Reading update:
Finished Treasure Island! Yes, it was a shortish novel, but it felt good to finish anything at all in that horrid month of January. How did it compare with the Muppets film version? Plotwise, wildly divergent, as you might imagine (though incredibly, the part where Jim Hawkins sails the ship alone is actually in the book). No Miss Piggy or cannibal tribe on the island, only the half-baked Ben Gunn. More fighting, wounds, and actual death in the book. Interestingly, the Muppets nailed the character of Long John Silver, so much that I kept picturing and hearing Tim Curry as I read. A good adventure, though the end was a little anticlimactic. A writerly note: Stevenson used first-person narration; primarily Jim Hawkins, but switching to Dr. Livesey when he needed to convey action that Jim knew nothing about. Write up the alley of my current WIP.
Books-into-movies update:
We finally finished watching the HBO miniseries John Adams (based on the biography by David McCullough). We had many interruptions between the sixth and seventh parts, including Life, illness, the need to sleep, and a cracked Netflix DVD. But we persevered, and honestly, we could just have skipped the final installment. As my husband put it (before he drifted off), “too much personal drama.” The last part has Adams retired and at home, his children dying or being abandoned by their husbands, etc. Do I want to see, hear, or even imagine a woman suffering a mastectomy without anesthesia? No, thank you. Nor do I want to see old men dying in their beds, eyes staring, while their families weep around them. (Ah, Jefferson! Where are your elegant drawl, your satin waistcoats now?) I might just add here that I once saw a documentary on historic houses (with Bob Vila) that showed Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom, and the bed in which he died; and it looked nothing like the bedroom in the movie. The one saving grace (besides the stirring movie score), is that if you stick it out to the end, you hear an Adams quotation in voice-over: “Now posterity—it will never know how much it cost us to preserve your freedom. I hope that you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.” I think that’s pretty good.
Writing update:
I finished interviewing two main characters (six single-spaced pages for the first and maybe three for the second), and am now working on one of the “villains.” What I love about this process is discovering the little details and idiosyncrasies that might never show up in the story, but which make the characters who they are. Once, at a Teen Writers Workshop, one of the kids asked, “How can you say you don’t know everything about your character? Didn’t you make him up?” Yes, and no. It’s a little like getting to know any flesh-and-blood person. There are layers there that need to be explored.
Piling it on:
Went to two different libraries yesterday. The top two are books I had requested through interlibrary loan; the rest are books that just caught my attention as I browsed (alone! sans children!) the stacks. Empires of Light, by Jill Jonnes, and Joplin’s Ghost, by Tananarive Due, are linked by a mysterious thread that will be revealed with the next edition of Lit for All. The Patriots is for novel research; the rest are for fun. I know, pretty ambitious for someone who finished reading a whopping one novel in all of January.
