Not-Trek

A funny thing happened on my way to Star Trek: Beyond. Every other movie for the past few years.

There's long been a hallowed tradition in American filmmaking, where (especially with Ye Summer Blockbuster) shit-blowin'-up-real-good is perhaps the core of the attraction. We like watching buildings explode, continents going kablooey - we even had fun with CGI destruction of major cities for a while there. Gosh darn it, good clean American fun, where nobody gets hurt (they're all just digital ants, right) and loud noises suffice for entertainment.

Rebooting has also been a big money maker, so we've rebooted the CRUD out of, say, Spider-Man (we're on #3 in under ten years, folks), every television show known to the Baby Boomers and now even some Gen-X'ers, and ... oh yeah, Star Trek.

Three years ago, DC Comics debuted their 'verse challenge to the box office, television, and beyond domination of Marvel's stunningly successful multiverse, giving the world the grey, grimy, gloomy, and petulantly self-indulgant Man of Steel. Antithetical to almost any possible character trait of Superman as he's existed for GENERATIONS now, this movie failed to score in one very major way: its sickening collateral destruction. The hue and cry against Supes' heedless and violent smackdown of his enemies, and the resultant, ya know, complete razing of some significant areas of human habitation, were loud and lamenting.

For those who are not fans: Superman is essentially a Christ figure. He never quite dies for our sins, but the only son sent from, well space, who gives up a normal life to serve mankind: yeah, it's a bit of a parallel.

So to make him an emo jerk with zero personality and a whinging little ax to grind, and to indulge an entire grubby looking feature film to the insane amounts of damage he and Zod leave around them without the slightest nod to those people and properties they destroy? Unpopular. And the movie sucked.

The result has been Batman Versus Superman. Not greatly more loved, as far as I have heard: but wow did it backpedal on the whole collateral damage thing.

Add to this Marvel's own multiverse spending now literally *years* addressing exactly the same issues - in the Netflix series Jessica Jones, on an existential level; in ABC's Agents of Shield, almost for the run of the series; in Captain America: Civil War, one of the biggest movies of this year. And it's no accident Civil War bears Cap's name, not The Avengers. He is all but alone, of his compatriots, in all the sacrifice and service we once saw and loved in Supes. And he's not a gun-toting ass, he is a human, the most human perhaps of all the Avengers, striving for principles and fiercely moral. Cap has become one of the most fascinating characters cinema has had to offer in a long time; his portrayal at Chris Evans' hands has been pretty remarkable on multiple levels.


So. Violence, and the fact that even in America its emptiness has begun to cause backlash.



I've been on record most of my adult life as being an open-minded fan - I will take what I'm given and generally try to enjoy it. Expansions of the Trekverse have rarely struck me as a bad idea.


Now we are "Beyond" the universe.

The latest Trek is a good movie. It's got some humor, it's got characters I quite like. I was surprised when I saw Simon Pegg was a writer (I might have expected *more* humor, if I'd known; but I was fairly successful in going in - even as late as I did - with little knowledge beforehand).

Pegg's Montgomery Scott has been a wonderfully winsome, moral presence himself, through the reboots. In Darkness, he was the voice of reason asking "hey, do we really want to go hauling possibly illegal weaponry into territory we're not allowed to be wandering around in in the first place?" and lost his job for it. For a while. He had to kill at one point, which was horrible to see and made me sad, but at LEAST it was theoretically justified by the script.

Beyond ... well, goes beyond. And over the top. And so forth.

The level of CRUELTY in Beyond is something worse than merely distasteful, it is both disrespectful of the entire Trekverse (and fandom) and a betrayal of the ideals on which every franchise used to be built. It is also incredibly tone-deaf.

In a world where DC Comics has to answer for wanton destructiveness, TREK of all things has produced a story in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of deaths just mean nothing. We've all joked about red-shirts, I can't pretend not to have myself. But the level of viciousness, the level of truly morally bankrupt violence in Beyond is heartbreaking.

TOS killed off the occasional redshirt, but generally to make a point about the awfulness of death - or, at the very least, the awfulness of whatever enemy/obstacle the crew were up against. TNG didn't do much killing, but they honored the redshirt tradition here and there, and stuffed up their crew's shirts with a fair amount of moral superiority along the way (I will say: not always justifiably).

DS9, long my favorite of the series, took death and allowed war itself into the Trekverse. But even the war was not a wanton reaction; it was an attrition, a defense, and tapped very much into the ideals of Roddenberry's universe. It explored with more depth, at times, the twisted moralities and allegiances born out of humanoid conflict. It was, for the most part, honest - and earnest.

There is no earnestness in Beyond. Much urgency, but little morality.

Our villain, in Beyond, is a confusing morass of magical properties. We're not supposed to recognize what he is, so he is capable of changing appearance for no particular reason. He's supposed to be scary and evil, so occasionally he's some sort of energy-draining vampire. How this works, why it is so, is not much explained; he's just BAD GUY (and a cruel short-changing of the talents of Idris Elba - and also, was nobody at all a bit squirmy about making a large black man the villain, after the racial issues attached to whitewashing Khan?). His entire motivation is, um. That he is semi-immortal and went nuts because of it? That he was abandoned (shades of Bond Reboot #2)? That he is personally offended (shades of Trek Reboot #1 or CA;Civil War)?

Trek villains are usually greedy or (sigh) culturally inferior (see also, my many issues with TNG's unrelenting smugness), not torturing madmen giving mental illness a bad name.

The villain - as we've seen so often in recent years - is merely the mechanism by which we get the story, such as it is, and the 'splosions, such as they are, into motion. I don't even mind that; many's the Bond film predicated on such red herrings.

But you have to tell a good story once you get the mechanism ticking.

Beyond ... is not a bad story. But it could have been so much better.

One friend of mine commented on the old "tech that's been lying around for centuries magically working just like that" but I stand by that as a Trek trope of long standing. Fine. And, if it bugs you, well consider that Jaylah has been caretaker of "her house" (and all its tech) for some years, apparently. So she kept things in trim.

More than anything else, I wish I could have seen even ACKNOWLEDGEMENT by the crew that people were dying left, right, and down the middle, and that was A Bad Thing. Nope. They're driven, yes, and death is bad, but there's no feeling towards the masses of people destroyed along the way.

And the Enterprise herself is killed off early in the film.

It all feels like a character is missing. And the killing-off here is done along the way to action scenes we've seen before.

The character sliding down the hull of a dying ship. Check: Khan did this in Reboot #2. The characters flying through space/midair without any craft. Check: Reboots #1 and #2 both. Exciting once, amusing twice, retreading now, and taking up time and space that could have had some sort of story going on. Spaceship rising out of the water. Check: Avengers did this a few years ago, and Enterprise did it in Reboot #2, opening sequence no less.

Trek depends upon tropes; I've made this clear right here - redshirts, and gee-whiz tech, and setpieces, oh my. But retreads are just a drag. And laziness is a killer.

I came in wanting to love Star Trek: Beyond, and knowing as little about it as I could. Reviews were sounding good, but I'd seen some doubt.

And I liked it. I liked it in parts. I liked Jaylah, a good character for a woman, something all to hard to come by. Cis-checked and Hollywood pretty of course, but still a strong opportunity in an industry not plagued with good women's roles.

I enjoyed what humor there was, and appreciated the memorial to Leonard Nimoy. Some of the nostalgia felt earned, even as strategic - and manipulative - as necessarily it was. It was respectful, and I loved the shot of Nichelle Nichols and the TOS cast.

The delving into Bones' and Spock's relationship was not merely Pure Comedy Gold My Friends, but lots of genuine fun. THAT was a great movie, braided into a couple other movies with hit-and-miss quality.

I thought Kirk was great, here. His reactions, his actions. I believed him wholly. Same with Zoe Saldana's Uhura, which has been among my favorite aspects of the reboots. This magnificent woman, played first by the marvelous Nichelle Nichols and now by the sensitive, powerful Saldana, has been wonderfully developed through the new films. Her beauty is impossible to miss, but the fact that that is only the smallest part of her has been too. Uhura has been a glorious part, character, image, story, since Abrams took the helm. She is not short-shrifted here.

And yet. And yet.

I liked it in parts. I will get it on disc, when it comes, for those parts. I'll listen for the places this film harmonizes not only with its fellow reboots, but with the Trekverse itself. The music of the spheres, Trek-style.



But oh dear me. The ways it failed are truly bleak.

Award Winning Novels and Popular Centuries

Day Al Mohamed has posted a striking infographic and some thoughts about what it takes to win the literary day these days.

... and Sarah Johnson at HNS (Hisorical Novel Society, y'all) tells us the most popular centuries in histfic right now.  This is very interesting to me - though my period doesn't seem to be burning it up these days.

The Ax and the Vase will change all that, of course.

Women Writing War

Recently, I've seen a number of blog posts, articles, and marketing blurbs focusing on women who are writing stories set in or directly putting their characters into war or battle sequences.  This is spanning from WWI and back to Alexander the Great, and if the attention I'm seeing indicates market viability (can't help but think it does) it certainly won't hurt me once I have revisions completed and begin querying again.  Take a look at this piece, which shows a nice breadth of examples.

Interestingly, some of these works are marketed not by their settings (martial conflict) but by their characters (women's stories) - but it looks like, more and more, that trick is trumped by the fact that some women are writing from the point of view, or centering on, male protagonists.  Alexander was Mary Renault's subject starting over thirty years ago, women's prominence in this type of historical fiction is gaining, and in fantasy women have been able to increase their presence for at least the past decade or so.

Hooray for women!  *Working away on those revisions*

When Ignorance was reviewed, Roberts noticed it was not described as a story about war, but a story about women. It is this critical misapprehension that Roberts suggests has led to the perception that women don't tackle war in their fiction.

"Jane Austen is often attacked for not being interested in the big issues but when I read her novels, I see she is writing about the battle of Waterloo, men coming home from war, and how middle-class women are dependent on these men."

Bitchin' Velvet

For those readers who may not be familiar with a cultural construct typified in a concept I like to call "the bitchin' Camaro", there is a use of this adjective which evokes a dude (it is *always* a "dude", man) who may have a mullet, is almost certainly smoking a Marlboro (it is always a Marlboro, man), and is wearing acid wash jeans tight to the ankle.  He may have heard about the memo that 1990 has come and gone - but he doesn't care.  And he drives a Bitchin' Camaro, thinking it's gonna get him "some tail".

Bitchin' jacquard

The "bitchin'" this guy embodies is the way a lot of historical productions treat their design these days, most especially costuming.  Films, miniseries, and shows touching on flashbacks or actual historicals seem to be populated, at our point in pop-culture history, with metal heads and emo lovers, endowed with crappy extensions (sorry, but as a lover of long-haired men, an actor given "long hair" by way of kanekalon always pretty much looks like a guy endowed with a bad fake mullet) and two-to-four days' stubble growth, wearing amazing costume design with all the historical authenticity of Prince after a particularly sweaty concert.

I'm focusing on men, you notice, and may want to sneer that I'm leaving the picture incomplete.  True.

The women in these productions, you see, are given SUPERIOR extensions.  Almost preternaturally glossy, thick, romance-novel tresses tend to unrealistically abound.  Unbound.  Of course.  Oddly, the costume design on women, I notice, is often poorer, historically speaking.  I think this is because the authentic look for certain periods seems cooler to our current sense of style, for men - as long as we give them the "bitchin'" look to keep it edgy, or goth, or dirty, or whatever.  Authentic-with-lace is acceptable, as long as an actor is given a sheen of sweat, his laces are undone at the neck, his doublet carelessly loosened or entirely open - as long as we have the fake rockstar "hair" and some anachronistic modern sexual posturing to go with it.

Women's costuming, though ... has to be enhanced - actually changed, to suit current sensibility.  To watch a film today is to believe that decolletege' was de rigueur at every hour of the day, for all possible occasions (especially one's own wedding - hah), for something approaching the ten centuries up to and including ours.  Corsetry and that "well cut through the body" look have never, ever gone out of style - even in periods known for a more billowing, or at least less midriff-conscious silhouette.

This isn't new - but it amuses me that designers right now almost certainly presume to a higher level of "authenticity" than one saw in historical productions in, say, the 50s or 60s when (just for fun) Liz Taylor used to run around in inexplicable bouffant styles or hideous swim cap styled headgear, as if THAT were remotely believable:

The Inexplicable Swim Cap

A Mid-Century Modern Sunburst Wall Clock as Hair Decoration

(The less I say about trends in makeup, then OR now, the better - it all follows on this rant anyway.)

I think my personal favorite throw-authenticity-to-the-winds idea of feminine costume design in recent memory is the body paint, nude gold lipstick, and fishnet fantasy from "The Mummy" (a movie, by the way, I actually enjoy - let it always be understood that my willingness to enjoy a production is as distinct from my willingness to dumb myself down to its caprices in design):

'tude

My point isn't so much that I would bother to call designers or makeup artists to go for authenticity.  Very few viewers of these productions truly prefer to give up the eye-candy aspect for rigorous veracity, after all.

This is just one of those areas in which a lot of fans get to, and love to, play Guitarist for a sort of fun.  Even as we lust after the insanely beautiful taffetas, and maybe think about how we will get to dress for Hallowe'en ...

This post will have a companion post in the upcoming Immaculate Misconception ...

Historical Fiction Markets

It's always a pleasure to find historical fiction anything like my own doing well (and winning prizes!).  Here we have three men at war - written by women.

Historical Fiction in the World

Things are looking up all genre over.  And congratulations Donroc!

How Good Does A Whore Have to Be?

... or ... "Yet Another Pop-Culture Critique/Rant/Hypocrisy" ...

When we were together a few weeks ago, I was admitting one of my worst guilty pleasures and we got to talking about reality TV.  He asked me, quite sincerely, because he believes there has to be a reason for things, "What is it that makes these people worth a TV show?"  He wanted to know who reality TV "stars" are - or what they do - that people would want to watch.

The thing about it is that he misunderstands the concept of content in this context.  He and I come from a mindset in which "entertainment" is defined by a certain set of expectations, and "content" is a commodity with demands upon it.  We grew up in a world where television (for instance) was more often written than not.  Entertainment was expected to be about something, involve a plot, make a point, cause some sort of emotional reaction.  It wasn't necessarily sophisticated; it was just the mechanism of "the entertainment industry" in a different time.

Human beings, though, are natural voyeurs, and happy to find lazy ways to make money too.  When we learned (a) how wide an audience there is for "reality" - for peering into other people's supposedly "real" lives - we made fortunes for, at first, the Sally Jessy Raphaels of the world, the Maurys, even the Robin Leaches.  Over the years, one hour of "reality" ceased to be enough, and we began to see The Real World and its ilk, and the genius move was made.

All it takes to make a mint, for anyone who can stomach participating, is to find ostensibly pretty people (the idea of what constitutes "telegenic" is another post I may indeed never have the stomach - nor even the hypocrisy - to write) willing to go on camera for "life".

When I was in my mid-to-late twenties, I can tell you pointblank that watching the Sally Jessy's and the like had an effect on my expectations of myself.  My being a lycra-wearing eighties girl obsessed with whether every man in the world found me attractive in that limited and specific way which seems important to some people (particularly at a certain age) was NOT born of the man who loved and married me back then, nor of my family and lessons I learned from anything resembling life.  It was born of those things I chose to expose myself to, even those things I still pretend to be a snob about and think I am superior to.  It was born of shouty talk shows and Kelly Bundy and commercials glorifying screeching "femininity" and brashness of the sort centered entirely on getting attention, regardless of its type or ramifications.

The diet available today frankly makes me blanche.  I'm daily given reason to be glad I am as old as I am - because if the girl I was then happened to be a girl NOW, I would unquestionably be first in line (in, likely, multiple lines) attempting to sell my "life" so I could be famous, could prove myself interesting, could prove myself "hot", could make money doing so.

The irony, of course, is that my very lack of substance, perhaps to some extent my very lack of certain appeals - that would have been exactly what would have made me what passes now for a wild success.  The tawdriness and emptiness is "what makes these people worthy of a TV show."

Rather than expecting a plot or a point, huge swaths of entertainment now are based on the goal to elicit that glow of schadenfreude which tells viewers they are superior to what they're watching.  Laughs or shocks are always good - and, of curse, there's always that genre of shows pitched at women telling us we are supposed to consider highly saturated magenta and blue lighting on tatty LA mansions as "fairy tale" settings for vicarious love and romance (and, indeed, certainly conditioning younger women and girls in the lessons of hideously distorted gender roles, body image, and social behavior) - but, at the end of the day, SENSATION has come to replace the content middle aged folks like me and X once expected.

It doesn't matter so much who the whore is, willing to be pimped to unseen watchers for the release of sensation their televised experiences will engender.  It doesn't matter which whore you get out of the phone book, if that's a call you want to make, as long as they fit the general description you request.  Willing to abdicate privacy and a personal life, or willing to perform certain unspeakable services - as long as they are, it doesn't matter who it is.  Success is measured not by talent, nor charisma - but only by the reaching of that sensation, the release, the short-term goal of a disinterested consumer.

It doesn't matter who provides their personal exposure - there is really no "who are these people" factored into this transaction, nor the financial rewards of the industry it has given gargantuan birth to.  As long as a fairly minimal interview with casting agents and a perhaps even more minimal background check is perfunctorily satisfied - the human fodder need not be particular nor honestly individual (*peculiar* is not the same thing ...) in order to satisfy the demands of reality TV.

"What is it that makes these people worth a TV show?"

Worth is the wrong choice of words, perhaps.  "Willing to do it" might be more to the point.  And it's a heartbreaking, dispiriting point, really.

I think of the number of women of my generation who wore stripper shoes and tiny dresses on talk shows for one hour of fame back in the eighties, and whose doing so was essentially ephemeral, is now over, and probably forgotten ...  Then I think of the number of women just in a single day, now, whose self-abasement for others' entertainment is likely to live on in a way those talk shows could not have made possible.  I think about how many of them parlay their appearances on The Bachelor or any one of those "Wives" shows or any one of a thousand competitive quasi-beauty or quasi-talent or quasi-game shows into *careers* of selling off further parts of themselves, and it makes me so sad.

And, of course, so superior - about "those kids today" and every possible other middle-aged (having lost my own twentysomething physical appeals) cliche'.  Superior because I escaped the opportunity to sell my entire life like that, and thank G-d I am old enough to have escaped it.  Superior over even the middle-aged, telegenic barbies of my own age, staging hyper dramatic middle school cat fights for a living.  Superior to those who think game shows yield love and commitment worth the name.  Superior to the entertainment itself.

I respond EXACTLY, in short, as I am supposed to.

And it still makes me so sad.  Kicking the whore out of the room when you're done must feel like that.

Video Game Aesthetics

Some who know me well are aware that one of the people I am closest to in the world happens to be a big old video game nerd, with a regular legit gig reviewing 'em, and a major interest in playing them.  He can discuss merits far more sophisticated than 'thangs git blowed up rill good' - and knows enough about the history of technology, art, music, and video gaming equipment and platforms not only to build his own custom, but to speak intelligently about the phenomenon.

Me, I never so much as played an actual arcade version of PacMan.  I think we borrowed a neighbor's Atari briefly in about 1979, so I probably have half an hour's worth of Pong under my belt.  But I am in no way a reasonable critic.

I am, however, a competent writer, and a smart enough consumer of entertainment to feel my opinions have at least some weight. And so I will venture to make this post.


With all my recent observations of histfic in theaters, what I haven't explicated is what these films are all starting to look like.  Which is:  video games.

I may not play them, but it would be the rare bird indeed, in our cultural environment, who couldn't identify some of the signifiers of the current aesthetic of games, and recognize that the division between filmic design and game design has been merging for a fairly long time now.  It's hardly new, and I'm not pretending to post news here, but the extent to which games have come to influence the look of films - and the content - has become almost startling.

It's not a loss, as such.  MGM's old historical epics are hardly the stuff of art, as much as I do love them.

But I did grow up on a certain sort of sepia-toned expectation, a mindset I don't feel much need to change, wherein historical fiction = tea-washed images of a certain brand of ponderousness we read as either romance  or majesty, depending on the plotline.  Even CGI didn't take that away ... for a while.

Historical Drama, we have been taught, looks like this ...

Lush.

Historical fiction - one of the reasons I have always loved it - has a seductive promise about it.  Even a story centered on evil looks inviting.  This comely, stylized persuasion away from my every day is, for me, the very archetype of storytelling.  "Once upon a time."

In the context of female leads in particular, though, historical fiction is looking more and more every month like video game box covers.

This isn't a bad thing per se.  But CGI is making things look so much busier - nothing seems left, in these worlds, not production designed ... nor computer designed ... to within an inch of WSD.  The color saturation of the 50s pictures has given way to an anime look right down to the way everything appears limned with cartoon black lines, to the way everything in a frame, in every image, seems to exist emphatically on its own, making the picture seem too full.  CG's capacity for detail can lead to a visual clutter, and you get in cinematography the same thing fashion has come to in the past 15 years or so.  It's all too much.  "Too many notes, Herr Mozart."

The trend isn't one I can fairly lay value judgments on, but the trends in storytelling, going along with these aesthetics, seem to me discouraging.  The arc for female leads, particularly, has gone off the rails - nothing may be realistic; not a figure, not a piece of wardrobe, and least of all a character's basis in reality.  Women have, in film as in gaming and in fanfic, become automatons.

There will be legions who would shout me down (if only I had the readership) but Ass Kicking Female Leads do not strike me as an excellent development.  It's still required that these images onscreen must be pneumatic or unrealistically willowy - the bodies of perfect movie star(let)s, not the flesh of actual womanhood.  Cup sizes may somewhat have diminished, since this brand of AKFL emerged from the venues attended by fanboys alone, and fantasy literature has allowed female authors success, but their entry into the realm of other genres and other media has made even the painful Mary-Sue-dom of proto-feminist characters cast in historical settings (and, all too often, extremely attractively corseted) seem dead-on in terms of verisimilitude.

The new breed of histfic in theaters has the appearance of focusing on sound and fury, and signifying nothing.  Now, I have not seen certain of these productions, to be honest.

But part of the reason for this is that the ideas seem so stripped down.  The urge to make histfic sellable redefines "EXCITING", unfortunately, as "loud, busy sensory overload" ... and story seems to be a thing to be avoided.

This is why I never got into video games.

I know story has become much more important over the years.  But, at the end of the day, when even a gamer wants to be told a story, a BOOK (or a movie) comes closer to the idea of the concept; a game - even with great actors voicing it, great art directors making it look "painterly", and people who do not, I believe, find as wide a literary readership for their scripts as do, still, actual novelists - isn't the object we turn to for story, for plot, for literature.  Art - yes.  But this particular type of it - is not the first point of contact for storytelling.  There can't be time to absorb a story - a well-drawn *character* - when it is necessary to fight, to kill, to MOVE your own way from screen to screen.

And movies are starting to move like that.  To feel the same way.

The *reason* I haven't seen Downey's Holmes, nor will see the new Musketeers, nor Anonymous (yes, apart from the heresy it entails - heh) is that they look to me like video games.  And I don't play video games.  I find it impossible to be drawn into video games, because what they expect of me is alien to my mind's understanding of the concept of entertainment.  I want to see characters and motivations, and the action films in particular taking their cue from VG aesthetics appear to reduce the the latter to "GIT 'em all" and the former to cardboard cutouts of the most depressing non-charisma.  I say "appear" because, obviously, I know I am not without bias.  But the marketing of these films is designed to demonstrate their content - and nothing I have seen in the marketing as yet has indicated any premium placed on writing at all; on character, development, or motivation.  These are movies which don't want me as a viewer - so I feel little guilt not signing on to be one, nor even in judging them based on what I have had put before me to judge.

It's hard for me to say I am deeply dismayed by the development.  I know that movies now are not less realistic than they were in the Brynner days above.  I know they're not even less *artistic*, as such.  It's just that the art, now, is not of a type I find appealing.


***


DISCLAIMERATION
Like any other would be debut author, I have indulged in casturbation.  Of course I have.  I don't *believe* in Hollywood coming a-calling.  But I believe in my work - and I know it is entertaining.  I do find it possible to imagine its being optioned for another medium.  It may almost be necessary for an aspirant to have dreams like this - their being realistic being beside the point in a way.  Yeah, it gets in the way for some (see also:  that link), but we all have to have some goals and hopes, and for me this one doesn't distort the work at hand nor what I hope/expect to get out of it.  So what I have to say above carries the imaginary and extraneous fear of "what if this could ever be my work?" ... certainly something centering on battles, power, featuring a strong female lead, and featuring all the lovely lovely action of a barbarian monarch's forging of a(n) (in)famous dynasty could lend itself to a whole buncha medieval-geek gaming style cinematic excess.  Even I don't claim my work is burdened with artistic depth.  It's good story telling.

But that is the point.

It is a story.  It's a ripping yarn.  But without its characters ... it would be *less*, to me.

More Histfic in Theaters

Yep.  Keep 'em coming, Hollywood - it won't hurt me as an author (even if they all seem to be a bit screamy lately!).

More Histfic in Theaters

I have an affection for Michael York's Musketeer (he's always been one of those few blond men who got my attention) - but as someone marketing histfic of an adventurous nature, I can never argue seeing new versions of such stories coming to the screen.  Woo!

Winfrey Readin'

Zuba and I talked yesterday for the longest time.  We don't get to do that much, but the stars happened to align, and it's always a gas when we get to have a nice long call.  We were talking about the book at some point, and she told me she keeps a hard copy of it in a binder - she was one of my readers once upon a time.  A friend of hers was over at the house once, and she was telling me yesterday - "She asked me if you had thought about submitting this to Oprah."

Heh.

Of course, this point is moot - not only with The Big O having retired her big show, but also given the fact that (even if she had time to read all the insane amounts of pitches one imagines a magnate such as herself must receive in an endless and misguided flow) Oprah is not actually in publishing.  Yes, she publishES - sure.  But she's not an imprint, and she's not an agent.  I have enough education in this field to know what doesn't work - and tugging the prodigious sleeve of Ms. Winfrey is as useful as recording a YouTube of my pitch and rilly rilly rilly RILLY hoping that my dream agent will come find ME.  Without any work.

Still.  Part of the reason for my "heh" above is that ... truth be told, In the Beginning - I did actually mention a couple of times how Oprah had featured "Pillars of the Earth" on her book club in November 2007.  The problem is, of course, in 2011 (almost 2012) discussing what a now-defunct talk show featured four years ago is about as effective as discussing the economy in 2007 terms.  The cycle is past, the (publishing) world has moved on.  In 2007 Harry Potter was still alive and so was Osama bin Laden.  2007 was another time, another place.

But in 2007 "The Tudors" cropped up, and reminded people how much they like histfic (emphasis on the FIC) for several years going.  "Spartacus:  Blood and Sand" (RIP Andy Whitfield) reminded them how much fun it is to turn it into Grand Guignol.  Wolf Hall won the Man Booker in 2009, and their long and short lists don't ignore histfic with any sort of reliable snobbery.

I just didn't happen to write about the Tudors.  They do seem perennial sellers - but they aren't the only history worth telling.  (And even they consist of more than Eight, Ann, and Elizabeth.)  It happens, I refuse to believe the Tudors are the start and end of interesting stories in history.  I have it on good authority, too:  I am not the only such blasphemer ...

Just think - Oprah herself read, with enthusiasm, about beheadings in medieval times, and exhorted a vast array of readership to do the same along with her.

Can ax-ings in Late Antiquity/the "Dark Ages" really be so far behind ... ?