This past weekend, M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender opened in theaters. For those of you who don't know, it's based on the completely and totally awesome Nickelodeon cartoon, Avatar: The Last Airbender. The series took place over the course of three seasons, each with their own title (The Book of Water, The Book of Earth, and The Book of Fire) and, unlike most American cartoons, had an overlying story arc with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Add to that characters that actually developed and grew over the course of the series, romance, moral dilemmas, action, adventure, and a serious threat to the world, and you've got yourself a winner.
Oh, and can't forget the humor. Lots of humor... so I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw the previews of a dark, joyless world in the grips of angsty melodrama.
I haven't seen the movie, nor do I intend to in theaters. I know, I know, there are some people who like it, but I'm having a real hard time reconciling some of the changes Mr. Shyamalan decided to make to the actual mythos of Avatar. Cutting things out of Season I to fit it all in a less than two hour movie, I can understand. Drastically changing the plot and the characters' personalities to suit his own personal vision? Unforgivable. And don't even get me started on the names. -_-;;
In any case, I did find something to help ease the anger over some self-absorbed director mauling one of the best things in the past ten years in some quest to make it his own: the Avatar: The Last Airbender Artbook. I spotted this in the bookstore Monday and just couldn't resist. Mike and Bryan (the creators) talk about the development of Avatar and how they got it all together, which is fascinating for anyone who is creating their own world, plus discuss the characters and the process and provide plenty of development sketches and conceptual artwork to drool over.
Yeah. This has made my week. :D
As for the movie? Well... we'll see what happens when it hits DVD.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
The Morganville Vampires
Back in January, I picked up a collection of YA vampire stories called Immortal: Love Stories With Bite. I admit it, I'm a sucker for vampire stories, and while not all the stories were fantastic, there were a lot of really good ones that make the anthology worthwhile.
Rachel Caine's short story "Dead Man Stalking" was one of my favorites out of the entire book, and while I wouldn't have called it a "love story" in the romantic sense, I think it explored a different kind of love, and I am so glad it was included. It was an introduction to Caine's series, The Morganville Vampires, which, I am sad to say, I may never have picked up otherwise. Here's another admission: the back blurb of a book matters to me. The title or cover might get me to pick up a book, but it's the back blurb that gets me to either buy it on the spot or look inside. The back of the first book, Glass Houses, never really grabbed my attention.
The short story? Grabbed me, hooked me, and dragged me back to Borders for more.
Luckily for me, the first two books were published in a 2-for-1 volume back in November, so I picked that up... and have flown through Book 1 in three days. Considering my normal method of reading is a chapter or two every morning, that's breakneck speed for me. I love the characters, I love the writing, I love the quirks and twists and turns and the way it keeps me on the edge of my seat. Caine isn't afraid to put her characters in danger and keep them there, and despite the main character being a 16-year-old brainiac in college, Claire hasn't struck me as a Mary Sue. Sure, she's super book-smart, but other than that, she's pretty much an ordinary girl who flounders in ordinary ways and finds herself in extraordinary circumstances.
I've just finished the first book, Glass Houses, and just started Book 2, The Dead Girls' Dance, about three hours ago... and am already six chapters in. It's not that I read that slow: it's that I have other things to do... or keep trying to do. And yet, I just keep picking the book back up, read another scene or two, try to put it down, and can't. I don't want to wait to know what happens next.
And that, I think, has to be the highest praise any book can ever hope to achieve.
I think there'll be another trip to Borders this week, and I will be grabbing as many of The Morganville Vampires series as they have.
Rachel Caine's short story "Dead Man Stalking" was one of my favorites out of the entire book, and while I wouldn't have called it a "love story" in the romantic sense, I think it explored a different kind of love, and I am so glad it was included. It was an introduction to Caine's series, The Morganville Vampires, which, I am sad to say, I may never have picked up otherwise. Here's another admission: the back blurb of a book matters to me. The title or cover might get me to pick up a book, but it's the back blurb that gets me to either buy it on the spot or look inside. The back of the first book, Glass Houses, never really grabbed my attention.
The short story? Grabbed me, hooked me, and dragged me back to Borders for more.
Luckily for me, the first two books were published in a 2-for-1 volume back in November, so I picked that up... and have flown through Book 1 in three days. Considering my normal method of reading is a chapter or two every morning, that's breakneck speed for me. I love the characters, I love the writing, I love the quirks and twists and turns and the way it keeps me on the edge of my seat. Caine isn't afraid to put her characters in danger and keep them there, and despite the main character being a 16-year-old brainiac in college, Claire hasn't struck me as a Mary Sue. Sure, she's super book-smart, but other than that, she's pretty much an ordinary girl who flounders in ordinary ways and finds herself in extraordinary circumstances.
I've just finished the first book, Glass Houses, and just started Book 2, The Dead Girls' Dance, about three hours ago... and am already six chapters in. It's not that I read that slow: it's that I have other things to do... or keep trying to do. And yet, I just keep picking the book back up, read another scene or two, try to put it down, and can't. I don't want to wait to know what happens next.
And that, I think, has to be the highest praise any book can ever hope to achieve.
I think there'll be another trip to Borders this week, and I will be grabbing as many of The Morganville Vampires series as they have.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
The Right to Write
One of my favorite writing exercises is pretty simple. I grab a book, flip to a page, and write down the first noun or verb I see. Repeat two more times. Then, write something using all three words. It's a good little exercise that can come up with some interesting results, especially if you do it shortly after getting up, before the Inner Critic and Editor have had their morning coffee.
Anyways, today the book I was using to find words was Novel Ideas: Fantasy, an anthology of short stories and novellas that eventually spurred the author on to full novels or series. I haven't read them all, having found it a fantastic source for my exercise and not wanting to know context for the words, but today, I flipped to the intro page of Orson Scott Card's story Lost Boys.* Well, the only Lost Boys I knew of involved Kiefer Sutherland in a pair fangs, so of course I had to read the intro... where Card described a night of storytelling at a university Halloween party where he decided to tell a ghost story that ended up with half the people present pissed off at him.
Long story short, Card decided to give personalizing a fictional story a try by telling it in first person as if it were fact and had happened to him, even to the point of using his own life and real names. He then added fictional characters and events, like his "eldest son" Scotty and the bodies in their crawlspace. When he later decided to write it as a short story and present it at a workshop, the other writers were furious. One even went as far as telling him he had no right to write a story about losing a son like that unless he actually had.
That got me thinking. Is there anything a writer doesn't have the right to write? It goes right back to that old stand-by of "Write what you know." But people tend to interpret that as, "you can only write your class, race, gender, and lifestyle." Which means people shouldn't write about different family set-ups, professions, or religions, either. Which, frankly, would make for a pretty bleak reading selection, particularly for a fantasy lover like me.
Instead, I prefer to think of it as having a deeper meaning. Humans were granted an amazing imagination, and we "know" a lot more than we give ourselves credit for. We all know the basic emotions: love, joy, anger, sadness, grief, desperation, fear, embarrassment, etc. Writers can take those emotion and extrapolate them into what their characters are feeling, and through their words, they can inspire their readers to feel those things, too. Imagination is a powerful thing.
Am I saying screw the research and just write whatever the heck you want? Not if you want it read by other people. Do the research, listen to people who have lived through something similar, pay attention, and then put that wonderful imagination to work.
So did Orson Scott Card have a right to write that short story from the first person? In my opinion, absolutely. As he wrote in his afterward, he may not have lost a child to death, but he knew intimately what it was like to have a child who couldn't really live the way all parents want their children to. The emotions in his story came from a very real place, and it resulted in a powerful story. That people would get outraged over the fact that he hadn't had a child die seems ridiculous to me. It's fiction - the truth is in the lies.
* This is the story that he later turned into the full-length book, Lost Boys: A Novel. Obviously, a lot changed, but the key idea seems to have stayed the same.
Anyways, today the book I was using to find words was Novel Ideas: Fantasy, an anthology of short stories and novellas that eventually spurred the author on to full novels or series. I haven't read them all, having found it a fantastic source for my exercise and not wanting to know context for the words, but today, I flipped to the intro page of Orson Scott Card's story Lost Boys.* Well, the only Lost Boys I knew of involved Kiefer Sutherland in a pair fangs, so of course I had to read the intro... where Card described a night of storytelling at a university Halloween party where he decided to tell a ghost story that ended up with half the people present pissed off at him.
Long story short, Card decided to give personalizing a fictional story a try by telling it in first person as if it were fact and had happened to him, even to the point of using his own life and real names. He then added fictional characters and events, like his "eldest son" Scotty and the bodies in their crawlspace. When he later decided to write it as a short story and present it at a workshop, the other writers were furious. One even went as far as telling him he had no right to write a story about losing a son like that unless he actually had.
That got me thinking. Is there anything a writer doesn't have the right to write? It goes right back to that old stand-by of "Write what you know." But people tend to interpret that as, "you can only write your class, race, gender, and lifestyle." Which means people shouldn't write about different family set-ups, professions, or religions, either. Which, frankly, would make for a pretty bleak reading selection, particularly for a fantasy lover like me.
Instead, I prefer to think of it as having a deeper meaning. Humans were granted an amazing imagination, and we "know" a lot more than we give ourselves credit for. We all know the basic emotions: love, joy, anger, sadness, grief, desperation, fear, embarrassment, etc. Writers can take those emotion and extrapolate them into what their characters are feeling, and through their words, they can inspire their readers to feel those things, too. Imagination is a powerful thing.
Am I saying screw the research and just write whatever the heck you want? Not if you want it read by other people. Do the research, listen to people who have lived through something similar, pay attention, and then put that wonderful imagination to work.
So did Orson Scott Card have a right to write that short story from the first person? In my opinion, absolutely. As he wrote in his afterward, he may not have lost a child to death, but he knew intimately what it was like to have a child who couldn't really live the way all parents want their children to. The emotions in his story came from a very real place, and it resulted in a powerful story. That people would get outraged over the fact that he hadn't had a child die seems ridiculous to me. It's fiction - the truth is in the lies.
* This is the story that he later turned into the full-length book, Lost Boys: A Novel. Obviously, a lot changed, but the key idea seems to have stayed the same.
Monday, January 25, 2010
The Case of the Mysterious Missing Book
For everyone out there who spent their childhood with their nose buried in a book, there is that one story, that one that sticks with them for years - hopefully in a good way and not in an emotionally scarring Clan of the Cave Bear way. For me, that book was The House on Hackman's Hill, by Joan Lowery Nixon.
I read this book in second grade. Nearly twenty years later, I can still remember being curled up on the couch, eyes wide and heart pounding as something slowly crept up the stairs towards where the main characters were hiding in the old abandoned house on their quest to find a missing mummy. Its portrayal of Anubis is actually what started my life-long love of mythology.
I can't tell you how well written the book was, or whether it would make all the creative writing students and teachers out there cringe (the fact that it was middle grade genre fiction would probably have a good chunk of them banging their heads right there - they miss so many good reads that way). All I can say is that I loved that book.
In fact, I loved it enough that I lent it out to a friend... and never saw that copy of it again. About five years ago, I ran into a newly reprinted version in the book store by chance and had to pick it up. Unfortunately, I didn't have a surplus of free time right then, and thanks to university burn-out, I didn't really want to read anything, mentally taxing or not, so I put it in a safe place, vowing to read it again someday and try to figure out just what it was that snagged me as an eight year old.
Safe places are the last place you want to put anything you ever actually want to see again.
The last time I remember seeing the book was a few months ago. It was still right where I had left it, still waiting. And I could have sworn I left it there. And yet, when I went to go find it earlier today... Gone. Again. No sign of it anywhere.
Since then, I have scoured my room and the spare room, everywhere I have stashed any books in the last two years or so. No sign of it anywhere. It has, once again, gone missing, this time a victim of the mystical Bermuda Triangle-like vortex that is my room.
No doubt it will someday reemerge, spat back out into our dimension where I can snatch it up and finally reread it again. Until then, I found a few more books hiding in the nooks and crannies that I never got around to reading, so the scouring wasn't a total waste of time!
I read this book in second grade. Nearly twenty years later, I can still remember being curled up on the couch, eyes wide and heart pounding as something slowly crept up the stairs towards where the main characters were hiding in the old abandoned house on their quest to find a missing mummy. Its portrayal of Anubis is actually what started my life-long love of mythology.
I can't tell you how well written the book was, or whether it would make all the creative writing students and teachers out there cringe (the fact that it was middle grade genre fiction would probably have a good chunk of them banging their heads right there - they miss so many good reads that way). All I can say is that I loved that book.
In fact, I loved it enough that I lent it out to a friend... and never saw that copy of it again. About five years ago, I ran into a newly reprinted version in the book store by chance and had to pick it up. Unfortunately, I didn't have a surplus of free time right then, and thanks to university burn-out, I didn't really want to read anything, mentally taxing or not, so I put it in a safe place, vowing to read it again someday and try to figure out just what it was that snagged me as an eight year old.
Safe places are the last place you want to put anything you ever actually want to see again.
The last time I remember seeing the book was a few months ago. It was still right where I had left it, still waiting. And I could have sworn I left it there. And yet, when I went to go find it earlier today... Gone. Again. No sign of it anywhere.
Since then, I have scoured my room and the spare room, everywhere I have stashed any books in the last two years or so. No sign of it anywhere. It has, once again, gone missing, this time a victim of the mystical Bermuda Triangle-like vortex that is my room.
No doubt it will someday reemerge, spat back out into our dimension where I can snatch it up and finally reread it again. Until then, I found a few more books hiding in the nooks and crannies that I never got around to reading, so the scouring wasn't a total waste of time!
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