Odds and Ends

I just had a lovely long weekend in Western Michigan (which was overly humid, even on the water, but otherwise quite nice), visiting family and attending my cousin's wedding. As much as I love to travel, and as nice a time as I had, I'm very relieved that I don't need to leave New England again until August! Packing and repacking certainly can wear a person out.

News in brief: Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and subsequent books are being republished with a launch that treats them like new books. This is tremendously exciting to me, as A Wrinkle in Time was a pivitol book for me. I long held out hope of being a quantum physicist so that I could figure out the actual science behind the tesseract. Alas, my skill seems to be more in imagining possibilities than in doing any actual science, as is reflected by my grades in calculus.

Question of the day: How did writer's residencies/retreats come to be, and who still uses them? As a married person, the idea of moving both myself and my spouse in order to get free rent for a number of months in a town that doesn't allow for a good commute seems less helpful to me than, say, a check. The ones associated with universities make more sense--the writer is actually there to interact with the students a few days a week, making a commute worthwhile (as those usually also come with a reasonable stipend). Beyond that, I'm sort of baffled by the concept, how it works, and who it works for.

Movies and Thoughts

I just watched Stranger than Fiction, which was excellent. I think it was probably a really challening role for Will Farrell, because he's not just a doof--he actually has a full range of emotions and comes off as a really amazing guy. It's also a great look at what story means, and what choices writers make, and why they decide to make them. I don't usually go for really touching movies, but I thought this movie was really touching and I liked it a whole lot. Maybe not quite as much as Lyrics and Music, but I think on the whole it was a better movie.

--

On a completely different note, I've started reading Wicked Lovely, which I'll write about once I've finished it. (Just to keep melissa_writing from being in suspense, I'm really enjoying it so far.) Between reading and watching the movie tonight, I figured something out:

The Hobbomock novel and the Tuatha de Danan novel, which I thought were the same story, are, in fact, not. The concepts I wanted to explore by writing about the Danans are really not going to work with the plot that I had set up. Which means I'll either have to drop that plot to explore the ideas, or I'll have to drop the ideas for the sake of the plot. (Or I'll have to separate them and let them each go their own ways.)

The theme of the story with Hobbomock in it was supposed to be about the relationship between the main character and her sibling, who is dead/missing/crazy (hadn't decided yet). The story with the Danans was meant to find out what it means that the Tuatha de Danan, who were thought to be gods, were defeated by humans and sent underground, where they became the same as the Fomorians. I was struggling to find the link that brought those two ideas together, the character who would bridge the main character from the Hobbomock story with the Danans.

I found her today, and I think she has her own story to tell. She's not interested in what Hobbomock has to say at all.

So I'm a bit back to the drawing board--but I think it's in a good way. I don't have deadlines on either of these stories, so I have plenty of time to explore what this separation means.