Tag: What do King Lear and The Princess Bride have in common?

F Is For: Fear

You shouldn’t even be taking the time to read this post.

Don’t you know that right now Death is breathing heavily down the back of your neck? You only have so many seconds left, and each word you read here strips another one away. You should be writing—you should be living—you should be telling people how you feel about them, whether that means love letters or hate mail. You should be putting each one of those precious seconds to some greater use because THIS IS YOUR ONLY CHANCE.

Sometimes I feel that poetry is really a terrible thing to inflict on overly introspective people. For instance, that marvelous Marvellpoem just about everyone reads in high school or college lit courses:

image via The Graphics Fairy

At my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.

The fact that it rhymes makes it that much easier to remember, which makes it that more likely that I’ll remind myself at least several times a day that I am doomed. That I will never find out the end of the great human story we’re all writing together. That (more modestly) I will never write all the stories I cook up in my head. That as Linda Holmes reminded us there is no way we can read or watch or listen to or see even a miniscule fraction of what is available for reading, watching, etc.

So I sit down, in a panic, and put my fingers to the keyboard.

The words: they do not come.

What if they never come, ever again? What if the three novellas I have published and the steampunk Shakespeare anthology I contributed to and the Secret Submission I sent out yesterday are the only works of mine that will ever see the light of day? What if writing romance and practicing feminism are not as compatible as I’d like to think? What if everything I fear in the depths of my soul is true?

You cannot write, thinking like this. You cannot live this way, either—it’s exhausting. So far I’ve gotten past it by just plain getting vaguely mad, but I can’t shake the notion there must be some better way.

Back to work; every second counts.

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April 6th, 2012
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My Very First Pirate! And Why I’m Still Anti-SOPA and -PIPA

We here at Olivia Waite would love to introduce you to an anonymous internet denizen known as ioedpee on Dailybooth. If that first link does not work, it is because the account has been removed as a violation not only of Dailybooth’s terms of service, but also as a violation of my own personal copyright. My publisher has sent them a cease-and-desist notice, but as of this posting they are not only still up, but still updating.

You see, ioedpee is the first person to pirate one of my digital books.

Time was, I used to wonder if being pirated would change my views on ebook piracy—and so far, no, I feel pretty much the same about it now as I did then. I’m gently anti-piracy and vociferously anti-DRM; I’m pro-digital lending (even more so now that I’ve come to enjoy the digital collections of my local library); I’m even anti-SOPA (unlike the RWA) because it seems to cause far more problems than it will supposedly fix.

So it’s nice that this new world where my books are being sold on the sly has not turned my opinions upside down.

Speaking of SOPA and PIPA … This blog will not be going black tomorrow, only because I do not have quite the level of technical expertise to accomplish this fact. The best I can do is switch my posting schedule so I’m not actually posting on the protest day.

As for why I’m still against SOPA and PIPA, the best breakdown I’ve seen is from the eternal Sarah at Smart Bitches:

For me specifically, under PIPA, it would be my responsibility to check the provenance of every site I link to, making sure that that URL, or any other page at that domain, did not contain any content that was copyright protected or possibly pirated. If I did link to a site that, for example, contained a scanned copy of a Fabio-festooned book cover from 1993, I could be seen as encouraging piracy and could therefore be blocked, my finances could be frozen, and my domains could be confiscated. If I linked to a site that someone felt was infringing on copyright by including an excerpt of a book, I could be blocked, frozen and in a heap of trouble. The interpretations of PIPA are too broad for my comfort, and the penalties too severe.

These bills are essentially trying to use a hand grenade to kill a horsefly. The overly broad language penalizes individuals and trusts far too much in corporate goodwill to prevent abuses. This law is a terrible, terrible idea.

But! Back to the fun part of this post: my own personal pirate. It turns out that I am far from the only author that ioedpee is attempting to circumvent.

Here are a few intriguing selections on offer from my pirate (who obviously has excellent if eccentric literary taste). Important note: The links will not lead you to the pirate site. Instead, they point toward Powell’s Books in Portland. Powell’s has long been among my favorite bookstores in the world, and to my vast delight they recently added Damned If You Do to their ebook catalogue.

Some of these books sound really excellent, and I do hope you check them out.

{Disclaimer: because I am a member in Powell’s Partner Program, actions you may take via the above links may prove beneficial to me personally. In other words, clicking those links helps me buy more books from Powell’s. Click—click for your lives!}

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January 17th, 2012
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Novel Films Blogfest: The Commentary

Hello there! Now that we’ve established my list of experienced book/movie combinations for Scribble and Edit’s Novel Films Blogfest, let’s jump right to the fun part—commentary!

The Princess Bride

Misty golden background. White horse in foreground. In middle ground, a pale-skinned man with long blondish hair and a blousy black poet shirt is passionately kissing a pale-skinned woman with long blond hair, an elaborate tiara, and a silver gown.

This kiss left them all behind -- and links to a pretty interesting analysis of the Dread Pirate Roberts' character.

Of course I saw the movie first. And when I finally tracked down the book, I loved that too. And one of the reasons I keep coming back to this book/movie is that the way William Goldman uses framing devices is really, really interesting. Both the book and the movie have a real-life narrative that supports and comments on the fairy-tale narrative, and in adapting the book for the screen Goldman simplified the frame while keeping true to its emotional heart.

Read more…

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August 3rd, 2011
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Beginnings and endings are easy . . .

Well, that just isn’t true, is it? It’s a line from a movie, and it tends to appear in my head according to some mysterious schedule of its own. Taunting me.

Beginnings, sure — beginnings are fun. They brim with possibility. They can also be terrifying, and terror begets interest. Let me be scared — let me be anxious — let me be frozen with fear — so long as I am not bored.

Endings? I find them impossible. There are two perfect endings:

  1. And they lived happily ever after.
  2. And someone/several someones died in a manner so wrenching that the survivors wished they’d died themselves.

Jane Eyre is a perfect example of No. 1 in its sophisticated form. King Lear would be an example of No. 2. (The contrarian in me suspects that the reverse would also be a defensible theory.)

This is why The Princess Bride is such a perfect book: you get both perfect endings at once. The rest of us are compelled to choose one.

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October 1st, 2010
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