The Wild Blog in the West

I really don't intend to be so sparse with my blogging every month.  Really.  I've been mainly trying to catch up on writing my second novel (now over 200 pages!) and caught up in work.  Oh, and going gaga over the latest Game of Thrones episode, but I digress. I wanted to give a taste of future posts.  As always, they will be a mixture of pop culture and personal likes and dislikes.  One big change: I am officially extending the Movie Musicals That Got It Right/Wrong to the classic movies.  Originally I was planning to wait until I had reviewed movies in the more recent past before moving on to the classics, but why would I sit through The Producers , Nine , and God knows how many iterations of High School Musical  before I could review  My Fair Lady , West Side Story , or The King and I (I said classics, not that they were all good classics).  So I'm going to switch back and forth, and I'm sure no one else cared one way or the other, but ...

Spoilers for anyone who has not read A Feast for Crows or A Dance With Dragons, or the released chapters of The Winds of Winter. By now, viewers of Game of Thrones  can see that the show's creators are beginning to shift the story toward its end game, toward the final Ice Zombie Apocalypse and One Who Wins the Iron Throne.  The outcome of most characters is highly uncertain.  Will Daenerys Targaryen fly her way back to the Throne on dragon wings?  Or will Jon Snow forge his way to the Iron Throne through a phalanx of ice zombies?  Or will it be stoic, meticulous Stannis Baratheon?  Or (f)Aegon?  Or Sansa Stark?  Maybe some combination of the above, like Jon and Daenerys, or even Jon and Sansa.* Who do I think it will be?  Daenerys. She seems like the obvious choice, which in the A Song of Ice and Fire universe usually means she is marked for death.  And I would not at all put it past Martin or the show's producers to kill her off...

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...