Blog

Insurgent: Book vs. Movie

Oooh… *rubs hands together* We might draw some blood on this one, because both book and movie were enjoyable, and both had significant drawbacks. For newbies, Insurgent is the second installment of the Divergent Trilogy, an action-filled dystopian trilogy that’s inspired a lot of love (and a lot of outraged shrieking) from its fans. It’s a post-apocalyptic world where the survivors are separated by values: honesty, bravery, etc. etc. Personally I thought “Ability to grow a potato” should have featured more prominently, alongside “Willingness to mate in a world without Clearasil” but hey! No one asked me. On the page, Insurgent suffers from a near-terminal case of Mopey Girl Doing Nothing. It’s a disease that runs rampant in the genre, much like pink eye through a daycare. It afflicted the later books of Hunger Games in a similar fashion, but...
Read More

Paper Towns: Book or Movie?

I love movies. Just not…the movies they have been making. For about the last ten looong years. Which means I was squealingly excited when they started making all my favorite books into movies. The latest of those, a whip-smart John Green classic, is Paper Towns. Paper Towns is about this crazy chick who does lots of cool stuff, and the nerdy guy who loves her, and then learns a lesson about how harmful it is to oversimplify someone into a fantasy image. The book was a triumph of charisma and nerdiness, leaving me giggling and flipping pages for the next clue. The movie, as it turns out, is a fantastic translation of everything that made the movie great. The book starts out with HELLO! Crazy Ninja girl coming in through a window! Who is this chick? In the film, Cara...
Read More

Fiction Writing, Psychotherapy & Patrick Rothfuss

This is a post on one of the most simple and complex facets of writing fiction, one that was brought to mind by my recent re-reading of The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. What do therapy and a bearded world-saving supernerd have in common, you might ask? (I doubt Rothfuss would take offense to being called this, but just in case, the beard is well-documented, as is his amazing WorldBuilders charity, and we’ll just let his Neil Gaimon infatuation speak for itself, shall we?) Back on track. We’re talking about good fiction here. So, once upon a time, before I was a tortoise chaser or a fanfic freak or a budding author, I was training to be a therapist. I was in the realm of bespectacled head-nodders and tissue-handers for years, and for all the talking they did, they...
Read More