BOOKS AT CHRISTMAS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Not Christmas books. Those are books about Christmas…or they are not about Christmas – just set then. Great Christmas movies? Bah, humbug! That was a hint about a great Christmas movie. I’ll leave you to discover it on your own.
   Christmas movies?
   Batman Returns.
   Lethal Weapon.
   STAR WARS.
   A James Bond film. You’ll have to guess which one, as many of them are shown at Christmas – which makes practically all of them Christmas movies. Do you know how Christmas trees are grown? I’ll leave you to discover that on your own.
   Christmas movies. Okay. But Christmas books? Do I read Christmas-themed books at this time of year? What would I consider a book with a Christmas theme? There’s an obvious candidate by Charles Dickens.
   The Chronicles of Narnia feature…koff, koff, spoiler alert…okay, eternal winter, and no Christmas as a major theme. So maybe, just maybe, if you do believe in fairies, talking lions, and Turkish Delight…Christmas might return to Narnia. Don’t accept sweets from strangers.
   It’s easier for C.S. Lewis to add Santa Claus to The Lord of the Rings than for J.R.R. Tolkien to add Galadriel to The Chronicles of Narnia. Tolkien couldn’t stand the thought of Santa Claus ripping down fictional barriers and being a guest star in a fantasy land. Mainly as he’d been busy as fuck impersonating Santa in letters to his children.
   Narnia is all the better for having Santa Claus in it. If, indeed, Santa puts in an appearance at all. I’ll leave you to discover that on your own.
   Do I consider Christmas books to be those with snowy settings? Is there more to it than that? Vitally, is there less to it than that? For reasons of the plot, C.S. Lewis gave us a Christmassy story. And there is snow. The snow also melts away, in the end.
   What about a story with a Christmas connection, angle, or timeline? The Midnight Folk, by John Masefield, leads to a very festive sequel called The Box of Delights. Perhaps the setting becomes more Christmassy for being written in the mid-1930s. But what sort of festivities feature in Masefield’s tale? I’ll leave you…etc.
   Scrooge inhabits Christmas. He is haunted by it. That was a spooky spoiler. In the land of Narnia, it’s always winter. Christmas was frozen out. Until…ah, but that’s a spoiler. I suppose there are stories you forget are set in December…
   But there are fantastical tales that don’t have the month of December in them, or any other month of the year. Those stories develop their own calendars. And may yet be Christmassy as fuck.
   There’s a rule about much-loved classics. Beware those who tout the phrase around. Particularly if they insert the word holiday into proceedings. A much-loved holiday classic. One we’ve never heard of.
   To return to the movies for a moment…animated movies…there’s a cartoonish cartoon based on the much-loved classic book I’d never heard of. The Polar Express. What the fuck is that, and why the fuck does everyone in the cartoon look like melted rubber?
   You may vomit at the very concept of Narnia, and that’s your business.
   Perhaps you’ll barely make it through more than five minutes of The Lord of the Rings. I read the whole thing and discovered that I’d never need to read one of Tolkien’s stories ever again. C.S. Lewis, being eminently more readable, and with a sense of humour, is an author I return to. But not specifically at Christmas.
   So what of books at Christmas? Not Christmas books. Books I find myself reading at Christmas. Oh. Gifts. Christmas presents. If I think of those books, they aren’t Christmassy in scope, theme, and use of language…
   The best gift of a book at Christmas is always one you are going to buy for yourself, as you know roughly what your own taste in books is like…though even you might unpleasantly surprise yourself with an ill-thought-out choice. So buyer beware – never surprise yourself with an off-kilter purchase.
   But always delight in an off-kilter purchase that proved true.
   You are not buying yourself a Christmas present. No. It’s a festive excuse to buy a book. As if you fucking needed an excuse. You aren’t going to wrap it and leave it under the tree for a stunned you to pick up in wonderment.
   For years, I’d just buy myself music I’d heard somewhere. That was my festive treat. Always have a back-up – music to listen to. I still buy music in, around this time of year. But the point of this blog is to consider books, and not festive discounts on music purchases.
   Books are great gifts if you like the books given. And if the books aren’t for you, they are for someone. Have I ever given away books I received as gifts? People have always chosen well, when furnishing the gift of a book.
   So…that’s never come up. It would be awkward to receive a duplicate of a book. But there are checks and balances in place. What would you like? Do you already have BLAH DE BLAH? I find that saves a lot of bother.
   It would be nice to receive an entire bookcase as a gift for more books that’ll turn up sooner rather than later. But I’d have to be asked if I have space for yet another bookcase. The answer is always NO, and then I conjure up more space anyway.
   How many books sneaked into the house this year? I never care to hear the answer. Why not? I always think the answer is around five. And it never fucking is. How many books leave the house? That’s the tricky part.
   I haven’t had a charity clearout in some time. And I didn’t dump much on the charity shops, even then. If I really need to, I’ll cast a cold eye over one or two volumes. Then I’ll take them to that nice farm in the country, and I’ll point out the rabbits.
   How many books have come into the house in the month of December? That’s easy. No books. So now I’ll set myself an easy challenge. How many books will have come into the house by December’s end?
   No more than…five…is my guess. And I will try to hold true to that. How? I’ll just not buy any. But wait a bit. There are things on order. Damn it. Yes. That’s true. How many? I have no clue. You see, I don’t want to know, and I don’t need to know.
   It’s true. I count my books by tonnage and not by volumes. The only thing stopping the floors collapsing is the lack of floorspace for more bookcases. It’s a complex mathematical calculation, to be sure. And it goes like this…
   Floorspace is represented by the symbol F.
   U, or Utility, covers the usefulness of the assembled volumes.
   From Einstein’s formula, we have C – in this case, standing for CASE. That’s the type of unit which absorbs floorspace and holds books.
   K gives us F.U.C.K. That’s what I think when I have to think of the number of books already here. The K might as well stand for KETAMINE at this point. I’m going to be on horse tranquilisers just thinking about moving another bookcase to make room.
   But I need not add five books to the library this festive-tide. I suspect five. There are 30 days left. If I want to be picky, I wouldn’t place bets on books arriving after Christmas itself. And we have to knock off a few days for lack of postal activity.
   Then there’s a week in which I will be recovering from the annual food coma. Last year I decided to cut back, and foolishly added parsnips to the Christmas dinner. I should have added lumps of concrete. Less filling.
   I suppose the most Christmassy book of all is a Christmas cookery book. That’s a gift once, just in time to be no use that year. But forever available for study, thereafter. I don’t believe I have any cookery books in the library. It’s better just to get on with the cooking.
   But that flies in the face of an entire industry, based around festive meals! So? Do any of these cookery books implore you not to add fucking parsnips to a meal that you are already trying to cut back on?
   Didn’t think so.
   I am reminded of Christmas annuals. Hardback anthologies of comic book characters. They year would always be the next one. So a 2024 Christmas annual is dated 2025. The format is for the next year. You are getting to buy the book early for Christmas, even though it’s technically a book for the New Year. Just a publishing quirk, designed to flog as many copies as possible. It’s like a sell-by date for a much-loved classic.
   A quick online check of Christmas annuals shows this chicanery is still going on.
   This blog post is now host to a question. Will there be more than five new books in the house, by month’s end? It’ll be a very short blog in January.

FILLING NON-EXISTENT GAPS ON BOOKSHELVES AND ORPHAN-RESCUE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Once every thousand million years or so – I’m under-exaggerating – I thoroughly check the bookshelves for non-existent gaps. And I also check for misplaced books in an unbalanced run of volumes. Orphans feature in this narrative. What the hell does any of that mean?
   It means my writerly library of physical books is stacked according to size and not going by the alphabet. Books go where they fit. You do your very best to keep a series on one shelf. And, in the time-honoured fashion, the first book in a series sits on the right of the shelf at the start of that series.
   So you can pick up a few books at a time, in reading order, of course. Reading order when you sit them down on a table, that is. Top to bottom and first to last.
   But…
   As Mercurial time passes, errors in this perfect system sneak in. You read the latest book in a series and set it down on a shelf. Any shelf will do. You are in a great hurry to save a pizza, and will fix all that book stuff later. No. You’ve created an orphan. Having finished the book, you move on to another tale. And the orphan remains lost in the tall trees. Okay, other books. They are trees.
   Books are trees by another name. Informative trees. Books are informative trees. A thousand million years passed by this week, and it was time to organise things I believed were already organised. Just triple double-checking.
   I started hunting out obvious candidates. Round up the usual suspects. You know the drill. That stray Dashiell Hammett volume that skipped town to commit murder in the dark. Reunite that bad boy with the other gangsters. One last heist. That always ends well.
   On my quest to discover misplaced tomes, I stumbled across a video recommended to me by Doctor Google. This was a video on decluttering. There are loads of ways to throw things out. Fifty ways to leave your bookcase…for recycling or demolition. What is the rule of 5 decluttering? Or the 12 12 12 rule? What is the 333 rule? Or the 20 20 rule. What is the 90 90 rule? Or the rule of 9…rings for mortal men. Doomed to die.
   What the fuck is Scandinavian Death Cleaning? Is it a band, and have any of the members been arrested for setting fire to churches? Is it Norwegian Death Cleaning, and is that the same as Swedish Death Cleaning?
   I saved time by not investigating the different rules of decluttering. On with the decluttering video, at double speed. Skipping the slow parts.
   An American woman told me she decluttered her house by no longer purchasing high heels or tampons. I somehow dimly suspected I was not the target audience of her particular video, and that the advice would prove useless in the extreme. There is no need to keep physical copies of movies, now that streaming services are so popular and versatile. Right?
   What of the other videos recommended next to this one? Same look to almost all of them. An American woman would warn me about the clutter of high heels, tampons, and movie discs in assorted formats and containers. But one video stood out.
   Another woman warned me not to abandon physical media. She was stockpiling movie discs to see her through the nuclear apocalypse. I stared at my bookshelves. My mission wasn’t to declutter anything. In the Digital Age, it was still important to me to keep all these physical books in some lunatic semblance of order. After all, they were bought and paid for.
   The declutterers of this world would accuse me of shuffling deck-chairs on the Titanic. That lone Hammett volume must shift from this bookcase to that bookcase. Orphan-rescue. And there’ll be adjustments along the way. No shelf is jam-packed so tight that you can’t get a book back out.
   Most shelves have a bit of wiggle-room to see them through. Books are stacked on top of each other when the shelf is half-empty. That’s now a mid-shelf bookend, to stop the rest of the books falling into the gap from the crater edges. Gradually, gaps fill. But there are also non-existent gaps…
   Damn it. There are two books in a series. I wonder if that writer scribbled any more? (Checks internet notes.) Damn it, there are another eight in the series. Now I must create a non-existent gap. Books in a series go together, if they can all fit on the shelf.
   Adjustments along the way. I don’t think I have a bookcase with fixed shelves. That’s insanity. A fixed mid-level shelf for stability, yes. It’s time to play the sub-game of Spreadsheet Purchasing Bingo and resetting adjustable shelves. Height is a factor. Width of a book is important. But height is your main enemy.
   I see those two books, and raise you the other eight. Spreadsheet Bingo. Wait. The paperbacks are all expensive. I can buy all the hardbacks for a third of the price? What sorcery is this?! Hey, I’ll take it. Luckily, there’s an old dodge here.
   The top of the bookcase is a shelf unto itself. One side is rammed against the wall. And I have a bookend that’ll hold the other side in place. This is a non-existent gap. I relocate two authors from crowded areas elsewhere. They take up a bit of space. Some books are now lying flat on the top of this lofty structure.
   Time to fill the non-existent gap. Buy these three books for one author’s series. Now order those hardbacks. But remember to buy that book from the one cheap place online. The volumes arrive in separate bags over the course of the week. Bingo! We have a full shelf.
   The dodge of using the top of the bookcase? That ignores height. I don’t have to adjust any shelves to take account of the taller hardbacks mixed in with diminutive paperbacks. It’s just you, me, and the ceiling, sport. I use the bibliography page of a writer’s Wikipedia entry to make sure these non-existent gaps are filled in the right reading order.
   Proper, right, chronological reading order. Hmm. This works for most writers and their books. Some of them go back and write prequels or interludes between tales at a later date. The reading order of Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories is guided by the rule of Chaos. And who is to say that’s a bad thing?
   You can read The Chronicles of Narnia in any order you please. Just be sure to read the last one last. C.S. Lewis has no say in that, of course. But read the last one last. To re-read that series now, I’d most likely start with The Magician’s Nephew.
   Reading order brings me, rather messily, to that other matter: misplaced books in an unbalanced run of volumes. What the hell is that? It’s about making adjustments. This stretch of books must move to a new shelf or a new bookcase or even across the hall into another room full of more bookcases.
   If I abandoned physical media, I’d declutter my library so heavily that the floor would spring back up once the obsolete bookcases were removed from those overburdened floorboards. Can’t have that. Empty rooms, easy to navigate across in a straight line, are no fun. Beware them.
   Yes, I juggle books. That’s what this is about. I pick up a row of books sandwiched between outstretched hands on outstretched arms. And I mostly manage to carry those from the old shelf to the new shelf. Occasionally, there’s an accident. Collapse. I pick the books up and stack them in the same order. Or so I think. I’ve unknowingly created orphans in the otherwise orderly pile.
   Lone Wolf and Cub. Yes, I know. The series is NUMBERED. I didn’t drop any while moving them. I sat the stories down on a table in stacks and then put one stack in the wrong order. A quick glance at the result showed enough numbered copies in the right order to fool the eye with a devious optical delusion.
   Anyway, I am on the hunt. And I spot stuff like that. Until next time, of course.
   Orphans. Books divorced from a series. Jumbled reading order. Sometimes that’s down to the original author. Realising a writer went on to write more books? Now I have non-existent gaps to fill. And, possibly, shelves to adjust as I make books fit in.
   There’s no decluttering here. Not if I am completing a series and creating a gap in a shelf to fill it. Instead of decluttering – throwing things out or giving them away – I am maximising the space on those bookshelves. A quick poll shows that the top of almost every bookcase is a shelf that holds even more books.
   Here, there, for technical reasons, this is not true. I have to be able to reach light switches. Do I really, though? No. Bookcases block light. That’s why there are so many extra lamps providing illumination from floor switches. The floor switches that aren’t blocked off by bookcases, that is.

BELATED VIEWING OF A PILOT EPISODE. RINGS OF PAH!: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

 

This one I came late to, on the basis that I’m no Johnny Tolkien fan. More of a Clive Staples kind of reader, truth be told. Though Clive Staples Lewis sounds like an unexpected office brawl, come to think.
   I was invited to mock the opening episode of Johnny Tolkien’s Amazon Prime’s The Lord of the Flies, Damn Flies, and Statistics Rings: The Infinity Gauntlet of Bigby Rings of Power – brought to you by Darth Bezos and Weetabix.
   Indeed. I may have made some of that up.
   Context. I haven’t read The Hobbit. But I did read The Lord of the Rings. I’ve read The Chronicles of Narnia, which has such a huge spoiler for it as a series that it is a huge spoiler just admitting there’s a huge spoiler for it. And I won’t spoil it for you. Clive can do that on his own time. What else? I watched The Lord of the Rings as animation before I watched the live trilogy of movies.
   If I ever tell you I’m a massive fan of The Silmarillion, it’s a coded warning that I’ve been kidnapped for ransom.
   I had to check notes for this next bit. Apparently, I was once invited to watch a Hobbit movie. It didn’t matter if I’d missed one. And it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t see the next one. So I guessed I’d be watching the middle one of the three padded movies.
   Normally, I would never do this. I’m going out on a stout limb here and stating that I don’t watch the second movie in a series unless I’ve seen the first. What does this all mean? It means I’ve now done this terrible deed, this crime against cinema, once, and once was enough.
   Also, the movie itself was a crime against cinema, padded to fuck, and quite the terrible deed. Something about a giant gold statue of a dwarf melting like a pack of butter and filling a swimming pool for a dragon to bathe in. There were a few dwarf characters as well, but it wasn’t worth paying attention to any of that.
   So. You will understand that I could never be a butt-hurt Johnny Tolkien fan, coming in here with my brand of criticism while cultishly praying to The One True Text. (Yes, The Brand of Criticism is a magical Dungeons & Dragons sword. And that…is a roleplaying fact.) No. That’s not the angle, here.
   By contrast against the non-fun movie about a Hobbit, the Narnia movies were fun. Far from perfect, true. But there was enough spirit to see you through to the end. Unless you were Disney, who bowed out after the second film in the series for reasons of corporate soullessness.
   The problem was that Disney needed a lordly ringly movie spree of its own about a wizarding bunch of English schoolkids caught up in magical adventures. Far better to stick to the source material provided by Lewis, than attempt a mish-mash of other franchises for the sake of a quick buck. Would’ve made more money by not trying to make more money chasing other franchises and their Balrogian shadows.
   After the third one, minus Disney, the moviemakers were really pinning their hearts to their sleeves in plugging the idea of a fourth movie about Eustace and Jill. It was not to be, Chéri.
   I am no butt-hurt fan of the land of Narnia the book series being ruined for eternity by Narnia the movie series. No. Even the harshest fans of the books-to-movies will tell you that Will Poulter was terrific casting as Eustace. In other matters, matters of story, were there some bewildering choices for those movies? Yes.
   You didn’t have to go to New Zealand to make Narnia come to life. That was a Tolkien-franchise-based thing. Do I care about accuracy to the sacred text? I don’t see the talking lion as a big furry golden Jesus-figure, and you don’t have to either if you don’t want to.
   No matter how shitty the adaptation from book to movie, the book is still there if you want to read it. And that’s always the harshest lesson to remember. The thing that you liked initially…is still around. We need reminding of that, from time to time.
   I’m looking at you, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Dullness. Not merely the worst Indy movie I’ve seen, but one of the worst movies I’ve seen. But the trilogy is available to watch. The thing you liked is still here.
   Sadly, I must return to the business of Johnny Tolkien. Too many people turned Tolkien into a business. The movies based around Smaug the dragon and the giant dwarf statue and Tolkieny shenanigans…they were padded to fuck, but made their money. Yes. The business of Tolkien.
   Tolkien’s son Christopher was saddened to see that Peter Jackson’s crew gutted the book and turned it into an action movie…
   He referred to The Lord of the Rings, but he also applied that to the impending film about Bilbo. Should have been a TV series. It wasn’t. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Trilogy is something I won’t be watching. Tolkien’s lore deserved a long-form approach. Television. Episodic. Building a world.
   And so, someone somewhere decided they could do a prequel. There was a TV series. By Amazon. Bezos. Massive fan of Middle Earth shenanigans. He sat there in a Star Trek shirt on his dick-shaped spaceship, contemplated Middle Earth, pondered his orb, and said Make it so.
   Cue Game of Thrones with its introductory map sequence set to jaunty music.
   I guess it’s better to have a dick-shaped spaceship than a spaceship-shaped dick. Depends on the sci-fi franchise. Back to Tolkien, though we’ll be detouring into a testicle-shaped spaceship eventually.
   What are the criticisms of this lamentable TV project? I am not here to have a go at the acting. So what is worth criticising? This folly. The format of the show, which we’ll return to. Criticism?
   It rewrites Tolkien! Big fucking deal. Tolkien rewrote Tolkien, and he was Tolkien for fuck’s sake. Once The Lord of the Rings became a thing, The Hobbit underwent some revision to bring it into line with the later history. Tolkien’s choice.
   Criticism. Events in the history are compressed for the sake of the TV show.
   Big fucking deal. Go back to The Lord of the Rings at the movies and watch Gandalf ride majestically to the parchment version of the National Database, in search of evidence on the One True Ring. He might be gone for a few weeks. We’ll be generous and say a month. There and back again, he doesn’t spend more than…wait. Read the book. See how long it takes for Gandalf to reason things out. Seventeen years.
   Rewriting Tolkien and compressing events are hardly criticisms. So where does the TV show go wrong? It’s fucking boring. Nothing happens in episode one. There are no stakes. Evil is gone and we cannot find it. Well, fuck all the dwarf prostitutes, hide my lunch, call me hungry, does Gollum still shit in the woods – and would that make for a more exciting TV experience? No, no, it wouldn’t.
   Generally, my tolerance for a new TV show reaches the point of crisis after fifteen minutes. I’ll know, within that time, whether or not I am going to switch off. Rarely, I’ll finish the first episode in full and then decide the show is not for me. But for the most part your goodwill, as a writing team, as a production crew, dies in the sixteenth minute of a show if nothing worthwhile happens in the first quarter-hour.
   I won’t name two shows. One I quit after six minutes. The other I left two minutes in – but I was playing it at double speed. So I guess I quit in the first minute, two minutes in. Yes, I almost always watch YouTube videos at double speed, to save time. If I could do that with all of your empty movies and ponderous TV shows, I fucking would.
   Amazon wanted their Game of Thrones experience. Yes, that one ended well. I’d seen the first series of that show, and stopped reading the books after a while when it occurred to me that G.R.R. Martin was a step below J.R.R. Tolkien in the sense that Tolkien was still alive after the conclusion of his large fantasy tale. If Martin lives to finish writing, I may return to his saga – from the start, obviously. Or, y’know, maybe fucking not.
   The Amazon TV version of Tolkien didn’t move fast enough at the very beginning. We have Galadriel narrating past events for us, as happened in the movie version of Tolkien’s world. And that’s the problem. We need to make this like Tolkien, which means we’ve only vaguely made it like Peter Jackson’s version of something like Tolkien. We’re in the general area, right? There’s a map, to guide us.
   I believe Amazon spent most of the budget on Elf Wallpaper™ and Google Middle Earth Maps®. Seriously, what is it with this fucking map? It shows us we are in another part of the land, somewhere, and people are not doing stuff in each location. Okay.
   Yes, yes, the beginning. It’s…the opening of The Lord of the Rings again. Galadriel narrates the history of evil, which, in this case, is the story of Morgoth, who – in a fit of anti-social tree rage – cuts down the Christmas lights on two mighty English Elvish oaks. Or something.
   There’s no Christmas in Tolkien. No Santa Claus. There is a Santa Claus over in Narnia, though. That pissed Tolkien right off. You can’t have Santa in Narnia, but you can alienate your readers by placing Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings.
  Why is Tom Bombadil the first to be cut from adaptations? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the way he treats that One True Ring as if it doesn’t exist and has no hold over him. No explanation. If you smoked weed while reading the books, you were into him. And if you were dropping tabs of LSD like Legolas dropping fools with his bow, then I guess you fucking loved Tom Bombadil, man. ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE NOT STONED READING THE STORY…not so much.
   Right. Morgoth is evil. He doesn’t like Christmas trees. They aren’t Christmas trees. Stop that. Even with the fairy lights. So Morgoth is ushered on and almost instantly ushered back off. His minion, Sauron, is soon ushered on and off again.
   It’s hard to care. The main antagonist in The Lord of the Rings is the One True Ring, not Sauron. Sauron has a walk-on part at best. He is remote. A pantomime threat. Where is Sauron? He’s behind you! The Ring, though. With its whispers, and temptations, promises, and sense of power. It’s the villain of the piece.
   And in a fucking prequel…is absent. Oppenheimer is having trouble gathering enough fissile material for its construction. So the story is about Galadriel and her search for evil. She piles helmets up into a muddy mound, commemorating the deaths of 300 Spartans, and regrets wearing clean willowy dresses on spattered battlefields.
   Don’t worry. She changes into Jeanne d’Arc’s battle armour soon enough. And we get this ice cliff climb that does nothing. Start that fucking scene on the icy wastes with the wind blowing and people falling behind, not on this sub-par Tomb Raider cliff climbing exercise. She’s looking for evil, but evil isn’t coming looking for her. Fuck. What’s the point of all this, then? Speed this up, for fuck’s sake.
   We are inter-cutting throughout, going to the prototype Hobbits and then to the doomed Elf-Mortal romance that borrows from The Lord of the Rings. Plots with not much going on in them.
   Who are the antler folk? Doesn’t fucking matter who the fucking antler folk are. Forget the fucking fucketty antler folk. Apparently, it mattered to Gary Oldman levels of EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!! when watching the trailer.
   But the trailer isn’t meant to showcase the TV show. It is just meant to promise you lies, damn flies, and statistics. Statistically, around a third of people watching actually finished the show.
   We’re in the realm of streaming and data-mining the streams to see who loved the…oh. Just below two-thirds of the audience fucked off before the end, sparing their eyes, ears, and brains, I guess.
   Too many characters spouting deep meaningful meaningless words from the ancient scrolls of Live, Laugh, Love. This is the internet bitches, and the fans turned up to Die, Scowl, Hate. Whole lotta nothing going on. But that doesn’t even begin to cover it. Back to the non-story…
   So Paladin GIRL BOSS Jeanne D’Arc LARA CROFT Galadriel and her D&D party go into this winter dungeon, see. They gaslight the lone inhabitant into being a monster, kill the beastie, and… gain experience points so they can go up a level. Oh, and Sauron’s been leaving a QR code around the place, to remind everyone that evil’s been up in ya business, ya bitches.
   I’d have started this episode with the testicle spaceship landing on a blasted heath. Fire up The Ride of the Valkyries, boys; sounds like Wagner’s back on the menu.
   Galadriel returns home and has to attend a town council meeting to receive some kind of STAR WARS medal. These town council meetings are always the fucking same. The rebellious character is on to something, but the elders don’t want her interfering. So she’s dragged back from the latest scraped knee incident to be given a final warning about not doing the thing.
   At which point, she proceeds to fuck off and she does the thing she was not meant to be doing – leading to adventure. Except for that very last part. Her reward at the meeting is to sail to Elf Heaven on a boat that is so fucking viciously green-screened that I cannot say the visuals were the best thing about this pilot episode.
   No. The best thing was the end of the pilot episode and the lessening of the burden on my shattered mind. I no longer had a shred of mocking commentary left in me.
   Commentary. You shouldn’t be in a position to provide live commentary for an opening episode. Or, indeed, for any episode. You should be swept up in a world and not swept out to sea.
   I’d have quit at the CGI snow troll fight if I hadn’t been asked to watch the whole pilot. Fuuuck. I am angered at the lack of quality in the writing of this non-episode, and, reminder, folks, I am no Johnny Tolkien fan. Even I was pissed off at this drivel.
   Galadriel’s reward is to sail to a big golden light. I thought for a second that Barbie and Oppenheimer had somehow come together in an imperfect fusion of mash-ups drawing The Lord of the Rings into the same orbit. Sauronheimer: The Barbie Incident.
   But no. That would have been a mercy. And faster-paced. Galadriel sails a stormy sea. On a boat with everyone standing upright and not swaying. At least on Star Trek they’d lean to the side when the ship was hit. Elf scientist Mr Spock confirms this, when he’s not singing about Bilbo.
   I think I’d rather just have the green background, if I’m brutally honest. Look at the amazing background visuals of the sea! And wince in pain at the truly fucking atrocious foreground nonsense going on there.
   Pros: it’s a pilot episode I never have to bother with again. Cons: everyone else listing pros and cons mentions great visuals as a pro. It’s a fucking lie. Watch and wince in agony at the CGI troll fight and this sheer buffoonery on the boat. Paging Ralph Bakshi. Ralph Bakshi to reception.
   ANYWAY, Galadriel is about five seconds from Elf Heaven when she makes the sort of rash decision that would get you killed under all other circumstances. This absolute megacorporate soulsucking fuck-muppet of a diluted non-character jumps overboard so she can swim an ocean in search of evil. Shit like that will get you killed in Dungeons & Dragons, real life, and most bleak movies.
   But not in Amazon’s version of Middle England Earth: The Land that Plot Forgot. What else is there? Racial slurs for Elf characters. Mysterious cow poisoning. More Sauron QR code nonsense. And waiting for the pre-Hobbit character Dolly MacGoodGollyMissMolly to run off and have a fucking adventure for fuck’s sake.
   Galadriel is not the only diluted fuck-muppet of a character in the show. And here, we must acknowledge that there’s a bit of a problem. When you are talking about the rings, three of them end up with the Elves. And we can quote the opening to the movie, for this bit.
   One word will do.
   IMMORTAL. Elves are immortal.
   I was there, Gandalf, three thousand years ago, when Tolkien himself signed away the movie rights.
   So how do you deal with immortal characters? This is what leads to time-compression in the timeline. You can keep throwing the immortals into the story, but your pre-Hobbits and your other mortal types will have story segments as long as the life-expectancy of a flailing fly. One option would be to do a detailed story of mortal characters, with the immortals restricted to cameos.
   Cameos for Galadriel? That would actually work. Mortal characters across many lands and many years are there to uncover the clues. Only the immortal Galadriel, Elrond, and Kelly Osbourne can fit the clues together, over time. Yes, you’d have to keep replenishing the mortal characters, but you’d do it from batch of episodes to batch of episodes, year after year.
   That’s one way. Incidentally, the very exact number of eight episodes was a contractual thing. The rights to TV shows longer than eight episodes live on in the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie. Something to do with the legal powers of the Witch-king of Angmar, Saul Zaentz. Operating from beyond the grave, beyond the pale, and beyond belief.
   No, Galadriel isn’t the only fuck-muppet of a diluted character. Yes, part of the problem lies in the immortal qualities of certain characters. In other words, all the Elf characters in this TV show are pointless. That’s despite having pointed ears.
   Did I mention I preferred the Narnia movies, and that I thought Susan’s romance with Prince Caspian wasn’t on my bingo card of things that really upset Hitler?
   The Rings of Power. Or. The Pangs of Hunger for a story. Oh, and don’t forget a guy fell out of the sky inside a ball-shaped spaceship disguised as a rock. At which point I declared him the Last Son of Krypton.
   And I just didn’t care. Evil made a cow ill. How evil is that? Galadriel didn’t go to Elf Heaven. She’d have to work her way through a Peter Jackson movie trilogy to gain the Golden Ticket admitting her at long last to that Great Chocolate Factory in the sky.
   But, in the meantime, in this TV show, night swimming. Lots and fucking lots of it. I’m sure I missed out loads of the plot from this pilot episode. Just as the writers did. Oh, Kelly Osbourne popped in to offer to build a few rings of power, but the show seemed reluctant to mention this. I may be pronouncing Celebrimbor slightly off-key.
   At least Sexy Shelob™ didn’t turn up to turn heads and drain bodies. Even if parts of this show looked like a computer game.
   Someone call the burns unit. We’re admitting an entire cast and crew.
   Is it a criticism to say nothing much happened in this pilot episode? You can criticise Tolkien for that, too. He built a fucking world. And used that as the backdrop, the foreground, the side dishes, and everything else. Plot takes a back seat to majestic travel at times. Then the Ents appear, and the story REALLY paused for breath. Why would you expect a TV show set BEFORE the main action to be any differently-paced?
   Don’t trust Bezos, Mr Frodo.
   This guy in a loincloth landed on Horsell Common , much to the dismay of the pre-Hobbits and H.G. Wells. Dolly MacGoodGollyMissMolly and her chums must face the mystery of discovering whether or not this truly is Kal-El, Son of Krypton. Or possibly Braniac.
   Maybe he’s Bruce Wayne trying out a funky ejector seat, given that his Batmobile was sliced in twain by a Balrog named Bane. That would tie in to Galadriel’s arrival in Gotham City in episode two.
   What do these TV shows do for us? Not much. To quote Michael Moorcock out of context…
   They don’t ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what’s best for us.
   Moorcock’s criticism of Tolkien’s Middle England Earth, taken from last century, applies to the town council meeting in this century’s empty non-adaptation of bits of Tolkien’s wallpaper the writers were permitted to plunder from the back of that Weetabix packet for a duration of no more than eight episodes. Contractual obligation achievement unlocked.
   When the first thing out of their mouths is WE’VE PLOTTED AHEAD TO COVER FIVE YEARS OF THE SHOW, you know you’ll struggle to make it through episode one. Let me just watch the trailer again.
   Oof. That trailer music should have served as warning enough. Everyone in the trailer looks busy getting ready for some unspecified looming evil. Buy one Morgoth, and have a half-price Sauron whether you like it or not.
   The show has been out for a while, now. It is difficult to research any of it. When I go to the internet, the internet seems to be concerned with who Galadriel is dating. Is it the bad boy, Morgoth? Sauron, rebellious and daring on his motorbike, perhaps. Could it be Kylo Ren or Sauron-a-like Snoke? Rosemary the telephone operator? What about that mild-mannered janitor?
   Could be.
   And the reviews. Holy fucketty fuck. By all means, change your opinion over time. But some of those reviewers were breaking Olympic records when it came to doing the backflip over shifting the reviews around.
   If your initial review was about sweeping majesty and a show not afraid to take its time, I’ve got hot fucking news for you. The show was eight episodes long. You didn’t have time to climb an ice cliff, twirl a blade like a drum majorette waving off an ice troll as a joke, or go on a quest for evil only to find out evil’s gone away for the weekend.
   Your reward for your pointless side-quest shall be…retirement in Elf Heaven. Off you go, now. Remember, we know best. You are just a youngster, Galadriel. Don’t huff those mushrooms in the forest, now.
   Then the head of the town council is off to a wooden condominium in what will one day become Rivendell, with the rest of the afternoon spent scouring the Palantir for rumours of Sexy Shelob™. A massive burning eye blinks on there for a second, but it’s a known Microsoft Update glitch. Nothing to see here.
   What haven’t I talked about? Dolly MacGoodGollyMissMolly, the pre-Hobbit. That isn’t her name. No. Really, she’s Dolly O’GoodGollyMissMolly. The Hobbits, in case you haven’t read The Lord of the Rings, are unfeasibly, unswervingly, abso-fucking-lutely ENGLISH.
   This is not the case in the movies, but we’re here to talk about the pre-Hobbits from the TV show. The Harfoots. Or the O’Harfoots. Just call them O’Hare and be done, bejesus. When is a Hobbit not a Hobbit? When it is a pre-Hobbit, or a…LEPRECHAUN Harfoot.
   So there are these…
   …pauses, sensitively, then gives up…
   …travellers, see. Down-to-Earth. Salt of the very soil. We know that, as they are shorter people. And there’s a lilt to their accents, begorrah.
   Aye. Travellers, in wagons, who speak in a particular way. And they are scavenging for food. Soon the forces of Sauron will engineer a food shortage aimed specifically at the Little Folk. With their chirpy attitudes and their ragged clothes and their muddy faces, they’ll fuck off to America in search of gold.
   You won’t find America in Middle Earth, silly. Though you will find Amarehk in the works of Michael Moorcock.
   Why are they hiding from the antler folk? FORGET THE FUCKING ANTLER FOLK. We need to boost this plot with something. These pre-Hobbit travellers don’t live in the Pale. They live beyond it. Could we throw in a villain?
   Dark Lord Sauron, come on down, the price is right. For Amazon, the financial cost of being TV hobbyists was far from right. Sauron is wheeled on with all the subtlety of Darth Vader turning up for a cameo in your Spider-Man movie. Back to the Future we forgive for that kind of nonsense, but don’t push your luck.
   An episode devoted to Morgoth being a character…would’ve been handled just as badly, I’m sure.
   MORGOTH: I’ve left the keys in the ignition and you really have to use those sandwiches up by the weekend. Other than that, rock on my #dudebro.
   SAURON: (TEENAGE GIGGLING.)
   Other problems. A horse died making the second series of the show. And that is fucking tragic. Whether a show is great or not, any death associated with it is simply awful.
   If you whined about black people being in a TV show featuring magic fucking rings, I’ve no words for you. Why is there a black man in STAR WARS?! He’s a Stormtrooper! Yes, he is. And he’s in Tunisia, filming the very first STAR WARS movie. He’s removed his helmet for an informal photo-shoot, back in the 1970s. So why are you angry at John Boyega, decades later? Oh.
   I don’t believe there’s any way to finish on a positive note, which is why I kept these last points to the end. Hard to believe a horse died over this show. I’ve made it this far. Let’s wrap it up in a bow of barbed wire. I thought I’d type up an exercise in comedy. But you all know it is tragedy.
   They tore out Tolkien’s appendix and displayed it on TV, so we could watch it slowly decomposing into dust over the course of eight treacle-slow episodes. Or so I am told. I barely made it through episode one.
   One episode to ditch them all and to TV history consign them. In the land of Amazon, where the positive reviewers lie. Then they sit up and gasp as other people hold contrary opinions.
   Stop making insipid piss. Yes, it is a medical condition. The cure for insipid TV is to stop watching. Find something you like and watch that instead. Sounds like a plan. Luckily, it won’t take eight episodes of tree-porn to enact. And now we must take our leave of Tolkien’s appendix, the CGI festival of notes for an actual story, and we must watch anything else, maybe even everything else, instead.
   Gimli proffers his axe. But I’ll see your axe, Gimli, and raise a remote control.

MEETING SERIAL KILLERS OFF THE INTERNET: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

If you haven’t pissed people off, you haven’t lived.

   Reader, I’ve lived.

   (Shout out to Charlotte Brunty. Yes, I happen to like that spelling.)

*

The flip-side to making enemies is making friends. I’m going to use the f-word and the c-word in this blog post. If you are offended, it means you are alive and – at the very least – semi-awake.

   As I navigated my way across the internet, I encountered all sorts of authors…and people who would be authors if they turned the spotlight of fancy on the hidden notion of writing.

   For those people, writing is the deer caught in the headlights. Not for long. It darts into the forest and is never seen again. Even the non-writers I encounter online have many a story to tell. It’s not all about author-to-author contact.

   Mostly, but not all.

*

What strange writers do I encounter, if I encounter all sorts? Oh, the usual dead ones: former scribblers who step out of the past with the subtle hello of an atom bomb landing on your plate. The living literary typing types come in many varieties. There are people who just burble merrily along, and you wave as they burble at your wave.

   Occasionally there are writers who reach out for help in a moment of crisis. In response, I furnish as little harm as I can mismanage under the circus tenties. If you can’t do some good, at least avoid doing any bad.

   There are writers who handed me my jaw after I dropped it during a conversation in which I was stunned by the universe-forming eloquence of the non-me part of the chatter. Believe me when I say there’s no such thing as small-talk when writers are involved. I keep reminding myself of that, and I keep dropping that jaw in surprise at momentous thoughts wrapped in casual conversation.

   It’s nice just to show up to a chat like that and stay warm by the fire while the words hit me. (Yes, it’s a cold day as I type this and the heating is effing slow to respond this morning. Sensing a theme of warmth, if not sensing actual warmth.)

   As scribblers, we look for that wonderful thinky stuff everywhere and write it down if we catch sight of a glimmer.

   I’ve encountered tale-tellers who are in another universe. The searing glow from the luminous presence dazzles the vision, leaving an after-image that looks exactly like the scribbler. But that scribbler popped out to the shops for biscuits. All I’m seeing is everything left behind in words, dancing across the internet. Look at a light bulb and look away and you’ll still be staring at the light bulb, even though…

   The bulb popped out to the shops for biscuits. In another universe.

*

With surprise in the hearing of it, I was ambushed by online writers and non-writers who used the f-word and called me friend. An alarming number of people reached for the c-word and called me charming. I’ve been called the other c-word many a time.

   (If you haven’t been called a cunt in Scotland, you haven’t stepped outside your door. In this part of the world, it is a routine form of greeting. If they really like you, they’ll call you a fucking cunt. It’s all just banter until someone takes an axe to you. Then it’s banter…with an axe.)

   I don’t think of myself as charming, and I question the sanity of people who state this of me. As they are writers, I must question their sanity in any case.

*

All of this background material informs my view that I should never meet people off the internet – they are serial killers. Yes, the jaw-dropping writers, the luminous ones, the people who hauled me out of the water to call me a friend. I can’t shake the notion that they are all one sharp axe and a decaying log cabin away from a court-appointed date with destiny.

   That’s just Canadian/American cliché, though. The Canadians and Americans I’ve met online seem to live in cities and not the backwoods. When they aren’t living in armed compounds. You know who you are. Big shout out to you across your walled enclosure. No names – it’s harder to plot drone strikes that way.

*

Why do I think these people live in log cabins, with mass graves out in the backwoods? They are writers. And all writers take bleach to their internet search histories. Writers, far more often than murderers, become unhealthily obsessed with methods of body-disposal.

   There is a healthy level of obsession over methods of body-disposal – it’s about three internet searches in, but you’ll cross the line without even thinking it over. Not a pang of conscience. It’s “research” and not for actual murderising. Anyway…seeking reliable disposal of a body doesn’t automatically mean you offed someone. No, there’s a mere 98% chance of that.

*

How do I appear to these writers? My online persona is that of the perpetual grump, snarling at the world and all its petty nonsenses…but these writers don’t believe any of that guff. With a casual wave, my grizzly bear grump is transformed into the teddy-bear slump. I am dismissed as non-grumpy, and slide under the table…snaffling a few chocolate biscuits as I go.

   Having trouble shaking A.A. Milne from my thoughts.

*

Yes, I’ve been genuinely grumpy on and off. Online and off. If you haven’t pissed people off, you haven’t lived. And if you haven’t pissed people off online, you’ve never been online.

   Occasionally, very rarely, I’ve somehow managed to prove that I am not fictional. I once had this accusation hurled at me…

   You are a real person!

   The author in question was delighted to discover that I wasn’t an artificial intelligence project languishing in an electronic lab, let out onto the internet in search of world domination and great coffee.

   Another author couldn’t decide. Was I an unfeasibly young student treating everything as research for a paper? OR was I the sort of person to set an exam for that type of student, being, instead, a retired American professor? (Complete with Tweedy Outfit and a sideline of investigating murder mysteries. Portrayed by Angela Lansbury/Dick Van Dyke. Delete as inapplicable.)

*

One authorly contact nailed me as an online friend, with the distinction that I wasn’t quite in the real world…the way real-life friends are. I countered with the observation that the hour was late, and I had to return to Cair Paravel for supper with Aslan and the Pevensies.

*

Yes, the internet is in the real world, too, surprise, surprise. Tread far enough from one into the other and you’ll realise that one is patently absurd and nonsensical. The other is patently absurd and nonsensical and online.

*

Why haven’t I met these people on the internet and off the internet as well? Distance. For the Canadians and Americans the distance is great or greater, depending on the coast. My nearest internet contact is on this side of the Atlantic, but still too far away for a casual half-hour visit.

   Planning. Expense. Opportunity. The planning is always there. I accept the expense. But the opportunity isn’t an easy thing to arrange. The closest I came to meeting an author offline was an attempted hijacking, koff, koff, was an invitation to turn up at a concert. For that, a second author decided to fly in and create a literary club rather than treat the whole exercise as an informal meeting.

   But the timing was off, and I was spared the tedium of a transatlantic flight. Travel from here to there is one thing. But travel to and from airports to wait for flights…that’s something else. A something best wiped off the bottom portion of the shoe.

*

I know when I am invited to a town that I am invited to eat out of someone’s fridge. This is unspoken. You are staying with us and all our cats and lizards. Are you allergic to cats and lizards, or bats and wizards? The big question looms.

   What if I turn up and discover that everyone is simply appalling OR that everyone thinks I’m simply appalling and the peasants revolt with flaming torches to hand? I suspect I’d generate that effect by accident.

   It’s a bit much to travel thousands of miles and take up station in a person’s abode on the off-chance that your online persona handled in small doses will match the offline version in living 3D. I know I’d be accused of GREAT RESERVE in flying over and booking into a hotel. And buying touristy tours to go on, just in case everyone is wretched to me. How to fill the hours before the endless flight back to Scotlandia…

   That’s before we get into the business of axes and log cabins.

*

Yes, the prospect of flying to someone’s fridge and then having an awkward hour-long meeting before faking a heart attack and being carried off by a fake ambulance and fake paramedics who must be hired in any event…

   The prospect fills me with gloom. I must accept the expense, of course. Can’t I just fly in, mumble a few words, and eat chocolate cake? We’d all be happy, then.

   There are authors who believe me when I say that I’ve just hired a Scottish actor to impersonate me. It’s that simple. I’m a busty blonde woman in reality.

   That’s not true. But it doesn’t stop authors fearing this is the situation. Don’t you dare. That’s right. I mustn’t dare to be a Scottish actor impersonating a busty blonde woman. No good would come of it. I’d be the talk of the Wikipedia TALK page.

*

And so…

*

Here I am, facing the prospect of meeting an online person in the offline world. The f-word was used to describe me. How do I handle this real-life encounter, bearing in mind that the internet itself is still a subsection of real life…

   Much planning. Acceptable expense. Opporchancity? We’ll see. I’m standing…not sure where I’ll be standing. They’ve taken the map away. (No, seriously. It’ll be back after building work is finished. So I can’t even see a map of how it looked before the building started. That is so online strange.)

   I’m standing…let’s hope I’m standing. Waiting for a sign to pop up overhead. Downloading Online Friend: 9% complete.

   What’s 9% of that? Boots? The boots. Will there be boots? You download online friends into the offline world from the feet up, right? Otherwise, you are into floating head territory. I need to research this a bit more.

   If I go for a meeting with an online person and never return, then I’ve gone shopping for biscuits. In another universe.

THE VORTEX OF BLOG ALTERATION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Bloggeration.
   Foolishly, I decided to flip the layout around so that everything on the left went to the right and everything on the right vanished in a digital puff of cybersmoke.
   Well. Damn.

*

There were at least two options open to me, and I mean barely ajar when I say open.
   The third option...ah, but I have no goats to sacrifice, not-so-gentle druid. Off with ye.

*

One option was to summon code from the internet and use wallpaper paste to fix it in place.
   I didn't care for that messy option. You'd only know it worked or shirked once the paste set...
   The other, painless, option was...
   Well, if you are bludgeoned enough, you'll be desensitised to the pain.
   The other option was to click a different layout. Just hit that button and flip the switch. So easy to flip back again. I flipped the switch.

*

What fresh hell is this?!
   Much juggling, and some coding, later, I pretty much had the blog under control. If you think it looks a little different, you think rightly.
   Sadly, the capacity to generate snow is much-diminished. The snow is gone from my blog, quite possibly for eternity. Aslan chomped the White Witch in two, and spring returned to Narnia.
   Something like that.

*

I've also lost two of my titles from the slideshow. Amazon isn't recognising those. Either I fix the glitch or complain vigorously to someone else who can fix the glitch.

   Alternatively, I may reinstate the old carousel. Shaking the blog out, the odd dead moth falls to the carpet. And what an odd moth that dead moth is.

*

Upshot? I'm forced to include a new image on the blog banner, with the title mocking me as I look on. A Vampire's Hallowe'en sits unwritten as I type.
   Though, as I type more, that will change.

WAS THE FILM AS GOOD AS THE BOOK?: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

This is a pointless conversation. We'll have it anyway.
   Let us suppose there's such a thing as average reading speed. You fly through the text at a minute per page. We'll allow 250 words per page. Every second you take in around four words, and you manage to follow whatever-the-hell-it-is the author is trying to say.
   Now we'll call this book a novel and set the limit at a minimum of 75,000 words. Below that, the book is a squished doughnut, a biodegradable bra, a weapon of mass-extinction, or something cheap of your choice.
   That matters not.
   We'll let the reading speed collide with the word-count and suppose you devour the pages like a rat-bastard motherfucker. No account is taken of the requirement to empty your bladder.
   Maybe you just sit and piss anyway.
   The writer sticks to small words everyone understands. Remember the most important point: Latin is dead.
   You are reading this epic tale in a room devoid of distractions. Fuck, there isn't even a door out. The lack of door proves no distraction.
   There's zero breeze to blow the pages in your face. You never lose the place or slacken the pace.
   After three hundred minutes, you finish that book. Converted from the old money, this means you perused the tome for five hours.
   The movie adaptation comes out. That film runs for two hours. We'll throw the end-titles in on top of that out of niceness. Can you show a five-hour novel in a two-hour movie?
   Yes. As you read the book, you take in the descriptive passages. The author sets things up on the basis that reading is viewing. There's a lot more to it than that.
   Cinematic technique did not develop on its own. A shocker, I know. Film fans, get the fuck over it.
   We aren't surprised that books written pre-cinema come across as cinematic. The crossover terrain, dreams to cinema and back again, is vast.
   Dream and reality fuelled our fiction before we delved into the possibilities linked to persistence of vision. Cinema was an extension of human existence.
   Granted, cinema took on a few tricks and twists along the way. The flashback is pre-cinema. What about slow-motion? Writers may have written of everything slowing down suddenly, in tales written pre-cinema...
   But we write now of slo-mo as a definite cinematic technique worked back into the text we write down. Slyly, perhaps, we are angling for a movie deal as we make the text more cinematic.
   I have veered the fuck right off the point. When the movie of the book comes out, the descriptive passages are filmed.
   Seeing all the stuff in the movie transforms the original text. This allows lengthy descriptive passages to pass rapidly. Running-time is condensed. Well, you'd like to think so.
   Cinema is littered with examples of the photographed stage play.
   Yes, you can shrink the novel to movie-size without losing anything. What do you gain? Accents, whether or authentic or not. Effects. Same goes for practical effects - they may not be that special. And the computer generated imagery?
   The Chronicles of Narnia, transformed into movies, must feature battles. In writing battles, C.S. Lewis concerned himself with character rather than the blow-by-blow account.
   There was a battle. Sometimes, that's all that need be said in a novel. Lewis was content to stoke imagination, rather than nail every detail to the page.
   Movie-watchers may demand more than mere mention of a battle. Readers use imagination to fill in the blanks. Cinema-goers do this too, it's true. Not to the same extent.
   Books and movies are related creatures, occupying different pages of the Bestiary.
   So dare we enter into the non-argument over which is best? A great book poorly-adapted will still gain fans who weren't fans of the book. Deal with it, authors.
   A poor book that somehow transforms into a fantastic film? I don't think I have anything to say on that point.
   I understand the need to do a movie tie-in. But I don't care to see photo-covers torn from the movie plastered with NOW A MAJOR MOVIE iconography.
   My shelves are littered with paperbacks like that. Many are from some other century, koff koff, and the wording NOW may no longer be relevant.
   And the descriptor MAJOR might never have applied to the movie in question. Excuse my while I line up more comedy koffs.
   I will not disgrace this pointless chat by naming names. Except, of course, that I mentioned C.S. Lewis with purpose.
   So I won't name names and declare the book better than the film, though narrower than the T-shirt, while being as tall as the marketing opporchancity.
   That way lies madness.
   Was the story entertaining? And the movie? Does the book give you stirring character insight that must be shown using a glance in a time-constrained motion-picture?
   Can the cinematic wizards bring a strange world to life? Or does everything look as though it's been smeared in marmalade? Is the music intrusive?
   If there's music at all.
   Was the film a good story, as a film?
   Oh, and please. If you must match one against the other, at least read one and view the other. Don't pretend you've read something you haven't.
   Authors sometimes pretend not to have written something they clearly did, but that's another tale.

   

ZELDA WASSER AND THE DUKE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Sprays coffee everywhere.
   I was...
   MENTIONED in a video?!
   Don’t these people know I’m on the run?!
   Hell, if I weren’t on the run before...I am racing for my life now. I’ve mentioned Zelda before. HERE’S A BLOG POST ABOUT THAT. I’ll wait for you.

*

Empress Zelda Wasser, Queen of ZeldaLand, is to her nation what Jadis is to Narnia. Hmm. That makes her sound evil. But is Jadis really that bad? Free Turkish Delight comes at a cost, it’s true...
   I don’t routinely beam my book links on the Twitter. People tune that sort of publicity right out of their systems. Instead, I speak to the masses about #coffee - which I hashtag - and mints, on which I sometimes overdose.
   This is all part of my evil plan to engage in wordplay on a social media site. Because BUY MY BOOK BUY MY BOOK BUY MY BOOK just won’t cut it.
   And so.
   Tuning in for a spot of Twitter and discovering Zelda Wasser, I was astonished to be made privy to a terrible tale of internet interaction. By her own admission, Zelda has no concept of privacy.
   She shares information any serial killer would love to know.
   Here is a list of the firearms stored at my house. Come visit. We’ll be waiting for you.
   Zelda’s latest misadventure drew me in, yes, in real-time. I used the word privy with a sense of mischief. However, this is a family-based blog and...
   The Manson Family.
   Who the fuck am I kidding? Even I’m not sturdy enough to be reading some of the sick twisted shit I come up with, let alone the material I encounter online.
   Right before our very Tweets, Queen Zelda suddenly engaged in simultaneous correspondence with a gentleman from the Indian subcontinent.
   Was he made privy to Zelda? This tale was more incontinent than subcontinent. Suffice to say the gentleman’s predilection for showers of a golden hue knew no bounds.
   Would Zelda oblige?
   No. Though Zelda would blog about her experience.
   Zelda drew up plans. I’d already been dragged into those. She bestowed a Dukedom upon me. And there was talk of filling in on the shark patrol.
   New plans ripened. She decided to pull that old madwoman in the attic routine. (Fans of literary greatness, look away now.) Being the 21st Century, the shock twist involved use of a third-rate phone and some rambling.

*

While Zelda texted to the dick on the other end of two telephone lines, she shared her exploits live on the interwebs.
   On occasion, I perform blog maintenance. I ran through my blog posts, checking for consistency. Alas…
   The main update is to note that Zelda’s video is no longer on the interwebs, rendering this blog post obsolete. One man impersonated two men and chatted to Zelda and other Zelda. This was hilarious for all the wrong reasons.
   I guess you had to be there. And now, it’s all gone. Only notes left in the aftermath of glitches let you know what went down.

OFTEN, READERS JUST HAVE TO LUMP IT. NARNIA RAISED THIS POINT: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

In an earlier blog post, I wrote of posts that never make it to the blog. They are unfinished or unfinishable. I wasn't planning on using this material. Plans change.

*

Writers make mistakes.
   I'm not talking about typos. No. (I tend to type thongs when I reach for the word things. That is a keyboard layout problem. Also, something to do with wildly flailing fingers.)
   Mistakes.
   If you send a woman into a scene with one name and she exits stage-left under another name, your reason for this had best be plot-driven.
   I was thinking about the second woman as I typed up the first woman's adventures. The scene itself involved a woman and a man. Luckily, I nailed the error.
   Yes, I find myself drawing diagrams to help me through the madness of steering characters across the vast plain that is the story.
   Stick-figures will ALWAYS be in fashion.

*

Clive Staples Lewis. Lewis calls police. Clive is arrested.
   Lewis wrote all sorts of stuff. He is best-remembered for his books about Narnia. Characters from one world journey to another, and have adventures.
   Perhaps this is what Lewis did, moving from Belfast to England. He journeyed to another world and had adventures, carrying scraps of the earlier world with him.
   That is neither here nor there.
   In telling tales of Narnia, he did something that many readers think of as a big mistake. Characters have access to Narnia. They don't reach the magical place by the same means each time. Also, there's a shifting roster of participants in the tales.
   If you haven't read the stories, I'll gloss over that ending.
   But I'll talk about a side-point that features in the story. One character, Susan, let's call her the sensible one, doesn't turn up in the last book.
   She is no longer a friend of Narnia. Her access to the place is gone. Susan became too sensible to believe in Narnia. It was all just a silly game of childhood pretence.

*

Writers make mistakes. Readers do so, too. To what extent?
   The writer creates a tale.
   Once that tale flies free into the world, it is open to interpretation. The writer has to lump it. However...
   There may be things in that tale the writer determines as fixed. Immovable. Beyond wild interpretation. Often, readers just have to lump it. Narnia raised this point.
   Readers thought Susan was somehow banished from Narnia. She'd fallen from grace, committed some crime, discovered nylons and lipstick and invitations...
   Lewis received letters. He did his best to answer the point about Susan. Was she sent to hell? No. Did she ever reach Narnia again? He hoped so.
   Lewis talked of having to write a different kind of book for a tale featuring a grown-up sensible Susan. The writer always has a treasure-store of other considerations when it comes to writing a story. Those considerations don't feature in every story. Not enough time.
   Sensible Susan. Well, going by the book she doesn't feature in, she's silly when no longer believing in Narnia - for she's turned to the sensible world of another reality.

*

I ran out of steam, stopped, and turned to another blog post. What was I trying to get at? In Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords, I gleefully murdered a few fantasy standards.
   Sword-wielding male mercenary teams up with female enemy to thwart greater threat. Does he end up in bed with her? No. Readers may bitch about that.
   They just have to lump it. I took that lesson from Narnia.
   And the sequel to Neon Gods...
   Is set at the same time. As is the sequel to that book. So the villain from part one is not brought to book in part two. Or part three.
   Sometimes readers just have to lump it. What appears to be a mistake is down to planning. The reader may feel this is mistaken planning.
   At which point, my advice to the reader is...write your own books. I encourage you to.