http://www.asofterworld.com/iblamethesea/index.php?id=104

buy this as a print I was moving my cameras from one box to another a couple of weeks ago, and found a mystery roll of film. It'd been sitting in this box for who knows how long, so I didn't have high hopes for the photos. HOWEVER when I got them developed, it turned out that they were from early 2005, when I lived in Victoria. This is the lobby of my old apartment building, which was remarkably Bond-villain-lair-like, with leather couches and rough rocky pillars and a psychedelic patterned carpet. Miss you (sort of?), Nottingham Court!

We just watched the latest (I think) episode of Legend of Korra, “The Aftermath.” I’m continuing to really enjoy this show for a number of reasons.

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD

Pacing: One of the things that bugged me was the love triangle between Korra, Mako, and Asami. It felt, not necessarily cliche, but easy. It’s an oft-repeated trope, one that could push characters into more cardboard, stereotypical roles and — if other shows are any example — drag out for far too long.

Instead, Asami’s character quickly developed more depth and conflict. The plot moved along, changing her role in the story. The conflict between Korra and Asami progressed through conflict into understanding and sympathy. I loved the quiet moment at the end where Korra tells Mako, “She’s going to need you.”

I’ve seen that pacing elsewhere, and I appreciate that the show doesn’t seem to get bogged down. There’s always a sense of movement.

Lin Beifong continues to be awesome. In many ways, I think she’s my favorite character. Partly because she’s an older woman kicking all sorts of ass. Partly because she, more than anyone else I’ve seen, seems to take full advantage of her bending abilities. The firebenders throw fire. Earthbenders throw rocks. Beifong, on the other hand, manipulates metal cables like Spider-Man, grows blades from her armor to punch through mechs, and seems to push the “What else can I do with this?” angle.

Complexity: The scene with Tahno’s character really jumped out at me. This is a character who’s introduced as a full-on asshole. He’s arrogant, he cheats, and you really wanted Korra to kick his butt in the tournament. Instead, the White Falls Wolfbats won … and thus became the targets of an Equalist attack.

In the next episode, you see Tahno without his powers, and he’s utterly broken. Korra feels for him. She knows what he lost and how close she came to losing her own bending. It was a fairly short scene, but that’s all it took.

The relationship between Tenzin and Lin Beifong is another interesting example. Their history, the contrast of their apparent discomfort with how well they work together in a crisis … I have no idea where that’s going, but I like the dynamic, and at this point I’m trusting the show not to go somewhere overly cliche with it.

While there are certainly characters who seem flat-out Evil, at least at first, I appreciate that things generally aren’t presented in a simplistic black-and-white way. Neither people nor power are simple, and this show respects that fact.

The Animation: This is a very pretty show, particularly in the way it portrays movement and the grace of the different benders. I get done watching, and other cartoons suddenly seem clunkier.

Trusting the Viewers: I was trying to figure out how to phrase this last bit, and “trust” is the closest I can come. I’ve never seen a single episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but it hasn’t stopped me from enjoying Korra. It doesn’t surprise me that they wanted a show that could welcome new viewers as well as old, but it struck me that there just isn’t a lot of exposition or hand-holding, period. There’s no talking down, no assuming that things will be too complicated or difficult to understand. Elements are explained as they become relevant to the story.

I know there are things I’m missing from Avatar, but I can catch up on my own, and I like that they don’t slow down the story to spoon-feed information.

In Conclusion: Okay, I get it. I’m officially a fan, and I have added Avatar: TLA to my list of things to catch up on (when I find the time).

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=818

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http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2012/05/radical-proposition-lets-take-word.html

Ten years ago, not long before the Queen’s Jubilee, I boarded a train at King’s Cross Station for Edinburgh.

It wasn’t Platform 9 3/4, but it might as well have been. My life changed the moment that train pulled out of the brick archways and into the rolling green countryside beyond London–it was just beginning to be autumn then, and the trees were full of crows. I remember thinking about bird magic, auguries, every story I’d ever heard about England and Scotland. I was a tiny thing, a maiden in all but the technical sense. I knew, as the old novels say, nothing of the world. My EuroRail photo looked absurdly, hilariously, preposterously like an illustration of Snow White. I had a bacon sandwich. My mother was with me, a psychopomp in knock-off Prada sunglasses, bearing me across the wall and into the life I didn’t yet know I was in for. It was the first time I wanted something with that desperate, pure fire–and made it happen, by myself, with will and work. After all, if you grow up loving fairy tales and King Arthur and saints who battle monsters, you want the British Isles the way some kids want boyfriends. Edited to add: is that a silly reason to want to go to a country? Yep. Is it a direct outgrowth of the complicated relationship of American culture to British culture? Yep. Was I 21 years old, pretty silly, fully of inchoate dreamy nonsense and trying to learn how to be a real person? Absolutely. In fact, a big part of that growing up was going to a place I'd dreamed about and figuring out what reality there was like.

I lived there for something over a year. I came back to America for stupid reasons–but that’s what you do in your twenties. Make stupid decisions while meaning so earnestly well.

My interviewer in Finland asked me: you’ve written about everywhere you’ve lived but Edinburgh. Where is Scotland in your books?

I laughed a little, pressed my lips together as I always do when I’m thinking, looked out the window of our car at the swans nesting in the golden Nordic estuaries. This is what I told her:

A poetry professor once told me that you can never name the thing you’re writing about. If the poem is about death, you can’t say the word death. Poems about memory shouldn’t go on about the thing itself. If you’re writing about grief, you can’t actually say grief, or sadness, or even tears. If you want to talk about love, love is the one word you can’t use.

Edinburgh is the thing I am a poem about and do not name.

Today, not long before the Queen’s Jubilee, I boarded a train at King’s Cross Station for Edinburgh. It was Platform 7. It’s just beginning to be summer now, and the fields are full of chartreuse flowers. The old churches spring up out of them like strange, huge blossoms. The train rushes over a stream so full of swans the current is pure white.

I think about bird magic again. Auguries.

I am no longer small. I know something of the world. Maybe not much of a something, but something. I have made things with my hands and heart. I look a bit pugnacious in my passport photo, like I still have something to prove. I had a bacon sandwich. My husband is with me and this time I am bearing him across the wall, to show him this object that sits at the bottom of my mind, a grey stone city with a castle and a mountain, a place that was once wholly full of fairy fruit and temptation and the rich mess of becoming bigger, becoming grown. That fairy fruit made everywhere else look dimmer for awhile. My goblin city, that swallowed me whole. I think it took falling in love with Maine to fix me–before then I always had the idea that of course I’d go back, that somehow, somehow, this was where I’d live when I could choose.

I’ve been near tears most of the morning, riding north through sheep and cattle and chapels and flowers. When you love a place, it’s hard to leave, and harder still to come back. You hope it will be proud of you, of all you became when you left to seek your fortune.  You hope it will be as you remembered; you hope you are still as it knew you.
You hope it will forgive you long neglect, lines in your once-clear face, a hard blue edge of cynicism.

O goblin city, I hope you will forgive me for never writing a book about you.

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2012/05/president-romneys-policies-would-make.html

Maryann Harris, Charles deLint, and me

I’m a huge Charles deLint fangirl, I freely admit it. I’ve gotten to meet him a couple times at FaerieCon and such, and he’s incredibly nice, in addition to being a prolific and fabulous author and musician. So when I saw him sitting at his booth at FaerieCon West earlier this year, of course I had to buy a book so I could get him to sign it.

I opted for Eyes Like Leaves, because it sounded interesting and it’s been on my to-read list for a while. And it has gorgeous cover art. As you may know if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, I’m a sucker for gorgeous cover art.

In his introduction to Eyes Like Leaves, deLint mentions that it was one of the first books he ever completed, but it wasn’t published at the time because he didn’t want to brand himself as only a secondary world fantasy author. So it got put on a shelf and largely forgotten for almost thirty years. When deLint decided to revisit the novel, he chose not to make too many substantive edits. In his words, he “wanted to give due respect to the kid who had this vision of his story some twenty-nine years ago.”

So did it work? In my opinion, largely yes. Having read a dozen or so of deLint’s novels, short stories, and novellas, I can definitely tell that this is an earlier work. There were some moments when I found myself thinking that he might not have made the same choices, had he written it more recently, and it has a bit of the melodramatic, sophomoric tint that the more mature deLint has gotten past. But the story is solid, the characters interesting, the mythology rich, and it was still a great read.

Set in a world that is heavily influenced by Celtic mythology, the Summerlord and Icelord are feuding and the latter is winning. The dhruides try desperately to find a way to keep the isle from being encased in permanent frost, but the Icelord’s minions are hunting and killing anyone with the blood of the Summerborn.

The bulk of the story follows Puretongue, a mysterious old dhruide, Tarn, his apprentice, Carrie, a young woman with strong magic but no experience using it, and a family of tinkers and musicians who stumble into the tale and become part of it. Of them all, Carrie is sadly the least realized character – deLint definitely learned a lot about writing realistic female characters after this book. She spends a lot of her time crying and being pathetic, but there are still glimpses of the strong women who would populate deLint’s later books. Some of the character interactions also seem a bit rushed, as though deLint knew what he wanted them to do and how he wanted them to react, but didn’t quite know how to show how they got there.

The story and characters were definitely engaging and fun to read, and the hints of Celtic lore and high fantasy make it a great book for fantasy lovers and folklorists alike. It’s perhaps not my favorite deLint work, but absolutely worth the time. 4 out of 5 summer breezes, 4.5 if you’re a huge deLint fan.

Why did you choose to make Princess Danielle white in your princess books?

Isaac Vainio, the protagonist of your next book, is a straight man. Why did you decide to write about a heterosexual protagonist?

Jig the goblin is smart, resourceful, and in an admittedly nontraditional sense, rather courageous. What made you want to write about a strong male character?

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.