It’s that time again! Submissions are poring in for our May / June issue, which revolves around children’s literature! I must say, there’s a lot of books in here I know and love, some I haven’t read since childhood, and a few I’ve never heard of but would love to read as an adult!

But it’s up to you to choose our next cover, so… pull yourself away from fangirling over Star Trek for a minute (just one minute!) and vote!

My goodness, it’s been dead on this blog lately! Are you all finishing up with finals, or enjoying the gorgeous, spring-like weather outside?

I watched Beautiful Creatures the other day. I didn’t like the heavy anti-Christian elements but I LOVED the overall plot… the magic… the love story that manages to be charming instead of stupid… I’m torn between my annoyances that Christians are always depicted as book-banning, hypocritical jackasses, and my fondness for the awesomeness of the movie itself.

The fact is, books and movies with magic in them (or in this case, Casters … witches) are taboo in Christian circles for a reason, but it doesn’t stop me from loving them. I’d give my back teeth for a Christian alternative with magic in it that is just as cool as all these witch books are. (Which is why I wrote one… and so far 40+ agents have said no thanks. Which means, I now get to decide between my historical/religious fantasy epic and the Pratchett-fantasy epic, and decide which version of the story to print on demand.)

Anyway, it revisited my love of magical fiction, and got me to wondering (both in terms of book recommendations and in my own writing) – what’s missing in Christian fiction that you wish wasn’t? What kinds of stories would YOU like to read? Does magic enter into it at all? Would you prefer a historical-set magical adventure, or a modern one? What don’t Christian publishers publish that you would like to read?

Talk to me. I’m starving for intelligent conversation … but I’ll take ANY conversation at this point!

Modern audiences might find this movie boring, since it’s less of an action film and more of a character-driven piece, about “Family” in all its forms, but more specifically, a mob family.

The Italian mafia fascinates me, because they’re such a bundle of contradictions; it’s “not personal, it’s business,” even when it comes to Family matters – and I’m not talking about mafia so much as literal, blood-relation family! The Godfather is art revolving around total moral disconnections, and it asks us (and causes us) to root for completely terrible people.

Unsurprisingly, I like that about it. I like getting up the next morning having watched it, and not being able to stop thinking about it. That, to me, is the mark of an excellent film. But here’s a few of the other things I like pondering in its two plus hours.

A Series of Vignettes: Unlike most films, the main story is about the actions of a mafia family; it’s built up of a series of vignettes that reveal how this “business” works… the scenes with Vito and his guests at the wedding (traditionally, an open invitation for guests to come and ask for “favors” from their Godfather), the incident with the movie director in Hollywood (the film doesn’t touch on it, but in the book he’s a well-known pedophile!), even the drug-trafficking discussion leave you wondering at first what the point is, and then you realize it’s the descent of Michael into evil.

Vito’s Sons:  Have you noticed that each of his sons have some aspect of Vito’s (the Godfather’s) personality? He’s a combination of all of them, which makes him a good Don… but without him, none of them are entirely effective except for Michael, who in the second film forfeits his wife because he can’t find the balance between “business and personal” that Vito handled so well. Yet, each of them is also something their father isn’t…

Sonny is passionate and defending of his family (in all its forms); he’s also headstrong and impulsive.

Fredo is caring and loving toward his family; he’s also weak and foolish.

Michael is calculating and intelligent; he also lacks his father’s warm nature.

The Family Disconnect: I find it fascinating that the Family could be so defensive of the men, and their honor, and so much less so when it comes to Connie’s relationship with Carlo, instead sacrificing it in favor of their Sicilian “men are the head of the family” sexism. When Carlo tells Connie to shut up at dinner, her mother reprimands Sonny for coming to her defense (stay out of it!). In the book, Connie complains to her father that Carlo hits her. The seemingly affectionate Vito says, “Stop giving him a reason.” (Gee, thanks, Dad!)

Yet, compassion toward his sister is what kills Sonny… he races off to rescue her after a beating, and winds up massacred on the causeway. This seems to support the ideology throughout that making business personal will wind up killing you; in effect, Sonny is symbolic of the ideology Michael embraces – that nothing can ever be personal, and to survive you must isolate your emotions. Later, Carlo pays for his crimes… but not on Connie’s behalf; Michael punishes him not for beating his wife, but for betraying the Family to another mafia don!

Monsters & Men: The death of Vito in his garden is peaceful and symbolic; peaceful because at last he has renounced his role as the Godfather and left it in the hands of Michael. He’s now just a grandfather, allowed to love his grandchildren and caution his son in his decisions. Yet, he dies chasing his grandson through the tomato plants… pretending to be a monster. Vito has more honor and less brutality than Michael; in a sense, his death as one “monster” raises up a far more terrible and dangerous monster to take his place – his brutal, calculating, and unforgiving son.

Michael: Some may make the mistake of believing Michael changes throughout the film; he doesn’t… he simply steps into the shoes the Family needs him to fill. Everything he does is motivated through logic (and in the case of his Italian wife, boredom and desire); he never loved Kay, he simply dated her as part of his father’s plan to “acclimate” the Family into society outside their Italian ghetto. His father wanted him to be a politician – so he found a suitable potential wife that would suit future voters – an all-American, feminist-leaning white girl from a nice family.

After committing murder to avenge his father, Michael was no longer an outsider in the Family business. His future career in politics was destroyed. He married Apollonia because she “fit” the new life he was embracing; she was a demure, proper, chaste Italian wife to his future mafia don.  After her death, he marries Kay because he needs a wife and it’s politically advantageous to choose an outsider he’s familiar with, rather than navigate the different Families in search of one. (This is, arguably, his biggest mistake – he brings a dominant, independent, morally-minded female into a household accustomed to submissive ones, with unfortunate later consequences.)

The Impossible Plight: Though it doesn’t justify any of the behavior exhibited in the film, we intrude on the lives of a family caught in an impossible situation – the mafia. You don’t resign from it. You never show weakness. It’s a constant struggle to remain frightening enough that the other mafia families leave you alone. Once Vito was gone, if Michael had shown weakness instead of strength, all of them would have been killed.

Superficial Religion: In arguably the greatest scene in the film, Michael renounces Satan and becomes Godfather to his sister’s child at the same time he has his enemies gunned down in cold blood. The juxtaposition of the christening and the violence is chilling, but underlines the spiritual tone of the film: for these people, Loyalty to the Family is God, and all else falls secondary. Their faith isn’t real, but a cultural tradition that has no impact on any of their lives.

Lies & Deceit: The ending to this film is powerful due to our discovery of Kay’s understanding and the scene that precedes it, when Connie accuses her brother of murdering her husband. Michael doesn’t deny it to her, but he does to Kay, who is comforted by his lie. Michael knows how to “manage” her, how to keep her content, but he can’t hide the farce from her for long. She sees his hand being kissed by his minions, as one of them shuts the door – effectively, closing her out of that part of his life, and knows the truth she hasn’t wanted to face until now: she married a monster.

Kay has always frustrated me, because she lets her emotions lead her decisions – there’s evidence all around her from the very beginning of the story of what this family is like, and who Michael actually is. His profession at the wedding that “that’s my family, Kay, it’s not me” is proven untrue after the attempted murder of his father; he doesn’t speak to her for two years, yet still she marries him, presumably because she still loves him. Even then, it’s evident who he has become – and later, she’s upset about it, because all her delusional illusions of his goodness are shattered. Because she wants him to be good, she believes he is … until she can no longer deny the truth.

Conclusion: In many ways, Michael is the definitive “evil” INTJ. He’s a loner by nature (even at the wedding, he’s off in a corner with Kay rather than circulating with the guests), quiet (as Sonny plans murder, Michael doesn’t speak until he’s prepared a plan), always thinking where others are talking (it’s Michael who knows how to use his former lack of violence to target their enemies). He’s always been capable of leadership (his lack of a shaking hand when he intervenes at the hospital, to save his father’s life), but doesn’t step forward until it becomes necessary. He makes decisions regardless of the feelings of others, to preserve them or serve a greater purpose (such as deposing Tom Hagen, or lying to Kay). He’s able to separate his emotions from his decision-making, leaving logic as his primary function (which is what makes him so dangerous – he rationalizes his actions in his mind, as being necessary to preserve the “Family”).

Though nothing about his actions are praiseworthy, they are fascinating… and that’s one reason I return to this film time and again, each time noticing something new.

[ review ]

What is the story of Ben-Hur actually about?

The main character is Judah Ben-Hur, a wealthy Jewish man in Jerusalem, whose friendship with his childhood best friend is destroyed when an accident endangers the new governor of Judea. Judah is condemned to prison and hard labor, while his sister and mother are thrown into prison and (he assumes) killed. Judah winds up in Rome after a long sequence of events and finally returns to Jerusalem, newly wealthy and with a different identity, to fulfill his desire for revenge against his former friend. Yet, all of that changes through the intervention of the Messiah, who heals Judah’s mother and sister from leprosy on the cross.

Fundamentally, the story is about the Messiah’s influence on their lives. It’s a story of redemption and forgiveness.

But modern filmmakers don’t understand that. They strip it away and are left with a hollow, sexualized shell of the author’s intentions. Much as there are things I like about the most recent adaptation of the novel (such as its lack of cheesiness, its cast, its better exploration of the characters, and its development of secondary figures), it disappointed me in its complete removal of the messiah. Oh, he makes a couple of appearances… but without knowing the whole story, an audience wouldn’t understand why his mother and sister awake after the crucifixion healed of their leprosy! How sad! Not only did they turn the author’s noble Judah into a fornicator, they removed the author’s faith from the finished product!

Unfortunately, this is a common theme in movies these days.

The miniseries John Adams leaves out the faith of that particular founding father, and only references it in a couple of passing lines of dialogue about “providence.” It conveniently forgets one of its primary figures, Dr. Benjamin Rush, had a theological degree, and his sole purpose in reconciling Jefferson and Adams was due to a prophetic dream (in which they exchange many letters and die on the same day in history – which they did).

Atheist director Michael Apted famously boasted about his efforts to remove God from the story of William Wilberforce in Amazing Grace. Indeed, his faith is evident but also absent in many of his conversations, where his arguments for abolition have more to do with human kindness than providence.

Many Christians actively praised The Blind Side for its positive depiction of believers… yet, their faith is barely mentioned and one wouldn’t even know they were Christians! The true story of the movie The Vow is that a profound faith in God enabled a couple to survive severe marriage trauma (the wife’s total loss of memories of their life together) and rebuild a strong marriage. In the movie, there’s no mention of God, or faith. It’s simply left out.

Believers have reached a point where like dogs, they beg for scraps from Hollywood’s table and are delighted when a piece of less-than-rotten meat falls to the floor. There’s nothing wrong with liking a good, clean movie with a few references to faith, but we shouldn’t be satisfied with the secularization of our society. We need to speak up more, support other believers in their efforts more, and stop pretending that this lackluster, passing reference to a non-specific “moral code” or “God” honors Him.

Never settle for less than the best… and always remember, the real story probably has a lot more religion in it.

Recently, a friend asked me my opinion on movie ratings and whether or not they’ve been permitted to “slide” over the years.

The answer is yes, but the main problem goes much deeper than that.

When movies first became possible, there was no censorship which naturally led to pornographic material. In order to “preserve American morality,” a censorship board was formed in Hollywood that included pastors. To gain a national release, a movie had to pass this censorship board. This was a positive thing for many movies and a determent to a few (one famous case is the altered ending to Hitchcock’s Rebecca, since it was against censorship policy to let a murder go free).

Eventually, the censorship board was done away with and movie ratings came in—at first, with only G, PG, and R. When Indiana Jones came along, it was too violent for a PG and not violent enough to earn an R, so PG13 was invented. And from that moment on, entertainment has exploded with immorality, graphic violence, pervasive sexual content, foul language, and everything else that desensitizes and dehumanizes us, under the banner of movie ratings.

Do I think movies are allowed to get away with more in their ratings now than in the past? In some cases yes – and in others, no. The Indiana Jones franchise has skin melting off faces, a priest tearing the throbbing heart out of people’s chests, and a man being shoved into a plane propeller blade, with grisly results. In many ways, that’s far less violent than the shocking kid-on-kid-murder seen in The Hunger Games.

Movies have always skated by with lesser ratings than many of them deserve; in the late eighties and early nineties, Disney had a “no-PG13 movie” policy, which meant their very violent Huckleberry Finn and the violent and frightening Tom ‘n’ Huck got a PG rating. In the more recent Harry Potter franchise, it’s strange that the first two films are only PG (one depicts Voldemort’s face growing out of the back of a man’s head, and the other includes frightening elements of possession and disembodied voices threatening to tear students to shreds).

And yet, as I contemplate this, my mind turns to what I think is much more serious: the change in television over the last decade. Indiana Jones’ tearing out of the heart earned it a PG13 rating in theaters, but you can see that on The Vampire Diaries on almost a weekly basis. Supernatural gets a grisly kick out of seeing how many gross ways people can die (impaled on a fork? head sliced off with a garage door falling?). Bones offers up a delicious assortment of decomposing, blood-soaked crime scenes, with bodies liquefying in bathtubs. On Hannibal, the viewer can see mushrooms growing out of half-decomposed corpses (or in one case, a survivor), the infamous Dr. Lector chopping up human lungs and frying them in a pan, or naked corpses with their ribcage exposed, with the skin of their back held up with wires to form “angel wings.” (None of these shows are on cable networks, either!)

It’s common on just about every show to have routine bed hopping, some of it quite explicit for prime-time programming. The good old days of a passionate kiss and closing door are gone; now we follow them into the bedroom for a five minute tumble.

Tragically, where it was once more common to have a couple married in a movie or on television, now it’s more common to have them cohabitating together. Entertainment’s constant pull in that direction has changed the face of our society; what was once taboo and thought of as inappropriate is now wholly accepted and embraced. The increase of homosexual characters on television (including Glee and gay sitcoms) is even cited as being the reason more Americans are leaning pro-gay marriage.

So, how did this happen?

We let them take God out of Hollywood. We stopped objecting to behavior that goes against our moral beliefs. We started to tolerate things on our television screens that we’d never let our friends do in our living rooms. Rather than being a positive force in our society, we let television guide its behavior.

The solution isn’t to crack down on television; it’s to remember that we, as Christians, must be the salt of the earth. Hollywood can take God out of its stuff, but it can’t take it out of us. Others won’t find it anywhere except in our lives, our behavior, how we treat one another, the lives we lead, and the choices we make. Don’t let movies or television define our society – fight to protect it by example.

Right now, I’m in writing / editing mode on one of my manuscripts, which means I’m thinking about ancient Israel and Rome 24/7 and don’t have a lot of other things to talk about. This makes coming up with blog posts challenging. So… is there anything you, my audience, would like me to blog about? If so, sound off below (writing? symbolism in movies? INTJ-stuff?). Give me an idea, you might get a blog post this week. Don’t, and you probably won’t. Either way have a nice week.

It’s kind of a bummer when you reach the end of a decade, and don’t feel like you’ve accomplished much. It’s a bit worse when you realize you’ve passed up all the ages of your favorite literary characters and then some.

I turn 30 this week.

It’s a different feeling than when I turned 20. I feel older. I feel wiser. I feel like the skin on my eyelids is looser!

Being 29 was… good and bad.

The bad stuff included depression and rejection.

The good stuff included The Hobbit, a brand new sexy pixie haircut, going down to a size four pants, and trying out dating for awhile.

It’s tempting to be melancholy this week. It’s the end of an era, a decade, my twenties. I can either see what lies ahead of me as lined with anti-wrinkle cream, or I can decide that my thirties are going to be the best decade of my life.

The other day, a motivational speaker said something that resonated with me: there’s no such thing as victims, just volunteers. People treat us how we let them treat us. We see our circumstances the way we want to see them.

So yes, I’m getting older. I’ll have crow’s feet by my eyes sooner rather than later. But it’s not the end of the world. My life will change at 30. I’ll publish some e-books. I’ll write awesome posts! I’ll discover new obsessions, read new books, and find new movies I can’t live without.

I’ll figure out how to do things just for me, and not for the approval of others. I’ll choose to have that meaningless, purposeless thing known as fun. I’ll decide to do things not because they’re logical, but because I want to do them. I may even change my personality a bit.

So bring on 30! I won’t go down without a fight!

I love stories set in Bible times. I love film adaptations of Biblical events. Watching The Bible miniseries recently, I nearly died of happiness to finally find a historically-accurate representation of Pontius Pilate.

Yet, as happens each time anyone writes a book or films a movie about the Bible, there are naysayers out there claiming we shouldn’t do these things. It adds to scripture! It’s like making a graven image!

I completely disagree.

Fiction is fiction. No one claims it isn’t. By watching an interpretation of scripture I’m not inserting pages into my Bible, or even saying this particular elaboration is what happened. The Bible flat out tells us Jesus did many more signs and wonders and miracles that the disciples didn’t write down. It isn’t sinful to imagine, to create, to revel in the wonder of God through fiction or film. Stupid as some of us may be, we all know that actor isn’t really Jesus and the story isn’t how it really happened.

In fact, I would take it a step further and say that denying our creativity is to deny how we are made in God’s image in the first place. I don’t think that verse in scripture talks about our physical appearance, but instead our consciousness: our spirit, our soul, and our creativity. Like God, we want to create. We sing, we write, we build, we paint. God has one task for us on this earth: to serve Him. That means loving one another and making disciples. If He didn’t want us to create, He wouldn’t have made us like Him. He wants us to use the gifts He’s given us to evangelize.

Some of us are too shy to go door to door and talk about Christ, but we can write a novel that will show Him to people through a historical event. We can film a two hour movie or a ten hour miniseries that shares our beliefs in more coherent, memorable ways than if we opened our mouth. God makes us different from one another for a reason, so He has missionaries in all aspects of society. We should be careful in condemning one another’s individual attempts to honor our Creator.

There comes a point in every writer’s life, after much study, improvement, and editing, when they look back and realize… their old stuff sucks.

So, what would I tell myself at seventeen, knowing what I know now about writing?

Don’t be pretentious.

Everyone knows you read Dickens, and Brontë, and Doyle. Don’t write like they did. That style went out of print over a hundred years ago, and all it adds is bloat that in thirteen years, you’ll be slicing through with an editorial pen, cursing the day you made an 80k novel 250k words.

Move the plot along.

Okay, so there ARE books out there that are huge, and long, and slow in places… but your book doesn’t have to be one of them. If it has no purpose on the plot, get rid of it. If the character goes nowhere, even if you love him to pieces, remove him from the storyline. If it’s redundant or information we’ve heard too many times already… kill it.

Show, don’t tell.

Yes, we’ve all heard this a thousand times but do we do it? Do we even understand what that means? It means, instead of having a character’s thoughts fill the page we can have them take an action that reveals their thoughts. You don’t have to say, “He was angry,” but “He punched the wall.” Instead of giving a long, drawn-out character history (if you even need it), have rapid-fire dialogue between two characters or just plain throw a line out once in awhile that makes the reader go, “OH MY GOSH.”

Your reader doesn’t have to know everything.

As the writer, you need to know the entire back history of your character… your reader doesn’t. They need only what’s relevant to your plot. I don’t care how persecuted and misunderstood he is, if it doesn’t move the plot forward, dump it. Save it for your book signings.

Have a plan.

There are three books every writer writes.

The first one is the “epic.” It’s long, it’s sprawling, it overflows with characters, loose ends, dead plot lines that seemed awesome at the time until you realized you have no idea what to do with them, and bloated descriptions. The second book is the one where you take out everything that is bad from your “epic,” and it winds up less than half as long. The third book is where you read through each chapter and do revision, with a clear goal in mind of where this story and these characters are headed. You polish up the descriptions and dialogue until it shines. That is the story you want to print.

Ground your world in reality.

Even if you’re writing a fantasy world, it needs to be plausible. Characters must be consistent, not waffle back and forth between different personalities or react the way you need them to, to get you where you want them to go. Your plot should drive the characters, not the other way around.

Don’t be afraid to write simply.

Deep down, we’re all egotists who want to get complimented on our writing style, but too much style can get in the way of the plot. It’s better to have someone flipping pages, incapable of putting your story down because it moves so beautifully and engages them emotionally, than to have them stop and say, “Oh, what lovely prose!” Do a little bit of both if you can, but always choose substance over style.

Try present-tense once in awhile.

Not only does this cut down your word count considerably (and in doing so, clean up your writing a lot) it’s fun to write, since it keeps your reader in the moment. Yes, it can be jarring for a first-timer but once you start doing it, going back to the world of “-ed” is a shock.

Read everything aloud.

If you get confused, change it. If you need to gasp for air midway through, your sentence is too long. If you find yourself skim-reading ahead to get back to the dialogue, cut some descriptions.

Pay attention in the editing process.

We all use worthless words and redundant words – like “that,” “rather,” “quite,” and “was.” Figure out the words you abuse the most and do a word search. Each time you find one, decide if you really need it or not. Usually, you don’t. Also, don’t start every paragraph with the same word and/or letter. Vary between letters and words. Your reader won’t notice if you do, but they might if you don’t (it’s really obvious to open a book and see “The” six times in a row).

Choose a name and stick to it, but don’t over-use it.

It’s confusing trying to keep up with names so keep it simple. Don’t refer to characters by a bunch of different names (nicknames, last names, middle names, full names – yes, Tolstoy, I am looking at you!). In first person, call Mother and Father just that, unless another adult is speaking to them. Also, people usually don’t use someone’s name unless they are a) singling them out in a crowd or b) really making a point. Don’t pull a James Cameron, and have a name at the beginning or end of every single thing two characters say to one another.

Happy writing!

I noticed something recently.

The Host bombed.

And when I say, “bombed,” it went down in a burning hellfire of “do not want.”

It proved a theory I’ve been forming for quite some time: it’s not who it is, it’s what it is.

Twilight was huge. It’s not because Stephanie Meyer wrote it. It’s because people loved the story. You can’t turn another Stephanie Meyer book, from a whole different genre, into a movie and expect the same people to go see it. The ones who loved the whole vampire/werewolf thing aren’t going to care about body-possessing aliens, or whatever the hell those things are (I haven’t read the book, and don’t really care to, which only proves my point).

You see, there are two kinds of people in this world:

Blind Fans: no matter what the author writes, the singer sings, the producer produces, or the actor acts, they will go see it. They will think it is wonderful and salivate over it. They will refuse to realize it sucks. Fortunately, this makes up a miniscule point of the population. (Or not; see the last presidential election.)

Everyone Else: who basically looks at something and says “make me care.” Yes, J.K. Rowling, I loved your Harry Potter books. Do I care that now you are writing boring, sleazy adult mystery novels? Nope! You know why? I don’t read boring, sleazy mystery novels, and I’m not going to start just because you wrote one. I’m not a fan of you. I’m a fan of one thing you wrote. You will not sell me other books unless you write in a genre I like to read. The same goes for everyone else. David Tennant, I enjoy your work – but if it isn’t a costume drama, Doctor Who, or a vampire movie, I don’t care to see it. I ain’t interested.

Hollywood has to be wondering why so many of their trillion dollar movies are bombing. Well, you’re not giving us what we want. You’re giving us what you think we want, and finding out, hey, you’re not the only alternative anymore. Why would a fantasy fan want to go see a badly-written movie in a genre they aren’t interested in when they can sit at home, play Dungeons & Dragons live with their buddies, and then marathon Game of Thrones?

While I’m at it, hey, Christian book distributors – why would I buy any of your Amish books when I can log on to Amazon.com with my Kindle and get a ton of self-published fantasy e-novels for a few bucks each?

It’s a changing world. Either Big Business is going to have to figure out how to take a much smaller slice of the proverbial entertainment pie, or it’s going to go under, because now, it’s all about giving the audience what it actually wants.