Harry Potter vs. the Monsters Dream

I think it’s important for writers to write down their dreams. Here’s one I had on the night of July 4^th.

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Three of the Harry Potter characters were leading a group of children through a forested realm thick with monsters. Each monster was at least two to three times the size of a human being and were mostly bony on the outside, often with spikes.

Harry, Hermione, and Nigel paused on a knoll that was clear of trees. A hologram appeared of General Patton (who looked like George C. Scott). He congratulated them on making it this far. He ordered them to proceed to their destination as fast as possible, killing as many monsters as they could along the way.

The three agreed amongst themselves that the order was contradictory: If they killed as many monsters as they could, they would not travel at best speed, and they would not survive. (It’s possible they had lost some children along the way—the tone was quite dark.)

Harry led the way. They did not fly, but a couple of times as he held Hermione’s hand and she held Nigel’s hand, Hermione’s and Nigel’s feet left the ground.

photo by DavidDjJohnson 

They arrived at their destination without losing any more children. The three of them went into some kind of control tower. There, they toppled something as thick as a telephone pole onto one of the monsters, crushing it.

Harry read an instruction sheet that stated they were to wait until 2:00 am for everyone to arrive (they had arrived around midnight).

An adult sponsor appeared and asked Harry if he had read the instructions. When Harry said yes, the sponsor said the sheet indicated they were to wait until 12:30 am. Harry, Hermione, and Nigel realized they could not trust this sponsor.

The control tower turned into the cockpit of an airliner holding the three of them. Another hologram (not of Patton) congratulated them for arriving. Obviously, this was how the children would be evacuated. Hermione sat in the pilot’s seat and put a headset on.

photo by Zaheer12a

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As an afterwards, I can’t say I’m a Harry Potter fan. But this is the second vivid, detailed dream I’ve had of the characters. The first one was posted here.

Grant Imahara Passed Away

So the news came in that Grant Imahara of Mythbusters fame passed away. He was only 49. He had a brain aneurysm.

I thought he was the smartest guy on the show. He was on what was called the “B Team,” but they tended to do the more inventive things. He was a pretty modest guy on the show, but as an electrical engineer, he built the robotics—such as a robot arm that swung with such force, they had to have a decapitation warning. He might be most famous for his robot cat, which was completely unconvincing, except for the dogs it was designed to fool.

photo by Gage Skidmore 

I knew he had early fame from designing Deadblow, a winning robot in the Battlebots competition. But I didn’t know he designed the arms of the Energizer Bunny. And he also updated the R2-D2 robots? He lived quite a life.

Christopher Tolkien Dream

I believe it’s important for writers to write down their dreams. Unfortunately I just have a stub of my most recent one. Everything else faded.

I made a phone call to the Tolkien Estate. To my surprise, Christopher Tolkien, the son of J.R.R. Tolkien, answered. He pronounced his name tol-ken, instead of tol-keen. Rather stupidly, I asked him if that was how the name was pronounced. He said yes and repeated himself.

That’s all I remember of the dream. I undoubtedly had it because of all the buzz about The Silmarillion. But it so affected me that while I was sitting at work I thought about how the name was pronounced tol-ken, then I realized it was just a dream.

So I was thinking at work about how J.R.R. Tolkien made charts of the phases of the moon for The Lord of the Rings. He remarked that he could not have Aragorn look up and see a full moon one night, then have Gimli see a full moon a couple nights later. He also kept charts of how fast Shadowfax, Gandalf’s horse, could run.

I’ve developed a spreadsheet for my novel manuscript Fairy War, a retelling of The War of the Worlds. Cylinders from Mars are landing in different major cities of the world, and this is how I kept track. Learn for the best.

Book Review: The Girl Who Sees

Sasha Urban is an illusionist—a stage magician. After doing her card tricks in restaurants, she finally gets her break to do her act on a TV talk show. Although nervous, Sasha manages to guess the card the host is thinking of, and a sealed envelope reveals her prediction of the day’s headline. All this is normal stage magician stuff. After all, Sasha knows the supernatural does not exist.

Then a zombie attacks her onstage—an actual zombie. The security people tear it apart as if they do this all the time. After being stared into a trance, Sasha is carried back to her apartment. She has a dream of another couple of zombies getting sicced on her. When this comes true, a friendly neighbor named Vlad destroys those two. Vlad doesn’t need to eat, and he doesn’t seem to age, so he’s a …

The Girl Who Sees by Dima Zales is a fun novel. Sasha keeps seeing impossible things, but because she gets put into a trance, and the people around her downplay what she sees, it’s a while before she knows for sure that the supernatural is real. As a stage magician who knows that magic is not real, this rocks her worldview.

This is written in first person, which is common enough for urban fantasy. But it’s also written in present tense, which I didn’t notice while I was reading it. First person present tense is best for a character who does not know what is going on, and that fits Sasha.

We also get an insight into how certain stage magic tricks are done. For me, this doesn’t ruin those performances—it shows the immense preparation that goes into them. And Sasha uses her mentalist abilities to try to get some clue as to what is happening around her.

Also, it is peppered with pop culture references--everything from The Matrix to Batman to Alice in Wonderland. And okay, Sasha Urban is a marketing kind of name for a character. But it works. Fellow writers should not be jealous.

Inception - Sources of the Movie

Inception - Sources of the Movie

(Originally posted 8/14/10.)

Alice: I should sue for royalties. Too bad I'm not real.

The movie Inception is very pretty, but very boring, so while I was watching the movie I took the time to crack the code on where the characters came from.

Come on, you should know this. The characters are: A madman, a prim young woman, an authoritative person who hacks a lot, a nervous person who leads others on a chase, someone who smiles and changes appearances, an odd person who seems a little druggy, and a minor character who gets hauled off to punishment. As a hint, these characters are going down into a strange

realm where our laws of reality do not apply.

Let's start with the main character, Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. He's constantly at the point of going mad over his children and his dead wife, his hair is one big cowlick, and he has this wild idea of delving into different levels of dreams, with time running differently on each level

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Yes, he's derived from The Mad Hatter. It might seem somewhat comical to compare Cobb's hair to the hat, but the resemblance is there. And The Hatter spoke in riddles about time, and said that time could be sped up or made to stay at the same point indefinitely. What can throw the viewing audience off is that it's some equivalent of The Hatter who is the main character, rather than --

Ariadne (played by Ellen Page). She is a comparatively proper young woman, who disapproves of the madness she sees around her. As the naive character, she needs things explained to her. Also, she uses a pawn chess piece as her link to reality.

She is obviously Alice, the young woman who constantly reproves the odd people she sees in Wonderland. And, of course, the odd characters she meets explain themselves and the surroundings to her, often in nonsensical terms. When she goes Through the Looking Glass, she starts out as a pawn and eventually becomes queen on a chessboard. And when you think of someone like Alice, you think of someone like --

Arthur, a very nervous character who warns Cobb his plans might not work. In a show-stopping part of the movie, he leads some characters in "a merry chase" through a rather claustrophobic hallway, then helps his friends in an elevator shaft.

This is none other than the White Rabbit. He is constantly nervous and tends to be a dis approving sort. He, of course, is famous for leading Alice down the rabbit hole.

The other characters in the movie have their tell-tale roles. Saito is the arrogant, high-ranking Japanese businessman who constantly hacks and coughs after being shot. He corresponds to the Duchess, who is very arrogant, and who sneezes a lot. Eames is the character with the smug smile who changes appearances. He's derived from the Cheshire cat, known for his smile and his ability to disappear and appear. Yusuf is the druggy-looking guy who fixes them up with the chemicals that allow them to descend to different levels. He's obviously the Caterpillar, who smokes a hookah and who tells Alice how to use a mushroom to increase or decrease her size. And the minor character of Nash who sells out Cobb and gets hauled off is the Knave of Hearts, who stole some tarts, and who is brought to trial.

What neatly ties this together is that Ariadne falls through some structures in the climactic scene of Inception as if they were a pack of cards, which is part of the jolt that kicks her team back to reality. And Alice in Wonderland ends with Alice upsetting the jury box and causing the card characters to fly through the air at her, at which point she wakes up.

(It's possible that Mal, the dead wife, is the Queen of Hearts, since Mal enjoys killing people off. And Fischer, the young heir they are trying to swindle, and who is so fond of a childhood picture of himself, may correspond to the real life Lewis Carroll. His real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and besides writing the Alice tales, he gained some fame for himself by taking childrens' photos. But these last two match-ups are more tenuous.)

Having said all that, I'm not maintaining that Inception is simply a retelling of Alice in Wonderland. Inception certainly is a different story. I'm saying that the characters were derived from Alice.

My work here is done.

Dolly the Vampire Slayer

Or this could be called “Slay Belle.” So this is the convergence between Dolly Parton, country music star, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Dolly Parton rocketed to fame with her hit song “9 to 5,” which was the centerpiece of the 1980 movie of the same name. She became famous not only as a country singer, but as a symbol of what nowadays is called female empowerment.

Then there is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is the TV series that jumpstarted the subgenre knows as urban fantasy. Were there some urban fantasy novels before Buffy? Sure. But it was the Buffy series that made urban fantasy an overwhelming subgenre in novels, movies, and TV shows.

So how did that happen? It turns out Dolly Parton was an uncredited producer of the original movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That’s right. And Dolly’s company financed the TV series. It was Dolly Parton behind it all the time!

photo by Eva Rinaldi

But what if Dolly hadn’t done that? See my post What if Buffy had Never Been? to see how life as we know it would be different. Meanwhile, you can see every season opening for Buffy below, including the musical episode.

Then you’ll definitely want to see my post Buffy the Vinyl Slayer.

Parkplace Destroyed

No, not the second most expensive property on the Monopoly boards that a lot of you are undoubtedly using. Parkplace was the first high rise in Kirkland, a suburb of Seattle. I remember eating at a Japanese restaurant there a few times. The new name for the area is Kirkland Urban, with a couple buildings of equal size built next door to Parkplace. Now that construction work has been allowed to resume, Parkplace has been torn down. 

All that was left of it this past Wednesday was a pile of rubble. I took a picture, but it was too blurry to use. It reminds me of how the old Totem Lake shopping mall was torn down. 

All is not lost. See what one of the new features of Kirkland Urban is:

Buddhist Science Fiction—Movie Review

A few hundred years ago, Siyama is a small village in feudal Siam. They are about to be attacked by thousands of warriors who kill everyone in their way.

After the local Buddhist monk performs a prayer ceremony, three young people show up, dressed strangely and traveling in a metal vehicle. They say they are from the future and do not know how they got there. The Buddhist monk assures them to not be concerned about the future. He forecasts they will return to the future during an upcoming moonless night.

The three young people have unusual skills and tools, and they decide to help the village in the days they have left. Can they possibly make a difference?

Siyama: Village of Warriors is a movie that keeps one’s attention, partly because of the historical panorama, partly from the compelling story of three young people trying to help in what seems to be a hopeless struggle. Ana is a female doctor and an Olympic-level archer. Gift is a female history major who knows martial arts. Boat is a male student who is . . . got no idea.

These three students do things that seem puzzling to the villagers but make sense to us, the viewers: Ana wants hard liquor to disinfect wounds and needs needle and thread to sew them up. Gift looks at the cliffs towering over a narrow path to the village and wants lots of gunpowder. Boat tries to solder together parts from the car to make amazing weapons. We end up really rooting for them.

The movie has some disadvantages. Neither the students nor the villagers are that surprised at their arrival. Most of the battles take place at night, so it is often hard to tell who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. And the special effects for the final climax are kind of embarrassing.

Still, if you want to see some Buddhist science fiction, Siyama: Village of Warriors is a nice change of pace.

Wascally Wabbit—Not

In the past few years, the Seattle area has seen explosive growth in the rabbit population. I happened to walk by one on the lawn of the condominiums where I live. When I went inside and came back out with a camera, a couple of other guys were moving stuff in to a unit, kind of noisy. I was surprised it was still sitting there, eating grass placidly.

It didn’t care that a human was pointing an object at it. I didn’t want to spend too much time near it, because I don’t want it to get more used to humans than it already is.