Terror in Acadia, One

Minudie is a town in northwestern Nova Scotia, Canada, where a village of Acadians once lived. One night in September 1755 these families were sleeping when a company of New England militia surrounded their houses. At first light the New Englanders fired a musket volley. They acted under orders from Colonel Robert Monckton, himself under orders from the lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia, Charles Lawrence, to arrest the men and boys and take them prisoner until such time as they could be deported from Nova Scotia. The governor specified that Monckton was to spare the French Acadians no distress or hardship in carrying out his orders. The colonel passed along this directive to the troops under his command.

Awakened and frightened by the musket volley, the citizens of Minudie, half asleep, rushed outside and saw the soldiers surrounding them by land. They couldn't escape that way, so many people jumped into the Beaubassin channel and tried to swim against the tide to the opposite shore, two miles distant. While the people tried to swim, and doubtless many succeeded in drowning, the New Englanders shot at them in the water.

What were the militia doing there? They had been assigned to Nova Scotia to help Colonel Monckton take the Canadian fort Beauséjour, which they did in June 16, 1755. The militias were still at the disposal of Monckton and Governor Lawrence, who used them to round up thousands of Acadians and force them aboard ships bound for various British North American colonies.

See, Faragher, John Mack, A Great and Noble Scheme:  The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2005, pp. 348-49.

Hungry for less noise, and then the movie came on!

I didn't read the books, and when the movie came out, I was glad. I like to watch movies for what they are, not for what they make of a book. Too many disappointing films have been made of some pretty terrific novels. So I enjoyed The Hunger Games with no preconceived notions, no worries about who got left out, what got left out or altered beyond recognition, and--my personal pet peeve--which character was SO miscast. (Think Paul Newman as Ari ben Canaan in Exodus--ugh!)

Jennifer Lawrence's performance was A. I thought Katniss came off a bit too sweet once or twice. I know! That's a silly remark and may seem to come out of nowhere. But Katniss was supposed to be rather unlikeable, which I understood to mean likeable, just too fierce and blunt for shallow people to warm up to her.

I loved the way the movie left me feeling Katniss shouldn't trust a single living soul! (Is that my paranoia talking?)

However, the six or seven or eight previews we had to endure before the movie started got on my nerves. For one thing, the volume had me wishing for a nice, quiet movie like Apocalypse Now. As for subject matter . . .

Spider Man, The Avengers--yawn, yawn. Superheroes saving the world. Uh-huh. Again. Okay.

Prometheus--Alien 5?

Snow White and the Huntsman--The Lord of the Rings meets The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe?

I might wait a year or two for the second Hunger Games movie.

Cabin number one, please.

I'm watching Psycho. I don't know when I first saw this tight, stark thriller, beautifully filmed in black and white and tautly acted. Believe it or not, this was the first time I've been able to keep my eyes open all through the shower scene. One of the beauties of the scene is the way the bloody water circles the drain before the camera cuts to an extreme closeup of Marian Crane's eye and does a slow, half-circle--the water down the drain/the life draining out of Marian.

I always cringe, too, at the length of the closeup on Janet Leigh's face. It must've seemed like hours to her, lying there with her cheek pressed to the floor tiles, eyes wide. No blinking. A bead of water slides on her face. If you watch carefully, though, you see ever-so-slight motion. I wonder how long Hitchcock made Leigh lie there; he had a rep as a director who tormented his leading ladies.

Chilling as the scene is, there's another that gives me shivers every time:  Norman Bates pushes Marian's Ford into the swamp and watches it sink. At one point the car stops sinking. Norman stops chewing his candy, glances over his shoulder, then watches the car again. It begins to sink once more. Norman relaxes, and a smile tugs at the right side of his mouth--Anthony Perkins's wonderful, mobile face!

So much of tension in this film is visual. Norman's scowl at the end, even when it changes to a smile, makes Norman look like an angry bird, a raptor, echoing the stuffed raptors on the wall of Norman's parlor. That smile of Norman's I mentioned earlier. It's such a brief expression, takes longer to describe in writing than show on film. And the scene in the fruit cellar when the wig falls to the floor and lies there in the shifting light from the swinging light bulb. Writing about such images doesn't convey the tremors and horror of seeing them.

How would you write such a description, or the most horrible movie scene you've watched, and leave your reader reaching for a quilt?

On the other hand, we've all read stories that leave us breathless and afraid to go to sleep at night--heck, afraid of lying on the bed and switching off the light! Stephen King's novels come to mind. But is reading a horrid scene really as effective as seeing it on film? Does the pen trump the camera?

Talking to myself

In today's issue of Parade Sunday magazine a small invitation to "Send a message to your future self." What do you want your future self to do or remember? A wonderful memory, family story, what you planted in your garden, Skyping with your son and granddaughter and the pouty look she got when you all had to hang up--did she want to keep talking to you, or did she just want to prolong the time before she had to go do something she didn't want to? :) Did it matter? (No.) Do you want to have learned to speak Japanese or Javanese by the year 2021?

Maybe it would be interesting to find out in future years what mattered to you today. Will you still care a year or five or fifteen years from now? Will you have forgotten you ever gave a thought to that particular issue? Will your insight seem prescient or trite? Will you say, "I can't believe I ever wanted to do that!"

If you're tempted to find out, see http://www.futureme.org.

Singin' the blues with Paul

"Sometimes I feel like a friendless child . . ."

Or is that motherless? Yeah, I guess so, but thank God I'm not motherless. And really I'm not friendless either. Just sad that two of my best friends are leaving town, one for a week and one for a year. Bummer.

Good thing I have other friends with whom to share the same and different interests, and I'm thankful for them too. It's still going to be a long year/week.

Will try to cheer up with the blues.

Content?

"THE Secret Handshake of Success":  I know many of us writers are interested in e-pubbing; some are doing it. Bob Mayer on his Write It Forward blog (HERE) tells us how to e-pub successfully. I believe him. It's what works for any kind of publishing. Check out what he has to say. I think you'll agree.

Below is one of the books Mayer has written with Jen Talty--my plug on his behalf, not at his request.

Tagged

Jessy Ferguson over at Praise, Prayers and Observations tagged me, so without further ado, I'm answering the questions.

1.  What is the one book you couldn't live without?
            To a writer and reader, that's the most unfair question ever. The one? Seriously? Maybe Christian Prayer, not only for the obvious reason. It's full of interesting Bible passages I find thought-provoking and inspiring as well as prayerful.

2.  What can you see out your window at the moment?
            Street light is shining on raindrops on the window glass, seen between the slats of the window blind. A nice effect.

3.  What's the weirdest thing you've ever eaten?
             Fried rattlesnake at the Big Texan in Amarillo.

4.  What fictional character would you most like to marry?
            Lord Aragorn. But only if he looked like Viggo Mortensen.

5.  If ever a fictional villain was going to win, who would you want it to be?
            Mr. Kurtz from The Heart of Darkness. "The Horror! The Horror!"

6.  How many types of cheese can you name off the top of your head?
             About twenty, including the stinky ones, which I don't eat.

7.  If you didn't want to be a writer, what would you like to be?
             A stand-up comedian. (I know, I'd starve.)

8.  Can you play a musical instrument?
             In the sense that I can operate a radio, iTunes, and an MP3 player, yes. Otherwise, I did take a year of band in high school and tried to learn alto sax. But the teacher sent me to a separate building to practice by myself while he concentrated on the skilled players. Yeah! I guess I was pretty bad. But I still love sax music. It's so smoky and sexy. Mmm.

9.  Do you own a Kindle or a Nook, or any kind of e-reader? If you do, how many books do you have on it?
             I have 33 books on iBooks and Kindle on an iPad and love it.

10.  You just got published. In a glowing review someone calls you "the next [insert famous author name here]." Which famous author has to watch her back now you're on the scene?
           Ann Patchett. I love her writing and wrote a post praising her and Bel Canto HERE in February.

Okay, that's it from me. Hope you were mildly amused. In turn, I tag Chris Baldauf and Angie Kay Dilmore. Then I'll see whether they speak to me afterward. :)

1000 other things you could be doing

How unprofessional have I been in my lifetime, just in my capacity as a writer? Oh, please, let's not go there. Accumulated acts of idiocy, if held against me all at once--instant death! Of shame.

I lived. I learned.

What? You expect me to list and admit to stuff? Dream on.

Instead, let's get chatty for a minute--okay, more like didactic:

Be enthusiastic and excited about your writing. If you aren't, it'll show.

On the other hand, never represent yourself to an editor, agent, even a fellow writer, like a panting puppy eager to show off its latest trick. That's just embarrassing.

Let the natural high of having finished the opus chill before approaching a possible publisher. Sell no wine before its time. How do we know when something's ready? Figure it out. That's our job.

Seriously, it's our job. Just because we can do it in a coffee-stained t-shirt and faded Madras pull-on shorts doesn't mean we aren't working. Working implies application, output, accountability. Something to show for the privilege of spending days sitting at a computer without having brushed our hair or teeth all day. Write.

No one owes us acceptance out there in the publishing world. It's easy to think someone does. After all, we work so hard and our stuff is so good. Yet even if we do and it is, there's still no entitlement. And are we working as hard as we ought to? Is our work all that good? Those are questions we can't afford to stop asking. Ever. (How do we judge quality? See "Figure it out. That's our job" above.)

In a sense, we owe agents and editors something--homework, as in, before sending unsolicited manuscripts, do it. Don't throw stuff at agents and editors they don't even publish or represent. They may not be considering anything at all at the moment. Not finding out, disregarding guidelines? Unprofessional.

You get the drift. I know you do. Know how I know? You're reading this post when you could be watching an NCIS rerun.
None of this is rocket science. All we need to do is write while we're hot, edit while we're cool, and act like we've got sense when we're trying to sell something.

The Wall(s)

I finished reading Douglas Kennedy's The Moment this morning, rushing through it in many places because I wanted so much to know what happened. In truth, Kennedy isn't at his best when writing love scenes--he gets trite and awkward--yet he conveyed the love between Thomas Nesbitt and Petra Dussman in Cold-War-era Berlin forcefully enough to make it devastating. And he did some philosophical and commentary passages I could've done without, but one or two things struck me during the read.

The first was that I hadn't been able to imagine how anything as evil as the Nazi plague could happen in Germany until I learned more about the Stasi. (Undereducated? Inattentive? Naive?)

The second was this passage:  ". . . [people] believe that by . . . putting up an 'antifascist protection device' that walls in an entire country, . . . we will solve our communal problems. Whereas the truth is:  Walls fall down."

Walls fall down. And yet . . .

One thing I especially liked about The Moment:

Kennedy didn't linger on the role one character obviously played in Thomas's and Petra's downfalls. It's obvious the character did what he did, and he was an agent of the CIA and maybe the Stasi also--two organizations I don't want to start comparing. Kennedy made it obvious and let it go, something I wish he'd done a little more of in other spots. Something I hope I learn how to do in my own work.

Atria Paperback, 2011

http://photoeverywhere.co.uk/west/berlin/slides/berlinwall0969_jpg_orig.htm