I find myself bored, and as it happens I do not have any great desire to clean my room. So I thought I would entertain myself by imagining what actors would play my characters if my books were turned into movies. Or say rather, actors who look like I imagine my characters to look.
(Of course, before the movie adaptation you have to write the damn thing, but..)
Up first? Princess. Continue reading
Remember Miri and Oren? I wrote a story about them for the last Saucy Ink collection?
They paid a visit to me in the shower. I had to scribble it down quickly before I forgot it, although I have no idea where or when it happens or who Bakir is or when Miri had a daughter (…um…) or why an underworld crime boss wants to employ her or why Oren is cool with this or…yeah I’m pretty confused.
(Also hi Tami I stole your dragon’s name by accident because it was pretty and stuck in my head…sorry…let me know if you’d rather I didn’t).
***
“You’re wrong.”
Oren furrowed his brow. “But Bakir said–”
“Bakir is a gossip-mongering idiot.” Miri turned away from the window. “I don’t blame you for Sitri’s death. I blame myself.”
She paced across the floor.
“I was so obsessed with our work – so caught up in the adventure — that I neglected my child. I wasn’t there. I didn’t protect her.”
“Miri, there was no way you could have seen it coming.”
Miri whirled on him, her eyes wild and full of tears. “Yes there was!” she screamed. “I should have known!” She flew at him, punctuating each word with a strike. “I. Should. Have. Known!”
Oren said nothing.
Suddenly she stopped, and the anger was gone as suddenly as it had appeared.
“Tell Vashara I can’t help her. Find yourself another water-witch.”
To everyone, celebrating or not, I hope you are having a wonderful week, and that you are happy and healthy and having fun.
I’m feeling reinvigorated and I’m raring to go on my novel. New goal: get to my novel’s Inciting Incident by the end of the year. That means I’ve got to write 3 scenes by January 1st! And off we go…
This is a Coquerel’s sifaka (pronounced shi-fahk or shi-fah-ka depending on who you ask), once considered to be a subspecies of Verreaux’s sifaka but since elevated to its own species. Its scientific name is Propithecus coquereli.
Last semester, I took a class called Explorations in Primate Anatomy. The overarching assignment of the semester was to select a “chosen species” and investigate, in detail, its distribution/habitat/behavior, cranial morphology, dental morphology, and postcranial morphology.
I spent three months immersed in this animal. (Well, sometimes I was looking at P. verreaxi bones but that’s just because we didn’t have the Coquerel, and besides they are extremely closely related and primatologists are notorious splitters anyway…)
Two weeks ago I went to the Bronx Zoo with my mammalogy class. We happily went around looking at geladas and giraffes and sea lions and brown bears and polar bears and tigers and then we walked into the Madagascar building and this is the FIRST THING I SEE.
I teared up. Not joking.
I was SO EXCITED AND SO HAPPY to see this little guy and I can hardly tell you why – I just spent so long with his species that I feel this very close affinity and to see one in person – the real, living creature to which the skulls I spent so much time with belonged – was just incredibly moving. And then he looked right at me and I pretty much did cry, looking at his adorable little face.
It’s a good thing that I’m not likely to ever run into a living Neandertal. I think if I ever met a Neandertal in person I’d expire on the spot.
I love my Kindle. I do. I can have hundreds of books on it and it’s still light and easy to carry. There are lots of great things about it.
I love my digital camera. I can fit 1000 photos on my memory card; I can catch moments that are gone in the blink of an eye. I can get instant feedback on whether the shot turned out right. If I mess up, I can delete the photo and try again.
But sometimes I like the feel of a paperback in my hand. Sometimes I like the feeling of stopping by the man who sells books on Broadway and finding a paperback I really wanted and buying it for $2. It’s like a surprise, a present. It’s something special.
And sometimes I like to shoot film. It’s softer, more intimate, more beautiful. It’s like opening presents when you send the film to be developed and get the scans back. If you’re lucky enough to have a darkroom, it’s peaceful when you develop the prints, watching the image bloom on the paper as you swirl it in the developer. I feel like I’m creating something, crafting something, as I work.
So yeah, technology is great! The world is moving at an astonishing pace, and ebooks and digital photos and whatever-they-invent-next-week are wonderful.
But sometimes I want something tangible. Sometimes I want something a little old school.
I spent most of last week up at my grandparents’ house in Connecticut. There are lots of things I could say about that, but most of them would be uninteresting to the internet-at-large so I’ll refrain.
But I will share this: up there, I turn into a girl.
I have a six cousins, two of whom are girls. One of those girls is 9 or 10 now and lives in Boston. She’s a total sweetheart but it’s not really like hanging out with a friend, because she’s half my age. The other girl cousin is three years younger and I love her to death. She’s the one who turns me into a girl.
When I hang out with my school friends we mostly talk, or go see a movie, or go out to eat. If we go shopping it’s usually for books. That’s just the way we are.
When I hang out with my cousin we shop for clothes and makeup and take selfies (usually I hate doing that) and just generally act like a couple of teenagers.
It’s a little weird. But I like it.
Things to be done today, sort of in order.
I shall return later and let you know if I actually managed any of them.
So I took a half day today to take a little girl I babysit to the ballet.
She was so cute – extremely excited, all dressed up, perfectly behaved the whole time. She’s about to turn five and not very big so we had to get a cushion for her to sit on. It was totally adorable.
I was actually really happy to be seeing Swan Lake. I got some last minute tickets in the fall from the Barnard dance department but I was way on the side and only had a partial view of the stage. This time we had amazing tickets – center orchestra, not too far back.
I’m not as familiar with ABT as I am with NYCB, as proved by a quick perusal of the program. I recognized only a handful of names. Hee Seo was dancing Odette/Odile, but I had never seen her before so I was interested to see how she did. Siegfried was being danced by Marcelo Gomes who is always perfect.
Hee Seo turned out to be gorgeous. She has beautiful legs and feet and extremely expressive arms (which is super necessary for Odette especially). Odette/Odile is a hard role – one because it’s a marathon and two because they’re basically polar opposites – but Hee did a wonderful job.
If I had to criticize, I’d say she’s not really a turner. Her fouettes, the big showstopper moment in act III, were not great. There was a lot of movement and she never pulled in for multiples, not even at the end. Not that I should really be talking, my fouettes are atrocious, but there you are. She also seemed to be struggling a bit with the step overs in her act II variation.
(By the way, if you want to see a stellar coda check out Gillian Murphy. Her turns start at 0:30 if you’re in a hurry although it’s worth watching the whole thing because Angel Corella is also phenomenal. I don’t love Gillian’s arms but you can’t argue with the bravura!)
Despite my nitpicks with her turns, Hee was absolutely stunning in all of the pas. She’s definitely a lyrical dancer. And when she was with Marcello – as;dlfjwa;lf. No, seriously, that is how inarticulate they make me. It was beautiful. Marcello is a gorgeous partner. And his turns! In his act III variation he did a pirouette, finished in passe, then gave us a cheeky grin and pulled in for more! God.
I was pleasantly surprised by a few of the soloists. In particular, one of the pas de trois girls and the four little swans. Four little swans was totally fierce – although I have to admit that no matter how good it is I cringe a little bit inside while I’m watching because four swans is a bitch to do. Not because it’s that hard but it’s disproportionately difficult to do anything when you’re holding hands with three other girls. Anyway, I’ll have to keep an eye out for them in the future. The corps, on the other hand, was rather messy. I know it’s early in the run but some things were really obviously not together.
The production overall is very nice, with lavish sets and costumes. I much prefer it to the City Ballet version, which looks like it was designed and painted by a child. I understand they were going for a more modern look, which I don’t object to in principle, but the execution failed spectacularly. Ah, well.
Swan Lake also has one of the most gorgeous scores ever composed for ballet (in my opinion at least). It’s Tchaikovsky at his finest. And I’m always surprised, every time I go, how much of the music I know! I could probably hum 70% of the score from memory. Considering how beautiful and complex and tragic it is, it’s very catchy.
Some people complain about the mitigation of the downer ending, but I don’t mind it. Speaking of which, Marcello got some serious air time jumping into the lake.
So that was my day; it’s interesting timing because I just started reading Mercedes Lackey’s Black Swan (recommended by Tami). I’m curious to see what she does with the story and how she adapts it to novel form. I’m only a chapter in but I was pleased to see a nod to the four swans/cygnets in the first chapter, even as I cried a little inside, thinking about those echappe heads.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Ballet has its own language. If anyone is reading and wants a translation/elaboration/explanation just ask! Also some french words are probably spelled wrong (although I do try to get them right) and missing accents as I am not in the mood to figure out how to put them in on Blogger and no I do not want to copy-paste from Word right now.
Been rather lazy lately – not just about the blog, about everything – and I’m kicking myself about it. But one thing seems to be going right…
I have never been a heavy sleeper, and never really one for dreams. The few dreams I can remember really clearly from more than a year or so ago are mostly recurring nightmares, and they’re full of dream logic and are quite frightening and make absolutely no sense at all.
There are of course a few exceptions to the trend. There always are. But mostly, nightmares or stress-dreams involving having to go onstage to perform without any hairpins. Or costumes – so, naked. And with choreography changed last minute.
But lately, something interesting has been happening. I’ve been dreaming stories. Some make more sense than others, and even have a bit of plot. Some are just sort of vague ideas or impressions of a story, and are more traditionally dream-like. Some are like watching a scene – or several- play out in front of me, complete with actual dialogue.
All of them have odd dream-elements. The one that was most developed and straightforward included aliens from Mars, just because. Obviously those were replaced with something more genre-appropriate when I wrote the dream down. That’s not to say that you couldn’t make aliens work in a fantasy novel; just that I wasn’t interested in doing so, and the aliens in my dream were clearly and obviously out of place and mostly there because I’d just seen War of the Worlds.
In any case, the reason I mention it is because just last night I had another story-dream. It’s been happening a lot lately. I can now bring the total up to – including one from a few years ago that I still remember bits of, clear as day – 5.
I’ll probably spend the next couple of posts talking about them in a little more detail – just the basic idea and in what direction I see them going.
In any event, it’s an interesting new fount of ideas. I wonder if I’ve been dreaming stories more because, while on break, I’ve been reading more? Providing my brain with new material? And sleeping more. I’m sure that helps. It seems I have my deepest, most detailed dreams somewhere between 8 and 10 in the morning – funny because I never used to sleep that late.
Anyone else dream stories?
The Great Novel Adventure 