Because I loved their production of The Magician’s Nephew last year, I went to see the Shaw Festival’s 2019 production of that other seldom-adapted Narnia story, The Horse and His Boy. This adaptation took a few more liberties with the original, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing (particularly since the…
Four episodes I watched all at once after returning from our honeymoon, four thoughts.
I’ve been thinking lately about how many of the books I enjoyed as a kid are… pretty explicitly awful in the way they treat anyone who isn’t white, straight, able, upper/middle-class, Christian, cisgender, and male. Part of that is because a lot of my favourite children’s literature came from pre-1960s…
One of the things that limits me as a writer is how much I enjoy stasis as an audience member. Because many stories in the genres I read and write and watch thrive on epic-scale plots driven by set-piece actions, skilled writers in those genres have to be able to…
Sidekicks are an interesting fictional creature. They can inspire the same amount of love as the hero, but everyone understands that they’re somewhat more malleable. And nobody understands that better than John Watson. I mean, John Watson. I mean… All of these characters serve the same story purpose(s). But they…
The first three months of the year are always a rough time for me, what with work density, grey weather, and mood stuff. So I’m always glad to find activities and stuff like these that make my life better! Here are some new things that worked for me this quarter:
*ding ding ding* Ladies and gents and other esteemed persons, do we have a show for you tonight! In this corner, the reigning champion, protagonist of the fastest-selling book in history, Harry F***ing Pot-teeeeeer and his world of wizards, magic, and blood purity wars. Our challenger: young, scrappy, one of…
I love good twist endings. You know, the ones that reveal a whole new layer to the story, that make you care about the characters even more and marvel at the solution to the puzzle you’ve been wrestling with all this while. Heck, I’ll even settle for bad twist endings,…
Happy Chanukah! The last quarter of the year feels about five times as long as all the rest. Daylight gets shorter, the school semester gets more intense (hello, end-of-term papers to mark!), and I get more stressed out. But class is over, and I’m chilling in the eye of the…
Whoa-oa, we’re halfway there! Whoa-oa, 50% through 2017! April through June contains both my most and least stressful times of year. End of semester = ton of marking (imagine a Looney-Toons style billion-ton anvil dropping from the sky). May is full of wrap-up-the-term work meetings, half of which I missed…