Category: A Whole Lot of Running

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Comfort Movies (54 Days In)

54 days into self-isolation/working from home because yours truly is a fine upstanding member of the high-risk group and therefore getting C19 would be very very bad for my continued existence on this fine planet. The city is slowly phasing into a full re-open which is not ideal but also not as bad as it could be. We’re lucky to have the Mayor we do.

I’ve been defaulting to my comfort films a lot lately with some of the work stress that I’ve been under. And while your mileage might vary, I figured I’d put up my short list of comfort films here in case it helps anyone else:

  1. The Mummy (1999) – because this is pretty much a perfect self-contained movie. It has an engaging plot, tons of action, a romantic subplot that is pretty much one of the best ever- it feels both authentic and developed naturally. That’s not easy to do. The cast is great, the effects are awesome and it’s got a banging score. The worldbuilding makes sense.
  2. Pacific Rim – also pretty much a perfect self-contained movie. The worldbuilding and cast are phenomenal, the writing is excellent, the score is one of my top ten favorites, and while the plot isn’t that complicated, the level of details put into this makes it a movie that I could roll around in for days and never get bored. It makes internal consistent logical sense and just yeah. Also – there is a deep awesome relationship portrayed that doesn’t have to be read romantically and that was nice.
  3. The 13th Warrior – An oldie but a goodie. I’m a historian and specifically a Crusades historian and I love this movie so much. I know it’s based off a Michael Crichton book but the man could spin a hell of a yarn and the translation from book to movie is well done. I LOVE that it is from Ibn’s perspective, I love that we get to find out about this completely foreign culture from his viewpoint. I love the cast, I love the storyline, and I really really love the battles. Pretty sure this movie is also responsible for my love of mead.
  4. Stargate – There is no universe where I don’t love this crap out of this movie. The storyline, the characters, the plotline, all the hilarious one liners and so many reasons why you REALLY NEED the humanities in addition to STEM. They get a lot of the details right and it’s one of my oldest comfort films.
  5. Jupiter Ascending – We have covered that I am a sucker for really interesting good worldbuilding yeah? This movie has that in SPADES. The cast is good, the visuals are breathtaking, the worldbuilding is great, the heroine is badass and gets to save the day herself as well as hooking up with the genetically altered space rollerblading werewolf-angel hybrid. This movie is everything the 14 year old inside me ever wanted and had never gotten until then. Haters to the left, this movie is GOLD.
  6. Rogue One – Quite possibly the Prisoner of Azkaban out of all of the Star Wars films. I love the casting and the views we get of the settings and how much deeper it lets us go into the story and worlds and mythologies and histories of the Star Wars universe. The music is gorgeous and the whole movie is about unyielding hope.
  7. Holes – probably the single best book to movie translations ever. If you have never read or watched this, please please do yourself a favor and fall into this world of awesome. Stanley Yelnats and the Green Lake Camp and then Kissing Kate Barlow and “I can fix that” and yes. So much yes. It’s so good. Eartha Kitt is in this movie ya’ll.

What are some of your comfort movies? Share in the comments!

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Weird Shakespeare Adaptations (Quarantine Panel)

Joe Crowe and Gary Mitchel with the American SciFi Classics track at Dragon*Con have been hosting weekly Quarantine panels to help keep us all going through these very interesting times. This week it was on Weird Shakespeare Adaptations!

It was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to the panels coming up in the next couple of weeks. Subscribe to their YouTube channel to see previous panels and follow them on Facebook to watch the livestreams on Thursday nights.

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32 Days In…

It has been hard to know what to write here. I am fortunate enough for my day job to be considered an essential worker who has the option to work from home and is able to do so. My lungs are not the best and I am grateful for the opportunity to not have to subject myself to the outside world for the most part.

I am fortunate that while my state’s governor is a little toothless, my mayor is not. Also that my roommate has taken on the outside errands and is obeying all the precautions etc. So we’re in an okay place.

However, this weekend has been the hardest we’ve had in a long long time, even before the pandemic started. A lot of the family members on both sides were already dealing with some not great medical issues – nothing COVID-19 related yet – but some fairly serious issues all the same. So there has been a lot of tension and waiting for results and news. If you’ve never had to deal with that kind of holding pattern, all I can tell you is that it sucks. It’s the worst really.

Sadly, one of them lost their battle yesterday. The times we are currently living in mean that we weren’t able to be there for their last moments and that there’s not going to be a service. Any celebration of life trips would have to wait until travel is not going to potentially kill a whole lot of people so we don’t even have the different surroundings to distract us. That has been very tough.

So hug the people in your household. Text/Email/Zoom Call your people you love them.

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Introductions For a New Year

In one of the other internet spaces I inhabit, there is a challenge going on where the first prompt was to introduce yourself. This is a fandom-specific challenge that was started in an effort to remind themselves about what they loved in fandom and since then it’s been a staple every January. It got me thinking about introductions and how they differ, depending on the place and situation.

For the most part with me, what you see is what you get (I’m shorter in person and older than I look, but the babble is the same) – the levels of formality differ whether I’m at home or on the job, but that’s true of most people. I was fortunate enough to be born into a very nerd-friendly family and encouraged in a lot of my early nerding over fandoms. Even still, I’m old enough to remember a time where fandoms weren’t as mainstream as some are now. Where disclaimers were the top note on everything fandom-related, especially fanfiction. No one wanted to be sued and we’d all heard the horror stories.

This was before Fanlore and A03 were even a thing, really. Before MySpace really got started and Facebook wasn’t a thing. We had Angelfire and Geocities and Tripod webpages, there were Yahoo!Groups and mailing lists so you could keep up with the fanfic works in progress you were reading. Or what your favorite fic author was doing next. There are friends I’ve made in one fandom that have carried over into others. Some I shared with them and some they’ve shared with me.

It hasn’t always been sunshine and daisies. There’ve been rough patches, some of them uglier than others, but for the most part, fandom has been one of the most influential things for me. A kind of central cornerstone of this life that I’ve built up, over the last couple of decades. I am who I am in no small part because of fandom.

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Untitled Book Poem

Born into change and tragedy.  
Forever seeking stability.  
Building so many castles on so much quicksand.  

Insecure in this ill-fitting body,  
Tree escapist 
People are hard and books don't lie.  
Or leave.  

So I climbed as far up as I could. 
Diving into the words.  
I followed the ice and snow to lands fantastical.  
Candy skies and talking trees. 
A fawn eager to please.  

A man who just wanted to go home.  
A detective solving the impossible.  
Fighting back with love.  
The It never stood a chance.  

Quantum unicorns and the Dashwoods  
Miranda and Prospero and Ferdinand.  
Treasure Island and the Black Arrow  
Curdie and the Goblins and cleansing rose fire.

I'd stay as long as I could.  
Until my mother started to call for me.  
A small flashlight joined the books as fall arrived. 
 
Books were safer than people.  
Than boys next door who wanted kisses.  
The girls who just wanted to play house on the playground. 
 
In rainy or snowy days, when I couldn't escape up the tree. 
There was the top of the fridge.  
Because no one ever looks all the way up 
And if you're quiet, no one will spot you for hours.  

If the lights in the kitchen ever got too much  
The linen closet's top shelf beckoned. 
Door closed and flashlight on.  
Cozy and dark and quiet.  

Books were less confusing than people.  
Even books that required a dictionary on hand.  
For all the grown up words I didn't know yet.  

Books gave you space and starships and magic rings.  
Books never made you feel stupid for not understanding.
They're great secret keepers, Books are.
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Wishes for the Coming Year (and Decade)

Wishes I have for the coming decade.

So one of my people gave me this prompt and it is kind of a doozy. For a multitude of reasons, I am not one generally given to thinking about my personal lifespan in anything other than a year or so ahead of wherever I am at the moment. I’m still amazed I lived to see my 30th birthday. This is, of course, hilarious, given that my chosen major and life passion is history so I’m well familiar with the passage of time and thinking in cathedral time. My only possible explanation for it is that I am a Crusades/Renaissance historian primarily and so I’m accustomed to applying that thinking to the past and not, you know, my present/future. So it massively threw me for a loop when I realized that we’re not only at the end of the year but at the end of a decade. Time is also this weird nebulous concept. It feels like 20 years has passed between right now and this past January. So yeah.

This post is about wishes.

Wishes are super magical things. They are desires and dreams and worries given form and sent out into the great ether. Wishes get transformed into so many tangible and intangible things. Like, if you are looking for the magic inherent in the world, it’s wishes, ya’ll. Trust me on this.

My personal wishes come in weird formats, ranging from the excessively minor to the staggeringly huge.

However, for this next decade, I think the thing I am wishing most for is to be happy.

Uncomplicatedly happy more often than not. This year and decade has done a hell of a number on me personally and also on so many of the people that I hold so dear. So yeah, I want to be happy. Or rather I want to be in a place physically and also mentally/emotionally where that’s something that my brain can latch on to more readily. Depression, anxiety, and chronic pain are no joke, but things have gotten better this decade. I want that to continue.

I wish for the world to be a safer place for people like me. I wish for it to be safer period.

I also wish that someone would come up with a better method for managing auto-immune conditions. Despite not really thinking I’d make it this far, I really want to see 40,50, and 60. Beyond that, too.

So my hopes and dreams and wishes for the upcoming decade come down to health, security, and happiness. For me, my tribe, and the world.

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Books/Fandoms That Made Me: Star Wars (Part Two)

The NJO came out and rocked my world, I got my first one from a bag of mixed books from one grandparents (it was Balance Point which I promptly opened up, read the first page and then “HOLD ON WHAT.” I got the entire series for Christmas and birthday after my grandparents realized that no really, that is all I wanted and that I was getting “lost” in bookstores just to actually read those books in the actual store because I was that into the ongoing plotline.

Star Wars (and Nanowrimo) also gave me my best friend (now roommate) because of a write in and an offhand comment and then suddenly there was a person there who loved pilots as much as I did. Who even had met the two authors that had written some of my favorite books ever in the EU. I found out later she actually worked for them over Labor Day weekends at this thing called Dragon*Con.

We’ve been fast and best friends since 2006 and cohabitating since 2011 and there is an entire wall of Star Wars Legends books in chronological order surrounding a smallish pilot shrine. The small collection of current canon novels is also arranged on one side.

I’d been so used to being the only fan in the city I had lived in, that meeting actual humans who geeked as much, if not more than I did, over shared stories and characters was three kinds of a blessing.

It wasn’t all sunshine, Ewoks, and fighter ships. I broke up hardcore with the fandom for a while during the time after the NJO. The Dark Nest trilogy left me cold and then the series after that…there were some deep and abiding characterization issues that led me to just fall out of the fandom for a while.

It hurt too much to go back when you had people taking a character that you loved, that you had grown up with in a literal sense and twist them into something incomprehensible with little to no explanation for how he got from point a to point zed. When just the description of the events unfolding made you so vicerally and incandescently angry.

Because this fandom was home in a way that most of my other fandoms had never been. Because this fandom and the characters and the people were one of the things that had kept me going in some really dark times.

The advent of the last X-Wing book, Mercy Kill (read by me as my roommate drove us to Atlanta so she could cackle at my reactions) was what brought me back. Sitting in the panel room, listening to Aaron Allston talk about it was engaging and there were flickers of that same spark that had consumed so many days during my pre-teen and teen years. I’ll never forget however when someone from the audience stood and stumbled a little bit over their words before getting to the meat of the question. “Is it safe to come home now?”

This was before we had an Episode VII or even really the concept of any of the anthology films and the fervor swept over all of us again at the thought of more new Star Wars movies. After the prequels, I hadn’t thought that I would see more new films in the franchise so soon. Especially given the way that the second trilogy had been scoured and picked apart and judged by everyone with a blog and an opinion.

That question from that audience member resonated with me and quite a few others in that track room. Aaron assured us that yes, it was safe to come back now. That the fandom still had room for us and while we couldn’t change what had happened in the past, that there was space to move past it.

So we came home. And glory of glories, we got more movies and more books and while there were serious upheaval moments (the movie canon becoming separate from the EU/Legends canon was one), we were still a family.

The representation in Rogue One and Episodes VII and VIII were magical. It was like walking into a dream where your favorite fanfic had just become canon. It was the Star Wars we loved with people who actually looked like us. There was more than one badass female character, there were young and old characters, and the storytelling was good.

Every third person was not a white dude and the stark change from the original trilogy was a little more magical because of it. 8pm Thursday night showings became the new midnight showings and the sheer joy of being in a theater with a hundred other excited fans all reacting at the same time to what was on the screen will never not be amazing.

You meet some of the best people at these things, especially in tense moments on screen where your right hand is being clutched by your roommate and your left is being held by the guy next you because the need for physical comfort was so high (Ep VII, you probably know the part).

And then there was the pushback from other fans, who couldn’t quite understand the need for all that diversity. For the additional women on screen or the need for the stories to evolve.

The people who grew up thinking they’d be the Rebellion and instead became the Empire. Unlike the controversies in the fandom before, this one wasn’t much of one. The people buying into that mindset were the vast minority, albeit a very vocal one. The core of Star Wars fandom is still there, glittering like our Space Mom, and eagerly awaiting whatever we get to experience next.

We have so many new stories coming out from a variety of media formats. We have amazing inclusive books and short stories written by so many amazing people, it’s impossible to name them all here.

We have an entire Disney park dedicated to the full immersive experience of being inside the Star Wars Universe.

I can’t wait to see what we’ll get next.

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Books/Fandoms That Made Me: Star Wars (Part One)

So I love Star Wars, this is not news for people who know me.

Star Wars was and is a huge part of who I am today. I fell in love with the series when I saw it with my dad at the age of nine. Some of my earliest fanfiction was me in the Star Wars universe, exploring things and having all kinds of adventures. My family, of course, was always Corellian. It seemed to fit them the best (still does).

I learned there was an Expanded Universe when I saw The Crystal Star by Vonda N. McIntyre in the Paperback section of our local KY Kroger. I begged and pleaded for my mom to buy that for me. I was a tiny kid who was already reading on a college level at 9. My parents had an easier time keeping me in sneakers than in books.

It blew my mind. Because here was the after I had been looking for, the what happened next, and this book wasn’t the only one. Luke was a full blown Jedi, Han and Leia were MARRIED. WITH KIDS!! My nine year old mind was over the moon. Here were all the details and the stories that happened after! Scoping through some of the pages, I saw that it wasn’t the only one either.

So I fell into this universe in a way I hadn’t before with any of the other things I loved, unless you count reading as a fandom of its own. Star Wars was really the first IP where I actively became part of the fandom as much as I could.

It was pretty slow at first, that was right around the time that we were moving overseas. However Episode 1 came out and saved my life (I wrote about that over here). That Christmas, I got the score and the novelization from visiting relatives and I fell further down the hole of fandom.

As I got older and had more access to the internet, I found websites like TheForce.Net and fanfiction.com and I started reading everything I could. I couldn’t get enough of it.

I joined a forum specifically geared towards Jedi Girls and through it, I met the first person I fell in love with. We moved again and our closest “neighbors” that worked for the same agency my parents worked for had a kid my age that owned a HUGE chunk of the Legends books that had come out at that time. They went back stateside for a year and I got to babysit the books while they were gone. It was kind of a dream come true.

I got to take my time reading through the Expanded Universe and revelling in all of the words and the adventures and the characters. The good and the bad and the weird (I still am not exactly sure about what the hell even The Black Fleet Crisis was about, it’s been 16 years and “Bzuh” is still my entire reaction to that trilogy).

These were the books that taught me what “canon”, “deuterocanon”, and “apocrypha” actually looked like, where 3-4 years of studying religious doctrine and history couldn’t. How piecing together different campaigns from across several books/trilogies actually functioned and the importance, not just of gaining knowledge, but also sharing it (Wookiepedia and so so so many fansites in the Geocities/Angelfire years) so that others could also nerd the hell out.

I fell in love with pilots to the point of ordering the entire X-Wing series with birthday and Christmas money from Amazon.com and having them shipped to me overseas (the estimated time of arrival without having paid for expedited shipping because I really didn’t want to give Amazon an actual kidney was anywhere from 6 weeks to 4 months, depending on the mail and customs). The books I was babysitting for my friend didn’t have all the X-Wing stories so I had to procure them elseways. This drove me bananas, because my impulse control to read all the things had to contend with the fact that I knew reading them out of order would mean that my brain would hyper-focus on what I’d missed.

Pretty sure that the only people happier than me getting those books were my family members, having to put up with my anxious slightly manic self. They were in 3 packages and I didn’t get them in order. I remember getting books 1,2, and 8 in the same package and agonizing because I wanted to read them in order and waiting until I had all of them was a special kind of torture. It paid off though because the joy of getting to binge read the entire series was so good.

Episode II came out and I saw it three times in the regular Brasilian theaters and then wonder of wonders, it was still in the Imax theaters near my grandparents when we landed stateside for a brief assignment. My dad took me and my sister to a late night Imax showing of it and it was the best thing in the world.

Episode III was the one where I camped out for tickets. Nothing was getting in my way from seeing this. Coming out of the theater from that movie and then pretty much getting back in line for tickets because I needed to see again. There was so much there that my brain needed to unpack and filter through what we already knew of the universe and how it fit into the EU and this opened up so much more of the already vast universe.

Part Two Tomorrow!

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Weekend Writing

Okay so this weekend, I tried to plot out more bits of the We Don’t Talk About Book Club universe which started as a kind of Nanowrimo dare type one-shot story. It was supposed to be a self-contained fun one-shot story.

To the complete lack of surprise to my beta-readers, it did not remain a one-shot. So my plan this weekend was going back to kind of figure out more about the world and overarching conflicts and some of those behind the scenes moving parts. The universe is quite popular among some of my Patrons so I had picked one of the earlier stories that hadn’t gotten fleshed out yet to focus on. Outlining it out on the whiteboard ( because my brain wasn’t being a help much this weekend) revealed several things that I had not previously known before.

There is apparently a constabulary type organization in my shadow world and one of the MC’s not-a-boyfriend’s is one of them. That my MC has a particular hate-on for some of those folk that ties back to her choosing a mostly mundane life up until then. That incubi lore is rather thin on the ground if you’re trying to not use the Catholic mythologies and don’t have access to certain books (I’m ILL-ing one of them and put one on my list of books to buy when I start buying books again).

Also that there’s a wedding I semi-forgot about and in the process of figuring out all of the above, also realizing that I’ve created the perfect circumstances for an inter-dimensional war. My goal was actually to try and make things less complicated, not more. Failing at that is pretty on brand for me.

Writing is not for the faint of heart, ya’ll.

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Cutting The Cord

So earlier this year my household decided to cut the cord. Just as an experiment because we were both stuck in a kind of rut where we just got home from the respective day jobs and sat and just zoned out to whatever random TV we decided on that evening.

It wasn’t good for our writing or for getting house chores done or really anything.

So we decided to cut that cord and see how that would impact the household. We weren’t going completely cold turkey because we knew neither one of us would be able to deal with that. We still had our Prime and Netflix accounts and the living room TV was one of the smart TVs so we could also connect the Movies Anywhere/VUDU apps to it to be able to access the digital copies of the movies we own. We also rediscovered our Spotify accounts and being able to play some of our lists off the TV is pretty awesome.

Neither one of us can work well without background noise so having those options available has been good for our productivity levels.

We’re seven months into it and so far we haven’t missed it much (my kingdom for the ability to just pay for MSNBC without having to pay for packages of stuff I neither need or care about – at least there are podcasts of the shows I actually care about oh well). It forced us out of the rut and while it hasn’t always been sunshine and daisies, it’s been a lot better for both of us, in terms of actually being able to get things done. For me, particularly, it has helped me whittle down the list of things I needed to watch/read/listen to. That list was getting seriously out of control and this push was what I needed to gain some momentum there.

I have been able to finish several things I kept meaning to, but time kept getting away from me, etc. Cutting the cord took away some of my excuses and that was grand, all on its lonesome. Granted I have some complicated medical issues that don’t always allow me to get everything I want to get done accomplished in the timeframe that I want.

Cutting that cord however gave us back money in the household budget and made us really stop and think about the habits we’d acquired and why we’d acquired them.

It’s not the answer for everyone, but it’s done a lot for us in terms of mental and physical health.

So for anyone else thinking about it or if you have questions about it, let me know. Happy to answer anything about our thought process going into it and what we told Comcast when we dropped it.

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