| Kickstarting Spellbound |
[May. 14th, 2012|08:42 am] |
Various good things and coping things taking up time and energy here, but I wanted to mention a Kickstarter because I'm part of the incentive structure. Raechel Henderson is trying to restart Spellbound fantasy magazine for kids, and if you go pledge at least $5 towards her goal, you'll get a sampler pack of the stories from last time she was doing Spellbound. It includes my story, "Grandma Disappears," as well as other stories from other writers. Fun for the whole family! Really, $5 is not that much to help out a cool project and get a story sampler pack, so go give it a look, see if it's the sort of thing you might like. |
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| Vertigo sucks, but there are tulips and frittata. |
[May. 10th, 2012|10:33 pm] |
In some ways this is a really good week. I got an unspecified really big project out the door and got confirmation that it got where it was going and the person who got it was still interested in getting it, so that is a thing. I finished a new short story and got that sent out and worked on some others that are exciting and fun and shiny and like that. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.7) markgritter gets home tomorrow and should be done with the every-other-week-out schedule, he thinks; alecaustin also arrives tomorrow, and gets to stay somewhat longer than his previous usual, which ideally will mean more short story work. There have been cool new timprov photos, and there have been meals with people I like and there are plans for more. I have a peach scone for breakfast in the morning, and the vases in the library and kitchen are full of tulips. (Purple in the library, white in the kitchen.)
And I am doing that thing where I am shoring myself up with reminders of lovely solitary afternoons reading and satisfying work and time with people I love, because I have had two bad falls in the last week, and I am both heartsore and rest-of-me sore. I am so tired of this. So very tired. We are doing what we can, we are doing what we must, but I am just plain exhausted with it, and I hate that what we must includes changing the bandages on my knees repeatedly and having to take computer time in short bits because my neck and arms are seizing up. I hate not being able to lean on elbows and knees because of bruises and scrapes and finding that my back is constantly needing rearranging because of having been banged around a couple of thorough times not to mention the two not-bad times. I put this on Facebook yesterday because Facebook is short and I could deal with short. But then there was a lot of, "Feel better soon!" Which...good idea. Yes. I appreciate this. But livejournal, you people have a bit more context, so while I know you wish that I will feel better soon, I also know that you understand that the feeling better, it is...a process that is complicated at this point.
And not a lot of fun.
But tulips. Peach scones. People coming home, or to my house to visit and eat frittata, or whatever. Yes. There are these things, and new stories with coppery keys and pneumatic tubes and things. And frittata, seriously, this is the best easy thing ever right now. You put the things in the skillet! And you cook some of them! And then you put more things in and you put it in the hot oven and go away! And you come back and there is this proteiny vegetable-full dish for you! Granted it will not feed your vegans. But frittata. We live in a world with frittata. Yay.
The unfortunate part is that Cheryl Wheeler has me singing "frittata" to the Mexican Hat Dance. But when I'm trying not to think of the stupid vertigo, sometimes we take what we can get. |
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| The other side of children's theater |
[May. 8th, 2012|09:38 am] |
When I was small, my cousins and I went to the Emmy Gifford Children's Theater all the time. There was James and the Giant Peach, for which my aunt Kathy got us peach Jolly Ranchers to suck while we watched the beautiful giant bug costumes--I expect there was a James, but I have no memory of him--and there was Cinderella, for which one of the stepsisters wore tennis shoes under her ball gown and chewed gum and was hilarious. Who knows if I would find her funny now.
But there was, oh, there was Where the Wild Things Are. And they put up a miniature stage in the middle of the seating, and the Wild Things. The Wild Things came out and danced. Right there where we were sitting. In the aisles and on the little platform down the middle of the seats.
My world changed.
I could not have been as old as my godson was now, but I was old enough to have the two levels of it, the immediate ooooh and the hey can you do that? I wonder what else you can do that I didn't think about.
Thank you, Maurice Sendak, for the wild rumpus that sparked so many other wild rumpuses in our hearts and minds. |
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| Curses! Sold again! Er, for the first time. |
[May. 7th, 2012|05:05 pm] |
Contracts in the mail, so it counts: I've sold a short story, "Cursed Motives," to Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
This is in the same universe as the novel I'm revising, What We Did to Save the Kingdom, but with a really completely different narrative voice. So that's fun. |
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| Pippi Longface |
[May. 7th, 2012|02:29 pm] |
On Saturday markgritter and I took our goddaughter Lillian to the Children's Theater performance of Pippi Longstocking. Lil announced that she was taking her Bear*, decked out in Bear's theater-going dress, in case things got scary. I told her that things were unlikely to get scary, but there was no harm to bringing Bear.
I was wrong.
They had added Obligatory Orphan Angst and Nightmares to Pippi Longstocking. The end of the first act was Pippi having a nightmare about being small with her parents and then being separated from her (now-dead) Mama and waking up screaming for her Mama. Then the curtain went down and the house lights came up; intermission!
There were a lot of unsettled little faces in that theater.
Look, I get that the theater is not always about sweetness and light. But Pippi Longstocking. It is not about woe. It is not about psychological realism. And I find it pretty sketchy that their mode of introducing the woe and the psychological realism just happened to be removing a lot of the anti-authoritarian content of the work along the way. Pippi is a strong, funny, independent kids' fantasy** who carries her horse around on her shoulders and thumbs her nose at stuffy grown-ups? We can't have that without injecting lots of stuff about how kids need to learn manners and go to school and have adults looking after them!
Look. Pippi is 9. NINE. It's okay for nine-year-olds to have fantasy characters who turn school upside down and never apologize. It's okay for nine-year-olds--hell, six-year-olds, twelve-year-olds, forty-year-olds, eighty-year-olds whoever--to have trickster characters who make bureaucrats look foolish and trip them with their own words. Not every play--book, movie, whatever--is about Teaching A Great Moral Lesson. Not every character is a role model. That is not the only thing we do. But also, not every role model is or should be modeling dependence. Kids know they need their parents. We don't have to tell them this at every single turn. "Don't even think about having fun with a horse and a monkey and your best friends, because your real focus should be the horrible impermanence of life! And also fitting standard adult modes!"
There are good plays for kids that do the psychological realism things and the role model things. Good books, movies, stories, whatever. Pippi was not written to be one of them, and I don't really like that it was rewritten to be one of them. I accept that children's classics sometimes need to be adapted to work better on the stage. Adapted to have more pro-authority message, less joy, and more nightmares...for the single-digit set? No. No, no thank you, no. Not a win for my goddaughter, not a win for her attendant godparents. Not even a win for Bear in her theater-going dress. I try to set aside my instinct that things have to adhere to the details of the book to be good when I go to something like this. But this version went very much counter to the spirit of the book--the meaning of it at all. And that made me frustrated and angry as well as leaving Lillian wanting to go home at intermission. (We decided to stay for the second act, in which Pippi's pirate father turned up. So at least there was that. The ending was incoherent but considerably more colorful.)
*Not to be confused with matociquala.
**I mean this not in terms of genre fantasy but in terms of daydream non-realism. |
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| Things I cannot tolerate |
[May. 6th, 2012|01:29 pm] |
I made the mistake of reading Katherine Kersten in the Star-Tribune today, and she was crowing about the recent study that declares that liberals de-friend more people over politics than conservatives do. Liberals are less tolerant, take that take that liberals! crows Kersten. (She also thinks liberals are ignorant for thinking that a party that wants to spend through the nose on the military--and has done so historically--does not want reduced government spending. Um. But anyway.)
I have de-friended two high school classmates in the last month on Facebook. One of them posted a video with the title, "Look at that n----- go!" His did not have dashes. He did not comment, "What an unfortunate title, but really the guy is an awesome athlete and worth watching." He did not in any way mitigate the slur in the video title. Seriously? I get that "Facebook friend" and "actual friend" are not identical, but either way: gone now, bye.
Within the last few days, another high school classmate posted an incredibly racist picture/caption of a South Asian man. I do not need to describe it for you and perpetuate the racism. Trust me: totally racist. She did post additional commentary. Her comment was, "haha stupid c----." My reaction was: 1) goodbye, racist jerk; 2) he is not a c----, that is another group completely, ignorant racist jerk.
And Kersten would like to believe that she has won the prize because the semantics of "tolerate the intolerant" means "ha ha I win!" No, Kersten. We all lose here. |
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| "I've been dreaming in full color" |
[May. 2nd, 2012|09:39 am] |
I really like both what timprov says in his blog post here and the song and video he's talking about in it. I can't watch the vid again, though; we didn't have enough snowy winter for me this year, and I miss the Minneapolis winter it shows too much. Next year. I'll get through to next year. In the meantime, go read about things that have nothing to do with snow, winter, or Minneapolis. |
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