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D.R. Ranshaw

D.R. RANSHAW

Understandably Unpleasant Characters

2/22/2021

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A fellow Tweeple --- someone who follows me on Twitter while I reciprocate (I’ve no idea whether that’s an official term, BTW) --- was recently musing about literary characters who are unpleasant, but understandably so, given their backgrounds. It got me to musing…
 
(And as Will so famously said, thereby hangs a tale.)
 
Unpleasant characters don’t have to be villains, you know. They’re not always twirling their moustaches, laughing maniacally while placing bound damsels in distress on railway tracks… not unless you want to deal with unbearably hoary old clichés, anyway. Which, in this day and age, when jaded, world-weary readers/viewers seem more aware than ever of tropes, plot twists, and cliché, I advise strongly against. Because, really, unless we’re channelling some saccharine saintly type, we ALL have unpleasant sides, don’t we? Perhaps Even Me. (And frankly, even saccharine saintly types can be quite unpleasant as they sanctimoniously proceed through life, reminding the rest of us, overtly or covertly, how woefully imperfect we truly are.)
 
Most unpleasant characters are, I think, that way primarily because of what SF author Robert Heinlein light-heartedly but accurately referred to as life’s ‘Surprise Party and Practical Jokes Department’ i.e., the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ life routinely chucks at us tends to have a marked effect on our dispositions, outlooks, and actions. (Yeah, I know all about the ‘nature vs. nurture’ debate. While people can be jerks from day one, I think what goes on in and during their lives has a greater impact.)
 
Even protagonists can be UUTs (Understandably Unpleasant Types --- pronounced oot, I’ve officially decided). Personally, I don’t recommend making a protagonist an UUT… it’s important for readers to be able to like and relate to protagonists, and many of us, I think, at least labour under the delusion we’re nice people more or less all the time. (That’s called rationalization, folks, and humans are mostly past masters of rationalization.) But I can think of at least two protagonists who are UUTs. Are they effective? Well, Vox Populi, Vox Dei, I say… AKA The Reader Must Decide:
 
Edmund Pevensey is one of four sibling protagonists in C.S. Lewis’ classic children’s fantasy The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe from the Chronicles of Narnia series, and Edmund is certainly an UUT. He’s angry, mouthy, rebellious --- quite a jerk, in sum --- which is, actually, played up more in the stunningly gorgeous 2005 film version. In fact, we can go further than mere jerk, because he betrays his three siblings and quite literally goes over to the Dark Side, at least for a while, before eventually, smartening up and getting redemption. (To be fair, he doesn’t initially understand the precise nature of the deal he’s making with the White Witch.)
 
So what is it making Edmund understandably unpleasant? Well, to start with, there’s a war on --- the Second World War, and he and his siblings are evacuated out of a London being bombed nightly by the Luftwaffe.  So… dislocation, separation from parental unit, relocation to an unknown environment not particularly conducive to children… check, check, check. Let’s also not forget he’s the third-born of four children. Now, as a first-born myself (I know… you’d never be able to tell), I can understand only intellectually what it would be like to be in the middle of the pack --- not the oldest/bossy star first child, not the youngest and ‘cute baby’ to be spoiled, just part of the Great Unwashed scrabbling for attention in the middle --- but I know there’s a great deal of literature out there discussing the psychological millstones of being a middle child. And once you get started on a certain path, even when you realize it’s heading off a cliff, a great many of us find it hard to swallow our pride and admit our mistake.
 
My second UUT of the day is (perhaps more controversially, although I’ll go with Kingsley Amis on this one --- he said if you can’t annoy someone, what’s the point of writing?) …Katniss Everdeen, of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy. I need to be honest up-front: I don’t like Katniss very much. I find her sullen, apathetic, and totally unwilling to accept the role that’s (admittedly) thrust upon her… right up to the end of the entire tale. She doesn’t want to take up any kind of leadership function, and allows herself to be manipulated by forces around her. Now, before you unleash all kinds of invective about how wrong I am and how Katniss is the greatest thing since sliced bread and how dare I take this attitude… sure, you’re entitled to your opinion… as am I. How is she different from Edmund? you ask. Well, Katniss is the sole protagonist, not one of four, and more importantly, unlike Edmund, she doesn’t undergo any great character epiphany by story’s end.
 
Again, to be fair (the ‘understandably’ U in our acronym), Katniss never asked for any of it. She didn’t want her sister selected as tribute; she didn’t want to have to volunteer in her place; she didn’t want to be forced to kill others in a bread-and-circuses gladiatorial arena on live TV; and she certainly didn’t want to become the face of an entire rebellion. I get that. Most of us wouldn’t want any of it, either. In spite of our frequently laughable romantic notions about ourselves, most of us just want to be allowed to quietly live our lives in peace and plenty. But… when you are The Protagonist… when greatness is thrust upon you… well, as a reader, I want a little more can-do attitude and a little less pouty teenage angst. You know, more along the lines of a Frodo Baggins, whose basic response on learning he’s been handed the Supreme Booby Prize i.e. a one-way suicide jaunt to Mordor AKA Hell on Middle Earth, is, “Well, sh*t, guys. (Pause.) Haven’t got a clue how to get there. But… (longer pause) … okay, I’ll do it. ‘Cause it’s gotta get done.” Yeah, that’s the attitude I want.
 
So suck it up, Katniss; you’re the Katalyst.
 
(Sorry. Awful pun. I’ll show myself out now.)
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Bombadil Days

2/1/2021

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These are Bombadil days.
 
This was the thought which popped, quite unbidden, into my consciousness the other day while I was vacuuming. (A task I frankly loathe, but decades ago, my wife and I divided up that part of household chores… she chose the wet cleaning, and I chose the dry. Note to youngsters: of such equitable divisions of labour are sound marriages made.) Now, I’ve no idea how or why this very random --- and very odd --- snippet wormed its way up through the vaults of thought, but, like most writers, I’ve come to expect and encourage such snippets when engaged in purely mechanical endeavours. Most of the time, they’re nothing if not entertaining, and sometimes, they’re actually useful with regards to writing.
 
Of course, you know Tom Bombadil. From J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (LOTR). What? You don’t know Tom Bombadil? Minor Character Extraordinaire? But… oh, wait, I know: you only watched Peter Jackson’s film version of the tale, didn’t you? You heathen. You Didn’t Read The Book, did you? he said, pointing an accusing finger of condemnation. Sigh. No, Tom Bombadil wasn’t in the film version. Jackson cut him out because he felt Bombadil did nothing to advance the plot. Which, on one level is true, but on others, not. We can discuss that later… or another time.
 
Anyway. Tom Bombadil appears early on in The Fellowship of the Ring, which is the first book of the trilogy. He’s humanoid, and lives in a very old, first growth forest called (surprise!) The Old Forest. Tolkien does a marvelous job describing this shaggy, overgrown aggregation of trees and other miscellaneous foliage, where the trees are unsettlingly self-aware --- in fact, one in particular, an old willow tree called (surprise!) Old Man Willow, is downright malevolent, and traps our redoubtable hobbits, who have been traversing The Old Forest in an attempt to avoid the agents of evil hot on their trail. Tom Bombadil shows up in the nick of time to save our hobbits from a gruesomely woody death, and then takes them home with him to meet the missus, a water sprite named (surprise --- no, really) Goldberry. They stay at Bombadil’s house for a couple of days before continuing on their journey.
 
If none of this is (a) familiar to you or (b) rocking your world right now, the main thing you need to take away from it all is that Tom Bombadil doesn’t venture beyond the borders of The Old Forest. Ever. It’s like that’s his quarantine bubble, and he absolutely refuses to travel outside it. Given that there’s no pandemic raging in the rest of Middle Earth (nothing, either along prosaic Covid lines or anything more florid, like Poe’s The Red Death), we’re not really sure why he draws this line. He doesn’t say, and Tolkien never explains Tom’s travel reluctance. Visa problems? Surly border guards? Poor airline food? We don’t know, and Tom ain’t sayin’.
 
Now, the Bombadil analogy to our current collective situation will only stretch so far… after all, most people don’t particularly want to be quarantined on home turf. But Tom is, in a sense, self-isolating… not from a virus, just presumably from a plague of negativity and evil. (Introverted writers don’t count in this whole thing… we’re the people who feel like we’ve been training for lockdown our entire lives. Oh, please, Br’er Fox, don’t make us stay at home to write in the peace and quiet!) In fact, most of our population is going a little squirrelly --- which is about the politest I can be --- regarding lockdowns and restrictions. In fact, it really does make me despair about the capacity of the human race to solve other major problems confronting our survival as a species. I mean, we can’t even all agree that wearing a small piece of cloth on our faces is a good thing. Or that staying home will save lives. Or so will vaccinations. No, no, we’ve got to rant and rave and froth and bubble about freedom (most people don’t, apparently, understand what it's really all about --- they think it’s just having all the cookies and eating them whenever you want… without having to share) and individual liberties and crackpot conspiracy theories and lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Sigh. I think we could do with more Tom Bombadil in our world today: he’s content where he is, doesn’t let the cares of the world get to him, enjoys and appreciates his beautiful wife, and, basically, doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Or the big stuff, come to that. And he seems to understand what so many people do not: that nothing lasts forever. I’m sure that one day, he’ll look around those shaggy old trees and decide it's time for a wee bit of a stroll beyond those (admittedly self-imposed) boundaries; that whatever it is that’s made him self-quarantine all this time is no longer a threat, and a boat cruise down the Anduin sounds just about right.
 
So chill, people. Just try pulling together for the common good.
 
For a change. 
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Slaying the Dreaded DEM

1/18/2021

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‘And hast thou slain the DEM?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.
                -with sincere apologies to Chuck Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carroll)
 
You know, even the ancient Greeks knew about it, to the point where it received a Latin name --- they didn’t use the Latin, of course; theirs was, unsurprisingly, in Greek, which is, frankly, a lot less pronounceable than Latin --- which is to say none of this is meant to be a disparagement of Greek intelligence, I hasten to add, merely an observation that it’s been around a very long time.
 
What is IT, you ask? Why, the dreaded Deus ex Machina (DEM), of course, more fearsome than a bad tempered, three-headed dog guarding the underworld… or, as writers say: faster than a speeding gerund… more powerful than a split infinitive… able to leap Oxford commas at a single bound!
 
In my last post, I discussed the problem --- or non-problem --- of cliché in writing. (I’d include a link to it, but seeing as how it’s right above this one… just scroll to it, fer cryin’ out loud.) I came to the conclusion that, while we might roll our eyes at cliché, there’s nothing particularly wrong with it in writing --- as long as we don’t use it like a 2x4 cudgel to hit the reader over the head. (Maybe a toothpick, instead. A blunt one.) Because, as I pointed out, for most of us pathetic mortals, life is just one long string of clichés i.e. the reason why clichés become clichés is because they happen so damned often to so damned many of us. People are not nearly as clever, creative, original, or funny as they think. (Trust me, I know --- boy, do I know: several eons ago, as a fresh-faced university student, I spent several summers working as a teenage Mountie in a historical park, and people’s comments as they came through the exhibit… not clever. Nope. Not creative. Definitely not creative. And after about the thousandth time hearing the same damned witticisms… not funny. I’m still scarred by the experience, lo, many decades later. Set me on the long road of disillusionment about the Common Man or Woman, it did. Oh, the humanity.)
 
However… cliché is not the same as DEM, not at all, at all. For the handful of you who’ve never heard of DEM --- the Latin phrase translates out as ‘machine of the gods,’ by the way --- it refers, at least as far as the ancient Greeks were concerned, to the plot device of resolving a play’s conflict by lowering an actor playing one of the gods from a machine suspended above the stage so he/she could dispense immediate judgement and quickly bring the play to a resolution --- in a highly artificial manner that left the audience muttering in their beards (and beer) about how damned unrealistic that would be in real life. It’s since become a phrase signifying creative bankruptcy on the part of a writer: What’s that? Painted your protagonist into a corner and now your significant other is calling you for dinner, and you can’t figure out a logical way to rescue the protagonist from the sticky situation you wrote? No problem! Throw some totally arbitrary, unrealistic person or circumstance into the mix and get ‘em out! Piece of cake!
 
Folks, when someone in your audience stands up and points the stern, Fickle Finger of Condemnation at your work, shouting out, “J’accuse! J’accuse you of DEM, you silly pig-dog! Merde!” (or words/thoughts to that effect), you’re in big trouble --- and it’s probably time to look discretely for a side exit, so as to make your getaway ahead of the outraged mob howling for blood. Why?
 
Well, look: as storytellers, we rely on a lovely little phrase I learned back in the Dawn Times, when I was just a wee young writer wannabe: the willing suspension of disbelief. (Ain’t that beautiful? Wish I could claim it as my own, but alas, I can’t. Its origin is lost in the mists of prehistory. Well, my prehistory, anyway.) Now, you can write all sorts of outlandish situations, settings, and characters… as long as you make them, and their actions, believable. You can write about mythical creatures, like dragons (or gryphons, in my case, he said disingenuously/shamelessly), unicorns and honest politicians ---- well, maybe not that last, let’s not get too carried away --- and, as long as you make the context you place them in logical and believable, your audience will accept them. SF writer Harlan Ellison coined the phrase for this whole concept interior logic, and that’s pretty bang-on the money.
 
When you engage in DEM, you violate the concept of interior logic. For example, when I was a kid, I watched this happen Every Single Week on the Batman TV series of the Dark Ages i.e. the 1960s. (And I’m still scarred from that, too. Fair riddled with neuroses, I am.) Every week, the writers set up some kind of mammoth cliff-hanger… you know, grisly, unavoidable death… no way out… curtains and all that. And then, the following week, when I breathlessly tuned in again (same Bat-time, same Bat-channel), those same writers found all kinds of ridiculous DEM to blithely whisk Batman and Robin out of their lethal predicament faster than a speeding… oops, wrong superhero mantra. Well, pretty damn fast, anyway. Never took longer than the teaser, so we could spend the entire episode building up to the next cliff-hanger, and so on. Even as an (admittedly precocious) child yet to reach my tenth birthday, it didn’t take me long to see the awful cheat in this.
 
Now, I know we’re not talking Tolstoy here, but… come on, guys. You can’t do this to your audience. I hereby designate DEM a Crime Against Literature.
 
If you get your protagonist into a spectacular crisis with no apparent way out… if you don’t want to just kill them off in the manner of George R.R. Martin… then you’ve got to construct reasonable, rational ways of extricating them from said crisis.
 
To do otherwise is… well, ‘tis a crime not to be borne.
 
Oy.
 
 
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Is It All Cliche? And Does It Matter?

1/4/2021

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“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings: how some have been depos’d, some slain in war, some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed, some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill’d, all murthered.”
                -Will (of course), writing in Richard II (Act III, Scene ii)
 
See? There ‘tis! he crowed triumphantly. Even in Will’s day, they knew all about cliché and stereotype. Thus it hast ever been, thus ‘twill ever be. Selah! Selah!
 
Ah, right. Anyway… cliché… something on my mind since watching Netflix’s enormously popular The Queen’s Gambit (TQG). That’s not quite the putdown it might initially seem. Let me start by briefly recounting the Sad Tale, complete with spoilers.
 
Poor Beth, a 1950s girl orphaned young. Her mentally ill mother commits suicide --- evidently tries infanticide, too --- by veering their car into oncoming traffic. Miraculously, Beth survives. (There’s a father around, but he wants nothing to do with Beth, so, hence, the orphan tag.)
 
Beth winds up in a state-run orphanage. It’s not exactly Dickensian, but definitely on the scale, with the kind of institutionalized grimness we’re accustomed to from countless novels. Beth is a solemn, introverted sort --- today we’d likely say she’s on the autism spectrum --- who, quite early at the orphanage, discovers chess, learning it from the janitor… and takes to it like the proverbial duck to water. She is, quite simply, a natural. A whiz. A prodigy. A savant. She displays an astounding ability to play and mentally map out whole sequences of upcoming complex moves --- hers and her opponent’s. Unfortunately, at least partially, this ability is augmented by tranquilizers the orphanage daily dispenses like candy to inmates (hey, it is the ‘60s), sowing the seed for a very unhealthy dependency.
 
Beth is ultimately adopted by an alliterative married couple, Allston and Alma. It quickly becomes evident Allston wants nothing to do with her, that the adoption was Alma’s idea, who also, BTW, has an unhealthy relationship with pills (and alcohol) --- though, to be fair, much less was understood about their harmful effects, 60 years ago.
 
Allston, callous bastard extraordinaire, has an affair and abandons Alma and Beth. Fortunately, Alma is shrewd enough to realize Beth’s chess abilities can prove lucrative if she wins tournament prize money, and so becomes Beth’s unofficial manager/agent as they criss-cross the USA, playing in competitions where Beth steamrolls over a host of fragile/misogynistic male egos. (In the ‘60s, competitive chess was almost exclusively a male domain, and to have a girl --- ooh, ick, cooties! --- be so much better than guys was… well, inconceivable.) In fact, the world chess championship doesn’t look out of reach.
 
Of course, this heady scenario must suffer unfortunate complications. Alma’s alcoholism (which she exports to Beth) and prescription drug abuse eventually catches up to her, and she dies --- in Mexico, in the middle of a tourney. Oops. Teenage Beth has to cope with all the grisly machinations involved with such an event, complicated shortly thereafter by a severe crisis of confidence frequently afflicting supremely confident people who discover, to their stunned, dismayed surprise (gasp!) they aren’t infallible --- and have feet of clay, to boot.
 
Additionally, Beth’s own very unhealthy relationship with alcohol and prescription drugs catches up with her, too, and she crashes (metaphorically) in heavily dramatic fashion. She retreats to her home, going on a spectacular bender that threatens to undo all she’s accomplished thus far in her young life --- including the upcoming world championship in the USSR.
 
Fortunately, she’s rescued by friends (including former competitors) who convince her to pull it all together. They patch her up and send her off to Moscow, complete with CIA handler, where she both charms the repressed populace and manages, in a final, climactic battle, to defeat the Soviet champion, thereby winning the world title. Yay, Beth! You go, girl.
 
(That wasn’t very brief, you note disapprovingly. Shut up, I explain. It certainly was, given we’re discussing a seven-hour tale. And I left a lot out... except a spoiler or six. Oops again.)
 
So… a plethora of characters and situations, many of which fairly smack of cliché. You know: po’ little strange orphan child makes good, tearing down a lotta stereotypical barriers and people along the way, etcetera, etcetera. Beth’s kinda like The Little Engine That Could of chess.
 
But before rushing to the conclusion I hated TQG, let me disabuse you of that right now --- and thereby hangs the tale, as Will might say. Or at least the point of today’s little epistle.
 
Sure, there’s a grab bag of clichés in TQG, and I recognized this early on, but (here’s the punch line) … It Didn’t Matter. Why? Well, a couple of reasons.
 
First, the story was extremely well told. The characters and narrative were absorbing. I’ve sat here a while trying to generate a pithy aphorism concerning how you can tell when a storyline involves riveting cliché, and when the cliché simply makes you want to puke because it’s so grindingly bad… and I’ve come up empty. All I can say is that, like true love, you know it when you see it. TQG was a story (about chess, for crying out loud, not an activity usually associated with acute visual/auditory spectator stimulation) that more than held my interest over those sevenish hours. (Yep, I play chess. The set I inherited from my grandfather is in the photograph, incidentally.)
 
Second, when you get right down to it… life is, for most of us plebes, one long string of clichés. People are not nearly as clever or original as they like to think. Clichés happen so often, to so many of us. That’s why they become clichés. We may get tired of them, but they keep on happening. And, you know… long before a fellow named Christopher Booker wrote a book about it, people recognized --- or at least maintained --- there are, really, only about seven story plots in all literature. So… like haters gonna hate, clichés gonna happen.
 
Does it matter? No, as long as writers aren’t rubbing our collective noses in it. We try to write unexpected situations and plot twists, but I begin to wonder whether that’s possible anymore.
 
But it’s not as important to me as it once was. 
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Revenge Redux

12/7/2020

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In my last post, I was ruminating on the concept of revenge (and if you haven’t already, I strongly and respectfully suggest you really should read it before proceeding any further with this one, to get the full benefit of my soaring prose, wit and wisdom… or at the very least, the thrust of what the hell I was babbling on about). Revenge is a concept which has motivated, I think, more characters, and propelled more plots than even --- possibly --- love, though I’m the first to admit I have no empirical data to back up such a heretical notion. But in my own defence, I’d like to point out that one of the (many) distressing things about humans is that, frequently, it tends to be the darker side of our collective psyches that seem to motivate us, far more than the nobler side --- a truism I take no particular pleasure in asserting, I assure you.
 
I was using a PS4 video game called The Last of Us 2 as my ‘text,’ you’ll recall, and posed a question at the end of the post which I glibly said I couldn’t answer at that moment, because I’d used up my allotted word count for the day (to my wife’s extreme annoyance, who thought that a facile excuse… though the real reason was that I wasn’t sure, myself, how to answer it, so employed one of the writer’s favourite tricks i.e. playing for time.) The question I asked was why Ellie, the protagonist, couldn’t bring herself to complete her Grand Quest Of Revenge even as she was poised at her moment of triumph.
 
So thanks, Constant Reader, for waiting a week --- even if it was involuntarily. For being such a patient little carbon-based unit, here’s your answer… after my week of reflection:
 
Because, ultimately, in the midst of a brutal, bloody battle she’s actually winning --- as I said, she’s within seconds of snuffing out Abby’s life by drowning the lass --- Ellie has, I think, a bit of an epiphany. Even in the midst of raging combat, which I grant you is not a time normally associated with thoughtful introspection. But, you know, epiphanies don’t have to be lengthy, convoluted skeins of philosophical thought; they can be blindingly quick and obvious flashes of insight, too. And it is that insight which hits Ellie like the proverbial freight train:
 
What the hell has this unending quest for revenge bought or accomplished? (Besides numerous deaths wrought in various grisly manners, that is.) Has it brought peace? It has not. Has it brought redemption? Definitely not. Perhaps most importantly, has it brought resolution, some kind of ending acceptable to the person wreaking the revenge? Most. Assuredly. Not. And seeing all those questions answered in the negative, then, we (or any thoughtful character who’s more than just a mindless killing machine --- paging the T-800!) have to ask ourselves: just what the hell has been accomplished?
 
Well… a few things: Ellie has sacrificed her relationship with her partner on the altar of revenge. It’s very possibly destroyed the family they were building (the story ends on a somewhat ambiguous note, so that’s not entirely clear, depending on what she decides to do next). It hasn’t brought Joel, the character she embarked on this bloody path for, back from the dead. It’s left Ellie physically mutilated (Abby bit off two of Ellie’s fingers in the climactic/inconclusive final fight) and unable to play the guitar --- which has a special emotional significance to her, given it was a favourite instrument of Joel’s, and he taught her how to play. (Unless she learns to play the guitar left-handed, which is doable, I suppose, but as someone who played classical guitar in the far-off halcyon days of my youth, I can assure you it would not be an easy task to rewire the brain pathways involved. Naw, I’m kidding: they weren’t particularly halcyon days, just the genesis of numerous traumas and subsequent neuroses. Oy.) And speaking of which, it’s left Ellie an emotionally devastated cripple. We’re waaay past the point of mere PTSD here. In fact, querying whether she’ll ever be emotionally whole again is a very valid thing to ask.
 
So… tallying up the scoresheet of what’s been accomplished, what’s been lost and gained, we’re left with a simple, bleak conclusion: Nothing Good, Just A Whole Lotta Heartbreak And Devastation. And so… she doesn’t complete her self-imposed task of killing Abby. Can’t, really. Yep, personal illumination’s really a bitch at times, you know. Or if you want to put it in biblical terms, yeah, the truth will indeed set you free… but frequently will also mightily piss you off in the process.
 
Watching Ellie at story’s end, as she wanders through the vacant home she shared with her partner and their kid (a home completely empty except, significantly, all Ellie’s stuff --- ooh, what a coldly mute testimonial that speaks volumes), you have to wonder what she’s feeling, because it’s kinda heartbreaking to watch. And we want to ask her, “Was it worth it, Ellie?” (Well, I did, anyway.) And I’m not being holier-than-thou… while most of us haven’t embarked on epic quests of lethal revenge --- at least, I hope not --- we’ve all had a vengeful thought or six in our lifetimes, and can relate to what the poor girl’s done. Especially in a society where all law and order, all the restraining mechanisms of civilization we’ve grown so smugly complacent about, have broken down completely.
 
But if Ellie hasn’t read Frankie Bacon’s essay on revenge, which she undoubtedly hasn’t, I’ll put tongue firmly in cheek and say that perhaps she should have read her Tolkien, for it’s to him I’ll give the last word today:
 
‘It is useless to meet revenge with revenge; it will heal nothing.’
 
Are you listening, Ellie?
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Stabbing From Hell's Heart

11/30/2020

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re venge (ri venj’) vt. to inflict harm in return for an injury
            -Webster’s New World Dictionary
 
A strange concept, really, when you stop to consider it… like many human characteristics and motivations: someone hurts us (in any number of appallingly creative possible ways, alas), and so we want to hurt them back, in some kind of perverse quid quo pro. Why, though? How is that possibly supposed to fix/heal/restore-balance-to-the-universe? The definition above is good at explaining the what, but doesn’t even attempt the why. Well, in the 2002 film of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (a marvellously clever adaptation I highly recommend, even though it takes a number of liberties with Dumas’ original story), the protagonist, Edmond, explains why he doesn’t want the people who destroyed his life simply murdered: “Death is too good for them. They must suffer as I suffered. They must see their world, all they hold dear, ripped from them as it was ripped from me” and I think that’s about the best, simplest rationalization for revenge you’re likely to get. In other words, if I’m going to suffer, you’re damned well going to suffer, too… at least as much as me, and preferably more, as punitive punishment for starting the whole thing in the first place. If I hurt and you caused it, I want you to hurt, too.
 
But in his famous 1625 essay on revenge, Francis Bacon came out against it, for several reasons: it’s illegal and immoral; it focuses on stuff done in the past; it carries grievous consequences against the avenger if caught; and perhaps most importantly, from both moral and literary perspectives… it just leads to more revenge i.e. it initiates a cycle of bloody acts, as the first wrong is avenged by a second, which leads to a third, and so on ad inifinitum. Whether he actually believed what he wrote… well, who can say? He was a contemporary of a certain writer named Will, who also had a few things to say about revenge in… oh… quite a lot of what he wrote. Because revenge is a great character and plot motivator. Just ask Hamlet… or Lear… or Iago… or Macbeth… or…
 
I’ve been musing on this topic because I’ve just finished a couple of stories, in two different mediums, which both focus on revenge as their primary motivator. And they’re both extremely well done. We’ll focus on the first one today.
 
The Last of Us 2 (TLOU2) is a PlayStation video game released earlier this year. As the ‘2’ should alert you, it’s a sequel to the 2014 original. The first TLOU takes place 20 years after a plague --- considerably nastier than the current one we’re dealing with --- has essentially collapsed modern society. Joel, a small-time 50-something smuggler, is tasked with ferrying 14-year-old Ellie across the decayed remains of the US… because, it emerges, Ellie is the only person immune to the infection’s gruesomely lethal effects. If she can be delivered to a group called the Fireflies, maybe a vaccine can be crafted from her. So Joel and Ellie --- who initially loathe each other --- unwillingly set off from the Boston Quarantine Zone on their epic trek. By the time they actually reach the Fireflies in what’s left of Utah, their relationship has grown to the point they’ve effectively bonded in a father/daughter relationship. The good news on arriving: yes, a vaccine can be harvested from Ellie. The bad news? The process will kill her. Joel must make a split-second decision, with vast, historic ramifications. Does he acquiesce and quietly leave Ellie to her fate, knowing we’re talking about salvation for the entire human race? Or does he play the protective father, throw humanity to the winds, and save Ellie’s life?
 
It’s probably no great surprise (especially to any parent) he does the latter, fighting his way through the Firefly installation and rescuing Ellie, killing a whole swatch of Fireflies in the process --- including the doctor who’s about to perform the vaccine removal process on an unconscious Ellie. The denouement is their successful escape to a survivors’ settlement in Wyoming.
 
TLOU2 takes place five years later, and guess what? Yep, turns out the doctor Joel killed had a daughter, Abby… and she’s been searching for Joel ever since. Doesn’t appear she’s read Bacon’s essay, because she’s obsessively determined to avenge dear old dad. Which she does: Joel dies a pretty horrific death at Abby’s hands --- with Ellie forced to witness. The people travelling with Abby want to kill Ellie, too, a pragmatic if not overly merciful move overruled by Abby and her on-again, off-again boyfriend. They came for Joel; mission accomplished, and it’s time to be on their way. End of story.
 
Except, of course, it’s not, just as Frankie Bacon predicted. Ellie sets out with her BFF to track Abby and avenge Joel’s murder… and yes, folks, weeee’rrrre off! Embarked on the Revenge Carousel, that never-ending round-and-round cycle of perpetual retaliatory attacks!
 
Now, the interesting thing occurring at the game’s finale is that, after all the slaughter and destruction, Abby and Ellie finally square off against each other. Like two superpowers engaged in Cold War games, they’ve spent most of the storyline engaged in proxy wars, killing subordinates left, right and centre, but now, there they are, Actually Fighting Each Other (gamers refer to this as a ‘boss fight’), quarter neither given nor expected. They’re both physically and emotionally exhausted, burned out to the core by their mutual hatred, ready to settle this once and for all.
 
But they don’t. Abby, near death from the ordeal of being captured and enslaved by another group, is weaker than Ellie --- who’s also had a pretty harrowing time tracking Abby down. After rescuing Abby solely so she can kill her, Ellie finds, to her stunned dismay… she can’t finish the job. Keep in mind that Ellie, like Melville’s Ahab, has had this single-minded obsession of revenge against Abby, her own Moby Dick, for months.
 
So… why can’t Ellie complete her self-set task of revenge?
 
Well, I’ve reached my self-imposed word quotient for today… so that’s a discussion for next time.
 
Same bat-time, same bat-channel.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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The Adventures of Nerdy Kid

11/2/2020

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Once upon a time… a very long time ago now… (much more than last Friday, with apologies to A.A. Milne) … a young Nerdy Kid loved to be read to, and lo, his parents encouraged and fostered this love, perhaps because, coming from hardscrabble working-class English families, especially during the lows of the Great Depression, they recognized the value of literacy. Or maybe they just liked to read. Or maybe it was just a way of keeping Nerdy Kid quiet.
 
Once he mastered the art of reading for himself, Nerdy Kid read all kinds of stuff… whatever he could get his grubby young hands on, really (he was the sort who’d read the sides of cereal boxes at the table if there was nothing else available… which there usually was, leastways at breakfast and lunch, because his parents didn’t seem to mind his reading at the table… although, many moons later, his wife would; but that’s a story for another day).
 
Anyway, I was digging through Nerdy Kid’s voluminous archives the other day --- but no need to worry about break and enter, or anything sinister like that, because, as you’ve surely guessed by now, Nerdy Kid was, of course, once upon a time (more decades ago than I’d like to admit, so don’t ask), Me. As is usually the case in such situations, I sought something else entirely, and quite serendipitously, came across the comics pictured at the top of this post. Classics Illustrated Junior --- which seems a little backwards, don’t you think? Junior Illustrated Classics seems much more logical, but you can see the title just as well as I can --- numbers 511 and 546. Of course, there weren’t really 546 of these literary gems… the listing inside reveals 75 titles, but I guess it’s more impressive to appear to have waaay more than that, so a little journalistic license seems to have occurred. And look at the price! The princely sum of 15 cents each! Well, it’s a princely sum if you’re ten years old and you get a weekly allowance of 25 cents each Saturday… although a quarter stretched a whole lot further back in the Dark Ages of my childhood. Yep, sure did. My paternal parental unit would bestow unto me my quarter after Saturday lunch, I believe, and I would thereupon hie myself ‘round the long, U-shaped suburban crescent on which we lived to the local drugstore, where 25 cents would get me a comic --- which were usually twelve cents, but the Classics Illustrated Junior ones were a whole three cents more, so it was a bit of a splurge to purchase one --- and some candy. Sweet Tarts, Love Hearts, maybe a little chocolate (even then, the Force/Lure of Chocolate was strong with Nerdy Kid). Then I would return home to read my new treasure whilst consuming my sugary confections. Life was so much simpler then. Even if it was mostly in black and white.
 
Now, here’s the thing: my comic collection bit the dust decades ago during a misplaced fit of adolescent smug superiority, when I decided comics were literary trash. And given how much collectors will sometimes pay for decades-old comics nowadays, I regret that smug superiority very much, I can tell you. (And several other things, too, but that’s also a tale for another day. Maybe.) So… I’m not really clear why these two comics were spared the axe. It wasn’t accidental, I can assure you: even back then, my young anal-retentive mind simply did not work that way. Nope, there must have been something else at work. So I sat down the other day, temporarily abandoning my search, and gave myself over to these two comics to reacquaint myself with them, to reach out over several decades and the mists of Time and attempt to reconnect with Nerdy Kid. Why did he like these two comics enough to keep them? What was the appeal? I’m quite sure he had several more titles in the series.
 
Well, that was easy, actually. To start with, you can call them fairy tales if you want, but they were Fantasy genre tales. I would have been intrigued by various elements:
-the clever, anthropomorphic cat in Puss in Boots, totally comfortable talking with humans… and no, this had nothing to do with Antonio Banderas and the glibness we were shown in Shrek. The comic follows the plot as told by the 17th century French author Charles Perrault, one of the fathers of the fairy tale as we know it --- and does it in a mere 28 pages of pictures and text, which is pretty impressive, when you stop to think about it. We’ve got castles, wicked wizards, a scheming feline, a beautiful princess… all the elements for rip-snortin’ good fantasy are there.
-the teeny, tiny elves (probably my first exposure to this literary species, so different from the ones who would later capture my imagination in Tolkien’s works), sneaking into the poverty-stricken shoemaker’s shop and expertly crafting shoes overnight, to the mystified consternation of the shoemaker and his wife the next morning. Something very… precise in the procedure. (Also in 28 pages --- and while I know you can’t plot a curve from only two points, I’m already sensing something of a pattern here.)
 
Even today, so many revolutions around the sun later, I still feel the pull they would have had on Nerdy Kid’s embryonic imagination, goading him on not only to read stuff like that, but maybe create his own, to write stuff like that.
 
Yep. That’s why Nerdy Kid saved those comics: to remind himself of Beginnings later on (much later on), so when he was No Longer Very Young, but a little… used up by life… frayed around the edges (rather like those comics) … he would Remember.
 
And Dream (still).
 
And Create.
 
And he did.
 
Does.
 
Will.
 
                
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Fame or Fidelity?

10/26/2020

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We writers are living oxymorons in many ways, you know. (Let me count the ways, oy… or better yet, let my long-suffering wife count the ways, from an objective observer’s perspective. Hmm. On second thought, let’s not.) I think most of us know this on an instinctive level, but it was brought to the fore when my wife and I sat down the other day and rewatched Saving Mr. Banks, the 2013 film chronicling the  early 1960s efforts of Walt Disney to make the film Mary Poppins from the books of P.L. Travers, the crusty British author who conceived the famous nanny. The film does an excellent job detailing the events, although apparently not always faithfully and/or accurately --- I used to constantly remind my students that Hollywood never lets the truth get in the way of telling a good story. But if we grant the film a generous dollop of historical/artistic licence, it works extremely well.
 
See, here’s the thing: writers will, by and large, tell you they write for themselves, they write because they have to --- really, a lot of variations on Isaac Asimov, one of science fiction’s towering giants (with, perhaps a towering ego to match; I read most of his autobiography --- two massive and rather self-indulgent volumes, if you please), who once said, “I write for the same reason I breathe --- because if I didn’t, I would die.” Which, I think, is all well and good, and even stripped of the hyperbole, largely true for most of us, including me. I write because I need to, have to. Particularly once I’ve started writing a story… it’s got to come out --- and in a timely manner, working on it diligently, not ignoring it --- because if I don’t, as Salman Rushdie has said, the story sulks.
 
But --- and here’s the first qualifier --- we don’t write only for ourselves: we want to share our work with others. We want fame and fortune. We want validation. Most of us want our words spread widely among the Horde of Voracious Readers out there; we want admiration/adulation… and maybe the means to live like J.K. Rowling. (Unless we’re weirdly reclusive hermits, like J.D. Salinger after the publication of Catcher in the Rye. Most writers tend to dream of literary fame… but once he had it, Salinger shunned it, with white-hot intensity.)
 
But --- and here’s the second qualifier, the one brought to mind from Saving Mr. Banks --- writers also don’t want to lose control of their progeny, particularly when adapting the work for either TV or movie theatre. We don’t want a nasty team of crass screenwriters taking our beloved characters and situations and transmuting them into something so foreign, so alien to our original story, that we recoil in horror and run screaming from the room. I rather suspect J.R.R. Tolkien, had he still been alive, would have been utterly horrified by what Peter Jackson did, first with The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy, then with The Hobbit --- perhaps especially with The Hobbit, where Jackson took a 19-chapter, 278-page book (at least in the Unwin edition I’ve had since I was twelve) and bloated it out to three enormous films, complete with all sorts of extraneous material --- and characters! --- not present in the original work. Again, I often pointed out to my students it was vital to keep in mind that Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Jackson’s Middle Earth are two very, very different places; and in many important regards, Tolkien’s tale, and Jackson’s tale, are quite, quite different stories. Saving Mr. Banks may not be totally accurate in its depiction of P.L. Travers’ reluctant horror about Disney taking her magical nanny and not merely giving her a spoonful of sugar, but stuffing her full of it, but I think it marvellously encapsulates the dilemma many writers have when confronted with such a scenario. (Kind of like Shylock crying out, “O my ducats! O my daughter!” What’s a hapless writer to do, for crying out loud?)
 
Not having had to face this conundrum (at least, not yet, anyway), I can only speculate on the answer, but I think it’s this: faced with the idea of greater recognition for the work versus… well, not… most writers will, ultimately, at least partially stifle the second qualifier above to allow the first qualifier to triumph. In other words, most writers will make their peace with certain changes to their literary child in order that it may reach a greater audience. Is this selling out? I don’t really know. Tolkien died long before Jackson’s films came along --- even long before Ralph Bakshi came out with his execrable animated version of LOTR in the late 1970s --- although Tolkien did sell the film rights to LOTR and The Hobbit before he died (for a pittance, apparently, especially given the multi-billion-dollar empire they’ve since spawned, but c’est la vie…).
 
It doesn’t, I guess, necessarily have to come to this Faustian deal with the devil that Saving Mr. Banks portrays. For example, George R.R. Martin, Diana Gabaldon, and J.K. Rowling have all, to varying degrees, been involved in the transmutation of their printed works to the screen, and one assumes, in the absence of anything contrary, they’re happy with the results --- Martin especially, seeing as how he was one of the creative Grand Poohbahs of the Game of Thrones TV series. Gabaldon is listed as a creative consultant on the Outlander series, which can mean anything from being deeply involved to just paying lip service to the creator’s ideas. Indeed, in rare cases, it can lead --- and here I drop my voice to a furtive whisper --- to better stories. Frank Darabont took the Stephen King novels The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, made them into films, and the films --- it pains me as a writer to have to say this, but I think it’s true --- were actually better than the original King stories.
 
So… it’s an interesting dilemma/conundrum for a writer.
 
But… there’s part of me that also thinks it would be a delightful dilemma to have.
 
In some ways.
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Making History

9/28/2020

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“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
                -Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
 
I recalled this quote the other day in light of what was, really, a throwaway point I made last post: “Yeah… I game… PS4, Xbox… so what? Stop looking at me like that. I really like games with strong, well-written female protagonists.” Several people --- not gamers --- commented, their thoughts tending to centre around two themes: 1) “Isn’t the gaming community mainly composed of adolescent male misogynists?” and 2) “Aren’t most games tailored to that market, with mainly over-sexed, impossibly muscled, aggressive male protagonists, tended by fawning, scantily clad, submissive females?”
 
Now, I don’t claim to be a gaming expert, but my answers are: first… I think there’s the usual cadre of lunatic misfits in gaming, as in any field of human endeavour (COVID seems to have brought this out with a vengeance) --- although I’m prepared to admit there may be more than usual in gaming. But I don’t run into them --- I’m a lone wolf, not doing multiplayer. Second, gaming may have begun with a bunch of Neanderthal male protagonists, but there’s a number of excellent, thoughtful games these days featuring ‘strong, well-written female protagonists’… and those are the games I find most worth playing. (IRL, I also find most women far more interesting than most men, but that’s another day’s subject.) Herewith, I submit for your approval five ‘strong, well-written female protagonists:’
 
Commander Shepard, Mass Effect Trilogy: ME was the first game I encountered where you choose your protagonist’s gender; my oldest daughter said the female voice acting was superior, so that’s what I chose. Either way, Shepard doesn’t, unfortunately, have an official first name --- I named mine Cat, short for Catherine, because she seems to possess nine lives. Shepard is a badass military commander/starship captain rolled into one, and through the course of a sprawling, sweeping trilogy, literally winds up saving the galaxy. Interestingly, this is the only game discussed here where you’ve the option of selecting a relationship --- either gay or straight --- for Shepard, adding an interesting subplot.
 
Lara Croft, Tomb Raider Reboot Trilogy: Now, let’s be clear --- the original Lara Croft was clearly designed to appeal to those adolescent male misogynists I referenced earlier, right down to her scantily clad, big-breasted appearance. But in 2013, Crystal Dynamics, the game developer, rebooted the franchise and gave us a far more intelligent take on the concept. Lara’s a recently graduated archeologist, interested in --- well, she doesn’t know it at first, but three games indicate her obsession is with the paranormal. Lara’s a bit intimidated at the beginning by the scope of what she must do, but she shakes that off pretty quickly.
 
Max Caulfield, Life is Strange: Maxine (I’d shorten that to Max, too) is an 18-year-old high school senior who discovers she has the ability to “rewind” i.e. turn back time, invariably to stop awful things from happening, particularly to her BFF, Chloe Price, a scrappy high school dropout with a lot of baggage (you get to play Chloe in the prequel Life is Strange: Before the Storm). Unfortunately, as myriad time travel stories teach us, you can’t mess with the past without creating all sorts of problems/paradoxes, and by the climax, Max has to choose between saving either Chloe or her town from total destruction. (I chose Chloe, BTW.)
 
Ellie Williams, The Last of Us 1 and 2: TLOU is a post-apocalyptic tale --- twenty years before the game begins, civilization is destroyed by a fungal plague turning infected people first into raving maniacs, then into gruesome mutations. (Hopefully, COVID isn’t taking notes.) 14-year-old Ellie, it emerges, is the only person immune, making her invaluable: if her immunity can be replicated, humanity is saved. TLOU deals with her journey across the United States’ ravaged remains to the only place a vaccine can be made. She’s shepherded by Joel, a 50-something smuggler less than enthusiastic about his task, and the game’s main thrust is the father-daughter relationship developing between two characters who initially loathe each other. (The sequel is waaay darker and as a result, I think, met with decidedly mixed reviews --- though I thought it also superb. It deals with hatred and the futility of the revenge cycle.)
 
Aloy, Horizon Zero Dawn: HZD is another post-apocalyptic story, but this time technological rather than biological. Humanity has been brought low by its own mechanical creations, and now lives in varying degrees of savagery. Aloy, a 19-year-old outcast from her tribe, begins the story wanting desperately to fit in, although as she becomes more aware of humanity’s frailties, grows less interested in that and more focused on her quest, which deals with putting to rights a world falling dangerously, lethally apart.
 
So… what makes these five appealing? They’re:
 
Willing: while not cocksure (pun intended) about their abilities, they know the job’s gotta be done, and they’re the lucky nominees. So, no whining.
 
Characters with Attitude: Little Women, they ain’t. They don’t sit around with gloved hands folded primly in laps, being well-behaved, passive/docile ciphers; they’ve thrown that stereotype in the trash where it belongs.
 
Independent and Emotionally Secure: they pass the Bechdel Test (look it up). None need guys to present plans or save the day. They’re fully capable of doing that themselves, thanks very much, so they don’t go around wishing they were guys: they know perfectly well women can do everything just as well.
 
Intelligent: there’s problem-solving elements to be confronted before characters can advance, and they do it with aplomb. No “math is hard” gender stereotypes.
 
Vulnerable, but Strong: to paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there’s a time for strength, and a time for vulnerability; a time to suck it up, and a time to weep forlornly. These characters know which is for when.
 
The odd thing is, all these characteristics are what make great characters great regardless of gender, and it’s incredibly unfortunate we even have to have this discussion; that in this day and age, these qualities in women characters specifically should be worthy of note --- or at all remarkable. But… *sigh* …here we are, in 2020, and it’s painfully obvious from current world events that, while progress has been made, we’ve still got a long way to go.
 
In the meantime: Shepard, Lara, Max, Ellie, Aloy… you go, girls. Don’t listen to the naysayers. Just keep on kicking ass.
 
You rock.
 
 
 
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Report!

9/21/2020

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Five years ago this week, so my calendar informs me, I had the book launch for my debut self-published novel, Gryphon’s Heir. As the autumn leaves were first seared by the frost, then withered, yellowed and gently cascaded to the ground, forming a crunchy carpet on the land, I gathered up my courage and launched my baby in the warm confines of an example of that increasingly rare and vanishing species, the indie bookstore. (The poetic drivel concerning autumn and leaves should be taken with a proverbial grain of salt… where I live, autumn tends to arrive with all the subtlety of an anvil dropping, and trees drop their leaves with the breakneck speed of the Whomping Willow in the Harry Potter books. After that, it’s seven months or so of winter that changes only in its degree of bleakness.) It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… well, not really. But it led me to random reflections, irresistibly reminding me of episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, where Kathryn Janeway, the trusty starship Captain, often swept out of her ready room adjoining Voyager’s bridge following an alien attack or other cosmic phenomena to make a terse, single-word demand: “Report!” Relevance? you ask. Well, this is me doing a similar thing… kind of a personal “Report!” musing, I guess --- so if you seek remarkably pithy and cogent observations about Life, Writing and the Whole Damn Thing, you may, to paraphrase Lemony Snicket, want to stop right now. This is just me, ruminating or free-associating or whatever you want to call it, on the occasion of a fairly significant personal milestone.
 
Five years ago! My social media guru back then (she eventually left the social media coaching gig after coming to the understanding how pointless and soul-sucking so much of it is) would be horrified to hear the number, particularly when that little factoid is coupled to the fact the sequel has yet to be completed, much less make an appearance. To which I’d say, chill out, girlfriend… it’s coming. Maybe not as fast as it should, but hey, been a lot of water under the personal dam (and other hoary cliches) the last five years: belatedly coming to the realization my little fiction wunderkind was not going to storm the literary world all on its own… my father’s passing and his estate’s messy settling… and the winding down of my nearly 35-year teaching career with consequent decision to retire, prompted by another grim realization i.e. all my bosses (I absolutely refuse to refer to them as superiors) had gone insane in their ideas about what constitutes sound educational philosophy. And let’s not even get into the dumpster fire that is 2020… plagues, infernos and other climate-change disasters, the shrill, demented worldwide chorus of discordant populist demagoguery/nationalism… gads, there are days it’s like we’re living the opening pages of Revelation. Yikes. Deep breaths, deep breaths…
 
Anyway, returning to one of the areas of sanity in my life. In the nine years prior to its publication in 2015, I wrote Gryphon’s Heir, a 186,000-word novel. It was never intended as a stand-alone, but the first installment in a longer tale… trilogy? Tetralogy? Dunno. The Muse has yet to inform me how long the story is. (And yes, I’ve asked. She hasn’t deigned to answer. She’s kinda standoffish like that, at times.) The sequel, tentatively titled Gryphon’s Awakening, currently sits at 178,000 words and change. Although, see, there’s a strange thing: it’s on hold.
 
No, I haven’t stopped writing. Several months ago, a very long time ago now, about last April (to paraphrase A.A. Milne), I was hijacked. I’d been minding my own business, writing Gryphon’s Awakening, thinking vaguely along the way about writing some YA or short stories with changed point of view just for something a little different, and this character unceremoniously popped into my head: a scrappy, 18-year-old girl named Areellan (ah REE lan) who plopped herself down beside me and in no uncertain tones commanded me to switch on my laptop and write as she directed. She didn’t say Hwaet!, but might as well have. 81,000 words and several edits later, I’m still listening… and she’s still dictating. And since she’s the one doing the talking, the story’s written in first person --- her perspective --- which I’ve never done before. (Strange how refreshing it is.) I’ve no idea how long her story is, or where she’s going with it. I’ve also no idea where she came from. Well, that’s not entirely true; at the time she appeared on the scene, I’d just finished playing a PS4 game with a young female protagonist, and her visual image resonated with me fairly powerfully. (Yeah… I game… PS4, Xbox… so what? Stop looking at me like that. I really like games with strong, well-written female protagonists.) Somehow, in a way I don’t fully understand, it allowed Areellan to shoulder her way up from the recesses of my subconscious, and she’s been beside me ever since.
 
And a couple of times a month, I crank out one of these little epistles --- this is my 188th blog post, incidentally, so, given I usually aim for a length of roughly 1000 words for them, I figure I’ve also written the equivalent of another novel in those five years. I used to do one every week, but that got a little untenable after a while, so now, I write (once again) more as the Muse commandeth. Sometimes she doesn’t provide a whole lot to go on: today’s post began with just two little words --- five years --- sitting naked and alone at the top of the page for quite a while, the cursor blinking impatiently behind them while it waited for me to get my poop in a group. But I started rambling, and before I knew it, here we are, that thousand words later, and --- whew --- literary collapse has been averted one more week. Today’s musings haven’t been quite as structured as I usually make them… as I said earlier, more just a personal reflection of where things are with me, writing-wise, at a rather arbitrary milestone during a very strange year… so, if you’re still here… thanks, Mom.
 
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    D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

    Author of The Annals of Arrinor series.  Lover of great literature, fine wine, and chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.

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