Copy Edits Done

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Marion

Today I sent back the Copper Road manuscript with the copy edits made. My copyeditor turned the document around pretty fast, I thought.

All in all, this process is much faster than “Aluminum Leaves.” There was a several-month gap between the time I submitted AL to my editor and the time she got back to me, based entirely on her workload. And there was a gap between the time I sent the revised version to her and it found its way to copyediting. Those gaps have been bridged, as Falstaff creates and codifies its procedures.

This time, they let my book jump the line because I sent it in a little early, my developmental editor Erin had a gap in her schedule and she thought Copper Road didn’t need any character, plot or structural changes.

The vast, vast majority of copyedit changes were to punctuation and punctuation-related things (I don’t know if three asterisks to indicate a section break is actually punctuation, but it seems like that’s the best category for it) to match the house style. In two or three places my copyeditor questioned word choices. Most of those I explained and didn’t change, but Melissa, the associate publisher, may push back on that. We’ll see. And in two places, the copyeditor thought the sequencing wasn’t clear and I actually rewrote a sentence or a paragraph.

For a 92,000 word book, I think that’s pretty good.

Some other documents went along with the manuscript:

  • The dedication
  • The acknowledgments. Along with all the people I thanked in “Aluminum Leaves” I added some more. You might be one of them!
  • An About the Author statement
  • An Other Works By list (a short list).

The next thing should be the cover. After that, page proofs. And after that, it’s real!

Posted in Thoughts about Writing | Leave a comment

The Way We Live Now #6: #MCWC2020

Posted on August 5, 2020 by Marion

2020’s Mendocino Coast Writers Conference was entirely online. Zoom provided the backbone of the event, used for the morning workshops, the afternoon talks, readings and Open Mike, and as far as I know the consultations.

There were some surprising bonuses to an online conference. I’ll break them out below, but I want to call out one right now. People from Maine, USA, Britain, France, and Taiwan participated in the conference. (I think the person from Taiwan was getting up to start the “morning” workshop at midnight their time.)

Before I get into the pros and cons of an online conference, I want to mention the entire MCWC staff and their excellence. At the top of the list is Amy Lutz, who managed the logistics brilliantly.

Access:

I touched on access, but physical distance and travel wasn’t the only obstacle brushed away by technology. The conference is not terribly expensive for a conference, but in person you pay for three (possibly four) nights of lodging in a well-known resort town at the peak of the season. And you buy at least a few meals. MCWC2020 was instantly more affordable.

Convenience:

I didn’t have to wear shoes. It was nice to sit in my library in a comfortable chair rather in in a classroom three hours a day. I could refill my coffee or brew a cup of tea without worrying I was disrupting the class or missing anything vital, because I could hear the workshop from my kitchen.

Often presenters use a whiteboard or a chalkboard. In the in person morning workshops, this works well. In the larger in person afternoon talks, visibility can be dicey. With screen-share, everyone could see the material equally well.

Chat:

Chat is a feature on every video conference platform I’ve seen. The conference encouraged the use of it during the sessions, with it set it to Everyone and Host. Those were the people you could chat with. Chat has a feature that lets you share with individuals only. It doesn’t show on the Chat screen, but it is not private. By setting the switch to, basically, Public, the conference made sure everyone knew that what they chatted about would be seen by everyone in the session.

And Chat was a great workshop feature! You could repeat names of titles people missed the first time around, clarify points, and post links without interrupting the group. Anyone having problems with their audio, which happened once or twice, can use Chat as an immediate backup. Chat gave an elegant pathway to agreeing with another participant’s comment, without slowing down the group.

If you really have to share something snarky  with a fellow participant, well, that’s what texting and email are for.

Tech Reliability:

My morning workshop experienced almost no technical problems. Yes, a few individuals had momentary glitches, but the software and the internet delivered, and that went a long way to making the conference a success. And again, kudos must go to the people working behind the scenes to make this experience seamless.

MCWC2020 was a great online conference and I’m glad I participated. It wasn’t the Mendocino Coast conference though, because the Mendocino coast wasn’t present.  Here are some other things that didn’t work as well for me.

Channels of Data Closed Off:

Weird subheading, I know. I learned a lot about how I take in information about other people. I think of myself as someone who processes information primarily visually. I don’t engage easily with audio-books. I like words, pictures, movies, plays, TV, slide shows and written instructions. Theoretically, then, video conferencing should be a good match for me. I only realized how much information I extract from nonverbals and non-audibles when I couldn’t access them.

I don’t even know what I was missing, exactly. The sense of connection to the group was tenuous. I couldn’t read body-language, of course, but somehow there is a whole cartload of cues I pick up in person that just weren’t there. And I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one.

Losing the Margins:

Great conference stuff happens in the margins of the formal events—a conversation at breakfast, a few minutes in the classroom before or after the workshop, a meeting in the bathroom or while out on a walk. Those things didn’t happen online.

The conference staff know how important those peripheral moments are, and they tried to model them with a breakfast meeting and some breakout rooms. I never used those breakout rooms, but another attendee did. She said it worked well for her. For me, the breakfast room experience was mixed.

I had two experiences that approximated the marginal ones; a scheduled Zoom lunch with two friends on Friday, and a random chance to visit with another friend when we both went to one of the breakout rooms and no one else was there for a few minutes.

Ignorance of Etiquette:

I am ignorant of the etiquette of leaving a large group, like the breakfast room, and moving to a breakout room, without looking rude. This, in part, kept me from doing it. I hope by next year I will know a little more about Zoom etiquette. (There’s a project.)

No Immersion/ No Buffer:

Yes, I could wander into the kitchen at any point during the workshop and make some tea. I could also wander in and start washing dishes or be bombarded by the latest political atrocity before almost before I drew my first non-workshop breath. No walk back to the inn, no stroll on the headlands while I let the morning’s material settle in my mind. No immersion.

I did build in a walk after the morning session the first two days. That was good for my physical health but did not create the illusion of immersion. It was much too easy to leave a session and start a load of laundry or go grocery shopping.

This leads to–

Self-care and Zoom fatigue:

Somehow, sitting for hours staring at a screen is physically exhausting, a fact which still surprises me after all these years. A participant friend said she was at the level of exhaustion collapse by Saturday night. She participated in more events than I did, and was not able to build in a walk or other physical activity. “I’ll need to prioritize self-care next year if it’s online,” she said, and so will I.

Zoom fatigue is a thing, and I needed to adjust for that too.

Lessons Learned:

  • I trust the tech more than I did before the conference.
  • Learn online etiquette. If next year’s conference in online (most likely it will be) I’ll be more assertive at seeking out the breakout rooms and figuring out how they work the best for me.
  • Create the environment. Surprisingly, the village of Mendocino is open to tourists now. Next year, as long as I wear a mask, practice social distancing and honor the innkeeper’s rules around sanitizing, there’s no reason I couldn’t go to Mendocino and participate in the conference from my room. It wouldn’t be a perfect replica, but it would be close.
  • Embrace it. Intellectually, of course. The online conference is a new experience for me. Now I’ve compared and contrasted it, I need to embrace the new.

Part of embracing the new is trusting the board, faculty and staff. They rose to the occasion in 2020. I trust that they will make #MCWC2021 the best conference possible.









Posted in Ruminations | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Missing Mendocino

Posted on July 30, 2020 by Marion

This year’s Mendocino Coast Writers Conference is online. It starts today. I am looking forward to the three-morning workshop, with Nebula and Hugo winner Kij Johnson as the workshop leader. I’m pretty relaxed with Zoom these days, and several friends are in the workshop. The writing offerings are high quality, and interesting.

Workshopping from home will be way more convenient. I can join the workshop in my pajamas if I want to. I’ll be in a comfortable chair instead of a folding one around a table in a classroom that is usually too cold for me. I can watch the birds in my front yard off and on. I don’t have the nuisance of travel.

And it won’t be the same.

The location makes the conference in many ways. I will miss staying at my favorite inn, in any one of several “favorite” rooms or suites. I’ll miss Elaine’s scones.

I’ll miss walking down to the mouth of Big River, past the humming bee tree, and taking pictures of ravens, seals, and black labs swimming in the surf. I’ll miss a daily walk on the Mendocino headlands. I’ll miss the fog. (We have fog. I’ll miss their fog. It’s better quality fog.)

I’ll miss oatmeal and coffee at the Good Life Café – and lunch there. I’ll miss Moody’s Coffee, and Harvest Grocery. I’ll miss Gallery Bookshop, where, even though I’ve bought books at the conference bookstore, I would buy more books, and in spite of my vow Not to Buy More Journals Because I Have Plenty I Haven’t Used, I would buy a journal. Because it’s the Conference, and I’m a writer.

I will miss driving six miles north, to Fort Bragg, and visiting the Botanical Garden. I’ll miss going further into Fort Bragg itself and visiting the Noyo Harbor waterfront, just walking around and enjoying the boats, the bustle, the seals again, and the river otters. I’ll miss walking across the bridge and looking down at the dogleg harbor with its narrow, rock-strewn mouth, opening into a glimmering tranquil curve of green water, salt and fresh, as the Noyo River decants into the ocean. I’ll miss the wash of waves from the fishing boats going out or coming in through the channelized opening, the bright pop of color from somebody—a pilot or maybe just a tourist—on the boat, with their acid yellow or neon red windbreaker sharp against the green. I’ll miss the Coast Guard boats and the kayaks.

I’ll miss my stop at the light house on the way back.

I’ll miss the lunches at the conference, and the afternoon cookies!

I’ll miss the coast-weathered picnic tables outside the cafeteria/multi-purpose room. I’ll miss balancing my paper plate precariously as I hike one leg over the bench and squeezing in with familiar faces and friends of familiar faces. I’ll miss the truncated, disjointed conversations as people come and go. I’ll miss the gossip! Not that we gossip. Well, I do but nobody else does. I’ll still miss it.

I was going to write, “I’ll miss sitting in my room and writing a paper letter to Linda in Hawaii,” which has become a tradition… but I can still do that! And maybe I will.

It’s a year for doing things differently. An online conference, or at least a conference with an online component, may bring down the cost and open attendance to people otherwise under-served. That would be good. There is no doubt in my mind that shifting to online was the right thing to do this year. It was the only thing to do this year.

This experience will be new. I’ll probably have much to say about it, and probably most of it good. Things like Open Mike, Blind Critique and Pitch Practices may be easier in front of a screen in the comfort of your own house instead of up on a stage, wrestling with an unfamiliar microphone.

Today though, this morning, I want to acknowledge what I’m missing, and I’m missing Mendocino.


Posted in View from the Road | Leave a comment

The Worldbuilding Bible

Posted on July 24, 2020 by Marion

My Copper Road editor asked me to send in a worldbuilding bible along with the manuscript.

To me, “bibles” were for TV writing rooms and shared universe series or anthologies; basically places where the writing is collective and certain conventions have to be held to. Characters who are brother and sister in Season One shouldn’t be married in Season Three (unless that is part of the world-building). A character whose cat phobia played a critical role in the plot in Season One probably should not adopt six cats later, unless this is meant to show some character change. I didn’t think bibles applied to independent works.

My editor pointed out that a bible helps the copyeditor. An alternate world fantasy often has different names, place-names and nonstandard English words. You’re helping the copyeditor focus on specific errors instead of having to learn the vocabulary as they read. Every bit of information you can give the copyeditor upfront helps them hone their focus on the missing words or transpositions, or grammar and punctuation questions, which is what you want them finding.

Here’s what I included in my bible:

Character Names:

I started this list for myself, both to help me remember the names and also to keep the spelling straight. This story has a lot of nonstandard names, and some that are common, but not from the English tradition. I used the document throughout the writing of the book, especially to help me remember the first name of a minor character, for example, when I needed it.

Place Names:

Some place names in the book sound English. Several do not. I put them all on the list. Here’s why. I have a town in the book called White Bluffs. White Bluffs is essential to the story. The name’s descriptive. I have a vivid picture of White Bluffs in my head. That didn’t stop me from typing it as “White Plains” at least twice in “Aluminum Leaves,” (which my editor caught, thank you) and at least that often in Copper Road (which I caught myself). Because a couple of place names evolved over the writing of the book, it’s possible that I still have multiple spellings in the book. The bible contains the final spelling.

Vocabulary:

  I included non-English words, including a few words that English appropriated, that will be familiar to everyone. Because of the mix of words, I put those on the list to be on the safe side. I included words like “coin” and “pledge” which have specific meanings in the book’s alternate world.

I was surprised at how many new words there were.

Which brings me to a pro tip: Start your bible as you start your first draft and add things as you go. This shifts a workload away from the back end of the process, when you would rather be finetuning your prose and punching up the rhythm of your paragraphs.

Relationships:

If Arabella and Hilario are siblings but she calls Hilario “cousin” on page 256, a bible will help the copyeditor catch that. You could probably go even further and designate birth order for siblings. I know I’ve read at least two works, one of them famous, where two siblings alternate calling each other “little brother,” or “big brother,” and I really don’t know which is which.

Modes of Address:

My alternate world uses hierarchical modes of address largely based on a person’s wealth. Some are gendered, some not. Some people are allowed titles, like “Doctor,” or “Professor.” They’re all on the list.

Prose/Text stuff:

I open one chapter with a character who is bored. To show that, I start each sentence in the paragraph with the word “She.” She walks around. She sits back down. She looks out  the window. She eats a snack. She walks around some more. The effect is to recreate her sense of monotony on the page.

The editor suggested I note this chapter and paragraph in the bible and put STET (which means “let it stand”) next to it, letting the copyeditors know that this repetition is intentional. Based on that suggestion, I added a couple other places where I invert common sentence structure or use repetition for storytelling purposes.

Some takeaways:

  • A worldbuilding bible helps the copyeditors. Anything that helps the copyeditors help you.
  • Starting the bible when you start your draft makes it easier to add things as you go and saves you that labor at the end of the process.
  • This is for the in-house staff. This is not a part of the book. More information rather than less is helpful.
  • It’s a good tool for your own memory, or your own creative process.

Good luck with your worlds, and their bibles!

Posted in Thoughts about Writing | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Hem: Half Acre

Posted on June 25, 2020 by Marion

No reason, really. I just think the song is beautiful.

Posted in Ruminations | Leave a comment

Some Books

Posted on June 19, 2020 by Marion

The Great Sequestration let us all get caught up on our reading, right? In my case, I often couldn’t concentrate to read, a situation I’ve never faced before. That issue has faded lately. I thought I’d share a few I’ve read, and some brief thoughts.

I already wrote about With the Fire On High by Elizabeth Acevedo. This is YA, but I recommend it for anyone who feels like they are having trouble holding onto their dreams right now.

Leonard Goldman’s initial Joanna Blalock mystery, The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes, was fluffy but fun. Narrated by Dr. John Watson Jr, the book tells the story of a suspicious death that is being ruled a suicide. The dead man’s sister seriously doubts it. She approaches Dr. Watson Senior, famous chronicler of the tales of Sherlock Holmes, and he enlists the help of a witness to the death, Joanna Blalock, who is… well, see the title. The book relies heavily (a little too heavily) on Holmesian deduction–a strange thing to say about about Holmes tribute book, I know–and doesn’t get Irene Adler right, but she isn’t as wrong as recent live action entertainments, large and small screen, have been. It’s Book One of a series and if you like puzzle mysteries and nasty villains, give it a try.

I reviewed Alexandra Rowland’s A Choir of Lies for Fantasy Literature. This is Book Two in Rowland’s series and both books are graced with absolutely gorgeous covers. Rowland is playful textually with the book, using a lot of footnotes. The premise of the book is that our first-person narrator has written down his version of events in a country that’s a fantasy analog of the Netherlands during a fantasy analog of the Tulip Craze, and given the manuscript to a person who was also there at the time. The reader has strong opinions that do not match those of the original writer, and engages passionately with footnotes and later by breaking into the narrative and writing partial chapters themselves. What’s not to love? Surprisingly, for me, quite a bit. The book is 450 pages long and for the first 171 pages, nearly nothing happens. And the Tulip Craze has been done before, so it wasn’t new enough or interesting enough to carry the philosophical or emotional weight of the story. On the plus side, Rowland’s prose is delightful and her descriptions lush and beautiful. Her exploration of the use (and ownership) of stories is interesting in both books. Read it for the ideas.

Life in a Medieval Village, by Frances and Joseph Gies, is one of a series. “Medieval” is specifically 12th-13th centuries in specific parts of Europe. This isn’t one I’m reading from cover to cover. I just dip into in now and then. Clear, readable prose and good research–some good photos and illustrations too. A reviewer at Powell’s calls it a good general introduction to the period and I would agree.

Currently I’m reading Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. I got it because it got a lot of genre buzz. I didn’t think I would like it because necromancy is my least favorite magical system, and because I grow tired of nasty characters. To my surprise, I am enjoying it in spite of myself!

There’s a handful. Feel free to check them out.








Posted in Book Reviews | Leave a comment

The Way We Live Now #5

Posted on June 14, 2020 by Marion

A man hurried toward me as I came out of the market. He touched his hip pocket, got a chagrined look on his face, and ran back to his truck, where the woman in the passenger seat handed him a face mask.

*

It was ridiculous how happy I was when my haircutter reopened for business. A tiny clear spring of happiness bubbled up in the center of my chest, and even I could hear the lilt in my voice when I called him. He has a one-station shop, so the deep-cleaning and safety protocols are do-able for him. He wore a mask, I wore a mask, which I held on my face while he cut around my ears.

*

Spouse was out on a walk. A woman walked toward him, maskless, and showed no intention of moving aside, so Spouse stepped off the sidewalk to allow clearance.

“Oh, don’t be such a scaredy-cat,” she said. “No one makes it off this rock alive!”

“A few hundred astronauts have,” Spouse said.

*

It is nice to see people sitting at outside dining establishments now, but I probably won’t be one of them for a while. And it will be quite a while before I choose the dine-in option.

*

Other things are happening.

It’s early June, and already the town of Winters has evacuated once due to a wildland fire. Parts of Southern California have been under red flag warnings for the past three days. People have stocked their freezers so they can limit shopping in the time of the pandemic, so how long will it before PG&E starts its rolling blackouts again, destroying all that food?

In spite of Covid, people are taking the streets (mostly wearing masks); risking their lives to save their lives and the lives of others. In Hong Kong, people fight for their autonomy. Here in the USA, people march and demonstrate for equity, justice, and real change in the corrupt and racist practices of police departments and a justice system that is systemically unjust.

Our Ignoramus in Chief has done the best he can to gouge the wounds deeper and wider, to pour salt into them, to fan the flames or racial hatred, and feed and nurture white supremacy. In spite of him, police and military leaders are speaking out in support of the protests, statues of Confederate leaders are coming down, and even the NFL, which engineered the firing of Colin Kaepernick for speaking out on the very issue of police brutality four years ago, has apologized and aligned itself with its Black players who are speaking out against injustice.

*

It’s late spring. The parks are open. Juvenile birds are getting adept at flying, but they fluff up and squawk like babies, demanding food, whenever a parent bird is nearby. The weasels are back in Ragle park, and their press corps with them.

The farmers market is approaching its peak, with leafy greens, cherries, strawberries, blue berries, squash, beans, carrots, potatoes, and the beginnings of tomatoes.

*

I haven’t bought fuel for my car since March. That’s not really surprising, but it was an eye-opener.

Posted in View from the Road | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Book Two is On Its Way

Posted on June 13, 2020 by Marion

Yesterday, June 12, I sent off Copper Road, the sequel to “Aluminum Leaves” to my publisher. Here’s a snippet to send it out on:

Aideen had visited smoke rifts and emberbeds since she’d been a child. She knew about their risks. She had hiked and climbed with her brother, and she knew the risks of the mountains, too. She had always feared heights. Standing at the edge of the mountain staring down into this passage, what filled her was greater than fear. She stood at the edge of a world, a world that did not know her, did not care for her any more than it might care for a single fleck of mica. Her whole body trembled. The beam of light danced wildly.

“Aideen,” Ilsanja said. Her voice turned flat and vanished. They were surrounded by smooth walls, but it did not echo. “Aideen, come back. Come back to me.”

“I can’t move.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

With the Fire On High

Posted on June 13, 2020 by Marion

With the Fire On High by Elizabeth Acevedo is not the kind of YA book I normally read. It’s general fiction, not SF or fantasy. There is magic in it, but it is part of main character’s life and culture, not the center of the book. I was beguiled by this beautiful cover but bought the book mainly to show solidarity, and shovel some revenue toward my local indie bookstore. I decided to read  chapter or two before I offered the book to a friend… and when I next looked up it was about two and a half hours later. I could not put the book down.

The book follows Emoni Santiago, a Philly high school student who is a single mom. Emoni lives with her grandmother who raised her after her mother died and her Puerto Rican father returned to his home territory to be a community organizer, letting his mother raise his only child. Emoni’s dream is to be a chef, and she can cook. Her recipes are mouth-wateringly delicious, and people who eat her food often find a good memory from their lives popping into their heads. Emoni is raising her daughter Emma, who she calls Babygirl, with the help of her abuela; she got into a charter school and is trying to keep up good enough grades to get into a college with a culinary program, and she works at a fast food joint. An undiagnosed learning disability makes reading and memorization hard for her and that makes school a struggle.

Emoni’s first-person voice is immediate and genuine. She has a lot stacked against her and a lot going for her; her abuela, her best friend Angelica, and a teacher who supports her. Babygirl’s father is in the picture, which is good for Babygirl, but dealing with him and his issues is even more stressful. When Emoni gets into a culinary arts immersion class at school, which has a class trip planned to Spain in the spring, the stakes get even higher, because there is no way Emoni can raise enough money for her share.

This young protagonist is a believable seventeen-year-old. She is fiercely committed to her daughter. She is smart and she fights for her dreams, and she makes teenaged mistakes. Emoni tends to bristle when adults try to tell her what she should do, because, as she sees it, since Babygirl’s been born, she’s been making decisions just fine. The book is good at showing Emoni being strong, and also making mistakes, and finally learning from them.

This is a great book to give any young woman with a dream. It’s not a bad book for an old person to read, either. I recommend it.

Posted in Book Reviews | Leave a comment

Briarpatch From Page to Screen

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Marion

Ross Thomas published his southwestern detective novel Briarpatch in 1984. His protagonist, Benjamin “Pickle” Dill (kids stopped calling him “Pickle” in the 4th grade after he beat up a bunch of them) returns to his New Mexico hometown to investigate the murder of his younger sister, homicide cop Felicity Dill, in a car bombing. Dill works for a clandestine Senatorial subcommittee chaired by a young, ambitious senator from Dill’s home state. Dill is a very good investigator, and the book implies he learned some extra-curricular skills working for the government in Europe and Southeast Asia.

The story of his cop sister’s life and death makes no sense, and soon puts Dill in contact with his childhood friend Jake Spivey and an elusive arms dealer named Clyde Brattle. Dill is shortly reacquainted with the power politics, corruption and discrimination that fill his old home town.

Executive Producer Rosario Dawson picked up Briarpatch as a star-project, updated it, and engaged in some judicious gender and race swapping, in a ten-episode series on USA. USA partnered with AMC.

Changing the ethnicity of characters can be tricky (and often lead to pathetic failures) but for the most part it works here just fine. The biggest switch (other than the MC herself, played by Dawson and called Allegra Dill) is the lawyer Anne Marie Singe. In Ross’s book, Singe was basically there to provide needed exposition and become Benjamin’s Dill’s sex partner. This character, now a Black man called A.D. Singe played by Edi Gathegi, functions in a very different way as he… provides needed exposition and becomes Allegra’s sex partner. Okay, so… not so different. It seemed different because Dawson and Gatheri had awesome chemistry together.

TV Briarpatch adds characters, like the chief of police Eve Raytek, and throws in some B-plotline complications, like an immigration trafficking storyline, oh, and changes the state to Texas. As another review I read noted, the television version tries hard for Texas Weird ( the review said it’s part “Twin Peaks in Texas”) most obviously with the premise in the first episode that an eco-terrorist released all the animal in the zoo, so various animals wander in and out of scenes… including, in the most Twin-Peaks-like and least plausible example, the tiger that roams the hallway that Allegra’s hotel room is on. Believable? No. Cool-looking? Yes.

Dawson, as the cool and detached Dill, is arresting in this role, but the two outstanding characters are Jake Spivey, played to weird perfection by Jay R. Ferguson, and the fey, strange and deadly Clyde Brattle, embodied flawlessly by Alan Cumming.

I thought we were supposed to assume something from Dill’s emotional detachment; deep psychological trauma, for example. Then I read the book, and saw that Dawson is playing Dill exactly as Ross wrote Dill. Apparently, nearly psychotic emotional detachment seemed normal for 1984 male MCs. Either that, or I still have gender biases. Whatever it is, it works the way Dawson does it. The one flourish I found unnecessary was the mild SM relationship with the handsome ambitious senator. Please! We get that Dill is in a position with no power. We get that she can only slap the Senator as foreplay, because he has all the power. We get it.

Updating was disheartening easy, really; black ops in Viet Nam easily translated to black ops in Afghanistan; political corruption is still political corruption, and shady land deals are always good drama. The way Dill and Felicity Dill communicated was awkward, because in the book, the younger sister wrote letters. In 2020, explaining why she uses this instead of email doesn’t quite work. Some of these episodes were quite slow. I think this story would have worked well in eight, rather than ten episodes.

I watched them all, but I’m still not sure I liked it. It isn’t something I will watch again, probably, but there were some interesting details. I think as a showcase for Dawson, it worked quite well. And, bonus, there were giraffes.

Posted in Thoughts about Writing, TV Shows | Leave a comment