mrissa | Entries tagged with galaxy quest blonde girl bounce

When I was small, my cousins and I went to the Emmy Gifford Children's Theater all the time. There was James and the Giant Peach, for which my aunt Kathy got us peach Jolly Ranchers to suck while we watched the beautiful giant bug costumes--I expect there was a James, but I have no memory of him--and there was Cinderella, for which one of the stepsisters wore tennis shoes under her ball gown and chewed gum and was hilarious. Who knows if I would find her funny now.

But there was, oh, there was Where the Wild Things Are. And they put up a miniature stage in the middle of the seating, and the Wild Things. The Wild Things came out and danced. Right there where we were sitting. In the aisles and on the little platform down the middle of the seats.

My world changed.

I could not have been as old as my godson was now, but I was old enough to have the two levels of it, the immediate ooooh and the hey can you do that? I wonder what else you can do that I didn't think about.

Thank you, Maurice Sendak, for the wild rumpus that sparked so many other wild rumpuses in our hearts and minds.

I have a problem with The Pirates of Penzance, and it's the same problem I have with Anne McCaffrey's Harper Hall novels.

I should back up and say that I love The Pirates of Penzance with a fierce and irrational love. I can sing the vast majority of it (if it's shifted by the appropriate octaves etc.), but I have had a preferred role since I was 11 years old, and that role is the Pirate King. (It is, it is a glorious thing to be a Pirate King. Trust me on this one.) I had backup singers, when I was eleven and singing that song, friends who would chime in to do, "Hurrah, hurrah for the Pirate King!" for me. We are all nearing three times as old now, and I still love those girls, and more rarely and preciously, I still love the women they've become. But that is a long, long digression, and full of Arthur Ransome and Rosemary Sutcliff and heaven knows what else.

But Pirates. Right.

So the thing about Pirates is that I see it whenever I have the chance, and yet it hardly ever gets the Ruth/Mabel thing to match the libretto. For those you who are unaware, Ruth is written to be a plain, frumpy 47-year-old, and Mabel is to be a beautiful 17-year-old.

Also Menolly of Dragonsong and its sequels is the most brilliant songwriter in generations.

Both of these are no problem whatever when I put it down like that, and quite a bit of a problem when you can check for yourself. And I get, and I totally support, that a) very few of us are the most brilliant songwriter in generations and also want to write a novel*, and b) when you are casting an operetta, voice is the most important quality. I do understand all that. But I feel that in the case of the novels, perhaps having everybody on the planet's surface react to your character with "OMG BEST EVAR" is not the thing, and if you're insisting that it is the thing, perhaps the songs themselves ought to remain shrouded in mystery so that the reader does not say, "I can do better than that, and I'm 11 and don't write songs."** And in the case of the operetta, there is such a thing as...dare I suggest it...costuming and makeup?

The worst Pirates I ever saw had a Ruth and a Mabel who both looked like they had reached their mid-fifties or early sixties through a great deal of hard living, and Frederick looked 14. This is almost impossible to do anything about, so if those are the voices you have in a small town production, you will just have to live with it. But today's Pirates! Today's Pirates with GSVLOC had cast a perfectly reasonable-looking young woman as Mabel...and another perfectly reasonable-looking young woman as Ruth. And I kept thinking, "Slap a grey wig on that girl! Put makeup lines on her face!" The singer, Therese Walth, was clearly the correct voice for Ruth--I don't mean she shouldn't have had the chance to play the role. (Which is a better role than Mabel anyway--but I am not a soprano, and I have made every effort in my life to never, ever be an ingenue.) I just felt that especially in her closing costume, Frederick was being shown to have rather specific tastes more than anything else. It is a risk of live theater. It is a risk of librettos that describe too particularly. Sigh.

We've now been going to GSVLOC since 2005, missing only when Grandpa died, and this is apparently long enough to acquire a favorite regular in their company, or at least long enough for me to do so. I am greatly fond of Christopher Michela, who played the Sergeant of Police today, who was particularly memorable as the Mikado a few years ago, and who generally has a notably expressive face and voice. But it's also long enough that I could spot when one of the Major General's wards had a cold today. I hope she feels better soon--she did a credible job anyway, poor dear--but I'm a bit pleased that I get to go to this thing every year, that the company shifts and changes and yet has continuity also, and that I get to see enough of it to know that sort of detail. It makes me happy.

Or maybe I'm just in a good mood because of the Pirate King song. Who knows.

*Although I have great hopes of the forthcoming Josh Ritter novel, "most brilliant songwriter in generations" rather overstates. I am not given to overstatement of this kind. It is enough--quite more than enough, given some of the places they've held in my life in the last few years--that I love Josh's songs. They need not prevent me from loving other songs to earn that.

**Eleven was not chosen randomly here. It was a big year for me.

Well, the holiday season is truly upon us: yesterday we celebrated Mikulas, and none of us was hauled away or eaten by Krampusz. Whew. Thursday is this year's Cookie Day, only this year we are having Cookie Day and Cookie Day 2: The Re-Cookenating. And this year Mikulas is in the middle of Hanukkah, so I hope that's fortuitous for those few of you who do both, and I hope those of you who only do Hanukkah are having a festive and bright one.

But that's not what I started posting to say.

I started posting to say that in the middle of Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder he was describing a game that John Keats played when he was a boy at school. And I was reading along and went--!!! Because Keats played Planets too! I have to tell you, I am more along the lines of W.H. Auden than John Keats, but I have never felt so fond of Keats in my life as I did just then.

You know Planets. Someone stands in the middle and turns slowly, and they're the Sun, and other people pick what planets and moons and things they want to be and revolve accordingly around the Sun and each other. And Uranus rolls in the grass and comets run in and out and create havoc and if it's raining you all get very wet, and regardless of whether it's raining you all get very dizzy.

It's an extremely good game, although I think this many years of vertigo would make me into a comet when my temperament had made me more a planet. And I am extremely pleased that it is so old a game that Keats played it too. One thinks of tag that way, or hide-and-go-seek, but I didn't play Planets until I got to be a physics major, so it feels more private, and yet shouldn't be. I want the godkids and the nieces to play Planets. It is so fine. One ought. And Keats did. Really, I feel much better about that urn by proxy, even if he did have the wrong guy smacking into the Pacific in the other one.

I dreamed that someone had embroidered for me a little long, narrow motto in a wooden frame for above the door to my office. It said, "Never give up. Never surrender." And it had the Galaxy Quest ships picked out in cross-stitch and outlining stitches.

If anybody really is good at that sort of thing, which isn't likely and we didn't expect it, my birthday is July 26.

I should know by now that "I am up to my elbows in dishwater" is not a good reason to fail to write something down. There was an insight into The True Tale of Carter Hall, and now it's gone. Fee. Come back, little insight! Join your friends!

The other insight, which is not gone, can be summed up in an index card reading, "Earlier Wild Hunt snowmobile deaths." So there's that at least.

The impulse to restructure the entire book is such a seductive one. I should remember that next time it hits. It nearly allows a reset to the beginning of the process, when all things seem possible, and also it means that the wibbling I'm doing is productive, creative wibbling, except when it totally isn't. This happened with What We Did to Save the Kingdom, too: "Maybe I need a second POV character!" No, you don't. "Maybe I need extensive flashback structure so that each chapter comes with a bit of the protag's past!" No. No, you don't. Write the book. Don't think, meat, just pitch. And stop breathing out the wrong eyelid. I mean William Blake.

I have no idea how people who don't have Bull Durham and Galaxy Quest in their brain write books, truly I don't. It's not that I don't believe there's a way, because of course there's a way. I did it myself, when I was 11 and again when I was 14. It's just that I don't remember how it goes any more. What gets you through revisions when you get to the middle of the book and spontaneously rant, "This scene was badly written," and then you don't think of Sigourney Weaver and grin? I'm not sure. I'm just glad to have it to hug to myself and move on.

Twenty trick-or-treaters cleaned us out of candy. It's the most we've ever had. But that's not why I'm posting here.

On the way back from our early dinner at our favorite Vietnamese place in the south suburbs, we saw the very best thing. First we saw Darth Vader and his daddy, walking down Duckwood. A few feet ahead of them strode a tiny Princess Leia. She was clearly Princess Leia; she had the white dress and the braid-buns on the sides of her head. She had the purposeful walk of a four-year-old who knows where she is going and is going to get there in her own good time, which will be faster than everybody else's good time by several minutes. She also wore a brown Jedi robe over the top of it. In one hand, she clutched her plastic pumpkin; in the other, a light saber.

She was Princess Leia the Jedi.

I have said before that the part that always gets me at the end of Galaxy Quest is the bounce of the little blonde fangirl when the crew crashes the ship into the con. I am that girl's bounce, and I always will be. But this is me, too. I am always the tiny purposeful hand that's clutching the light saber and not only will not but cannot hear any objections to her having it. Princess Leia the Four-Year-Old Jedi is perfectly prepared to kick the butt of any naysayer who tries to point out that this is not canon; this is her light saber, and she is Princess Leia, and you wanna make something of it, buddy? She thought not.

Yeah. Yeah.

(

timprov wants to suggest that if you have one child dressed as Darth Vader and one child dressed as Princess Leia, you really need to have or borrow a baby to dress as an interrogation droid. I admit this would be awesome.)

For some years I have wanted more science fiction that's optimistic in tone without being utterly disconnected from the current situation. I would like more upbeat-cool futures we could get to from here. It's not that I don't like dystopias or grim futures, and it's not that I'll refuse to read them. It's that I don't find myself lacking in that area. Ditto the stories that are either far-future enough or alternate-timeline enough that there is a chasm between here and there that may or may not be unbridgeable but certainly doesn't look bridgeable soon: they can be great fun, they can be good stories, but I'm not lacking in them. The bridges that are difficult for me are the social ones, more than the technological ones -- I don't think Mundane SF is the solution to this problem in any generalized way, although probably some works of Mundane SF will fit the bill for me. What I mean here is, FTL all you want, but don't pretend that we have a working space program at the moment or, y'know, in my lifetime. Alternate social structures, absolutely; alternate social structures that we have painlessly established in twenty years, pull the other one.

I was finally able to put words on this desire when I rewatched Galaxy Quest for the umpteenth time in May: the Thermians have taken something ridiculous and in parts frankly stupid and made it into something beautiful and functional. That's our job here, people. A lot of what we have right now is ridiculous and in parts frankly stupid. We're trying to get from that to beautiful and functional. (And funny and kind, ideally, but I'm already asking a lot of this future thing.) I don't need these tales to be predictive. I don't need them to be purely extrapolative rather than speculative. What I mostly want is acknowledgment that, yes, ridiculous and in parts frankly stupid, and I want to see glimpses, little side notes out of the corner of one's eye while one reads a really good story, of how the heck it got from that to the nifty shiny fun future setting.

The thing is, as I said, I've wanted this for some years. But in the last few months, as I've been working on What We Did to Save the Kingdom*, some of the connected-but-clair** SF stuff has been starting to fall together. I can see how to do some of the short stories I've wanted to do. I can see not only what I want to read but how to write some of what I want to read in this area.

This is, I scarcely need say, kind of exciting. What We Did is what I consider high fantasy, by which I mean fantasy with a lot of politics and magic. I think other people mean other things by high fantasy. This is not a quest fantasy. It has no elves (not even under other names), nor dragons, nor wizards. It is mathy, and there are barricades in it. I am uncommonly fond of novels with barricades, the kind that come with peasant uprisings. The last book I wrote indulged my lifelong fondness for sea serpents; this one has barricades. I have a little knit sea serpent on my desk, but no one need feel obliged to knit me a barricade. Aaaaanyway. I can't tell why on earth working on this book should have this effect on SF stories of a type I've wanted to write. But at this point, I'll take it. Why not? Strange are the ways of writerbrain.

*I'm still pretty sure that the book is going to be called something other than What We Did to Save the Kingdom, but that's the necklace's title, and I don't have another title for it, so here we are.

**As opposed to noir, a distinction coined by

truepenny or at least introduced to me by her.

Right line: actually listening, not just hearing.
Tyop line: actually listening, not just herring.

As if I would ever speak dismissively of herring, even in a fictional character's voice!

I skipped the part of the mid-book where I don't know what to do next and it's all kind of messy and it drags on forever and won't this book ever go somewhere? This is a very good thing to skip, if you can manage it. I hope to skip it next book, too, actually.

What my brain has decided to give me instead is the idea-storm that comes before the last burst of brain-eating. Any minute now the last third of this novel is going to hunker down and make breakfast out of most of my grey matter. And before that happens, the brain is throwing out ideas like crazy -- maybe attempted defense from the brain-eating process, maybe inspiration from the burst of work to come. Hard to say.

But the neat part is that many of these ideas are things I've wanted to do for awhile now, and they've fallen together, and I think they'll stay fallen together until after the book draft is done some weeks from now. This is good. They are disproportionately SF short stories, and I could use a few more of those.

The thing is, there are things you want to do, and then there are things you want to have done, and then there are things you want someone to have done. I've been wanting someone to do some of a particular type of SF short story. But it's very hard to motivate oneself to things someone ought to do, even with one's childhood pastor's voice in one's head empowering one just when one didn't really want to be empowered. ("Someone ought to do it? Square your shoulders, lift your chin, and say, 'Hey! I'm someone!'") This is the source of a lot of house chores not getting done in a lot of houses: "Oh, someone ought to do the dishes. Hmm, someone ought to vacuum the stairs." And when something someone ought to do competes with something I ought to do and something I want to do -- well, "someone" loses, more often than not. But now! Now there are SF stories I want to write, in modes in which I want someone to have written! Fortuitous coincidence! Happy day!

I know there are people who have careers as writers but never actually want to write. They want to have written. I have a great deal of respect for these people's self-discipline. Sometimes I want to have written, but mostly I want to write. This is very useful. Writing can be hard, but having written has all the hard of writing built into it plus some extra hard all its own.

So having scribbled notes for one entirely new YA novel and two short stories, onwards, onwards, back to the book. Well, to Byerly's. But then back to the book. Go book.

Last week I told

the_flea_king I would tell this story. So.

I was thirteen, and it was one of the last summers I was spending a long time up at my grandparents' house. (They lived up in the north suburbs, in Brooklyn Park, and my folks and I lived in Omaha at the time.) I stayed in the basement bedroom where Grandpa kept his books and his stamps and everything. So one night I'd been reading, and I set my book and glasses on Grandpa's desk and turned out the light. I tossed and turned trying to get comfortable. And stopped.

There was the glowing outline of a door across the room.

There was no door to the room, just the door down to the basement. I was too old to believe in things like that. I rolled over and screwed my eyes tight shut. A few minutes later I checked again: glowing. Door. Yep.

No. No, I knew there was no such thing, no door there, I was seeing things, dreaming, reading fantasy novels too late at night. I rolled back over. I shut my eyes.

...And had to check again, because -- glowing portal! Come on. You can't go to sleep with a glowing portal in your room, no matter how tired you are.

I put my glasses on, and it was still there. I ventured across the room very slowly, expecting it to disappear any minute. I grabbed at my backpack just in case, not taking my eyes from the outlined light of the door. Just in case. If there was something. Going to get shoes from upstairs would take too long -- it might disappear -- but the backpack I could reach without looking away.

I put my hand out.

It was the door to the cedar closet. It wasn't used as a regular closet, just a storage closet, and so I usually forgot it was there. Grandma had retrieved something during the day and left the light on inside.

But the point of this story is not, ha ha, stupid kid, nothing ever happens. No, it's that to this day, I'm really, really glad that I was the sort of person who checked. I don't like either, "it must be something truly weird," or, "it can't be something truly weird," nearly so well as, "well, let's find out."