Here are some fireworks to start off a New Year that I hope will be happy and bright, peaceful and healthy for everyone.
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Author Archives: Ginger
Views near Golden Grove
At this time of year the days are short, and the light is precious. Here’s a photo from 2006, with best wishes for a radiant holiday season!
Feeding the movie queue monster
Dan and I are having trouble keeping our Netflix queue full. We just don’t hear of good movies to add to the queue as quickly as we watch the movies that are already in it. Most of the methods we’ve tried to find more movies we might like haven’t succeeded very well:
- Adding movies that look good in the trailers that come with other movies. This system works well for weeding out movies we *don’t* want to see, but there are some real duds out there whose only good moments are those incorporated into the trailer. Great trailer, lousy movie. Who was to know?
- Adding movies to the queue based on recommendations from friends. You’d think this would work really well, but we were surprised. Some of our extraordinary, smart, and delightful friends recommend the most ordinary and dull movies. In particular, we’ve learned never to trust the “hot” movies that everyone is seeing and talking about right now. By the time they make it to DVD they are no longer “hot” and often of little inherent worth.
- Using the Netflix recommendations (“Movies You’ll ‘Heart’”). The results of this, as nearly as I can tell, are totally random and useless.
- Adding movies directed by the same person as other movies we like. This isn’t a bad system if the director is consistently good. For example, Ridley Scott was, for the most part, a great success for us. However, any director’s oeuvre is limited, but our Netflix queue never ends.
But finally we have hit upon a system that works.
We ask my mother.
She is unerringly on the mark.
It’s gotten kind of scary. Dan always puts my mother’s recommendations at the top of the queue. And we always really like them. I think my mother is nervous now about recommending additional movies to us. The stakes keep getting higher.
Her most recent success was Vantage Point, a movie that tells the story of an attempted terrorist coup from a number of different but unexpectedly related perspectives, each layer adding depth and complexity to the story. It’s also a nonstop action movie that would do the TV series 24—the only ongoing TV show that I like—proud.
The movie that this reminds me of the most is Crash, which portrays the multifaceted interactions in the lives of a number of complete strangers in Los Angeles, some of whom meet by automobile crash or hijacking and some of whom never meet. We actually saw Crash twice, and enjoyed it both times. Frighteningly, this was another of my mother’s recommendations. Tonight I discovered that there is a name for this type of movie, and there are members of the genre Dan and I haven’t yet seen. Food for the queue monster.
Other movies that share this quality are Memento, Run Lola Run, and Babel. We liked all of these, too. I wish there were a Web site where you could enter the names of some particular movies, and it would tell you others that are in some way similar.
But meanwhile, Mom, you’ve scored again. Please keep those recommendations coming.
And, dear reader, I’m open to *your* recommendations, too!
Views near Golden Grove
The winter sun sets far to the south of the lighthouse. From our house we look through the sparse trees on the nature preserve to our south, across Sachem Pond, over the dunes, and to the sea beyond.
“Those are very pretty sunsets,” my mother comments, “but they don’t look like winter sunsets.”
“What does a winter sunset look like?” I ask.
“Well… colder. Less colorful.”
Sorry to disappoint you, Mom, but we get wonderfully colorful winter sunsets. Here’s one from November 20th.
Views near Golden Grove
This was a sad weekend, because it was our last weekend on the island this year. We are in exile until spring. But the island rewarded us with a beautiful sunset just after 4pm as we were packing up the car. I am especially fond of the ones when there is a sunglade across Sachem Pond.
Communications in the ferry terminal on the island seemed to have come down to the bare essentials. Maybe it’s the deadening effect of the cold weather that rolled in this weekend along with biting winds. There are, as anyone on the island surely knows, two doors to the waiting room in the terminal, one marked with an official sign that says: “Entrance Only”. The other bears the corresponding official sign: “Exit Only”. Beneath the “Entrance Only” sign, someone had taped a hand-lettered piece of paper reading: “IN”. And sure enough, they had also taped a hand-lettered sign beneath the “Exit Only” sign: “OUT”. Just to be perfectly clear about this.
Meanwhile, the following conversation took place in the waiting room.
Person 1: It sure did get cold today, didn’t it.
Person 2: Yup. But maybe it’ll get warm again sooner or later.
Person 1: Yup, maybe it will, sooner or later.
Well, duh! If spring doesn’t do the trick, maybe global warming will.
Goodbye, island! Until spring! Or global warming, whichever comes first! 🙂
Writers Block
Writers block. It’s in the air. Last Wednesday my friend Jagi Lamplighter Wright wrote a blog entry about it. And for the last few weeks I’ve been struggling with it.
Since breaking through the block that barricaded the final scene in The Last Lord of Eden (as described in my blog post of September 13th and that of October 4th), I’ve gotten all tangled up in rewriting An Appointed Time. And so I’ve managed to do just about everything else, some of it high on my avoidance list, while An Appointed Time is opened up like a patient on the operating table. But I can’t bring myself to put An Appointed Time back together again in the new way. Even though it’s going to be ever so much better, honest.
Here’s how it happened.
About 66,000 words into The Last Lord of Eden, my protagonist rather forcefully let me know that he didn’t want to be a married man. And more to the point, his wife agreed. The problem is that I married the two of them off toward the end of An Appointed Time in a chapter that one of my friendly reviewers long ago suggested was just a little bit boring. The book will be better off without it.
However, as now written, An Appointed Time leads to this marriage as surely as the Yellow Brick Road leads to Oz. In order to have the option not to marry the two of them, I have to make changes that reverberate all the way back to the beginning of the book.
This has turned out to be a Good Thing, because the extent of the required rewrite also enabled me to scrap major parts of the first two chapters and begin the action where it should begin instead of way back in the back story where I tend to begin things.
And now that I have the patient opened up on the table, I see that I can consolidate two separate minor characters into one character, who will therefore become an interesting character in his own right. And this, in turn, gives our heroine a more believable motive for something she does that gets her into a lot of trouble.
So An Appointed Time is getting a revamp from start to finish. But it’s bloody hard work, all this throwing out of the good stuff I’ve written in order to make room for the even better stuff that will replace it. No wonder I’ve been avoiding it. This makes submitting the flex account receipts, rebalancing the retirement investments, following up on medical bills, making airline reservations, and preparing the documentation for 2009 taxes all look like enjoyable tasks.
I think I’m in trouble.
Views near Golden Grove
No doubt this was inevitable. We have watched a sunset that evolved so beautifully that I can’t pick just one picture. So here are five pictures taken over the course of twenty-five breathtaking minutes on November 21, 2009.
The sun comes out from behind the clouds just as it sets.
After going down, the sun lights up the cloud bank to the east from beneath.
The sun has already set, but the sky show isn’t finished.
Views near Golden Grove
It’s been five or six weeks since we’ve been on the island: much too long! The island seems not to hold a grudge, however, and gave us three wonderful sunsets in as many afternoons this weekend. We were heading home as the sun set on Sunday, but we stopped to snap this shot over the Great Salt Pond.
Quote of the day
“When all else fails, try modern technology.”
Yeah, Mom, for better or for worse technology can definitely make things, well, different. In some ways.
Whimsical buddha
You never know when or where you might get an idea for a new blog post. Or for a new story or novel, for that matter. Or for how to live your life. It’s not just the dark inner creative places where these things bubble up from; it’s also the sum of your experiences and your relationships and your emotions and thoughts and dreams, and your way of making connections among these things.
Looking over the statistics for this blog for the last few days, I noted a search that had resulted in two views. The search term was “whimsical buddha”.
What was this person looking for? And why? Did he find it?
Would I be disappointed if I knew?
Well, I don’t know, but I do have a whimsical buddha for my mystery searcher, wherever he is, if he’s still looking. The buddha sits in the garden at night in the drenching early April rain. “He looks so forlorn,” I say to Dan. “I feel sorry for anyone who has to be out in the rain on a night like this.”
“Oh–just a minute,” replies my kind-hearted husband, and the next thing I know he too is out in the cold rain carrying an umbrella, to lend the poor buddha a hand.
