Spooky deadlines

October draws to a close, and November swiftly approaches. This means several things. First, it means that I and everyone else who agreed to write a story about mermaids in September are late. The end of October also forms something of a hard deadline for that, since everyone who had planned on writing a mermaid story is also doing NaNoWriMo, so new adventures will soon take precedence. I already talked about my own plans for the month.

But the end of October also brings us the yearly ritual of gouging the innards from a gourd and carving it into a human semblance. This year, because there is so much television and only so much time, I did my brainstorming while watching the episode of Angel with the killer tree, and then did the scooping and carving while watching the latest episode of The Walking Dead. But my creative mind, apparently, was elsewhere.

I was pleased with the result.

A dapper o'lantern.

And here is the gentleman in his natural habitat.

Hullo children.

That was yesterday. Sadly, he has been nibbled on a little by the ravenous beasts which scour our neighborhood at night, but the result is merely that his mustache is a bit lopsided.

Today Girlfriend and I realized that a pumpkin on our stoop would of course be an invitation to roving packs of children tonight, and if we didn't want to be paid in the currency of "tricks" then we would need to acquire some "treats" with which to buy them off. Thus I ran out to Target today to pick up some candy, half fearing that they would be thoroughly picked over by the time I got there. Fortunately, they were still well stocked, and wisely so, because I wasn't the only adult in the candy aisle.

However, enjoying the capabilities of my new phone, I did take a surreptitious picture of the Target's "seasonal" section.

Winter is coming.

The staff were already at work converting the display. I remember when it was fashionable to complain about this happening the day after Thanksgiving. Apparently if we had wanted to hold that line, we should have instituted a policy of exchanging Thanksgiving gifts or something. Because this year it looks like T-day's just getting a pass.

A momentary digression of Disney-rage

While I am busily butchering The Little Mermaid for the amusement of my friends, I discover that Disney has, of course, outdone me. People. People. Have you seen this? Put in your mouthguards and stretch out your teeth-gritting muscles.

 
For those who don't want to watch, lemme sum up: Disney is bringing The Little Mermaid back to a few theaters for a limited run. The twist is that they are inviting children to bring iPads to play with a special app that will give them games to play (and sing-alongs to sing along with) synced to the movie--that is, while the movie is on.

As an aside, here, again, are words I've seen or heard too many times: "Experience the Disney classic... like never before." Is that what people want? If the trailer said, "Experience the Disney classic... exactly like you did in 1989," I don't know who wouldn't shell out.

(A parable, perhaps, for our time: I became aware of animated movies, more or less, in 1989. The "Disney Renaissance" was not a thing that was happening; it was simply a law of the universe that Disney made an excellent animated movie every year. Thus it had always been, for as long as I could remember anyway, and thus it would surely continue until the end of time. Thus it continued, anyway, until I was about ten, and I learned about the transience of things.)

I don't begrudge Disney the drive to innovate, in the abstract, but I think that this is one of those things, like cloning velociraptors, that science has made possible but human wisdom ought to prevent. I don't imagine that there is any shortage of rage about this. The idea of watching a good children's movie in a darkened theater filled with children who are distracted from the movie by glowing tablets is a horrific one to me.

Part of what frightens me is the thought that the folks at Disney didn't think The Little Mermaid could hold today's children's attention on its own. What frightens me more, though, is the thought that this is a test case and might catch on. The real potential of this gimmick isn't to enhance children's movies that don't need enhancement, but to pacify children during movies that couldn't otherwise hold their attention. There's a whole subset of the movie industry that serves no purpose but to temporarily hypnotize antsy kids during the summer, but don't think movie makers would pass something up that might let them get away with making even less interesting movies.

Today a children's movie has the relatively simple goal of holding a child's attention for about 90 minutes. But it still takes some work to do that. Even children demand a certain degree of novelty, coherency, and even intelligence (of a sort) from their entertainment. But what if the movie only had to play in the background while the child played a reskinned version of Bejeweled?

The app would be provided at the usual movie theater markup, of course.

That got grim. But don't mind me. All roads lead to the zombie apocalypse in my imagination lately.

Dis- and re-assembly

At some point in the recent past I agreed with some friends to spend this month writing a short story based on a fairy tale. It's a venture we attempted once in the past but didn't follow through on as a group--although I personally came out of it with "The Long Dance," a longish short story that I am quite proud of and that would be in the mail on its way to an editor right now if not for some frustrating events at my local FedEx place grumble grumble never going back there again grumble. This time, everyone is more on board, I think.

The seed this time is "The Little Mermaid," which I initially protested was not a fairy tale in the strictest sense, but a children's story by Hans Christian Andersen. (My strictest sense of "fairy tale" is a subset of "legend," so having a single, definitive author is a disqualifier.) I was outvoted, though, and there are worse things than having to temporarily swallow my personal flavor of pedantry. I had never actually read the original story anyway, so my education in things everyone except me has already read continued.

It will be fun to see how other people interpret the task. Although I complained at first, the source material is rich enough to offer different solutions to the problem of what to keep and what to throw out. And that's without getting into the rich and varied tradition of other stories about aquatic females.

After some headbanging, a partial inversion, and a transportation to a fantasy world that I was already working on, my mermaid story (ahem) grew legs. Then, as is apparently inevitable, it stalled out around the halfway point. Today I started from the beginning and realized that I've done all this before--in fact, it may even be my "process" to write half a first draft and then start over with a second draft of the first half, and continue that straight on into a first draft of the second half.

Once I can see what the story is starting to be shaped like, I know how to tear it apart and shape it like something else, I guess.

I still don't know how this story ends, which vexes me, because given the source material I have no confidence that it will end happily.