Durable Fairy Tales--Beauty and the Beast

I don't know when I first read Beauty and the Beast, but the first filmed version I saw was Jean Cocteau's dreamy, surreal version of the fairy tale. I remember the disembodied candelabra lighting the Beaast's home. And I remember thinking that the Beast was much more interesting than the bland man he transformed into.
Since then I've read a lot of variations on the theme, and seen a lot of the movies too--from Disney's rollicking musical version to Beastly, with Mary-Kate Olsen as the witch who curses pretty-boy Alex Pettyfer. 

Today, when I got my daily slew of newsletters offering free and almost free books for the kindle, I noticed one called The Beast of Bath, a Regency Fairytale. I thought it looked interesting and I started thinking about how many versions of the B&B I've read in the last few years, wtih their widely diverse settings. Christine Pope, for example, kicked off her popular Gaia Consortium series with a novella called Breath of Life, her version of the story.
Why is Beauty and the Beast so popular?
I think one of the reasons is that the heroine is really likable in any of the versions you read. Unlike her sisters, she isn't selfish and vain or greedy.
She is not a shallow person. One of the things I remember most about Robin McKinley's lovely version of the story (Beauty) is that she delights in the Beast's library, which has all the books ever written, as well as those that have yet to be written.  I thought that was a most wonderful thing the first time I read it and I still do.
But the Beauty is also someone who makes a moral choice. I'm not a fairy tale scholar, but I remember when I read the tale of Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady" that it was a Beauty and the Beast story with a gender change. My favorite moment in the story comes when the Lady asks the Knight which he would prefer--being able to see her as the beauty she is at night, when it's just them, or during the day, when the court can see he didn't marry a "beast." And he tells her to choose for herself, thus breaking the spell. This story is one of the subplots of a truly godawful movie called Merlin and the Sword (Candice Bergen as Morgan le Fay, Rupert Everett as Lancelot and a young Liam Neeson playing a character called Grak), and Patrick Ryecart (currently in Poldark) as Gawain. Ryecart was terrific (you might have seen him in the BBC Romeo & Juliet), and I wish the movie as a whole had been even a little better because who doesn't like King Arthur movies?
But I digress.
I was trolling through Amazon.com looking for other Beauty and the Beast stories and I found a ton of tales that looked interesting. The one that intrigued me most of all was Depravity by M.J. Haag.
It's the first in a trilogy, and it's got a 4.8 rating. It sounds like it's got a darker edge to it and that works completely because at its heart, B&B is a psychologically complex tale. I can't wait to read it.

Steampunk fairy tales

Every year or so when I have a little discretionary income, I like to download images for use on my covers and in my blog and for personal projects that need to be jazzed up with graphics and illustrations and photos. I use various different places, but this month I'm taking advantage of a sale on Bigstock. One of the projects on my "to do" list is to put together a collection of fairy tales filtered through a steampunk aesthetic. I've never really written in steampunk but I enjoy it when I run across a well-done story in the genre.

Bigstock has a selection of great steampunk fonts and I'm slowly downloading them 10 images per day. I still don't make my own covers--Joy Sillesen of Indie Author Services does that--but I really like playing around with images and font and typefaces and graphics. And I love having these images to play with.

Are SEALS the new Vikings?

I don't write contemporary romance, so I'm only vaguely aware of the elements that are trending these days. (I didn't know New Adult was an actual thing until a client asked me to edit her NA novel.) I am aware that shifters of all shapes and sizes (particularly BEARS, particularly with BBW) seem to be dominating (some would say "cluttering up") the best-seller lists in paranormal romance, and I've recently been made aware of hot alien tentacle sex. (There are some things that can never be UNREAD.) There are also about a bazillion "billionaire bondage" knockoffs of E.L. James' books. Lately though, I've noticed that the go-to alpha male figure is not the cowboy or the cop or the biker bad boy but a Navy SEAL.
I get it. When I think of Navy SEALs, the picture that comes to mind is that scene from Top Gun where all the young, hot, shirtless naval aviators play volleyball. What's not to like? But the new SEAL love is interestung to me for two reasons. One, I've read a ton of thrillers with SEALS at the center, including those by Richard Marcinko, one of the original membes of Seal Team Six. And in those books, there usually isn't even a woman character, much less a romance.  So it's interesting to see the difference in how a male writer and a female writer view the characters.
When a female writers uses a "Highlander' as her protagonist, the result is Outlander; when a male does, it's more likely to be Rob Roy or Braveheart. Love versus war. (And I am not saying here that I don't think a woman can write war stories or that a man can't write romances--I'm talking gender generalities.)
But the other reason I find the SEAL heroes intriguing is that I actually know a SEAL. And he's an impressive guy. But if you lined him up against a wall with say, Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel, and Chris Hemsworth and said, "pick the Navy SEAL, he'd be the one you picked last.
Which is, I guess, why they call it fiction and not fact.

It's been a long time coming...

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice--Martin Luther King, Jr.

FUBAR by Weston Ochse--a review

A Warrior’s Words

I am a soldier’s daughter. My father served in three wars, two of them popular, one of them not. The only stories he ever told about those times in his life were carefully edited, G-rated anecdotes like one about running over a python when he was in Burma building Bailey-Bailey bridges.

He bore his burden alone because that’s what men of his generation did. He died with his stories untold. And maybe that’s one reason why he died so young.

I wish my father—who loved to read—could have read this collection of essays and fiction.

Weston Ochse is a warrior. He is a humanist. And he is a damn fine writer.

I’ve read some fantastic collections of war stories in the past and this one is now in my top five, along with Michael Herr’s DISPATCHES and Anthony Swofford’s JARHEAD.

Every single story in this collection has been curated with care and all of them will go through you like the ball bearings spit out by a Claymore mine when someone not paying attention steps on it.

“Why is it so hard to be a man?” the protagonist of “Family Man” asks and then he offers up a sacrifice to his family that is simply…heart-stopping. “Family Man” is one of those stories, like “Plastic Soldiers” by WD County, that can never be unread.

The essays are just as strong as the fiction, with “Every War Has a Signature Sound” being one of my favorites. Ochse ends the collection with a piece called “Finishing School” that is inspirational and confessional and altogether insightful and a story about warring with your self when it just seems so much easier to quit.

But warriors don’t quit.

concrete Angel by Patricia Abbot a review

This book begins with a bang, literally as Eve Moran unloads her gun into a man whose name is either Joey or Jimmy or Jerry--she can't quite remember. And if she did remember, she wouldn't care. Because Eve only cares about herself.

If you know Patricia Abbott’s short stories, you’ve been waiting a long time for her debut as a novelist. If you’re new to her work, you’re in for a treat. This mother/daughter tale is filled with sharp observation and lethal detail that underlines the family dysfunction (with a capital D) with economy and grace. One paragraph, early on, tells us everything we need to know about narcissistic Eve Moran and how little she cares for anyone else in her life, including her daughter: 

She invited him up to her apartment where she served him stuffed figs, cocktail nuts, dates, and several dry martinis before taking him to bed. She’d given up cooking for men after a nasty episode a few years earlier, but kept prepared foods such as these on hand for potential guests— items looking attractive in a cut-glass bowl. We often made a Sunday dinner of the leftovers if they didn’t disappear on Saturday night.

We see all too clearly the damage Mona is wreaking in her daughter’s life, even though Christine is too young to understand just how masterfully and completely she is being manipulated. But even though she’s blind to how her mother operates, Christine sees how the world works, and her point of view is clear-eyed and unsentimental, rather like Mattie Ross in Charles Portis’ novel TRUE GRIT (or Addie Pray in David Brown’s ADDIE PRAY, aka PAPER MOON). And though there’s something her father said to her mother in the heat of the divorce proceedings, something Christine can’t quite wrap her head around, the meaning is clear to us and explains so so much about Eve and why her 12-year-old daughter believes that “Saving Mother” is her special skill-set.

This is a story about lies and deceptions and what happens when all those lies come home to roost. Eve is a fantastic character, a moral chameleon whose capacity for self-delusion is even bigger than her thirst for instant gratification. CONCRETE ANGEL is a hard-boiled delight for people who like character-driven stories.

The Fixer by Joseph Finder A Review

Readers soon realize that the title of this thriller has a double meaning. Rick Hoffman has come back to the house he grew up in, a money pit of a 1903 Queen Anne house that has been on the market for months with only one offer, so lowball that the realtor didn’t even acknowledge it.

Rick, a former investigative reporter who’s just lost his job as editor of a slick metropolitan magazine called BACK BAY, is in need of some fixing up himself. Unemployed, uncoupled (his ex-fiancée has moved on) and basically unmoored, Rick latches on to the idea of fixing the house up with the help of his next-door neighbor and then selling it for seven figures.

And then he finds the money in the wall.

What happens next sends Rick on a journey he never expected and shows him a side of his law-abiding lawyer father he never suspected existed. Leonard (Lenny) Hoffman looms large in the narrative even though as the story opens, he’s lying in a long-term care nursing home, a stroke patient unable to speak. He is able to communicate though, and his message to Rick is clear. Let sleeping Benjamins lie. But Rick used to be a reporter and old habits die hard.

This book is written in a cinematic way that keeps the action moving at a brisk clip. The plot keeps opening out and getting more and more sinister with each revelation that Rick uncovers. And along the way there are old girlfriends, former neighbors, and a whole lot of people who have been keeping a couple of really dirty secrets.

I can’t say it wasn’t a little formulaic and there were elements that were kind of predictable, but honestly—if you read a lot of thrillers, it’s harder and harder for a writer to surprise you. It’s enough that this book entertains.