Too Busy?

I thought I was busy in second grade when I had after school activities three days a week. I thought I was busy in sixth grade when the only homework I had was spellings tests. I thought I was busy in middle school when I had daily math worksheets and one or two other assignments a week. I thought I was busy my first two years of high school when I had one club and one AP class.
Today I went to school, half of a writers' club meeting, a rescheduled piano lesson, play rehearsal, and watched another play with friends. But you know what? I had time to redo a fifty five question test. I had time to count my cup holder change at a stoplight. I can live in stolen moments.
People fascinate me, and it peeves me when no one takes interest in my life, so I try to ask questions. My go to question, "How's your life going?" is usually met with "I'm busy."
Really?
That's not any better than "Okay" or "I'm fine".
I think I'm busy. Eight school clubs in addition to all this senior college crap. But you know what? I can make it work, and in a few years, I'll work with even more.

Gold Car Syndrome

Yesterday I walked up to one of my writer friends and bounced a story idea off her. She cut me off before I could get two sentences in. "Don't write something that's already been done."

That made me pause. Sure, I've read a lot of stories like the one I'm planning, but does that mean the idea is taken?

I drive a Toyota Camry. The day I got it, I was so excited because it had everything I'd ever wanted in a car. It had wheels! It had an engine! It moved! The radio worked!  So did the air conditioner! And, as an added bonus, the car was gold. Everyone else in the world had white or black or grey. I'd never lose it in a parking lot.

Then I actually took that car onto the road. I realized my next door neighbors had a gold car the same size. So did my other neighbors, two doors down in the other direction. And so did a girl who lived across the street from them.

Four gold cars on one street. I guess I wasn't so unique after all. I never paid attention to it before. If you'd asked me to count all the gold cars on my way home from school, I'd say, "There's only eight. Gold isn't a popular color." Now I'd say, "Eight? EIGHT? Why does everyone have to drive a gold car?"

They're not copying me. These people bought their cars years before me and didn't bother to ask what I was doing. They're different brands, makes, and models. And even if someone did try to copy me-a gold 2000 Toyota Camry Solara-it wouldn't be mine.

We see what we look for. The same thing happens all the time with books. People track down a book with a magic school or a world portal in Kings Cross Station and accuse J. K. Rowling of cheating. No, she just lives in the same world we do. She's gone to school. She's been to Kings Cross Station. And she took her imagination with her.

You want a unique car? Then you can't buy it from a car company, they all copy off each other. You'll have to build your own. It can't look anything like mine. It can't be gold. It can't have a radio. It can't have an air condition. It can't have wheels. It can't have an engine. I'll sit here while you go and build it.

Done yet? Okay. Does it move? Nope. Congratulations. Your car is nothing like mine.

Don't cry. I know you want a good car. You want the best car. You want a car like no one's seen before. But don't be afraid to copy. You can have wheels, an engine, and even an air conditioner. It will still be yours in the way the brakes screech when you put it in reverse. You personalize it when you pull too far into the garage and scratch up the front. If it's not so unique, so what? It's your car.

There is nothing new under the sun. Including that last sentence and the book it comes from.  Everything's been done before, and everything can be done again.There are eighty keys on the piano, how many songs can you write? There are seven colors in the rainbow, how many pictures can you paint? Soon enough they'll start looking and sounding like each other, and of course they do, because you're playing favorites with certain notes and shades. But when you get bored with that you can go on. There probably is a limit to the number of patterns and hues. But you'll never reach it.

 

Will the Real Olive Please Stand Up?

Olives are green

Except for when they're black

Here are a pair of olive eyes.

And here we have Jacqueline, my olive skinned friend.

Everyone uses "What's your favorite color?" as an icebreaker question. Nobody's ever asked for my least favorite. I think I've found it.

Can A Story Come Too Late?

I was fifteen years old. I had this oversized gray jacket that made me feel scrawny. My feet didn't touch the floor in my biology class chair. I was nowhere close to getting a driver's license. All my friends had the other lunch. I wasn't a career AP student like some of my friends, but the workload was enough to crush me. I won't say I was depressed-that's a mental health term and it belongs to the mentally ill-but I had gray days more often than not.
Life got better. I'm seventeen now, not any taller, but I can adjust the seat enough to reach the brake, so it doesn't hurt me. That jacket lives in the back of my closet. I'm taking slacker classes, like film studies. Today our teacher had us watch Dead Poet's Society. "If you haven't seen this yet, you're in for a treat."
She was right. School-weary students crushed by their parent's expectations. Clandestine poetry readings. True friendship. An inspiring teacher, played by Robin Williams, no less. And then there's that phrase they keep tossing around. Carpe diem. Seize the day, seize the day.
I can appreciate it now. I laughed at all the right parts and plenty of the wrong ones. While my friends did math homework by the screen's light or hid phones under their desks, I was enraptured. But I couldn't escape this sense that it had come too late. Dead Poets Society is brain candy for me now. But two years ago it would've been a pill.

This summer I read Jane Eyre for English. I picked it up sophomore year, read the first 200 pages, then ditched it for other books. There were times I wished I'd kept going. Jane struggles with loneliness. Maybe she would've lifted me out of my own.
Then there's this beautiful quote:
"Laws and principles are not for times when there is no temptation. They are for moments such as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour. Stringent are they, inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I could break them what would be their worth? They have a worth, so I have always believe, and if I cannot believe it now it is because I am insane. Quite insane, with my veins running fire and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this moment to stand by: there I plant my foot."
I didn't have to look that up. I copied it down into my phone, iPod, journal, writing notebook, and this 30,000 word document on my computer called Rant Space. The words are seared into my mind. Aren't they pretty?
Maybe they aren't. Not for you, not for now. Would some context help? This is what Jane says to herself after the Mr. Tall Dark and Brooding Rochester asks her to become his mistress. If she leaves, she'll be penniless and alone once more.
But that's what she chooses.
And Rochester respects her for it.
More importantly, so does Jane.
To me, to me now, these words are powerful. They're all about how choosing to resist temptation is just as much of a choice as choosing to give in. They talk about that tipping point when you can feel yourself slipping and you just want to fling your agency into the wind. And then we get to see the aftermath. Jane's homeless for a few days. She nearly starves to death under a bush, but then she finds friends who feed her and goes back to Rochester eventually.
But at fifteen? Maybe I would've skimmed over that paragraph. "Blah blah don't know what stringent means blah blah just ditch him, Jane. How long is this book?"
This happens a lot. I read something. A book or a blog or an article, and I think, "Where was this when I needed it?"
My English teacher told me there's no such thing as reading a book too late. Humans are like Russian nesting dolls. The person you were is still the person you are, she's just hidden somewhere deep down, somewhere close to your core. When you pick up a book, the words penetrate the layers and they mean something to her-even though your new self has different problems and passions.
I'd like to agree with her. But I don't know it I can. Maybe I needed some distance from my sophomore year before I could even recognize the healing power of Jane Eyre and Dead Poets Society. Maybe they've hit me at the right time after all.

The other night, I watched Back to the Future with my fourteen year old brother. He doesn't need dead poets. He lives for laughs. There's a scene towards the beginning where Marty clings to the back of a truck while skateboarding. I found it stupid. "What's he doing? That's a good way to get yourself killed." But my longboarder brother? "That's genius!"
A boy in book club wrote this in my yearbook: "Remember, there's no such thing as a bad book, just a good book read at a bad time." I hope I can stay in touch with my inner layers. I hope I can find a way to make every book the right book at the time. I hope I can harbor some piece of myself that smiles when Marty hitches a ride.
What do you think? Is it better to run into a good story to early or too late?

Do Your Research!

So, I might be writing a historical fiction novel about the Salem Witch Trials. I say might because I've got two other novels I'm working on, though I've theoretically abandoned both to focus on getting into college. I can write books for the rest of my life, right? But this is my last chance to be a high schooler.
Last night I stayed up until 11:30 creating a thirty three page presentation on important players in the Salem Witch Trials. A few days ago, I contacted a descendant of a second cousin five times removed of Ann Putnam, Jr., one of the most vocal accusers in the trials, and asked them for a family tree. I haven't officially dedicated my life to this book. Yet I've spent a huge chunk of my day wondering whether Ms. Goode, who was either four or five when she was jailed for witchcraft, was named Dorcas or Dorothy. One source said Dorcas/Dorothy had a sibling. A brother? A sister? Older? Younger? I have no idea. Then another source comes along and says she was an only child.
My last book was a Sleeping Beauty retelling. I researched the guts out of that story. I read every folk version-along with scholarly analysis of them-multiple times. Then I researched themes, motifs, symbols, and historical interpretation of the tale. After that, I gave my self a crash course on spinning wheels through the ages and conditions that can cause extended sleep. Finally, I scoured the internet and my local library for other Sleeping Beauty retellings. I mapped out the elements of the tale and the way different authors twisted them.
After all this, I read the first chapter to my creative writing class. The teacher-the teacher-asked me, "Are you going to follow the original Disney?"
I've spent the last several years wondering, "Should the enchanted sleep stem from a prophecy, like it does in Giambattista Basile's 1634 tale, or should my princess be cursed like she is in more modern versions?" But everyone who picks it up will say, "Hey, she renamed Maleficent."
You know what? I can't read everything I can find. Because I can find too much. I'm going to read everything helpful. 

Evolution of the Disney Princess

In 1937, Snow White hit theaters. She wasn't just the first Disney princess. She was the first full length Disney film, and, for that matter, the first full length animated film. Snow White made history. That, and her inclusion in the Disney Princess franchise, is primarily why we can remember her today. The next ten movies Disney cranked out weren't much to look at. We got stuff like Bambi and Dumbo as well as obscure ones like Fun and Fancy Free and The Three Amigos. The first real Disney movie-that is, the only one people care about today-is Cinderella. Walt's twelfth film. Nine years later Aurora came out and did horribly in the box office. Sleeping Beauty was the last princess movie produced in Walt's lifetime.
It's important to note that Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora weren't associated in any way. Not anymore than, say, Wendy Darling and Alice. They did not appear on products together.

After Walt's death, Disney went through a creative slump. The last movie he had a hand in was The Jungle Book. The company cranked out crap films like The Fox and the Hound and The Great Mouse Detective. And The Black Cauldron, which features a largely forgotten princess.



Eilonwy is not happy about being left out of the franchise.

In short, they weren't doing so hot without their leader. Things picked up again in the nineties. They entered what's known as the Disney Renaissance with the release of Little Mermaid in 1989. In the next decade, we met Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, and Mulan. The Renaissance also saw the creation of favorites like Hercules, The Lion King, and Tarzan.
Still, they were not grouped together as Disney princesses. Belle and Jasmine had no special connection with each other that Jane and Meg didn't share.
The Official Disney Princess line was born when Andy Mooney, Disney Consumer Products Chairman, went to a Disney On Ice Show. While waiting in line, he found himself surrounded by hordes of girls in princess costumes.
Not Disney princess costumes. Home made, generic princess costumes. An unexploited demographic! A franchising goldmine! A gross corruption of the individual princess mythologies, or so the rest of Disney claimed. Why would princesses from completely separate movies made over the course of several decades show up on lunch boxes together? But he managed to sway them.

Meg and Jane

They considered putting Meg and Jane in the franchise but felt they didn't fit the mythology. Tinker Bell was originally included as well, but they dropped her. Now she rules her own product line, the Disney Fairies. Somehow, Mulan  got in, despite not being a princess by birth or marriage.
In 2009, Disney kicked off the third generation of princesses with the release of The Princess and the Frog. Tiana was joined a year later by Rapunzel. Merida, Anna, and Elsa soon followed.
In the late nineties, Andy Mooney, chairman of Disney Consumer Products, went to a Disney on Ice show. Standing in line behind a cluster of girls in generic princess costumes, he realized
The rest of Disney was skeptic at first. Clump together princesses from completely separate movies in the same franchise? But Mooney managed to sway them.
Disney princesses have evolved over time. The original trio wished for things. This is apparent in songs like Cinderella's "A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes" and Snow White's "I'm Wishing". A non princess example from this time period is Pinocchio's "When You Wish Upon A Star."
In the second generation, princesses moved from wishing for things to wanting them.

I've got gadgets and gizmos a plenty
I've got whozits and whatzits galore
You want thingamabobs? I've got twenty!
But who cares? No big deal,
I want more

I want to be where the people are
I want  to see, want to see them dancing

I want much more than this provincial life!
I want adventure in the great wide somewhere
I want it more than I can tell
And for once it might be grand
To have someone understand
I want so much more than they've got planned

A want is more concrete than a wish, but it's still abstract, especially because the things they want are intangible. Ariel and Belle both want adventure, something we see in Jasmine and Pocahontas as well. But Mulan, the last of the second generation, wants something different: acceptance. She struggles between finding her own sense of identity and pleasing her family.

Now let's look at the third generation. Tiana doesn't wish or want. She has the very concrete goal of owning a restaurant.

 

I remember Daddy told me
Fairytales can come true
You gotta make 'em happen
It all depends on you
So I work real hard each and every day
Now things for sure are going my way
Just doing what I do
Look out, boys, I'm coming through

After Tiana, Disney decided they'd repented enough for their damsel days. With Rapunzel they step away from doing and go back to dreaming. Tangled analyzes what it means, exactly, to have a dream. Rapunzel's dream-to see the floating lanterns gleam-is concrete but fleeting. After the lights sail into the sky, she's not sure what to do with her life. Brave blatantly defies previous princess tropes. Merida's concrete goal-shooting for her own hand-morphs into saving her mother halfway through the film. Anna starts out with no goal in particular while Elsa's tormented by her need to hide her powers. 

The original trio all meet and marry a prince after knowing him for a song and a few lines of dialogue. Aside from Ariel, each one of the second generation turns down either a specific suitor or the concept of an arranged marriage.

The most obvious of these is Mulan. 

This trope continues with Tiana and Merida but skips over Rapunzel. Having lived in a tower her whole life, she has no need to deny male company. With Frozen, it's okay for a girl to fall head over heels into a legitimate love triangle
Another third generation trend is titles. The first and second generation take their title from a fairytale or the heroine's name. After The Princess and the Frog flopped in box offices, Disney put the blame on the name: apparently men won't see a female lead movie, but if they called the next one Tangled, they could trick them into buying tickets. Thus Merida became Brave and Anna got Frozen.
The 2018 film, Moana, will finally buck this trend-and another. Over half the second generation were women of color. Aladdin, Pocahontas, and Mulan are beloved 90's classics. But The Princess and the Frog did fail, remember, and I don't buy the gender excuse. Anyone who watches the Tangled trailer can tell it's a Rapunzel movie. And she more than doubled Tiana's box office dough. Perhaps Disney was afraid of a different demographic.
Disney played safe by portraying golden haired Rapunzel as golden haired and making Scottish Merida a white redhead. But when they dared make two Scandinavian heroines Scandinavian, outraged fans decided they'd gone too far.

Moana concept art

Polynesian Moana gives Disney fans exactly what they want: something to obsess over for the next four years and something to complain about when the movie finally comes out. Just watch, they'll do something wrong. Disney made several changes to Tiana's inital character. Her original name, Maddy, was dropped because it sounded too close to Mammy. She swapped her maid job for waitressing and her prince became black as well. After hiring Oprah Winfrey as a technical consultant, Disney figured they were good-until the complaints rolled in. The heroine spends seventeen minutes as a black princess and the rest as a green frog? Green gowned Tiana plastered on green watermelon candy? Why is she the only black princess, anyways?

But perhaps Moana will pacify feminists, the diversity crowd, and-dare we say it? A new generation of kids who will grow up with Moana dolls. There's quite a gap between her and the last princess film, though it's smaller than the one between Mulan and Tiana. Let's see if Moana continues the tropes, trends, and traditions established by the third generation, or if she's a new kind of princess entirely.


Three Things Everyone Ought to Know About Marie Antoinette

1. Who She Was
You can say queen of France if you want. You'd be right. But please don't go around saying she was born in France, because the girl was Austrian. She married into the throne.
2. What She Look Like

Because Marie Antoinette was into bare shoulders

And lacy knee socks

Also sandals.

For the record, here is what Marie Antoinette actually wore.

Fun fact of the day: She had four children. Sophie died before the picture was finished, so they painted her out.

3. What She Said

The words "let them eat cake" never left her lips. There is no record that she said so. The earliest mention of this quote comes from Rousseau's Confessions:

Finally I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: "Let them eat brioche."

Marie Antoinette was nine years old at the time and living in Austria. The quote comes from Maria Theresa of Spain, who lived a century before Antoinette.