Jordan MacLean's Blog: Brain Squeezings

As promised, the Heroes anthology which contains my novella, Cry Havoc, as well as work by four other authors, is available now on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

This anthology explores heroism from the perspectives of five different fantasy authors.

http://www.amazon.com/Heroes-Raconteu...

I've spent the last couple of months creating two novellas, one of which, "Cry Havoc," will appear in an upcoming anthology from Raconteur House. Details as they become available.

I haven't yet decided what to do with the other. "The Forgotten" is a dark horror fantasy. I may expand it to a full-length novel, or I may put it into a different collection. Truly, I hesitate to open it again. Writing that particular story gave me nightmares.

"Cry Havoc" follows an Englishman, or, more property a Welshman, who was condemned long ago as a coward andwho must move through his life in disguise to search for clues toward his redemption in a world gone horribly wrong.



"The Forgotten" is an exploration of the heart of heroism when it never sees the light of day. It is set in the very far future and centers around a prisoner whose acts, good or evil, go unnoticed in the world.



Next up, another novella, this one about a skeptic, a debunker of great lies, living in a time when those lies were held to be truths. Not even a working title. I literally JUST opened a new page in my editor to start writing this. I'm excited!

Anyway, that's what I've been doing with my winter vacation. I hope yours was as exciting/productive/relaxing/amusing. I'll post announcements about the anthology and about future releases as the information becomes available. Be well.

While I know this site in particular is dedicated to books, I feel it's important to mark when legendary artists leave our company.

As my son said when he found out, "I was kinda hoping he'd live forever, you know?"

I feel much the same way. Logic says that 81 is a good run, and he has given more than his share of blessings to the world. It's time for him to rest. But the part of me who could never get enough of those piercing blue eyes and that remarkable voice feels cheated. Surely there was one more Lear to be had, one more Polonius, maybe even just one more revisiting of Henry II in a new play somewhere to follow up Lion in Winter and Becket, SOMETHING more.

So good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. You touched our lives, Mr. O'Toole, and inspired so many of us. Thank you.

A huge thank you to everyone who came out to my book signing this afternoon, and especially to the great folks at The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, NC.

Please check out my interview with Awesome Gang.

http://awesomegang.com/jordan-maclean/

(posted on my website, reposted here)

I believe every story has a “word” that defines it. It has a raison d’être, a “why,” of course, which usually becomes more or less apparent as the story progresses. That’s what the story is about, and that’s the stuff of research papers. But I believe that there’s also a word, maybe a private word the author never even mentions, that explains why she decided to take action and write the story – that story and not another -- rather than let it pass as a fancy. Something made the story worth telling right now or the writer would have written something else.

In the case of Sword of Hemlock, I suppose that word is “frustration.”

Once upon a time, I found myself in a very odd position where, having already pursued several careers from cellist to software engineer, running a small company and so on, my then husband and I had done well enough for ourselves that I no longer needed to work. I could do what moms were supposed to want to do in the 90s and stay home to raise my child. This was what I had been taught all my life was the thing to do, and it was what I was supposed to want. I settled into my new role and very quickly discovered I wasn’t really happy. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my son. I did, and I took great joy in teaching him. It was that I felt like half of my life had been cut out from under me, but I wasn’t allowed to notice. I found the contradictory expectations I met every day hard to reconcile.

On the one hand, other women with careers looked down their noses at me and condescended to me, to the point where I felt compelled to “qualify” myself as one of them by bringing up my professional history. I didn’t like that feeling. I felt like I was chasing after my dwindling self-esteem. On the other hand, returning to work would have won me great disapproval from all the other stay-at-home mothers in our neighborhood and made me feel guilty for abandoning my duty to my son. They already made it clear that they didn’t like how I dressed or wore my hair, and I didn’t dare bring up my professional history with them. I felt like a bad person for even having self-esteem based in anything I’d done before becoming a “mommy.”

So I was trapped between two worlds, the “world of war,” the career world and the world where I had to fight and compete for what I wanted, the only place where I had felt challenged and fulfilled, but a world that was not what I was supposed to want, and the “world of peace,” the stay at home life that was supposed to demonstrate my husband’s prosperity and my commitment to my child but instead left me cold. When I was used to tracking down tricky problems in the guts of the system code to save the company million dollar sales, I found it hard to get excited about picking up the Legos off the floor.

Now, bear in mind that I’d always been one of those “imaginative” children who so vexes parents and teachers, so I’ve always been something of a storyteller. Even as a cellist, even as a software engineer, I always had characters rattling around in my head and bits and pieces of stories stowed away on my computer. It only got worse when I became an actor and director. So I was not surprised to hear a character in my mind speak this line, from the first chapter of Sword of Hemlock: “This I’ve wrought for myself, Gikka. Peace, security, and the exquisite boredom of a life at court.... And would that it were not so.” That idea rolled around in my head for quite a while as I stepped over the Legos on the floor and waited for my son’s school bus.

One by one, the characters came out of the shadows to take their places and started telling me their stories...

So... in honor of St. Crispin's Day and because I'm such a fangirl, I watched most of the new Henry V tonight. I only watched most of it because it glitched about halfway through. I hope to see the rest tomorrow. Here is the link: http://video.pbs.org/video/2365095278/

I really wanted to like it, and to be fair, some parts of it I really did enjoy. I liked some of their edits to the original script, but I didn't like all of them. I felt like they sacrificed pacing for unnecessary backstory and detail, and they cut scenes -- the one where Henry confronts the traitors, which was ESSENTIAL to English history and the next four plays felt like it bit into the quick a bit far.

I LOVED Tom Hiddleston's Henry for the most part. It was a very nice, nuanced read of the role, not as physical or loud as Brannagh's, but great nonetheless. I believed he could be a wild, carousing young man who straightened up as soon as he assumed the crown, a sudden scholar, a great leader.

For all that I've directed Shakespeare and I've done film both in front of the camera and behind it, I honestly can't tell you whether the choices I objected to were production issues, directorial issues or cinematography issues. Some of each, I reckon. Mostly I felt that the shortcomings had to do with budget.

It had a cheap feel about it, like they were having to make do with at most about 20 actors at a time for a scene and trying to fool you into thinking it was actually an army. The costuming was inconsistent. Sometimes it was great, sometimes it felt like they raided the costume shed.

And why is Nell Quickly ALWAYS cast as a (much) older woman? It wouldn't be an issue except their Nym was very young. Nym wanted to marry her, and she ended up married to Pistol instead. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all about cross-generational relationships, but I found it hard to believe that their 20-something Nym was ever engaged to the (still lovely) sexagenarian Julie Walters as Nell. The chemistry was not convincing like it was in Brannagh's version with Judi Dench and an older Nym. But these are all niggling trifling concerns.

Hiddleston owned the part of Henry. I'd like to see what he could do with it on stage or in a film with something more than a TV budget.

So for the first half, at least, I give it 3 stars, two thumbs up.

If you're of a mind, raise a glass today to the memory of Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warrick and Talbot and even silly old Fluellyn on the anniversary of their unexpected victory against a superior force at the Battle of Agincourt.

(In this clip, if you pay attention, you will see a VERY young Christian Bale.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-yZNM...

A soldier freshly back from Afghanistan wrote me this message on Facebook. I've edited it only to keep his personal information private.

***

Hey. I feel bad for taking so long to have said this, but I tend to procrastinate. I just saw the post for your new book in the Lords of Syon saga is coming out, and it made me think to send this. First off, I am ecstatic about Guardian Last coming out so soon. Secondly, I read Sword of Hemlock while I was deployed to the lovely country of Afghanistan.... It was amazing. I was entranced from the first page and left wanting more at the last. I am no writer, but I can imagine that publishing your first novel is no easy task, and for that I congratulate you. I await with great anticipation the release of the next book in the saga, and all that follow.

***

This message made me super happy. At one of my book signings, a woman who served with the Coast Guard said something similar. She had some horror stories to tell about serving aboard the ship for so many months surrounded by men and the lack of privacy. My book let her escape with Renda and Gikka, and she sympathized with Renda's feelings of unease at returning from that experience.

It's not often an author gets such wonderful feedback on how her work makes life a little better for someone, especially with such a dark work of fiction. All I can say to these soldiers and sailors is, thank you, and I'm glad my work helped keep up your morale.

http://www.zmescience.com/research/st...

Briefly, gamers playing Foldit managed to fold a model of this pesky enzyme into its lowest energy state and unlock its secrets for researchers who have been puzzling over it for a decade.

Kudos to the gamers for solving this puzzle so quickly, but kudos also to the researcher who had the "crazy" idea to let them take a shot at it.

The human mind doesn't always work in straight lines. This is why fiction can sometimes be so revealing to us of truths we've probably been told a thousand times but never internalized.

The notion of "show, don't tell" applies. :-)