Five Januaryish things

[mrissa]

1. I have seen the Table of Contents announced, so I feel comfortable that I'm not stepping on anything if I say that my good short story news squeaking at the very end of last year was selling "Tusk and Skin" to Ekaterina Sedia for her Bewere the Night anthology. The spelling on that is correct: it's a shapeshifter-themed anthology. Very very pleased.

2. Many of you have probably seen this from other friends of elisem, but just in case: signs of a stroke. Learn them, know them, cherish them in your heart. If tnh hadn't known them and acted quickly, we don't like to think what. Instead we get our elisem some more. So: make sure you know how this stuff goes, just in case.

3. I have been in tidying mode around the kitchen. This does not mean putting things away in the cupboard or Narnia or the recycling bin as one might expect. It means that when in doubt as to what to eat--and I am often in doubt as to what to eat these days--I am Using Things Up. I am a holy terror at Using Things Up, which is good, because the tea/tisane section of Narnia is rather overflowing after Christmas. So I got major points yesterday for using up an entire kind of tisane, even though it's a good kind and I should probably get more next time I go to Tea Source. But! The Tea Source run is not imminent, and in the meantime I have so-virtuously cleared out space.

Why, this makes me want to have a cup of tisane right now. Just to continue with the virtue of tidiness.

(Yes, my shorthand for our pantry is Narnia. If you'd seen how it opens up in layers, you might well believe there was a magical land behind the cereal also.)

4. timprov was not up for an hour and a half of subtitled French, so we didn't watch the movie we've got on our pile for "family movie night" next time (Micmacs, for the curious, but I can't tell you anything about it). Instead markgritter and I watched the beginning of the butchery they made of The Dark Is Rising to see if it was as bad as we feared. Friends, it was worse. They were clearly trying to make it more "action-y" and "relatable," but half the changes were counterproductive for the other half's goals, and it just ended up a wandery mess with no bearing on the original. It was the sort of thing that made me wonder why they even bothered using the name and paying Susan Cooper, because there was that little relationship between the book and the movie--they could have just made an action fantasy about an American (!!??!!) boy in England and not tried to pretend it was The Dark Is Rising.

There was an ad for the movie of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader before it. "If you like butchering children's fantasy classics, you might try...."

5. Relevant to #1: I am terrible at writing author bios. Terrible, terrible, terrible. I have my standard one, but I get tired of it, and then the process invokes my inner sullen teenager: "I dunno. Nothin'." Which is ungracious and unpleasant. I also tend to roll my eyes at the people who give into their impulses and have bios like, "Ever since she was horribly scarred, Marissa Lingen has been living under the Paris Opera House and coaching promising young singers in secret, hoping that one of them might love her." Nor, in fact, was I born in the wagon of a travelin' show. And, "Marissa Lingen wishes she was writing any other novel than the one she's writing," probably won't be true by the time the book comes out. It is a conundrum.

Comments

I would be happy ...

[freelikebeer.livejournal.com]

to write your author bio. No facts needed!

Re: I would be happy ...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

How generous! But I can do the no-facts-needed version myself.

Ahh, but I don't know you ...

[freelikebeer.livejournal.com]

I am an unbiased estimator.

I should add...

[freelikebeer.livejournal.com]

that with that last response, I'm out of jokes.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Man, I was just talking about that movie last night. Didn't they change the title to The Seeker or something? I mostly tried to scrub its existence from my thoughts; originally I was so excited to hear they were filming The Dark Is Rising, and that they cast Christopher Eccleston as the Rider, and it all seemed so promising . . . and then I saw the trailer and a piece of my soul died. Not for love or money would I watch the resulting film.

[finnyb.livejournal.com]

Depends on what part of the world you're in. Here in Canada it was The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, in the States it was The Seeker, and in the UK it was The Dark is Rising. No matter the title, it's a horrid movie.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That is not strictly true. On our OnDemand here in the US, it was listed as The Dark Is Rising.

We are, however, in Baja Canada. So maybe that explains it.

[finnyb.livejournal.com]

Hmm...that's what I'd seen on all the movie posters and such that I'd seen for the various countries, and such. Perhaps they changed it again. Wouldn't surprise me, what with all the other changes they made!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was not intending to watch it, but then markgritter wanted to give it a try.

When the dog asked to be taken outside, that was a break-point that allowed us to say to each other, "I hate this movie! Let's stop!"

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The things we do for loved ones.

[adb-jaeger.livejournal.com]

to say to each other, "I hate this movie! Let's stop!"

I've thought a great invention (you could easily do this with a smart-phone app) would be something where you could vote to stop watching a movie.

I mean, if something *really* sucks, I'll just say "I can't take this", and go do something else (I did that with "The Road"). But there are many movies my wife and I get to the end of, and we both say "wow, that sucked".

But you don't really want to say that mid-stream, if your SO is enjoying the film. So I envision some app where you could press the "SUCKS" button, and if you both pressed it, it would enable a guilt-free termination.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

See, in this case it was a further iteration of that. We were both sitting there going, "Ack, this is awful." So it wasn't that I was thinking, "Perhaps markgritter thinks this is good, and I shouldn't spoil it for him." (Because if he had that little taste, I would spoil it for him. I've done it before. I have a friend who used to read Terry Brooks novels and now can't stand them because of me: he argued against my critiques vociferously, only to find that when he returned to the scene of the crime, he couldn't stop seeing what I was point out. Wiktory is mine.) But I think we were both wondering whether the other person was enjoying finding it awful.

timprov makes all this easier: he just gets up and leaves regardless of what the rest of us are doing, so there's never any question, unless it's the question of shouting after him, "Wait, I hate this, too! Do you want to play BSG instead?"

[timprov.livejournal.com]

You need one of these if you end up trying churches again.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, well, in that case we already have an agreement that we are both Bad Spouse, after the horrible incident where we were both Good Spouse instead.

[careswen.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering if it's sort of like that certain body language or gesture that a couple has that says between them, "I'm ready to get out of here when you are." I know this one well.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh. Actually the incident in question came about through a failure of that mode: we both kept getting more and more tense and angry, and we kept thinking, "He/she is about to snap and get up! And then we will be done with this awful place!"

Now we just have a standing agreement not to wait.

[finnyb.livejournal.com]

As the books are my favourite books of all time, I refer to that butchery as "The Movie that Must Not be Named"--it is truly hideous.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Just to piggyback on what freelikebeer said ... it is a time-honored tradition to have someone else write your author bio, with or without facts.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

I thought you might like to know that on a recent occasion my son Glen was seen to be wearing his pajamas in the evening--the same ones he had slept in. When it was noted, he said, "I win!"

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Noooo, Glen! You have to bathe and put on different pajamas in order to win!

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

Oh, he did! :-)

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say I like butchering children's fantasy classics. There are all those sub-plots and secondary characters to chop off, and then you have to hang them up so all the drama can drain out.

(More seriously, I do mean to get to the Chronicles of Edison, as well as the other portal fantasy-derived thing we've talked about. Eventually. *sigh*)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, metaphors. How they lead us down grody paths.

Chronicles of Edison wouldn't be butchery, though. It would be awesome. Which I have said before, but it doesn't hurt to repeat.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Z tried to show me the trailer. It started "Will Stanton was just an ordinary American boy" which contained so many errors in one line that I refused to watch the rest of the trailer. He later admitted that after watching that much of the trailer himself, he realised that the only entertainment he was going to get out of that movie was watching the steam coming out of my ears.

your pantry = Narnia

[careswen.livejournal.com]

I've seen it. I do believe.