Story on the Brain

Season Two went fine, though the actor playing Ash Tyler developed a bizarre speech effect from bad dialect coaching. It will sound farfetched, but he sounded exactly like Nick Blood did when he suffered from bad dialect coaching on Agents of Shield. British people! Just let them be British! If they're not good at an American accent, don't make them try to do one. Oh boy was that distracting. It was even hard to understand him, which by the way it would not have been in his native accent. The character of Ash Tyler was a problem the whole season long. He was thrown here and there like they had no clear plan for him. The guy with severe PTSD and major identity issues who had like two hours of training to join Section 31 ended the season being head of it. More nonsense. This was the beginning of the make it up as you go along problems that became unmanageable in Season Three.  Also L'Rell had a bizarre CGI face at the beginning that threw me out of the story entirely. And I d...

I'm just starting to catch up to the modern iterations of Star Trek. After all of those, I'll catch up on Star Wars. The last Star Trek I saw, not counting the movies, was when I tried to watch Enterprise (hated it) and before that Voyager (hated it) and before that DS9 (loved it, lived it, breathed it, obsessed about it). So I am relieved but also I suppose a little disappointed that I neither hate nor love Discovery. I like it! I like it just fine.  And I have many things to say about it, because when I watch something, I think about it constantly, to the point where I can't sleep after watching. This is sort of a problem, actually. I mean I was up most of the night. I was confused about why it was so bright outside my windows, until I realized that was morning starting to happen.  Not sure what the solution to that is. "Don't think about it" has never worked with me. SPOILERS ABOUND. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. Discovery! It's fascinating to me that it's ...

This was one of my very favorite books growing up. I'm rereading comfort food books because I don't sleep when I read upsetting books, whee! And for your own writing it's essential to read things you love and think about what makes them so important to you. The heroine, Margaret Thursday, is an orphan who lives with the maid who raised her, but this year the money to support her did not show up, so her beloved Hannah and the vicar can't afford to keep her and have to send her away.  That's a terrific story beginning right there. Margaret is very proud of the fact that she was left on the church steps as a baby with three of everything of the very best quality, so that even though she has the most precarious existence and no family, she has an inner pride and strength that gets her through everything. It's fascinating to me that this is the very opposite of the Harry Potter books. Harry is abused and neglected in a cruel wealthy household. Margaret is loved and c...

After I read this yesterday, I also read Still Life With Tornado , one of the most upsetting books for someone with a history of a severely dysfunctional family. Without getting into it too much, Still Life echoed a whole lot of bad things about my past. Dig is quintessential A.S. King in that it features a cast of characters who are terribly stuck in their lives. Other than The Freak, who is the least stuck person on the planet, we meet five characters, all teens, who are in terrible situations. Jake is being abused by his older brother and made to join in actual felonies, not to mention white supremacy nonsense and recruitment. Loretta is living in a trailer with a violent and sexually abusive father and her abused mother. The Shoveler is starting his eighteenth new school (some atrocious number like that) and has decided that shoveling snow solves his problems, though carrying a shovel everywhere with him certainly complicates his social life. Malcolm's father is dying but he...

I recently reread Naomi Novik's Uprooted for maybe the tenth time. I was struck again by something brilliant she does that I've rarely seen elsewhere, though I think it happens in an Alan Dean Foster novel called Glory Road . I need to reread that one. And there's something related in A Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, which I also need to reread. It happens in one of my favorite movies (despite the disempowered heroine), Jupiter Ascending . I'll come back and write more about this when I've reread those.  What Novik does is start out with a character with an extremely limited view of the world she inhabits, then move that character into a larger and more complicated world, over and over and over, almost every single chapter.  Agnieszka starts out as a village girl who gets yanked unwillingly into the Dragon's tower to serve him as a cook and cleaner, though also she has the power of magic, though she doesn't know that. Just going...