Where the knots in tales become untangled…
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Soooo…. remember my post “Making Things Happen” from two weeks ago? Yeah, I’ve already been derailed. Kind of. I’ve been working on the Faylinn organization and upload to World Anvil, although it hasn’t been as regular. I’ve been lifting my weights, although that too has not been regular.
But honestly, right now, I’m an emotional wreck.
I was going to write something all moody and self-pitying (and still might sometime soon) but then I remembered today was May 4th and therefore Star Wars Day, which is cause for celebration! I’ve written before about how much Star Wars influenced me, both personally and creatively, and at the moment I have nothing new to add to that conversation, other than another long fan-girl squeal. So instead of boring you with a ramble, I’m sharing some fun things around the internet, all Star Wars related, that you might enjoy:
This entry is part of the “Spoiled By Supplements” blog series.
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Some people care about this topic more than others. For myself, I prefer to know what is part of the story and what is mere speculation, fan fiction, or notes on things that didn’t go anywhere. My time is both finite and valuable, so I want to know what is necessary and what is supplemental. These kinds of things can be interesting to know about, like reading a movie script to learn what was originally intended, see how it was actually executed on screen, and understand why it was cut or redone. These kinds of “alternate realities” are intriguing from an academic point of view. And a lot of artistic creation involves a lot of people, so seeing how the final product differs or adheres to the original vision and why it changed or stayed the same is pretty neat.
But how “final” is that final product? In an age where it’s easier and easier to make changes, from releasing Special Editions with CGI edits, changing a character’s design due to fan outcry, or redoing the CGI of an entire movie after it was released in theaters, it becomes harder and harder to call something “finished.”
Continue reading “When Canon & Commentary Collide: What Is “Part of the Story”?”
This entry is part of the “Spoiled By Supplements” blog series.
Click HERE for the Audio Edition!
Every story has a beginning, middle, and end.
Or do they?
Stories are carefully crafted illusions that are supposed to make sense in a way that life does not. Most of the time it’s a simple matter of picking up the book, popping in the DVD, or opening up the comic to start the story. You follow it all the way through to the end, and you’re done (at least until the sequel comes out). However, there are some stories and mediums where the lines are blurred and the entry point for the story is not nearly as obvious. The prime example I can think of is comics.
I’m still pretty new to the world of comics and graphic novels, and they can be really hard to get into. I remember after watching the Marvel film Doctor Strange, I wanted to learn more about the character. But when I went to look up the comics, I immediately faced a major problem: where should I start?
Continue reading “Overlapping & Long-Running Stories: Where’s The Entry Point?”
Welcome back everyone! Sorry it took so long to get this next entry to you. I’d gotten really into working on Ravens & Roses during the original day this entry was supposed to be done and didn’t want to derail myself. Then life threw me a family health emergency curveball during the follow-up date, so I’ve been handling that instead of writing. Things are finally calming down and everything is fine, so here we are with the next installment of my “Spoiled By Supplements” blog series. Enjoy!
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I think that, once a story gets big enough, it’s inevitable that it will start to creep across mediums. Some of that may be due to creative curiosity, to see what kind of take on the story will come out of the medium. Some of it may be from commercial pressure to reach a wider audience or different niches within a potential audience. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with that. A feature length film has different creative restraints from a novel, which is different from a comic book, and so on. It can be interesting to see how the medium shapes or highlights different aspects of a story or further explores the world within that story. It also makes marketing sense to try to reach as many people as possible, and everyone has different mediums they prefer their stories to be in, so why not satisfy everyone?
The problem is that sometimes it can become too sprawling, too widespread, and too muddled for anyone to follow the story properly, or even access it. This can be a real problem for new or more casual fans.
Continue reading “Muddled Multimedia Narratives: Where and How Can We Access the Story?”
Audio Edition Coming Soon!
Wyrd: a concept in Anglo-Saxon culture roughly corresponding to fate or personal destiny.
Few lines make my hackles rise more than hearing, “It is your destiny,” particularly if it is said by some old guy in a black robe. I have some serious issues with the concepts of prophecy, destiny, fate, and Chosen Ones. From a practical standpoint, they are overused tropes and cliches in works of fantasy. Predestination is a lazy cock-and-bull story made to justify plot threads or character motivations. But on a deeper level, the concept is actually rather disturbing. I’m a big believer in free will, so the idea of having everything I have done, am doing, or will do laid out for me with no ability to change it is both creepy and frightening.
Continue reading “The Wyrding Way”
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I recently went to see Black Panther with some friends, and if you haven’t gone yet, you need to reevaluate your priorities because it’s fantastic. *ahem* Anyway… as we were leaving the theater, one friend noted that during the very emotional scenes between T’Challa and his father T’Chaka on the Ancestral Plane, they noticed that T’Chaka had an old (but still very obvious) facial injury.** Since the characters were interacting in a spiritual realm, my friend wondered why this injury was still present since spirits don’t have physical bodies and therefore wouldn’t have those imperfections. Almost immediately, I commented that a person probably couldn’t spend years as King of Wakanda and as the Black Panther without suffering some kind of accumulated spiritual damage, which then manifested on the Ancestral Plane. My friends just kind of stared at me and said that I had “the strongest headcanon of anyone they’d met.”
You see, while that explanation for T’Chaka’s appearance in the Ancestral Plane seemed perfectly reasonable to me, there was nothing in the movie itself to suggest that was the case. My internal headcanon had pulled from all my fictional sources and compiled them into an explanation. Actually, I’d come up with two possible explanations on the spot, one being the accumulated damage from a life of service and suffering. The other was that it was simply T’Challa’s perception of the spirit, giving it a familiar face. Kind of like how Anakin Skywalker’s Force-ghost appeared at the end of Return of the Jedi as a forty-something man rather than as his twenty-year-old self, who would have been completely unfamiliar to Luke. (No, I do not accept the insertion of Hayden Christensen into the remastered editions of Star Wars. There’s some headcanon for you!) Both of these plausible explanations occurred to me within seconds of my friend’s question, and I hadn’t even noticed until they pointed it out.
Continue reading “The Power of Headcanon”
Being a hermit of the literary kind, I tend to not join things. But I’d enjoyed Gabriela Pereira’s panel “Rock Your Revisions” at the Writers Digest Annual Conference last August and joined the mailing the list for her online newsletter. So I got an email announcing the DIY MFA Book Club starting January 8th. I mulled it over for a while and decided, “Why not?” Get prompts to share stories about writing with other writers? Could be fun! I signed up and got the first prompt on the 8th, the second on January 10th, the third on January 12th, and the fourth on January 15th. While I have posted answers to these prompts in DIY MFA’s Facebook group “Word Nerds Unite,” I decided to include both the first set of prompts and slightly more in-depth answers here on The Cat’s Cradle:
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Well, I finished my book.
Actually, I finished it about a month ago.
Yup.
Yeah, I know, I’m not exactly jumping up and down with joy. If anything, I’ve been rather subdued about it. Not sure why. I mean, Courting the Moon is the culmination of two years of work. That’s nothing to sneeze at. But while I feel a certain amount of satisfaction, I’m not experiencing anything close to “joy.” Maybe it’s because the worry about not finishing was gone by the time April rolled around, and without that tension, it was a forgone conclusion. Maybe it’s because I know I still have plenty of other projects waiting in the wings, namely Ravens and Roses. Or maybe I’m mentally burnt out and just don’t want to think about it anymore.
I haven’t written anything for weeks.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. I reread my draft of Ravens and Roses, which pleased me because what I had still held up after being neglected for so long, but it also made me sigh because now I can see just how far I have to go for it to be finished. And I suppose I have been writing a little bit. I’ve started writing down scenes for the Star Wars fanfic that’s been circulating in my head literally since I was thirteen. But that’s about it.
Some random news pieces:
– I went to see Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 and liked it.
– I got to go to Free Comic Book Day for the first time, albeit in the evening so most of the events were over, but that was fine with me; I don’t care much for crowds.
– But these days, most of my brain has been consumed with watching The Clone Wars in chronological order in the hopes of actually finishing the series this time. (When I started watching it a year or two ago, I stopped midway through Season 3, and for some inexplicable reason never went back to it until now.)
While part of me feels a little guilty for not working on the synopsis for Courting the Moon, or researching agents, or continuing work on Ravens and Roses… another part of me says, “To hell with it; I’m going to veg.” (Being stricken with allergies doesn’t help with the brain-fog either.) Of course, a writer’s mind is never truly still. Even when we seem to be passively engaged with something like television or a movie, we are absorbing more story ideas and elements, adding them to the primordial ooze that is our brains.
So I think for now I will go ahead and gorge myself on Star Wars until I feel ready to tackle writing again.
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While perusing my shelves trying to decide what to read (no easy task, I can assure you), my eyes landed on my collection of Star Wars books. Over the years I’ve acquired quite a few, many of which I originally read as library books and later added to my personal collection. Jedi Apprentice. Galaxy of Fear. The Jedi Academy Trilogy. The Thrawn Trilogy. X-Wing: Rogue Squadron. The Young Jedi Knights series. Many of these I haven’t read in years. And as I gazed at them, recalling fond memories of reading those stories, a melancholy feeling overwhelmed me.
Because these stories don’t officially exist anymore.
Now, I’m going to state right up front that I completely understand the decision to make anything created before April 2014 no longer canon. (This of course excludes the six main films and The Clone Wars TV series and movie.) Although the Star Wars Expanded Universe (EU) did its best to avoid contradicting itself (and managed it far better than poor Star Trek did), I can understand why, in the interest of creative freedom, Disney and Lucasfilm didn’t want to be shackled to the expectations and events presented in the EU. While some additions to the EU are absolutely amazing, like the characters of Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade, others are… shall we say… far less desirable. (I’m looking at you, New Jedi Order.)
So, I get it. I really do. But I don’t always have to like it.
Continue reading “Star Wars: The Death of a Universe”
The Cat's Cradle : On Hiatus! 