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Fi's Five Most Embarrassing Fictional Crushes #5: William Turner of Pirates of the Caribbean

3/31/2013

(Click the links to read Embarrassing Fictional Crush #1, #2, #3, and #4)

April is going to be a confession-heavy month on Confessions of the One and Only F.J.R. Titchenell (That I Know of)!

I’m going to be lightening the mood after our month of tragic figures and posting a series of the five most embarrassing fictional characters who can make me an April lovefool. This month will have prettyboys and badboys, freaks and dorks, plus a special sixth entry by Jenniffer Wardell, author of the upcoming Fairy Godmothers, INC!

First, in the number five spot, we’ve got William Turner of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Why it’s embarrassing:

He’s a punchline. Orlando Bloom is universally acknowledged shorthand for “boring, insubstantial, Disney brand prettyboy who can serve no purpose other than nonthreatening lust-object for girls grappling with the very earliest pangs of puberty.” And Will Turner isn’t even one of his attempts to break out of that persona; it’s the one that cemented him there.

Why I can’t help myself:

As prettyboys go, this is one striking-looking man. He is pretty, sure, even unnaturally so, but he’s memorably pretty. That face doesn’t blend into a crowd of other pretty people. You could pick it out of any lineup, and the swarthy, pirate-y, unshaven Will Turner look cancels out most of the creepy androgynous-child-creature vibe that excessive prettiness tends to carry.

Okay, enough with the actor. This is a list of fictional crushes, and we’re talking about Will Turner here. No, he’s not the most complex character ever written, but he’s not the nonentity that so many Prince Charming types are either. He’s clearly in the story for the girls to sigh over rather than for the boys to identify with, and his motivation revolves almost entirely around Elizabeth, but he doesn’t just show up when our poor heroine’s story gets too difficult for her so he can slay all the dragons. It’s his story too. He’s got his inferiority complex to work out, an impractical honor code eating at him, and a pirate-filled world to adapt to.

You cheated!

Pirate.

He’s in way over his head, and he knows it. He stumbles and gets laughed at and has his ass repeatedly handed to him, but he just keeps on getting up and trying again, the way heroes are supposed to. There’s nothing he won’t do if he believes it’s right. He’s the kind of painfully noble that manages to come off as adorably naïve rather than irritatingly masochistic.

And, let’s face it, to the teeny tiny part of me that’s still an awkward, pimply, twelve-year-old girl cooing over the pages of Nonthreatening Boys Magazine like I do over the puppies in the petshop window,

Will Turner’s a wittily soft-spoken good soul who carries a sword and knows how to use it. That’s about as crushworthy as they come.

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Movie Review: The Host

3/30/2013

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Movie Review:

The Host

March 29th, 2013

F+

I don’t believe it. My prediction was incorrect. I can’t believe I’m saying this.

The book was better.

Oh my god, this was terrible.

Okay, first the necessary notes:

As usual, I read the book before the movie came out, as is my compulsion, so I can review the movie from the underrepresented reader’s perspective. However, in this case, reader’s perspective does not translate to fan’s perspective for me. You can read my review of The Host novel here, but in short I consider it a bland, overlong, gutless C+.

I still held out some minor hopes for the movie. Stephanie Meyer books have a track record of being made into movies that I like better than the source material, thanks to heavy necessary cuts and directors and screenwriters who have some semblance of boldness and a sense of humor, and the two-souls-in-one-body-alien-apocalypse premise of The Host had plenty of untapped potential.

What a waste.

The upside:

The plus next to the F is there for three reasons. First, Diane Kruger as the Seeker. She does the best she can with what she’s given, doesn’t make me laugh for the wrong reasons at all, and is all-around awesome. Second, all the things that did make me laugh for the wrong reasons. As a whole, the movie’s much too boring to be classified as “so bad it’s good,” but there are plenty of isolated moments that fall into that category, between the breathy, over-explained, melodramatic dialogue, one terribly choreographed car accident, and the way the porno logic of Wanderer making out with two men to try to resurrect Melanie becomes even more absurd and gratuitous when visuals are added. Third, one tiny detail that wasn’t in the book. After the aliens have taken over, there’s no money or brand competition anymore, and the survivors at one point raid a grocery store that’s simply labeled “Store.” It made me laugh for the right reason, so I must give it due respect.

The downside:

Holy shit, this could take a while.

First of all, everything that’s wrong with the book is still wrong with the movie, only more so. As moviemaking demands, a few unnecessary subplots are gone, but that only leaves more time for the main plot to plod through scene after scene of slow, quiet, polite talking for 125 agonizing minutes.

Oh, and one of the details lost in the edits is the rather important guilt the main male characters feel for repeatedly beating the shit out of something that still looks like a human woman.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m the reader who’s always yelling at excessively principled male superheroes to fight back when they’re letting themselves be beaten by female supervillains just because they’re female, but Wanderer’s no supervillain. There’s something very, very awkward about the way she openly lusts after two men who’ve both physically attacked her at times when she’s posed absolutely no threat, without even displaying the minor internal conflict about it that the book had time for.

And that’s not all that’s been sucked out of the male characters. It’s hard enough to differentiate between all the painfully bland, noble characters in the book, with their different-looking names spelled out right there on the page. Replace that text with a roomful of bland, scowling, vaguely blond men, and it’s damn near impossible.

Again, these are all preexisting problems with the book that the movie made worse instead of fixing. So if, like me, you’re not a fan of the book and were hoping for some improvement, the movie is a disappointment. If, on the other hand, you are a fan of the book, I’d lay odds that the movie is still a disappointment, because on top of the bland, slow, low-stakes writing, the movie also offers terrible (and I mean really, really terrible) acting.

The whole story of The Host hinges on the assumption that Melanie has one of the strongest wills humanity has ever produced. That’s why she stays conscious in her body along with Wanderer so drama can ensue. I couldn’t entirely buy this in the book, where Melanie is, at best, a thoroughly ordinary character, but the movie’s Melanie (Saoirse Ronan) is the downright whiniest, most uncertain, short-sighted, indecisive voice anyone could ever have stuck in her head. The idea that even someone as similarly weak as Wanderer (same actress) could fail to snuff her out, let alone actually do as she says and learn to love her, makes my brain leak.

So… not catching this one on DVD.

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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Tragic Figures #1: Peter Pan of Peter Pan

3/27/2013

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I know, I know, this one doesn’t leap readily to mind when someone says the word “tragedy.” It takes a little bit more thought than most, but it’s a personal favorite.

Peter Pan is a sweet little fantasy about a boy who decides never to grow up and lives forever on the magic island of Neverland with his friends, playing with fairies and mermaids and fighting pirates and Indians, and also he can fly and no one ever gets hurt or has to face responsibility, right?

Not quite. Peter doesn’t exactly have friends, and he certainly doesn’t get to keep them forever.

The musical and film adaptations imply that simply being in Neverland stops people from aging, and all the children who live there stay children forever unless they make the conscious decision to leave. Imagination becomes reality for everyone, and Peter just happens to be the leader because he’s charismatic and has been there a long time.

In the book, on the other hand, it’s clear that the Neverland magic only really works for Peter. He’s the only one who sincerely can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality, the only one who can’t retain memories long enough for them to make him mentally older and wiser, and he’s the only immortal. What happens when the lost boys start getting too old for his games?

Peter kills them and recruits more. Seriously.

Yes, he lets Wendy take a batch of them with her when she leaves, but that’s not his M.O. He’s not a whimsically benevolent utopian governor; he’s a full-on mad dictator who might easily have a bigger body count than anyone else on this list, considering how many lost boys he has at any given time, how narrow an age window he keeps them for, and the fact that he’s immortal.

Of course, a body count alone certainly doesn’t make a character tragic, in spite of how often they seem to go together. How about a tragic backstory? He’s got one. Maybe.

When Wendy asks Peter about himself, he tells her that he ran away from home because he heard his parents discussing what he would be when he grew up, and he decided he didn’t want to. He later tried to go back to them, only to see through a locked window that they’d had another child. Of course, it’s noted that with Peter’s broken memory and sense of reality, the past he believes in changes from time to time and may or may not be true.

It’s kind of like this:

You want to know how I got these scars?

Now that’s sad, how little he knows about himself, as well as how close to the truth this version probably is, but Peter’s real tragedy, the reason he’s on this list, is the fact that he spends his whole story reaching out to connect with people, but because of his power and his terror of growing up, he’s doomed to spend eternity alone.

Tinker Bell? Nope, no help there. Neverland fairies have short lifespans. Within a year of that whole poisoning scare, she’s dead anyway and already gone from Peter’s short memory. Even his relationship with Captain Hook is noted as simply the most recent of a long string of similar rivalries.

And then there’s his twisted romance with Wendy. Her feelings for him are clear. She tries to kiss him the night they meet, and she’s absolutely charmed by the chance to play house and be mom and dad to the lost boys with him, but even in the movie/musical world where he can offer her immortality, he still can’t give her the complete life she wants. The story is hers as much as his, and for her it’s a coming-of-age story, in which Peter plays the unenviable embodiment of the childhood she has to outgrow.

He does have feelings for her, enough so that he’s crushed when she decides to leave, but he can’t comprehend and process them without letting himself grow up too much. He can’t even separate the void he wants her to fill from the one his parents are missing from.

Yes, he gets over her, he forgets her like everything else. In the end, he flies away with her daughter, and the cycle continues, and by the way Wendy’s mother talks about him before Wendy even meets him, it’s strongly hinted that he’s had something with the girls of the Darling family for generations already, but this really isn’t any better than having to remember the breakup with just one of them.

Peter escapes adult responsibilities, but this is the life he gets instead. He gets to love and lose people, over and over, always as acutely as if it were the first time, forever.

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Book Review: Requiem

3/23/2013

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Book Review:

Requiem (Delirium)

By Lauren Oliver

Harpercollins, 2013

A

****Spoiler Alert: Requiem is the third book in a trilogy. Read this review only if you’ve read Delirium and Pandemonium. If you’re just considering getting into the series, check out my review of Delirium, which I’ve reposted below****

This one has to start with a few notes.

First, I love-love-love Lauren Oliver and the Delirium trilogy. This was one of those event books I was counting down to and planning ahead to drop everything for. Again, I’ve reposted my Delirium review below, so you can check that out for context.

Second, I’m aware that it’s damn near impossible for there to be a perfect ending to a lead-up as intense as this series. I accept that.

That said, let us proceed to this crazy fangirl’s best attempt at fairness.

The Basics:

Lena and the other rebels who’ve escaped the procedure to cure them of amor deliria nervosa (love) are no longer being ignored by the authorities in the regulated cities. The Wilds where they’ve taken refuge are under attack, and Lena is forced to fight back in a full-scale resistance alongside both Julian, the boy she’s just rescued from the cure in Pandemonium, and Alex, the first love she’d assumed dead after he was shot while rescuing her from the cure in Delirium. Meanwhile, in regulated territory, Lena’s former best friend, Hana, is coming to realize that her own cure may not have been entirely successful, and that her assigned fiancé, the soon-to-be mayor of Portland, is still a dangerous psychopath in spite of his.

The Downside:

With Lena spending almost the entire book in the emotionally unregulated Wilds and Hana’s storyline limited almost completely to people who can’t be completely cured, the very powerful basic concept of the trilogy doesn’t get to shine as much as in the previous two books. The moments when ordinary love is made breathtakingly special by its contrast with a total absence of love are present but fewer and farther between, making it feel more like any other dystopian rebel epic. The body count demanded by such an epic also means there are a lot of background characters who aren’t quite worth getting to know. I won’t spoil which shippers come away triumphant (or whether I was one of them), but I will say that, after a full book’s absence, and with the scarce and mostly negative showing Alex gets (he’s got some issues to work out after escaping from the Crypts), he’s a lot harder to root for than he probably should be.

The Upside:

It’s Lauren-freaking-Oliver. It’s some gutsy, cutting, and seriously poetic prose. The bloody dystopian rebel epic storyline may not be as innovative as the original Delirium concept, but it’s still a fantastic bloody dystopian rebel epic, and like everything Oliver does, she makes it fresh. Even without the ever-present feeling-free backdrop that threw the drama of the first two books into such sharp relief, she can still cut through the numbness of a jaded reader. She still unfailingly makes me cry and cringe and cower at all the right moments as only the power of a good book can.

Those throwaway background characters actually do add to the surrounded-by-death feel of the rebels’ world in a way extras’ deaths seldom do, partly because it’s very clear that their deaths do not mean that the main characters are safe. No one is. Nothing is. The first two books set a clear enough precedent that no horrifying detail of this universe will be glossed over or sanitized when it arises, but Requiem really pulls all that lurking horror into the light, pushes it as far as it can go, then pushes farther, without it ever reaching the relief of the cartoonish too-far.

The parallel storylines of Lena surviving in the impoverished and violent Wilds and Hana fearing for her life and her conscience in her fiancé’s pristine mansion offers a similar, if not quite as dramatic, contrast to the one the cure created in the first two books, with the added explosive tension of waiting for their two lives to collide again. The bonus short story included in Requiem’s first printing, while not essential to the overall story, is definitely worth getting your hands on. As well as being a gut punch in its own right, it offers the sympathy for Alex that’s hard to come by in the novel itself. In fact, I might recommend reading the short story first for that reason.

The end is… open-ended. Tidy conclusion to the epic it’s not, but it works with the spirit of the story. A world where love exists is untidy and unpredictable and uncontrollable, but it’s better than the alternative. That’s kind of the point.

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Book Review: Delirium

3/23/2013

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Note: This review originally posted to Facebook/Goodreads/Amazon November 2012

Book Review:

Delirium

By Lauren Oliver

Harpercollins, 2011

A

It was something of a reckless indulgence for me to open this book at all after reading the back cover, one I don’t regret a bit. As a writer, I do my best to regulate my intake of anything belonging to an oversaturated or declining trend, to keep any dreaded Unmarketable Concept At This Time from making up a disproportionate segment of my pool of influence and inspiration. Even when reading according to nothing but my own whims, I’ve never been much for trends anyway. If I love a book, I don’t really expect to find another one that does what it does better than it does it, so I’d prefer to read one that attempts something different instead.

But I’ve been a sucker for Dystopian ever since I discovered Fahrenheit 451 at the age of twelve, and I’ve been thrilled to see it flourish in YA, even if only temporarily. Oliver’s Delirium is yet another YA gem in the Dystopian tradition.

In an alternate reality, love has been classified as a disease, renamed amor deliria nervosa. The USA has closed its borders, all citizens are “cured” (essentially lobotomized) at the age of eighteen, and all who resist, display symptoms, or attempt to contact the uncured “Invalids” on the outside are treated as terrorists, threatening to spread a devastating pandemic. Our hero, seventeen year old Lena, has been raised by her dispassionate, cured aunt and uncle since her mother’s death, supposedly the result of an incurable case of love. Lena carries the stigma of hereditary predisposition and can’t wait to be cured, to prove that she can be normal, until she meets an Invalid boy, who begins to teach her what love really is.

The world Oliver creates does what all good Dystopian worlds should. It forces the reader to reexamine the world as it is, recognize the worst of it, defend the best of it against new arguments, to consciously justify ideals that are usually taken for granted. It asks WHY love is good and important in spite of all the ways it goes wrong, and it presents human potential for indifference and paranoia with haunting realism. Oliver doesn’t sanitize the police state culture necessary to the story’s universe. Its injustices are not simply indicated with characters’ shudders of remembrance. The brutal, government sanctioned home raids and the secretive prison referred to as “The Crypts” are described in graphic and terrifying detail.

Unlike many Dystopian works, however, Delirium is intensely uplifting and far from pessimistic in its overall outlook. The sheer number of things that are missing from Lena’s world serve to point out how jam-packed full of love the real world is. It’s impossible to turn on a TV or radio without coming across something that would make her government’s secret list of Dangerous Ideas and feeling, at least in my case, a little thrill of gratitude for the simple ability to feel.

Delirium is also a joy as a simple love story in its own right. Lena’s internal conflict as she reexamines everything she’s ever known is natural and complex. Alex is an irresistible hybrid of the seductive man of mystery and the knight in shining armor, with the charisma of the first, the comforting trustworthiness of the second, and (almost) none of the condescension common in both. The relationship that develops between the two is a perfect, inescapably relatable picture of the process of falling in love, and the near-loveless backdrop highlights the feeling of irreplaceable rareness that accompanies every good love or love story, no matter how common.

Lena’s best friend, Hana, is also endearing and refreshingly compassionate, given her role as someone to be grown apart from. Instead of the jealous impediment she could easily have been, she’s a heartwarming representative of another form of love worth acknowledging.

A few major flaws prevent me from giving Delirium a perfect A+. As smart and decisive as Lena is for much of the book, her part in its otherwise beautiful ending is unsatisfyingly minimal. Oliver also gets a little careless with the word “love,” given how loaded it’s meant to be in Lena’s world. It’s treated as a major milestone when Lena first says the word out loud, even to describe a simple view of the stars, but Lena HAS said the word before, not only in passing as our narrator, but within earshot of public officials and with the encouragement of her strict, conformist family. When we first meet Lena, preparing for the official evaluation intended to determine her place in society after her cure, she’s rehearsing the lie that she “loves children.”

Still, even with its quantifiable issues, Delirium successfully makes me cry, think, and see the world with fresh eyes, and for that I cannot give it adequate credit.

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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Tragic Figures #2: Carrietta White of Carrie

3/20/2013

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Here’s another classic most people already know the gist of. At least, most people know the “girl gets doused with pig’s blood at prom and goes on telekinetic rampage” scene, but if that’s the only part you’re familiar with, the setup’s kind of important.

Carrie’s always been the school freak, and her story opens on what could easily go down as the worst day of a normal person’s school career. She gets her belated first period at the age of sixteen in the school shower, thinks she’s hemorrhaging to death, calls out for help, gets laughed at and pelted with tampons by a mob of better-informed classmates, and is sent to wait for her abusive and fanatically religious mother in the office of a faculty member who can’t be bothered to remember her name. She then reproaches said abusive and fanatical mother for not warning her about periods, and is told that if she had been absolutely sinless, the period would never have come.

Not an easy day to bounce back from under the best of circumstances. It doesn’t help that the girls who ganged up on her in the shower actually got in trouble for it, so as well as new mockery material, they now have a shiny new vendetta.

Of course, no story can be truly soul-crushing without a little bit of hope sprinkled in. There’s one girl, Sue, who feels genuinely bad about what happened in the shower and tries to atone with the well-intentioned, if not entirely well-thought-out, gesture of having her similarly good-hearted boyfriend, Tommy, take Carrie to the prom.

And then there’s the telekinesis. Carrie notices it developing as a defense mechanism, getting stronger the more she practices, until she’s powerful enough to lift all the furniture in her room up and down with minimal effort, more than powerful enough to override her mother’s prom veto.

Tommy coaxes Carrie out of her shell, and they have a great time (a lot better than even Sue intended), and most of the prom-goers are happy to let bygones be bygones.

Most. Oh, the shower vendetta’s not over yet. Carrie and Tommy are voted prom queen and king thanks to a stuffed ballot box and dragged onstage. And that’s when this happens:

Tommy is accidentally killed instantly by the falling bucket of blood, and Sue survives with lifelong nightmares and notoriety, but pretty much everyone else of note is killed when Carrie blows up the school and half the town in a fit of rage, before getting stabbed by her mother, not even to save lives but as a condemnation for witchcraft. Oh, and the mother gets it too before Carrie goes down for good.

The appeal for a YA horror geek is pretty obvious. No, Carrie isn’t technically YA, but it is horror, and it certainly strikes strong YA chords. The magic and carnage all feed into a coming of age story gone horribly awry. Carrie is a teen girl so lifelike that it’s mind-boggling to realize that she was created by an author who’s never been one (sorry, Steve), and her telekinetic powers surface as such a perfect allegory for puberty that if she’d survived, this could have been a superhero origin story. She discovers a new part of herself, more dramatic and godlike that the ordinary physical strength, sexual awareness, and social responsibilities we get in real life, but it forces the same exciting, terrifying question, “Can I handle it, or will it blow up in my face?” And in Carrie’s case, it’s the latter.

That sounds harsh, but the normality of her struggle and fall only makes them sadder. Her concerns are not lofty and epic. They’re universal, unavoidable, unforgettable teen angst. “What’s happening to me?” “Is it wrong?” “Why can’t I be normal?” She doesn’t start off looking for divine purpose or even revenge. She just wants to be allowed to grow up like everyone else. By the prom scene, all she wants is for one night, one part of the process, to go right, and it almost does. It just takes one act of supreme pettiness that wasn’t even meant to be lethal to ruin everything.

If Sissy Spacek’s face in the 1976 movie doesn’t make you want to cry:

Then let’s try my favorite quote from the book, spoken by Sue about Carrie’s (pre-pig’s-blood) insistence on skipping the after party.

“This is the girl they keep calling a monster. I want you to keep that firmly in mind. The girl who could be satisfied with a hamburger and a dime root beer after her only school dance so her momma wouldn’t be worried.”

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Book Giveaway! AND Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Tragic Figures #3: Norman Bates of Psycho

3/17/2013

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That's right, we're having a book giveaway!

Step 1: Like my author page (if you haven't already)
Step 2: Share this post on Facebook or Twitter
Step 3: Let me know in the comments or on Facebook (be sure to leave a link to an online profile if you use comments, so I can contact you if you win)

Voila, you'll be entered to win a free copy of Fearology, an anthology of skin-crawling, spine-tingling short stories about phobias, including my own "Gravity."

Now, on to today's tragedy, some more great psychological horror!

****Spoiler Alert****

I know, it’s a little odd to give a spoiler alert before talking about such a classic, but I’m one of the few people of my generation who got to see Psycho unspoiled the first time, and if there’s anyone else still out there who doesn’t know how it ends, I’d hate to deny them that rare chance to find out the right way.

For those who do know but haven’t seen the movie at least a few times, here’s the refresher: Our apparent heroine, Marion Crane, steals money from her job and runs away, hoping to use it to help her boyfriend out of a tight spot, but on her way to meet him, she stops for the night at the secluded Bates Motel and spends the evening talking with its painfully lonely and boyishly charming owner, Norman Bates.

It soon becomes apparent just how he’s managed to stay both painfully lonely and boyishly charming. He has scary-sad mommy issues. Then, in a pulling-the-rug-out storytelling move that would afterwards be known as the Psycho Switch, Marion is murdered halfway through the movie, and the focus shifts to her boyfriend and the police, trying to figure out what happened to her, and Norman, trying to cover for his homicidally possessive mother. When the two sides finally collide, it turns out that Norman’s mother has been dead for years but had him so utterly dependent on her by that point that he’s been keeping her mummified corpse in her old room and has taken her on as a second personality, which routinely kills off any woman the Norman personality is attracted to.

Did I mention this movie was released in 19-freaking-60?

It isn’t just great because it’s shocking for its time, though; it’s timeless. The thing that makes Norman so special as tragic villains go, other than that previously, repeatedly noted boyish charm…

Seriously, can you say no to this face?

… well, actually, that’s most of the reason. Hang on, bear with me. I can explain.

In order to give me that mind-blowing Psycho virgin experience, my husband had to be very careful the first time. (Um… yeah, I know what I just said.) I didn’t know the ending, but by how excited he was about breaking in a Psycho virgin, I could already tell there was going to be a twist, so when Marion was stabbed in the shower, apparently by Mother, I instantly accused the only other suspect, Norman.

My husband’s reply? “This is all Mother.” And, in a way (as he pointed out in impassioned self-defense as the closing credits rolled), he was right.

That’s why Norman’s different. Lots of tragic figures are insane, and most have the lost potential to be good people under better circumstances, but usually we’re only told about that those lost good people in passing, or through a few snippets in the setup phase. After that, it’s all about the madness. Norman’s particular brand of madness – multiple personality disorder – leaves a very large, very active element of goodness in him all the way through the story. That’s what lets him go from this:

To this:

… with complete sincerity and without a single flashback. The good person he could have been is so close to the surface, and that’s what makes the monster he is so terribly sad.

Tragic sweetness runner up:

Seymour Krelborn of Little Shop of Horrors. Unlike Norman, Seymour does commit every one of his crimes with full knowledge and consent. They’re of the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time variety, all meant to build a half-decent life for himself and the woman he loves, but somehow through every bloody, no-win turn of his tragic story, he maintains his well-meaning sweetness and never does descend into true madness.

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Guest Post by The Brothers Washburn: What it Takes to Be a Team

3/15/2013

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Today we have a guest post by The Brothers Washburn, authors of the YA Horror novel, Pitch Green, which launches tomorrow, March 16th! In the meantime, you can enter to win a copy here! Since I also co-write YA Horror (with my husband), I asked the brothers for their take on what it's like writing as a team. Take it away, guys!

What it Takes to Be a Team

When my son, Ammon, played basketball for his high school, my wife and I cheered enthusiastically from the bleachers. We soon found out that not all his teammates were "team players." Most notable were those whose whole ambition was to get the ball and drive hell-bent down the court to make a spectacular layup. As a 6'4" forward, Ammon was especially good at working the boards, rebounding and driving in to pass off at the last second, allowing another player in a better position to score. During a particularly heated game, the Dad of one of the players, who was seated behind us, commented, "Ammon is too nice. He won't get the stats."

I thought, "That's because he's a team player."

In any team sport, there are two driving forces that must be kept in balance: what’s best for the one versus what’s best for the whole. In the end, team work means doing what’s best for the whole team first, before doing what might be best for any individual, including yourself.

Successful teamwork takes a lot of professionalism, and great teams come together only when each player cares as much about the success of the other team members as he cares about his own. Brotherly relationships can be notoriously complicated, with a lot of old baggage, which can make teamwork difficult, but in our case, I enjoy my relationship with Andy and value his friendship. As writers, I think the different experiences and skills we bring to the table are complimentary, and the product of our joint efforts is definitely greater than the sum of its parts.

We discovered this only as adults. Growing up, I was always in the “big-kids” group of siblings, while Andy was always in the “little-kids” group, even when he was no longer a little kid. Big kids were allowed by our parents to do things that the little kids were not. Our different privileges created a gap between us, and when we did interact as children, it was often when the big kids were playing dirty tricks on the little kids. Fortunately, Andy survived, and in many important ways, we had similar growing-up experiences, though the events in Andy’s life came a half-dozen years after the same events had occurred in my life.

Then, for about 35 years, I was a business lawyer working for international commercial finance companies in the mid-west, while for about 25 years, Andy was a trial practice lawyer working in Southern California. Eventually, we each moved to Colorado, where we had a chance to interact as adults. The difference in our ages was no longer significant, and we talked for some time about starting a business together. We both have many years of formal writing experience, and we have always been story tellers, first to our siblings, then to our own children, and now to our grandkids (who are increasing exponentially in number). Scary stories have always been a family specialty, and I love sci-fi. I started writing a young adult science fiction series, and when Andy also tried his hand at writing fiction, it didn’t take long for us to come together as The Brothers Washburn on a young adult horror series. We find that once we start telling a horror or sci-fi tale, any bounds on the story are limited only by our own creativity and imagination. Telling tales is way more fun than being a lawyer.

As brothers, we get along well and have a healthy level of mutual self-respect, so we can freely share ideas and challenge each other without worrying about egos. We are more creative when we are bouncing ideas off each other and discussing a general storyline, but we actually write separately, conferring afterwards on what we have been doing. Though we sometimes disagree on specific wording, there is usually some friendly give and take as we consider alternatives, and then we can agree quickly on the final wording. We both appreciate the different perspective and skills that the other brings to the joint process.

In some ways, we are very different in how we approach a story. Andy used to be a planner (a habit he got from writing like an attorney), but in fiction writing, he no longer likes to plan ahead. He likes to develop his characters, and then let them take the story wherever it is going to go. On the other hand, I am definitely still a planner. I am always making lists and outlines, not only for the current story, but for future stories as well.

In addition, Andy doesn’t like having other people around him when he is writing, especially when he is creating new material. There is no real reason for this, just sometimes people bug him. In my case, I have to organize my surrounding work environment. Once everything around me is in order, then I can detach from the world and write.

If Andy hits a tough spot in the story development, it is almost always because of outside distractions. If he can get rid of the distractions around him, he can keep writing. If I hit a tough spot, I don’t try to force it. I stop, leave the house, pick up some fast food, and then I can come back refreshed and ready to move the story forward. I find that fresh ideas just come naturally when I’m eating--Chipotle is always good for stimulating my creative juices.

For both of us, background research is important in the theoretical sciences as well as in the local Trona geography. The Dimensions in Death series is an ongoing horror story based on principals of science rather than on demons, devils or magical creatures, so an understanding of scientific theory is necessary and fun. But, Dimensions in Death is not a science fiction series with a few scary scenes. It is horror, suspense and fright in a fast pace narrative with a little science sprinkled on for spice as the truth is gradually discovered by our heroes in the story. Separately, the local geography in the story plays a critical role in setting the mood of the tale. Trona, California is a real place in this world located in a desolate region of the Mojave Desert by Death Valley, and we try to keep the series settings as real as possible.

The general outline for Pitch Green, the first book in the horror series, came together in November of 2010. We were attending a writer’s seminar together in Manhattan and listening to panel discussions by top literary agents during the day. One night, as we rode the subway from one end-of-the-line stop across town to the opposite end-of-the-line stop, and then back again, we mapped out the basic elements we would need to expand a favorite childhood scary story into a full-length novel. Andy wrote the first rough draft, and then, in our typical tag-team effort, I took that draft over to edit and expand the tale. In the writing of the first book, the ground work was laid for both the sequels and the prequels in that series. The whole tale is long and complicated. However, as The Brothers Washburn, we are having more fun in the spinning of it than should be legally allowed, but that’s okay--we know some good lawyers.

About Pitch Green

Trona is a small, smoggy, mostly insignificant town in Colorado. Besides a booming chemical plant, the only thing that characterizes this dismal town is dirt, sagebrush, and an enormous abandoned mansion.

The mansion is, admittedly, the only notable addition to Trona, but it’s something everyone tries to avoid due to its creepy facade. Everyone except for Camm Smith, who is obsessed with the need to get inside.

Seven years earlier, as Camm herded a pack of little trick-or-treaters past the mansion, her young neighbor, Hugh, disappeared, becoming just one of many children who have vanished from Trona over the years without a trace. Now a senior in high school, Camm is still haunted by the old tragedy and is sure the answer to the mysterious disappearances lies hidden somewhere in the decaying mansion. Joining forces with her best friend, Cal, who also happens to be Hugh’s
older brother, Camm naively begins a perilous search for the truth.

As things spiral quickly out of control, and others die, Camm and Cal discover it will take all their combined ingenuity to stay alive. An unseen creature, lurking deep within the bowels of the mansion, seems to have supernatural powers and is now hunting them. Making matters worse, they become entangled with hostile federal agents, who care only about keeping old secrets permanently hidden. Left with only their
wit and seemingly ineffective firearms, they know they are running out of time. Unless they can make sense out of the few pieces of the puzzle they manage to unearth, the monster will certainly destroy them, and like so many others before them, they will be gone without a trace.

About the Brothers Washburn

BERK AND ANDY WASHBURN, aka “The Brothers Washburn,” are both lawyers by profession, writers at heart. They grew up together roaming the wastelands of the Mojave Desert, where most of the series is set. Both brothers returned from lengthy and successful careers in the wastelands of the law to write YA horror stories based on the wastelands of their youth. They currently live north of Denver, Colorado.

The Dimensions in Death series is merely the beginning of the
ingenious and spine-tingling world of the Brothers Washburn. Be on your guard, people, there is a new Grimm in town.

For more information, you can find the brothers on their blog, Twitter, and Facebook, or contact their publicist, D. Kirk Cunningham.

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Book Review: Redshirts, by John Scalzi

3/10/2013

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Book Review:

Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas

By John Scalzi

Tor Books, 2012

C+

The Basics:

Andy Dahl and his fellow new crewmembers on the Intrepid, a craft very much like the Enterprise of Star Trek, begin to notice that something is very wrong with their ship and its crew. The fatality rate on away missions is astronomical, and free will and the laws of science tend to suspend themselves at dramatically appropriate moments. Once they can bring themselves to accept the fact that their lives are being controlled by the scripting of a low quality Sci-Fi TV show on which they’re little more than extras, they have to find a way, within the low quality Sci-Fi rules, to stop it.

The Downside:

It’s a one-joke book. If you want deep and character-driven, this isn’t it. If you’re not familiar with Star Trek, don’t bother. The loosely drawn redshirts jump through whatever hoops the joke requires for the equivalent of about three quarters of a novel. The remaining pages of the book are devoted to the three “Codas,” supplemental shorts that read like writer’s workshop exercises. Speaking as a writer, they’re mildly interesting, particularly the one written from the perspective of one of the scriptwriters, but with the story already perfectly well wrapped up, reading them has the aimless, extraneous feel of chasing videogame bonus material once the storyline has been played through.

The Upside:

For those who do know Star Trek, it’s a pretty good one joke. Whenever it gets tired, there’s another laugh-out-loud twist on a standard trope, another inventive loophole noted in the rules of surviving an episode. The one character who could be called “main” in both the book and the show within the book is a fascinating study, his offscreen personality so deluded and warped by onscreen time that he has to struggle to think or be anything real, not just to win the freedom to do so. If you can handle maybe one too many “writers are god” quips, it’s an enjoyable exercise in metafiction.

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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Tragic Figures #4: Sweeney Todd of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

3/6/2013

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Sweeney Todd is my all-time favorite revenge tragedy. I’ve never had the opportunity to see it onstage, but luckily, it has one of those superbly cast, directed, and performed musical film adaptations that, in spite of a slightly altered ending, manages not to make me feel like I’m missing anything. If you haven’t seen it, here’s how it goes:

Sweeney Todd was once Benjamin Barker, a humble London barber with a beautiful wife, Lucy, and baby daughter, Joanna, until the esteemed Judge Turpin developed an obsession with Lucy and had Benjamin sent to a penal colony on false charges. He makes it back to London fifteen years later under his new name and finds out from Lucy’s friend, the widowed pie shop proprietor Mrs. Lovett, that Turpin never succeeded in courting Lucy but eventually raped her anyway, driving her to poison herself, and has since been raising Joanna as his own.

If there’s a better setup for a revenge story, I haven’t heard it.

With Mrs. Lovett’s help, Sweeney sets up his old business and lures Turpin into the barber’s chair, but when he finds out that Turpin plans to marry Joanna and is then interrupted before he can slit his throat with his signature straight razor, he loses what’s left of his mind in possibly the most chillingly epic musical number ever, “Epiphany.” Here’s a taste:

We all deserve to die, / even you, Mrs. Lovett, even I, / because the lives of the wicked should be made brief, / for the rest of us, death will be a relief. / We all deserve to die.

After that, Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett strike it rich killing people in the barber shop and selling their flesh in the pie shop while they wait for another chance at Turpin. They take in an orphan who was working for one of their first kills and set up a full grizzly charade of economic and domestic bliss together. Yes, now we’ve got an awesome revenge story with awesome music that’s Broadway in style but metal in spirit, plus cannibalism.

In the end… well, here’s where I’m tempted to put a spoiler alert and gush about the twist that hit me like an anvil when I first saw it, but we all know in spirit how this kind of story has to go. Sweeney does get his revenge, and after the whole play’s buildup, it’s everything it should be, but there’s no happy ending for him. He racks up more bodies than just Turpin and some nameless extras, and when it’s finally his turn, he’s beyond trying to fight it.

The whole play is one beautiful, disgusting, unstoppable flash of a grease fire. A few peripheral good characters do manage to crawl out of the ashes at the end to offer hope, but at the center of the action, you’ve got Sweeney, formerly a good man, targeted through no fault of his own by an undeniable evil so strong that when he tries to fight it, it consumes him and, through him, everything else in his life, until finally, it burns itself out.

Pyrrhic victory honorable mention:

Hamlet of Hamlet. Like Sweeney, it’s kind of hard to blame him for losing it. His uncle did kill his father and then take over the kingdom he was supposed to inherit, but the fact that his uncle is one of the bodies by the end could almost be overlooked in the blood-running-down-the-backdrop ugliness of everything else Hamlet does.

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Fi's Five Most Embarrassing Fictional Crushes #5: William Turner of Pirates of the Caribbean

Movie Review: The Host

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Tragic Figures #1: Peter Pan of Peter Pan

Book Review: Requiem

Book Review: Delirium

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Tragic Figures #2: Carrietta White of Carrie

Book Giveaway! AND Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Tragic Figures #3: Norman Bates of Psycho

Guest Post by The Brothers Washburn: What it Takes to Be a Team

What it Takes to Be a Team

About Pitch Green

About the Brothers Washburn

Book Review: Redshirts, by John Scalzi

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Tragic Figures #4: Sweeney Todd of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

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