I’m not going to go into much detail on this one because 1. It’s new and I don’t want to spoil it for anyone and 2. At $10 a ticket, I’m only going to be watching it once until it comes out on iTunes.
But man was it a good movie.
The Good Dinosaur is The Lion King meets Milo and Otis with DINOSAURS. It’s also a coming of age/boy with his dog story. The movie manages to cram a lot of theme work in despite long stretches of Pixar quality silence.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not UP. But it was a really good movie. Beautiful imagery, surprisingly intense plot, somewhat epic, at times genuinely terrifying for my six year old, (two words: Sky Sharks, you’ll get it when you see it) at other times it was heart wrenching (Stick Figures will make you cry, fair warning), and oddly lacking in comic relief, it’s definitely worth a watch.
Instead of doing For Real Friday this week, I’m doing Thankful Thursday because…Thanksgiving. I’m thankful for my family, my friends, great books, and for being fortunate enough to live in the moment.
Living in the moment is hard when you’re stressed or broke or busy. But I’ve been making a conscious effort. And I recognize my privilege here. My husband and I are mostly in a place where life is pretty stable. I’m able to stay home with my daughter and write, but we’re not comfortable enough for that to be a long term plan, so I’ve been finishing up my EDs in school library media this semester. After a semester of interning five days a week, balancing school work, editing Venus and Adonis/Aphrodite, studying for the GACE, attending conferences, and just being overall very busy, something really nice happened last Friday.
I had a minute to breathe. I’d taken and passed the GACE the day before. I’d finished up all the intern hours I had to do and was just going back in for a few hours to wrap up some loose ends, I’d finished another pass on Aphrodite, and Bella was about to be off for an entire week (I’m really involved at her school). So I woke up, got everything ready, and then went to wake up Bella.
She didn’t want to get out of bed. It’d been a hard week for her, we’d just been so busy! And for this one day, I wasn’t in a rush. So instead of dragging her out of bed and stressing us both out as I rushed her along her morning routine, I returned to the kitchen, put our breakfast on trays, and snuggle beside her for a breakfast in bed.
“It’s just hard to get out of bed sometimes,” Bella lamented.
“I know,” I sympathized. Sometimes, it really is. So we snuggled, and ate, and she told me all about her dreams, and I told her all about our plans for Thanksgiving break (a lot of staying home and doing nothing, but also maybe the zoo) and we just had this perfect moment of relaxing and not being stressed and just enjoying each other. Then breakfast was over, she got ready for school, and somehow we weren’t even late. It’s like time froze for that one magical moment and I could just feel her tiny little body tucked against mine as she stared into my eyes and told me absolutely everything that came to mind. She’s going to outgrow moments like that. She mostly already had. Most mornings she’d be pushing me away from her and grumbling that she has to brush her teeth RIGHT NOW so she doesn’t miss playground time. So I’m thankful, SO thankful, that I was in a position to take advantage of that one precious moment before it was gone. And I hope I’m lucky enough to catch the next one.
As you all know, I attended #YALLFEST last weekend and I thought I’d share some notes on the first panel I attended. At the first panel, Gayle Forman, Marie Lu, Libba Bray, Margaret Stohl, Daniel Handler, and Scott Westerfeld talked about creativity, jealousy, fear, and success.
A bit about the authors:
Scott Westerfeld is the second reason I was there (Brandon Sanderson was my first). He wrote the Uglies series, the Midnighters series, The Leviathan series, Peeps, So Yesterday, Afterworlds and Zeroes. He’s one of my all time favorite authors, and one of the few (who I read) who has been writing YA fiction since before YA fiction exploded after Harry Potter. He adapted beautifully in a way that many other writers weren’t able to. One of the notable things he said in this workshop is that a lot of times when he’s reading he’ll see a particularly good concept or sentence or way something was done and try to figure out how to do something similar himself. Now that he’s famous enough, when he can’t figure out how to do it himself, he steals the author for a collaborative project so he can try to learn from them directly. After all, great writers steal. The way he described reading a book and stopping to go “ooh…” is so much like me. It was crazy listening to these writers interact because they sounded so much like my writer’s group. It was really great to see them interacting, not just with fans, but with writers, because online I get so much of their fan persona, but listening to them geek out with each other and get all excited about the way this author did this, or that author did that, just let me see an entirely different side to them, and that side is something I can identify with so much more.
Also, because Scott Westerfeld is awesome, he hung around afterword to sign my copy of Uglies and to sign my writing journal. His advice: Read lots. Write lots. Listen to everyone.
Libya Bray wrote The Diviners, Beauty Queens, Going Bovine, and the Gemma Doyle Trilogy. I recently discovered her through Beauty Queens and then when I pulled an all nighter reading The Diviners. She was the moderator of the panel, so while she asked great questions, she didn’t actually give much input because the focus was on the authors answering. She did stick around to sign my writing notebook though.
Her advice: Take Risks. Read Everything. Let your freak flag fly. Revise. revise. Revise. Oh, and have fun!
Gayle Forman is the writer of If I Stay and Where She Went. I didn’t get a chance to get her autograph, though I did see her after the panel. But…she was deep in conversation with her eight year old and it just felt too rude to interrupt. She had some interesting notes on the book to movie process, along with Daniel Handler and Margaret Stool about how basically authors have nothing to do with how the movie is made, and the best way to approach hollywood is to take the money and run.
Marie Lu wrote the Legends series and the Young Elites series, which I am now adding to my TBR pile, because she seemed pretty cool. She, Libba Bray, and Margaret Stohl went off on an interesting tangent about feminism and how one of the things she’s jealous of is how guys can interact on a publicly different level than girls can. They can poke fun at each other or maybe not congratulate one another on release days or not over analyze every word they say to make sure it’s not misinterpreted. Watching the guys handle that discussion was interesting because it put them in a kind of awkward situation where they couldn’t do the standard panel interrupt and share their thoughts without being the guy cutting off the girl. It was an interesting discussion.
Margaret Stohl wrote the Beautiful Creatures series and elaborated a bit more on going hollywood and how weird it is to be kind of behind the scenes of your own creation. She admitted to being jealous of the way some authors seem to flawlessly project themselves through social media. She also said the year her book was being made into a movie was the worst year of her life.
I didn’t realize that Daniel Handler was Lemony Snicket, and now I feel ashamed and like I squandered an opportunity to hang on his every word. One of the other authors noted that they were jealous that he (and he quickly pointed out and his wife) donated a million dollars to planned parenthood. He was jealous of a wine bottle.
The wine bottle story needs further elaboration, but I’ll never be able to match the way he told it. So he was checking out somewhere that there was a huge tower of wine bottles when one suddenly fell from the top of the pyramid. The guy checking him out caught the wine bottle and set it down without so much as breaking his sentence. No one else stopped, no one else stopped or acknowledged how awesome that was, leading Handler to assume this kind of thing just happened all the time. He wishes that he knew someone could catch him that effortlessly and with that much grace and confidence.
I’m racking my brain for more tidbits from this awesome panel and coming up dry. I hadn’t settled into the note taking yet and this panel began what was a very long and very amazing day. I keep hoping a video of these panels will pop up on youtube so I can jog my memory. But mostly, I just sat in awe of the fact that I was in the same room as Scott Westerfeld. Great way to begin a day. But the biggest tidbit I got from the panel is that it’s okay to use your jealousy. Use it to become a better writer. Use it to motivate yourself. Just don’t get petty or disheartened by it.
Until I can safely venture back into the realm of Mythology Monday’s (I’m out of myths that don’t pertain to the book AFTER my next book is released), I’m changing up my blog a little bit. Wednesdays I’ll be writing about writing, Fridays will still be about real world issues, they just won’t be linked to myths, and Mondays…I’m still playing around with. But for right now, how about Movie Mondays, where I overanalyze one of my daughter’s movies.
See here’s the thing. As a parent, I find myself watching the same movies over and over and over again. And as a writer, that gives me a lot of time to stare into the gaping plot holes and grumble. Since these grumblings amuse me, I figured why not use it for a blog post in case it amuses you too? So as I watch a movie for the umpteenth time, I’ll summarize and record my thoughts in these blog entries. Let me know what you think.
And to show you how little control I have over these movies, rather than this blog feature starting with the Little Mermaid, Tangled, or Aladdin, we’re starting with The Return of Jafar. Because THAT’S what my daughter wants to watch for some reason. *grumble grumble*
Return of Jafar starts exactly like Aladdin. SO much like Aladdin, I thought I was starting the wrong movie, until I noticed just how jerky the animation is. It took me a few seconds to convince Bella I hadn’t just made a mistake and restarted Aladdin, but she caught on when a group of thieves started counting their loot. A small furry hand darts in and takes a piece of treasure while Abis Mal shows off his poor leadership skills. Aladdin shows up to steal the loot and for a moment, I got really confused. Why is he stealing when he’s essentially a prince? Is this just setting up how he and Abis Mal know each other and in a few seconds we’ll flash for–nope, because there’s Carpet. What’s going on? It’s been a while since I saw this movie, but I didn’t expect to be so confused.
Meanwhile, Jafar and Iago are bickering and Iago, after singing a song that sparked a ton of random memories (seriously, I remembered every word, how weird is that), decides to go take over Agrabah by becoming friends with Aladdin.
Back to Aladdin, he’s playing Robin Hood and throwing stolen gold to starving children on the streets. Very impractical solution that’s no doubt wreaking havoc with Agrahbah’s economy, putting those street children in danger by giving them something bigger, stronger, meaner people can take, and/or getting them in trouble with the over zealous guards. Kind of surprised that there hasn’t been a lot of reform since Jafar was deposed. Jasmine clearly didn’t know how bad things were on the streets in the first movie, and how much the Sultan was told was questionable given his advisor, but what’s the excuse for the rampant starvation and homelessness now? And why is Aladdin the only one doing anything about it?
This will totally last us until the next time Aladdin decides to go on an adventure.
Aladdin and Iago meet up just as Aladdin bumps into the group of thieves. They bicker but eventually Aladdin and Iago team up after Iago convinces Aladdin Jafar hypnotized him into being bad and saved Aladdin from the thieves. Aladdin realizes he owes Iago his life, but says he still has to turn him over to the Sultan. First he’ll soften the royals up though so they won’t kill Iago on site.
Jasmine pops up, and my god, her voice is so…I don’t know why it annoys me so much, but I really don’t like it. Also, her character has done a total 180. She used to be such a spitfire and now she’s all “Oh darling, you rescued a princess.” I guess love “softened” her, but she didn’t need to be softened. Also, she had a pretty big hand in saving the day in the first movie and that’s swept totally under the rug here.
“I’m even more useless now!”
Genie comes back for a visit because he missed his friends and sings a song I had literally no memory of. He also manages to establish that as a free genie he’s not as strong as he used to be. Nicely done on avoiding the God Complex, Disney. Though honestly, Genie never seemed to be truly powerful. After all, he technically never granted Aladdin his original wish, to BE a prince. Not to pretend to be a prince, not to impersonate a prince, but to be one. Genie’s always been real good with illusion, not so much in actual delivery. The main characters depart for dinner and the scene switches to Abis Mal discovering Jafar’s lamp.
You aint never had a friend like me!
The sequence where Jafar takes Mal through his wishes is the reason I spent more hours than I can count as a child perfecting the phrasing of my three wishes should I ever find a genie. Honestly, that scene had a much more profound impact on my life than it should have. It’s probably influenced why my characters can’t lie and all my practice getting them to say things so specifically. Language games are fun 🙂
The Sultan makes Aladdin his royal advisor but then all hell breaks loose when the royals discover that Aladdin was harboring Iago. Jasmine and Aladdin argue about Aladdin hiding things from her again, and then Iago helps them patch things up with the “Forget about Romance” song. Another song I knew every word of. I loved this song. I honestly think they wrote this movie because they didn’t include Iago in enough songs in the first movie.
Speaking of Iago, it’s really amazing how much more common sense he has than genie. He gets hints that Al and Jas want to be alone. He picks up on nuances. It’s really refreshing having a side kick that isn’t clueless so the protagonist can look good and he really rounds out the team for the TV series. This movie did a really good job setting the tone for the TV series over all.
Anyway, Jasmine is appeased, but her father’s still pissed, so the group decides that Aladdin just needs to spend more time with him to win him over. Aladdin, Iago, Carpet, and Sultan fly off for a picnic the next day, which is of course a trap. Jafar and Abis Mal attack. For some reason the carpet doesn’t just sweep up the Sultan and fly away with him, and instead tries to defend the Sultan by tripping the bad guys. Can I just say how much better Jafar is as a genie than Genie. I mean, he’s obviously evil, but in terms of using powers he puts Genie to shame. Anyway, Aladdin is tossed into a raging river and the Sultan is carried away and Jafar congratulates Iago on his betrayal.
Aladdin wakes up, yells at Iago and returns to Agrabah only to realize he’s been framed for killing the Sultan (apparently torn hats = bodies? I don’t know, I feel like a more ambitious palace guard would…like…search for their missing ruler.) Jasmine comes in, acting all not Jasmine like at all, and yells at Aladdin for killing her father, sentences him to death, and runs off in tears before morphing into Jafar and revealing dun-dun-dun! The real Jasmine and Sultan chained up in another part of the castle (great job searching, guards) and Genie trapped in a magical bubble.
Disturbing on so many levels
Meanwhile, my daughter is experiencing major sympathy pains for Iago. “He didn’t have a choice, Mommy. Why are they so mad?” I’m struggling for the words to explain how people often blame the victims in emotionally abusive relationships and how she’s right, it’s not fair. Iago is a tiny, helpless bird. All he has is his attitude and what’s that against an evil wizard, much less an all powerful genie. Jafar, as a human, put a full grown man-child of a king under his thumb. What exactly could a bird have done differently? Maybe the characters are so angry at Iago because he represents their helplessness?
Although, to be fair, first movie Iago had no nuance. He delighted in Jafar’s evil plans.And he started this movie out to take over Agrabah…so…. Some pre-planning would have made this whole transition a lot more believable.
LOL, JK!
Anyway, Iago flies to the dungeon and while ignoring all Jasmine and the Sultan’s bashing, frees the genie first, because he’s the most intelligent member of team Aladdin. The others realize what he’s doing and have a change of heart regarding their alliance with Iago just in time for them to be freed as well. Genie announces that if they destroy Jafar’s lamp, they destroy Jafar. And here I pause the movie and stare dumbly for a second because…what?
What?!
I’m sorry….destroying the lamp was an option? WHY DIDN’T THEY DESTROY IT AT THE END OF THE FIRST MOVIE? Why would they rely on the cave of Wonders? By the way, how did Jafar escape from the Cave of Wonders? That was kind of unclear. I mean, the start of the movie shows Iago digging the lamp out of the sand, but um…was it really that easy? Why couldn’t Jafar have dug INTO the cave of wonders to get the lamp in the first movie then? And why would Jafar sitting in a lamp for 10,000 years before being released into the world with major powers be a good thing? This completely undid the cleverness of the end of the first movie.
Itty Bitty Brain
Anyway, they release Aladdin, and team Aladdin go on a mission to destroy the lamp. Mal is supposed to use his third wish to release Jafar, but he hesitates because what if all of his wishes go away without the genie there (nice call back to Aladdin’s hesitation in movie one, although, again I maintain that if the genies actually granted the wishes, not the illusion of them,this wouldn’t be an issue). During their argument, team Aladdin makes a play for the lamp,but failed to reach it. Iago swoops in to save the day and flys off with the lamp (instead of just dropping it in the lava, but okay, and gets critically hit by Jafar. The lamp and Iago land on a rock. Aladdin tries to knock it off the rock, but can’t reach, and Iago summons just enough strength to kick the lamp into the lava. The ground starts to shake, Aladdin is somehow magically able to reach Iago on the same rock he couldn’t reach the lamp on, and takes him to safety. Iago looks dead,but this is Disney, so they manage to work in the phrase “you’d be surprised what you can live through” into the movie 10001 times, Aladdin turns down the position of royal advisor and goes off to see the world with Jasmine.
We don’t give a flying f*ck about out people!
Um…okay, selfish much? First of all, royal advisor was part of the Sultan’s slow plan to legitimize Aladdin in the eyes of his subjects so he could marry his daughter. Secondly, as a former street rat who better than anyone in the palace know how the subjects feel about their king and what they need, he could do a lot of good? Maybe instead of stealing treasure, he could point out that…I don’t know, the sultan’s people are STARVING.
Eh, at least I know why I only watched this movie once as a kid. And it entertained Bella for a while. 3 Stars.
People died. It happened. And more often than not, death wasn’t right or fair. I wasn’t going to twist myself into knots about it. But if I told Persephone how I felt, she’d attribute my lack of grief as divine callousness.
But here’s the thing. Humans were modeled after us. How else could they watch the news—a montage of war, death, and human suffering—over coffee then go about their day like nothing was wrong? People needed a certain level of callousness to get by without drowning in the horror story of life.
~Aphrodite
I’ve been pretty quiet on the Paris front. At first it was ignorance. I was at YALLFEST when the attacks occurred and in an effort to be more present in the moment, I wasn’t checking my phone or logging into social media much over the weekend.
But then I checked back into the real world and felt horrified at the violence I found there, but almost before I had a chance to process that, came the guilt. Social Justice Warriors united as one to condemn the mainstream media for their grief over Paris when so many OTHER places had suffered without an ounce of media coverage.
I wanted to react right away. I wanted to sit and write this blog and comment on every post I saw. But I stopped myself because engaging would only detract from the real issue at hand and that’s not respectful to all the Parisians who lost their lives. I also stopped to evaluate my feelings and make sure my knee jerk reaction wasn’t just me being defensive.
And mostly, it was. Because yeah, I feel guilty. There is a massive double standard when it comes to news from Western Countries as opposed to the rest of the world. Yes, it is problematic that trivial stories about celebrity gossip made the front page on days hundreds died in countries most westerners aren’t sure how to pronounce. But telling people when and who they should mourn is not the way to get that message across. Hijacking a tragedy to prove a point is never going to be respectful and it’s not going to change anyone’s minds. Worse, guilt tripping other people is slacktavism at its finest. Instead, DO something. Next time you want to share a Facebook post shaming people for not caring enough about a thing, anything, stop and make a donation to support that cause. I promise there’s a button to share the donation you made with a link to information about the issue you support and a way to take action.
As for the sins of the mainstream media, we live in the information era. Why limit yourself to mainstream media? Seek out news from a variety of sources. The mainstream media reports what they think people want to read. If you want to change that, be the person that doesn’t fit their algorithm and share the stories that you think people need to read. But do it in a way that doesn’t condemn people for what they do and don’t know or how much they do or don’t care. Because as messed up as it is, to some degree we have to cherry pick what we do and don’t care about because if we stopped to acknowledge every tragedy, even on identical scales, we’d never stop. And even for the tragedies we do stop to acknowledge, we’re never going to mourn enough. I had school on September 12th, 2001. I’m willing to bet that 90% of the people here in the states saw the news about Paris, read the story, forwarded the status and then went right back to work, saddened, but not on the level that death demands.
Unless we are personally affected by a tragedy, we cannot care enough. It’s not possible. And while that sounds like a horrible thing, it’s a survival mechanism we have to have in order to keep going. But making people feel guilty for the moment they did (and sorry, no matter how many caveats there were in all those statuses and articles about how we should still mourn Paris but we should mourn equally, doesn’t change the fact that at the core, people were being guilt tripped for caring), that’s not going to make them care more. It’s only going to make them more callous the next time around and the world we live in is callous enough.
My thoughts are with Paris. My thoughts are with the world. Want to make a difference instead of just talking about it? Click here to make a donation to Doctors Without Borders or The Red Cross or any organization you feel is making a positive difference in a place you feel needs it. A dollar goes a lot further than a like.
On Friday, I went to the YALLFEST. There were no workshops or anything on Friday, just signings, but because I only read eBooks, I had a problem. I’m a fan of 90% of the authors who attended YALLFEST. Not a small fan, like I’ve read everything they’ve ever penned, but I didn’t have copies of their books and their books are nearly $20 a piece. You see my dilemma? So I bought four books and a notebook for the other authors to sign with writerly advice.
A bit on the authors I got autographs from on Friday. Brandon Sanderson is 99% why I was there. I’ve said it more than once, and I’m not embarrassed to say it again. He’s a writing god. I love him, in a totally platonic way, I mean. So…less like love, more like I think I may worship him?
He wrote the Mistborn series, Elantris, and he finished the Wheel of Time series because he’s that amazing. He does a podcast called Writing Excuses where he talks a lot about his process, and as a human being he’s just pretty amazing. Example: Anytime he has a spare minute in an airport he goes to the bookstore nearest him and signs every copy of his books in stock so that the next person who buys his books gets an amazing surprise. He’s also pretty awesome to follow on twitter.
In person, he’s just as amazing. He signed my Mistborn book, my notebook of writing advice, and cards for members of my writer’s group when I mentioned how much they loved him as well and how we’re essentially his cult.
Here’s what he wrote in my notebook: Write what you love, finish what you write. You’re out of excuses.
Rae Carson was my next signature in the notebook. She wrote the Fire and Thorns trilogy, which I haven’t read, but I’ve been eyeing them on kindle for weeks now. I’m going to kick myself if I read them and they end up being my favorite books. But what can you do?
Her advice: Don’t waste time on projects you don’t love. Pursue passion.
Melissa De La Cruz is most famous for writing Disney’s Descendents, but she also wrote the Blue Bloods series among many other books. I think she’s also the mind behind Witches of East End? She was on every panel I attended and she was pretty awesome in each of them.
Her advice: Never Give Up!
Margaret Stohl is famous for her Beautiful Creatures series. I was not the biggest fan of that book, because while I felt it had a great message for young women, (Claim Yourself), it fell short when the dark/evil girl’s only defining “evil” feature was that she was promiscuous. Like prior to being evil she wasn’t? I don’t like the message that sends, that everything that matters about young girls is wrapped up in their sexuality one way or another. So I was fully prepared to dislike this author, but after listening to her talk at a few panels (more on those later) I really like her. I’m really interested in where she goes from Beautiful Creatures.
Her advice: Put your butt in the chair and do it.
It was an awesome beginning to a great conference. Just wait till you hear about the panels.
I don’t mean I’ve retold every myth that’s ever been, but I have caught up to the myths I’ve used in the Persephone trilogy and the first Aphrodite book (twice). Going further into the myths behind the next two books opens up a world of spoilers, but not even in a fun way since you’ll be missing the context for the spoilers in the next book.
So Mythology Monday is going on hiatus for a while, at least until Aphrodite is released (I should have a date soon. I’m actually waiting on a phone call from my editor to clarify a few details in about thirty minutes.)
But for the meantime, I can’t just not blog. That’s no fun. I was thinking maybe set up a temporary schedule of Writing Wednesdays, where I talk about what I learned at YA Lit Fest (YALLFEST) and writer’s group and occasionally throw in some of my WIP drafts. I haven’t decided how to approach Monday and Friday yet, but I’m brainstorming some ideas. Maybe mythology Monday could continue with guest blogs? I’d love to hear some of your favorite myths. I’ve been toying with the idea of fairy tale Friday, where I overanalyze my daughter’s recent disney obsession. I don’t know. But I’m open to suggestions 🙂 What would you like to read about?
I’m not going in any official capacity. Mostly I’ll be there to completely fan girl over Brandon Sanderson and Scott Westerfeld and Gail Carriger, and Veronica Roth and, and, and….OMG!!! I’m so excited by the list of authors I might actually get to meet. But I’d be happy to meet readers too! Send me a message if you’re there. Maybe we can meet up.
*Quick Note* Persephone is on sale for 1.99 at all retailers for Columbus Day Weekend. Share the good news and buy it here!
I just want to thank Raye Wagner again for taking over my blog this week while I get some much needed editing done. Raye is the author of The Origin of the Sphinx and The Curse of the Sphinx, two very entertaining books about an ancient mystery that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. Today she’s here to talk to us about a very real issue her fictional character deals with in her novel. Grief.
I’m not a psychologist, but I work in healthcare, and I frequently deal with individuals who’ve gone through a major life event. While death of a loved one brings understandable sorrow, other major life changes will bring similar stages of grief and/or adaptation. The top 5 major life changes are death of a loved one, marriage, divorce, job change, and moving.
I’m always surprised when I ask about stress and a patient denies anything significant, only to disclose that they’ve moved, had a job change, and oh, yeah, just broke up with their boyfriend. (Statistically, more women than men go to healthcare providers, so I use ‘boyfriend’ solely because I see more heterosexual women than men, or gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender individuals).
Individuals suffering with intense emotional distress frequently experience physical symptoms, which is why 60-70% of patients seen in a specialty practices have what would be classified as “functional disorders” (no organic pathology). Receptors for neurotransmitters are not limited to the brain. In fact, serotonin, the “happy hormone” has a significant percentage of receptor sites on the GI tract. Interestingly enough, serotonin and cortisol (stress hormone) have an inverse relationship so if one is up the other is physiologically depressed. I tell patients that if they are stressed out enough, it can physiologically induce a chemical depression, and quite often make them physically ill.
Grief associated with significant loss, be it job change, or the mourning of a loved one that is deceased, has several stages (5 or 7 depending on which model you look at) and an individual’s journey through those stages is highly variable. Some people move quickly through them, and other’s get stuck, either lacking the tools, skills, or support system to adjust to their loss in a healthy way. The stages include: Denial and Isolation, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.
In Curse of the Sphinx, Hope carries a curse from Apollo that forces her to move over and over, developing no lasting relationships. Her isolated life pretty much sucks, and she knows it. She has her mom, who is also cursed, and a family friend who visits semi-regularly, and that’s it. Then she loses her mother. No more spoilers, but things go from bad to worse.
Hope has several challenges, not the least of which is her grief, and she goes through each of the stages throughout the first novel, and even into the second (not yet released). Because of her immortal state, she can’t get physically ill, but we see (and hopefully feel) the emotional strain, and the effects it has on her life.
But isn’t that what we want? We want to read about protagonists who triumph over weaknesses, insecurities, or trials. We want to feel their pain, knowing it isn’t our own, and yet in some small part reflective of something in us. And when a character we identify with takes a risk, or makes a sacrifice, we collectively hold our breath, and hope for the best. We feel their sorrow, pain and loss, just like we feel their victories and achievements. It is part of the human condition, this empathy for one another.
If at the end of a book, we feel a little braver, a little stronger, a little more courageous, a little more hopeful, grateful, or empowered. . . Isn’t that what leaves the sweetness of the story imprinted on our soul?
And did you know reading a well-written novel releases neurotransmitters in our brain (and the rest of the body, too)? It’s these chemicals that lend to the emotions we feel towards the characters who, when the author does a really good job, are just as human as the guy you sit next to on the subway, or the barista at the coffee shop, or even a loved one.
On Monday, I had Raye Wagner on my blog, telling her version of the Origin of the Sphinx. Today, I’ll be posting my review on the first novel of the series, the Curse of the Sphinx.
As an author who focuses on modern day retellings, I’m always interested in how other authors approach the bringing the ancient into modern day aspect of the world building. Raye Wagner took a unique approach by making the Greek myths not just well known, but real to all the citizens in her society. Modern teens worship the Greek gods. Demigods are a known phenomenon walking among them. Monsters and curses are an every day part of life. The book maintains this fantastical sense of a magical AU without ever losing focus of the truly modern day. The high school is a normal high school, the students in it, just as much. This book *feels* like a really good representation of what the world would actually be like if all the magic of mythology was real. Everyone wouldn’t be a demigod, humans wouldn’t dare hunt/experiment/or otherwise go after demigods and monsters because friendly reminder, the greek gods do not take mortals trifling in their business lightly. Wagner pulled off a very believable society.
The actual protagonist is a victim of one of those generational curses so common in Greek mythology. Readers hoping for more background should definitely check out the prequel. I’ve read it, so I can’t say whether or not readers would be lost without it. The romance was as anti-instalove as you could get. And the pace had a slow, gradual build up that kept me reading well into the night. I will say the story felt a little fragmented at first, but once the character arrives in Goldendale, the plot smooths out and takes off.
All in all a very unique and interesting take on Greek mythology.
Kaitlin Bevis 