Storybook Perfect

Always quirky, sometimes sweet speculative fiction

Month: July 2012

When You Get a Song Stuck In Your Head – For Two Decades

July 18, 2012 / / 0 Comments

In Third Grade we had an awesome teacher (90% sure her name was Miss Hume, I remember her short, curly, dark hair and tall, thin frame far more vividly than her name, but I always was dreadful with names – and still am) who had spent the previous few years teaching in Indonesia. She passed on quite a bit of the Indonesian language to us in class throughout the day. She also taught the older grades as well so we learned more and more. By the time I graduated primary school and reached high school I knew so much Indonesian that when they tried to teach us (it was one of the mandatory language classes for the first two years of high school) I was a whole year ahead of the rest of the class.

While the vast majority of what I learned all those years ago has been lost in the recesses of my memory there is one thing that has stayed with me for almost two decades: A song about chickens.

The tune and the repetitive lyrics have stuck in my head for two decades.

Several times in the past I’ve tried to track down the song, failing miserably due to uncertainty as to both the spelling of the lyrics and the accuracy of my memory of said lyrics. Finally – driven mad by a need to prove this song exists to my husband – I found a YouTube video.

or if you want to know the lyrics

For the tender of heart don’t try to translate the lyrics, if memory serves things don’t end well for the chickens – yet it’s a song traditionally sung by children (or you’d hope so since I was taught it when I was nine years old).

Have you had a song plague you as long as this one has plagued me?

What’s A Blogger To Do?

July 13, 2012 / / 1 Comment

What’s a blogger to do when her internet stops working? Why actually get some work done on her novel of course!

I took on an ambitious task recently, turning my epic fantasy trilogy into a quartet. I’d been considering it for a while. I’d noticed a disparity between the size of Storybook Perfect when compared to its two follow up novels. Storybook Perfect runs at 175,000 words, but when I look at the scenes I’ve planned for its untitled sequels neither seems like they will go much over 120,000. Usually the series starts with smaller books and the last few are the large ones. I’ve been thinking of ways to combat this problem. I don’t really want to ‘pad’ the later volumes, padding usually reads exactly like that – as filler. If you doubt me, anime fans, think of Naruto’s filler episodes. They lacked the lustre and power of the episodes that were drawn from the original manga. They weren’t terrible (though some may dispute that statement) but they weren’t up to the standard of what came before or what followed. I am NOT doing that to my books. I want my books to be shiny and strong.

So my next option was cut from Storybook Perfect. I have revised that book more times than I can count and while I could probably shave a few thousand words of somehow (god knows how, but there would be a way) it would never be the tens of thousands I’d need.

So a thought came into my head. Turn Storybook Perfect into two books. There were ideas I had to relinquish for the sake of word count that I could rewrite and of course I’d have to add a new conflict in to wrap up the new book 1, but it could be doable.

I agonised over the decision for a few months, no one wants to go back and tear through something they spent ten years already working on, but I didn’t feel there was any other way.

Scrivener is a godsend. I transferred my existing Word document into Scrivener, split it into scenes so I could flick through to add and remove at will (soooooooooo much easier than scrolling through a 294 page Word document). Now I can also move scenes that will be in book two easily as well.

The only down side is shortly after that I got a fever and a bad flu  >.< but I’m back online and (almost) feeling fine so we’ll be talking again soon.

I Am So Behind The Times

July 2, 2012 / / 1 Comment

So, I watched Bladerunner for the first time ever on Saturday nite (took so long to post because yesterday I was too busy being surrounded by my AWESOME writers group who I am more infatuated with than a schoolgirl for the captain of the football team.). What I say next may shock you.

I was disappointed.

I’ll admit, I was expecting the movie to tackle a lot of what Philip K Dick did with the story it was based on(Do Androids dream of electric sheep). In fact I was banking on it because I am considering writing a novel (or maybe novella) with an android protagonist and I wanted to avoid any inadvertent plagiarism I might do by not reading the story and watching the movie.

The movie was just an action movie. I’m not saying it was bad, I just set myself up with all these big expectations so it fell short of my mental image.

A lot of people these days do that. They imagine this next big game in an old series (or movie) will be as stunning as they remember the original, but it often seems to fall short (Dare I mention Duke Nukem?) so it’s interesting to see a similar thing working in reverse. Of course there is always the standard ‘the movie is never as good as the book’ statement that comes out EVERY time a book is made into a movie.

And then there’s the ‘love scene’. I put that in hyphens in the most derisive way I possibly can. There was no romance there, only date rape. Go back and watch the scene if it’s been a while since you watched the movie. She doesn’t look impressed when he kisses her cheek/nibbles her ear/whatever it is he’s doing behind her lustrous eighties curls, she flinches away when he tries to kiss her on the mouth. She runs for the door and he won’t let her leave. Where is the romance? Not in this scene that’s for sure. He even tells her to tell him she wants him while he pushes her back against a wall. I was glad to see it wasn’t just me disturbed by the scene as when I complained to my husband he concurred, though he did say maybe it was an 80s thing ‘me big strong man, you confused android girl, me show you how to lurve’. Regardless, not cool.

I understand that Philip K Dick died before the movie was completed, he knew it was being made and reportedly was excited to see a scene showing off the world. I wonder what he might have thought of the movie if he had lived long enough to see it.

What was your take on the movie, am I being too harsh because of my trumped up expectations? What about the ‘love scene’, did it bother you as much as it did me?

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