Susanna Daniel “What took you so long?”

 This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

Oct. 12 Susanna Daniel: I cut out this National Post article “What took you so long?” by Susanna Daniel on Aug. 3, 2010.  It’s about how she struggled to complete her novel for 10 yrs.  I can and I’m sure a lot of writers can relate to the experience.  Here’s the article:

There is surely a word—in German, most likely—that means the state of active non-accomplishment. Not just the failure to reach a specific goal, but ongoing, daily failure with no end in sight. Stunted ambition. Disappointed potential. Frustrated and sad and lonely and hopeless and sick to death of one's self.

Whatever it's called, this is what leads people to abandon their goals—people do it every day. And I understand that decision, because I lived in this state of active non-accomplishment for many years.

I wrote the earliest bit of what would become my first novel, Stiltsville, in January of 2000, when I was in my first year of a graduate writing program. In May of 2009, I sold Stiltsville to HarperCollins—the hardcover is due out next month.

This means that the time from my novel's conception to its appearance on store shelves adds up to a staggering 10 years. An entire decade. Between, I graduated and spent a year on fellowship (during which I wrote a lot but only half of it was any good); then there were the teaching years (during which I wrote very little, hardly any of it good); then there were the Internet company years (during which I barely wrote at all). 

Stiltsville is in good company, which is reassuring. There are oodles of novels that took a decade or longer to write—including some famous examples, like Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Díaz spoke in interviews about his own decade of active non-accomplishment. He said that five years into the process, he decided to give up on the novel and start a graduate degree (in what, he didn't say). He said his life improved: no more torture, no more fights with his fiance. Oh, Junot, I thought when I read this, I understand! Still, something pulled him back, and another five years passed, and then he was finally done.

Then he won the Pulitzer, which isn't going to happen to me. And I think I can speak for pretty much anyone who publishes a novel after 10 years: Whether you win awards doesn't matter one bit. The hardest—and therefore the most rewarding—part was just finishing.

Writing is hard—writers say this all the time, and I think probably only other writers believe it. But it's not nearly as hard, in my experience, as not writing. 

During my should-be-writing years, I thought about my novel all the time. Increasingly, these were not happy or satisfying thoughts. My "novel" (which had started to wear its own air quotes in my head) became something closer to enemy than lover. A person and his creative work exist in a relationship very much like a marriage: When it's good, it's very good, and when it's bad, it's ugly. And when it's been bad for a long, long time, you start to think about divorce.

My friend Bob, a playwright, told me years ago that he finally understood how writers stop writing. "It happens one day at a time," he said to me, clearly in the midst of a revelation. I'd come to the same realization a few years earlier. In the years between conceiving my book and finishing it, there wasn't one month when I didn't have a writing goal—five pages a week, say, or half of a chapter—but most months, I didn't even come close.

The thing is—one-day-at-a-time is the most painful way for active non-accomplishment to happen. It's the psychological equivalent of death by a thousand cuts. A painter I knew told me once that she'd reached a point when she said goodbye to painting, much the same way Junot Díaz considered doing—she said it was the kindest, most generous thing she'd ever done for herself.

I know a lot of writers, both published and not, and so I know that for every book that makes it to stores, several are never published, and several more are never finished. Many of my friends and acquaintances from graduate school published right away, but most still haven't. No doubt some will publish in the coming years. And some have gone into social work or law or medicine and seem to have left fiction writing behind, happily, like an old hairstyle. 

And what about the rest of them? These are the people—many of whom write beautifully—I wonder about. And I wonder about strangers in similar situations, artists of all ilks. I wonder if they wake in the night, their hearts racing, unable to feel anything but the fear and frustration and disappointment of the fact that they haven't finished anything in a month. I wonder if they're anything like me. My guess is that many of them are—and naturally I feel tremendous empathy. Having been there, I know there are no magic words of encouragement, no surefire tough-love tactic. I wish there were.

It could have gone either way for Stiltsville, which is a thought that gives me chills. But then a couple of years ago, three things happened that gave me the push I needed.
One, my close friend Jen referred to my work, not unkindly, as "the great American novel." It's not that I hadn't realized there was a certain epic and hopeless quality to the damn thing, but still it stirred something in me to hear it out loud.

Two, a writer friend ran into a former instructor, and he asked about me. He told my friend it was too bad I wasn't writing because I'd been good. It was probably just something he'd said to make conversation, but it buoyed me in the way unexpected compliments—even sad ones like this—can.
Three, I woke one night in the midst of a minor panic attack. It wasn't unusual for me wake in the night, anxious and scared—and I always knew the source of the panic right away. But it was rare for my heavy-sleeping husband to wake at the same time. And instead of reassuring him and letting him get back to sleep, I told him the naked, humbling truth. I told him that if I didn't finish my novel, I thought my future happiness might be at risk. He wiped his eyes and yawned and said, "OK. Let's figure out how to make this happen."

It didn't happen overnight, but the tide of my life shifted. I dropped a few obligations and started getting up early to write for an hour or two before leaving the house. Of course I was sidetracked again—moving, pregnancy—but not for long. After I wrote the last sentence, I printed the whole mess and got out my red pen, and the relief of having a complete draft was overwhelming. I had more writing energy than I'd had in years. At this point, no matter that the sky was falling in publishing-land, I was certain that I would see my book in print.

In the end, I don't really believe it took me 10 years to finish Stiltsville. There's no exact start date (that first bit I wrote didn't make it into the completed novel, after all), so the math is pretty fuzzy. Here's how it works in my head: It took one year to write the first half, another year and a half to finish the rest, a few weeks to sell it, and 18 months for it to lumber through the publishing process.

But between the first half and the last, I cannot deny that there were four or five years when I failed to complete a single new chapter. One day at a time.

Everyone knows that the line between succeeding and failing can be pretty thin. But the fact that it took me so long haunts me less and less these days, and I find myself looking forward instead of back. After all, as every writer is aware, the ending of a story does most of the heavy lifting. It can make or break the whole thing.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/07/what_took_you_so_long.html

My opinion: This article really delves into her personal life experience.  I can relate to it.  Like the 4^th paragraph where she talks about how she writes and only half of it was good.  I write a lot for my script and only some I like and keep and some I recycle.  The parts I recycle are usually because they’re not good, and/ or they have been replaced by something else in the story.

I have mentioned before about “a cabin in the woods”, but the part didn’t fit into the Rain script when I decided the characters don’t go there in the end.

Resident Evil: Afterlife/ I Am Legend/ District 9

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Jun. 12: I saw this movie on Jan. 10, 2014 and I’m writing my review for it now.  I used to write movie reviews for the Golden Vanguard.  Their website, Facebook page, and one of the founder’s email isn’t working.  I did find an email that did work, so I sent an email to him.  I haven’t written a review in over a year.  I had to check a word count on my old review to see how long it’s supposed to be.  The last one was about 250 words.

Resident Evil: Afterlife: Well here’s my movie review.   I saw the first Resident Evil in 2005 with my friend Leslie when she came over to my house.  I saw the second one Apocalypse on TV.

Resident Evil: Afterlife movie review

By Tracy Au

For people who aren’t familiar with the Resident Evil franchise, it’s about Alice (Milla Jovovich) who fights zombies and wants to destroy the Umbrella Corporation who is responsible for it.  Alice hunts down the bad guy Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts) and there is an epic fight scene and shoot out in the beginning.

It leads to Alice in the Arctic and she finds her friend Claire (Ali Larter).  They fly to LA and land on a prison where there are survivors.  They are NBA player Luther (Boris Kodjoe), a movie producer Bennett (Kim Coates), his intern Kim (Norman Yeung), an aspiring actress Crystal (Kacey Barnfield) among them.  There is prison cell for Chris (Wentworth Miller) and he says he’s a soldier.  The zombies were everywhere so the inmates were released to fight the zombies.  However, he was jumped and is now locked up here.

The others don’t trust him.  He says he knows a way out of the prison and onto Arcadia which is safe ship on the sea.  He will tell them the way out when he’s released.

The situation proves challenging when the plane that Alice and Claire flew in can only take two people at a time, and can only make one trip.  The zombies are coming and the prison can’t keep them safe for much longer so must they escape.

I would describe this movie as mediocre and pointless.  I watched it for the horror and action.  There are scary surprises and action, but it seems like this movie was made to make money first, and tell a story second.

I Am Legend: I saw this movie on Jul. 9, 2013.

I Am Legend movie review

By Tracy Au

This is a movie based on a book by Richard Matheson.  It’s about a man named Robert Neville (Will Smith) who lives with his German Shepherd Sam in a post- apocalyptic New York City.  The city is overrun by zombies or known as the Infected.  It’s very scary because it’s realistic how a disease can wipe out humanity and turn humans into creatures that lose all their senses and become raging monsters.

The majority of the movie is Robert by himself as he scavenges over people’s things and broadcast himself on the radio to find other survivors.  I was skeptical at first if Smith can carry most of the movie himself and not interact with too many people.  Can this movie still be entertaining?  Yes.  There are flashbacks of Robert interacting with his wife Zoe (Salli Richardson-Whitfield) and his daughter Marley (Willow Smith) as they escape the city that has recently experience the outbreak.

Isolation and desperation are everywhere as Robert struggles to find the cure to reverse the effects.  He works tirelessly everyday in his lab by testing on animals and other humans.  He struggles to live a normal life by talking to mannequins.

Fellow survivors do appear, played by Alice Braga and Charlie Tahan.  There is a very scary, dangerous, and suspenseful action sequence at the end.  It was an unpredictable, well- written, solid movie.  I recommend you all watch it.

Jun. 14 Death Race: I saw this movie on Jun. 2, 2013.

In the future, prisoners race to death on TV for entertainment.  It reminded me of the movie Gamer and The Fast and the Furious.  It’s about a man named Jensen (Jason Statham) who is framed for murdering his wife.  He is thrown into prison and is separated from his baby daughter. 

He is forced to race by the prison warden Hennessey (Joan Allen) because he used to race back in the day.  If he wins 5 races, he will be released from prison.  Jensen has a team to help with his car played by Coach (Ian McShane), Lists (Fred Koehler) and his navigator Case (Natalie Martinez).

There is 45 minutes of set up and 1 hour and 15 minutes of the race.  The dialogue isn’t very strong, but then again you don’t watch this movie for the dialogue.  There is a good story as Jensen tries to figure out who killed his wife and why he was framed for the murder.

There is lots of tension in prison as Jensen has to face off inmates like Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson.)  This is an exciting, dark, gritty, and violent action movie.  There are explosions, and intense obstacles that leads to gruesome deaths.  It’s filled with creative and aggressive driving.  If you like action movies, you’ll enjoy this.  

District 9: I saw this movie on May 9, 2014.

I thought this was going to be an action movie with massive shoot outs, explosions, and death.  There was that, but there was actually a very strong story with characters that you can connect with.

This movie looks like a very smart and realistic documentary.  In Johannesburg, South Africa, a big space ship hovers over it in 1982.  The aliens look like prawns and live in a military ghetto called District 9.  Wikus (Sharlto Copley) is a government agent who works at MNU, Multi National United and he is to enforce that all the aliens move to another part of the city.

Wikus goes in there and tells the aliens they will be moving them.  He then gets infected with a black liquid.  He slowly becomes an alien and becomes a science experiment.  He

will be killed and have his organs harvested to be studied.  Wikus fights for his life and escapes to District 9.  He calls his wife Tania (Vanessa Haywood), but the relationship can not be saved.

He becomes an ally to the alien Christopher (Jason Cope) and his young son who are trying to get back home.  There is a cure for Wikus’s condition on the ship.  First, they must get that black liquid that is in MNU’s lab.

There is a lot of suspense, action, and drama, especially in the exciting finale.  This movie actually has heart to it and you feel for the characters.

Jul. 17 The Den: I got this media release email sent to me:

“After receiving a grant for her graduate thesis, Elizabeth Benton (Melanie Papalia) logs onto a video-chat site known as THE DEN, on a mission to explore the habits of its users. During one of her random video-chats, Elizabeth watches in horror as a teenage girl is gruesomely murdered in front of her webcam.  While the police dismiss it as a viral prank, Elizabeth believes what she saw is real and takes it upon herself to find the truth. Her life quickly spirals out of control as she gets pulled deeper into the darkest recesses of the internet. And eventually, Elizabeth finds herself trapped in a twisted game in which she and her lovedones are targeted for the same grisly fate as the first victim.”

Here’s the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R8L6D7nnxo

Scream Queen B: I was reading the Edmonton Journal business section.  They have “Capital Ideas” about Edmonton entrepreneurs and their tips on how they run their business:

“Scream Queen of the B Scene is written by Lindsey McNeill, actor-writer-director and former radio journalist. Capitalizing on her characteristic wit and unfortunate potty mouth, she gives an honest account of working in a male-dominated industry and how to embrace your inner B to get shit done.

Her feature film "Truckstop Bloodsuckers" is available on BiteTV.”

http://screamqueenb.blogspot.ca/p/about-me.html

The Golden Vanguard: It’s been 2 months and one of the editors finally emailed me back from the Golden Vanguard.  He’s ending the website because of life changes and he’s really too busy.  That’s fine.  I still have my blog to post my movie reviews among other topics.

Ryan Knighton/ John of God

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca: 

Aug. 31 Ryan Knighton: I cut out this Globe and Mail article called “Transformations” by Marsha Lederman on Mar. 26, 2013.

Vancouver-based author Ryan Knighton is by no means a religious or spiritual person, but he is in another way uniquely qualified for the very hot screenwriting job he has landed. Knighton, 40, will write the screenplay for Universal Studios’s adaptation of the giant bestseller Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife.

The memoir debuted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list in the fall and retained the No. 1 position for weeks (it’s currently No. 2). In it, Eben Alexander, a Virginia-based neurosurgeon, recounts his 2008 near-death experience. At 54, he contracted a rare strain of bacterial meningitis and fell into a coma. He lay near death for a week. When he woke up, he had an amazing story to tell: He had seen heaven.

Even if the story has its skeptical detractors, the book has been a publishing phenomenon, and seemed a natural for a film adaptation. But the agent representing the book for film rights initially was unable to secure a deal, as Knighton tells it, because the studios — despite keen interest — were having trouble seeing a movie in it.

That agent also happens to be Knighton’s screenwriting agent, so he asked Knighton if he would check out the book, which Knighton had not yet read. Two weeks later, Knighton was on the phone with studios in L.A., offering a thumbnail version of what he thought the movie would feel and sound like. A couple of weeks after that, he was in Los Angeles, with Alexander, pitching the project in studio boardrooms.

If it felt strange sitting next to Alexander, describing the man’s story to Hollywood, Knighton has a very intimate perspective on the matter. On his 18th birthday, he was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, which would lead to total blindness. He knows what it’s like to have your world rocked by an unexpected medical bombshell and emerge from it, altered.

“I do recognize something in this book in a very distant way,” says Knighton, sitting in his East Vancouver living room. “This is a guy who went into a coma and came out something else on the other side. And in my own distant experience with late-onset blindness, I went through something that I recognize dramatically…. I remember very deeply that process. And so [Eben] and I have had very interesting conversations about what it’s like to really come out and feel yourself a different person, in his case a radically different person. As I keep joking to him: You’re the only ghost I know.”

With that personal foothold into the story, Knighton devised the bones for an adaptation, focusing not just on those seven days Alexander spent near death in the hospital and his journey to the Core, as the doctor calls it, but also on what happened to the man post-medical-miracle recovery. He had long conversations with Alexander about that, and it became a key element.

“I was more curious about his life after, because he doesn’t really [write in the book] about what happened to him after the coma. Coming back and what it did to his life, his profession and his family and everything. And that sort of gave the second engine in the story that it needed.”
Knighton has written two memoirs of his own (Cockeyed: A Memoir and C’mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark) and written other screenplays, but has yet to have a film produced. So he felt like he was a bit of a long shot. On the other hand, he is extremely thoughtful, articulate and funny – and can with ease captivate a room — not just the classrooms at Capilano University where he teaches English literature and creative writing, but also, it seems, a boardroom of studio executives who spend a lot of time listening to project pitches.

“It’s funny because it’s an incredibly blind person’s medium, because what you’re doing is you’re describing a picture to people who can’t see it. And trying to make them feel what it would be like to see it.”

The final pitch — the one to Universal — is the one that led to the deal. Disruption Entertainment’s Mary Parent (Pacific Rim) and Cale Boyter (Wedding Crashers) will produce.

Knighton has not yet started writing the script, but as he develops his ideas, he plans to spend time in Lynchburg, Va., with Alexander — witnessing him work, meeting his family. He’s also thinking about a lot of different films: Awakenings (“a guy returns to a world he doesn’t recognize”); Contact (“the elements of sci-fi swapped out with a medical thriller for this one”); A Beautiful Mind (“how does a marriage survive when one of the people in that marriage radically changes?”); even, in some ways, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (“that’s dad and his wacky quest”).

“It has a lot of similar DNA to those movies,” says Knighton. “And I think there’s a real medical thriller in this story,” Knighton says. “The infection itself and the fact that they thought it was this very deadly antibiotic-resistant E. coli. For a while there they thought he brought the black plague into the United States. You can’t get stakes much better than that for a movie.”

http://nhne-pulse.org/universal-studios-to-make-movie-about-nder-eben-alexander/

My opinion: I thought this article was inspirational because it was about filmmaking.  Then it was also kind of religious and reminded me of the book Heaven is for Real which I wrote about here:

http://badcb.blogspot.ca/2014/08/the-pen-is-more-intimate-heaven-is-for.html

John of God: I cut out this Edmonton Journal article “Science can’t explain spiritual experience” by Ron Lajeunesse.  Here are some excerpts: 

Spirituality has been defined as the search for the sacred; finding purpose and meaning in life.

Many of us are more spiritual than we think; that is, we search for something to explain why we are on this Earth (purpose) and to understand if or what God is (the sacred.) In my youth, I was very religious, although I now understand that to be quite different than spiritual. When I was educated in "critical thinking" and the scientific method (medicine and business), much of religious doctrine seemed to make no sense.

It wasn't until 2009 when I discovered the Centres for Spiritual Living (CSL) in Phoenix and Edmonton that any philosophy resonated with me.

In general terms, CSL is a combination of scientific principles, philosophy, psychology and the revelations of many religions, all made relevant for today's world.

We are urged to examine all views and accept all people. We are also urged to be open to new experiences beyond our usual willingness - such as the pilgrimage I made recently to John of God.

First, some background about this controversial man. João Teixeira de Faria was born in 1942 in Abadiânia, a small town southwest of the capital of Brasília.

He has no medical training and he describes himself as a simple farmer. He completed only two years of education and, following self-described apparitions, spent a number of years travelling from village to village doing faith healing. Since 1978, his centre, the Casa de Nom Inacio de Loyola, has been visited by millions of people seeking healing.

Casa is not a church; collections are not taken and there are no charges for service. Costs are apparently covered by the sale of blessed water, crystal beds, books, trinkets and herbs. John of God, we are told, is not paid for his services.

De Faria claims to act as a vehicle for God's healing and that he has absolutely no recollection of anything he does during the procedures.

"I do not cure anybody," he says repeatedly. "God heals, and in his infinite goodness permits the entities to heal and console my brothers. I am merely an instrument in God's divine hands."

Notable people who support him include Shirley Mac Laine, who claims to have been healed by De Faria, Oprah Winfrey, Ram Dass, Wayne Dyer and Dr. Mehmet Oz.

The reported results to date include an almost universal stronger "spiritual consciousness," improved "personal/interpersonal well-being," cancer remission, spinal alignment, pain elimination, cyst disappearance, thought clarity, and so on.

Certainly much of the experience and outcome can be explained by energy-healing and belief. But there is something far beyond that. I can describe it, but I cannot explain it.

http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/religion/story.html?id=01ab678f-c996-4aab-9208-8a2952bdea5a&p=1

My opinion: I’m not religious, but since I wrote about Ryan Knighton, I added this religious article.  As soon as I read “John of God”, I was like: “Wasn’t he on Oprah?”  I then checked my blog, and I wrote about it here in 2010:

John of God: I watched Oprah about "John of God." It's this Brazilian guy who's a miracle healer. There is footage of him cutting an egg sized tumor out of a man, scraping a woman's eye, putting scissors through people's nose to the brain, without anesthesia. O talked to doctors who saw it first hand and the patients who went through surgery without anesthesia. They reported no pain.

http://badcb.blogspot.ca/2010/11/funny-video-2020-john-of-god.html

Anita Shreve/ Northwest Angle/ digital version

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca: 

Oct. 12 Anita Shreve: I cut out this Globe and Mail article “You don’t sit waiting for the muse to come” by Kate Taylor on Dec. 4, 2010.  She interviews the author Anita Shreve:

A book editor once had the gall to tell the popular American novelist Anita Shreve that literary fiction is written by men. What women write is women's fiction. Her retort started with Alice Munro and went on from there.

"My books at times have been classified as women's fiction," Shreve said on a recent visit to Toronto to talk about her new novel Rescue. "I find [the category]very offensive - and dismissive. It's meant to be dismissive." Still, Shreve acknowledges that, like many novelists, her audience is almost exclusively female while her publishers always put a woman on the cover and favour pastel colours. "They categorize things so they know what they are trying to sell … I have lobbied very hard for grittier covers."

Truth is that Shreve's work, which ranges from the Oprah's Book Club pick The Pilot's Wife to the Orange Prize nominee The Weight of Water, is unusually positioned somewhere between literature and less lofty fare. It's not a difficult spot for Shreve or her publisher (her sales are in the millions) but awkward for anyone who wants to pigeonhole her books. Her admirably unadorned prose once led a critic to speculate that the mighty E.B. White, co-author of that classic primer The Elements of Style, would approve; her plots, meanwhile, are driven by life-changing tragedies - a fatal plane crash, a climbing accident, a teenager's coma - and remarkable second chances. And she produces a book every 18 months.
On the other hand, Shreve doesn't do happy endings, sometimes tells her story from a male perspective and avoids those damaged women so favoured by Oprah's club.

"It's not all smiles and hugs at the end," she says of Rescue and the hopeful way it leaves its main characters. "I didn't think they were all going to go home and live together. They might make it, they might not."

Rescue's cover does show a young woman, her head turned to look out the rear window of a car. She is wearing a pale green floral print that stands out nicely on a background of soft yellows. But the novel's protagonist is actually a man, Peter Webster, who is raising a teenage daughter on his own after he banished an alcoholic wife when their child was just a toddler. The narration is in the third person, but the reader is only privy to Webster's thoughts as he tries to understand his daughter's rebellion and his wife's drinking, depicted in scenes set 18 years earlier.

Webster is a paramedic - hence the book's title - and the novel gets its structure from highly realistic scenes describing him on the job, defibrillating hearts and slipping bodies onto backboards.

"I was determined to write something about somebody who had a real job, not an artist, a gallery owner, a failed writer - there is so much of that," Shreve says. "And if you want to have someone who has a real job, you have to show them at that job." Shreve researched the profession by reading manuals and interviewing a paramedic who also vetted sections of the book. She originally created the Webster character to write a literary thriller, figuring a paramedic was less of a cliché than a police officer or private detective but would have access to his whole community. Her plan, however, did not work out.

"A) I didn't know how to write a thriller; and B) it was going to be a domestic tragedy, which is what all my books are," says Shreve, who answers questions with the same efficiency that drives her writing.

Where Rescue departs from much of her previous work is in the harshness of its milieu. Shreve's work is often set on the picturesque New England coastline where she lives, with a house in Maine and a condo in Boston. But this book takes the action inland to impoverished rural Vermont. Webster lives in a fictional, downtrodden town called Hartstone, while Sheila, the drunk driver who becomes his wife, is on the run from some nastiness in Chelsea, a small, real and violent city on the outskirts of Boston.

"Nobody gets out of Chelsea unscathed," Shreve says. "She is risky and you can't trust her as far as you can throw her." In short, Sheila is not the kind of woman who turns up in a pastel floral print.

Shreve once wrote a book ( Where or When) seemingly inspired by the unusual story of how she met her current husband (her fourth) - they had only known each other as kids at camp when he saw her photo in the newspaper years later and began a correspondence - but she says any autobiographical content in her books is unconscious and largely limited to the metaphoric. Her characters and their stories are mainly a product of her ever-active imagination.

"A large part of writing is daydreaming. We all do it," says Shreve, who confesses to occasionally missing her exit when driving. "You are rehearsing a conversation you had last night, and you are going to change the dialogue a bit so it comes out right, or you imagine what you are going to say when you get home. The only difference with a writer is a writer loves the challenge of structure and crafting sentences."

Shreve, who will turn 65 next year, thrives on that challenge and has produced her 16 books in the space of a mere 21 years. "It's embarrassing," she says of her prolificacy, noting her publisher places no particular demands on her. When she is writing, she works from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. seven days a week. Her only explanation is that her early years as a journalist - a former high-school teacher, she worked as a magazine writer as she tried to launch her literary career - built her work ethic and showed her the connection between what you can produce to deadline and what you get paid.
"It taught me that writing is work. There is nothing precious about it. You don't sit waiting for the muse to come."

After Christmas, which she and her husband will spend with their combined family of five adult children, Shreve will sit down at her desk and begin work on her 17th novel.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/anita-shreve-you-dont-sit-waiting-for-the-muse-to-come/article1317674/

My opinion: What stood out to me was that the main character’s job is a real job like a paramedic and not an art gallery owner or private detective.  Also there is nothing wrong with being a prolific writer.  I write a lot of emails, but I pace myself in sending them.  I only send 3 emails/ weekly blog posts a week.

Northwest Angle: I cut out this Edmonton Examiner book review "Oh, baby, this is good" by Terri Schlichenmeyer on Sept. 7, 2011.   She reviews Northwest Angle by William Kent Krueger.  I can’t find the article on the internet so I’ll have to type up a few excerpts:

“Corocan (Cork) O’Connor rented a houseboat and gathered his in-law and his children on a trip to Minnesota’s Boundry Waters Canoe Area.”

“And then the storm hit.”

“Dazed, Jenny went looking for Cork and stumbled upon a cabin.  Inside it was the body of a woman who had obviously been tortured, and a hidden baby.”

“Staying where they were wasn’t an option, a notion underscored by the sudden, unwelcome presence of a man with a high-powered rifle who seemed to want nothing but the baby.”

“Local officials surmised that the baby was the son of Noah Smalldog, a Ojibwe native, Others say the child belonged to Sonny Chickaway, Smalldog’s friend.”

My opinion: It sounds like an interesting thriller.

Oct. 23   Digital Version:

Why I’m putting up these book reviews and author interviews:
 

1.      I’m clearing clutter.  I don’t need to keep all these news articles.  This will be the digital version on my blog.

2.      I want to show all these good articles to my friends and blog readers because they are really good to read.

3.      I want to be inspired and motivated by reading all these book reviews and author interviews.  These are good books, and I like to read the creative process of the writers.

A Matter of Life and Death or Something/ Richard Ford

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Oct. 5 A Matter of Life and Death or Something: I cut out this National Post book review “A quest inspired by a found notebook…or whatever” by Raymond Beauchemin.  He reviews the book A Matter of Life and Death or Something by Ben Stephenson.  Here’s the article: 

While walking in the woods near his home one day, a 10-year-old boy named Arthur finds a notebook, which he reads through to the end. The notebook was written by someone named Phil, a lost soul hopelessly in love with a woman named E, who likes him but doesn’t want to Be With Him. After reading the notebook — which is only 43 pages long, but they do go on — it’s understandable. It’s hard to empathize with the guy.
But Arthur does.

The majority of A Matter of Life and Death or Something, a debut novel by a New Brunswick-born artist and writer, is told from the perspective of Arthur, a homeschooled child whose wide-ranging, though peculiar, vocabulary and interests suggest scattershot teaching. Scattershot parenting, too: Having a 10-year-old boy discover the notebook in the woods serves the purpose of the narrative; in the real world, it would suggest irresponsible parenting — “Come back before dark,” his father, Simon, tells him. (Arthur insists Simon is not his father and makes up occupations and adventures for his “real” parents. By the end, there’s a hint of the truth.)

The book also includes excerpts from the mournful Phil’s notebook. Something “really bad” happens in the diary, which I can’t reveal, though it’s likely the reader will surmise what it is within pages, if not paragraphs, of its discovery. It’s sad that a 10-year-old should have to read about the things that happen on page 43, sadder still that there’s something in him that propels him to try to remedy the irremediable. But try he does. The narrative push of the novel is Arthur’s attempt to find out who Phil is. To do so, he does the rounds of the neighbourhood, tape recorder in hand, asking residents if they know Phil.
For an author’s literary device to work — and how many times have we read about someone finding a diary, a notebook, a ring or a key and then embarking on a quest of some sort? Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close comes to mind — the reader has to be as emotionally engaged by its contents as the character who finds it. Arthur may care about Phil’s notebook and fate, but I didn’t. The ambivalence, I’m afraid, starts with the title; the “something” feels like Stephenson can’t commit to the life and death underpinnings of his novel. He may as well have titled it A Matter of Life and Death or Whatever.

The notebook is but one device in Stephenson’s utility chest. There are references to The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” crowd, of which Foer is a member. There are also nods to J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee, who Stephenson counts among his influences. To Kill a Mockingbird is mentioned by a character named Finch, Arthur’s down-the-street playmate, and a Boo Radley-like hermit who plays a didactic role in the denouement. But these references don’t go anywhere or deepen any understanding of the book. The book includes pencil and ink drawings, too (Stephenson studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design). And trees. I don’t want to forget the trees, who narrate their own chapters. These not very Ent-like creatures speak in poeticisms bordering on the floral, which I suppose is appropriate, but the chapters they narrate — watching Phil, Arthur and the notebook in the woods — feel tacked on, as if Stephenson doesn’t trust the reader will make the leap between chapters. I wanted to cut the trees.

The novel, sadly, feels “written,” a long exercise in multiple voices and alternative storytelling, which is a shame because the storyline is compelling: Arthur is a smart, sensitive boy on the cusp of adolescence, with all its physical, mental and emotional changes, facing a new life situation and full of deep questions about himself and that self’s place in the world. He deserved better.

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/04/13/book-review-a-matter-of-life-and-death-or-something-by-ben-stephenson/

My opinion: What stood out to me was about the story device about finding a notebook and going on a quest.  Another part that stood out was that the book feels “written.”

Richard Ford: I cut out this essay “Rich Writer, Poor Writer” by Pulitzer Prize- winner Richard Ford in the Globe and Mail on Oct. 22, 2011.  He talks about being published and being a paid writer.  Here’s the whole essay:

Money is an odd and complex subject to a writer. In America, at least, probably few people get into the writing racket because of the money – I'll bet not even John Grisham,  And for the guys I've always hung around with, we got into it because we wanted to write a really good book that people would read and be changed by for the better. If that occurred possibly money would follow along – although how that would happen wasn't very clear, and probably it wouldn't happen no matter what we did. The old adage of Samuel Johnson’s that says anybody who writes for any reason other than money is a nitwit, was a status I had to hope would become true of me, before which time I had to try not minding being a nitwit.

The first book I ever wrote sold to its New York publisher for the sum of $3,500 – which didn't seem like a lot of money, even in 1975. It mattered a great deal more to me that my novel would be published and possibly read than that somebody paid me for it. My wife and I felt like the money was more of a one-time windfall than anything resembling real "earnings". We certainly had no thought that it portended more money would ever come our way. Although, we knew what to do with it. We drove to Mexico and lived off of it as long as we could (which wasn't long), and tried to feel as much as possible like Hemingway and Hadley in Pamplona or wherever they'd been – eating and drinking cheap, having a good time, picking up cheques at the American Express office – while I factored up the fantasy of myself being a "working writer", which wasn't very persuasive. The money felt like what we Americans call "funny money": cash you find in a shoe box inside the closet of a house you rented, and promptly blew on drugs or a vintage Porsche or a new sound system – knowing you'd never get it again so why save it? It was real money, okay. But it wasn't "serious money". That, you got from a job. And writing wasn't really a job. It was more of a lark. It was art for art's sake. Not art for money's sake.

This idyll of my youth still affects me as being sweet and true. And during the 35 years of my writing life it has lain at the origin of how I feel about money, and specifically about money I've made writing novels and short stories and essays. In my estimation, I've made quite a lot of money being a writer. (I don't want to total it up; I might be wrong.) And that's over a writing career that's never been meteoric – although I'm happy with all of it, since I've gotten to do what I've wanted, unimpeded. I'm fairly sure I've made more money from my books than all my publishers – which doesn't seem right, or even explicable. I've made enough to keep from having to work at other jobs, or from becoming a college-professor-who-also-writes, or a slave to cruelly pointless magazine assignments. (It should be said that my wife has always had a "real career", and has brought home money fairly regularly – although never a king's ransom. And it should also be said that we didn't have children, those non-essential creatures who make money disappear in a way that can only be described as "viral".)
 
Professional athletes are sometimes quoted in interviews as saying, "I can't believe someone's paying me to do this. I'd do it for nothing." I've never quite believed that. But I've occasionally felt vaguely that way about writing. It isn't very hard to do, and it can sometimes feel pleasurable. This was a feeling I had when I was younger, of course. At 67, I'm not sure I'd do it now if somebody wasn't paying me (although no one's paying me very much for writing this – which is probably reasonable). But with less time lying out in front of me these days, other activities have begun to seem more attractive.

In truth, I don't know what I'd do differently if I had a lot more money. My house is paid for and so is my car. I don't owe anybody anything. I don't even want a vintage Porsche anymore. As a son of depression-era parents, I don't mind saying that these prosaic facts of life make me uncommonly happy – as happy as writing makes me. My wife, who's a great beauty and a former model, likes nice clothes; but we have money enough for that. I have a really wonderful motorcycle, but it's 23 years old. And my car that's paid for, I bought "used".

Oh, when I read about writers being picked by Oprah or winning an Oscar when they've tried their hand at screenwriting – and I find out that a big truck has backed into their driveway and unloaded millions – I admit I'd like to know what that feels like. (It probably feels like going sky-diving knowing god's promised you're going to land safely.) I'm happy for those writers – my good colleagues. I'm happy if they're happy, and I hope they are, and that all that money doesn't ruin their lives and cause them to get divorced and be miserable. Of course, the thing about writing is that you can't ever count yourself out. And I don't. That big truck may be looking for my address right now – which would be wonderful. I'll leave the light on. I'm sure it wouldn't ruin me.

So, as I said, it's an odd and complicated old business – money. I've always liked the adage that Samuel Johnson apparently didn't say (Louis B Mayer, that old scamp, probably said it): "If anybody ever says it's not the money, it's the money." Which means nobody much tells the truth about money – not the whole truth, anyway. Which is why it's both the source of so much giddy fun and also the root of all evil. We both love and hate it enough to lie about it. What could be more human? More … well … writerly?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/07/author-author-richard-ford-money

Iain Reid/ Young- Adult Frankenstein

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Oct. 5 Iain Reid: I cut out this article “Unanticipated Opportunity” by Iain Reid in the National Post on Jan. 14, 2012.   He talks about the sophomore slump.  He gets one book published and writes another.  Here are some excerpts.  I have to type them up myself because I can’t find the article on the internet to copy and paste:

“It would arrive in the form of my recklessly following the same steps I’d taken with my first book.  I didn’t want the progress of a potential book to become predictable or formulaic in any way.”

“I heard an interview with a novelist I admire.  He said he had no interest in writing a memoir because he wouldn’t want to start writing a book he already knows the ending.  He might use some elements of non-fiction in his work, but ultimately he wants to write fiction for the opportunity to go somewhere unanticipated.

But I think that’s where we all want to go.  Writing non-fiction doesn’t inherently sully the process of creative discovery that oxygenates all writers.   It doesn’t intrinisically provide an author with a known ending prior to the writing.  It’s the individual ingredients that have been tasted, not the finished dish.

With my first book, and now second, I’ve lived and interacted with actual people, reflected on this reality and then started writing.  But I’m not a reporter.  The techniques and tools used are the same as if I’d been writing a novel.  So is the process of exploration and advancement- what all writers (and readers covet.)”

The Code: Also on the same National Post page “A crime game played on thin ice.”  It’s a book review of The Code by G. B. Joyce.”  The review is by Sarah Weinman.  What stood out in the article was this:

“What we do to each other on the ice would be criminal in any jurisdiction if it were to take place on the street.  Even the cleanest bodycheck would be an assault…a team is just a gang by any other name, playing hard, partying hard, living hard.”

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/01/20/book-review-the-code-by-g-b-joyce/

Young- Adult Frankenstein: I cut out this National Post article called “Young- Adult Frankenstein” by Mark Medley.    He interviews Kenneth Oppel. Here’s the whole article: 

Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, her first and best-known novel, when she was only 21 — an age when most people are still in university. Impressed? Well, Kenneth Oppel was still in high school when he published Colin’s Fantastic Video Adventure, a novel he’d begun at the age of 14.

Now, 25 years after the start of his writing career, Oppel has mined Shelley’s masterpiece for his latest book, This Dark Endeavour: The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein, one of the most talked-about young-adult novels of the fall.

“I think any time you use a classic as a springboard, you might be asking for a bit of trouble,” says Oppel, sitting on a patio near his Toronto home earlier this week. “You’re begging for a comparison. And it would be pretty tough to come out on the winning end.”

Oppel was rereading Frankenstein a few years ago when he was struck by descriptions of the scientist’s childhood. “No human being could have passed a happier childhood than myself,” Frankenstein says in an early chapter, before chronicling carefree days spent seeking the elixir of life, searching for the philosopher’s stone and raising demons.

“What kind of happy kid spends his time trying to raise the dead and commune with devils?” Oppel asks. “But, as a writer, I looked at that stuff and I thought, ‘Hmm. It’s pretty interesting kernels for stories.’ ”

Although he jotted down some ideas, Oppel was hesitant to write an origin story. The market was already flooded with prequels — Young Sherlock Holmes, Young James Bond — and Oppel didn’t want to be seen as jumping on a bandwagon, however lucrative it might be. Eventually, after finally deciding to explore Frankenstein’s childhood in a novel, Oppel typed up a couple of pages and sent them to his agent, who “flipped” for the idea. He then wrote two sample scenes, which his agent sent to publishers around the world. “There was a bidding war for the book based on the idea,” Oppel says.

In This Dark Endeavour, a 16-year-old Victor Frankenstein, with the aid of his pseudo-sister Elizabeth and friend Henry Clerval, set out to find the Elixir of Life, which Victor hopes will save his twin brother, Konrad, who has been afflicted with a strange malady. Oppel describes it as an alternative history of the Frankenstein family.

“I’m just trying to capture the flavour of the book,” he says. “It’s not supposed to be a total simulation of what Mary Shelley might have written had she gone back further in the chronology of the story.”

Those familiar with Shelley’s life or her 1818 novel will spot elements Oppel has borrowed for his own work, but readers needn’t be familiar with Shelley’s book to enjoy Oppel’s offering, though he hopes young readers will seek out the original afterwards.

“What’s exceptional is the story and the subject matter,” he says of the original. “It’s mythological. It’s a cautionary tale about science and religion and early technologies — our relationship to the things we create on the planet and the other creatures on the planet. So it’s a very moral and ethical book. I think that’s one of the reasons I like it — it’s got everything: it’s a page-turner, it’s a great story, it’s got a monster for God’s sake! It’s sci-fi! It’s horror! It’s everything! But as a writer, it’s all material. I look at it as, what a great story. I’d like to dig around in that and see where I can go with it.”

Oppel, who says he’s drawn to “heroes with huge cracks in their character,” sees some similarities between his own work and the scientist with the Lazarus complex.

“We’re grave robbers,” he says of writers. “We dig stuff up. We chop it up. We sew it back together. We do our best. Sometimes it’s ugly. Sometimes the suturing isn’t good. Actually, when I think about it, it’s a pretty excellent metaphor for the creative process. Because there is theft — subconsciously if not consciously. My imagination is informed and made up with all my favourite books, everything I saw, every comic I read, every movie, every video game I played, every theme park ride I was on. Every experience that I had is somewhere in there. And you pilfer, and you poach, and you try to recreate these amazing moments you had as a kid — these perfect, amazing, moments — and create this world.”

The 44-year-old Oppel has been creating worlds since 1985, when his first novel was published. Since then, he’s written more than 20 books for children, young adults and adults, including 1997’s Silverwing, which has sold almost a million copies around the world, and 2004’s Airborn, which won the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature.

This Dark Endeavour may prove to be his most popular book yet. It has already been sold to 13 territories around the world, and optioned for film by Summit Entertainment, the powerhouse behind the Twilight franchise. Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) has been tapped to direct. Although Oppel is realistic about the movie’s chances of being made — he says seven Frankenstein features are currently in development — This Dark Endeavour has one thing going for it: “Mine … is the only one with hot teens.”

Whatever happens with the movie, Oppel is not leaving Shelley’s world behind just yet — a sequel called Such Wicked Intent will be released next year.

Midway through our interview, I ask Oppel if he’d mind it if another writer used his work for their own fiction.

“After I’m dead, I don’t imagine I’ll have any say in it anyway,” he says with a laugh. “It’s an interesting question. Sure, if they did a good job, all power to them. Go for it. I don’t mind that, it’s really quite flattering. Too bad I wouldn’t be around to get some of the residuals.”

This Dark Endeavour: The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein by Kenneth Oppel is published by HarperCollins Publishers ($19.99).

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/09/28/kenneth-oppel-on-his-young-adult-frankenstein/

My opinion: That was a really good and strong article.  It kind of inspired me.  I did read Frankenstein in Eng. 101 when I was in Professional Writing.  The book was average to me.

Civilization: The West and the Rest/ Rewritten classics

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Sept. 21 Civilization: The West and the Rest: I cut out the Edmonton Journal book review “Biased look at history’s ‘what ifs?’” by Richard Shervaniuk.  The review of Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson on Nov. 20, 2011.  The rest of the articles in this post are on the same newspaper and date. 

I have to type up the excerpts because I can’t find the article on the internet to copy and paste.

Sir Walter Raleigh (author of the first volume of History of the World in 1614): “As one of three eyewitnesses to the crime, he was called to testify and was appalled that each person told a totally different but equally plausible version of what had happened.  If eyewitnesses to the same event cannot agree on what occurred, said Raleigh, how is it possible to believe historical accounts?”

Here’s the book on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.ca/Civilization-West-Rest-Niall-Ferguson/dp/0143122061

My opinion: I’m not really into history so I won’t be reading this book.

The Affair: “An affair to remember, however formulaic" by Basem Boshra.  It’s about The Affair by Lee Child:

If Lee Child were to reveal that he cranks out his Jack Reacher novels with the aid of a computer-based algorithm, it would not qualify as a shocker.

Child's thrillers - featuring the taciturn military police officer-turned drifter anti-hero Jack Reacher - are almost comically faithful to formula. But it's to Child's credit that his savvy plotting, engaging characters and droll, eminently quotable dialogue keeps Reacher fans so tickled.

The Affair, the 16th book in the Reacher series, is what super hero comics aficionados would refer to as an "origin story" - fitting, in a way, since the seemingly indestructible Reacher has more than a touch of the superhero about him. Rewinding to 1997, The Affair finds Reacher still employed in the U.S. army's military police. (Child has flashed back to this era before; 2004's The Enemy was also a prequel set earlier in Reacher's MP days.)

Already disillusioned with the state of the U.S. army and his place in it, Reacher is sent further into a funk when he goes undercover to Mississippi as part of a murder investigation that reveals some much larger, uncomfortable truths about the organization he has devoted his adult life to.
The usual Child/Reacher tropes - Reacher falling for a comely smalltown sheriff, his Houdini-esque escapes from sure-death situations, his Holmes-ian investigative prowess - are all here in abundance.

But it's in finally revealing precisely how and why Reacher left the military for the wayward and hardscrabble life that has been the canvas for the Reacher saga that truly makes The Affair worth remembering.

My opinion: I haven’t read any Lee Child books.  I will watch a Jack Reacher movie when it comes on TV.

http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=712a9962-8efd-47f3-a4d6-ea91a9d56c88

Charles Dickens: The article is titled “Celebration of Dickens is gearing up.  Great expectations for 200^th anniversary of author’s birth."

Charles Dickens will be feted around the world next year in literature, film, theatre, music and art, underlining his international cultural impact 200 years after his birth.

The author of classics like Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities is considered one of the greatest novelists to have written in English. Sales of his books, which are still in print, run into hundreds of millions of copies, and during his lifetime his works were turned into theatre

http://www2.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=3fc75e9d-3a0f-4903-904e-3122db202dcc

Sept. 25 Rewritten classics: I cut out this Globe and Mail article “Jane Eyre and Sherlock Holmes as mommy porn?” by Russell Smith on Jul.26, 2012.  Here are some excerpts:

Were the classic novels of the 19th century actually mommy porn in disguise? That’s the premise of e-publisher Total E-Bound, which has released a new series of e-books (“Clandestine Classics”) that include the titles Northanger Abbey (by Jane Austen and Desiree Holt), Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Bronte and Sierra Cartwright) and Sherlock Holmes: A Study In Scarlet (by A.C. Doyle and Sarah Masters). What they have done is quite simple and easy: they have taken the texts of these famous books and added some graphic sex scenes.

The added sex scenes are written in a sort of pseudo-19th century language to try to blend in. The books are cheap – under $5 – and the company boasts that you are only paying for what their “authors” have added, not for the original content.

The sex scenes in the neo-Austen and neo-Bronte books are pleasingly frank and uninhibited, but still tend to climax in the clichés of the mommy-porn genre.

That’s fine for them – 19th century novels, particularly those with Gothic influences, are indeed ripe for the Fifty Shades of Grey treatment, as they already contain the building blocks of every Harlequin romance: the stern and controlling antagonist, the virginal and powerless protagonist, the subtle threat of coercion, the promise of everlasting love.

But the purists need to lighten up. Great novels are the raw material of every new writer’s work: we are always rewriting the books that influenced us. We modernize and upend them – we castrate them, some critics say – by rewriting them, we use them and conquer them and make them our own. Shakespeare took almost every story he ever wrote from some other source. The Disney corporation creates its hyper-modern comic cartoons from classic fairy tales and legends.

My opinion: Interesting.  I won’t be reading any of these books because I’m not interested in erotica or stories in historical fiction.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/jane-eyre-and-sherlock-holmes-as-mommy-porn/article4441438/

Oct. 7 Villians: I was reading an Edmonton Journal book review “A twisted tale with a Glagow accent” by Tracy Sherlock.  She reviews the book Gods and Beasts by Denise Mina.  She says:

“Denise Mina’s mysteries are dark.  They are chock full of psychopathic criminal characters, getting ahead using crime, violence and dark power.”

Oct. 12 Pens: In July, I found a bunch of Dixon Premium clear pens. There’s ink in them, but when I write it, after a few words, it stops working.  I looked it up to see if there are any of those pens still selling and I can’t find any.

Back in 2012, I found these 3 Papermate pens and that’s what happened.  Every time I write a few words, it stops working.  I put them down for a while, and then write a bit, and it stops working.  I don’t like throwing things out and I was going to recycle the pens when it is completely out of ink. 

However, I can’t see how much ink is in it, because it’s not clear.  I kept them for over a year and then recycled them.  I don’t like to throw things out, but recycling is good for the environment. 

Oct. 14 Veronica Mars: Did you know that there are Veronica Mars books?  This was months ago, but it was in my parking lot email.  I would read this if I was in my teens or early 20s.  Maybe if I have time.

http://www.amazon.ca/Veronica-Mars-Original-Mystery-Thousand-Dollar/dp/0804170703

Do No Harm: Here is the trailer to this cancelled TV show.  It’s a 3 min. trailer and it’s really good.   I want to add that Alana De La Garza who plays a doctor here, she is now on the new TV show Forever.  She plays a detective to Ioan Grufford (Fantastic Four movies) who is an immortal ME.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24jRWTT3dh0

Iconic literary characters

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Sept. 23 Iconic literary characters: In the National Post “In others’ words: When iconic literary characters outlive their creators” by Angela Hickman on Jun. 24, 2011.  This is a really good article: 

In art, tributes are pretty much de rigueur. As consumers we’re accustomed to cover songs, tribute bands and flawless copies of famous paintings. In literature, though, that expression of adulation is less common. Certainly, there is a wealth of fan fiction and series written under a common nom de plume, but perhaps for fear of accusations of plagiarism, writers tend to steer clear of writing too much like one another.

Nonetheless, some series and characters take on a will of their own — or rather, the fans do. This sometimes leads to the publication of unfinished novels, or, as the latest James Bond novel indicates, to continuations of an author’s work.

The latest Bond is Carte Blanche, which essentially describes the conditions under which American crime novelist Jeffrey Deaver worked when writing it. Deaver is the fifth author to write about Bond since Ian Fleming died in 1964, and the first to fully embrace a contemporary version of the famous spy.
Deaver was approached by Ian Fleming’s estate in 2009 and asked to write the latest continuation novel. After taking approximately five seconds to agree, Deaver cleared the project with his publishers, put off his two other projects and got down to it.

“We set the ground rules right up front, and I had said I wasn’t interested in doing this project if the book were going to be a period piece,” Deaver says. “And they were in agreement on that — that I would write my kind of a story, a very fast-paced thriller, but I would put into it the character of Bond, of course updating the character that Ian Fleming created.”

Deaver did have to submit a 40-page outline to the estate, though, just to make sure things were heading in the right direction. Although he said there weren’t any specific elements he had to include in the novel, he said the estate gave him some pointers on just what Bond would and would not do.

“I had Bond, he’s in a very tense situation, he survives, and he has two of his cocktails, and he’s with his associate Felix Leiter, a CIA Agent,” Deaver says. “They have something to eat and Bond thinks, ‘There’s a nice Chablis on the wine list here, I could go for that.’ And then I just casually wrote — he’s still pursuing this guy, he’s kind of conducting surveillance — he said, ‘No, I better stay sharp. I think I’ll pass on that.’ The estate said, ‘James Bond would never turn down a fine Chablis,’ so now he has the Chablis. Not too much of it, but he has a little bit of Chablis.”

Other than little twitches here and there, though, Deaver says he was free to write what he wanted. Of course, there are certain James Bond elements he felt compelled to include, such as details about Bond’s weapon, his love of fine food and drink, his gadgets and the rather preposterous names of some of the female characters. But, since this Bond was born in 1980 and therefore much, much younger than Fleming’s version of the spy (who first appeared in 1953) Deaver was freed from any concerns about continuity.

That was not the case when award-winning author Budge Wilson agreed to write a prequel for Anne of Green Gables, which came out in 2008 in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the book’s original publication.

Wilson says the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority were very particular about the details of Anne’s early life, and Wilson had to be very careful not to write something in Before Green Gables that would be incongruous with the original novels written by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Wilson says the specifics of Anne’s early life are laid out in Chapter Five of the original novel, and they became a kind of blueprint for her novel’s timeline.

“If I had put anything in the book that was inconsistent with what did happen in those four pages and then in all the things that came afterwards in the other books, they would have told me and stopped me and said, sort of, fix it,” she says. “And that’s an odd kind of experience for a writer, not to be totally free in what you can say.”

Wilson says that when Penguin first approached her, she didn’t want to do it. The idea of writing about someone else’s character worried her, she says, and she flat out refused to try and write the novel in Montgomery’s voice.

“I thought, would I like anyone taking one of my stories and writing a prequel to it? And I thought, no, I wouldn’t. That bothered me,” she says. “That bothered me really quite a lot.”

But then Wilson reread the Anne books and started to really think about the kind of story the prequel would be. She was very curious about how Anne — whose childhood sounded truly awful — could have ended up as well adjusted and optimistic as she did. That curiosity, and the realization that perhaps Montgomery was unable to write about Anne’s early life, were deciding factors.

“At one point [Montgomery] gave a talk about writing and she advised [the students] all to write about happy things; don’t write about sad things,” Wilson says. “Which means that she herself could not have written the prequel because it’s a pretty sad book and I think in many ways, an adult book.”

These kinds of continuation novels, though, seem to end up being more adult than the originals, whether that’s intentional or not. Deaver read and enjoyed Fleming’s novels as a child and Wilson says she read the Anne books when she was a girl, although at the time she preferred Montgomery’s Emily books. Revisiting these series as adults perhaps brings more insight to a character you have known for many years, but it also complicates your audience: Do you write for the original audience, now older, or do you target the same people the original author did?

Deaver says that although many teenagers read his work, his core audience is middle-aged, so he wrote with them in mind. Wilson, on the other hand, was told to write for anyone who had read the original novel, which she says was just too vast an age span to handle. So, she says, she just wrote the book as it came to her and didn’t worry about it.

In this way, both Deaver and Wilson were relatively free to write their novels as they saw fit, but that is not always how it works out. When Max Allan Collins took up Mickey Spillane’s character Mike Hammer after the prolific crime novelist died in 2006, he did so with several unfinished Spillane manuscripts in hand.

Collins had been an avid Spillane reader as a kid, and after he and Spillane met in 1981, the two became friends. After Spillane’s death, his unfinished manuscripts went to Collins.

Collins says he has become kind of a specialist when it comes to writing in the voice of another author — he took over the Dick Tracy comic strip when Chester Gould retired, for example — and said the challenge of writing as Spillane didn’t worry him.

But Collins is doing more than writing as Spillane; he has actually taken Spillane’s unfinished manuscripts and finished them, which he considers more of a collaboration than a tribute or continuation. The first such novel was published in 2007 and three more have been published since then, the most recent being this year’s Kiss Her Goodbye.

“A major tenet of my approach, which would horrify purists, is that I don’t just pick up where Mickey left off,” Collins writes in an email. “I take his manuscript of 100 or so pages and, usually guided by plot notes, expand it, weaving my own stuff in and around his. That allows me to have genuine Spillane content deep into the book, two thirds of the way usually, and when I do take over, the difference is barely noticeable if at all.”

It’s a vastly different approach than that of Deaver and Wilson, but the result is the same: more time with a character we love, in a format and tone we’re familiar with. Writing a collaboration or continuation novel is subtler than a tribute song perhaps, and certainly more creative than simply retelling a story we know, which is its own genre entirely.

Instead, the continuation novel, in whatever form it happens to take, is about breathing a hint of new life into a story arc the original author was unable to continue. Collins says he felt a responsibility to finish Spillane’s work, while Deaver was kind of entering into a tradition. Wilson, though, says she found that the character just wasn’t finished speaking.

“[I] found myself so bewitched by Anne that I sort of entered her head and felt as though I became her,” Wilson says. “Therefore, if you can believe my writing methods, Anne sort of did her own talking. I didn’t stop and figure out how she would say this or say that. It was she who spoke.”

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/06/24/in-others%E2%80%99-words-when-iconic-literary-characters-outlive-their-creators/

Extant TV show review

 This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

Sept. 20 Extant: I saw the pilot “Re-entry” to this show on Jul.9, 2014.  After I saw it, I thought it was good.  I was unsure if I wanted to continue watching it.  A week goes by and the next episode was on Global.  I decided to watch it Global’s website and kept watching the rest of the season.  I’m writing about it now, because it finished airing the season finale.  There is no news if it will be renewed or not.

This is the premise on imdb.com: 

“An astronaut struggles to learn how she became pregnant while on a 13-month-long solo space mission.”

Molly Woods (Halle Berry) is throwing up.  Her 8 yr old son Ethan (Pierce Gagnon) asks if she’s okay.  There is a Welcome Back party for Molly who was in space for 13 months.  Ethan gets into a fight with a boy.  The dad John (Goran Vismjic) talks to Ethan at bed time.

Ethan: I need a flip.

John puts battery back into Ethan.  Ethan is an android.

Molly sees a figure as she takes out the trash.

Molly watches a video in a photo album of her and Marcus.  He had passed away.

The show is set in the future with the mirror/ TV screen and a mechanical car that can drive on it’s own.

Molly talks to her friend/ doctor Sam (Camryn Manheim) at the space agency ISEA.

Sam: You’re pregnant.

Molly: What?

Sam: You’re pregnant.

Molly: That’s not possible.

There is a flashback of Molly in her spaceship and talks to the techno voice Ben.  Molly talks to a video of Ethan and John.  The lights then go out.  Molly floats to a desk and computer and switches it on.  She sees a figure, and it’s Marcus.  He writes “Help me” on the window.

Back to present.

Molly: Give me some time before I go tell John.  I can’t get pregnant.  I tried for years.

John does a presentation about artificial intelligence and Ethan is the prototype.

John: Human bots won’t overrule us.

Femi Dodd (Annie Wersching): What if they can’t be controlled and we can’t kill them?

There is an argument and John may not get the funding for his project.

Molly talks to the ISEA.

Molly: There was a shut down, and I slept for 3 hrs.  It came back working.  I was to copy the video, but I accidentally deleted it.

Alan Sparks (Michael O’ Neill): Okay, we’ll see you in the psychiatric meetings.

Sparks opens the futuristic coffin of Yasumoto (Hiroyuki Sanada).

Sparks: John didn’t get funding. 

John then gets a call from Yasumoto Corp.  He enters it and it looks a like a museum.  It’s really a home.  John tells Yasumoto about his project.

John: I thought Ethan needed to be raised in a family.  Lots of married couples need a kid to be happy. 

Ethan and Molly are eating ice cream in the park.  Molly gets a blue star balloon with a note “I know what happened, contact soon.”  She gets freaked out and they leave.  Ethan gets angry that he dropped his ice cream cone.  He runs away and Molly follows him into the woods. 

Ethan stops at a dead bird.

Ethan: It was like that when I got here.

Molly and John talk in John’s lab in the garage.  There are full of robot body parts.

Molly: He looked at me like he hated me.

John: I got funding from Mr. Yasumoto. 

Flashback of Molly in space.

Molly touches the light bulb and it hurts her hand.

Molly records it by putting a camera on her chest.

Molly: Marcus.  Do you need help?

Marcus: Do.

Marcus touches her face and traces it down her neck and stomach.

Molly touches his face.

Marcus: It’s okay.

They touch each other’s face.

Marcus: It’s okay.

Molly talks to the ISEA therapist played by Anne Ramsay.  As soon as I saw her, I was like: “She’s Ricky’s mom on Secret Life of the American Teenager.”

Sparks and Yasumoto talks about how a previous astronaut committed suicide.

Flashback.

Molly is on the spaceship and she wakes up to watch the video.  Marcus isn’t in it at all.  Molly is touching the air and feels nothing.  She deletes the video.

Present time.

Molly takes out the trash.

Molly: Harmon?

Harmom: It’s me.  It’s not a hallucination.

Molly: Everybody thinks you’re dead.

Harmon: Don’t trust anyone.

Harmon is played by Brad Beyer.

My opinion: Now that I’m writing about it, I can see the pilot set a lot of questions for the viewers to continue watching so they would know the answer. 

How did Molly get pregnant? 

What’s causing her hallucinations? 

Why is Harmon alive?

Why is Yasumoto in a futuristic coffin?

I watched the season finale on Global’s website.  I then read some of the reviews and comments on the internet.  Twop.com closed down their forums, so I had to look at other websites.  There were reviews that people thought it was boring, and too slow in telling the story.  They poked holes in the season finale because there was no conclusion to Yasumoto, though there are endings in other storylines.

I would say overall the season and TV show was average.  If there wasn’t a second season to this show, I would be okay with it.

Oct. 7: There still hasn’t been any news if it’s renewed or cancelled.

Gang-related: This is a summer TV show and I didn’t watch it.  Here it says it got cancelled.

http://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/gang-related-cancelled-by-fox-no-season-two-33750/

The Inn at Cuckold's Lighthouse: I got this email earlier this month and I put it up on my blog:  

Good Morning, Tracy,

At the moment, I have a destination that may be up to your alley to write about for Tracy's Blog. It¹s an interesting angle for your writing blog: The Inn at Cuckold's Lighthouse is a bed and breakfast on a private island off the coast of Maine. It is a cool story because the lighthouse itself was built in the late 1800s, but in early 2000 was threatened with destruction because the Coast Guard had no use for it anymore. The Maine locals got together to save the lighthouse and, in 2006, succeeded. Since then, volunteer-led efforts have been the driving force to restore the historic light station. Local businesses have donated building materials, design expertise, and other resources to bring the project to fruition. The Inn at Cuckold's Lighthouse launched last June.

We¹re positioning the bed and breakfast as a perfect place for writers to have moments of solace in order to write, with breathtaking views of the Atlantic. Additionally, we are currently hosting a competition for bloggers who mention the inn on their blogs. Everyone who mentions the bed and breakfast is entered into a competition to win two free nights at The Inn at Cuckold¹s Lighthouse, plus airfare covered up to $400. You can also offer this prize to your readers to generate more participation on your blog.

If you are interested, I will send over the media kit and several hi-res images. Eager to hear your thoughts!

Thanks X,

http://www.badcb.blogspot.ca/2014/09/the-inn-at-cuckolds-lighthouse.html