The Walking Dead's Lori finally does good

*** MAJOR WALKING DEAD SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 4 THE KILLER WITHIN ***

Did anyone see episode 4 of season 3 of The Walking Dead last week?  America got it one week before us and I was plagued with tantalising tweets of how shocked everyone was.  Something shocking was coming!  How could the writers do that?  This is huge!

I couldn’t wait.  I bounced around the house on Saturday, trying to keep myself busy, knowing that episode 4 was sat on our planner.  That evening we watched it.

Huh.

To be honest, my first prediction was correct and my second prediction was more shocking than what actually happened.  Despite this, the end was incredibly moving and Sarah Wayne Callies (Lori) brought me to floods of tears.

I’ve never really paid much attention to Lori.  I’ve found her mostly irritating throughout.  She’s a bad wife, cheating on Rick, urging him to kill Shane and then admonishing him when he does, and a bad mother, seemingly never able to keep one eye on her son, Carl.  She’s the matriarch of the group, purely because she’s Rick’s wife.  

On Friday night, I found myself forced into liking her for ten minutes as she struggled with life and death.  Her death reminded me of Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith.  I’ve only seen this film once and it was at the cinema.  As Padme gives birth to twins, she ‘loses the will to live’ after learning of Anakin’s evil deeds and promptly dies.  Surrounded by grown men in fits of tears, I felt physically sick.  What woman allows herself to die purely because the stupid idiot that impregnated her has gone to the dark side?  Any woman worth her salt would hear that and be determined to live, to protect her children, to make sure their father doesn’t have any influence over them.

Lori’s death was beautiful.  Faced with death and taking her baby with her, or an agonising death as her baby is cut from her, Lori bravely forces Maggie to slice her open.  She then gives an incredibly emotional speech to her son about how much she loves him, how proud she is of him, how brave he is and what a wonderful man he’s going to grow into.  I blubbed.

Lori’s passing was not only a message of life and death and a mother’s sacrifice but will also be the pivotal point for Rick and his damaged mental state.

Who was Lori?  As a standalone character she was annoying with far too much air time.  However, in death she is a key piece in The Walking Dead.  With her passing the matriarch position is passed on, the group is left with a newborn, Carl is now a man having had to put down his own mother and Rick’s mind may well be lost.

What a wonderful ending to a character.

Some characters are made to be disliked by some (all writing is subjective) and some characters exist purely to shape others.  Women are often pivotal in this role, they are the lovers and mothers who can give, build and destroy lives in a way men can only imagine.  Lori may have annoyed a lot of people in life but death she is finally redeemed.

A wizard boy, a vampire and a bit of kink

Once again I must apologise for my lack of posts.  I can really only blame myself but I don’t like doing that so instead I’m going to blame work which has been very busy this last week.

Following on from my previous post about bestselling ideas, I was a little shocked that the first three bestsellers that immediately came to mind were all women; J K Rowling, Stephanie Meyer and E L James.  

Where are the bestselling males making headlines?  Well of course there is Stephen King who everyone has heard of, but he doesn’t seem to have the same punch as these three women.  What about Terry Pratchett?  I am slightly biased, being a fantasy fan, and I have a strong suspicion that Mr Pratchett is more a household name recently because of his commendable campaigning for euthanasia and Alzheimer’s rather than his wonderful books.  There are others; Iain Banks, Dan Brown, John Grisham, but no other writers have made quite as big a splash as J K Rowling, Stephanie Meyer and E L James.

 All three women are the creators of a franchise, are household names, they have all owned headlines and the book series, movie deals, crowds of screaming females (the ages of which depend on the particular books) and inescapable merchandise.  Harry Potter even has a place in the Universal Studios theme park – I wonder if they’ll do something similar for 50 Shades.

Why have these three women succeeded in making headlines where others have failed?  Does them being female have something to do with it?

I’ve been having a good, long think about this and I do think that being female is a part of their success.  Not because women are better at writing than men, of course they’re not.  It’s because of the market.

More women read than men and women are more likely to discuss the books they’ve read and share with friends and family.  These three women cover every age bracket; J K Rowling captures the young and subsequently their parents, Stephanie Meyer has hold of teenage hearts and E L James taps into the (consenting) adult.

Success in publishing is largely down to understanding your target audience.  Who is your book aimed at?  Young adult fiction and romances are the largest parts of the publishing market, so it seems only natural that these three major bestsellers should fit into these two categories (if 50 Shades can be considered romance).

I still think that 50 Shades’ success was actually down to the taboo idea.  Let’s face it, E L James didn’t necessarily have to build up her readership in the way that other authors do.  She simply jumped onto Stephanie Meyer’s grown up readership with a new twist on an already successful idea.  She threw in a lot of kink and her own fantasies and came out winning.  Not to mention that the story was so taboo that people who would usually not be interested in erotica felt the need to read this book.

So 50 Shades can claim that it went beyond satisfying the need of a major target audience and it broached the concept that humans are social animals.  To a large extent to be different is to be outcast, and instinctively humans need other humans to survive.  So a handful of people read a book, raise questions, criticism and glow about it which means that other people read it to find out what the fuss is about.  Soon enough, people are buying it purely to be ‘in with the crowd’.  What a feat!

So here’s another question; would a man be able to do what these women have done? 

Of course!  Ian Fleming did it before any of these three.  Will Twilight and Harry Potter survive as long as Bond, James Bond?

Is the idea more important than the words?

As a writer, published or unpublished, do you react negatively when the name Stephanie Meyer is mentioned?  How about J K Rowling?  E L James?

All three are best sellers with the most simple of ideas; the vampire romance, the epic story of the wizard boy and basic erotica.  These are not new ideas, so what makes these so different from the others?

I grew up on a series of books called The Worst Witch which told of Mildred, a young witch attending witching school, and her adventures.  Ok, so she was just clumsy rather than being prophesised, she wasn’t going to save the world but I still couldn’t put the books down.  Does anyone remember these books?  They certainly didn’t make headlines.

When I hit the dreaded teens I lapped up vampire romance books.  I can’t remember any off hand but I do remember loving them, pouring over them, soaking them in.  The fact that I can’t remember them shows that they definitely didn’t make headlines.

I’ve read quite a bit of erotica in my time too.  Mills and Boon, Black Lace, My Secret Garden, all of which are well known, none of which have commanded the headlines that Fifty Shades of Grey have. 

There are a number of theories as to why Harry Potter, Fifty Shades and Twilight made it big when similar ideas have gone fairly unnoticed.

Luck is a major factor.  No one can really know that their book will be a bestseller.  They just put it out there and if the cosmos wills it, they will have released it just as the world’s readers want that story.

Marketing is also important.  I recently read an article about the importance of titles and it’s very true – if Fifty Shades of Grey had been given a normal, erotica title then it would not have been the success it is today.

Another article I read recently made a worrying point, however, about the quality of these books.  It is well known that Fifty Shades is not particularly well written, you only have to read the Amazon reviews to get a hint at the quality of the writing.  The first Harry Potter book is not exactly writing gold, as J K Rowling recently admitted (which made me like her – she’s acknowledged just how much she’s grown).  Does this mean that ideas are more important that quality writing?

What would this mean for all of the amateur writers out there?  We who scour the internet in our procrastinating moments, looking for hints, tips and rules to perfect our writing, and pour for hours over our manuscripts, working each sentence to near perfection.  Is it all a waste of time?  Should we instead be thinking up new angles and original plot lines and to hell with the writing?

I don’t know about you but this thought terrifies me.  Then it occurred to me that Twilight isn’t original.  The basic plot has been told over and over.  There’s nothing new about it so what makes it so special?  Harry Potter and Fifty Shades, I can understand.  The epic boy wizard and the taboo of sadistic sex, but what is so special about the girl who falls in love with a vampire?

Perhaps in this case, the story is just what teenagers (the target audience) wants.  I spent a lot of time at school writing the girl meets vampire story for my friends (and myself).  Maybe if I’d just put that little bit of extra effort in, I could have penned Twilight.  But then, who can’t say that?  It seems to me that Twilight’s success is purely down to tapping into teenage desires and nothing more.  Following along that line of thought, Fifty Shades of Grey must tap into the taboo thoughts of some women, especially as it is basically Twilight fan fiction.  Fifty Shades is the adults Twilight, which explains a lot of its success (although doesn't excuse it, in my opinion).

Because I can’t contemplate the notion that ideas are worth more than good writing (both should be equally important, surely) and because I want to be able to give mainstream readers some credit in taste, I like to think that luck is the real reason these three bestselling ideas made it big.

You can’t predetermine what will be a bestseller, but if mainstream readers are after ideas, whether original or not, over quality writing, I hope to never be included among them.  I would rather be a good writer with compelling words and ideas, than a bestseller.

A night of fright

***MINOR SPOILER ALERT***

  

Happy Halloween!

What do you when you’re off sick on Halloween?  You snuggle up on the sofa and watch a film!

I’ve got quite a few horror films on the old Sky planner but due to the reasons for which I was off sick, I didn’t want anything too heavy so I chose Fright Night, the 2011 remake of the 1985 Fright Night, billed as a horror-comedy.

Staring Colin Farrell, Anton Yelchin, David Tennant and Toni Collette among others, I wasn’t sure about Fright Night (hence not watching it until now) but I was very pleasantly surprised.  When Charlie (Yelchin) discovers that his new neighbour is a vampire named Jerry (Yelchin), he fights hard to protect his girlfriend and mother (Collette), turning to vampire expert Peter Vincent (Tennant) for help.

Fright Night successfully pulls off a vampire movie that isn’t too scary but is interesting and tense enough to not be boring.  Sure, it has romance and the vampires are fairly traditional – garlic, crosses, holy water, etc – which does make it a little cliché in places and yet the romance isn’t overbearing and the clichés are subtle enough to work harmoniously with the characters and plot to make this a modern, fast paced vampire flick.

It may be considered that Colin Farrell would be a strange choice for the vampire but he is actually brilliant.  As all vampires should be, he is sexy and suave but he also manages to pull off an original, dangerous aura with strange head gestures and a dark confidence.  In other words, he is a believable vampire without being yet another clone straight from the vampire mould.

The special effects were also good.  Often less is more and this film keeps a lot of the vampire effects until the climax which means that there is an build up of tension throughout.  While the vampire effects were good and creepy, they were not particularly horrifying although the squealing, animalistic noises and actions were brilliantly original and spine tingling.

What is especially enjoyable is the seemingly painful transition that the vampires experience between humanoid and monster and the build up that the vampire has to go through before feeding, giving a new insight into the monster that I haven’t seen in other vampire flicks.

David Tennant was a breath of fresh air and such a good choice for the character of Peter Vincent when the casting people could have easily chosen Russell Brand and completely ruined the character.  At first Vincent is Russell Brand but Tennant is able to add layer upon layer to Vincent to make him go from an arrogant prick to bumbling, drunken vampire hunter, in order words you dislike him and then you love him.  Well...like him, well...emphasise with him.

Yelchin (Kyle Reese in Terminator Salvation and Chekov in Star Trek, if you were wondering) was flawless.  What was especially interesting about his character is that he starts the film as a bubbly teenager and towards the end he is pale and ruffled and has a look of Twilight’s Edward - the vampire prey becomes the vampire of a poetic fashion.  Whether the irony of this was on purpose or not, it works wonders and helps to show the realistic horror of what he is facing.  This is particularly important in modern vampire films in a world where vampires have become so common place and almost boring.

While dubbed as a horror comedy, Fright Night is not particularly funny.  It is light hearted in places and more creepy then scary but there were no laugh out loud moments.  I did, however, enjoy Charlie attempting to break into Jerry’s house using his smart phone to get instructions on picking locks.  I enjoyed the fact that it worked even more!  Seriously, is there an app for that?

Fright Night is a fast paced, modern vampire film which is effectively creepy and light hearted at the same time.  There is not one weak link in the cast and there are even some original moments (bearing in mind I haven’t seen the 1985 film) which makes the whole experience refreshing.  If one was to be picky, the weakest part would be the romance but even this is done gently.  There’s no slush to be found in this film, although perhaps this could have been done without the strong emphasis on sex/the losing of virginity but this again was a bit different.

Fright Night is definitely worth a watch.  It isn’t amazing but it is enjoyable with interesting characters.  Who’s ever heard of a vampire called Jerry, anyway?

“This is real. He's a real monster and he's not brooding, or lovesick, or noble. He's the fucking shark from Jaws. He kills, he feeds, and he doesn't stop until everybody around him is dead. And I seriously am so angry you think I read Twilight.”

How many inspiration hits can you get in 24 hours?

Oops, it’s been over a week since I last did a blog post.  Naughty me.  In my defence it has been a jam packed week of terrible news, awful days, social activity and wonderful, unique experiences.  All of that and it’s a week off work! 

Anyway, I wanted to share two of these days with you, none of the awfulness of this week but some of the grimy moments and the most wonderful moments (cut down otherwise the post would be huge).  This post stands as evidence that inspiration can be found everywhere and those moments are picked out in bold.

We arrived at the hotel in the early evening.  The sun had recently set and darkness had settled over the city bringing with it heavy clouds and drizzle.  After having a rest, we made our way downstairs to the restaurant, eyelids already drooping.

The restaurant was tiny compared to what we were used to, and it was heaving.  Thankfully there wasn’t a queue but there was still a good deal of time between a waiter spotting us, saying he’d be right with us and actually being shown to our table.  Beside us, two gentlemen (who were these men?  Where had they come from?  Where were they going?  What did they think of the situation?) asked for the bill as we settled with our menus.

Our drinks arrived but my husband had been brought the wrong one.  It was taken away and brought back some time later.  Eventually our order was also taken.  The gentlemen beside us still hadn’t paid, my husband whispered to me.

‘Hmm,’ I muttered back.  ‘Looks like that might be the case with everyone.  They do that to us, we’ll just walk out.’

Our food arrived and still the gentlemen beside hadn’t paid.  As an entirely different waiter who had taken our order, completely different still from the waitress who had brought the drinks, laid our food before us, the gentlemen to the side took the opportunity to ask for the bill once more.  Forty-five minutes later.  They finally paid and were able to go on their way.

Dinner was spent watching the people around us.  Watching the three members of staff running from table to table without any sign of organisation. (Did they think it was disorganised?  How was their shift going?  Who were they?)

We ordered our desserts.

‘Can I have the chocolate brownie sundae, please?’

‘The chocolate brownie?’

‘The sundae.’

‘Oh, yes, the special?’

‘Yes please.’  I watched him leave knowing full well I wouldn’t be getting the sundae.  We waited and waited, watching families come and go.  Just as I was considering venturing into the kitchen myself to make my own dessert, they were brought out to us.  Low and behold, I was given a chocolate brownie.

‘No, no.  I ordered the sundae.  The special.’

‘Oh,’ the waitress sighed.  ‘Sorry.’  She turned and took it back.  I sat back and watched more families come and go, my husband munching away at his apple crumble, scraping the plate clean.  The waitress appeared with a bowl, the chocolate brownie placed inside with two scoops of ice cream dumped on top. 

‘Thank you,’ I said without much enthusiasm, picking up the spoon she had given me.  It was dirty.  I could have banged my head on the table, or stood and screamed, but instead I got out of my chair and found the waitress.  She brought me a new spoon, her face now a scowl.

We managed to pay quickly by standing in front of the waitress and not allowing her to move until she had dealt with us, and made a quick retreat back to our room.  A faint scent of urine hit us as we opened the door.

‘Lovely,’ my husband remarked, making for the bed and kicking his shoes off.  I disappeared into the en suite to wash the sticky ice cream from my fingers.  The sink filled quickly despite the plug not being in and sat there. 

‘Wonderful,’ I muttered.

I was kept awake that night by the constant thrum of traffic.  Until midnight, there were sirens and flashing lights every few minutes (the hotel was surrounded by hospitals, we found out later.  Who was in those ambulances?  Who was driving them?) and eventually I fell asleep purely out of exhaustion, my dreams haunted by the din.

We woke to a city sat in fog.  We walked down the street, the skyscrapers on either side only coming into view as we approached.

‘Like an old computer game,’ my husband said with a grin.  We dodged the suits and crossed roads at a run, not trusting pedestrian or driver.  The skyscrapers gave way to beautiful old terraced houses and we turned off the main road, heading for the gate to the park.

Cute!!!

What a contrast!  The road noise vanished, to be replaced with bird song.  Golden and red leaves surrounded us as we walked down the path, following the signs to the zoo.  The gardens were immaculate, trimmed hedges and elegant fountains emerged from foggy entrails.  Business people cut through, striding down the wide paths.  Joggers and dog walkers were more relaxed and we walked hand in hand, beaming at the beauty.  We watched a dog running full speed down an area of grass, utterly joyful in the presence of mud and seagulls and other dogs to be chased and sniffed. (While his owner screamed at him to come back.  His name was Cookie.  He was obviously enjoying himself but what sort of day was his owner having?  Was she taking a walk to get away and have a think about something?)

We passed a group of four men sat on a bench, a four pack of cheap lager by their feet, unshaven and dirty and engrossed in a tale being told by one with great hand gestures.  (Who were they?  Were they homeless?  And what tales of adventure or retribution was being told?)

As we reached the top of the park, a strange noise was heard.  A shrill cry that was repeated.  We had reached the boundary of the zoo.  The cry followed us down the path and along the road as we searched for the main entrance.  Desperate to know what that cry was, it fell silent for the rest of the day as soon as we stepped foot inside the zoo boundaries.  (What the hell was it?!)

The reptile house inside London Zoo is among the original buildings and not yet fully renovated.  We met with a friend who gave us a wonderful tour of the animals she cared for, giving us a truly incredible and unique experience.  As she led us out of the reptile house, we went through the centre and down into the space between enclosures.  All around us were venomous snakes, locked away behind metal and locks, accessible only by old wooden planks.

‘They say it’s haunted,’ my friend said (ghost story alert!  Move to red alert!) and a shiver ran through me.  ‘A keeper who was bitten by a cobra.  It’s a bit freaky being the last one here and closing up for the night!’  We laughed nervously, as she closed and locked the door behind us, letting us back out into the foggy world of the city zoo.

A friend I made at London Zoo.  Got to love intelligent birds...

Tired, aching but beaming, we returned to the hotel and ventured back down the restaurant.  We were too tired to find somewhere else and an early morning beckoned.  There were more staff and we were seen much quicker.  We were still served by each of the staff with no semblance of organisation but at least we were given the right dishes.  My husband ordered the special chocolate brownie sundae to finish and I was enraged to see he was given something very different to my own sundae of the previous night.

While listening to me wittering on, my husband watched those sat behind me, nodding and murmuring where he felt it was appropriate.  He watched a blonde woman enter the restaurant and sit behind us.  She took out her mobile, pressed some buttons, stood and walked out.  He thought nothing of it.

As we were finishing our desserts, a woman and her daughter approached the table.  Some commotion followed, where she brought some of the waiting staff over. 

‘My bag.  Where is my bag?  I left it here by accident and now it’s gone.’ (Who was the thief?  Why did she steal it and how long had she been watching the restaurant?  Who were the woman and daughter?  Why were they staying at the hotel?)

The staff shrugged, they hadn’t seen it.  Exasperated and without answer, the woman and daughter left the restaurant. 

‘She had her bag stolen?’  I hissed at my husband, pulled my own bag closer.  I watched then as a gentleman sat behind my husband described the blonde woman to a waitress.  She nodded and shrugged.  The woman would be long gone.  What could they do?