Tag Archives: Characters

Replaying Xena: Season 2 – I’m in love with a Warrior Princess

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Xena, stern and steely-eyed after her bath.

Xena looking stern and steely-eyed after a bath.

It was with season 2 of Xena Warrior Princess, I now recall, that I fell in love with the show.

Thinking back on it, season 2 may well have been the first season I actually saw.  My memory of  it all is rather cloudy.  While watching season 1, I remembered every episode, but for some reason don’t recall having viewed them on TV, at least not from the beginning.

In any case, I do remember that it was also season 2 that made me want to be an adventurer – to roam far and wide meeting people, solving problems, battling evil, and having fun.

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Character Study: Cookie Lyon from TV’s Empire (it’s the bad that makes her so good!)

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Like 17 million other people, I’ve been watching Empire.

And in keeping with the prevailing opinion, I think it’s a great show.

When I told my sister I was watching it, she expressed surprise.  Not an unexpected reaction given most of what I watch is either fantasy, sci-fi, historical, or about science and nature.

However, Empire, at its core over the first season, is a succession drama, which I always love and happen to be writing myself in a historical setting.  As well, I have a prior history with stories about record companies thanks to the 1985 movie Krush Groove, which my sister and I watched together and both enjoyed.

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Diverse Characters Don’t Have to Earn Their Keep

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Glenn from TVs The Walking Dead

Glenn from TV’s The Walking Dead

Although I’ve never watched the show The Walking Dead, it recently became the subject of lengthy conversation in my writers’ group.

The discussion had to do with two specific characters: Michonne (whom I’m told I should consider cosplaying for Halloween) and Glenn, who is Korean-American.

That is to say, the discussion had to do with diverse characters.

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5 Habits I Didn’t Know Were Strange Until People Told Me

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Well, I found a stock photo of it so it can't be that unusual.

Well, I found a stock photo of it so it can’t be that unusual.

As a writer, I trade upon odd and unusual characteristics.

Conventional writing wisdom says that a story’s protagonist, no matter how much of an everyday, person-in-your-neighbourhood s/he’s meant to represent, should possess some special quality –  something that not only makes him/her memorable but also plays a role in motivating and ultimately resolving the story’s plot.

I mine a lot of my own life in my creation of characters – both my own characteristics and those of people I observe.  I then proceed to spend months and years with these fictional people, to the point that they become like real people to me: fully-realized, self-determining, and with certain traits in common with me.

This, I suppose, has the effect of inuring me to my own oddities.

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Character Study: Dido Belle Lindsay from Belle, history, the present & the future

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Belle movie posterSOMETHING I LOVE MOST about historical fiction is the opportunity to contemplate the lives of little and lesser known people – those who weren’t among history’s winners whose story and version of events have been codified into what mainstream society accepts as The Way Things Actually Happened.

When I blogged about my favourite media of 2014, I included the movie Belle, which I watched during my plane ride home from Australia.

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It’s the Silence That Keeps Me Awake

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Can't sleep

What keeps you up at night?

For some reason, I have a disproportionately large number of friends who are insomniacs.

I’m not talking people who occasionally suffer bouts of sleeplessness like we all sometimes do.  Rather, I mean folk who chronically don’t sleep more than a few of hours, every night of their lives.

That must really suck.

The notion of insomnia really came to the fore of my mind due to my recent trip to Australia. From my connection at Los Angeles airport to Melbourne, Australia, the flight was about 15 hours long.

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Replaying Xena: Season 1 – The adventure (and my binge-watching adventure) begins

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Xena - Sins of the Past

One season down, five more to go!

My decision to re-watch all six seasons of the show Xena Warrior Princess – which is set in Ancient Greece – corresponded with my decision to someday rewrite my shelved first fantasy novel as historical fiction, also set in Ancient Greece.

That and because Xena is such a thrilling character – my favourite fictional character, in truth – whom I hadn’t watched since the show ended in 2001.

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On Female Ghostbusters, Gimmicks, and the Nature of Storytelling

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Ghostbusters original cast(1984).

Ghostbusters original cast (1984).

By now, most people have heard about the plan to reboot the movie Ghostbusters with an all-female cast.

Some people are really excited about it.

Others are really upset.

Like really upset, to the point of borderline self-righteousness, with words like “gimmick” and “pandering” receiving a thorough workout.

Maybe I’m just splitting hairs over semantics, but in and of itself, I don’t consider a gimmick to be a negative thing.

All marketing and media uses gimmicks or “hooks” to attract a target audience, in this case the hook being the casting women where previously there’d only been men, ostensibly to attract – at least in part – a target audience of female viewers.

Which right there may well be the real issue.

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Is There a “Method” to Your Writing? (Writing advice from the acting world)

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Acting

Earlier this year, I met a writer who was also an actor, from whom I received some interesting writing advice.

It happened during a session of the writers’ group that I run.  At each meeting, we discuss a specific writing-related question that all attendees are given a chance to answer.

The question du jour inquired which element of writing craft folk felt they needed to learn more about.

When it came my turn to answer, I said character voice.

Specifically, the fact that I wanted to someday write a sequel to my WIP from the first person point of view of a different character, but was unsure how to make the voice distinct from the first person narrator of my WIP.

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Character Study: Optimus Prime from Transformers (and the struggles of the Lawful Good)

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By GEARSMITH on deviantART

By GEARSMITH on deviantART

Having recently watched the latest Transformers movie in theatre – perhaps against my better judgement – I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the character Optimus Prime.

Because the movie, in my humble opinion, made his personality almost completely unrecognizable.

Optimus Prime – right up there with Xena, the Warrior Princess – has long been a favourite character of mine. For those unfamiliar with the Transformers franchise – of which there have numerous incarnations via cartoons, movies, and comics – the main, unchanging premise is that of a race of giant alien sentient robots who are gripped in an eons-long war of good against evil.

Optimus Prime is the long-standing leader of the heroic Autobots against the ruthless Decepticons led by the tyrant Megatron.

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