An Exploration in Fantasy -- Part Five: The Source (an IWM post)

Imagine you're a kid. Your father is a landowner and a knight. Your older brother is obviously being groomed as the heir, which is normal and natural. He is, actually, a knight in his own right. You, however, are not being trained as a second, a backup, which would also be normal and natural. You're being trained to take care of horses and muck stalls and do the upkeep on your brother's gear, but that's about it. Sure, you'll get to be a squire, but you can tell there's some... difference; you're just not sure what it is. Clearly, your father loves you, and it's not a matter of favoritism; your brother is held just as accountable for wrongs as you are. But there is something... something that sets you apart. Or is that just wishful thinking?

This tournament comes up, and your brother is going to take part. He's even one of the favored knights. But something happens. The morning of the tournament, there's a problem with your brother's sword. He's livid. Stomping around. He demands that you find him a new one. And that's where everything changes...

* * *

Raise your hand if you know where this is going.

Raise your hand if you knew you were going to have to jump over to Indie Writers Monthly to read the rest of this. Now, go!

The Spirit Well

The Spirit Well is book three in Stephen Lawhead's Bright Empires series currently scheduled to have five books. I reviewed book one, The Skin Map, here and book two, The Bone House, here. The titles of these books are great, and, as I've said before, I  love a good title. Book four is called The Shadow Lamp. Hmm... shadows... I have this thing for shadows.

As I mentioned in the review for The Skin Map, I started out not really liking the main character, Kit, of this series. He was... well, wishy-washy, at best. He spent a lot of that book whining and complaining and, honestly, by the end of it, I was pretty sick of him. If it hadn't been by Lawhead, I may not have continued on.

But I'm glad that I did, because Kit really grew into himself as a character in the second book, which probably had a lot to do with the tragic ending of the first. In the second book, we see Kit take control of himself and strengthen his will and resolve. He becomes a character that takes action rather than just trailing along behind. Of course, he doesn't really know what he's doing, but he means to do it well.

The third book gives us a Kit that becomes strong in body and mind, too. In many ways, he has no choice in the matter considering he gets trapped in a stone age past (but, remember, this isn't time travel) with a clan of cave men. By the end of his time there, he doesn't want to leave. It's interesting character growth and I really enjoyed those sections of the book.

The book, on the whole, centers on character growth and story growth. The plot doesn't really advance, but we do see it filled out and some of the missing pieces from the first two books filled in. There's also a new character, which seems a little late to me for her to be coming in in book three, but we'll see how that plays out. She seems to be important and much of the book centered on her journey to get her up to the same point as the rest of the characters. She's not the only new character, but the rest are characters related to the Arthur story line, so they weren't like bringing in a whole new plot thread.

So, overall, the book kept me engrossed, and I really want to know where Lawhead is going with all of this. There are hints of a larger "quest," "quest" being used in the sense of (King) Arthur's Quest for the Holy Grail, and, in some ways, this is a parallel type story to that. There are definitely Grail Quest overtones, at any rate, not to mention the use of "Arthur" as one of the character names. And, then, there is that Lawhead has actually written one of the best Arthurian series I've ever read, so, I suppose, it would be difficult to escape those things. To say the least, I am looking forward to the fourth book (as soon as it's out in paperback).

One thing, though, these are not in any way individual books within a larger story line. You can't grab book three and expect to understand what's going on, nor can you read the first book and expect a satisfactory ending. There is just one story, here, being told across multiple books. So far, it's a good story.

The Religion of Writing: Part One -- Religion

Disclaimer: This post is not meant to be offensive in any way. It's about an actual experience which will serve as an example to my actual point in this series. Having said that, though, and knowing that religion is a touchy subject, as is writing, I know that this post is opening to door to people being offended. Just know that when I write this, I'm not really condemning anyone else's beliefs or belief system. I am condemning people that are condemning of others' beliefs, though, because that's just wrong. People ought to be allowed to believe whatever crazy thing they want to believe no matter how wrong it is without the fear of other people coming along and damning them for it. You know, as long as those beliefs aren't hurting someone else.

I started working at my church at a pretty young age. I don't mean just helping out in VBS and stuff like that, although I did do those things, too; I mean I was actually on staff and getting paid. I was 15 when I started being in charge of things like the gym and being left to supervise various recreation programs we ran. By the time I was in college, I was actually in charge of the youth and recreation programs.

One of the things we did was rent out our gym building (which had the chapel in it (as opposed to the sanctuary, which was the bigger building where we had "big" church)) to other church groups that didn't have a gym at their church. The most common reason other churches wanted to rent our facilities was to hold lock-ins. That meant I had to be there for the duration of any given lock-in. [Sometimes, during the summer, we would have a lock-in every weekend.]

There are a few things here you need to know:
1. My church was Southern Baptist. I have always liked to refer to the Baptists as the Pharisees of the Protestants. They are as tied to tradition and "how things are done" as the Catholics.
2. That being said, there are "worse" denominations (by worse, I mean even more strict and legalistic). One of those is the Pentecostals (and the Pentecostals really liked to rent out our gym).
3. Sometimes, to have something to do during a lock-in, I would invite some of my friends to hang out in the office with me. Seriously, it was important, because it was hard to stay awake otherwise. Just sitting and watching people skate and play basketball isn't all that entertaining.

4. You also need to know the basic fact of Pentecostalism: you only get to go to Heaven if you speak in tongues. [Yes, I'm boiling it down to its very core essence, but there's really not room, here, to elaborate.]

[The issue with the speaking in tongues thing is that it doesn't say that in the Bible. Not explicitly. There are some passages they base this belief on, but they create a logic trail you have to weave all through the Bible to come to that conclusion, and there are just as many passages that knock the foundation out from under that belief.
And, now, the plot is set for you.]

So... there was this lock-in, and I had invited a couple of my friends from college, both ministerial students, to come hang out for the night. I mean, it's free food which is pretty close to the Holy Grail for college students. All the pizza you can eat is a pretty big draw, and, in all actuality, getting invited to come to one of these things with me was pretty highly sought after. These were my two best friends, and it wasn't the first time they'd done this.

At one point, I was in the office working on something; I don't remember what but something to do with the lock-in. The guys had wandered off to the lounge where the TV was; one of them to work on a class assignment, which happened to be a sermon. He had his Bible out and open. The two of them were alone in the lounge. For a while.

But a group of the women (moms and such (chaperons)) who had been setting something up in the chapel for later in the evening came out into the lounge and found my friends there, one of them with his Bible out (maybe both of them, I'm not sure). One of the women asked them what they were doing, and the one working on the sermon responded that that's what he was doing...

And the group of women began telling my friends about how they were going to Hell.

It was the noise of the arguing that drew me down the hall. My two friends were surrounded by about half a dozen Pentecostal moms, one of the scariest things on the planet, I'm pretty sure. One of my friends was holding an open Bible with which he was refuting statements by the women. Now, here's the interesting part of that:

One of the women would say something like, "Well, the Bible says blah blah blah."
And my friend, with the Bible in his hand, would look up that passage of scripture and say, "That's not actually what it says. It says," and he would read it, "blah blippity blip blah."
To which the woman would reply, "Well, that's wrong, because my pastor says it says blah blah blah."
Did I say that my friend had his open Bible in his hand?
But the Bible was wrong because of what some woman thought her pastor had said about what was in the Bible. And none of the women had ever read the Bible. Many of them had never actually physically read any part of it because they had been indoctrinated to believe that they shouldn't read it because, you know, they couldn't figure it out for themselves, so it was better to just let the pastor tell them what was inside.
Even if it wasn't.
[I'm not making that part up. Several of them made statements to that effect.]
It didn't matter that my friends had the book in question in their hands, the proof, so to speak. The proof, the actual data, was "wrong."

That's what I walked in on. I was no less offended than my friends, but I was offended because they were in my church telling us we were going to Hell. My only question was why they wanted to rent our building if they believed we were a church on the way to Hell. With or without the hand-basket.

Since I was in charge, though, I had to break the whole thing up, so I sent my buddies down to the office to cool off for a while.

I'll be explicit here:
Many writers are just like those women in the way that they treat writing. In all sorts of ways. Things like traditional publishing being god. Agents being priests carrying the Holy word that can't be questioned. And all sorts of other things that I'm not ready to get into, yet, because we'll get to them in good time. Just be thinking about the ways you might be like that group of women. Believing without questioning what's being handed down to you.

Tucker, Dale, and Evil

I just want to make it clear that I am NOT a horror movie fan. At all. They don't do anything for me. Probably, it's the lack of any real story in them, because, really, what kind of story do you need for a guy to go around killing people in the most gruesome ways possible? And, then, there's the gore, which is not something I need in my life. I mean, I went to see Punisher: Warzone (at the theater!), and that may have scarred me for life. Of course, that may as well have been a horror movie considering the lack of story and the excessive gore. I can count on one hand the number of horror movies that I've seen and thought they were pretty good: Halloween (the very first one, which I saw when I was a kid (I'm pretty sure it was an edited for TV version) over at a friend's house) and April Fool's Day (which I didn't want to watch, but I was kind of stuck at a party, so it was either watch the movie or go sit in a room by myself), which is worth it  for the ending. Okay, so that didn't even take a hand.

That being said, I love Alan Tudyk. Even before Firefly, I thought he was awesome as Steve the Pirate in Dodgeball, and that's where I recognized him from when we finally watched Firefly. Besides, how can you not love a guy that was in Spamalot? As Lancelot, no less, the Cleese character in Holy Grail (or one of them, anyway). So I was really torn when I saw he was in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, but what a great title, right?

I'm glad I finally broke down and watched it. Yeah, yeah, it has plenty of gore, but it's not exactly the mindless gore of your typical horror/gorefest movie. I mean, in Tucker and Dale, you're busy being shocked or trying not to laugh while it's going on. Like when [spoiler] the "stupid college kid" throws himself into the wood chipper. Trying to laugh, or not to laugh, while being horrified is maybe not as easy as it sounds.

Alan Tudyk is, of course, awesome, but so is Tyler Labine as Dale. They have a great buddy chemistry going, but, really, the success of the film is rooted Labine's performance as the best friend and the romantic lead as he chases after Katrina Bowden (from 30 Rock) as Allison, who is also quite good. Jesse Moss pulls off the preppy jerk and could have walked right out of any number of 80's flicks.

The true genius of the film is that it takes the idea of a "comedy of errors" and mixes it up flawlessly with the horror genre. It makes me wonder why no one else has ever done this. Or maybe they have, and I just never heard of it, but I'm more inclined to think this kind of thing hasn't been done before. All of the classic horror movie pieces are there: group of college kids going off into the woods, spooky warning from a creepy cop about how "you shouldn't go there," and a "ghost" story as a backdrop. Really, I was all set up for the typical horror movie and wasn't actually sure I'd watch the whole thing, even with Tudyk in it.

But you can tell there's something else going on from the beginning, you're just not quite sure what it is. Tudyk and Labine are saying "buddy comedy," and the group of college kids are screaming "the horror! the horror!" What you get... well, if you can take the gore, it's definitely worth the watch.

The Star Wars Christmas Special

No, not that Star Wars Christmas Special. Which is just the oddest thing in the world to have a cult following. I mean, have you seen the "Star Wars Holiday Special"? Of course, when I was a kid and I saw it, I loved it. But I was eight. And it was Star Wars. I sort of agree with Lucas, now, though, in that it's the worst thing that's ever been made. I can barely see clips from up without thinking, "What were you thinking? Seriously?" The point is that it's a lot of those same people that hate Jar Jar that also love the Star Wars Christmas thing, and I can only think, "What are you thinking? Seriously?" These are the people that call the Holiday Special the Holy Grail of Star Wars.

But that's people for you.

And we're not watching the "Star Wars Holiday Special" at my house this year. Mostly because I don't own it unlike those made for TV ewok movies which we do own and my kids used to watch constantly.
But I digress...

All of that to say that Star Wars is always a big part of Christmas at our house. For those of you that were around last year, you may remember that I got this:

And I made these (although I don't think I ever posted pictures of them):

(there were also regular peppermint bark ones, but Han shows up better in these)

I added a couple of molds this year and made these:

Then we had not one but two Lego Star Wars Advent calendars!

I'm voting for Snow2-D2 as the astromech's name, but my son hasn't approved it.

There are even Star Wars ornaments on the tree (which is nothing compared to what I have planned for next year!)

Next year, the Death Star will have to be at the top of the tree.

Naboo being attacked by a giant space dinosaur. Yes, we also have dinosaurs on our tree. And Spider-Man (not pictured).

So there's just a little flavor of Christmas at my house. It's kind of pepperminty, don't you think?

Oh! I also have it on good authority that Santa's bringing season 4 of Clone Wars, so I see a marathon coming starting the day after Christmas.

So... however it is you celebrate your holiday, I hope it is a grand and joyous one!

Merry Christmas!!!

[As a special Christmas bonus, most everything I have available will be FREE! for your Kindle or Kindle app on Christmas day and the day after. Just go here for a full list!]