Unpopular Opinions: Lorelei Gilmore

I'm sure you've all heard that Netflix did a new Gilmore Girls show. I didn't watch the old one when it was on, but thought I should now that people are talking about it again. It's one of those shows that I've heard a lot about. Lots of intelligent women I like and admire enjoy it and I always intended to watch it someday.

So, I've been giving it a go. I'm in Season 2 right now.

I don't quite hate it enough to walk away. I'll still watch more. But I definitely don't love it.

Dialogue: 
People who told me I'd like the show praised the dialogue.

And, yes, there are some cute bits. I tend to like Luke's rants better than Lorelei's. I snorted during a recently-watched episode when Luke went on about how unprepared he was to become the sudden parent figure for his nephew. "I have no patience for jam hands!"

But these bits feel like staged monologues to me, or maybe dialogues when Lorelei and Rory do one together. Kind of like bits by Abbott and Costello, but with less real emotion and more elbowing you to make sure you've noticed how clever they are.

In short, the dialogue is fun, in a plastic, surface-y, insincere way. But it doesn't move me.

Quirk overload:

So, this town is on quirk overload.

I enjoy some good quirky characters. As a younger woman, I was half in love with Chris in the Morning on Northern Exposure, another show set in an imaginary town full of odd people.

But there's too much quirk for me in Stars Hollow. When everyone is bizarre, the bizarre gets boring. You need a straight man for the comedian to play off of. But here, everyone is Groucho Marx and there's no Margaret Dumont.

When I lived in Nome, Alaska, I used to joke that instead of a town drunk, they had me: the town sober. Stars Hollow doesn't have one! Even the curmudgeons are just a different brand of quirky. Thank goodness for the outsider perspective of characters like Dean and Max who can at least see that this place is a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

Lorelei:

And Lorelei is here to out-quirk them all. She's the manic pixie dream girl sent to torture Luke and we're supposed to cheer for them to get together. I'm like, "Luke, Dude, back away from the manic pixie. Those things will eat you alive!"

Lorelei is beloved among the quirk-tastic denizens of this town above all others. I'm waiting to see why. So far, she seems just irresponsible and self-centered to me, only interested in other people to the degree that they are foils for herself. The way she treats Sookie, for example, grates on my nerves. Friendship, dear Lorelei is a two-way street, and you are a terrible friend.

Which leads me to my biggest complaint:

Suspension of Disbelief:

I don't believe this story. I have no trouble watching shows that are patently untrue and feature characters doing things that are physically impossible like flying or running at the speed of light or reading minds or any number of crazy things. But, I have to be able to lose myself in the story, accepting the world around me as real, believe that the characters can do the things they do. And I just don't do that on this show.

The backstory, as I understand it so far is:

Lorelei was a poor little rich girl who didn't want her debutante life. She got pregnant at sixteen, ran away from home, and settled in this tiny town not too far from where her parents lived. She convinced a woman who owned an inn to employ her and give her a place to live with her infant and, over the next sixteen years, worked her way up until she is now running the inn. The child she raised alone while doing all of this is a Mary Sue of a girl with no serious bad habits or scars from her poorly supervised childhood.

I don't buy it.

I don't buy that Lorelei had the gumption to build a life for herself whens she'd been raised a pampered rich girl.

And even if I could buy that, I don't buy that this sixteen year old child had the patience to raise a baby with such care and love, even while working full time to keep them in food and shelter, that they are now so close it's of interest to Freud.

I don't buy that the kid came through unscathed: kindhearted, generous, bookish, ambitious, and of chaste habits.

I've been a single mother. It was only for two years, thank G-d. I was thirty-two. I had the support and help of my parents. I was lucky. And it was still freaking hard! I was exhausted all the time.

Lorelei, as portrayed so far, isn't woman enough to have done all she is supposed to have done.

And if she were, why would she give up so quickly on funding her daughter's education without mommy and daddy's checkbook? Surely Stars Hollow could have funded her with a giant quirky festival that raised the tuition dollars if her independence was that important to her.

Conclusions: 
Gilmore Girls is glib. I value sincerity and deep emotions (in life and in fiction). This show has a pretty surface, but it admires itself too much. While there are some things about it that are refreshing and interesting, After watching 1.5 seasons, I'm afraid I still don't get it.

So what do you think, people of the Internet? Want to help me understand what's so great about this show? Tell me I'm wrong? Agree with me? Please comment below. I'd love to know what you think, too.

IWSG: Burning Fast and Bright or Burning Out?

I'm not one to turn away opportunity. After all, you don't know if it will come knocking again at all, or that you'll be free to take it at another time. But even though I've got a ready publisher willing to take on the fourth and fifth books of my planned 5-book series, I'm taking a pause from writing them.

It's scary as heck.

I'm worried that I'll lose momentum in sales and building buzz. But I'm also worried that if I keep going at this pace, I'm going to burn out and lose my love of the work.

A little history:

I got my first book contract in 2014 and the book (Going Through the Change: A Menopausal Superhero Novel) came out in spring 2015. When the first book was accepted, I was partway through writing the second, Change of Life. I finished it in early summer 2015, then quickly wrote a novella in the same world for an anthology my publisher was putting together (Indomitable Ten). Both the anthology and the second book came out in spring 2016.

Meanwhile, I wrote another novella and two short stories in the same world for other anthologies (Theme-Thology: Mad Science, The Good Fight 3: Sidekicks, and The Realms Beyond ), a handful of stories for my blog and newsletter readers, and the third novel, which is is in edits now and has a summer 2017 release planned. That makes 10 works of varying lengths in a single universe in three years writing time.

That's quite a wave I've been riding, and I'm tired.

I couldn't be more thrilled to have so much interest in my work, but this pace is exhausting (it doesn't yet pay enough to let me cut down on the day job), and worse than that, it's not fun.

Readers of this blog probably remember that I had to do a revise and resubmit on the third novel. Looking back on it, I think I ended up in that spot due to a combination of trying to work too fast and burnout.

So, I'm doing something I hope is brave and not stupid: I'm not writing the fourth novel yet. Instead, I'm going back to a completely different novel, my NaNoWriMo project from 2015 and making it my 2017 project to finish. I want to have it ready for submission by August. It's a middle grades novel, which doesn't feature any superheroes, but does have a lot of science and magic: Rat Jones and the Lacrosse Zombies.

I'm thinking this is a good idea for a few reasons: finding the fun again, not burning out, diversifying my output.

I'm thinking this is a bad idea mostly because I'm worried that I won't be able to easily pick it back up again after taking a break or that readers will have lost interest.

But I figure that it's better to have readers lose interest because of a longer wait for book four than because I release a sub-par book four. This would be a great time to have a crystal ball and know that my decision is the right one to serve my writing career, but since I don't, I'll just ask all of you to tell me I'm doing the right thing. I am, right?

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If you're not already following #IWSG (Insecure Writer's Support Group), you should really check it out. The monthly blog hop is a panoply of insight into the writing life at all stages of hobby and career. Search the hashtag in your favorite social media venue and you'll find something interesting on the first Wednesday of every month.

This month the group asked "Have you ever pulled out a really old story and reworked it? Did it work out?" So far for me, the answer is no, I haven't. I've just begun reworking an "old" novel, but it's only been two years since I wrote the draft I have, so it's not really that old. In fact, I haven't been at this long enough in any serious way to have any really old work to go back to. Before I was thirty-five, I'd only written poetry and essays, not novels. I do have one trunk novel I'd like to go back and revise at some point, but we'll see what we see. 

Con Artists and Star-Crossed Lovers: My Picks for #sonofapitch

I've been working as a judge this week for #SonofaPitch a query contest masterminded by the talented Katie Hamstead Teller. You can check out the details of the contest here. Katie has done this a few times now, so keep your eyes peeled for the next contest if you didn't have the chance to participate this time.

My team was Team Hera, as in Hera Syndulla from Rebels. I picked her because she is fierce and motherly at the same time. One of the reasons I love participating in this particular query contest is because the participants (both the query-ers and the author-judges) foster such a supportive environment. It's hard to balance support with critique, but we do it every time. Hera would be proud of us.

I've made my picks for the five queries to go on to the next level of the contest. So here they are! These are not in ranked order. Luckily, no one made me rank my votes. So, these are alphabetical by title.

Choice 1: A World Apart: This story struck me for pushing the boundaries of what constitutes romance as a genre. Besides just meeting and falling in love, the two men in this story have history and personal baggage to overcome. Their story is further complicated when a crime investigation is involved.

Choice 2: Empathy: Imminent Dawn: I must have been in a romantic mood, because even though this story is a thriller, I was first drawn in by the main character who was willing to take incredible risks to regain access to her wife. I know I'd love to read more about the cyberpunk type brain implants and the intrigue surrounding them, too. I'm just hoping the lovers make it in the end!

Choice 3: Lunar Base Lost: Frontier politics and family conflict are at the center of this story. I was intrigued by the motivations of the characters, and curious to see how far they are willing to go to get their way.  I also really liked seeing the way the author incorporated the feedback received to hone and focus the query itself. The last version was a much tighter piece of work than the first one, and that's really the goal of the whole experience in a contest like this one.

Choice 4: No Rest for the Wicked: The author posted this one as an adult gaslight fantasy. Gaslight or steampunk is a genre I'm really starting to appreciate. They seem to capture that old movie feeling of a woman with spunk and moxie. The main character of this one sounds like a woman I'd enjoy inviting to tea so she could tell me about the cons she has pulled and the trouble she's escaped.

Choice 5: Prisoner of Fate: I was intrigued from the opening line of this query, which intermixed the modern concept of a mid-life crisis with the old-fashioned one of a carriage. When I moved onto the excerpt and met Sedhan, a man obviously up to no good, my curiosity was piqued.

I didn't get to read ALL the entries. Darn day job getting in the way of my fun . . . But you can check out all the entries here and at the blogs of the other hosting authors:  Elsie Elmore (Team Droids), Elizabeth Roderick (Team Leia), Kathleen Ann Palm (Team Darkside), Rena Rocford (Team Rebels), and of course, our organizer and Grand Poobah, Katie Hamstead Teller.

If you're a writer working on querying your work, you can glean a lot of insight looking through contests like this one. And if you're a reader, it's a good way to see who the new up-and-coming authors might be in the next few years.

#SonofaPitch: Query #10: The Deserved

For my regular readers, these are some special posts this week as part of a pitch contest I'm providing feedback for. My normal musings will return next week.

For participants, welcome to my blog! I'm happy to host you and excited to see what kinds of stories you've written. Please remember that only the author of this piece and the participating judges are supposed to comment. All other comments will be deleted.

We're Team Hera! Because here on Balancing Act, we're both bad-ass and warm and nurturing, and we'll fight to bring out the best in our crew, um, team. :-)

You can check out other teams on the other hosting blogs: Elsie Elmore (Team Droids), Elizabeth Roderick (Team Leia), Kathleen Ann Palm (Team Darkside), Rena Rocford (Team Rebels), and of course, our organizer and Grand Poobah, Katie Hamstead Teller.

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Title: The Deserved
Category and Genre: Adult Fantasy
Word Count: 127,000

Query:

Myran is deadly hot, the ground is cracked open and rays of lethal light flash through the city every day. But nothing worries Donovar as much as the constant threat of attack.

When he was a soldier, Donovar never imagined he’d be ruling the empire. He hates it. Despite holding a third of the voting power, he’s never felt so powerless to make any real change.

He supported the war in Shense to hunt down and capture the Selsahn rebels, but then they went underground. Disappeared. And when they started targeting civilians, everything changed. Now magical attacks ravage the empire, people keep dying in impossible ways and they’re no closer to stopping the rebels than they were two years ago. There’s only one option he can see: give up and pull out of Shense. Bring the troops home.

But the council won’t stand for it. As long as this war lines their pockets, they’re not pulling out. And the public are so angry, so driven by fear, that even the suggestion of surrender would brand him a coward and a traitor. He’d be kicked out of the Diarchy in the blink of an eye. Donovar’s a war hero, after all. He should be stronger than that.

No - Donovar’s going to have to work in secret. He’ll have to do everything he hates: lie, cheat and backstab his way through the politics and the bureaucracy. If that doesn’t work, he might even need to get out the old sword. Because he’s running out of time. He’s beginning to suspect there’s more to these attacks than meets the eye and, if he can’t find a way to end it soon, the next might be the one that kills them all.

First 250 Words:

The wretch wiped spit from her cheeks. A figure loomed over her, anger distorting the bronze wrinkles on his face.

“Get back, filthy Shem!”

He spat again, this time at her feet. Curling herself inwards, she scuttled away, keeping low to the floor. The man stamped after her – but only until she had scurried back into whatever dark hole she had come from. After scratching out a quick warding sign on the dusty red wall to his right, he turned back to his goods muttering,

“Bloody wide-eyes, can’t a man make an honest living…” 

The wretch lay waiting round the corner and pressed to the floor until he was out of earshot. She looked at her spoils. Brushing orange dust from the single bronze drachm she clasped between her bony fingers, she sighed. It was pointless: she couldn’t eat it and nobody would sell to a Shem. 

Nobody honest anyway, and she daren’t risk trying to buy from anyone else. Letting the coin drop into the dirt, she made herself small and hurried away, clinging to the walls of the buildings for shade. The farmer had let her go, but the harsh sun would not be so forgiving.

It was approaching Hardlight and she had still not found food. This was the second day running, and if she did not eat tonight she would not have the energy to search tomorrow. She would starve. She would probably die.

#SonofaPitch: Query #9: First5

For my regular readers, these are some special posts this week as part of a pitch contest I'm providing feedback for. My normal musings will return next week.

For participants, welcome to my blog! I'm happy to host you and excited to see what kinds of stories you've written. Please remember that only the author of this piece and the participating judges are supposed to comment. All other comments will be deleted.

We're Team Hera! Because here on Balancing Act, we're both bad-ass and warm and nurturing, and we'll fight to bring out the best in our crew, um, team. :-)

You can check out other teams on the other hosting blogs: Elsie Elmore (Team Droids), Elizabeth Roderick (Team Leia), Kathleen Ann Palm (Team Darkside), Rena Rocford (Team Rebels), and of course, our organizer and Grand Poobah, Katie Hamstead Teller.

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Title: FIRST5
Category and Genre: Adult Fantasy/SciFi
Word Count: (93,000)

Query:

The Inhikiod, a winged race living high in their mountain cavern hives, never bother to look down. Their life is flying the skies. As a star competitor in the Inhikiod flying competitions, nineteen-year-old Hikala lives only to fly and win accolades for herself and her Inhikiod family. After an irresponsible challenge resulted in permanent injuries to her flying partner and best friend, Hikala is banished to the planet’s surface for a year, forbidden to fly.

Never having set foot on the surface, Hikala must come to terms with her own race’s millennia old history of enslaving the planet’s indigenous race, the non-winged Dawk. Only knowing the Dawk as servants in her hive, Hikala struggles to enmesh herself in their culture and survive their hatred while dealing with the surface’s bi-annual flooding and predatory creatures.

Tid, a Dawk who sees more in Hikala than just being Inhikiod, helps her navigate the surface challenges. But as their romance grows, so do the rumblings of a revolution. The Dawk want Hikala to become a linchpin in their fight to free themselves from their Inhikiod masters. But if Hikala stays to help, she must give up flying forever, ripping out her soul. If she returns home, she’ll break Tid’s heart and abandon her new friends to the vengeance of the Inhikiod.

First 250 words:

Cradled by wind and sunlight, Hikala spun through the sky, a mirror to her partner’s flight. The air whistled through her wings, sounding a harmonic note to balance the wind-song created with each stroke of Sarwa’s violet wings. A final double flip merged flashes of blue and violet and ended their sky dance to screams of approval from the observers scattered across the sky.

Blue wings cupping the air beneath her, Hikala floated on her back and shouted her exhilaration to the wind. Always more reserved, Sarwa hovered at her side and only laughed in response, a wide lopsided grin spread across his dark brown face. Hikala sighed when the same thought she had after every perfect sky dance crossed her mind—to forget the world and keep flying with Sarwa forever. But they had finished their doubles routine and needed to return inside for their score; a score that would determine the winner of this year’s Inhikiod Games.

There were many competitions throughout the year, but these Games were the pinnacle of them all. Not much interested the Inhikiod other than their flying competitions and socializing, so the Games were highly anticipated and the best races were dissected over dinner tables for the rest of the year.

Sarwa offered his hand and he and Hikala flew back to the King’s landing pad, the staging area for the Games. As they lightly set down on the crescent-shaped entrance platform to the huge cavern carved into the mountainside, raucous cheers erupted.

#SonofaPitch: Query #8: Empathy: Imminent Dawn

For my regular readers, these are some special posts this week as part of a pitch contest I'm providing feedback for. My normal musings will return next week.

For participants, welcome to my blog! I'm happy to host you and excited to see what kinds of stories you've written. Please remember that only the author of this piece and the participating judges are supposed to comment. All other comments will be deleted.

We're Team Hera! Because here on Balancing Act, we're both bad-ass and warm and nurturing, and we'll fight to bring out the best in our crew, um, team. :-)

You can check out other teams on the other hosting blogs: Elsie Elmore (Team Droids), Elizabeth Roderick (Team Leia), Kathleen Ann Palm (Team Darkside), Rena Rocford (Team Rebels), and of course, our organizer and Grand Poobah, Katie Hamstead Teller.

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Title: EMPATHY: Imminent Dawn
Category and Genre: Adult Sci-fi
Word Count: 110,000

Query:

EMPATHY: Imminent Dawn is the story of art-school dropout Chandra Adelhadeo, who, in a desperate effort to communicate with her comatose wife, enrolls in the first round of human trials for an implant that will give her access to the internet in her mind.

Though Chandra is elated when she becomes the first for whom this technology functions, the study takes a sinister turn when dozens of patients begin to seize and go missing. Trapped on the research compound without answers from EMPATHY’s pioneer as to whether the nanochip will let her speak with her wife once she, too, has it implanted, Chandra must take action if she’s to ever see her wife again. By teaming up with an amateur programmer and an on-compound administrative assistant, Chandra fights to save the study from itself… before she, too, disappears.

First 250 Words:

Chandra Adelhadeo ran her fingers along the scar as she sat in the post-install waiting room.

So much hinged on the conversation she would have on the other side of the door at the end of the hall. Had the install gone as planned? How soon would the implant start to work? When could she use it to speak with Kyra?

Any minute now they would call her name and—ugh. Chandra cringed. She was doing it again.
She curled her fingers inward, grasping tightly at the grit of the charcoal pencil in her hand. The advice of her pre-study therapist came to her.

Draw. Write. Focus on something you can control. 

Chandra eased in a breath and opened the sketchbook on her knee to a fresh leaf.

Kyra, 

I’ve felt miserable for abandoning you since Ratan dropped me off. That’s not the right word, though: abandon. I did this for you, for us, and when this is all over we’ll be closer than we have been in a long time. 

As soon as EMPATHY is working for me, I’ll make sure you get it as well. No matter the cost, I will make sure this works for us. We need it. I need it. I—

“Chandra?”

Her attention shot toward the receptionist. A bleary-eyed participant emerged from the back room and passed between them.

“The doctor will see you now.” 

Chandra bit her lower lip. “Thanks.” A stunted breath escaped as she stood.

#SonofaPitch: Query #7: Playing God

For my regular readers, these are some special posts this week as part of a pitch contest I'm providing feedback for. My normal musings will return next week.

For participants, welcome to my blog! I'm happy to host you and excited to see what kinds of stories you've written. Please remember that only the author of this piece and the participating judges are supposed to comment. All other comments will be deleted.

We're Team Hera! Because here on Balancing Act, we're both bad-ass and warm and nurturing, and we'll fight to bring out the best in our crew, um, team. :-)

You can check out other teams on the other hosting blogs: Elsie Elmore (Team Droids), Elizabeth Roderick (Team Leia), Kathleen Ann Palm (Team Darkside), Rena Rocford (Team Rebels), and of course, our organizer and Grand Poobah, Katie Hamstead Teller.

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Title: PLAYING GOD
Category and Genre: Adult, Contemporary Fantasy
Word Count: 106,000

Query:
Sworn off family in-fighting and rivalries, Apollo has spent the last decade in Portland, Maine, incarnated as research scientist Dr. Paul Archer. Family’s not the only thing Apollo’s sworn off — he’s also done with women (of the mortal ilk), and most of all, Pantheon, a chess-like game the gods play with human lives. So when Venus drops by unannounced, demanding that Apollo repay a debt dating back to the Trojan War by helping her pull off a move in the game, Apollo’s intention is to execute the move, wipe the slate clean, and get right back to work in the lab.

What Apollo doesn’t expect is how this game and its pawn, college senior Theresa DiPaulo, revive his long-buried feelings of guilt and failure stemming from his mother's deicide at the hands of his stepmother. Nor does he expect how compelled he feels to intervene to save Theresa from the same fate. As the game unfolds, and the parallels to that long-ago round of Pantheon mount up, Apollo gets sucked deeper and deeper in, until he can no longer run from the intrafamilial conflict he left behind when he abdicated Olympus and took refuge DownEast. Apollo’s got a plan — if only Theresa would open up and let him in, if only she’d stop trying to protect him, if only she loved him back, pulling it off would be so much easier.

First 250 Words:

“Hold still.” I closed my eyes and, my hands flat on the bare skin of the boy’s chest, forced a surge of energy into him, feeling it spread through his frail body with the beats of his heart. My strength gushed out of me, like I’d cut a major blood vessel. A minute later, when I opened my eyes, my head swam and my legs shook.

The kid was staring at me. I withdrew my hands, and disconnected the IV. Then I sat on the foot of the gurney, fighting the tunnel vision and nausea.

The door opened. The jingle of bracelets told me it was my assistant Demetria. She pressed a Gatorade into my hand and passed another to the boy. I heard the boy’s gulps. I couldn’t open mine, my fingers too weak to grip the cap and twist. Demetria extended her hand for the bottle, and opened it with the same cruel matter-of-factness with which she’d snap the neck of a lab rat.

“Good thing for Connor his parents had him transported here, instead of Maine Med.” Her dry tone belied her words. The boy would have died at the hospital. In surviving to five, he’d already beaten the odds. Demetria wasn’t happy that the boy was still alive. No, that was harsh. She wasn’t happy that I’d brought him back from the edge. It was an important distinction.

I took a couple sips of Gatorade and pressed the damp bottle to my cheek.