A quick nonfiction update, featuring a series of bad ideas!

First, The Downsides of Dating a God is up at Fantasy!

Despite the supernatural nature of the deistic pantheon (and their intramural dating scene), there’s a remarkable amount of god/human canoodling in the mythological tradition. Dating a deity has a certain ineffable appeal—the carefree demeanor, the kinky shapeshifting, the supernatural transportation options, the lure of immortality. However, it’s also one of the most dangerous extracurricular activities in which any legend-dwelling young person can engage, mythologically speaking.

Things to consider include how to handle unrequited love (goner), how to handle the family tree (goner), and how to handle breakups (goner).

Second, From the Desk Of… details the in-office horror of some of the movies’ most awkwardly employed, including the Premiere Hairdresser of Rohan and the incredibly unfortunate box-office intern from Phantom of the Opera:

“Yes, good afternoon, madam, happy to serve you and your husband, whose patronage we value greatly. We’re staging Hannibal this fall, would you like tickets?”

“I’m so sorry, we’re no longer doing Hannibal due to a change of management, but the Paris Opera would be happy to offer you tickets to Il Muto! It’s starring Carlotta, and is sure to be a smash hit.”

“My apologies, this is the Paris Opera – we’ve just had notice of a casting change for the Countess…”

The third awkward pursuit is the Avengers trailer, but either you’re into the Avengers movie or you’re not; I’m in the latter camp for several reasons, so the trailer was really just a reminder that I didn’t have to worry about double-booking my cinema trips that weekend.

We kind of need to talk about this.

This is the poster for the Footloose remake. The tagline they have chosen to accompany this epic story? CUT LOOSE.

The sad thing is that, in the sea of completely baffling remakes and other surrounding creative decisions, I guess I understand how this movie happened more than I can understand, say, the Smurfs movie (ever). On paper, this is a story about liberal youth culture rebelling against increasingly conservative and despotic exercises of power, and about the dangers of suppression or repression of self-expression (every -ession!), and about rejecting small-town theocracy in order to get into some PG-rated big-city shenanigans.

However, that stuff didn’t work in practice even in the original Footloose (tagline “One town. One kid. One chance.”), which tried to balance scenes of John Lithgow tightening his despotic grip on the town as a way to deal with his grief over his son and scenes of Kevin Bacon’s dance double Fosse-ing his way through warehouses. To no one’s surprise, the balance was way off, and Lithgow’s character goes from foil for the two-dimensional teens into complete plotcakes. At the end of the movie, he’s interrupted in mid-tirade about how no one can dance or express dissent or disobey by someone announcing a nearby book-burning. Now, he’s outlawed drinking and dancing and all other kinds of young-person fun, and has held his iron fist over the town for years, and hates the kid trying to make prom happen, and uses God as a weapon to instill fear in people, but book-burning? That is just a WILD idea he couldn’t have anticipated WHATSOEVER! So he runs to the book-burning and tells them that books are great, and dancing is ALSO great, and he can’t WAIT for prom, can you? Yay, prom! The end for no reason!

It’s to Lithgow’s credit how much you end up buying this in the moment, because he’s such a phenomenal actor that you can actually see him suppressing his grief and struggling with the edicts he’s put in place as they’re challenged by the new kid and his collection of Bible quotes about dancing that he reads to City Hall as reasons dancing should be allowed, because separation of church and state something something. However, this movie is most famous for its dance sequences (Opening Credits, teaching Chris Penn to dance, Angry Warehouse Dance, and Worst Prom Imaginable), and not for any of the underlying themes that the movie addresses (poorly) at random intervals, and reverses on a dime.

Given that we’re actually in a political climate that’s welcoming exactly this sort of counter-intuitive theocratic lawmaking, and dismissing the expression of dissent by having cops mace them all and arrest them for daring to protest, I’m very curious to see how this movie tries to stick it to The Man while still getting flyover-state butts in the seats. Early signs are mixed: the current leading man is their fourth choice, which sounds a little awkward, but Dancing with the Stars alum Julianne Hough is in it, so the corporate synergy is all lined up!

However, I might be entirely shortchanging the deep artistic goals of this remake, and need to keep an open mind, lest I become the John Lithgow Preacher of today. So I, for one, look forward to this movie’s hard-hitting small-town politics and attack on neo-conservative despotism, viewed through its well-rounded characters and honed through its keen dialogue. I can only hope it lives up to its predecessor in the revolution, whose powerful and emotional conclusion can teach all of us something about what it means to live life, fight for your freedoms, and most importantly, cut loose:

(So, watching this musical number, I realize that the part of Footloose where everyone was suddenly a professional dancer has never bothered me, because musicals live in their own universe where that is just something that happens, and also because just being caught on celluloid in this scene forever must have been punishment enough.)

I have spoken many times about the messed-up movies that helped define my childhood. The Red Shoes might be the primary offender in this case, but The Last Unicorn, The Linguini Incident, and The Flight of Dragons also feature heavily.

However, there are several formative movie experiences that I missed the first time, when you’re in that golden age of understanding that makes you the primary target for that particular piece of cinema entertainment. Labyrinth, for example, I didn’t see until high school, too late for me to wholeheartedly embrace the Henson-ness, and WAY too late for me to not snicker at the relentless sexual-initiation subtext of pitting Jennifer Connelly against the Thin Tights Duke, a dynamic that jump-started puberty for so many others.

Another one of these gems I seem to have missed is Rigoletto, a jewel in the crown of the Feature Films for the Family series.

(Actual tag line on that video box cover: “A musical fantasy ringing of truth and filled with mystery and love.” Just…keep that in mind.)

It has nothing to do with the opera Rigoletto. In theory this is good, since Rigoletto is kind of odd. (There’s a Duke who wants to bang everyone, and his jester Rigoletto, who gets cursed by some gent and who keeps his daughter locked up in the house except to go to church, and of course the Duke saw a hot virgin at church and wishes to sex her, and sends nobles to find her, but they follow Rigoletto and when they see his daughter they think he has a mistress, so they blindfold Rigoletto and make him participate in the kidnapping of his own daughter, and she gets to the Duke’s and is like, “Oh, you’re that guy staring creepily at me all through church!” and he’s like “Nice shoes, shall we bang?” and Rigoletto shows up and is like, “I am going to kill that Duke, I am so mad, okay, you dress as a boy and get out of town and I’ll hire an assassin,” and she dresses as a boy but comes back to warn the Duke as the Duke is pleading for his life with his new girlfriend in the room (awkward), but the daughter is still like, “I’ll sacrifice myself for the Duke I love!” and then the assassin drags a corpse in a bag over to Rigoletto and Rigoletto is like “YESSS ALL RIGHT let me look inside OH MY GOD IT’S MY KID OH GAH THE CURSE” the end.)

However, this movie’s plot is even weirder.

And frankly, could have used an assassin.
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Most of my brain time the last few weeks has vanished into writing, family time, and cleaning house in an attempt to avoid writing.

Sure, there are movies coming up (the mid-90s Beauty and the Phantom homage Rigoletto probably being first on the block, because a movie that disturbing must have been a DOOZY to see as a kid), but before you can blog a movie you have to screencap a mile in its shoes, etc., and somehow I haven’t been able to bring myself to go back and watch the whole movie again. I will! I just…need time. Time in which to test all my pens and throw out the ones that don’t work any more, and then arrange them by color in my pen holder I made from a mug, because I was too lazy to get a real pen holder, and let’s face it, the mug does a perfectly good job. (Before you judge, let me say, if you were sitting through a movie about how a questionable relationship with the close-talker at the top of the hill rockets a preteen to stardom just in time for somebody to be beaten to death only not really because of magical fairy tales about true love that apparently relate to said preteen, you would also be looking for excuses to do something else.)

However, even after all the pens have been tested, there are things left to do, which seems unthinkable, and yet.

First of all, things I am planning on leaving the house for in the near future:

Oct. 14-16: Capclave. I always have fun at this con, with the bonus of getting to see my DC-area family for a little while. (Part of my blog quietness is due to family time, and it’s always nice when the train to DC overlaps family and work.)

Oct. 29.5 – 30: World Fantasy. (This will also be immediately preceded by family time. In fact, as it turns out, I’ll be at the con a little over 36 hours; we’ll see how THAT goes! It will go with vats of coffee, I’m guessing.)

Second of all, things I would LIKE to leave the house for generally include walking the second leg of my trip to and from work, which is usually delightful at this time of year, but because of weather conditions has instead become a self-guided walking tour of a fetid swamp occasionally enhanced with bus fumes. I have continued to make the walk, but it’s so bad that commuters and early-morning joggers all eye each other back and forth as if determining whose fault the humidity is, or who’s more foolish for being out in it. (Joggers.) However, it’s still worth it to get the walk in, especially the morning shift, when there are long lines of judgey pigeons sitting along building ledges, just awake enough to glare at you but not really ready to begin their daily routine of harassing tourists.

Third of all, new fall TV is coming through, but I’m having a little Review Ennui, largely because I have yet to sit through any of the pilots I tried so far and think, “Season Pass!” Or even, in most cases, “I will watch the second half of this episode!” Have I just become a curmudgeon of epic proportions, or is this fall a little watery-gruel in terms of new TV? (This is even excluding obvious comedy gold like Unforgettable, whose tagline is, “She can do anything but forget,” and whose ads all feature her saying, “I can’t forget!” and/or “I remember!”)

I mean, I’m all for avoiding writing by watching TV (I’m all out of pens, I have to do something), but so far all that’s happened is actual writing, which is productive yet mildly disconcerting.

Including some self-promo, handbell choirs, and a confession about the nerdiest things in my attic.

First, stories!

1. My terrorism-and-toads story “Bufonidae” will be appearing in the inaugural issue of Phantasmagorium, edited by Laird Barron! It seems like this horror number might be available around Halloween, which is handy, so stay tuned.

2. John Langan and Paul Tremblay’s anthology CREATURES is alive! (It’s not actually in all caps, I think, but I like to type it that way and then imagine I’m a newscaster in a 1950s monster movie.) Covering thirty years of monster stories, the Table of Contents is pretty awesome. Alongside this august company is “Keep Calm and Carillon,” my horror story about a handbell choir.

The anthology is available now online and at booksellers in various places.

2.5 (On another Tremblay-related note, I was flattered to see he enjoyed Mechanique, though I would like to go on record as being against bringing back hissing in movie theatres, since I think that’s a danger to the public in case of a sudden influx of snakes in the building.)

3. I generally don’t talk about process, because it’s widely variable by project for me and it makes me feel a little unqualified to pretend I know what I’m doing all the time, but over at Clarkesworld, I do a little talking about style, approach, and how I clearly stayed home a LOT in college. (Bonus appearance of the best mural ever!)

4. And over at BookBanter, I answer some questions, including what advice I would give to aspiring writers, which is the write-a-million-words advice, because that is advice I believe in.

Related: I went home a few weeks ago to spend some time with family. Part of the weekend included me cleaning out some things from the attic. Alongside the historical costumes (now passed along for someone else to enjoy) and clothes so out of date they were cool again (now passed along for some hipsters to enjoy), I found a box of my old writing.

It included a few pages of the Star Trek tie-in novel I wrote when I was 11 or 12 (in ProWrite!) and printed out from my dad’s dot-matrix printer. I had hand-drawn a cover that I attached to it. It was about Guinan using her alien powers to bring Tasha Yar back from the dead for necessary plot reasons I cannot remember, and the time-paradox problems that ensued. It was called “Obfuscation.”

I showed my mother.

“Oh, that’s sweet,” she said. “How old were you? Eleven?” She paused, thinking. “Yeah, I remember you didn’t leave the house much that year.”*

I kept it – it’s tucked safely away underneath the X-Files spec scripts I wrote in high school, which we speak not of. The box is big spanning grade school through college; I’m going to guess it’s one million words. I’m glad I wrote them, and I’m extra glad they are being kept somewhere far, far away.

* This is true of any year.