Should I Ever Get a Trilogy

This past holiday season has inspired more contemplation that writing and I find myself at the beginning of a new year reading and studying short stories, trying to understand their rhythms. For me, a good short story is like an excellent ice-skating performance: kindled anticipation from the first note of the music or sight of the costumes, flashes of amazement at the improbable moves, and endings that carve themselves abruptly into that frozen internal sea.

Yet, I find that short stories are also functioning like matches, casting brief flares into the dark heart of the novel that I'm drafting. Or, at this point, thinking about making notes on prior to drafting. Yeah. It's been that kind of writing season. Ideas are circling, revealing a few scenes, and then flying off. Meanwhile, here I sit, listening to podcasts and scrolling through Facebook and fearing setting pen to paper.

And listening to the Tolkien Professor podcasts and trying to not talk to the Pumpkin King about my disappointment with the latest Hobbit film. When we saw the movie, I was as twitchy as a toddler by the end, sighing and shifting in my seat each time an orc feigned death only to rise again for several additional minutes of battle. Yeah, I know. Named orcs have 50K hit points and get extra ones from each unnamed orc who falls to a war pig or half-dead but brave villager. These ultimate battles have been promised since the first film and everyone is looking forward to them. But they didn't resonate for me the way Galadriel's moment of kick-assery did, nor the way the songs over the end credits hinted at movies that could have been made. So today, while enjoying a sunny drive taking the long way home (it's been grey, cold, and drizzly for several days), I started to think that part of the challenge of the Hobbit films was having to recapitulate (even if you reimagine parts of it) the story.

If I had the chance to make a trilogy of movies based on The Hobbit (at least if that opportunity came, oh, today), I would prefer to pick pieces of the book. These pieces:

1. Dark Webs in the Bright Leaves: This opening movie would be the story of the sylvan elves and their battle with the spiders. Focusing on the conflict between being stewards and the possibility of eternal learning and care versus the necessity of determining what requires fighting and when sacrifice is justified, this initial installment could have plenty of music (Elves--not just bleach and eyebrows) and conflict. Flashbacks to previous dragon battles? A demonstration of the way that we ignore danger because it's just far enough away to be someone else's problem? Do gated communities work as safeguards? The end would hint at the growing darkness and maybe include a rumor of dwarves. This could establish the deep history of the world (what else are the elves but the visible manifestation of the deep natural history) but also set up the idea of changes and at the same time the rot of long-dead empires or ideas contaminating the present/future.

2. A Brief Kingdom: This movie would take place in The Lonely Mountain in between the death of the dragon and the (spoiler alert?) death of Thorin and would focus entirely on Thorin. Flashbacks might give some backstory, but the interaction of the dwarves could establish a good deal of their character and Thorin would get an entire movie to enact his accession, fall, and redemption, with the benefit of introducing Bilbo, who will be the focus of the last movie.

3. The Road and the Tale: This final movie would take place entirely on Bilbo's return to the shire, as he explains to various companions (Gandalf? Various elves? A passing ranger?) what has happened and we begin to see how the story that we've experienced from various viewpoints becomes the story of a particular hobbit whose family will become so important to the upcoming LOTR trilogy. I love the idea of watching a story becoming myth as Bilbo continues to refine what he will remember from the adventures.

Breaking the story free from the book and plunging deeper into certain pieces struck me as a way to wind through the story without just repeating it. To give one a chance to both honor the source material and demonstrate that stories change every time they are retold.

It is manifestly a good thing that I will never get the opportunity to recreate a trilogy.

Container/Essence

I feel like screaming, genuflecting,
like Not Causing A Scene.
Going where I carry odd tales
Of the blank dragon spaces
Where I come from.

I climb as high as an idol
In this tiny space and yell.

The altar beneath me creaks
with the crap I worship.
Shirts and underwear and toothpaste
And books--all unsteady
Under my feet.

I read my way to a liturgy,
Faked my way to this altar.

I feel like screaming.

Thank you to Magpie Tales for providing the above image/inspiration for today's poem.

Meditation

Last night I dreamed myself into a library--The Library, since institutions in dreams tend to be singular. I was looking for The Alchemist, a book that I dislike, although I had high hopes for when I first read it. Instead of encountering the actual text of the book, I found a poster hanging down the length of a wall like an unrolled scroll with what seemed to be the entire text of the book (up to page 96, for whatever random reason). It began with a line abot the libraries of the author's childhood.

To read this long poster, you laid on your back on a large pillow provided for this on the floor of The Library. Large plate-glass windows and bright but diffused ceiling lights allowed you to float in the bright space, cocooned by the pillow and your own body and climb through the tower of text before you.

Having just come through a holiday season that encompassed more anger than calm and more silence than praise, I was looking for something that was embodied in The Library. For the bulk of the last few months I've felt as if a hand was laid across my lips in terms of my writing. Stories would begin and then fizzle. Words and themes would surface and then vanish before I could find a pen or find time to sit at the keyboard. And so I found myself balancing on a pillow, legs crossed and folded and resting against the wall, while I read an unrolled scroll that overwrote the text of a book striving to embody the sacred with a reference to the actual sacred--the libraries of my childhood. Even more than bookstores that stock the most recent along with shelves of games and fresh coffee, libraries are places where I can try out different types of books and where, once upon a time, I had to earn my way through the stacks, from picture books to biography to the jokes at the end of the sidewalk.

Not to mention the concept of borrowing and returning. Impermanence of ownership. It isn't the book that matters, it is the impression left behind.

And Then Weasels Invaded Via The Bathroom Window

Christmas is coming up--it's this Thursday. (not panicking. Wrapping. Really.) What happened to November?

I seem to remember lots and lots of text scrolling across pages and pages of a Word document. There may have been plot involved. I'm pretty sure the plot was mixed in with the text, although I can't swear to that, now. All of that text has been safely extracted and placed in a black binder. It whines at me occasionally from the chair that has become an extension of my desk and which I am currently using as a footrest so that I can type on my lap rather than on the desk. This way, I can keep my eyes on the stacks of drafts and half-read books that are becoming restive in their stacks.

Paper taming takes patience (and a tolerance for sliced fingers) but I believe in keeping my drafts in a half-wild state, gnawing at my ankles while I draft blog posts.

Consequent to Nano devouring my November like a wild coyote, there are lots of incidental holiday tasks that have yet to be completed. Shopping. Wrapping. Cooking. At least the Texas weather and I are on the same last minute schedule. Today was the first day in weeks that it was cool enough to wear jeans and a sweater as we were running around. Yesterday it rained from before dawn to early afternoon and it's still grey. If I was capable of making cocoa on the stove, I would be having cocoa while making excuses for not having blogged or done much of anything in weeks. Instead, I am enjoying a Platonic cocoa in my imagination. With whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles. Yum. Fun fact--we discovered over Thanksgiving that if you use a microplane zester to grate an entire bar of chocolate for pie, the fine chocolate shavings will become statically charged and stick to your skin and float over the pan as you are melting them. Chocowizard pie!!

And the weasels? Once they invaded, we stuffed them in Santa hats and incorporated them in the décor because Nano teaches us to use whatever comes up as part of the art itself...

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

Interjection!

Today's post suffers from a distinct lack of inspiration. With NaNoWriMo coming up, I'm trying to organize my thoughts--which characters do I want to spend November obsessing about? Which projects can I finish before November?

Right now, I think NaNo will belong to Cupid. Cupid the maniacal, power-hungry, multi-chromatic winged bringing of insanity Spenser introduced me to in The Faerie Queene. Cupid who would like to rule Olympus, perhaps who has waited in the shadows until he's the only one left still be celebrated...every Valentine's Day getting a sugary jolt of power, like a crazy soda burst of energy.

Meanwhile, there are a few additional drafts that need work. A short story that needs expanding into a short YA novella--I had been struggling for a while to make Bastian Creek into a good magical realist setting and between the spiders, the Arcade, and the trees vying for control, I think it's finally there. Almost.

I had always wanted Bastian Creek to become the setting for several of my stories and yet I find that finishing this story to some extent drains some of the impetus away from it. I'm not sure how writers manage with serials.

Next week, Halloween posts!!

Deep & restful reading!

Links

(image courtesy of Magpie Tales)

I planned the shot like a billiard run
Where a flash of white finds each side.
We thought it just another angle.
Then the shards of myself were struck
By light itself, unfelt, into the silver.
In a small bathroom, I became shards
Sealing myself in without privacy
As we do now, in bathrooms or at table;
Lives bright as curated toy shelves.
I am easy to see, skim, select, apprehend,
Banked through random links to you.

Untitled

(Image courtesy Magpie Tales)


Wind comes like the heat, drawing the tide
Beating against her chest. Hollow land breathes,
Invisible air tangible as a touch on her neck.
She runs.

The spin beneath her feet drives her
Like the chaff of clouds racing above.
It tangles the winds; it jumbles thought.
It shoves.

Every sigh speeds its roll. Tumbling on
Until the drover and the driven, blind,
Run as if the rocky land chased them.
It does.

The wind speeds it behind her. Wire
Nets the empty land, catches her up
Like a dolphin in the sea that came
Before.

Run! Until it plucks the skin from your
Hands, the cotton from your back, the
Blood from beneath your flesh. And, then.
Then, run.