…

Worth remembering:
Why it matters: A collection of quotes about why fantastic literature is important, presented by Terri Windling at the Endicott blog.

On the same note:
The new sci-fi: An interesting piece from the Guardian about the current state of SF on television, and speculation on why it’s no longer just fringe group entertainment. One interesting quote: “Meanwhile, in the wider world, the event that has made sci-fi and fantasy palatable, and indeed positively appealing, to a mainstream audience is 9/11. 9/11 shook value systems and certainties, making the heretofore incredible seem not so outlandish. In a world in peril, we look to the fantastic for succour. The fin de siècle feeling that pervaded culture at the end of the 19th century, when the end was thought to be nigh, produced a burst of enduring science fiction and fantasy literature.”

Joy, Unadulterated:
This Place Looks Familiar: Did you know that right now, in New Haven, CT, they are currently filming the fourth Indiana Jones movie? Due out in May of next year, the same time as Prince Caspian is supposed to be released. What a double whammy! I’m overcome just thinking about it.

Back to thoughtful:
Endings: I didn’t watch The Sopranos, but I could sympathize the fans who didn’t like the non-ending, while at the same time understanding the reasons the creator might have chosen to end the series as he did. Gerard Houarner uses The Sopranos some interesting points in this Storytellers Unplugged column, about the implicit promises a story makes to its readers, and about defying established expectations.

And, since I was tagged by Bri, here are 8 random things about me:
1) I stopped tagging people in blog memes a while back, because I always feel bad when those tagged don’t follow through. Irrational, I know. Also, I don’t feel the need to follow the rules strictly, especially the part about posting the rules of the meme.
2) I only own one pair of shorts. I shrank out of all of them this past year, and I haven’t had a chance to buy more. It’s a bother right now, because of the current heat wave.
3) I had a summer internship with a film company in Hollywood, when I was in college.
4) I gave birth twice without any pain killers, and though I try not to look down on women who choose otherwise, I really do think they’re all a bunch of wimps.
5) I was born on my dad’s birthday, and we used to celebrate every year by having lunch together. Just us. Miss that a lot.
6) I have a 120 feeds in my bloglines feed reader. I cannot possibly read that much, can I? Well, I do get paid for some of it!
7) I’m an “innie”.
I’ve been doing a lot of my writing longhand, lately. For one thing, I can take it with me when I sit by the pool supervising the girls swimming. But I also think it helps free me from the inner editor, since I don’t get so caught up in editing what’s already on the page. I’ll use any paper I can get my hands on — I’ve got one notepad with two different stories running through alternating pages, which leaves me baffled sometimes when I’m ready to transcribe — but I’ve got to use a Uniball Jet Stream pen, in black or blue. It’s fast and smooth and utterly divine. I’m desperately afraid that they’ll stop making this pen, though, but I swear I’ll never go back to Bic.

As a side note, Nin mentioned she never saw the 10 Queens post I made a couple weeks ago — I wonder if there is anyone else who reads this blog through LiveJournal who saw it, or was there some sort of burble in the system? I wondered at the absence of any comments, is all.

Prompted by a writing exercise, of sorts, I realized that my main problem with 10Q was voice: I was trying too consciously to be Mythic, striving for something that sounded ancient and ponderous yet poetic at the same time…and failing miserably. What works best for me is a more comfortable, personal voice — not without artistry, but not overcome by it either. It’s easier to write, and probably more entertaining to read, and since the stoopid realization decreed that I needed to be posting audience-friendly fiction on a regular basis — if only for the personal satisfaction I get from it — it seems that taking a more personal, character-friendly tack with the project is the right course to take. It’s not like I ever intended 10Q to be something “publishable” (though what that means anymore, who knows). It’s practice, really, a step along that million-word march towards being a really good writer.

Last night’s session went really well, for all that I wasted half of my two-hour outing catching up with my former colleagues at Borders. I wrote over two-pages, longhand (which is a lot for me, I’m a slow writer, when it comes down to it…maybe this exercise will help me to speed up some), and will hopefully finish the piece this afternoon, to post over the weekend. So this is just a heads up that a weird little bit of episodic fiction will be appearing in this space soon, and if you haven’t looked at the 10Q section of the site you might want to. Just to prepare yourself. Or to give my site stats a boost for the day.

In the meantime, here are few links from the past few days that have caught my eye:

Thought Provoking:
Pimp My Story: The “ugly duckling” and “naked emperor” archetypes in contemporary news and reality entertainment. A keen realization about media trends. (Poynter Online)

Curious About:
A Dark World Comes to Life: Lucy has been devouring Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights trilogy the last few weeks, and she was estatic to hear a movie based on the first book, The Golden Compass, is coming out this fall. We watched the trailer for it online, and it looks pretty impressive, and since Pullman seems to be heavily involved in the production it should stay fairly faithful to the original. Lucy has a pretty good head on her shoulders about that sort of thing — she saw the movie Ella Enchanted, enjoyed it; then she read the book and promptly declared that the movie was full of silly things and book was far superior. Anyway, we’re looking forward to seeing this when it comes out. (Sydney Morning Herald)

Touching:
Grain d’Or: Corey Amaro’s blog never fails to enchant me, but I especially love this story about an old Marseilles custom about a gift celebrating life’s accomplishments. It actually reminds me of something created in my Imaginarium once.

Mind Numbing:
Warner Bros. buys “Shannara” books: I suppose it was inevitable, given the current Hollywood interest in fantasy, that someone would grab what was the first mass-market fantasy best seller. Admittedly, I’ve not read any of the newer books (just the original trilogy, and it must be over 20 years since I read those) but I’ve never heard anything that made me suspect I was missing anything. Still, if they play up the post-apocalyptic angle as the news item seems to suggest, it could give an interesting new look to fantasy on the big screen. (Reuters)

Exciting as Hell:
Artful Blogging: It’s almost here, folks! Go pre-order your copy and help secure my career with this company!

Honestly, my favorite bit of the book was in the preface, presumably written by one of the supporting characters in the story, Redcloak. After explaining exactly what PC and NPC means, for those readers who aren’t familiar with gaming terminology, he makes this hard-to-argue observation:

Heck, as far as I’m concerned, the presence of players is a necessary evil at best. I think most gamemasters will agree that their world functions significantly more smoothly before the PCs ever show up.

Truer words were never spoken!

I started reading Order of the Stick because of the roleplaying jokes, but I have found the story that has developed over the past 450+ strips to be quite intriguing, and the commentary the author, Rich Burlew, provides in the printed volumes is useful and enlightening, from a storyteller’s point of view. I wish I had No Cure for the Paladin Blues, the second collection, on hand to quote some of the more interesting passages, but alas my mate has taken it off to Indiana with him. I’ll have to try to get back to it another time.

In the meantime, here’s an interesting link to a blog post with some thoughts about creating and fulfilling reader (or viewer) desires in narrative, the main point being that it is the job of the storyteller to defer satisfaction, which not only keeps the audience intent but makes it all the more satisfying in the end.

The media seems to be concentrating on two themes. One is Narnia vs. Harry Potter. Personally, I think the Narnia movie will tromp all over the fourth HP movie this season, if only because with it’s PG-13 rating many younger kids won’t get to see Goblet of Fire. On top of that, Narnia is fresh, cinematically, and has been aggregating fans for 50 years, most of whom will be as ga-ga as I am about seeing it on screen, especially if it’s told as faithfully and as well as its cousin, The Lord of the Rings. As an extra bonus, Narnia has the potential to draw in the Christian audience that condems the “occultist” tendencies of Harry Potter, and likes to glorify the Christian allegories present in the Narnia books. That, of course, is the second major theme the media is focusing on — how much emphasis one can or should place upon the Christian elements of the Chronicles of Narnia.

By far, the most interesting article on the subject I’ve come across is Adam Gopnik’s “Prisoner of Narnia: How C.S. Lewis Escaped” over at The New Yorker, which tries to understand Lewis, his faith, and his creation without extolling Lewis as a paragon of Christian morality, nor condemning him for being…well, a paragon of Christian morality. What comes across most clearly is that Lewis was someone who was caught between fantasy and faith, wanting them very much to be the same thing all the while knowing that they were not and could never be.

As a member of the Inklings, Lewis is rightly hailed as one of the founding fathers of the modern mythopoeic arts, which brings me to the heart of why I am writing about this article at all. I know, personally, that Lewis inspired my first forays into mythopoeia — my first novel, co-authored with my best friend when I was 10, had many elements directly derived from the world of Narnia — and I’m certain he’s inspired many other authors as well. Gopnik’s article provides some brief insight into the workings of the mythopoet’s mind, starting with a quote from Lewis’s work of literary criticism, “The Allegory of Love”, which identifies three worlds available to the writer: the actual world of experience (it’s true because you can see it), the world of religious belief (you believe it to be true), and the world of the marvelous (you know it’s not true). Gopnik’s summary of Lewis’ observations is a succint “rule to live by” for any aspiring mythopoet:

“When we sit down to write a romance, then, we make up elves and ghosts and wraiths and wizards, in whom we don’t believe but in whom we enclose our most urgent feelings, and we demand that the world they inhabit be consistent and serious.”

This also goes a long way towards explaining why the Narnia books continue to be of such importance to Christians and non-Christians alike. It doesn’t matter that the tales happen to contain a message that is compatible with the Christian faith. The mythology contained within the books sustains itself without any external references at all, and its Truths are revealed through honest storytelling — actions, reactions, and emotion — not through didatic exposition or otherwise telling us what we should be learning. If Christians recognize similarities between their own beliefs and the mythology of Narnia, that’s fine, but even non-believers can take pleasure — Lewis’ “joy” — in a sojourn to a magical realm that emerges so completely from the page that even today, more than 50 years after it was written, kids are still poking around in the backs of closets, hoping to find a way in.

First, from A List Apart, a journal for people who make websites, are a couple articles on building narrative into websites. Not necessarily websites that are intended as narratives, but just about anything: online stores, company sites, news sites, etc. In Beyond Usability: The Narrative Web Mark Bernstein writes:

We want to see narrative everywhere. Stories are fun, exciting, comforting. This isn’t just a matter of bedtime stories and art. The saga of the Great Browser War, the Open Source tales, the stories of Bill (Gates) and Steve (Jobs), populate our work life and our weblogs. So, too, do tales of Rise and Fall – of individuals, companies, and websites.

The point is not that we should add stories to our sites to ensnare narrative-starved readers. The point is that the reader’s journey through our site is a narrative experience. Our job is to make the narrative satisfying.

He then goes on to describe some high-level methods of doing so.

Then in A Case for Storyteling Curt Cloniger discusses the need for web makers to develop a narrative voice in site design, bridging the gap between style and content.

During the work day, mere data is exchanged. This work-day data exchange might be analogous to a multi-user, Lotus Notes(tm) collaboration. But at night, around the fire, stories are told. It’s the stories that the cowboys will remember after the drive, not the daily exchange of data. Data is denotative. Stories are visceral and emotional. Stories effect our entire beings, not just our minds.

And which stories will be remembered the longest? Which stories will be loved the most? Which stories will “succeed?” For the stories to succeed they first have to be interesting (read: good content). For the stories to succeed, they also have to be told in the native tongue of the listeners (read: no JavaScript errors). And finally, for the stories to succeed, they have to be told well, in a compelling, mature, engaging narrative voice.

He goes on to compare the web with television advertising in the 1950’s, and how commericials have evolved into 60-second narratives that make us laugh, cry, and watch the Super Bowl even though we hate football. And he compares a web development conference to a novel-writing seminar where the bulk of the time is spent on teaching you how to write neatly. But of all the worthwhile points Cloniger makes in this article, the one I find the most relevant personally is this: “The more power a user has to control the narrative himself, the more a user will “own” that narrative.”

Of course, one of my driving interests is interactive narrative, and that’s an important rule to remember. The idea that users – or players, when we start talking about games – want control over the narrative is understood if not overtly stated in the article Foundations of Interactive Storytelling, which discusses methods of allowing true interactive experiences in a gaming experience. The author briefly traces the evolution of interactive storytellling starting with tabletop RPGs and then segues into methods designers can use to add interactivity to a story via plot, characterization, or theme. There are some good basic principals here, with a reasonable balance in the presentation between the artistic and the technical merits of each method.

Finally, here’s a new twist on the granddaddy of all interactive storytelling: Choose Your Own Adventures. Ryan Macklin is putting together a book he calls Choose Your Own Fate, which is really just a collection of endings that maybe could have appeared in the original series.

If you’ve ever read Choose Your Own Adventure books, there were generally a number of ways that you would die or fail. This project is a collection of unconnected short stories in a style that emulates those horrible fates. The idea is that each story is completely contained in two facing pages, so that a reader can flip to a random page in the book, and in that way choose their fate.

Best of all, the proceeds will go to the Red Cross Katrina relief fund, so not only would it be fun, if you choose to submit, but it will be for a good cause.