Oh epic!

Kudos to whoever it was who reached my blog by Googling for “silly men dancing on the road”. I hope you found what you were looking for 🙂

The Hobbit – Not As Bad As It Could Have Been

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Unlike most people, I’m not a Peter Jackson fan. While I was as wowed and delighted by The Fellowship of the Rings movie as anyone, the travesty that was The Two Towers disenchanted me to such an extent that not even the largely-better-but-still-wrong Return of the King managed to rescue. I’m a purist, I freely admit it, and the thought of someone so tone-deaf to Tolkien’s worldview making three films based on the wonderful but slight story of The Hobbit made my skin crawl.

That didn’t stop me from going to see it, of course!

I made my low fat Slimming World crisps, smuggled them in in lieu of popcorn, and settled in with low expectations, imagining I was in for some beautiful pictures, a plot that mostly resembled that of the book I loved, and a moral slant that would have had the professor spitting acid. As it was the third that was most unforgivable to me in the LotR films, I was very happy to find that in The Hobbit I got the first two only.

The visuals are beautiful, there’s no doubt about that. I’d never imagined the city under the mountain to be so large and so properly-kingdomy. To tell the truth I’d imagined it as a great big hole in the ground, so I was pleasantly surprised to have my own thoughts much improved on. It was also nice to have the dwarves feature in a heroic epic. They are rather sidelined in the Silmarillion and in LotR, and it only seems fair to adapt The Hobbit into a similar tale from the dwarves’ POV.

I was pleasantly surprised by how little was made up, as opposed to being filled in and expanded on from the appendices to LotR. What was made up tended to irk me. The whole ‘lets give Thorin a named enemy among the orcs to heighten the tension, give him more motivation than simple survival, and provide him with a heroic arc’ thing, for example, annoyed me by being so… textbook cliche storytelling.

The same thing went for the invented “let’s give Bilbo an arc where he’s desperate to prove himself to Thorin,” thing, which struck me as rather undignified for a mature 50 year old gentlehobbit. Also, despite feeling glad to have a dwarven epic, I didn’t like the whole Thorin is a heeero, Look how heroic he is! Everyone’s overawed by his heroism, dudes, you should be too! thing. There’s nothing more likely to put me off someone than bludgeoning me over the head with scenes of everyone admiring him. CoughCanwesayMarySueCough. And I know from having read the book that Thorin is nothing of the sort, Bilbo is the hero of this story. Thorin is just a warrior. The two terms are not synonymous.

I found the way the film shifted tones from silly to epic and back to silly a little jarring. The book starts with silly and works up to epic so gradually you hardly notice the tone changing, but the movie tries to have both together and I’m not sure if it works. Particularly with Radagast. I also found the interminable chase and fight sequences as boring as I found the chase and fight sequences in Indiana Jones – which may be more of a personal preference thing than a legitimate critique. Possibly other people find those scenes more gripping.

On the positive side, Bilbo was perfect, and Balin was a wonderful surprise. Such a nice old lad. Fili and Kili were very engaging too, and I liked Bofur. I recognise Dwalin and Bombur, but I admit I can’t really pick any of the others out of a lineup by name. A bit more characterisation and a bit less “orcs talking like standard fantasy film badguys in subtitles” would have been good.

I sound very negative, don’t I? And I guess I came out feeling relieved it wasn’t any worse rather than overjoyed by how wonderful it was. But it really could have been worse, and it was nice to see Rivendell again. The White Council was as ineffective as I’d always imagined, and Thranduil on his battle-stag promises good things to come, so on the whole, I’m happier than I thought I would be, and looking forward to the next.

Posthumous pardon for Turing?

This never ceases to annoy me:

http://www.themarysue.com/alan-turing-official-pardon/

It’s obvious what ought to be done. Either you posthumously pardon everyone who was convicted and punished under that law, or – if the law of the time is the law regardless of how silly it was – you do not pardon Turing. To posthumously pardon Turing alone is to say “heroes can get away with stuff that normal people can’t.” I don’t think that attitude leads to anything good for anyone.

A Rather Furious Rant.

Being too mean and/or poor to buy new books, I went over to Amazon’s kindle store yesterday and downloaded a large variety of free fantasy and mystery novels. All of these appeared to be book one of a series, which made a lot of marketing sense. The risk of liking a free book so much that I have to buy the rest of the series is a risk I’m more than prepared to take.

At any rate, I settled down with a book with a gorgeous cover – some sort of fantasy – and was forcibly reminded of one of the very few stylistic quirks that makes me want to sharpen my nib and convert my pen into a sword.

Dire Wolf

Starving, dropping with exhaustion and about to die of exposure, the heroine found herself in a “rather dire” situation. This was the point at which I deleted the book in despair. This wasn’t the first time such a namby pamby, uncommitted, lazy construction had been used, it was just the point at which I couldn’t take any more.

I fully admit that I’ve been guilty of this one myself. I hate it so much because it’s one of my own old mistakes. It seems to be a typical mistake of beginner writers in fact, and now I’ve mentioned how much I hate it, I should probably explain why.

You see, ‘rather’, like ‘slightly’, and ‘quite’ and my personal failing ‘a little’, are qualifiers. Their purpose is to take away the impact of the word you put them with – to make them mean less than they would mean alone. A ‘rather’ dire situation is nowhere near as dire as a dire situation, because that ‘rather’ dilutes the impact of the word.

Now this may be what the writer wanted to do in the first place. It’s possible he meant to convey the fact that the situation was not properly dire at all. If so, it works, in its way. But a better way would be to find a single word that can convey the correct level of direness without mealy-mouthed equivocation. To just slap a ‘rather’ in there is lazy and half-arsed.

So, the situation is not really dire? Perhaps then it’s ‘perilous’? Or is it only ‘threatening’? Or is it even less bad – ‘worrying’ maybe? There are perfectly good words for a range of levels of threat somewhere less than dire. It’s stronger, more efficient, more meticulous to use one of those instead.

But if the writer really meant that the situation was a dire one – honest-to-goodness, it really is. Seriously, brace yourself, she may not survive – then the writer should have the courage of their conviction and actually say so. Something which is rather dire is not more dire than something which is simply dire. Dire needs no stinking qualifier. Dire is cool enough to ride alone, with a four megatonne nuke under one arm and a grimoire entitled “Five easy spells to end the universe,” under the other.

And to be frank few other words need it either. I don’t believe in bad words, so there must be occasions when I’d rather have a rather than not. But on most occasions it’s better to write with certainty, rather (heh) than writing as though you can never quite commit to what you’re saying. And that means picking a good word and letting it speak for itself.

Another short post about not much

So, I’ve reached 233,253 words towards my Get Your Words Out challenge of 200,000 words in a year. Having cracked the target, I’m feeling very demotivated towards writing any more, which is something of a drawback. Next year, I can see I will have to aim for 250,000.

That gives me two completed new novels – one of which (Too Many Fairy Princes) is out on submission to publishers, one (The Pilgrims’ Tale) is with my agent and I’m hoping to get back with editing suggestions this month.

I’ve also done 101,000 words on The Glass Floor, and am still enjoying it. Extraordinary. That should come in at roughly 150,000, so I imagine it will be finished early next year.

I’m writing blog posts like a mad thing for a Blessed Isle blog tour from 31st of December to 7th of January. More about that later.

On completely different news, congratulations to JL Merrow for winning two Rainbow Awards! Outstanding! And couldn’t have happened to a more deserving author.

~

And it took me ages to work this out. See if you can do better:

Article on m/m in USA Today

I share a blog with these two ladies and also am a big fan of their The Druid Stone, so it’s great to see them in so august and mainstream a publication as USA Today

http://www.usatoday.com/story/happyeverafter/2012/11/27/male-male-appeal-violetta-vane-heidi-belleau-riptide/1730781/

talking about m/m romance and recommending some of their favourites. I continue to hear good things about Hot Head by Damon Suede, and anything by Harper Fox is bound to be good. I must try them.

Congratulations to Violetta and Heidi for the scoop. And thank you especially for recommending my Under the Hill series. Eeee! That’s fantastic 🙂

Dancing with Destiny

I’m blogging over on the LGBT Fantasy Fans blog today on a subject close to my heart – ritual dance.

http://lgbtfantasyfansandwriters.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/dancing-with-destiny/

Which was prompted by a great time at Mill Road Winter Fair at the weekend. One problem with playing music for one side while dancing for another comes when both sides turn out to the same event. Then who do you support? Crisis! Clash of loyalties! Woe is me! Who should I let down this year? Or can I figure out a composite kit and support both? I will give you a clue:

There seems to be no rule that the waistcoat you wear for the Riot can’t be black. So with a black waistcoat and a zebra blanket thrown around the shoulders for those chilly muso moments between dances, I mostly fitted with both sides at once. And boy did I need that blanket! It was perishing.

I must say, it’s excellent practice for your breath control – finishing a dance, then taking half a minute to throw on a hat and cloak & going out to play the whistle. I was out of breath most of the time, but I don’t think it showed.

Congratulations to winners of Rainbow Awards

I’m delighted to find that the Under the Hill books got an honourable mention in the SF/Fantasy section of the Rainbow Awards this year.

http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/1819913.html

And big congratulations to Charlie Cochrane for her second place *and* honourable mention in the historical section 🙂

Oh but this!

Listen to this. Is this not the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever heard in your life? It’s certainly one of them for me, and I don’t normally like male voice choirs.

How do I convey the same atmosphere in writing? It’s as bad as trying to describe what apple tastes like. Sometimes words are a very blunt instrument indeed.

‘Look’ meme, caught from Sandra Lindsay and Elin Gregory

“The game is to find the word “look” in your current work in progress, and post an excerpt from that section of the manuscript.” – Elin’s post is here

This is, as per usual, from The Glass Floor. Now 86,000 words long and almost exactly half way through. Why do I write such long books? Why?

~

A pall of smoke from the graveyards darkened the summer sky and made the light yellow-grey. Ash was falling like pre-dirtied snow. It had needed the driest tinder and most seasoned wood to build the first pyre, but now they were true bone-fires, and fed themselves on the city’s many dead. She didn’t at first distinguish the smell of wood smoke from that of burning fat. Not until she turned the corner and came into the quiet end of Mihai Voda street, where for the past three years she had rented the rooms for her salon.

There a whiter smoke gathered in cloud-like roiling, the building itself gutted and smouldering – a heat haze still wriggling over the acrid black spikes of wood that poked from the tumbles of brick.

Four other figures, huddled close to each other, stood next to what had once been the door. All of them stared at her sharply when she exclaimed “No!” and darted forward as if to run inside. There had been books, in there! There had been her master bibliography – her guide to which grimoires were worth the study, which mere tissues of lies.

She scrambled over the blackened door step, her coal black shoes crunching over a surface that still exhaled heat. There had been a mirror which Frank had had some success in enchanting. It must still be in here somewhere, and maybe she could rescue…

A hand caught her shoulder and another closed on her skirt, pulling her out of the still steaming wreckage. She turned on them “I have to find–”

“I don’t think so.” The hand at her shoulder belonged to Bogdan. “I think perhaps, with the country at war, we should all move on.”

She didn’t like his narrow, displeased look, politely contemptuous – as if he’d been served a dish of rotted eel at a state banquet and was trying not to spit it out over the floor. Since he clearly knew it was she, she folded her veil back over her headdress, to reveal her blotchy, unhandsome face. If he would scowl, she would give him a reason. “That mirror could be invaluable in battle – for a general to see the battlefield all at once, where the enemy feints, where his sappers tunnel under. I should present it to the Voivode at once as an earnest of what the mages of Bucharest can achieve–”

“Madam,” Bogdan drew himself up, all sharp edges and glitter. “Do you think the Voivode, or anyone else, would trust you again, now it is known how you’ve gulled us all this time? I think not. I suggest, for your father’s sake, you do the decent thing and find a nunnery that will take you in, for surely no decent man will ever have you to wife, if he values his independancy and the ability to be his own man.”

“That’s what you came to say to me?”

“It is.”