Check out this interview, with me, on AFA’s site.
I’m to be the guest tomorrow on Tim Wildmon’s “Today’s Issues” show, 10:10-10:30 a.m. Central Time, on American Family Radio, which you can listen to online at http://www.afr.net . I have not been able to train my voice to sound like Basil Rathbone’s or Charlton Heston’s, so I’ll just have to go with my own. Yeesh.
I know the topic is to be my books, the Bell Mountain series of fantasy novels. But I’ve never yet had any radio host tell me in advance what questions he or she is going to ask me, so it’ll all have to be off the top of my head. If I get caught flat-footed and have to answer “Homina-homina,” you have my excuse.
If you think being on 200 radio stations at once to speak extemporaneously about your books, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, is a no-pressure situation, just try it sometime. Me, I’ve got the heeby-jeebies.
Not knowing what the questions are going to be, I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to say tomorrow! But if I can’t talk about these books, who can?
Look at this: it’s almost 11:00 and no one’s been here yet. Does that mean I can write anything I want, since no one will see it?
I finally got a chance to read one of the Redwall series of fantasies by the late Brian Jacques. Redwall itself, Book #1 in the series, wasn’t available, so I chose Martin the Warrior.
These books have been fantastically successful, spinning off TV specials and even an opera, of all things. Blamed if I know why.
All of the characters in Martin are talking animals. Somehow this works just fine in The Wind in the Willows and the Freddy the Pig books, but I didn’t find it worked for me here. I suspect it was because many of these animals act like badly-behaved human beings. This is supposed to be fiction for juveniles, but I would rate it “R” for violence.
For all the fighting and the journeying in this story, it doesn’t seem that much really happens. Jacques could have told the story in half the time he took. Instead, he padded it with long descriptions of what all the characters were eating, every two or three pages. After a few chapters, this began to strike me as a very strange procedure.
By now you may be getting the impression that I don’t like anything. But can I help it if there’s so much poor workmanship out there? I wanted very much to like this book, but I got kind of turned off by all the blood and guts and the perpetual fascination with food. Was Mr. Jacques starving while he wrote this thing?
I got the all-time champion nuisance phone call this morning. As soon as you pick up the receiver, a robot voice says, “Please continue to hold…” I hung up before I heard any more.
But what kind of dodo would actually stand there and waste a piece of his life because some unidentified machine asked him to? Continue to hold for how long? Maybe they could get you to be on hold all morning.
Then again, look at the people we pick to be our leaders. We really must be idiots. Mayor Bloomberg today unveiled a plan to make New York City “greener” by reserving 10,000 parking spaces–people in New York will kill for parking space–for electric cars. This would require the installation of charge meters so the cars can be plugged in while they’re parked… oh, and wiring, and special poles, and more public employees, and more public employee pensions, and so on. It’ll cost tens of millions of dollars. Maybe even billions. And take away 10,000 parking spaces from the vast majority who don’t have electric cars.
There’s a US senator, currently, who’s in hot water for allegedly enjoying under-age prostitutes (he got sued by a couple of adult prostitutes for not paying them for services rendered); and he’s also said to have found a few illegal ways to pad his paycheck, big-time. His ex-wife teaches “sex education.” Their daughter appears on TV a lot to push “The Vagina Monologues.”
These are the kind of people who tell us how we ought to live.
Yeah… we’re stupid.
I can’t tell you how tired I am of watching my country get disemboweled and dismantled by its so-called leaders. I want to start writing the next book of my Bell Mountain series, #7, so bad, I can taste it.
First, though, I’ve got to do my live interview with Tim Wildmon. For those of you who want to hear it, this is the pertinent info: Wednesday, Feb. 20 (that’s a week from today), 10:10 to 10:30 a.m. Central Time, on American Family Association radio, Today’s Issues with Tim Wildmon. The program will be broadcast out of 200 radio stations, which kind of gives me the jitters. I’ve done radio before, but never on this scale.
So, why don’t I just start writing #7? And, by the way, #5 The Fugitive Prince and #6 The Palace have been written and are waiting to be published.
Well, I have to wait until God gives me the story (which He has done six times already). Bell Mountain, The Thunder King, and The Last Banquet started out as very vivid dreams. The Cellar Beneath the Cellar was a natural outgrowth from Bell Mountain. I’m not sure where The Fugitive Prince came from, but the climax of The Palace came to me fully-drawn–just burst into my imagination. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to get to the climax.
So now I’m just standing outside the world of Obann, waiting for My Lord to let me back in. I know of no way to rush Him.
PS: And of course the link I tried to provide to the Bell Mountain series takes the reader immediately to some wine website and makes me look a right dicky-doo-dah. Well, I never said I could handle computers, did I?
PPS: The radio interview can be heard online at http://www.afr.net .
No, I’m not going to watch Dracula’s speech tonight.
Who’s Dracula? Why, our first voter-fraud president, of course. I call him “Dracula” because he’s sucking the nation dry.
Christopher Lee, you ought to watch this guy. You could learn a lot from him.
Instead of sitting there listening to two or three dozen lies a minute, I will read my Bible and then watch an old movie on youtube, maybe play some chess. The lies will still be there in the morning.
As my wife was marveling at the latest “People of Walmart” on the ol’ computer, I couldn’t help asking, “Can I go back to Narnia now?”
The BBC treatment of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader came out in 1989. All right, some of the costumes are kind of hokey. But there is poetry here. It gets under your skin. It stirs the blood. When the voyagers come to Ramandu‘s island and meet the ancient, retired star–I mean a star brought down from heaven… This is among the most beautiful and emotionally moving scenes you will ever find on film. We have seen it many times, two tough old birds, and it never fails to bring up tears. Nor is it the only beauty in this movie. Best of all, it is all in the service of Jesus Christ Our Lord.
The new movie threw out all the poetry and underplayed the Christian theme. Fooey! Fools! Do you think beauty created by a human mind is cheap? Oh, we can create many things that seem to be beautiful… but they aren’t. The real thing is a gem of great rarity. And you threw it away. For all your gawdy special effects, for all the money that you spent, there was nothing–nothing!–in your Voyage that came within long miles of the poetry and beauty brought forth by C.S. Lewis and happily captured in this humble old BBC effort.
But then Christ is the fount of beauty. No one who is embarrassed to praise Him will ever create real beauty.
Everything outside wears a shining white mantle of snow, and icicles glitter from the eaves of all the houses. God has painted another beautiful picture.
Sometimes I am not able to follow the example of the Macabees, who laid off fighting on the Sabbath (unless they were attacked). If you’d like to see this morning’s set-to, go to the Chessgames.com website ( http://www.chessgames.com ), scroll down to “Chessforums,” click it, and then scroll until you find the “Playground Player Chessforum,” with the little green dinosaur for an avatar. That’s my forum. Click it and follow the discussion, in which I attempt to defend the right of a Christian baker in Oregon not to be forced to create a cake for a lesbian “wedding.” The state is flexing its muscles, trying to compel this man to do something abhorrent to his conscience. Sounds all too familiar, doesn’t it?
But that’s done for the time being, and we’re going to spend the afternoon watching the wonderful old BBC rendition of C.S. Lewis‘ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Part III of The Chronicles of Narnia. It’s vastly better than the fancy new 3-D movie version that came out a little while ago.
I love these stories because they never fail to remind me that, no matter how aggressive our statist bullies are today, Christ is King–and He shall reign forever and ever.
Granted they got hammered pretty hard in New England; but here in the New York metropolitan area, people freak out over snow for no reason but that the media tell them to.
The forecast for New York City yesterday was for 10 to 12 inches of snow. So naturally there was nothing on the radio all day long except chatter about the impending snowmageddon, the storm to end storms, blah-blah… It was a perfectly typical snowstorm for this part of the country, and people carried on like they were going to wind up with the Donner Party.
Let me ask you nicely, folks: please, please, please stop believing the so-called “news” media. They hype, they spin, they lie. They sit on stories that make Democrats look bad (which means they sit on just about every true story about public affairs). They suppress. They get a real charge out of scaring people. Some of them, if they ever discovered afterward that they had accidentally told the truth about anything, would go out and hang themselves.
Here in New Jersey, the only hard thing about this snowstorm was having to listen to the media trying to panic people–and seeing them succeed.
I don’t like to rip an author who has died recently and can’t defend himself; who was extremely popular and successful; and who, in the book I just read, was trying to create something positive and wholesome, even if he didn’t pull it off.
So I’m going to write a review without mentioning the author’s name or the title of his book. Why do such an odd thing? Because the book has lessons to teach anyone who wants to write a fantasy.
The biggest of those lessons is this: Don’t waste good ideas.
The story is a fantasy set in Victorian England. That’s a good idea; makes a nice change from the usual medieval stuff. The hero, unbeknownst to the other characters in the book, is immortal. In fact, he comes out of a legend that they’d all recognize. That’s another idea with a lot of potential.
The hero communicates telepathically with his dog, who is also immortal. The author could have done a lot with that. Instead, the hero and his dog mostly exchange sappy small talk that accomplishes nothing but to add pages to the book. Lots of pages.
There’s nothing in the story that makes it uniquely Victorian. We could just as easily be in New Jersey in 2013. There’s no Victorian feel to the story.
There is no reason for the hero to be immortal. He doesn’t do anything that a mortal hero couldn’t do. He’s been wandering around as in immortal for a couple hundred years, but we are told nothing of his adventures or experiences during that time.
Lesson Two: Please do try to make sense!
Just because your story is a fantasy doesn’t mean it can be incoherent. A lot of the stuff in this book happens for no apparent reason. A boy and his dog are made immortal–by a talking angel–and instructed to walk the earth and “do good.” Wherever they are, the angel warns, they must move on as soon as they hear a bell, any bell, toll once. How come? I dunno. And I don’t know about you, but being sentenced to an eternity of perpetual wandering seems like a heavy burden to me. What did the boy and the dog do to deserve this? Nothing, actually. Maybe the angel was just in a bad mood.
Lesson Three: It’s really hard to believe a story in which everyone is either 100% good or else totally mean and rotten. Worse, all the nice characters are really smart, but all the bad characters are abysmally stupid and incompetent. It’s hard to imagine how these villains could find their way out of bed in the morning, much less pose a threat to anyone.
This book was written for young readers, 12 years old or so. Unless an author has a warped desire to write to idiots, I think it’s always better to write up to children than to write down to them. Just because your readers are young doesn’t mean they’re unintelligent. Show them some respect. Give them credit for being able to understand that bad people sometimes look like good people, until you get to know them better, and that wicked schemes are dangerous precisely because they aren’t clearly labeled “wicked schemes.”
Give pre-teens credit for some smarts.