I just looked at the top 20 best-sellers at Amazon. Here is what I found.
Fifteen of the 20 are nonfiction.
Six are nutrition/diet books. Three of those are in the top 10.
The first fiction book comes in at #9. It’s 50 Shades of Gray.
My conclusion: If I want a guaranteed best seller, I should write a diet book with lots of sex in it.
***
To my loyal followers, I am not dead. I simply dropped this ball for a while. I will be back with regularity in mid to late April.
Hello? Hello? Anybody still out here?
If so, you may have noticed that my blog has been experiencing a deathlike silence since late October. Indeed, there is a bluish tinge to its lips, and its eyes stare glassily at the sky.
But wait! Is that a slight rise to its chest? If I hold a mirror to its mouth, will steam cloud its surface?
Perhaps, but its survival will require intubation. A slow drip of creativity. An iron-willed lung to breathe the life back into it.
The doctors say that, with time, therapy, and support from loved ones, a full recovery is possible.
Tomorrow is the official release date of The Hobbit (part I). Until now, I’ve been feigning mild interest in the movie, with a hint of cynicism. ”How nice,” I said, when I heard the movie was being made. “I hope it doesn’t suck.”
Yes, I’ve been playing it cool…being all, “I’ll see it when the crowds die down” and ”Let’s wait and see what the reviews say, because you know how it is with sequels.”
But behind this cynical facade, deep in the childlike heart I keep hidden from the world*, hope and excitement have been growing. First I heard they’re getting Howard Shore to do the music. Then the announcement was made that Martin Freeman was to play Bilbo, and I thought, hey, this thing could really be good. Who better to play Bilbo Baggins than the guy who portrayed the hapless Arthur Dent so convincingly?
But I didn’t say that out loud. At least, not in public.
My burgeoning hope faltered with the announcement that The Hobbit would be three movies instead of one. “Oh, they’re just milking it for all the dollars they can get.”
You thought it, too. Admit it.
Maybe it’s true. But as long as they do a good job, do their motivations really matter? If all three movies are great, then don’t they deserve to make a dollar or two? Aren’t you excited at the prospect of having parts II and III to look forward to, just as we all looked forward to parts II and III of The Lord of the Rings?
So now that the movie is about to be released, now that I’ve seen the previews, read the interviews, and re-watched episodes of Sherlock, I am willing to admit it: I can’t wait to see this movie. In fact, if I had prosthetic hairy feet and the right wardrobe, I would dress up like a hobbit and go to tonight’s late-night showing.
—–
*My own, not someone else’s that I keep in a jar on my desk.
Today I unveil the shared story begun on the first day of Coffin Hop 2012. I have to hand it to you people. You rock.
The fun part of this exercise is seeing the different writing styles. I see hints of Victorian gothic tone and Lovecraftian imagery, with a flare of heavy metal sentiment to spice it up. Some contributors chose to explore the atmosphere of the story, others provided background. Some steadfastly tried to forward the plot, while others knocked the plot onto another set of tracks.
In short, the story’s a mess.
And now, it’s up to me to end it. In five sentences or less.* Egads and little fishes!
But first, the winners! The shared story contest winner is Eric Tolles. He wins a copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury, and an e-book of Valknut: The Binding, by me. The grand prize winner is Nina D’Arcangela. She wins the TESSpecFic pack of five e-books, pictured below, plus e-books of my short stories Rose in Winter and Hell Hole. Your comments were appreciated.
And now, the story. (My contributions are boldfaced.)
The Thing in the Closet. And…that Other Thing Out the Window
David Garley watched the tree shadows dance on wall above his bed and prayed for the darkness to end. He was supposed to be asleep. Tomorrow was Halloween and a school day, so his mom had sent him to bed before nine o’clock to “stock up on sleep” for the big night ahead.
Sleep. Ha. As if he’d ever be able to get to sleep early. He might not sleep at all. He’d lain awake past midnight every night for the last two weeks. But this had nothing to do with the excitement of Halloween.
It had more to do with the dread.
Dread of the sound in the closet; the one that slapped and bumped. The one that sounded like something had crawled up out of the ocean and hidden in the darkness.
At twelve-years-old, David believed in fact, not make-believe. He discovered early that storks didn’t carry babies and that his dad swiped teeth for change. But all that common sense couldn’t deny the truth…when he stabbed the pumpkin from Bradbury’s farm, it screamed.
That resulting scream was David’s first glimpse into the world beyond the one he had taken for granted. Now he could see how the lines blurred and the veil lifted. Staring into the abyss of his newfound knowledge, he was chilled to the marrow in his young bones.
This clarity of vision convinced him the noises in the closet were malignant. They had grown more persistent as Halloween approached, until tonight. The persistent sounds were accompanied by a fetid stench of something rotten and unclean. In his mind, he was brave enough to investigate, but when he swung his thin legs to the floor, his muscles seemed frozen.
He kept a flashlight on the nightstand next to his alarm clock. A silver chain with attached crucifix generally hung from his lamp, but that night, he’d worn it to bed. His aluminum bat, a present from his father for the new baseball season, was propped between the bed and nightstand. Gripping it with one hand gave him the strength to stand. Then he palmed the flashlight.
The moon slipped out from behind the clouds that had hidden half of its face like Erik’s mask and twisted the limbs of the tree outside his window into fingers playing shadow puppets on the far wall of his room. He watched as a rabbit mutated into something misshapen; with horns and far more appendages than anything born of this world. Its teeth were legion. Some other landscape had spit that creature from its belly, and David’s bones chilled at the thought of the mouth that could smile upon such a monstrosity or the breast that could nurture it.
David snapped the flashlight on, aiming its beam like a sword at the beast. The light flickered.
The beast vanished in the yellow, fading light, but David knew that it would be back the moment he shone his light on any other part of the room. The sounds in the closet had morphed into low growl. Ten thousand years of fight-versus-flight glued David to his spot on the floor, his eyes and ears filling his body with terror.
The growl seemed to be getting closer. Was it in truth, or was it just in his head? His heart was now racing, he began to fear it was about to explode.
“David?”
He jumped. The flashlight slipped from his hand. Clattering on the floor. It’s light skittering wildly over the wall as it rolled.
“David, what are you still doing up?” His mother flicked on the light switch. He blinked against the burn. She stood in the doorway, hand on her hip. He pointed at the closet and the fetid odor that still crept out from its depth.
David had always been a strange child, special. It had been a tough pregnancy, and a deadly birth; his biological mother, Sarah’s twin sister, died. Sarah and her husband took David in, and cared for him as their own, despite the way darkness and unnatural coincidence seemed to love David as much as they did.
His mother’s arrival changed the parameters. Whether he had been born of her body or not, she’d always been there for him, his security in an often confusing world, in all ways his mother. As if his weak flashlight beam had suddenly flared to illuminate the situation, he realized that this time he must be her protection against a horror she did not understand.
The sounds in the closet changed from sounding like a feral animal to seeming more like a guttural human growl. Then the growl took the form of one low, menacing word repeated over and over: “Sarah.” David had never heard the voice before, but his mother’s eyes widened in more than just terror at hearing someone speaking from behind the closet door.
Sarah backed from the closet, her lips forming the same word over and over, soundless as though from lack of air.
Willie.
And David knew what that thing in the closet had to be. From childhood, he’d heard stories of Weird Uncle Willie, who had died in the electric chair when his mother was a child. Cousins whispered rumors in his ear that Willie was the true cause of David’s real mother’s death, that she died of fright when Weird Uncle Willie caught her in her hospital room, alone except for baby David in her arms.
And now Willie was back for Sarah.
The closet door creaked open. And a man-shaped thing immerged, its flesh rotting and falling away from the bone. It reached for Sarah. She screamed and stumbled over a chair. As Willie bent over her, David ripped the crucifix from his neck and thrust it into the monster’s face. But Willie swept it away and knocked David against the wall. Stunned, David slid to the floor. The only mother he’d ever known would die, and he couldn’t stop it.
As Willie’s bone-tipped fingers reached for Sarah’s throat, a crash came at the window in a spray of glass. The misshapen beast swept into the room on wings of black ice. It seized the corpse of Weird Uncle Willie, winding him in the grip of its countless appendages. Then, in a wind tainted by decay and death, it hurtled through the window and was gone.
David looked at the closet, now standing open and empty, and knew it would never hold anything but clothes again.
*Okay, way more than five sentences. But I had a lot of loose ends to tie up. Hopefully I got most of them.
Welcome Coffin Hoppers and other friends! I’m excited to announce that the e-book for my dark humor short story Hell Hole is now available for sale.
Strike that. The Hell Hole e-book is available for free! For the next three days! (After which, the price will be 99 cents (or your country’s equivalent).)
Here’s the blurb.
Whoever said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” probably shouldn’t have said it to Dent Bergman. For twenty years, he’s been trying to beat Peter Gaston—at golf, women, anything. Peter always wins. But today, that streak is about to end. Or is it?
As a special bonus, I’ve included JW Manus’s short The Devil His Due, plus a sample of my dark urban fantasy thriller, Valknut: The Binding. (I’m still trying to figure out how to hyphenate “dark urban fantasy thriller,” or whether I even should. Opinions?)
Hell Hole first appeared in The Anthology from Hell, edited by Julia S. Mandala. The guidelines for this anthology said submitted stories were to have hell clichés for titles. I chose Hell Hole because I felt had loads of potential.
And then I got brain lock.
I tried writing stories about a kid’s messy bedroom, a disreputable bar, an outhouse…. I even tried to write one about mole hills, which were sprouting up in our yard at the time. All attempts died timely and well-deserved deaths.
The deadline grew near. I grew desperate.
“I don’t know what to do,” I told my husband. “Coma patients have more imagination than I have. What is this story about?!”
“It’s a golf story,” he said.
Dope slap.
My first draft was finished in about two days.
Now go forth and hop for Coffin Hop 2013!
***
Special thanks go to JW Manus, without whom this e-book might not have been built until the year 2020. She is a meticulous and creative builder of e-books. Check out her website, where she gives great advice for building better e-books. You can also hire her services, if you don’t want to get your hands dirty with all that HTML.
My thanks also go to Glenn Sixbury, who encouraged me to write a story for Anthology from Hell: Humorous Stories from WAY Down Under, and to Julia Mandala, who bought my story for the anthology. If you enjoy a bit of dark humor by people like Mike Resnick, Robert Sheckley, Spider Robinson, and Lawrence Watt-Evans (…and me), you can pick up the Anthology from Hell e-book from Amazon or Smashwords. Or you can order a print version from Yard Dog Press or Amazon.
***
Leave a comment any time by the end of Halloween and you’ll be entered in the weeks’s grand prize drawing for the TESSpecFic Pack of five e-books, pictured here, plus e-books of my short stories Rose in Winter and Hell Hole. If you want to know more about Coffin Hop, click here.
The Corridors of the Dead, by Jonathan Allen
Stolen Climates, by Aniko Carmean
100 unfortunate Days, by Penelope Crowe
The Imaginings, by Paul D. Dail
Valknut: The Binding, by Marie Loughin (Me!!)
In honor of Halloween and Coffin Hop 2012, I’ve decided to share an excerpt from my dark urban fantasy, Valknut: The Binding. Since the first chapter is available for free at Amazon, it makes sense to share something else. Something fitting for the season.
(But no spoilers.)
First, a little background. Valknut: The Binding is set in current times, but several scenes flash back decades before protagonist Lennie Cook was born. I think I can share one of these flashback scenes with you without giving too much away.
So, for your Halloween pleasure, I’ve selected an excerpt sliced from the middle of a scene set in 1893. It stars William “Red” Galloway and Angus Cook, two railroad employees laying track in the Big Horn Mountains. The two men have inadvertently caused a landslide. Their “Bossman” has given them the task of clearing the rubble. But Red and Angus find much more than rocks in the debris….
Red planted his shovel where he had found the bone and began to dig. Angus watched for a moment, then put the cigarette away and joined in with his hands. They found more bone fragments, but nothing conclusive until Red found part of a jaw. Looked human. He held it up to the light for a better look. Angus kept digging.
“Whoa, I think I got somethin’, Red. Somethin’ big!” Angus stood over a patch of white that gleamed through the dirt. “And hooo-wee—it sure smells bad.”
It didn’t look like bone from where Red stood. Too big. He hunkered down next to Angus to help dig. After a few minutes’ work, they had uncovered something as large as a horse and wound in white string. Dirt-crusted tufts of dark fur poked through the bindings.
“Maybe it’s some kinda art-ee-fact,” Red said. “I hear them collectors pay good money for old Indian crap.”
Angus shook his head. “Nah, that string looks too clean to be that old. And it smells deader’n a skunk in a beaver trap.” He waved a hand in front of his face. “Phew! Maybe we should let it alone.”
“Don’t go all knock-kneed on me, Angus. Whatever it is, it might be worth somethin’ to someone.” Red glanced nervously at the wagons, half-expecting to see the Bossman coming toward them. “Let’s have a look. We can always hide it and come back for it later.”
Red tugged at the string, trying to break it. It felt flimsy and soft, but it held firm. He braced himself and pulled harder. The string bit through his skin and pain shot up his arm. He swore and let go, staring at his bleeding finger. “What the hell?”
“Here, let me.” Angus dug in his pocket and came up with a buck knife. He opened it and slid the blade under a few strands. They parted easily. Angus grinned. “I guess my knife’s a mite sharper’n yer finger. Now, lessee if —”
He paused, eyes large in surprise. Red leaned forward to see what was wrong. The cut ends of the string hissed and crackled, shriveling away. The sight chilled him, though he couldn’t say why. He touched one end and jerked his hand back in pain. A blister formed instantly on his fingertip.
Not shriveling—burning. Like a lit fuse. How could a steel blade do that? He staggered back, shouting a warning to Angus. The thing didn’t explode, but the ground shook and a roaring filled Red’s ears as the remaining string loosened and fell away. Before him, in a slaughterhouse reek, stood a gigantic wolf, its head on level with his own. Its jaws gaped wide, propped open by a black-handled knife with a long, bronze blade. Its eyes glowed yellow in the sun. Red cried out, backing away. He tripped and sprawled on the ground under its cancerous gaze.
Through his fear, he heard Angus laugh. “Why, it ain’t nothin’ but an ol’ statue.”
Red watched in horror as Angus stepped closer to the wolf and slapped it on the flank. He grinned. “Whaddaya so scared of?”
The wolf swung its head around and fixed Angus with its yellow eyes. Angus froze, bug-eyed and open mouthed.
“Run!” Red shouted, forgetting his own danger. “Run, you stupid bastard!”
But Angus didn’t move. The wolf braced its paw against the bronze knife’s hilt and pushed downward. The blade came out with the sound of a shoe sucking free of mud and clattered on the rocky ground.
The Bossman’s furious voice shouted at Red from behind. “What the hell is going on here?”
Afraid to move, Red tried to whisper a warning. The Bossman ignored him. Flushed, neck veins throbbing visibly, he stumped over to Angus and began yelling as if this were just another regular day of work. “What’s the matter with you? The snow’s already flying in Montana and you’re just standing around. And as for you, Red, I see you over there taking a nap. If you think I won’t dock your pay, you’re sadly mistaken—”
The wolf uttered a growl so low Red couldn’t hear it. But he felt it through the rocks under his back. The Bossman felt it, too. He turned, his mouth still flapping, and his words became screams. The wolf leaped and buried its muzzle into the Bossman’s neck, ending his life as he lived it—mouth wide open and making noise.
Red stared, unbelieving, as the Bossman’s twitching body hit the ground. He knew he should run, but didn’t want to leave Angus. Besides, he wasn’t sure he had enough strength to stand.
The wolf turned back to Angus. Its mouth hung open in an obscene parody of a smile, tongue lolling out over its teeth. Angus still hadn’t moved or even changed his expression. The wolf licked the blood-soaked fur around its mouth and stepped closer. Red found he could stand after all. He picked up his shovel, uncertain whether to attack or run while the wolf’s attention was on Angus. Not liking either option, he screamed at the other workers for help.
The wolf looked at him. They will not hear you.
Red heard the words in his fear-crazed mind and screamed again, waving the shovel in the air, but the workers unloaded ties as though nothing were amiss.
The wolf’s head swung back to Angus. You, I shall not kill.
As though to make a lie of its words, the wolf’s mouth opened wide. To Red’s fear-crazed mind, it seemed as though its upper jaw touched the sky and its lower jaw scraped the ground. It engulfed Angus, swallowing him whole.
This, thought Red, would be a good time to run.
But before he could move, the wolf sat on its haunches and began to howl. The sound rose in the air so thick and full that Red could almost see it. And as it howled, the wolf began to shrink. Fur sloughed from it in great handfuls, disappearing before it hit the ground. Its muzzle shortened. Its ears turned inside out and flattened to its skull, the points becoming rounded, tufts of fur thinning to a few wiry strands. Its body thickened in some places, shrank in others, reshaping itself, until the wolf was gone. In its place crouched Angus, naked and feral.
Exhausted by fear, unable to accept what he had just seen, Red wanted to believe the man before him was Angus, that it had all been a dream or a bad joke. But the lifeless body of the Bossman told him otherwise. And so did the rim of blood matting the beard around Angus’s mouth.
The wolf who was now Angus examined its new body, flexing muscles, working the joints. Then it picked up the sledgehammer and turned on Red.
Nothing of Angus remained in its eyes.
***
As you might guess, things continue to go poorly for ol’ Red through the rest of the scene. But perhaps not in ways you might expect…
You can find the Valknut: The Binding e-book at Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and most other online outlets.
Leave a comment any time this week and you’ll be entered in the weeks’s grand prize drawing for the TESSpecFic pack of five e-books, pictured here, plus e-books of my short stories Rose in Winter and Hell Hole (coming soon). If you want to know more about Coffin Hop, click here.
The Corridors of the Dead, by Jonathan Allen
Stolen Climates, by Aniko Carmean
100 unfortunate Days, by Penelope Crowe
The Imaginings, by Paul D. Dail
Valknut: The Binding, by Marie Loughin (Me!!)
Not everyone wants visitors on Halloween…
In my world, Halloween begins today. If I had more talent, I would write a song. It would be called “The Eight Days of Halloween,” and it would go something like this:
On the first day of Halloween
My blog will bring to you
A spooky shared story
And a prize…
Obviously, I’m not that talented. Besides, I’d be hard pressed to come up with 36 prizes to give away over the next week.
But, like the song says, I bring to you a shared story. And a prize.
I’ve included the opening lines of the story below and am inviting all of you to add up to three sentences in the comments. The comments will be sorted oldest to newest. Read what everyone else has written and add your sentences to the end. Feel free to come back each day and add another 1-3 sentences. Only one addition per day per person, please. That means each person can add to the story up to seven times.
The comments for this post will close on October 30th, at which time I will write the ending of the story in five sentences or less. The resulting mess—er, story will be posted on Thursday, November 1. (I reserve the right to omit from the story any comments that do not make sense. And keep it friendly for the PG13 audience.)
About those prizes: I will be giving away a hardback edition of my favorite Halloween read, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, plus an e-book edition of my dark Urban Fantasy, Valknut: The Binding. Each addition to the story counts as one entry for the prize (up to 7 entries per person). Any story additions added to the comments by the time I go to bed tonight (around 11:00pm Vancouver (Pacific) Time) will be entered for both today’s prize and the grand prize (which will be explained in my next post because this post is getting far too complicated).
And now, here is the story’s opening. Go forth and write!
David Garley watched the tree shadows dance on wall above his bed and prayed for the darkness to end. He was supposed to be asleep. Tomorrow was Halloween and a school day, so his mom had sent him to bed before nine o’clock to “stock up on sleep” for the big night ahead.
Sleep. Ha. As if he’d ever be able to get to sleep early. He might not sleep at all. He’d lain awake past midnight every night for the last two weeks. But this had nothing to do with the excitement of Halloween.
It had more to do with the dread.
NOTE: This post is part of Coffin Hop 2012. If you don’t know what that means, read here. Some terrific authors are offering stories, games, and prizes for your digital Halloween goody bags. If you want to knock on their doors, click on anything on my site that says Coffin Hop to find their links.
Ah, October, when leaves fall and trees reach their bony fingers to the sky, when I think of Snoopy and the Red Baron and candy sorted into little piles on my bedroom floor.
How sad to be all grown up, denied the races across darkened lawns. Nevermore to shriek in delighted terror when Freddy or Jason or Frankenstein pops from the neighbor’s bushes.
But wait! There’s still a way for us all-grown-uppers to share in Halloween thrills. It’s Coffin Hopping we will go. Trick-or-treating at digital doors, where writers of horror will open their bags of goodies to share with those who dare to stop by.
And don’t be afraid to stop back for seconds…or thirds…or even sevenths. In our neighborhood, Halloween lasts seven days.
The fun starts tomorrow (October 24) and continues through Halloween. I’ll be posting several times during the next week with Halloween thoughts, reviews, and possibly some new fiction.
Oh, and prizes, so be sure to say “trick-or-treat”!
Quick note: Halloween quickly approaches, my favorite time of year. To celebrate, I will be participating in Coffin Hop next week. This is an event sponsored by writers of horror and dark fiction. To be honest, I don’t totally understand how a blog hop works, but I will be (hopefully) posting a piece of flash fiction, announcing publication of a short story e-book, and giving away some books. You’ll also be able to explore the work of other talented horror and genre writers. So stop by (a few times) and help me celebrate Halloween. 
And now, back to my irregularly scheduled program…
A couple of days ago, in need of some light action-adventure, I watched Clash of the Titans (2010). I was saving this movie on my DVR for this very purpose. I had forgotten that I’d already seen the movie.
It seems odd that I would forget a movie that I had probably seen within the last year. Especially when it’s full of monsters and magic and men in short skirts – like just the sort of thing I should like. So why did it take a full ten minutes of film time for me to realize I’d seen it before?
Aside from the obvious reason (I had another birthday last week – dang things just keep piling up), I suspect I forgot the movie because it is, well, completely forgettable. And I don’t just mean the acting. It would be delusionally optimistic to expect good acting in a movie featuring giant god figures, sea monsters, scorpions as big as Greyhound busses, and humanoids that appear to be made of wood. I don’t watch such movies for the acting. Nor do I expect brilliant plotting, so that can’t be the problem, either.
But I do expect the plot to be coherent, and that is where the disappointment begins.
The story of Perseus from Greek mythology is convoluted and full of interesting characters. It is a quest story, in which Perseus completes a series of strange and dangerous tasks, slaying the sea monster and winning the hand Andromeda along the way. The story presents a moviemaker with lots of appealing material to work with.
Unfortunately, these moviemakers didn’t make coherent use of it.
Let’s start with the sea monster. In the following clip, Zeus delivers what has become the movie’s most immortal line.
*
Pretty scary, eh? As CGA monsters go, this one is pretty good. Except that a Kraken is a Norse sea monster from the cold waters of the Norwegian Sea. And a Kraken is a giant squid. No clawed hands attached.
It’s hard to imagine why the moviemakers didn’t use the Greek name Cetos (or Ketos) for the monster. That would totally end-around the squid confusion. I suspect it’s because they didn’t know how to pronounce Cetos. (Note: In Ovid, the sea monster is called the “Draco,” which means “dragon” in Latin. There is a Draco in this movie, but he’s human. And he’s working with Perseus to defeat the Kraken. Irony abounds.)
While we are on the subject of misplaced creatures, take another look at the film clip. What’s that stirring in the background behind the Almighty Zeus? Why, it’s a bald eagle, best known as an American national symbol. Because is found only in North America! Don’t the Mediterranean Islands have eagles of their own?
And then there’s the addition of the bark-faced people during the battle with the giant scorpions. I can let the scorpions ride. At least scorpions do live in Greece. But those bark-faced people turn out to be Djinn. Which, last time I checked, were part of Persian mythology. What exactly does the inclusion of a Persian Djinn person to Perseus’s troupe add to the story? I mean, besides another character available to die at the right time? If that’s all they needed, why not use something Greek, like a centaur or minotaur?
These foreign creatures were not the only instances where the moviemakers needlessly altered the mythology. At the start of Perseus’s quest, he is told he must go to Norn Mountain to seek answers from Stygian witches. These witches are indeed from Greek mythology. (They are called the Graeae, but I can hardly blame the moviemakers for changing their name to “Stygian witches.” I’m not sure even the Greeks know how to pronounce Graeae.)
But Norn Mountain? Norn? Really? Maybe I just didn’t hear that right.
Enough nitpicking. None of these deviations actually ruined the movie for me. I’m easily entertained. Monsters and magic and men in short skirts, remember? No, for me, the deathblow for this film’s credibility was the fiasco that passes as a love story between Perseus and Io. This deviation is so wrong and awkward that I can’t even find a good analogy to express myself.
You see, it would be awfully hard for Io to have adventures with Perseus when she spends most of her time disguised as a cow. (No, really – read it here. )
Why on earth did the moviemakers choose to throw Io into the mix when they had a perfectly good love interest in Andromeda? If They wanted a strong female character to join Perseus’s quest party, how about some random Amazon? How about making her an equal with the other warriors in his crew, rather than a weak love interest? If the addition of Io is a deflection of the “rescue the maiden” story, why not instead make Andromeda a strong enough character to withstand accusations of sexism?
What were this movie’s writers thinking?!
<*Pant, pant.*>
Clearly I’m making too much of this (especially since the movie was released two years ago). Bad movies have been made before. Mythology has been abused before. It’s just…WHY? The story was practically written for them. Why did they have to make it worse?
Will no one ever make a decent movie using Greek mythology?
(Feel free to make suggestions in the comments, if you know of a good Greek mythology movie that I’ve missed.)
Okay, so I’ve been MIA from my blog for far too long. We won’t even talk about that New Years Goal that shall be buried in the graveyard of laughable promises. I have many excuses, but none of them are particularly interesting. So instead, I will share this video by my new YouTube love, storyteller Olan Rogers.
Even his name conjures happiness.
Olan. Yessss.
Brought to me by Daughter the Second.
Recent Posts
