The Wild Blog in the West

I gave my novel draft over to be critiqued by a professional editor, as I said I would do i n my last update .  While she had a lot of positive things to say about the story and characters, she had one major criticism: she did not like my female protagonist. I've gone into my novel and its characters in previous posts .  Suffice it to say, my character, Isabella, has a lot of issues.  She is young, angry, scared, and overwhelmed.  She responds by lashing out at those who don't deserve it, with some pretty terrible consequences.  As a result, she bears a life-long scar.  Though she reforms, by the end of the novel, her reformation is not complete.  And, to be perfectly honest, it will probably never be. Isabella is not my first "challenging" female protagonist.  For a pilot script I wrote some years ago, my female protagonist was also angry.  She had just lost her job and ended a relationship.  She finally bonded with her teenage n...

This is just a brief update.  Work has been grueling of late, I've been trying to write my one page per night, and damn those seasonal allergies.  Anyway, I thought it worth mentioning that I've put aside Bleak House  for now.  I was into it for a short while, but somewhere around the time the heroine met Mr. Jarndyce, or whatever his name, I stopped caring.  I'm not sure how many pages I am into the book... my Kindle tells me 8%.  I'll try again, really. Some observations: Dickens uses a mixture of styles that I had considered to be "modern" and hadn't really seen in other Victorian novels (though my catalogue is far from complete).  The first chapter begins almost like free-verse poetry, written by someone on crack: "As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill." Bo...

Growing up, I loved watching the original Twilight Zone  (1959-1964).  It was the perfect blend of creepy and thought-provoking, often portraying what happens when we take certain longings to their natural (or supernatural) conclusion. For Twilight Zone junkies, the classic episodes are almost too numerous to count.  However, the best of them tended to tap into our deep-seated fears and yearnings.  These include "Walking Distance," "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," "The Hitch-Hiker," and "A Stop at Willoughby." Yet while Twilight Zone  had that sort of universal appeal, it was hard to dismiss that its perspective was largely white, middle or upper-middle class, urban, and male.  The theme of an inordinate number of episodes was men longing to escape the constraints of their hectic modern lives, whether that involved escaping shrewish wives or modern urban life altogether.  The "ideal" world was one that likely never existed,...

Yes, another article about Disney's  Frozen .  At least it's relevant, given the recent premiere of the  Frozen Fever short and the announcement that there will be a Frozen 2 . While Queen Elsa's character in Frozen has often been compared to a lesbian coming out of the closet, her embrace of her icy powers could be metaphorical in other ways.  One such way could be an introvert learning to embrace her true nature... or conversely, learning to become an extrovert. Can Elsa's character arc be read either way?  To begin with, is Elsa an introvert?  Introverts are typically: reserved interested in big ideas rather than small talk needs to be alone to replenish after socializing thinks before he/she speaks prefers to observe rather than be the center of attention Some of this would definitely apply to Elsa both pre-Trauma (nearly killing her sister) and post-Trauma.  Even early innocent Elsa was more reserved than Anna, and she seemed more ...

I'd mentioned back in August that I was disinclined to blog recaps for  Downton Abbey  Series Five due to, well, a complete lack of interest.  After finally watching Series Five, I'd say my instincts were correct.  Series Five was a snooze for about the first two thirds, with only the final third making it a better series overall than Series Four. Overall, these are my impressions of Series Five: 1.  Even the Show Realizes How Poorly Used Cora Is.   For four previous series, Cora was little more than a cushion on the sofa, zoned out and seldom interesting unless the script called for it.  In Series Five, the script did call for it quite often.  Not only did Cora receive the attentions of an elegant art collector, but she also got to remind the audience of her life before marriage, as the daughter of a Jewish millionaire.  Cora was interesting and insightful in a way that she was rarely called upon to be, and the scripts acknowledged th...

I feel as though I've been living in a cave.  Sarah Waters has been publishing neo-Victorian and early/mid 20th century novels since 1998, yet I learned about her only a year ago.  More is the pity, because her writing style is so compulsively readable, at least going by her third novel,  Fingersmith  (2002). As with Crimson Petal and the White  and The Seance , I read with one eye toward seeing (1) what aspects of the Victorian Era were incorporated, (2) what "modern" elements were added, (3) what worked and did not work, (4) how well Fingersmith  conformed to expectations of "what would sell," and (5) whether it was a good story. Starting with No. 2, one common aspect of Sarah Waters's novels is that their protagonists are lesbians.  Not all, but at least the first three, including  Fingersmith .  Waters was working toward a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, with a thesis focused on "lesbian and gay historical fictions, 1870 to...

After cutting and refining my novel, I finally decided I was ready for the next step: attend the San Francisco Writers Conference, where real-live agenty people would congregate... along with the rest of us. I won't provide a ton of detail, except to say that the price is probably a bargain if you attend all four days.  I came for only two.  Still, I managed to get what I came for.   On Saturday, my first full day, I showed up at the Mark Hopkins Hotel to do what is called "speed networking," where you meet with an agent for three minutes and pitch your novel.  At 8 am, riding a caffeinated high, I flocked into a large room where agents sat and lined up with the ones on my list.  I had just an hour to appeal to as many agents as possible, and regrettably, I was not as efficient with my time as I could have been. One big-time agent shot me down, stating my idea wasn't high concept.  It was painful, but then again, she was right.  It was ...