November « 2008 « Welcome to pattioshea.com

Archive for November, 2008

Sense and Sensibility

Sunday, November 30th, 2008

This Thanksgiving, I watched Sense and Sensibility starring Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Huge Grant, and Alan Rickman. This move is from 1995, so I’m not going to worry about spoilers. I figure anyone who wants to see it, has by now.

Mr. Dashwood dies, and by the inheritance laws, everything goes to his first-born son, leaving his second wife and three daughters penniless. He gets his son to promise to take care of the family, but his conniving and witch of a wife manages to talk him down to doing nothing for them. While they’re trying to find somewhere that they can afford to live, the witch’s eldest brother (Hugh Grant) arrives and it turns out he’s not only kind, but he’d like to be a minister. He develops an affection for Elinor (Emma Thompson) which the witch detests and she arranges to have her brother recalled to London.

The widowed Mrs. Dashwood announces that a cousin has offered them a cottage on his property and she and the girls move to a new part of the country. And along with the cousin, they meet his mother-in-law? (I can’t remember) and she turns out to be a matchmaker. She tries to set up Marianne (Kate Winslet) with Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman).

Marianne, though, finds herself taken by the dashing Willoughby who turns out to be a libertine who dumps her to marry for money. One of his past affairs got him in trouble and he needs the money of an heiress. Marianne is heartbroken at first, but over time realizes that Brandon is more worthy of her love and her feelings for him change.

In the meantime, some Lucy person tells Elinor that she’s been secretly engaged to the wannabe minister, which breaks Elinor’s heart, although she’s too circumspect to show it. When Lucy informs the witch of the engagement, Hugh Grant’s character loses his fortune to his youngest brother (although I’m not sure how since inheritance law should apply across the board, yes?) and this Lucy chick marries the younger brother who’s now rich. That leaves the minister free to marry Elinor.

The movie closes with the double wedding of the two sisters–Marianne and Brandon and Elinor and the minister. Willoughby is on the hillside, watching and knowing that the woman he loves is lost to him for all time and he’s stuck in his loveless marriage. The End.

First off, let me say that my parents have become leery whenever I bring a movie over for Thanksgiving. I have a terrible track record for having duds on this holiday. Unfortunately, this year wasn’t any better.

My folks managed to sleep through most of the movie. When they did wake up, I got all kinds of questions. I had to tell my dad three times that Emma Thompson wasn’t Kate Winslet’s mother. I saw why he was confused, though. Emma Thompson was too old for the role she played.

The plot seemed convoluted and it left far too many questions unanswered. Who was this Lucy chick and was she really secretly engaged to Hugh Grant’s character for five years? Or was she in cahoots with the witch? How’d Lucy end up with the younger brother and why was the younger brother interested in her? How did the younger brother get handed the family fortune? And if the family disowned the older brother for being engaged to Lucy, why didn’t they then take the fortune away from the youngest brother when he married her?

Maybe if I’d read the Jane Austen book that this movie is based on, I would have had a better understanding of what was going on, but I hadn’t read it. I wasn’t lost, but the movie just seemed to skim over things that I wanted answers for. Of course, squeezing a novel into a 2 hour movie isn’t easy, but it would have been better to leave some stuff out rather than have unanswered questions. At least IMO.

I also kept thinking where is Marianne’s chaperon? Isn’t her mother or someone worried she’ll ruin herself? That was a huge deal back then, at least that’s the take I get on it. Yet she’s running hither and yon with Willoughby who’s a libertine. Huh?

Anyway, overall I found the movie a bit dull and I didn’t find the romances believable. Elinor takes a couple of walks with the wannabe minister and they’re both in love. Marianne being infatuated with Willoughby was a little easier to understand because she was so into her emotions and he did rescue her and all, but you just knew there was something off about the man. How she switched her affections to Col. Brandon is never shown, we just see her attitude has changed as the colonel reads to her and then boom, they’re getting married. I wanted more.

My rating: 2 stars out of 5

Tags: movies, reviews
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

The Zone

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

There are times when I’m writing that I hit a place I like to call The Zone. I think anyone who’s done something creative knows what this is. This is when hours pass like minutes and focus on the project at hand is absolute.

I love The Zone, but it’s also hard at times. You see, when I’m in it I don’t want to be bothered by anything else–not email, not the Evil Day Job, not even sleep. If I’m really heavy into The Zone–and when I’m pushing to make a deadline, I almost always am–I even resent the time it takes to eat or shower. Even one minute away from the story is annoying.

So I’m in The Zone right now and I have been all week. It’s fabulous, but it’s also frustrating because I have so many things I have to do right now. I’m truly looking forward to this four-day weekend because I plan to barricade myself in my house from Friday until Sunday night. Three days with little contact with the outside world. Yeah, some people–extroverts–look at that as torture, but me? I consider it a pleasure and I’m counting down the minutes.

Tags: the_zone
Posted in writing | 2 Comments »

Authors and Covers

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

If you hang around writers long enough, you’ll hear comments like: the cover gods were smiling on you or I’m praying to the cover gods or even the cover gods have it in for me. This only makes sense if you know that most authors have no control over their covers.

It’s true. The cover process from the author’s side of the fence goes something like this: Fill out a form with information that conveys what the hero and heroine look like, what kind of clothes they wear, and the locations where some of the scenes take place. We’re also supposed to include a brief blurb of what the story is about. Once that’s turned in, we start our prayers because odds are we won’t see or hear anything more until the cover is finished.

I think it’s safe to say that all authors want a cover that captures a reader’s attention. For me personally, I also like the cover to convey the tone of the book (action/adventure/suspense) and I’d like it if the people on the cover would actually bear some resemblance to how I envision my hero and heroine. I’ve only had that third thing happen once. On the cover of Through a Crimson Veil, the models actually almost look like Mika and Conor. Almost.

I dream of having more input on my cover some day, of being asked what I think. I don’t have the art background and I wouldn’t interfere too much, but I would like to be able to say, hey, I don’t think this concept conveys the tone of the story if that’s the case and be in time to get changes made so it does match my book.

But alas, I don’t have any say in my covers. So in the meantime, I continue to light my candles and offer up promises to the cover gods. If you want to light a few candles on my behalf, I’d appreciate it because I have a new cover in the works for Edge of Dawn, my July 2009 release, and I’ll see it done and finished in December.

Posted in books | 6 Comments »

Childhood Dreams

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

This summer, not long after I bought my new iPod, I was over at iTunes U and saw one of the top free downloads was called Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. Cool, I thought, and downloaded it. For months now, it’s sat on my iPod without my making any effort to listen to it. What kept stopping me? It was an 1:16 minutes long. Yesterday, though, I finally played it–and was blown away.

This is one of the most wonderful, uplifting lectures I’ve ever heard. I’ve already listened to it twice and I printed out the transcript–That’s how incredible it was.

The lecture was given by Dr. Randy Pausch, a professor from Carnegie Mellon University. You might have heard about him on the national news over the summer when he passed away from pancreatic cancer. Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams has another title, one that it’s better known by–The Last Lecture.

Before you think, wow, how depressing was that speech, I can tell you it was the farthest thing from depressing. Dr. Pausch was upbeat and funny. He didn’t talk about cancer, he talked about dreams: His own, how to enable others to pursue and achieve their dreams, and what he’d learned. I’m going to recap a couple of things that I found especially important.

…the brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.

Wow! That’s just incredibly profound and very true.

I’ve always wanted to draw. I can see beautiful pencil sketches in my mind, but my attempts at drawing are, frankly, pathetic and I’d do one or two, see the results, and give up. The brick wall there was my lack of interest in practicing, in putting in the time and effort it would take to get good enough because I didn’t want it badly enough.

Now let’s look at writing. I started my first story when I was in 8th grade and I kept at it no matter what. From time to time, I’d let it lapse, but I always found my way back to it, and if something wasn’t good enough, I kept working on it until it was. And if I couldn’t fix that story, I’d move on to the next and the next. I was on the school newspaper my freshman year, the school yearbook my Sophomore, junior and editor my senior year. I majored in copywriting at the University of MN. I kept at it. My first rejection in my mid-twenties stopped me for about six months, but then I decided that if the editor thought I wrote two-dimensional characters, then by God, I’d learn and grow and become good at characterization. And one of the comments I get over and over from readers, reviewers, and others is how real my characters seem. I love hearing it.

Brick walls. Check. I didn’t want the art badly enough, but I did passionately want the writing and no brick wall stopped me for too long.

So my next piece of advice is, you just have to decide if you’re a Tigger or and Eeyore.

This is something I need a lot of reminders about–attitude. I tend to be a glass-half-empty person and I’m farther toward Eeyore than I’d like, but I can learn and change and grow. I can take a step back when I’m going down the Eeyore path and try to be more like Tigger.

I’m going to stop here, but the entire speech is filled with great life lessons. It’s definitely worth a listen and I’ve been telling everyone and I do mean everyone that they have to watch this video. Most of it is audio, so if you’re like me and not able to watch, you won’t miss too much. The second time through I saw the graphics and there are some funny shots, so if you can see video as well, that’s even better.

You can find the lecture at iTunes U, just search for “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” and it’s from Carnegie Mellon. If you don’t do iTunes, you can find it on Google Video at Randy Pausch’s web page on the CMU site. It’s about halfway down the page. There are also links to other videos, the transcript of the speech, and the PowerPoint slides among other things.

Please, listen to this talk. It’s that cool!

Tags: dreams, learning, lecture, life, pausch
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

When Good Characters Go Bad

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

Catch me over on the 2B Read blog. I talked about When Good Characters Go Bad. And yeah, it has been a busy blogging week for me.

Tags: blogging, characters
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Mistletoe and Holly

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

I talked about The Terminator and kick-butt characters over on my agent’s blog today. This is a direct link that I didn’t have when I first posted this morning. If you have a chance, come over and visit and maybe comment so I don’t feel so alone. You see, Live Journal–where the blog is–was down for like 5 hours today and I’m guessing no one read the post. Considering I spent all day Sunday writing it, someone needs to read it. Yes, I am begging.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, on to the blog post for today. I just downloaded Frank Sinatra’s Mistletoe and Holly and well, I’ve been playing Christmas songs for nearly 2 weeks now. It’s early, I know it, but it’s been so darn cold in MN that it feels like December!

I’ve also had a co-conspirator in this–my cable company has music channels and the traditional holiday music kicked off I think at the beginning of November. I downloaded my first holiday song shortly after that–Santa Baby by Eartha Kitt.

You might have guessed that I love Christmas music. It’s the only thing about winter I like. And I’ve been known to play Dean Martin’s Baby, It’s Cold Outside at any time of year because 1) I heart Dean Martin and 2) I love that song.

There’s one pattern in all the songs I’ve mentioned–every single one is a traditional song and each one is performed by a classic artist. I love Garth Brooks, but I don’t want to listen to him sing Mistletoe and Holly. Christmas means Andy Williams, Burl Ives, and Gene Autry, not any modern artist. Not for me at least.

I think it was last year (or maybe the year before), I spent weeks and weeks tracking down Christmas songs that my parents had played every year. It was no easy feat, either! I ended up buying complete CDs to find one song. I wanted Robert Goulet’s I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas, Doris Day’s Silver Bells and Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme singing Let It Snow among others. MP3s of the classics were hard to come by (hmm, maybe it was more than 2 years ago then? It doesn’t seem that long ago) and even tracking down copies of the CDs were hard. I persevered.

That doesn’t mean I’m still not adding to the holiday collection as I hear another great song that I forgot I loved. I love iTunes and Amazon–it’s making my Christmas song collection so much easier to grow

Tags: holidays, music
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Guest Blogging

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

I’m a guest today over on my agent’s blog. The post isn’t up right now (5am central time), but it should be there some time this morning. I talked about The Terminator and kick-butt characters.

Tags: blogging, characters
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Get Smart

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

Today’s movie review is Get Smart starting Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway as agents 86 and 99 respectively. This movie is from 2008, so I’m going to try not to give any spoilers, but beware that sometimes I slip. Don’t read any farther if you for sure don’t want anything given away before you see the film.

Maxwell Smart (Agent 86) is an analyst, not an agent when the movie starts, but he’s taken the test and passed it with flying colors. The chief, though, says he’s too important to lose as an analyst and he will not be working as a field agent. Max is disappointed, but when the identities of every one of CONTROL’s agents has been leaked to the enemy, he’s sent into the field with Agent 99. She’s had extensive plastic surgery and is unrecognizable from her earlier appearance. They go out to battle KAOS and save the world.

I wish I could do a better summary of the movie, but I can’t. I thought the plot lacked focus and a strong bad guy. It seemed to me as if the characters were running around for no particular reason without any particular goal or purpose. I’ll confess here that I was working on a manuscript while I was watching, so maybe I simply wasn’t paying attention when it all would have been made clear. If that were the case, though, you think there’d be more detective work revealed. We’re in Russia to find this and because of what we learned, we’re going to Washington. I didn’t see any of that.

Steve Carell was okay as Maxwell Smart, but he’s not Don Adams. I used to watch reruns of the original Get Smart TV series when I was a kid and I used to love it, so he had a big pair of shoes to fill. He made me wish Don Adams was still alive and young enough to play the role. As for Anne Hathaway, she was okay as well, but I didn’t see any chemistry between her and Steve Carell and that made the “romance” between the two agents difficult to believe.

The film is 110 minutes long and I enjoyed the last 15 or 20 minutes of it. Yes, it really took that long before I found something to laugh at. If the entire movie would have been like the end, it would have been a fun way to spend an evening. As it stood, I was bored and would have quit long before the finale if I hadn’t needed to input some stuff on my manuscript.

My opinion? Give the movie a pass and rent the old television series. It’s probably dated, but you’ll find out why Don Adams was so perfect as Maxwell Smart and hear all the great signature lines he had. They tried to replicate them in the movie, but they just didn’t work like they did in the series.

Rating: 2.25 out of 5

Tags: movies, reviews
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Inconvenient Sin

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

Sometimes I wonder about how a writer’s mind works. At least my own mind. I’m doing some revisions for Edge of Dawn, the third book in my Light Warriors series and book four still needs to be written–I have a deadline–but I’m getting information on book five. Keep in mind that book 5 didn’t exist until a few months ago and is unproposed and unsold. I should be focused on the books that are on the front burner and my mind isn’t.

If the series continues past four books, the fifth will have Sinclair Duncan as the hero. He was introduced in In the Midnight Hour and was not exactly the most sympathetic character of all time. And his heroine is Tris Andrews. If y’all read Edge of Dawn when it comes out July 2009, you’ll meet her there.

I believe I’ve mentioned this pairing before on the blog, but what I didn’t know is that by the time the story takes place, Tris and Sin have a past. With each other! That was a surprise. I knew that there was conflict between them, enough so that things were not peachy when the book kicks off, but I thought it was the circumstances that caused the problem. Well, mostly I thought that. I did wonder because the intensity seemed out of proportion–it was just too heated–but since I had other stories to write/work on, I didn’t spend much time trying to figure out the whys. As it turned out, I didn’t need to–Tris and Sin were happy to interrupt and pass along the information this week.

So they have a past together, one that didn’t end on the best of terms–at least on Sin’s side. It’s a little more complicated for Tris, but then she’s the one who ended it. I think it happens after Edge of Dawn ends, but I don’t know enough yet to be 100% certain.

I also got confirmation of something I suspected in Midnight Hour, but didn’t know for sure because I was solely in Ryne or Deke’s points of view–Sin is/was jealous of how powerful Ryne is. I think he got over that, at least that’s the impression I have, but he feels it’s too late to patch things with his former friend. He’s just burned too many bridges between them too thoroughly to think they can be repaired. Which has the potential to be another thread of conflict between Tris and Sin. Tris, you see, looks up to Ryne as the example of what she wants to be as a troubleshooter, and since her brother got involved with Shona, she’s met Ryne and likes her. I’m not sure how or even if this will play a role in the story, but it’s there.

It’s been a really interesting glimpse into their lives even though the info is far from complete. It’s also been interesting to get to know Tris a little. I suspected she was…feisty, for lack of a better word, but now I have a better gauge on just how much. I also know that she’s spent years trying to prove to her brothers that she’s as tough as they are and that she should be part of their group. The problem is that Logan and Kel are twins, that’s a special bond that she can’t share, and they’re four years older than she is and that made a big difference when they were kids.

I’m thinking I should write down all the stuff I’m getting right now so that I remember it when I do want to work on their story in a few months. I’d hate to forget important stuff.

Tags: characters
Posted in writing | No Comments »

Life On Mars

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

My new favorite TV show is Life On Mars starring Jason O’Mara as Sam Tyler and Harvey Keitel as police lieutenant Gene Hunt. For someone who never found anything interesting on television, this new season has offered me two great shows (see my earlier review of My Own Worst Enemy) and I’m loving it!

Life On Mars is about a NYC police detective on the trail of a serial killer in 2008 who gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. He’s still a police detective, a new transfer into the 125th precinct, he has a car, and an apartment, but nothing about this world seems familiar to him. It’s as if he’s been plopped down on an alien planet.

The show is at its heart a police drama, but the time travel adds an interesting twist. The cops in 1973 are cowboys–they’ll plant evidence and do whatever else it takes, legal or illegal, to get their man. Sam is a detective from 2008 where there are rules to be followed. But more than that, at his core, Sam believes in justice and he believes the police should embody that ideal. His fellow detectives think that he’s a loon and don’t understand why he battles with them about such simple things.

It’s not only the police force that’s different. 1973 is a whole ‘nother universe. Watergate hasn’t happened yet, there’s Vietnam, the relationships between the various groups of people who live in NYC, and a world where racism and sexism still pervade life to an extent that they don’t today.

Sam also has a woman he’s in love with back in 2008 and he wants to return home. Nothing’s clear, though. Is he dead? Hallucinating? In a coma? On drugs? He doesn’t know and freaky things keep happening like cryptic comments from old men and little miniature robots streaming around him. He wants to know what’s really going on; what’s happening to him and why.

Throw in Sam’s parents–he helps his mother when he sees her being roughed up by a thug who works for a loan shark and saw his father taking him to a baseball game–and there’s plenty of story and questions and drama to be had.

I totally love this show, especially the juxtaposition of a 2008 man in a 1973 world. Watching this show makes me wonder if things really were this way back then. It seems so hard to believe that this was the world such a short time ago and that things have changed this dramatically in such a short time. And not just the technology either, but the attitudes and the militancy and the unrest.

Jason O’Mara is perfect in his role as time traveler. He’s lost, he’s confused, but he knows he still needs to function in this strange, new world and he does. He also hangs on to his ideals, and by his actions, have given his lieutenant an opportunity to be a better man, to be the young idealist who joined the police force and had that optimism tarnished by cops on the take and other things he saw, other things he did. The character interactions are wonderful.

I also like the way hints are dropped into the show that the time travel happened for a reason. We, the viewer, don’t know what it is any more than Sam does, but like him, we’re given enough information to keep us guessing. It’s fun at the same time that it’s frustrating. Like Sam, I want to know!

Anyway, give this show a try if you haven’t already. It’s on ABC at 10pm Eastern/9pm Central on Thursday nights.

My rating: 5 stars

Tags: reviews, TV
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »