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Better than the Book: The Last Unicorn

Good morning, squiders! This week, in our continuing series, we’re looking at the Last Unicorn. If you’re unfamiliar with the book or the movie, the book was written by Peter S. Beagle and published in 1968, and the movie came out in 1982 and is TERRIFYING.

Seriously, what were children’s movies in the ’80s. No wonder we all grew up the way we did.

My grandmother owned the Last Unicorn on VHS, and every so often, I could convince my sister/cousins to dig it out and watch it at family events. The movie is classic Rankin/Bass (think the animated ’70s version of the Hobbit) and the Red Bull was (and is, we recently rewatched the movie) unnecessarily scary. I wasn’t ever a horse child, but this movie did get me onto the unicorn train.

(There was a children’s book series called The Secret of the Unicorn Queen that I was super into.)

The movie is definitely worth a watch if you’ve never seen it, and it’s got some pretty impressive actors on it for being from the era before A-listers were the only people who could voice an animated feature. And the music is really great.

Like Jurassic Park, except even more so, I saw the movie before reading the book. I think I was…five or six when I first saw the Last Unicorn, and I probably didn’t hunt down the book until my late teens or early 20s.

But unlike Jurassic Park, I wouldn’t say that there’s a clear winner between the movie and the book in my eyes. The book is also really good! There are aspects of it that I do like better than the movie version (character personality stuff, the way some things are explained). But there are also things that are better in the movie (again, some character personalities, some other plot points, the Red Bull).

Thoughts on the Last Unicorn, squiders? Thoughts on ’80s kids’ movies?

WriYe and Genre

Still playing catch-up, squiders! We’re doing May this week.

May’s prompt: What genre scares you the most?

So much interpretation on the prompts this year. Oh well! This one I’m going to say means what genre scares you the most to write. Like, what sounds like the hardest.

There are many genres that I don’t have any interest in writing. They’re not necessarily “scary” per se, just not interesting.

But ones that are actually scary…hmmm.

Romance is scary on some levels. I always worry that it’s coming across as silly, or that I’m not properly explaining things in a realistic manner. I mean, I’ve never had complaints, but maybe it’s only a matter of time.

Mystery is scary. I love mysteries, but they seem very hard to write. You’ve got to have enough possibilities in play that your reader can’t predict what’s going to happen, and you’ve got to know exactly how everything went down without accidentally foreshadowing things too early.

I wrote a cozy mystery a few years ago for Nanowrimo, if you’ll remember. I was pretty pleased with it–a good first try, in my opinion–but it definitely has issues. A little light in the second half on twists and whatnot. I’d love to fix it (this goes back to last week, when in my perfect year I’d be getting stories revised faster) but it’s a couple stories back on the queue.

Hmmm. Not sure anything else I write or would like to write is “scary,” in my mind.

Is that arrogant? Maybe. But part of writing is because it’s fun, and to explore things, and to try new things. If it’s scary–too scary–then what’s the point?

Better than the Book: Jurassic Park

Hey-ho, squiders! This is the start of a maybe-ongoing series. The saying goes that the book is better than the movie, but have you ever come across a story where the opposite is true? Where you liked the movie (or TV show) better than the book?

I’m sure this is all subjective, so feel free to argue with me if you want!

I read a lot of Michael Crichton when I was a teenager. Sphere, Congo, Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Lost World. Big fan.

But I love Jurassic Park the movie more than I liked the book. (The Lost World movie is a mess.)

Part of this might be because I read the book after I saw the movie.

I was 10 when the movie came out, and it was the first PG-13 movie I ever saw. And, squiders, I loved it. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, honestly. I am anxiously awaiting the time when the small, mobile ones will be old enough to watch it with me. (The bigger, mobile one is older than I am when I saw it, but he doesn’t want to. In retrospect I think it’s because when he was 2 we went to a museum with a full-sized animatronic t-rex and that was a bit traumatic.)

(The T-Rex was a surprise for us all.)

I think I may have searched out Michael Crichton’s books after the movie, so it was a while before I got to reading Jurassic Park the book.

Often the complaints about books made into movies is the amount of things that are left out–side plots, characters, entire plot points, etc., because in almost all cases it’s impossible to adapt everything from a book into a 2- or 3-hour movie. In many cases I’ve also found that characters’ personalities are changed as well, which tends to really bother me.

All those things are true here. There’s characters in the book that don’t carry over to the movie, and the ones that do are different, sometimes in arbitrary ways. Different people get eaten by dinosaurs. John Hammond’s vision is completely different, and there’s the danger of the dinosaurs escaping the island. By all rights, I should have been annoyed by the discrepancy.

(That being said, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to be more tolerant of changes in story between different mediums. A story can’t–and shouldn’t–be the same in different formats, but needs to be adapted to work in that particular form. For example, I’ve read Pillars of the Earth, watched the miniseries, and played the video game. All of them are different, but still good in their own form. And I once took a class on Coursera where each week we’d watch part of Fellowship of the Ring, read the same section in the book, and play that area in Lord of the Rings: Online. It’s actually quite fascinating.)

(Arguably where the issues arrive is when changes are made that change the core story.)

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I do truly believe that whatever form you’re first exposed to for a story (assuming you liked it) tends to be your “base” for that story. I saw the movie first, so I like it better. Maybe if I had read the book first, I’d be chalking Jurassic Park up as another example of the book being better than the movie.

(Some stories, however, seem to work great in a number of forms with a number of changes. I don’t know how many variations on the Wizard of Oz I’ve consumed over the years, but I pretty much like all of them.)

(I don’t make the rules.)

What do you think, squiders? Thoughts on Jurassic Park specifically? Thoughts on whether seeing a movie first changes your perception?

WriYe and Writing Years

Hey-o, squiders, I realized I haven’t done the WriYe blog prompts. Since March, actually. Whoops! Let’s fix that.

April’s prompt: Your best writing year ever!

I’m going to interpret this to mean “if you could have your best writing year ever, what would that look like?”

(Interesting that this was April’s prompt. Seems like a January prompt, almost, like you could manifest your best year if you put it into words.)

If I had to describe my best year ever….hmmm.

I would be super productive, first of all. Get through all the stories that have needed revising that I never seem to get to. Polish everything that needs polishing. I’d love to finally get some of the stories that seem to be lingering finally out the door and into the world.

I’m actually having a pretty good year all things considered (writing wise, not natural disaster wise). The feedback I’ve been getting the last few months has been super helpful, and I’m actually making decent progress. Not as quickly as I would like–the revision of Book 1 is at about 20K, out of somewhere between 100K and 120K–but arguably the feedback is worth the slowdown in output. Better to go slow and get it right, than rush through and have to do it again.

But yes–more things done, more things out into the world. That would be amazing.

What would be your best year, squiders?

Summer Media Thoughts

I’m starting to feel like a broken record (the revision is going well! I’m getting so much great feedback! Some natural disaster came along and tried to kill me!) so let’s talk about something else for a minute.

Reading

I’m at 23 books for the year, which is 2-3 books behind where I should be to reach my 50 book goal. I’m currently reading Havenfall by Sara Holland which is YA fantasy and takes place in Colorado. I love books that take place in Colorado! But not really. Most of them feel like they’ve been written by someone who has never even stepped foot in the state. That’s not really a issue here since this is high/portal fantasy and as such is not meant to be representative of the actual state. So far so good, about halfway through.

Movies

The smaller, mobile one and I have been watching through the kid-appropriate Studio Ghibli films recently. We watched Ponyo (still a little confused about the mechanics at the end of the movie, but overall cute), The Secret World of Arrietty (based on The Borrowers which I’ve never read and probably should), and Spirited Away (one of my very favorites). She tried to get the whole family to watch Totoro but we ended up watching Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, which was cute and a little weird. Perfect kid movie from that angle, actually.

On the adult front, we don’t get to watch a lot of adult-aimed movies at the moment (the small, mobile ones don’t go to bed until 9-ish and then we have to watch them over a couple of nights, and most of the time we’re just too tired). But we did watch Tenet last night. Man, Christopher Nolan likes his confusing scifi movies, doesn’t he? Still pondering the movie, suspect some of the plot is held together looser than at first glance. But it had lots of heist elements, and I love a good heist. Bit annoyed at the mother character, who was very much a stereotypical mother (“nothing matters but my child!”) though the actress did well with what she was given.

TV/Streaming

First of all, can I say that I am pissed off about this trend of services deleting shows/movies off to write them off as a loss? This is stupid. After many people put their time and love and energy and creativity into a project, just to axe it? And more annoyingly, these are shows that are doing well, because they make more money back if a show is going to turn a profit when they write them off.

It was bad enough when Disney did it (The Mysterious Benedict Society deserved their third season, and now you can’t watch it at all, and it was so delightfully quirky) but now Paramount has cancelled and deleted Star Trek: Prodigy (which I talked about on here earlier). As a life-long Trekkie, making a Star Trek series unwatchable is a cardinal offense, but I don’t really know what there is to be done about it. I’m just sad and frustrated.

In actual watching, we’ve been watching Muppets Mayhem on Disney+. I love the Muppets a lot, and this show is hitting a lot of the boxes on what I like about them. It’s silly but has heart, and it’s nice to focus on the Electric Mayhem since they’ve been around forever without really getting any notice. We ended up buying the vinyl that went along with the show (in transparent purple) and it’s actually really good.

What have you guys been consuming? Anything amazing I should know about?

See you next week!

The World Keeps on Turning

It’s been an interesting week, Squiders. As I said last week, we were hit by a tornado, which is, in itself, interesting, since I don’t live in a place that traditionally gets tornadoes. I mean, we had tornado drills and everything as a kid, and some of the surrounding towns do have tornado sirens, though I’ve only heard them used as tests.

I looked it up, and we’ve only gotten 15 tornadoes in the last seventy years. So.

We’re okay, our house is okay. We did lose seven trees, all except one of which were at least thirty years old and about 50 feet tall. Four of them fell over in the storm, and the other three were so badly damaged they’ll have to come down. (One of them already has.)

We’re all still cleaning up, of course. The chainsaws start bright and early, and sometimes you can’t get through the neighborhood because it’s so clogged up with trucks. One of the news stations has picked our street as their street for their coverage, so every couple of days a new video comes out that includes my neighbors. Apparently FEMA is supposed to come by some time and take a look as well.

Here’s what our view from our patio was pre-tornado:

(It’s from autumn, obviously, but I don’t normally take pictures that direction so that’s what I’ve got.)

And here’s the same view now:

My poor trees. I miss them.

Enough of that. The world doesn’t stop just because you go through something traumatic, unfortunately. And dwelling doesn’t really help either.

I did end up having to edit and re-submit Chapter 3 for the critique marathon this week, and though I was annoyed at first, I think it’s for the best. The new chapter is MUCH stronger which is only going to mean good things in the long run. And my in-person critique group on Sunday got Chapters 1 and 2, revised from the critique marathon comments. That also went really well. Getting lots of good feedback and, even better, validation.

This is how the critique process is supposed to work. I’ve been more productive lately since…I don’t remember when.

Some stories for you guys to read:

My flash story “Coming Home” was published by Wyldblood Press today!

Tomorrow, the second part of “Across Worlds with You” comes out over at Turtleduck Press. Part 1 is here, and part 2 will be here (won’t work before midday on Sat, July 1).

See you next week! Stay safe!

Small Natural Disaster Hiatus

Hello, squiders. Hope you’re doing well.

We got hit by a tornado yesterday, so I’m going to take a hiatus of about a week while we deal with that.

Thank you!

Trucking Along

How’s it going, squiders? Busy busy over in this neck of the woods, but that seems to always be the case.

(We’re going to get new neighbors soon, which is always a bit nerve wracking.)

So far so good on the feedback. I spent yesterday transferring the marathon comments into an editing copy and then editing Chapters 1 and 2 (which I finished this morning), so that’s ready to send to the in-person critique group.

manuscript pages with markup — wheeee colorful

I put chapter 3 up yesterday for the critique marathon and was pretty pleased with how I updated it, but so far people aren’t into it, so that’s a bit of a downer. Oh well. However, the way the marathon is set up, if enough people don’t think it’s ready, I’ll have to redo the chapter and repost it before I can move farther in the story.

So I may have to skip a week, because I’m not sure I can fix it (also depending what people think is wrong) before next Monday. But we shall have to see.

I signed up for some sort of structure challenge at AutoCrit but I haven’t even touched it because of critique central over here. Oh well! I’m sure it would be helpful but you can’t do everything all the time, and I am getting work done toward my main goals, so it is what it is.

Also, when I went to work on Chapter 4 I discovered I’d switched chapters 4 and 5 in my notes. I can see why I did that, and I think it will work nicely, so good job past!Kit on properly documenting things.

Anyway, I hope things are going well for you! I’m feeling pretty great, like I’m actually getting somewhere. Getting up early to work has been a bit rough (not going to bed early enough) but it is paying off in the productivity.

Fingers crossed that chapter 3 passes muster!

Month of Feedback

Hi-ho, squiders! I’d forgotten how much a different summer camp every week messes with my routines. Blah. I’d better sit down and figure out how I’m going to deal with that.

Anybody had any thoughts about the summer series this year? I warn you, if left to my own devices, who knows what we shall come up with. (I’ve made a list! Bwhahahahahaha)

Anyway, last week the summer critique marathon started over on one of my online writing groups. This is a great resource–several members have recently gotten agents–and I wish I was always in a place where I had a story to submit, though it does take a lot of my time to keep up with critiques for other people.

I’m going to run through Book 1, which means I need to stay about a chapter ahead on my revision so I have a chapter ready each week. Should be doable, fingers crossed. Best laid plans of mice and men, and all that jazz.

Last week I put Chapter 1 up and got some interesting feedback. Half the people have seen the story before and half haven’t, so it was interesting to see what new people said vs old people. In general, the feedback has been more positive than I normally get for this particular story, so I’m calling that a win!

If I budget my time right, I’d like to take the feedback from last week and this week and revamp before sending the first two chapters to the new in-person critique group I joined.

This is both an exciting and a terrifying idea. I so rarely have so many opportunities for feedback, and being able to tweak not once but twice this month is an enormous task. But since the beginning is a lot of the problem, it’s definitely something I should try and hit.

Anyway, wish me luck!

So Long, May

Holy crap, squiders. May was one disaster after another. (And it’s lingering–my grandmother is in the hospital and it could be really bad.)

But, on the other hand, I actually sold two short stories. Hooray! Vindication!

Now I only have three stories in rotation, though. Time to write some more, I guess. Will need to ponder when/how the best way to do that is. Look for anthology calls? Troll my inspiration list?

I’m actually thinking about maybe trying my hand at some mystery short stories. Publish under a penname, give myself some credentials for when I get my cozy mystery series ready to go.

Should at least do some fantasy ones. All the ones that are left are horror. Maybe scifi. Maybe do a little of everything.

The first part of my serial that I wrote in April goes live today (not yet, because the news about my grandmother has derailed the last few steps on that, but check Turtleduck Press later this evening or tomorrow morning once I get my act together. It’s called Across Worlds With You.) so that’s also fun.

And we’re in chapter 3 of the Book 1 rewrite. Cpt 3 is going pretty well. I think I’ll give Cpts 1/2 to my critique group this month and maybe also run it through the critique marathon, which starts next week. The critique marathon people have seen the beginning of this story a couple of times so they can at least tell me if it’s getting better or not. Hopefully.

So. June.

Summer is always interesting when the small, mobile ones are out of school. May try to get up early and work before they wake up, because it’s very hard to concentrate around them, even if they’re doing their own thing. Constant interruptions.

But the plan is to continue the rewrite (and deal with feedback as we get it), poke SkillShare (I was planning on reposting the classes in May but, you know, May), and generally see how things are going. Maybe if things are going well I’ll add in some short story poking too. Options, options.

Will also need to ponder our summer series for the year and get that going soon too. If you have thoughts (something specific, or reading vs writing related), let me know! If you’ve been here for a while you know I love to absorb random knowledge and regurgitate it whenever possible, so I’m open to pretty much whatever would be helpful.

Fingers crossed that the life front for June is better! (The writing/publishing front for May was quite nice, no complaints there except I could have used more writing time.) Requests for the Summer Series? Random thoughts?

See you next week!

OH! I forgot. Hidden Worlds is part of the Adventure of a Lifetime bundle at Prolific Works this month! Swing over there to get a copy for free!

Books by Kit Campbell