Stories I Love (Despite Themselves): Endeavor
I’ve mentioned before on the blog that the Stories I Love (use the Category dropdown to read all of the posts) are those where I feel a real connection with one or more of the characters. Not only that, but character trumps all for me—it’s much more important than the plot. That was driven home once again last week when we watched the latest recommendation from my Facebook Page: Endeavor. (Thanks, Maureen!) Endeavor is an ITV/Masterpiece series chronicling the early years of Inspector Morse (from the Colin Dexter books and the previous ITV series), the years before he became a Read more…
Seriously? You’re Playing the Amnesia Card?
This week’s blog post is a quick (or at least somewhat scattered) combination rave and rant. The rave is me sharing a show I’ve been enjoying lately. As for the rant, you may remember a post a while back on things that can jolt you out of a story (How Factual Do You Want Your Fiction?). This week I stumbled upon another very specific story jolter, and I thought I’d share. A lot of people claim we’re in a Golden Age of TV, and there do seem to be a lot of quality shows on television now. I don’t have Read more…
A Stories I Love Holiday Tradition: Thunderheart
Last week, in addition to eating yummy foods we usually don’t take the time to fix (mmm… gravy), my husband and I indulged in another Thanksgiving tradition. Almost every year for—let’s just say a lot of years—we’ve watched the same movie. (I even stuffed it in my suitcase when an earthquake sent us to England during the month of November, but that’s a story for another time.) And it never gets old… Thunderheart is the story of a gung-ho FBI agent, Raymond Levoi (Val Kilmer), assigned to investigate a murder on a Native American Reservation in South Dakota. Tensions on Read more…
The 100th Blog Post, with Stories I Love: The Last Policeman
The Blog turns One Hundred today—woo hoo! Well, at least this is one hundredth entry posted, so I thought I’d share something special. Today’s Stories I Love features the book that got me (for good or ill—depends on who you ask) to finally jump into the world of indie publishing. Nope, it’s not nonfiction. It’s a mystery. And a sci fi. A mysti-fi? Imagine that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth. We don’t know exactly where, but we do know when—six months from now—and we know it will be catastrophic. What do you do with your remaining days, and Read more…
Stories I Thoroughly Enjoy: Zero Effect
Raise your hand if you remember the 1990s. (Unless you’re wearing a T-shirt you bought at a Nirvana concert; then you can keep it down.) Bill Pullman is one of those actors that I don’t initially remember being in things (my sleeping brain thanks me for blocking out The Serpent and the Rainbow, and all other Wes Craven movies), but he was in a lot of movies in the 1990s. They ranged across multiple genres, from the romantic comedy While You Were Sleeping to David Lynch’s Lost Highway (yes, I consider Lynch to be his own genre) to the blockbuster Independence Read more…
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