I mentioned the idea of DeviantStories back in October, and since then I've decided to switch the name to ArtStories here on the website. Not because of copyright or anything (though I imagine that there might be complications if I ever earned money off of these stories--something that gnaws at me but I'm choosing to ignore), but because I think it's a better name overall and more clearly explains what I'm trying to do.
Anyway, this essay isn't an update on ArtStories as much as it is a quick behind-the-scenes of where my first completed ArtStory came from. If you're curious about the story itself, it's found here, or you can visit the ArtStories section of my website, where there's a PDF for easier reading. I would recommend reading the story before reading the BTS, as there are spoilers…I guess… See, the first sentence of a short story is supposed to be something that hooks the reader, that sets up what's to come. And my first sentence really does that, I think: "When Randen first started his career as an artist-murderer, he never thought that his mother would be the inspiration for what would make him so well known." I mean, I tell you how it's going to end right there. How can we be talking about spoilers if the first sentence already tells you how it's going to be? I mean, the rest of the paragraph points out that he has all of the standard earmarks for being a sociopathic killer, so the ending really shouldn't come as any sort of surprise. Still, as I was writing the story, I had this weird feeling like it was easy to forget that we're reading a story about a murderer. I don't know if that's true--I can't ever read this story as anything but my own; I'll always know how it ends, what the purpose of each moment of the story is for. So the experience of reading through it is always a process of rereading, for me. It will be interesting to see if people forget where it's headed by the end or not. I think it's fair to ask why I would feel compelled to write a murder story when the image behind it is so benign. And I think that's why it worked for me. When I saw "Duckie", there was nothing about it that seemed sinister or intimidating. I mean, that is one happy duck. But what stood out to me was the number written on its chest. PrismoTheSmoke writes that the project came about as artwork to be sold during a Rubber Duck Festival. The artist's design was to show off how different media can make for different effects. For me, seeing a black and white drawing of a duck with a number across its chest, I had to wonder what the other numbered ducks would look like. And, since it's in black and white, I couldn't help but think that it almost looked like the numbers were written in blood. At first, I thought of it as a cop story: Lewy and Hutch, two grizzled detectives, find this numbered rubber duckie as a type of calling card and score counter--it's the two-hundred-eighty-first murder of this kind…and that's when I petered out. First of all, I don't really know how detectives work, aside from what I've seen on TV shows and movies. Also, how incompetent would Lewy and Hutch have to be to let a guy get away with almost three hundred murders? (In fact, part of the reason that Randen picks specific numbers for his forty-odd duckies is because I wanted to use the number from the picture without having to march through massive quantities of death. And, since it was order 281 that inspires Randen, that's why he uses that number, rather than it being sequential.) So I shifted the narrative from the pursuers to the perpetrator. Coming up with Randen (which is simply "Branden" without a b) was easy, as the news is replete with incels of his type. I'm not particular sensitive to people who view violence as the way to deal with life, so there's a callousness toward him that I couldn't help but include. What humanizes him, I think, is his mother. Their conversation--which takes up a fair portion of the story--is one that I think any parent or role model has with a charge who is feeling directionless. I've worked through these sorts of questions with former students before--though I usually try to get a better grasp of what she (or he) is after before dispensing my (probably erroneous) advice--and there's nothing wrong with it. In fact, if anything, Mama Anderton was doing the best thing she could in the situation. It's not her fault that he wanted to graphically murder a coworker and photograph the mutilation. She probably thought he wanted to, like, recreate "The Last Supper" but with rubber duckies, poor woman. I wrote the entire story in a single sitting, which is really the only way that I can write short stories. Coming back to them after being away is very much having let the iron cool and then bringing back the hammer. I've a couple of other ArtStories that I've attempted, but neither of them ended in a single sitting--the story was either too big or too ill-defined for me to finish--so they continue to languish on my hard drive. Maybe they'll come back a bit later, who knows? The last bit of "Where did this come from?" has to be traced to the fact that I'm reading a short story collection by Stephen King. I feel like the best part of the book so far (and I'm two-thirds of the way through) is the title: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. A couple of the stories have taken strange twists, and there's plenty of weird situations--as you might expect from a King story--but nothing has really struck me as 1) scary (I've yet to read a scary book, though I've read quite a bit of horror lately), or 2) that memorable. Nothing against King; short stories aren't my favorite, I guess. So there is a bit of irony that I'm putting "Duck, Duck, Death" onto my website and trying my best to write more short fiction. Well, that's about all there is to the behind-the-scenes. If you've read the story and this much, I want to thank you for devoting enough of your life to reading over four thousand of my words today. That's mighty fine of you, and I do appreciate it. I found out about Megan Phelps-Roper's departure from the Westboro Baptist Church when a video clip interview made its way across my timeline on Twitter. I poked about a bit and found out that Megan (I'm going to use her first name instead of her last because it's shorter) left the Westboro Baptist Church a handful of years ago. Now she's written a memoir and doing the whole book-tour thing, which piqued my interest. While I try to buy books as often as possible, sometimes I snag stuff from the library, which also shows support for writers. I put her book, Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church, on hold and promptly forgot about it. When the text notification let me know it was there, however, I made it a point to pick it up as soon as possible. With all of the other things that I have on my plate--including Les Miserables (for the twelfth time) and Why Write? (for the second time…this year) among others--this was actually the best way for me to read the book: I knew I had to return it, so I couldn't pull a typical-Steve and buy the book so that it could gather dust at my house instead of Barnes and Noble.
I'm glad I read it, though. It really is a heartbreaking and inspiring story that traces Megan's involvement since she was a little kid with her family's church. If you aren't familiar with the Westboro Baptist Church…well, you're pretty lucky, then. This is the church that protests the funerals of soldiers, victims of mass-shootings, and other high-profile people. They tote around colorful protest signs that say things like "Thank God for IEDs" and, their number-one-jam, "God Hates F*gs". They use harsh, offensive language, manipulating press coverage to get themselves more publicity, though the "inside look" that Megan gives us is much more nuanced than this summary. And that's what I really liked about the book. It gave me a glimpse into a life that I had already judged--and, on occasion, was even right about--being one of a type of religious depravity. But there's more to what's going on than hatemongering--which they are absolutely doing. Some of what I've long heard about the church had to do with the late Fred Phelps, the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church and most prominent firebrand. His fiery sermons invoked hellfire, wrath, destruction, and condemnation on any who weren't the elect of God (e.g. his church and its handful of members, almost all of whom are family). His doctrines focused primarily on the collective sin that America has committed by allowing the LGBTQ+ community to have human rights; death was the ultimate punishment, in his mind, drawing attention to that sin during a community's most vulnerable moments (that is, at the funerals for victims of sundry events) was the best way to demonstrate the immorality of the country. From a theological point of view, his thinking was pretty messed up, though Megan points out that, as they were a Calvinist-inspired denomination, they didn't have to worry about trying to convince anyone of what they were preaching, as everyone was already heaven- or (more likely) hell-bound. It doesn't really behoove me to unpack their doctrine, in part because my Bible game is pretty weak, and also because that seems like a waste of time. I'm more interested in seeing the ways that Megan navigated her youth. She's about my age--within one or two years, give or take--which makes it easier to tap into some of the things that she had to deal with, including the way the internet changed everything in the late '90s. However, Megan had a couple of experiences that stood out to me: One was the cocksure way of approaching any problem. "We're right and they're wrong" was a catchall. Biblical explanations pasted over massive problems--while Megan doesn't report of any specific physical abuse from her grandfather, it's clear that he beat Megan's mother (his daughter) and his other children. When explaining this part of the story, Megan did what she does throughout--tosses in a verse of scripture, in italics, that would be used as the hermeneutics for the behavior. In the case of child abuse, she quotes Proverbs 23:13, which reads (in the King James Version of the Bible, which is the one both Mormons and Westboro Baptists use), "Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die." I don't think I have to explain--I hope I don't have to explain--why this was so startling to me. What really got to me was that I, as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, have a distinctly different relationship with the Bible than other denominations (probably one of the larger reasons why I'm not in the "Mormons are Christians, too!" camp, but I've already talked about that). More than that, however, I don't worry about fitting every moment of my life into a biblical narrative, which is clearly an impulse that Megan grew up with. If something bothers my heart, I don't turn to the Good Book to try to assuage what's bothering me--and it really doesn't take too much to find a biblical verse to support any specific idea that one might wish. That isn't to say, however, that I'm not also in a tradition that is cocksure about any and every question. Even if you take one that's non-eschatological (though, if we poke at it long enough, it could be eschatological) as the concept of evolution, some Mormons will assert that the official word is that evolution isn't true. Others, including my wife, will point out that there actually isn't any official stance on the topic (which is correct; the Church doesn't go either way), though there are plenty of opinions on the matter, even from high authorities in the church. The point of this example, however, is to show how "We don't know" can be a bit of a surprise answer when the theology is supposed to be one that "has all of the answers". My own understanding of that reality has been one of the necessary steps I've had to take in how I treat my belief system. Megan had a similar issue, and in the end she decided to abandon her church--which also meant that she had to abandon the family she deeply loved. She apologized for the hateful messages she'd been sharing for the majority of her life, and in many ways sought to make amends. This was hard to read about, not because I think she did the wrong thing (she didn't; leaving her church was the only logical thing for her to do in her situation), but because it's so familiar. Members of the LDS Church are taught to care deeply about families, and a family member who doesn't worship the way the rest of the family does can very often be ostracized. There are plenty of heartbreaking stories about kids who are transgender, gay, atheist, or somehow non-conforming to Church principles being exiled from family institutions. In Megan's case, she left her church after she'd already graduated from college*, making her able to land on her feet, to a large degree. Her process of self-discovery takes up the last third or so of the book, and her musings over what she'd learned, how she had to unlearn it, and what she did to try to make things right is a beautiful component of the text. On the whole, I would really recommend this book. It's thoughtful and thought provoking. I don't always agree with some of her conclusions--particularly the argument, voiced in the final pages, that a marketplace of ideas is the panacea for the poisoned discourse that we suffer through daily (though that's a different topic for a different day)--but Unfollow is a remarkable book. I would say that, of the two, Educated struck closer to home, as its theology more closely mirrors mine, but both memoirs of women leaving the theologies of their youths are worth pursuing. --- * This was one of the surprises about the Westboro Baptist Church: It is a well-schooled institution. Many of the highest members are lawyers, and they always sent their kids to school (Megan picketed her own high school graduation, then went inside to get her diploma), and they are a far cry from the homeschooling version of fundamentalism that I saw in Educated. The other large surprise was that Fred Phelps was instrumental in advancing civil rights for Blacks in America back in the day. That he could view racism (though not antisemitism: he had a lot of spleen for Jews) as a genuine evil but not homophobia is one of the most extraordinary examples of cognitive dissonance I've ever seen. Despite the flaws, I really enjoyed Endgame back when I saw it in April. Ever since I saw it, I felt like 1) I wanted to watch it after a refresher viewing of the previous movies, and 2) I wanted to see it with my boys.
The second impulse came (in part) because of what happened when I was at Infinity War, which, if you still haven't seen it, I'm going to be rather spoiling the film for a quick sec. At the end of Avengers: Infinity War, the Snappening transpires, which totally shocked me because I had been so well conditioned by Marvel movies to see the heroes pull off the big win at the end of it all (additionally, I purposefully don't pay attention to announced movies as much as possible, preferring to be surprised by when they show up, rather than anticipating them). The ending to that movie is powerful, raw, and surprising. Gayle and I sat in the theater, waiting for the end of the credits (again, conditioned), only to hear the heart-rending wailing of a kid a few rows in front of us. He had just seen some of his most beloved heroes get dissolved in front of his eyes. Methinks the price of that family's tickets will increase with therapy bills later on. I didn't want that to happen; I didn't want my youngest (he's six at the moment), who has seen some Marvel movies, jump ahead to Infinity War and see so many characters get Snapped. That was not a parental-trial I wanted to face. So I decided that we would get around to rewatching all of the Marvel movies together as a family--yes, there's some uncomfortable content, and I'm not going to sweat that too much (I saw Batman Returns in the theater--you know, the one with the Penguine trying to bite a guy's nose off? Yeah, that one--and I'm only slightly permanently scarred)--before I hit Endgame again. Then my kids would have a fuller experience with the emotions that the film is playing with. It's not quite the same with being in the moment, I know--there's a full third of my life in which Marvel movies have been made. Considering how I was very much the stereotypical nerd who yearned to see his favorite characters on the silver screen someday, the Marvel films really have been emotionally significant to me. I can't recapture that: My kids grow up in a Marvel-dominated world (and hurrah for that, says I). But I think this process will be worthwhile anyway. We've already knocked back Iron Man, Thor, Iron Man 2, and since I rewatched The Incredible Hulk only a few months ago, we're considering that one complete. That meant that, before Amazon Prime loses all of the Marvel movies to Disney+, I decided to watch Captain America: The First Avenger last night. And by saying that, I have now taken about 500 words to get to this particular point: I am still conflicted about that movie. There are a lot of things about the Marvel movies that are rightly criticized: The music is forgettable (good while you're in it, I suppose, but essentially without the ear-worm stylings of earlier superhero movies (think the John Williams Superman theme, or Danny Elfman's Batman theme, for example)), the colors are sometimes a touch bland, the character arcs are familiar, they always end with a swarm battle, the girlfriends are immaterial to most of the heroes…all of these are valid points, and there are some more, too. One of the more subtle critiques--and one that really just gnaws at me--is that it's a much more progressive world. I mean, don't get me wrong: I love the fact that Agent Carter and a couple of nameless (essentially; I didn't catch them, at least) Black guys are brought into Captain America's squad after he busts his best friend out of Hydra prison. I wish that Bucky had been Black just to drive that home a bit more: In this version of history, they weren't Buffalo Soldiers or a segregated unit like the 442nd Infantry Regiment. They have a San Diego-born Asian-American, a Brit, a guy I'm assuming is Irish, as well as a couple of White guys and the Black guys. We don't spend a lot of time in their presence, so we never get attached to them, but seeing that kind of rich diversity that America can have (if we let it) is awesome to see on the screen. So what's the problem? It's not historically accurate--and what I mean by that isn't "I want my superhero movie to only feature White people 'cuz that's what history says and the source material" kind of argument. It's the same problem as having Captain America focus on defeating Hydra instead of Hitler: The real-world, real-history problems were deep, damaging, and destructive, but the film vaults over them without so much as a hesitation. The Holocaust is pretty much one of the most wicked things that happened in Europe--World War II was pretty much one of the most wicked of things to have happened to the planet. No one walked away without sin. Our institutionalized racism was horrendous--so bad, in fact, that the Nazis used our racism as propaganda to try to influence Black soldiers to defect--and America is the only country in the world to drop two nuclear bombs on civilian populations. It isn't like we walked away from that conflict without some heavy stains on our souls. But the version of America that Steve Rogers represents isn't the one that we have. Maybe that's the biggest part that bothers me: He has a vision and understanding of America that we never got, though many of us believe it is the same one. There's nothing wrong with having a story with an alternate-timeline of how American history went. That's not the issue: It's the way that it feels like it's supposed to be interchangeable with our own timeline. I plan on talking to my kids about this very thing, especially since my oldest is studying The Hiding Place right now, so he's becoming exposed to the real terrors of that time period. This matters to me because so much of how we view the world is filtered by the media we consume. While I do think America was a force for good during World War II, I don't want my kids to think that Rogers' America is our America. Additionally, it still bothers me to think about how Captain America--the paragon and quintessence of Americanism--is used to charge a dumpy little fortress in the Alps when he could have been helping push through the German lines at Bastogne or liberating parts of France. The timeline of the movie, to me at least, was a bit murky. Obviously, it was post D-Day when Rogers arrives in Europe, but where he is and when is incomplete. I mean, when he attacks the Hydra headquarters, he literally rides his motorcycle in, as if it's just a matter of using the 1940s version of MapQuest to figure out the best route in. I know that there are a lot of cuts that a movie like this has to take in order to 1) hit the two-hour run-time, and 2) keep it simple enough to tell the portion of the bigger story (how Captain America came to be and ended up in the 21st century), so there had to be concessions. Nevertheless, I feel like their version of the war doesn't really show the sacrifice, danger, death, and suffering that transpired in the war. Nothing really shows that to me quite as strongly as the shift from Hitler to Hydra. Honestly, the easiest way for me to swallow what happens in Captain America: The First Avenger is to assume that the Holocaust doesn't happen in this timeline. I know that America didn't get involved in Europe because we wanted to stop a genocide. But by the time (again, it's not perfectly clear) Rogers was blocking blue disintegration blasts with his vibranium shield, the crimes of the Nazis was no longer whispers and rumors: We had been liberating camps as we marched eastward, and the Russians (non-entities in this film, which is not unusual for World War II narratives; why should we credit our future enemies with their due? They were communists, after all) had been doing the same as they raced toward Berlin. Steve's fixation on Hydra--which is flimsily cast as being even worse than the Nazis, though it's only through some hasty dialogue--honestly feels out of sync if there are death camps dotted throughout Europe. Look, he even thinks about diving into the water to save that young scamp during the foot-chase scene ("I can swim! Go get him!" the kid tells him). Are we seriously going to say that he understands the Hydra threat to be so large--this mystical, quasi-magical weaponization of Norse deities' power--that people being burned alive in ovens is immaterial to him? I'm not saying that I want Hydra to be more wicked than Nazis. That would require a lot of uncomfortable decisions that wouldn't make sense in the alternate-world that the Marvel movies work in. Instead, I wish that the Nazis were also considered a threat…maybe the threat of the story, only learning about Red Skull and the tesseract in the final moments. The thing is, masked soldiers who do a double-arm salute instead of the blonde-haired, blue eyed brownshirts doing a single-arm Nazi salute really doesn't feel like a legitimate threat to me. I feel like Hydra's dangerous because the movie says they are, while the historian in me is reminding me of all of the horrible things that happened to those who fought against the real-life villains. For me, it's a bridge-too-far to pretend like there was anything worse than Nazism's ideologies that were motivating the violence of the Second World War. I can't turn off my visceral reaction to that time period long enough to let a garishly-dressed supersoldier kill (and, boy, does Rogers do a lot of killing) his way through these faceless spearcarriers without feeling like something is really missing. "But, wait. Don't you love Wonder Woman? Isn't that doing the same thing, but during World War I?" Yes. Good question. And that has been grist for a lot of thinking on that front, too. In fact, I felt so strongly about how Wonder Woman treated the Great War that I took my son to see Wonder Woman as a way of getting him exposed to World War I. So, what's the difference? On the surface, it's basically the same story, isn't it? Superpowered person ends up in the theater of war and, through heroic efforts and immense self-sacrifice, manages to keep a plane loaded with deadly, world-ending weapons from being released, all while defeating an antagonist who isn't actually concerned with the historical motivations for why the war is being fought. But Wonder Woman does a lot of things differently. First of all, they picked a less-popular war (what a world we live in where wars have anything representing popularity), one that wasn't as pre-loaded in the minds of Americans. The 101st Armistice Day was observed just a couple of weeks ago, but what was the experience like for Americans--here and over there--during that time a century back? Do we remember any of the soldiers who survived the Great War--or are they only significant in the way that they came into play during the Second World War? How many battles can the average American name that happened during World War I? How many battles did the Americans fight in during World War I? These are massive gaps in our collective memories, and as a result, it allows a fictional version of the war to fit inside the superhero paradigm better. Having Diana Prince in this less familiar conflict allows the film's incongruities (like, how the H did they get close enough to the bad guys' headquarters that Diana could go incognito in a stunning blue dress without being noticed?) to be easier to swallow. More than that, however, is the trench scene. Not only is there the symbolism (which I absolutely love) of Wonder Woman being the only person who can get across No Man's Land, but there's an intimacy with the violence that makes it feel more significant. That is, Wonder Woman has to navigate the trenches, where we see the suffering of soldiers wounded, horses drowning in the mud (about 8 million pack animals served during World War I; the screams of dying men were echoed by equine death-throes), and families displaced by the violence of the war. All in about ten or fifteen minutes of screen time, we get a strong sense of the cost of the war, the effect it has on those surviving it, and the traumas it inflicts. Remember the sniper guy's PTSD being so bad that he becomes a liability? Shell-shock was a real problem, one that many--if not most, to one degree or another--soldiers experienced. In other words, Wonder Woman treats the war as a war--albeit a PG-13 version (which is fine; not everything needs to be Saving Private Ryan level of graphicness)--and allows there to be cost, danger, violence, and stakes. Wonder Woman has its own flaws--the third act is, in retrospect, a fairly large stumble--but in the area where it feels most important (to me), it really succeeds: It makes me feel like this is a real war in which Diana Prince is committed to doing her best to help end it. Captain America feels like Rogers is taking out some bad guys in a foreign country, a la the beginning of Black Panther. Couple final thoughts: All of that being said, I still really, really like the film version of Steve Rogers. The comic book version never really clicked with me--as a kid, the Man Out of Time trope wasn't very interesting (I don't know if I'm that way still; I haven't thought about it) and his costume always struck me as ridiculous. However, Chris Evans' work with the character is really enjoyable. Yeah, his pre-serum body is a bit distracting, but I positively love what they did with the character. He's committed, self-sacrificing, brave, and unwilling to compromise in the areas where conviction matters most. He's simply fantastic. In a lot of ways, Captain America: The First Avenger is less useful as an origin story, and more valuable as a character study of what makes Rogers so intriguing. Lastly: Watching Captain America and thinking about Wonder Woman and the portrayal of those films makes me--once again--deeply consider what I'm doing with my War Golem book. I've mentioned it on occasion before (like right here), but in case you've forgotten, I wrote a novel where a World War I-inspired war is fought, but with gigantic golems as an additional part of the war. If you take the dragons from Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern and their relationship with their riders, the scale of Michael Bay's Transformers, and dropped them into trench warfare, you have a sense of what I'm going for in the story. It has always gnawed at me that I chose to write a book (two, technically, though I haven't looked at the sequel since I wrote it) that uses the real-life suffering of men and women in order to tell an adventure tale. I don't normally watch war movies, as I take issue with the idea of profiting off of the death and misery of some of the worst moments in modern human history. I know that some people view them as homages and demonstrations of appreciation, and I don't disagree with that. However, as I mentioned earlier, the media we consume gives us our lenses, and viewing the wars the way that Saving Private Ryan or Dunkirk do tends to push the narrative into a "my side is the heroic side; the other side is the evil side" kind of thinking. After all, there are only a couple of hours to tell the story, so shortcuts are required. But if a person watches Hacksaw Ridge (which I haven't seen, so I'm guessing here) and thinks, "Man, the Pacific War was crazy. Look how many people died! It was so bloody!", then the film has failed. Any story of Desmond Doss, I would argue, that doesn't inspire the audience to rethink what it means to serve a country and fight in a war is a failed telling of that man's story. (Again, I haven't seen it; I can almost guarantee, however, that some people left with those sentiments I just mentioned.) I haven't been able to come up with a way of squaring this circle. As I mentioned in my linked essay, I really do like War Golem. I think it's a pretty good book. Because it's a fantasy, I don't have to worry about things like the Armenian genocide or the British blockade that starved millions of Germans--I can have a Captain America style world where the terror is in the trenches alone. But I'm trying to make it feel like Wonder Woman in terms of giving the reader a sense of the trauma and fear, the worry and pain that war of that type creates. Is that enough? Is that what it takes to make a story with real-life suffering as its cornerstone? Care, consideration, and respect? I don't know. I really don't. But I wish I did. I started off NaNoWriMo strong, and I finished strong. With only a handful of essays written in November because of NaNoWriMo, it's kind of strange to be jotting down a couple of thoughts about the experience instead of hammering away at my Hamlet reboot.
Thought One First off, I definitely made a mistake in my choice for my Yellow Passport assignment this year. (For those not inclined to follow a link, this is a chance for me and my students to find something to work on--an area that we wish to see changed or improved--and make it a new habit during our reading of Les Miserables.) I decided that I needed to get over my aversion of editing, so I've busted out War Golem for yet another passthrough. This time, the goal was to reduce the total words by ten percent--the arbitrary number that Stephen King decided on with his writing and, therefore, has become The Rule™ ever since--in the hopes of being less scary to agents when I start soliciting again. The thing with this process, however, is that it's rather painful. Not because I'm totally in love with all of the words that I've written, but because they're the words I wanted for my story to work. That's why I picked them in the first place. Now, sure, there are always areas where I worded things strangely, repeated a phrase, or somehow left things somewhat messy. That's a given. And that's the stuff that I'm trying to squeeze out of the manuscript. But it's a difficult process. I find myself counting out words to see if a rewrite will scrape one off; I dread the feeling of having to rewrite a section, because I'm confident that I will be adding to my word total. To this end, I've been reading each chapter, sentence by sentence, backwards. This works for me on a couple of levels: One, it strips away the context. I'm not involved in the story; I'm not stuck in the experience with the characters. Instead, I can look at the sentence and ask myself if it's doing what I want it to do, or if there's a way to improve it. Most of the time, it's fine. And, honestly, thus far (I'm on chapter 13 out of 31, though I skipped the first chapter because that's always the one I'm looking at, which makes me discouraged (as that's also the one that agents have looked at the most, and still found nothing to interest them) and so I wanted to come back to it at the very end of the process), editing this way has been helpful. I've yet to add words to a chapter, and though there's no way I can get the book down to 90,000 words, it most definitely will be below 100,000 words. Fantasy novels are allowed to be longer than other fiction, but I've tried really hard not to let the book get too large or out of control on that front. Much of what I want to say I've left out in the first place (another reason, I wager, why I'm not finding a lot of fat to trim from my manuscript). Though this has been a good thing, overall, it's making it harder for me to know what I mean when I think about "good writing"…and that's a topic, I think, for another day. I kind of need to get on with Thought Two Rewriting a Shakespearean play in novel form is a strange experience. I find snippets of the original creeping in--phrases or images that plant themselves in my mind and grow fruit on the page, as it were. Sometimes I'll think about a particular character detail that happens later in the play, but makes more sense to include it in the chapter I'm working on. Other times I'll find myself turning to Shakespeare to point me toward the plot again, lest I get distracted by some detail or other and lose track of where I'm supposed to go. On that front, writing my NaNoWriMo novel has been really enjoyable: I'm able to reexperience Hamlet and even put a specific interpretation on the story that fits my retelling, even if it distorts the original. That is surprisingly freeing, which I think comes because of the quasi-sacred feelings I have for the play. The inhibitions of worship are unmoored from me as I go through this story. Unfortunately, I didn't put the time and effort necessary into properly outlining the novel. Or rather, I didn't do it the way I've done it in the past. The issue with this, you see, is that I've had to do a lot of tweaks and rewrites to the outline as I went along. This is not unusual--I rarely end the exact way that I originally anticipated when I first started outlining the book. However, I normally jot down those chapters on notecards--just little 3x5s that I've collected over the years--so that when my story starts to follow its own version, I can chuck out the chapters that I don't want any more. Because I outlined on a single Word document this time, I've had to renumber the chapters four or five times this November, tweaking when one event happened in comparison to another, or fusing two chapters together--whatever the case ended up being. That meant that I ended up spending a good portion of time doing a tedious chore that, if I had simply used notecards, would never have happened. (And while I save time by typing, I have a notecard app that would have let me do the same sort of thing digitally as what I do by hand.) Not only that, but the combination of my time with War Golem and then with my reading journal and then my NaNoWriMo…well, I was feeling pretty tapped out, to be honest. My first couple of days were really effective--I took a day off from school, it was over a weekend, and it pretty much was wonderful. Once I got into the grind of school, commuting, editing, and trying to write…well, it wasn't so wonderful. In fact, some of my most embarrassingly bad writing is (I think, anyway) now up on the website under the 2019 NaNoWriMo section, almost all of it done when I simply wanted to get my wordcount done for the day. Speaking of the wordcount, I did "win" NaNoWriMo with 50,080 words total. The novel still needs three or four more chapters--some of them fairly large--to finish off the story. That means I'll probably pick at it and throw up a chapter or two as I end them. It also means that I don't really know how to hit wordcount targets, though I can surpass them. Thought Done It's nice to be finished. I dropped over 1,200 words into this essay, which is a fun muscle to flex that's been languishing a lot this past year. I'm glad that, at least for now, I can say that I'm back into something resembling a writing groove. Here's hoping it stays that way, ya? Despite wanting to reread the entirety of Shakespeare's oeuvre in a year, I come to the end of the first third of November having barely finished six plays. I don't have a defense, though I do bring an explanation: With the Wooden O Symposium of 2018 scarcely more than a year gone, I really didn't want to retread 1 Henry VI again. For that--and other reasons, of course--I chose to forego much of my Shakespearean reading. I knew that I wouldn't get the whole thing done, and though I was hoping to get more of it finished than not, I'm glad to be able to finally move out of the shadow of Shakespeare's least developed plays (in my opinion) and into something a bit more interesting. After all, Richard III is next on the docket, and since that will also be at the Utah Shakespeare Festival this upcoming season, reading it in the next little bit will have additional rewards. However, this is part of my rereading of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and I'm focusing on this early, early play. I don't think I agree with Tina Packer's argument in Women of Will that this play was probably a rewrite of Shakespeare's school project, but it certainly has its share of blemishes. It is action-packed, with over a dozen battles, as well as characters running around with their clothes abandoned, plus the ever-interesting Joan la Pucelle makes for a slightly better experience, but on the whole, it feels much more performative than other plays. Yes, I recognize the irony in that: Plays are meant to be performed. But other Shakespearean works have a humanity and inwardness that is absent for most of this play. I think the conversation "between" Margaret and Suffolk in 5.5 is a good indication of this. In the scene, Suffolk is talking to Margaret, the princess of Naples, and is so smitten by her beauty that he stands around, musing to himself in front of her. Here's a protracted quote (28-59): MARGARET
Even if you don't read the entirety of the conversation--if we're being generous in calling it that--you need only cast your eyes down the left-hand side and see how frequently the [Aside] crops up. These two are talking past each other--sharing the same space without acknowledging the other. Even when Margaret is directly addressed, she still responds in an aside. From a technical standpoint, this is rather clumsy. Though Shakespeare will utilize the aside as a way for a character to unfold her or his thoughts in later plays, this particular example shows an ineptitude in characterization. What we as an audience get is an on-stage fretting--a performance of internal conflict--that isn't an honest unfolding. The technique of the soliloquy--of which Shakespeare is an undisputed master--is supposed to give us access to those innermost thoughts of the character. When the components of a soliloquy are broken up like this, it becomes fractured and though we can understand Suffolk's inner turmoil, it doesn't imbed itself into the story. We can forgive Hamlet for stepping to the edge of the stage and saying that he is upset at his uncle-father and aunt-mother getting married so quickly--it doesn't detract at all, and actually allows us a greater insight into the conflict of the human on stage. Seeing this quasi-schizophrenic jumping of thoughts from one character to the other and then back again merely serves to underscore the theatricality of the moment. More than anything, though, the feeling of performance comes from the end of Joan la Pucelle's tumultuous life. I can only guess at the Bard's politics, but it seems clear that, problems with the crown or the state religion that he may (or, more likely, may not) have had regardless, Shakespeare was an Englishman through and through. Joan, therefore, is clearly performing the role of a virgin warrior, though Shakespeare constantly treats that concept with disdain and disbelief. First of all, he selects "la Pucelle" to designate her, though "Joan of Arc" or "Joan d'Arc" would also have served. The French word pucelle meant "maid" or "virgin", but the English slang term puzzel, pronounced in almost the same way, was another word for "slut". This is no accident (look at Talbot's work on 1.6.85: "Pucelle or pucelle, Dauphin or dog-fish…" as the clearest example), and Shakespeare will take every chance to diminish Joan's accomplishments. After all, if she was as she claimed--a virgin inspired by God to lead the French to victory over the English--then the inherent rightness of the English cause would be called into question. To that end, Shakespeare utilizes innuendo in almost every conversation that Joan is a part of. She's constantly called a whore by the English, or a witch, or a hag. If the battle goes to the French, she's hailed as a beauty and a wonder. If the battle goes to the English, she's remonstrated and called a harlot. She's one of those who, in the first scene of Act 2, abandons the battlefield in front of the English with the stage directions "They [the French] fly, leaving their clothes behind", another example--depending on the director, I suppose--of her sluttish ways. Nothing, however, demonstrates what Shakespeare thought of this old English enemy than 5.3 and 5.6. In the first instance, the entire scene is dedicated to Joan pleading to the actual fiendish spirits that have, thus far unseen by the audience, helped Joan to her sundry successes throughout the play. She pleads with them, "Where I was wont to feed you with my blood, /I'll lop a member off and give it you/ In earnest of a further benefit" (13-15). When they refuse to continue helping, she even promises that her body will "Pay the recompense if you will grant my suit" (19). She is forsaken by the fiends--and we're left with the impression that she had done unspeakable things with and for them to gain the powers she'd used earlier--and therefore caught by the English. It is during the penultimate scene of the play, 5.6, that we see Joan's performative behaviors brought to a head. She's condemned for being a sorceress, and after denying her connection to the shepherd who fathered her (who, upon leaving, shouts to the English, "O burn her, burn her! Hanging is too good" (33)), is forced to defend herself in what I think must be considered a sham court. At first she declares she's a virgin, of pure heart and intent (49-53). Then, when it's clear that her chastity is of no use, she then claims that she is actually pregnant ("I am with child, ye bloody homicides" (62)), though the father of the child constantly shifts. They guess the Dauphin (67), but she insists that it's Alençon (73) who's guilty of paternity. When that doesn't fly, she tries to implicate René King of Naples (78). The play doesn't specifically indicate whether or not she was actually pregnant and only used that as a defense against burning, though the reality doesn't seem to matter; it's performed by her, rather than being a part of her character. When I think of this sort of storytelling and I compare it to the powerhouse moments in The Winter's Tale and Hermione defends herself from her husband's baseless surmises and jealousies, it's clear to me the way that Shakespeare improved his craft. Yes, the parallels aren't perfect--Joan is depicted as truly guilty of something heinous, while Hermione rebuffs Leontes' perversions of justice with power and vigor--but it feels as though Joan is acting like Joan in this play, while anyone who portrays Hermione will be given a human to depict. I don't know of anyone whose favorite play is 1 Henry VI. It is rough, limited in female characters (there are two in the whole play: Margaret and Joan), and though quick-paced, loses some of what I expect when I come to Shakespeare's writing: Well-wrought characters working their ways through immense difficulty. As far as its use in the canon, I think that it's crucial to see how the king Henry VI changes throughout all three of the pieces. But whether or not that justifies in spending more time in his court is an open question. Nevertheless, like Titus Andronicus and Taming of the Shrew, though there are flaws--immense flaws in both of them, actually--I think they indicate the greater power that Shakespeare is able to bring to storytelling than what others of the time could produce. Most people's highlights or masterpieces would be something like Titus, Shrew, or 1 Henry VI; for Shakespeare, these are the prologue to much greater plays, much greater characterizations. I can hardly wait to read more. When it comes to streaming TV, I'm perpetually behind the curve. I watched season 1 of Stranger Things only after everyone was done talking about it, I've finally caught The Dark Crystal (I only saw it once as a teenager, and it was after a school dance and I basically fell asleep, remembering almost none of it) so that I can chip away at the new series based in that world, and since I try to limit how violent, swear-prone, or nudity laced the TV I watch is, I've completely avoided The Boys (I'm not even a fan of Amazon's version of The Tick, having watched a couple of episodes and feeling like the point of the character has been misinterpreted).
Good Omens, on the other hand, has been on my radar since it first was announced. I'm a mild fan of both Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett; of the two, the latter, I think, is a better sentence-level writer, while the former is always ready to lean heavily into the soft magic fantastical. Due to my personal preference for harder magic systems, Gaiman's oeuvre doesn't get a lot of my attention, though I always enjoy what I read from him. The late-Terry Pratchett, as everyone knows, was one of the absolute best writers in the modern era and his death has diminished literature. Feeling this way, it's no wonder that I was excited for the show, though it may come as a surprise that I haven't read the book yet. It's one of those things where I just didn't ever find it in my To Be Read pile and so it has, so far, gone unread. (Don't worry: I plan on fixing that just as soon as I can.) So this review of the Amazon Original TV Series Good Omens is only looking at the six-part mini-series and isn't even bothering to juxtapose it to its source material, since of that I'm ignorant. The Amazon Original TV Series Good Omens is exactly half of what its title implies: It is good. It is very good. Indeed, for the majority of the series, I was giggling at the droll narration of God (which, I realize, is a tricky convention to incorporate into film--I think of how clumsy the narration of Spider-Man 3 is, for example--but is absolutely necessary in a series that derives much of its humor in the way the story is told; The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also has this issue, but, fortunately, Stephen Fry exists, so the film didn't lose much of Adams' dry humor), or the madcap plotting, or the hilarious situations. My wife especially has much to do in the evenings, yet she postponed almost all of her costuming work throughout this weekend (we started it on Halloween and finished it last night) so that we could watch a couple of hours of it. There are a lot of things to commend it: The main characters are a delight. Aziraphale makes just enough mistakes and carefully bends the truth to be an imperfect angel, and Crowley was just in the wrong place at the wrong time when Satan's Fall happened--not his fault, really--so he's interested in helping out and only causing a really lazy, surface-level mischief to keep up his credentials as a demon. The taking of the two archetypes and melding and melting them into something unique and memorable is one of the great accomplishments of this story. I did find the reliance on prophecy and destiny a bit incredulous, but that's just a personal taste in why and how characters behave the way they do. The conceit of both Heaven and Hell vying for the end of the world and actively straining to let/make (respectively) it happen was an interesting wrinkle in the context of the world that I really liked, too. But that's the story, which is close to the book, from what I understand. (The series was written by Neil Gaiman, so I'm assuming there's a high level of fidelity.) The advantages of seeing it are, of course, the perks that always come along with watching over reading. Seeing the British countryside that I miss so much was a painful delight, and I pretty much just want to live in Aziraphale's bookshop for the rest of eternity. The acting by the leads, Michael Sheen and David Tennant, is top notch. Both decidedly British, but evoking different moods. Their costuming was always enjoyable--particularly during the '60s and '70s--and the chemistry between the two characters, Aziraphale and Crowley, is perfect. Another thing done particularly well is pacing. A six-hour investment into a story is quite a bit, but the episodes rarely lagged. It wasn't breakneck, but steady, with enjoyable quirks and mysteries that would crop up--mostly in the form of prophecies--and then unexpectedly resolve. Each episode felt like a lot had been accomplished with plenty left to do, all the way up to the end, which took care of each plot point well enough that very little of it felt rushed. The visual effects were never stunning--far better than TV shows had any right to be back in the early aughts, clearly--but they served the story well enough. The camera work was well done, and the editing clean and only occasionally tipping into the showing-off side of things. So, from a guy-sitting-on-his-couch perspective, I felt like it was really well put together. The three F-bombs were a touch much, I felt, mostly because the first one came with such great comedic delivery that it made every other use gratuitous by comparison. There's some naked butt-cheeks at the beginning of the story, which commences in the Garden of Eden--so no surprise there--but as far as streaming TV "adult content", there isn't very much. Oh, and speaking of the Garden of Eden, I loved the idea that Adam and Eve were Black. I thought that was cool. Having just come off a pretty in-depth reread of much of Paradise Lost, this story's use of angels, demons, and the bureaucracification of both Heaven and Hell--essentially turning Milton's vision into the mundane of corporate England--was perfect timing. It may, in fact, turn into an annual tradition for me to revisit Good Omens as I finish up Paradise Lost. At this juncture, it's as close as I can get to a good retelling of Milton's biblical fanfic on screen. And that's pretty good praise. Okay, so I'm kind of conflicted here. It's Day 2 of NaNoWriMo and I'm well ahead of where I've been in the past. I have reasons--explained below, for those who wish to know--that it's that way, and I'm really glad about it. The story is also coming out better than I expected--though not as well as I would wish--with relative ease. Yet I've now set my expectations and baseline so high that I know I won't be able to maintain it. Here's what I mean:
My first three chapters are written (that's about ten percent of the story in terms of chapter length, but my word count is at 8,300, which means that it's about twenty percent to the NaNoWriMo goal). I took a day off from school yesterday and wrote through the morning and into the afternoon. It was by no means a high watermark day of writing output--during my retreats, I see 8,300 by two o'clock, with hours left to crank out more text--but as far as a NaNoWriMo experience, it's more than amazing. In fact, I'm essentially done with the first five days of the project. That's really encouraging. I owe a lot of this to having spent three or so hours--maybe even more--in outlining what was going to happen. And though there are tricky decisions about how to make the story behave, particularly in the later chapters, I feel like I wrote pretty much what I was expecting to write for these first three. It also has helped a great deal that I'm intimately familiar with the story of Hamlet, so as I'm writing the chapters (they roughly match with each scene from the play), I can reflect on what I know each character is supposed to be thinking or feeling--inasmuch as it's known through the play. It's been kind of fun to reinterpret, for example, Hamlet's first soliloquy in the play as an older millennial sitting in an LDS chapel and trying to sort out his feelings. I've relocated some of the parts and ideas from one scene to another, as needed by how I'm telling my version of the story, and I keep finding myself throwing in small quotes from the play because it's both an homage and an inevitable output from my familiarity with the source material. It's just…what it is, I guess. And that actually leads to where I'm most disappointed in my writing. Because I'm trying to keep the story moving along, I'm not spending much time wordsmithing. This is always a tension between my desires: I want to write a lot, and I want to write beautifully. They are not--for me, at least--compatible desires. I can only have one at a time, and as far as NaNoWriMo is concerned, that means I have to write a lot. The solution to getting both of what I want is to rewrite--a lot--to get the prose to really sparkle. And that's the thing that I struggle to do more than anything else. It isn't that I haven't tried. I can't tell you how many times I've printed out another copy of a story, or hummed up the computer with the manuscript on the screen, only to feel a crush of despair that keeps me from moving on beyond the first paragraph. I legitimately try…and I seriously fail almost every time. So, while I'm enjoying what I've written for NaNoWriMo thus far (it being the second day, of course), it's not exactly good writing. It's not, at least, the kind of prose that I wish I could spontaneously create. It reminds me of John Milton's description of Shakespeare's writings: "They easy numbers flow…" And that's the thing--we don't know how much editing Shakespeare put into his work (the whole "never blotted a line" praise is rubbish, and we know this because there are vestigial pieces of Shakespearean process within the plays), but his end effect is one of effortless writing. Even Milton, whose poetry transcends so much of what's available in English, visibly strains to make the poetry work in some places. Shakespeare is graceful, like a Michael Jordan on the page. It just…comes to him. It is, of course, foolish (and wrong) of me to try to compare to Shakespeare, for lots of different reasons. But I'm dissatisfied with how well I do things on my first try. Maybe that's why I write so many rough drafts: I'm trying to write better the first time so that I don't have to rewrite more often. This seems like a plan that could maybe work, but it's likely the longest way around possible. At any rate, my quick update for the beginning of NaNoWriMo is a positive one: I'm off to a good start. Here's hoping that I can start merging my two desires together and getting a good start into a good rough draft, one that I'm not sick of by the end of the month and one that I'm actually proud to share. If you wish to read the book as it comes out, I'll be updating it (as much as I can) daily here. This is the link to chapter 1. I hope you enjoy it. |
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