Author: Kelley

Box office magic, baby!

We are all about the movies today in our house. Nicola gives you a look at the new Robin Hood, and I have this snort-your-tea trailer (big hat tip to Colleen!) for a film I am sure will be an instant classic. Man, I should have written this movie…
 

 
Enjoy your day.

(Sorry about the ads — I don’t seem to be able to do anything about them, but you can turn off the ad window).

Oscarisfic

Nicola and I Tivoed the E! preshow awards because we like to look at all the pretty dresses, and then of course the Oscars. We drank beer and wine and ate dinner while we watched (skipping all the commercials, which is the beauty of TiVo). I got snockered, because I do every year for the Oscars — they are, even more than writing awards, my Great Big Dream of Recognition, and I like to drink and wave my arms and opine about the speeches, and most of all to imagine myself there. My BA is in Acting, and I’ve been on stage, or writing, or both, since I was 8 years old: the Oscars have always been one long evening of what if and what I would say and how marvelous it would be.

So, a few thoughts on tonight:

Isn’t Kathryn Bigelow awesome?

Helen Mirren is so gorgeous and I want to be her when I grow up.

I love that for the Best Actress and Best Actor nominations, they bring out people who have actually worked with the nominees who can say something personal about them and their work. It’s a big award; it’s nice to have a chance to see the nomination be truly meaningful.

I read the screenplay of Precious recently, and thought it was astonishingly moving. Screenplays are not novels: it’s not so easy to make them interesting reads. This one is really good.

James Taylor can still sing. It is nice to see age and experience onstage. Youth and energy and potential has its place, but the older I get, the more I enjoy seeing potential realized.

Someday writing awards will be sexy. Today is not that day.

Can I just double down on the Kathryn Bigelow thing?

In 1989, after Clarion, when Nicola was back in England and I was in Georgia, I wrote her a long letter that was essentially a play-by-play of the Academy Awards. That year they made a bunch of unfortunate women dress up like dancing stars with tap shoes. The star costumes covered their heads and bodies, so out on stage they were just great big gold stars with legs and arms, tapping away. It was a particularly funny production number, and with any luck at all we will not see its like again. I sat on my sofa with a glass of wine and drew Nicola a little picture of the dancing stars. I don’t remember who won that year, but I remember wishing that she was there. So tonight was a good night, you know?

Have a good week. The world is full of magic: I hope some of it comes your way.

Læta Kalogridis talks about screenwriting

I haven’t been out of my editing/writing cave in a while, and I’m missing the movies. I like matinees with quiet grownup audiences and fresh popcorn. I like that immersion in story…

But right now it’s all about the Netflix, and that’s good too. There’s lots on our list right now that I’m looking forward to, including Shutter Island. I’m always curious to see how writers handle adaptations of fiction like this, that has an essential secret at its heart. It’s easier to keep these kinds of secrets in prose, it seems to me, easier to bring the audience into the mystery without making them feel jerked around.

And so I was interested to read this interview with Shutter Island screenwriter Læta Kalogridis. I thought I’d be reading about adaptation: instead, I found a very thoughtful discussion of women in Hollywood, urgency and violence in narrative, and a lot more.

And she’s from Winter Haven! (*Tampa native waves at Læta Kalogridis through the internet*)

Enjoy.

In defense of raccoons

Hi!

I respectfully disagree with the posts here about the raccoons. They can be nice and sweet and they are obviously cute. The lady in Florida who was attacked by a family of raccoons “attacked” first… She went outside with a broom and started to hit them, I think any animal, specially one with babies with them would have done the same, just to protect themselves.

I have been feeding a small female in my backyard. She is the sweetest thing, 4 nights ago she brought 3 babies for me to meet, the cutest thing. She lets me get near her, she has never showed any aggression.

Respectful disagreement is never a problem here. Thanks for taking the time to write.

There is a reason the Park Service says Don’t feed the bears. But I sincerely hope it all works out for you, and am glad you are enjoying it.

Lambda Literary is here!

Today there’s a new website in town: Lambda Literary. It’s a virtual home for anyone who reads, writes, publishes, reviews and supports stories by and about queer people.

When I met Nicola in 1988 and then went back home alone to Atlanta for a year, the queer people I knew were friends I’d met by happenstance at first, and then through dances and parties and, most especially, Charis Books and More. I missed Nicola, and I had new things about myself to figure out, and I was hungry for stories and connection with people who wrote them.

Fortunately for Atlanta, Charis is still there. But many LGBT bookstores have not survived, and that means that queer people in many parts of the US — and around the world — have to go looking for stories elsewhere. Because of the hard work of an amazing team of people, Lambda Literary is a new place for all of us. Because it’s not just about finding book reviews, interviews with writers, news of queer literature — although you will — it’s also about finding community.

It’s important. And it rocks.

I’m enormously proud of my beloved Nicola, who championed this vision to the LLF board; our dear friend Karina Meléndez, who developed this extensive, beautiful site; and of people I’ve never met — Tony Valenzuela, the Executive Director of Lambda Literary Foundation, and Antonio Gonzalez, the Web Producer and Chief Editor, who together will keep the site growing for all of us.

So hey, that’s enough from me. Go take a look! And tell everyone!

Because love doesn’t always mean wheat

We are big fans of wheaty goodness in our house, but, as Love Story reminds us, love means not always having to eat the wheat (or wait, maybe it was something about sorry… which I always thought was deeply silly. Call me wacky, but I think love means sometimes saying you are sorry even when you aren’t.).

Today I made my sweetie a non-wheaty treatie…oh dear, I am becoming punchy and must go make more tea immediately.

Enjoy your day and all the love in your life, whatever form it may come in.

Banana oat muffins

  • 1 cup oat bran
  • ½ cup oat flour
  • ½ cup rice flour
  • 3 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 egg
  • ¼ cup canola oil or other vegetable oil
  • ¼ cup honey
  • 1½ cups milk
  • 1 or 2 ripe bananas
  • ½ to ¾ cup raisins, depending on your taste
  • ½ to ¾ cup sweet dried cranberries, depending on your taste
  1. Preheat oven to 425°F. Oil or butter the muffin tins.
  2. Whisk the oat bran, oat flour, rice flour and backing powder together in a large bowl.
  3. In a separate bowl, mix the oil, honey, egg and milk.
  4. In a separate bowl, squish the banana(s) into paste with your hands, then mix in the raisins and cranberries.
  5. Stir half the liquid into the dry ingredients until just blended. Add half the fruit and stir. Then add the remaining liquid and fruit, stirring until just blended.
  6. Fill each muffin cup about 2/3 full. Bake at 425° for 15-25 minutes, until the muffins are brown and a toothpick in the center comes out mostly clean. Remove from oven and allow to cool.

Makes 12 – 15 muffins. If you wish, you can cook 6 at a time and keep the batter in the fridge (keeps up to 2 days). Stir cold batter well before baking.

The big time differential depends on your oven. I do 16 -20 minutes on convection, and it generally takes 25 minutes for my oven on non-convection. Don’t be afraid to let them get brown on top.

Everything, briefly

From artist Jamie Bell, A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything. Brilliant.

This is the final piece for my AS art course, a flipbook made entirely out of biro pens. It’s something like 2100 pages long, and about 50 jotter books. I’d say I worked on and off it for roughly 3 weeks.
 
Song is French Cancan by Jaques Offenbach.
 
Additional sounds credited to Valve, specifically from their game Team Fortress 2.
 
Other stuff is from the 300 trailer and O Little Town of Bethlehem.
 
— Jamie Bell, artist, A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything

 

 
Enjoy your day.

Two scoops of Hax

I have said before that I think Carolyn Hax is made of awesome sauce, and, well, here I am to say it again with two recent columns that made me talk back to my computer screen (You go, Carolyn!)

The first column starts out being about elevator rudeness, but read the entire column (which is an ongoing conversation). Really, we’re talking about what tolerance means, and how assumptions and judgments hurt people. I’ve had plenty of personal experience of this, and so has Nicola, and you know what? All you people who have ever rolled your eyes at her because she doesn’t look sick enough to meet your standards can just fuck off.

I don’t know why people feel entitled to get up in the face of strangers who are making non-hurtful-to-anyone-else choices about how to spend their time and energy. I think it must be a spirit-bruising way to live. I can put on my Judge Judy pajamas with the best of them, but I am trying harder to save it for times when people are hurting each other, not just themselves.

Robert Heinlein said, “Hurting yourself isn’t sinful, just stupid.” I don’t like the word “stupid” — it means something particular to me and I hesitate to apply it across the board this way. Because we’ve all made choices that hurt ourselves. And sometimes it really is stupid, and sometimes it’s just… I don’t know. Sometimes it’s just learning. Which seems to me to be the opposite of stupid.

But deciding whether other people have a “right” to take the elevator or not is stupid.

Here’s my other helping of Hax for you today: why do people protect their bitterness? I’ve got bitter slippers in my closet just like everyone else (they like to snuggle up to those Judy Judy pajamas…) but mostly, I prefer to wear the Cloak of Everyday Happiness and drink champagne and appreciate kindness when I find it in the world.

It’s raining in Seattle. Nicola and I went to the park anyway. We got very wet. Because of the rain, Nicola wore her hat again. People walking by in the park tend to either avert their eyes when they see her in this hat, or smile tenderly (seriously — tenderly), and we finally figured out it’s because they think she’s a chemotherapy patient. At least they don’t roll their eyes.

Enjoy your day.