Next on the Agenda

Well, as the revisions on Peter Pan: Betwixt-and-Between draw to a close (I just have a few tidbits/scenes to plunk in here and there) I am already thinking about what I will work on next.  But, that's to be expected, write?  It won't be a story about the boy who never grew up since I've had enough of him for now.  But I can and shall always return to him.

I'm fortunate to not have a lack of  ideas that I've been kicking around, and I thought for a while there that I'd tackle the sequel to What If It's a Trick Question?  But the truth is I'm just not "feeling" it yet. 

I'm now leaning toward a particular story that's been scratching at my proverbial door for quite some time .  I keep "hearing" about it, although not from any particular character.  It should be a lot of fun to write.  It's one of two 'ghost stories' I've had my "eye on" and it's the non-scary of the two.  I don't want to reveal the crux of it, but suffice to say that it's not a haunting in the traditional sense.  I imagine it to be peppered with humor (but that's not the difference/plot point either.)

There's sort of a problem, though.  I've got the premise, but the ultimate goal(s) of the characters has not yet been revealed to me.  So there's this cool idea floating around, but no end or purpose in sight.  Minor goals, yes.  Major driving plot, no.  However, I'm confident that there is someone fictional ready to spill his or her beans any time now.  Perhaps if I start defining the characters more clearly the overall scope will arise.

I do know the "nature" of one of the characters, but he's not the protagonist.  I might have a name for him... not that I love it nor hate it, but I wrote it down just to be sure.  I used the marvelous internet to check and see if it had been as original as I thought, but alas, it actually is a last name.  And here I imagined I'd created something altogether unheard of - how silly of me.  I don't remember ever hearing the name/word before, but I guess that subconscious is a powerful thing, eh?  Thus, I might not use it.  No, not because it isn't wholly original, but for the simple reason that I am not in love with it.  It came to me two days ago and I haven't "heard " from nor had any great revelations or insights about him other than what I already know, so I'm thinking maybe it's not his name after all.  But it's got to be close, for it doesn't quite feel wrong.

Well, I'll know soon enough... and who's to say?  Right now Buttercup is still reading What If It's a Trick Question?  Life has interfered several times now.  But she's almost done!  Perhaps her enthusiasm when she does finish will ignite the further adventures of those characters after all.  [And then with my luck, the 'ghost story' characters will haunt me to death as I'm working on the sequel.]

To PRE or Not to PRE?

A while back in the comments of this post, I started to ponder the idea of “prequel.” It’s a curious thing, a prequel. For in order to be a prequel for the audience, the “original” needs to have come first. That sounds like a no-brainer. But consider some examples.

As I’ve said before (and also re-posted links to Danny Pitt Stoller’s great articles as such) The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis are often [and I feel erroneously] read in chronological order. Technically, of course, The Magician’s Nephew is a prequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But for many, it’s not seen/understood that way, though it is most definitely a prequel as far as Lewis is concerned — he didn’t know the events himself when he wrote LWW!

George Lucas’s epic saga of Star Wars is famous for having prequels. But let’s face the facts. It’s a bit different than with C.S. Lewis. Here, they are not really prequels. Lucas had written out the grand scheme of the story he wished to tell from the start. Granted, it received rewrites and drop-outs, but on the whole, he knew the spine of the story. Due to feasibility concerns he began his tale in the middle. (Also because Episode IV - A New Hope is the only part that can manage to stand alone [in case it had been a flop.])  I cannot confirm that it is true, but allegedly Hayden Christensen wants to one day show his kids the episodes “in order,” meaning beginning with Episode I - The Phantom Menace. (I think that would ruin the suspense of the saga, just for the record.) Either way, the “prequel trilogy” is only such because they came out secondary to the “original” set.  According to Lucas’s musing and composition, they’re not — at least not in the same sense as Lewis.

Those are but two examples of this "phenomenon."

When I’d been writing Peter Pan: Betwixt-and-Between I always thought of it as an interquel (a sequel to one story and a prequel to another). I had just assumed that people would already know the story of Peter Pan (a.k.a. Peter and Wendy.) Anon pointed out to me that someone, however, just might not know that story and read the adventures of Peter Pan from “the beginning,” starting with Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (or The Little White Bird), moving on to my interquel and then on to the story most of us know. It didn’t really occur to me that someone wouldn't consider it an "adventure before." (To quote Slightly in Hogan’s version: Stupid of me.) But seriously, although unlikely, it’s bound to happen. Thus, in that sense, I did not write an interquel/prequel.

The status of “prequel” is relative.  Something to think about, eh?

Don't Panic - It's Still Flying

In case the status of the revisions on Peter Pan: Betwixt-and-Between have been wondered about...I took a break from it on purpose. Not so much from lack of initiative or even oversaturation, but from the standpoint of being able to have a “fresher” read of it. After having made all the minor tweaks (and some major ones!) and also having left myself in-document comments and reminders on what to toy with later, I decided it would be a good idea to come back to it after a hiatus.


The idea worked out well. I’ve been back into it for a while now. I certainly did need to go away from it and then read through from the beginning in order to keep the changes straight.  I do have that fresh look I needed, as I actually had forgotten one of the next scenes coming up that a character spoke about.  I find myself cutting lines and simplifying others. I’ve put in a couple of the bigger additions, too. All in all, I’m happy (or happier, to be accurate) with it. It certainly flows much better now and the kinks have been smoothed out. I’m currently going into Chapter 11 (of 14.) Once I’m all through I’ll go back and put in a chunk that I didn’t have the gumption to write when I came to it. And then it should be all set to put into the hands of Andrea Jones, author of Hook & Jill. She’ll be the second person to read it.

After that, well, its fate is still up in the air...

Page 326

Waiting for something to load, I picked up my 'baby name book' which I have, of course, to consult for character names.  I opened a page at random and landed on the name Lindford, an Old English place name meaning "Linden tree ford" or "flax ford."  Yeah, okay, so what?  Well, I worked my way down the page, stopping to read about the name Linus and glad for the Peanuts mention, nodded at the not-so-suprising notion that Lionel means "young lion"... and then what do I see?  Llewellyn.  As in Llewellyn Davies, the "adopted family" of Sir J.M. Barrie.

I love "coincindences."

By the way, according to my book there's some discrepency over the meaning of Llewellyn.  Apparently it's "resembling a lion" but another school of thought akins it to "leader."  In either case, the name is of Welsh origin.

Playing Around

I had just been thumbing thru the script to the play Peter Pan.  As I have said before, it's not as saturated in me as so with the novel, since I tend to deal with the book.

I had to share this, as I truly laughed out loud.  In Barrie's description of how to portray Nana, he writes:

...must never be on two legs except on those rare occasions when an ordinary nurse would be on four.

Ah, the cleverness of Barrie!

Bill & Ted: STILL totally EXCELLENT

Not sure if it has been here on this site, but it’s no secret that I am a fan of Bill & Ted. (Well, if it had been, it isn’t one now.) Yes, they’re utterly silly, but hey, that’s why I like them.

I remember seeing the ads on TV for it, thinking how (dare I say) stupid it looked. But my friend Zaph (rest his soul) and I needed something to do on a Friday night. And we figured: It’s about time travel (a subject of which I am [and he had been] a sucker for) and something, at least one thing, will be funny. Well, we loved it. It had been so much more than I expected it to be, and the toying with time clocked in rather nicely, too. The (sad?) truth of it is... we saw it every consecutive Friday for seven weeks. We probably would have seen it more, but (definitely sadly, perhaps horribly) our preferred movie theater started to chop it up. Yes, really! We knew, we had seen it many times. But whole parts of scenes were missing. I don’t know the reason for it, but nevertheless, it had happened.

I even "had to" have (and did obtain!) a red denim jacket like Ted "Theodore" Logan.  [And did so without the internet.  {The internet didn't exist!}]

Another anecdote... Zaph and I had been in a fast food place and two nuns arrived. They spoke the praises of a movie, none other than Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. They were ecstatic that we liked it, too. They’d been entranced by the wonderful message of “Be excellent to each other,” finding it a hip way of expressing the purest form of their beliefs.

I’ll also tell you that Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is the movie I have seen the most. I won’t disclose how many times, partly because it has been so many times I lost track. (Double digits involved.)

Naturally, I’d been really happy about the sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey coming out. And yes, I liked it, too. No, I didn’t love it as much, but I found it totally worthy. A bit of cool trivia from the sequel - the villain in it is named De Nomolos, a very slick and (ahem!) excellent name for a bad guy. Here’s the trivia part. It’s derived from simply flipping the names of one of the writers (of both films): Ed Solomon.

I even sort of liked the cartoon series. It could have been much better, but what we got had been a lot of fun for someone who just can’t get enough of those lovable doofs. However, as we learned from the ill-fated live action show (which lasted for what, two weeks?) it’s not always the case that we will love them. Not having Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves really made a difference. (In cartoon form it didn’t matter so much.)  [For the record, my friends and I wanted a TV series long before either had been announced.  The cartoon show,as it appeared, had been title Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures.  I don't recall the live-action title and don't even feel like looking it up.  Not to sound pompous, but I liked our title for a series better:  Triumphant Tales of Bill & Ted]

WELL, they’ve been kicking around the idea of a third movie for about 15 years now. I’m happy to report that it is still alive. Yes, there’s a distinct possibility that they’re going for the charm of three. The best news is that Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson, as well as the all-important Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves are all on board - so long as they agree on the script/story. The general consensus is that it will deal with Little Bill and Little Ted (their kids, as established in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.) Too bad George Carlin can’t be involved. Rest his soul, too. If you think about it, it might seem overkill and a rehash to keep his character Rufus as part of the storyline anyway.

Time (ha!) will tell, but I’m hoping it does show up.

NetherNeverland

Well, here's the new face for Peter Pan.

That's actor Charlie Rowe, playing Peter in the SyFy Channel's Neverland.
(The photo is not from the SyFy 4-hour movie event.)
New information has come forth.

I'll say flat out, I'm a bit disinterested.  For one thing, it's going to be a prequel to "Peter Pan."  Not that I object to them doing that... I'm cool with it as long as it's a re-imagining and not meant to be directly contiguous with Barrie's tale.  The fact of it is, though, that I'd looked forward to a re-invention of the story we all know... maybe with flying airship pirates and laser swords and rotating hook hands.  Not that I'm particularly excited for those things.  I just mean I wanted to see it sent into some other style and universe.  Thus, a prequel doesn't quite cut the mustard for me.  It seems to borrow from iconic lore enough, but it doesn't sound very 'Peter Pan' to me, either.  I'll still watch of course, just to see what they do with it.  It's being brought to us from writer/director Nick Willing.  Somehow that's a good match for Darling, so I guess I'm willing, too.

I've borrowed this from MovieWeb, who posted the rest of the story here.

Sweeping in time from the turbulent seas of the pirates of the Caribbean to the back alleys of Dickensian London to a world of pure imagination, Neverland is the inspired origin story of one of the most cherished characters of all time, Peter Pan.

Raised on the streets of turn-of-the century London, orphaned Peter and his pals survive by their fearless wits as cunning young pickpockets. Now, they've been rounded up by their mentor Jimmy Hook to snatch a priceless--some believe, magical--treasure which transports them to another world. Neverland is a realm of white jungles and legendary mysteries of eternal youth, where unknown friends and enemies snatched from time welcome the new travelers with both excitement and trepidation. These groups include a band of 18th century pirates led by the power-mad Elizabeth Bonny, and the Native American Kaw tribe led by a Holy Man, which has protected the secret of the tree spirits from Bonny and her gang for ages - and that has meant war. But as the fight to save this strange and beautiful world becomes vital, Hook, Peter, and the ragamuffin lost boys consider that growing old somewhere in time could be less important than growing up, right here in their new home called Neverland.

Cause for PANic?