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Merry Christmas 2021!
Well, I actually did it. Holly and Ivy is written, edited, formatted and staged in its entirety. At 43,877 words, it’s very close to my target length of 43K. That (along with some goodies I ordered from Amazon) is my Christmas gift to myself. I wanted to be done early and it finally happened. Maybe, next year, I can even get the whole thing done before Thanksgiving…
What We’ve All Been Waiting For
For it is in giving that we receive. ~Francis of Assisi
So, this is Christmas…
Yeah, I can’t stand that song either.
Anyway, this is “the big show”. Watching the kids tear into their gifts, hoping they like what we got them.
I’ll let you know how that worked out on Wednesday.
In the meantime, I wish you the merriest of holiday festivities. I wish you comfort, joy and plenty.
The Reason For The Season
The Little Drummer Boy | 1968
HD | 1080p | Full Movie | Christmas Movies for Kids
Okay, while this is one of my least favorite Christmas songs and I never particularly liked this one when I was a kid, this particular Christmas special has its own charm. The drummer boy is a bit of a Scrooge figure.
Instead of being greedy like old Ebeneezer, Aaron is a bitter orphan who hates humanity for all of the indignities that have been inflicted on him over the course of his young life. Rather than the three temporal ghosts of Scrooge’s redemption, Aaron meets the Three Magi who lead him to find Jesus.
It’s an interesting take on the Christmas story whether or not I enjoy the song it’s based on.
It’s not my least favorite song. I think former Beatles Paul and John hold the corner on those tunes. Another song that I genuinely can’t stand is Mary, Did You Know? It’s not because it’s a bad song. It’s a lovely tune with a meditative quality, but…
YES!
SHE KNEW!
THE ANNUNCIATION IS A THING!
Sorry, I don’t like when people make songs that are supposed to be inspirational doing a grand jete over the Scripture they’re supposed to be well-versed in.
C‘MON, MAN!
She was personally briefed by an Archangel, so yeah, she knew...
Through A Kaleidoscope
Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it. ~Lloyd Alexander
People like their fantasy to have a verisimilitude. It used to be enough for an audience to understand “A Wizard Did It“, but no longer.
The problem with having obsessive nerds as a potentially core fan base is that they’re going to obsess nerdily. They’re going to want to poke into every nook and cranny of the most extraneous minutia.
That’s fine, it’s expected. It’s just setting the bar for me.
If you didn’t already know, the reason why there’s a transporter in Star Trek is because in the 60’s, special effects were costly in both time and material costs. Rather than spending extensive periods of time doing rocket launch scenes, they could just beam down from orbit with a less arduous camera trick and some post-production razzmatazz.
People rolled with it because it was freaking cool.
Only after the show had been canceled and several generations of obsessive nerds had time to watch the episodes over and over in syndication did we start getting books on the Physics of Star Trek and official-sounding technobabble.
Once the new series came out in the 1980s, the studio realized it was a money maker. As such, it was staffed with experts in creating convincing technobabble, high-end special effects, artificial languages and prosthetics that hadn’t been seen since Planet of the Apes.
That’s the baseline.
For SciFi, you’ve got Star Trek, Star Wars, Aliens, The Expanse and a host of other franchises who define the bare minimum for futuristic verisimilitude and conceptual rabbit holes for the most meticulous of nerds.
For fantasy, you’ve got Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, The Witcher and a ton of other franchises who define the parameters for magical adventures, simulated lore and esoteric species.
For superheroes, you’ve got the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Extended Universe, The Boys, The Arrowverse and oodles more four-color heroic properties setting pace for anybody who flies, swings, teleports or shoots lasers out of any part of their anatomy.
People expect to be wowed. They expect to take a breath, go back and watch it again and be wowed again by all of the little details.
Given that I shoot from the hip, it’s not something that’s going to happen on the first run. Being that it has been my method, I’ve got to start doing something that doesn’t come naturally to me at all.
I’m going to have to write it out, my way. Then I’m going to have to go back and take what I’ve written and find the spots where all of those details need to go. Wow, that’s quite a challenge.
For now, I’m happy to be done with Holly and Ivy on schedule. I’ve got to make the paperback cover and format the book for KDP.
Next year, The Sentinels begin again…
Blessings of the season to you and yours from me and mine. Merry Christmas, everyone.