It took over a year to capture the original pictures and longer still to process them into a storybook format. I’ve had to learn a few new music and media skills to get this far, but this trailer is 100% created by me. PLEASE let me know if you do or don’t like it; any and all feedback will help me improve my work in the future. I hope you enjoy it.
Lend me your ears…that’s disgusting; take those back this instant!
After taking a year off to concentrate on my burdening…no, bludgeoning… wait, *burgeoning* writing career, I’m a guest at this year’s Ancient City Con at the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront on July 18th-20th, 2014. I’ll be bringing a bunch of books: copies of The Matriarch and The Matriarch: Guardians. If you already have one or both, bring them by to get those dead-tree editions signed at no charge! There will be panels…oh yes, there WILL be panels…including an all-new edition of The Ultimate Occult Showdown with myself and Brett Link as your enforcers…whoops, I meant “hosts!”
C’mon down, get a hotel room right on the waterfront, and party with us for the eighth-annual Ancient City Con this mid-July. Seriously, there’s nothing else to do that weekend in Jacksonville…I promise. Would I lie? I mean, when it’s important?!
See ya there!
A friend pointed an article my way called “We’re losing all our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome,” citing a concern that, while storytellers in film have come a long way in empowering female characters, those characters are often reduced to mere plot devices.
There is an essential truth to this: they ARE plot devices.
And the reason for this is just as true: secondary characters support the Protagonist’s story.
Before we crawl under the hood, understand that I am not advocating the treatment of Strong Female Characters in many works – the author of the article makes a fair point of this – but we’re not talking about Ripley from Aliens or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” because those are their stories. We are also not talking about “Women In Refrigerators,” a trope concerning violence against women in comics as a plot device to “hurt” Strong Male Characters.
The article outlines eight questions writers should ask themselves about Strong Female Characters, everything from “(can she be) seamlessly replaced with a floor lamp with some useful information written on it” all the way to “deciding to have sex with/not have sex with/agreeing to date/deciding to break up with a male hero” pointlessness. The article contends that writers should rise to the occasion to create someone worthy of the name Strong Female Character, but these could all be reduced to a single, far simpler question: Can your Strong Female Character be seamlessly replaced by a Strong Male Character? If yes, all’s good; if not, why not?
Continue reading “Are Strong Female Characters in Supporting Roles Mostly Useless?”
In the wake of a Slate blogger YA-shaming adults (backlashes are occurring everywhere), I’d like to weigh in on why *I* dabble in “childish fiction.”
Complexity isn’t reserved for the old; it’s often a mistake that, too often, many adults forget how smart they were as kids and underestimate young adults. The difference is experience, not intelligence. Also, the point of view of a child isn’t any less interesting than an adult – or an alien, a monster, an animal, an addict, a plumber, or an artificial intelligence. Stephen King’s Stand By Me aka “The Body” has an all-child cast; It is born of childhood fears and has one leg in. Very few will argue that John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In is “for children.”
An interesting thing about YA is lessening the importance of sex in the story; the definition of adult (aka “literary”) fare seems to be that everything must be ultimately motivated by your crotch – music, film, poetry, whatever – because everything adults do in life must lead to something naked and primal. Kids also have the advantage of being blind to society-imposed gender roles rather than be pigeonholed in the way many adults classify things. The whole “put away childish things” and “know your place” is something children are taught, not something that just happens.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion; unlike facts, opinions are never wrong. If you like books about complex feline societies masquerading as a social commentary on the human world, enjoy. YA is just another classification to help readers find what they’re looking for, no different from sci-fi, horror, romance, thriller, superhero, or whatnot.
The truth is this: a good story is a good story. Don’t feel guilty…just enjoy.
Hero’s Journey is the classic stock-plot framework; it works and you can build upon it in infinite ways. From a three-act perspective, this sets up our narrative and story, but it often all hinges on a single decision – an unhealthy one at that.
This is the moment where many viewers/readers will say, “Why didn’t they just do THIS?” The easy answer is “because then we wouldn’t have a story,” but the trick is to make the audience feel enough for the character to go along with it and propel the story forward…not always an easy task.
This setup also plays strongly into the ending; if the journey and character growth promised at the start isn’t clear, any ending – no matter how many explosions and cool character deaths take place – will fall short and leave the audience feeling unfulfilled by the experience. A solid story needs to provide what was promised, even if it’s not exactly in the way the audience imagined it.
Listen to Pixar’s Michael Arndt, screenwriter for Toy Story 3, explain first-act methodology (it’s cooler than it sounds) with examples from The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and the original Toy Story.
Got all that? Now, get back to writing!
The sequel to The Matriarch has been published! The Matriarch: Guardians now available in Amazon Kindle and paperback!
“… BETTER than the original! The reader can tell that Kevin Ranson really grew as an artist between books…Vampire lovers have found their next favorite vamp series!”
http://cedarcrestsanctum.com/the-matriarch-guardians/
If you like it or enjoyed The Matriarch, please tell a fellow reader or give a copy as a gift.
Enjoy!
Season 13 of “American Idol” is over, and someone won.
And yet everyone won.
As a rule, I don’t watch competition shows; I’m pretty selective with my television watching altogether. People with superstar dreams (note: without a ‘Z’) flock to local competitions, putting their lives on hold for a few minutes of fame and perhaps to get noticed. Sometime it’s about the prize and sometimes it’s about the exposure, but at the heart of it all, these shows are still a competition: there will be one winner and the rest are losers.
My family watches the show, and one of their favorites this season was Caleb: all rocker with a throwback sound you’d have to look for on Pandora or maybe “Ozzy’s Boneyard” on SiriusXM. Caleb looked and sounded ready-made for superstardom; he looked like he was auditioning, not competing. I paid attention, drifting away from my writing desk to listen in when his turn at the microphone came up; if you’re a fan of classic rock, he’s hard to resist, belting out David Coverdale tunes like a secret lovechild. In spite of his incredible talent, he not only sought out the other contestants for support but genuinely supported them in return. Instead of a weekly shrinking group of flaring attitudes, they all became closer, and you could see it on the screen, often with Caleb at the center of it.
They were all competitors, yet they all supported one another.
Peeking in once in a while, there was a time many years ago when “Idol” interviewed their contestants and asked what they thought of one another, highlighting the drama in the competition (possibly even orchestrating much of it). Those days are long gone, and the show itself isn’t the ratings champion it once was… too bad. You hear so much in the media about how narcissistic and selfie-oriented today’s youth are, with no ambition and expecting their handouts, yet there on the stage were over a dozen young adults competing for a single prize and more than willing to help one another reach it – just because they could.
Should all artists be like this? Lessons learned.
There’s no reason for this way of thinking anymore. A writer is a writer; it’s hard work and takes dedication to the craft. Why can’t we all support one another and stop clinging to the labels that no longer apply?
Imagine selling two million books, having half a dozen of your novels hit the New York Times bestseller list, being inundated with thousands of fan emails every month, and then having someone call you an “aspiring writer.”
That’s what happened in New Orleans this weekend, when the planners of the RT Booklovers Convention decided to place self-published authors in a dinky room off to the side while the traditionally published authors sat at tables in the grand ballroom.
Authors like Liliana Hart, who is at the top of the game not just in the romance genre but in all of publishing, was labeled an “Aspiring Author.”
RT is a major bookselling convention, a place that publishers expect to sell boatloads of titles. The bookselling, I believe, is handled by Barnes & Noble, a company with a history of segregating self-published authors on their online bestseller lists and who has no incentive to promote authors they don’t stock. So the fault here is not with the authors in the other room; it’s with the organizers and the undoubted pressure they feel from monied interests.
According to TheGuardian.com, there are 10 specific points regarding whether or not a novel ought to be deemed “gothic,” citing Horace Walpole’s 1764 publication The Castle of Otranto as the first such work. While I had no such specific intention to do so, it appears that The Matriarch is, indeed, mostly a gothic novel! I’ll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, so here we go!
1. The villain is a murderous tyrant with scary eyes. Check and check. +10%.
2. The heroine is a pious, virginal orphan, prone to fainting. Well, not so much. Janiss is neither an orphan nor prone to fainting, but she certainly fits the bill of “good girl” although she isn’t actually a virgin. To quoth ye olde The Cabin in the Woods, “We work with what we have.” +5%.
3. It’s set in a spooky castle or stately home. You caught me; I did this on purpose. It wasn’t done to make it gothic, but I was thinking about the equivalent of a modern-day Dracula’s castle when I created Cedarcrest Sanctum as a vampire stronghold. +10%.
4. There is (probably) a ghost or monster. Yep: vampires AND ghosts, but with the requisite twist and fresh take. +10%.
5. It’s set in the olden days. While the setup for The Matriarch does refer to century-old events, it isn’t set in the distant past; no points for this question. 5 more to go!
Continue reading “Is The Matriarch a Gothic Novel?”
The casting for Star Wars VII is out, and besides everyone’s favorite former bikini-clad slave princess Carrie Fisher, there is only one new female character in anything resembling a major role… out of SEVEN. Throw in the original Boy’s Club cast of six and that’s two out THIRTEEN principles.
This shouldn’t be a big deal, right? There ARE women in Star Wars, just not many with relevant or speaking parts ON FILM. Oh, and the so-dubbed “expanded Star Wars universe” was declared null-and-void and not official movie canon, so apparently there ARE only two relevant women in the entire galaxy. Worse yet, those two are related and the younger one (SPOILER!) died after childbirth – because, you know, that’s what women do: have babies and die. Really?!
Say, isn’t this a J.J.Abrams production? What’s interesting is that his television programming (“Lost,” “Alias,” “Fringe”) have meaty roles for ladies and often many of them, but his film production credits (Star Trek, Cloverfield, Super 8, Mission Impossible) seems to only have room for a chosen few in an ensemble, often ONE. Playing devil’s advocate, maybe this is an informed choice: are relevant female characters too complex for most screenwriters to simply throw them up on-screen and present them believably in a film format?
Continue reading “Female Characters: Good for Television, Bad for Movies?”
Kevin A. Ranson 