How Are We All Holding Up?

Posted on April 24, 2020 by Amanda Rudd

Hello folks! I hope you are all doing well. How is the quarantine treating you? I’m on day 44 of “self-isolation” – well, sort of anyway. I did have to go into work a few days this week and will again next week, but other than that I haven’t gone anywhere else and most things are still shut down (so no bookstores or movie theatres or window-shopping in Midtown…)

Are you all handling things ok? Are you finding things to keep you occupied? Did you have some kind of income to keep you afloat, or did you lose your job because of the pandemic? It’s all very scary right now and we are all under a lot of stress. Some people are using this time to “better themselves” and others are taking care of their families and still others are just fighting to keep it together. Whatever you are doing, it is ALL GOOD. You are doing the best you can and that’s all anyone should expect of themselves or others in a time like this.

Don’t be too hard on yourself. This is something I have to remind myself as well as anyone else. I have had some really rough days, and some days that have been perfectly fine. That’s totally natural but sometimes we cannot help but feel like we’re not doing enough – even though we know logically that that’s totally silly.

I thought I would share a few things that I’ve been keeping busy with, and if you’d like to share what you’ve been up to, that would be great!

I am still participating in Camp Nanowrimo for the month of April, and doing surprisingly well. I mean, I’m not going to be writing 50k words like some people – I gave myself a SMALLER goal, just 20k words this time. But I have managed to keep up a daily writing streak ALL MONTH, which is the best I’ve done in YEARS, and I have written a little over 16k words so far, which is more than I have written (again) in YEARS. I am very happy about that. While I am in no way minimizing or trivializing the difficulties, tragedies, and death toll of this pandemic, I am trying to be grateful for the small things, and one of those things has been the luxury of free time I haven’t had in quite awhile.

I have also been reading a lot still. Not quite as much as I did the first couple weeks, but still. I finished Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex (book #7 of the series) last night (technically at 2:30am this morning). Unfortunately, because I am borrowing those audiobooks from the library, I now have to wait for the final book of the series to become available and the wait is KILLING ME. In the meantime, I have started the audiobook of The Wee Free Men (one of the Discworld books) by Terry Pratchett. This book will satisfy one of the categories in my “Storm the Castle” 2020 Reading Challenge (which much of my reading these days has not done). I am also slowly working through the nonfiction book The Queens of Animation by Nathalia Holt.

Speaking of my reading challenge, I have now completed 9 out of the 21 books on my challenge. When I finish the two books I’m currently reading, that will put me at 11 and I’ll be halfway through! In addition, when I finish the 8th Artemis Fowl book I will have officially finished the first series in the 2020 Finishing the Series Reading Challenge. And then I’ll move on to the next series (perhaps The Dresden Files, though that I might be TOO ambitious…)

I have also bought a computer game for the first time in, oh… 12 or 13 years… I bought the video game Gris when Steam was having a sale last week. I’ve never been a big gamer, but I did play a couple computer games back in the day and I thought it would be fun to pick it up again. I’m only 3 “chapters” into Gris so far, but I absolutely love it. It’s quiet and calming and the art (which was the main selling point for me, I admit) is absolutely GORGEOUS. I highly recommend it.

In addition, I am doing more cross-stitch work. I’m almost done with this robot design I got from the Etsy shop DianaWattersHandmade. She has great designs for reasonable prices, she ships quickly, and she’s really friendly as well!

Anyway, those are some of the things (besides work and house-cleaning) I’ve been doing to keep busy and calm. How about you guys? Found anything fun? Read anything good lately? Please do share! I’d love to hear about it!

Book Review: The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water

Posted on April 22, 2020 by Amanda Rudd

Book: The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water
Author: Zen Cho
Release Date: 23 June 2020
Source: ARC borrowed from employer
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

The novella The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho, published by Tor.com publishing, packs a surprisingly emotional punch in its little body. It has been marketed as wuxia-inspired, and it is definitely that (though there are far fewer martial arts fight scenes and flying about than one might expect if you are at all familiar with Chinese wuxia books or films). Instead this slim book is about inner battles and emotional landscapes.

In a vaguely Asian-inspired country under oppressive rule, Guet Imm, a former nun of the respected monastic order called The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, teams up with a group of bandits who are more than they appear. These bandits are not merely criminals, but political outcasts and rebels, trying to earn money for their cause. The bandits begrudgingly concede to their new companion (when Guet Imm gives them little choice), and accept her help in protecting a priceless religious relic.

Over the course of their journey through forests and mountains, the nun becomes a part of their found family, and inspires one bandit to reconsider the faith he had thought dead forever. And just to keep things interesting, they also have to fight for their lives.

This book is a wonderful meditation on what it means to choose your family and your path, deciding for yourself who and what is important no matter what society has to say on the subject. It is also a beautiful examination of the joys, pains, and contradictions of religious faith – what means to have faith, to lose it, and to regain it. As a lapsed Catholic with a very complicated and ambivalent relationship to religion, I really appreciated and resonated with this facet of the story.

It is full of fun martial arts film tropes, and also features a gay man and a trans man – and neither of these identities is in anyway questioned or rebuked by any of the characters in the book, which is refreshing.

I gave this novella a 4 out of 5 because I genuinely enjoyed it and I look forward to what this author does next, but it didn’t totally WOW me. It didn’t knock my socks off. (And honestly, I would have enjoyed a bit more of that great wuxia staple: impossible flying-about martial arts fights.) Still, I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a short fun novella, stories about found families, and/or people who like an Asian aesthetic in their fantasy.

Here is the link to the Goodreads page for this book. And if you would like to pre-order I would recommend either IndieBound or the new online store Bookshop.org (as amazon has been delaying new book releases lately in order to deal with increased shopping for the quarantine situation).

In Honor of Apollo 13

Posted on April 17, 2020 by Amanda Rudd

Today, April 17th, is the 50th Anniversary of the landing of Apollo 13, after over 5 days in space in a mostly-broken space capsule. It landed at 18:07 UTC (6pm), in the South Pacific Ocean, carrying astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise safely home after an intense and harrowing ordeal. It is one of the defining moments of the entire space program.

So I thought it was a fitting day to talk about my obsession with space and NASA and my dashed hopes of being an astronaut.

Let me state the obvious: I love space. I’m not sure if I love space because I read so much scifi, or if I read so much scifi because I love space – it’s kind of a chicken or the egg deal. But I love it. I read books, watch films and documentaries, buy NASA t-shirts and dream about it a lot. I had a plan back in high school: I was going to get a degree in physics, join the Navy – because they have a PHENOMENAL science program – and eventually work my way into NASA.

When I went to college I tried to double-major in Physics and English (because English and books have always been my first love and I really didn’t want to have to choose between the two). But by my third year of college, I was taking 18-20 credit hours per semester, working 30-35hrs per week at a part time job, I was editor of the university literary arts journal, and I was on three student organizations. Something had to give and my advisor told me I really just needed to choose one major, at least for now. I was attending Rockhurst University, a small Jesuit college in Kansas City, that I absolutely adored. They had a great liberal arts program, but their science department wasn’t the greatest (at least at the time), and I had been really inspired by a couple of my recent Literature professors, so I chose English. And eventually decided I might actually want to go to grad school for English and become a Lit professor myself someday.

I graduated with a BA in English and a minor in (of all things) Theology, and went straight into grad school for a MA in English and American Literature.

There are a lot of things I loved about my Master’s program, and things I STILL and will ALWAYS love about the Literature field. I took some absolutely amazing courses in grad school, I met some brilliant professors and grad student colleagues that I am now lucky enough to call friends. I wrote some interesting papers and went to some very cool conferences. But I quit. After six years stalled out in my PhD program, despite the fact that I was ABD (“all but dissertation”: ie, I had completed all coursework, comprehensive exams, and preliminary writing, and all I needed to do was write my dissertation), I quit.

And now I keep looking back on my choices with regret, wondering if I made the wrong decision, if I should have done the Physics degree instead.

I visit NASA’s Space Center Houston and walk through exhibits and watch documentaries and cry. Really truly cry for the lost opportunities. My mother likes to tell me it’s not too late. I could go back to school and get that physics degree and try. But it IS too late and no false hope is going to change that. I try to teach myself to accept it, to move on. I have plenty of other dreams: I still want to be a novelist, I still want to open a bookstore, I want to write a musical, I want all sorts of things. But this loss still breaks my heart, and I’m not sure I will ever be over it.

So instead, I absorb everything I can. I am working on a collection of every fictional film and documentary about space I can find (or, ok, at least the GOOD ones). And I have read so many nonfiction books on the subject – biographies, histories, science books – it’s kind of ridiculous. And on that note, allow me to offer some suggestions on books and movies/documentaries that I HIGHLY recommend for the space/NASA lover!

Of course, the most obvious movie to name is Apollo 13, which is particularly appropriate today of all days. And it is one of my favorite movies of all time. Obviously, as with anything, a few liberties are taken with historical accuracy in order to ramp up the drama and streamline the number of characters involved, but for the most part, it’s relatively accurate. The directing and cinematography and acting are all just GOD-TIER in this movie too, so there’s that. Yes, I will be watching this later today.

There is also, of course, The Right Stuff, both the book by Tom Wolfe, and the 1983 movie. They are both CLASSICS.

For fictionalized movies, I also highly recommend The Martian (another one of my favorites) which really captures the true SPIRIT of space exploration: the wonder and awe and excitement and danger and heart of it all. It’s also genuinely funny, and also beautifully shot. And if you haven’t read the novel, you should totally get on that too.

Similarly, I would recommend Interstellar. This movie gets so much hate. It seems to have become a fad, a popular past-time to hate on this movie, and I just DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY. Really, I don’t. When I saw this movie in theatres – in IMAX, because OF COURSE – I was blown away! I was entranced. I was emotionally invested and enormously distraught. Is the thematic conclusion a little heavy-handed? Yes. Could it have done without the constant repetition of the Dylan Thomas poem? Probably. But it is still an absolutely gorgeous movie – it is visually stunning and emotionally resonant and philosophically interesting and it really gets at the sense of scale and awe of space travel that few other movies ever have (save maybe 2001: A Space Odyssey – which I also highly recommend).

For documentaries, about NASA I would start with the newest one that just came out last year, called Apollo 11. It is very high quality, with a lot of newly released footage. It’s available on both Amazon Prime and Hulu. There’s also the CLASSIC documentary series: From the Earth to the Moon, which remains one of the best documentaries ever produced on the subject.

In addition, there is the biographical documentary called The Last Man on the Moon, which is about Gene Cernan, who was literally the last astronaut to walk on the moon, during the Apollo 17 mission. It is an absolutely fascinating look at Gene Cernan’s life, both his personal life and his experiences with the Apollo missions. I had the great privilege of attending one of the premiere showings of this documentary in 2016, with Gene Cernan and several other current astronauts in attendance for a Q&A at the end. It was one of the highlights of my life, quite frankly, and I was very sad when Gene Cernan died in 2017.

For books written on the subject, there are so many it is practically an embarrassment of riches. But if I HAD to choose just a few, they would be:

Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America’s Apollo Moon Landings written by Alan Shephard and Deke Slayton (so you know this is the REAL FUCKING DEAL)

Failure Is Not an Option, the memoir written by NASA Flight Controller Gene Kranz, (who was made immortal by Ed Harris’s portrayal of him in the Apollo 13 movie). This is one of my favorite biographies of all time (and I read A LOT of biographies), and I would sell a limb or two to meet Gene Kranz and get his autograph.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey, a nonfiction science book that goes beyond our present and projects into the future of what space exploration could be.

Again, this is just a very small sample of the content that exists about NASA in particular and space in general. I have watched and read quite a lot more than that, but these are some of my favorites. If you’re a space/NASA nut like me, please come chat! I would love to talk about anything space related!

Top 20 (+1) Favorite Books Of All Time

Posted on April 15, 2020 by Amanda Rudd

Top 10 (or 20 or 5) lists…. Some people are really obsessed with and good at them. My brother is constantly asking me “list your top 5 favorite” this or that. Sometimes he wants me to make a distinction between the things I love most, versus the things I think are objectively the “best” which he posits are not always the same. I see his point here, but at some level or another, doesn’t labeling something your “favorite” mean that you think it IS objectively the “best” – even if no one else agrees with you?

I am a “lists” person. I LOVE making lists. Lists of my favorite things. Things that are the most important to me. But I am NOT AT ALL GOOD at putting those lists in any kind of ranking order. Deciding that this thing definitely outranks that one, etc. And, when someone asks me to name one single favorite thing I can NEVER pick just one. I love too many things too wholly and completely to pick just one. It would be like choosing a favorite limb and cutting off all the others. Just NOT possible!

I recently saw on Twitter a few people asking such questions just for the fun of it. Pick just one favorite book, or favorite movie, or favorite fight scene, etc. And multiple answers were considering “cheating, or too easy, or boring.” I sat for awhile and tried to narrow it down, but I just couldn’t. And then last night, when I couldn’t sleep, my best friend and I brainstormed our favorite books. We both agreed we could not narrow it down to just one, but we both managed to narrow it down to our top three. And then went on to do a full top 20 list.

It was not easy. And I kept overthinking it. The first three titles that came to mind, are the same three titles that ALWAYS come to mind first. But I thought, “surely it’s not that simple?” So I kept thinking and listing and eliminating. Until I told myself: “be honest. What books do you always think of first? When you consider the idea of getting a book quote tattoo, what comes to mind first? It really probably is THAT simple.”

And so, when I was honest with myself, it was.

So my TOP THREE FAVORITE BOOKS OF ALL TIME ARE:

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

Watership Down by Richard Adams

Dune by Frank Herbert

Friends who have known me a long time would not be surprised. In fact, my best friend guessed two out of the three with little effort. I think I may, sometime in the near future, write a book review (or maybe more of a tribute – they’re all such CLASSICS they hardly need “reviews”) for each.

And for the curious, and just because I put an embarrassing amount of thought into this, here is my full Top 20 list. A few notes on this list: The top three are clearly THE TOP THREE, but after that they are not in any particular order. There is no hierarchy here. Also, I fully admit I cheated a little because I put all of The Lord of the Rings as a single book, AND I put “Pride and Prejudice (or Persuasion?)” because I have been waffling between those two as my favorite Jane Austen book for YEARS now. And when I say Dragonbone Chair, let’s be real, I really just mean the ENTIRE Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy. Just as when I say Lord Foul’s Bane I really just mean the ENTIRE Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series. And yes, I actually ended up with 21, because I simply could not eliminate one more. And my best friend very magnanimously said “I’ll allow it…”

So, without further ado, my Top 20 (+1) Favorite Books List:

Neverending Story – Michael Ende
Watership Down – Richard Adams
Dune – Frank Herbert
Dragon Prince – Melanie Rawn
Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
Pride and Prejudice (or Persuasion?) – Jane Austen
Sunshine – Robin McKinley
Mairelon the Magician – Patricia C. Wrede
Neuromancer – William Gibson
We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
Journal of Albion Moonlight – Kenneth Patchen
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Wizard of Earthsea – Ursula K. LeGuin
Redwall – Brian Jacques
The Dragonbone Chair – Tad Williams
Taran Wanderer – Lloyd Alexander
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle
The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien
Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
Lord Foul’s Bane – Stephen R. Donaldson

I did notice that MOST of the books on this list are books I read before the age of like… fifteen, I think. It’s amazing how much those early books really stick with you and form who you are a person. There are a few exceptions: I read We in my senior of high school, and both Neuromancer and Journal of Albion Moonlight during my second year of college, and I can’t actually remember when I first read The Things They Carried… but other than that, yeah. All before the age of fifteen.

Another side note: none of the books I have read VERY recently are on this list (pretty much for the reasons mentioned above) BUT I suspect Paul Krueger’s Steel Crow Saga could very easily slide into that list over time, because holy shit I loved that book a LOT.

I had so much fun doing the list – it was like torture but FUN torture – that I have decided I want to do more of these lists. I’m already working on a favorite movies list, which has actually turned out to be even more difficult than the books so far. I have had to split live action movies and animated movies into two separate lists or I was going to end up with like…. a top 50 and no way to narrow it down more. I also think I want to do a favorite nonfiction books list (since the above list is fiction). After that we’ll see what else I can come up with.

If anyone has any recommendations (or requests) for other top 20 lists, hit me up! Also, please share some of your favorites in the comments! Can you name a single favorite book (can anyone actually DO THAT?), or maybe a top 3 or top 5? I’d love to hear from you!

Song and Story: My Personal Playlists

Posted on April 14, 2020 by Amanda Rudd

Over the last few years, especially as apps like Spotify have become more common, making playlists for all sorts of things has become more and more popular. Fans make playlists based on their favorite books, fanfics, ships, etc. Some authors have taken to releasing an official book playlist for each of their new release publications. And so on and so on.

As my best friends are aware, I have been making playlists for DECADES. Since way back-when, when they were still called MIXTAPES. I remember with great fondness, the labor of love that was: listening to the radio waiting for bated breath for your favorite songs to play, ready to press record the second those first few notes hit, and doing this over and over again until the cassette tape was full. And then, years later, the joy of burnable cds and the first version of itunes, allowing you to make endless combinations of music to suite every mood.

I make playlists for everything: specific themes, stories I am writing, stories I am reading, characters I love, for road-trips and for test-taking, etc. I mostly keep mine on “private,” though I have started curating a few of the official playlists for the book subscription box Fox & Wit, for whom I work.

The playlists I make for Fox & Wit are usually around 10-14 songs long, however, I usually start with MANY more songs than that and then cut down to the best songs that most fit the feel/tone/themes of the book.

But I thought it might be fun to share just a few of the playlists I’ve done for myself as well. So here we go:

First, this started as the official book playlist for Just Watch Me by Jeff Lindsay, curated for Fox & Wit, but I discovered I didn’t actually like the book that much, so this rapidly became more generally what I call “The Greatest Heist Playlist Ever.”

Next we have a playlist called “You Go Too Fast For Me” which is, of course, a playlist I made for Good Omens, and one of my favorite ships: Crowley and Aziraphale.

Then we have one of my more idiosyncratic playlists. I have an obsession for songs about trains. I have been adding to this playlist slowly for YEARS. I don’t have every single song ever written that mentions trains – there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of blues songs ALONE that mention trains – I mainly just keep the ones I like best. I call it “Runaway Train” (because of course I did).

I also have this playlist, “Icarus and Daedalus,” the title of which is probably self-explanatory. I am likewise obsessed with songs (and poems and art) about the myth of Icarus and Daedelus. Like the train playlist, I have been adding to this one slowly for years as well. I’m still tinkering with it a lot lately.

Then I have this playlist called “Songs to Conquer By” which I made specifically to help power me through studying for my PhD Comprehensive Exams – I made it through mostly unscathed.

On top of all that, I have playlists I make for the stories I am writing personally. Currently, I am working on a fanfiction for Camp Nanowrimo, so I made a playlist for that one: It’s called “Holes In Your Coffin” (which is the name of the fic) and it is for The Dresden Files (more the short-lived tv show than the book series) and for my Harry/Bob ship.

In addition, I have a playlist for the only novel I have written a FULL draft of, called “Midnight’s Knife.”

And finally, I have a playlist for my half-started novel “They Shall Have Fire.”

So there are just a few of my playlists, all available on Spotify. I have others on Spotify that I will probably keep to myself. And I have even more in older formats, like on burned CDs.

If you like to make playlists and feel like sharing, I would love to see/hear them! I am also always looking for new music. I am a VORACIOUS music omnivore, so please send me any recommendations you have!

General Updates

Posted on April 6, 2020 by Amanda Rudd

Hello all! I am personally on Day #25 of social distancing/mostly-quarantining. In the last 25 days, I have gone into work once because it simply needed to be done (and in between have been a little work from home), gone to the grocery store twice, and three times left the house just long enough to pick up a food order from my favorite local/family-owned restaurant. And that’s pretty much it. I will have to go into work for a least a couple days around April 20th, but other than that I suspect I will continue on as I have been for the last almost-month.

For the most part, I continue to do ok with the isolation (my brother, no so much). However, last week proved less-than-stellar and particularly non-productive. I spent most of April 1-4th feeling pathetic and self-pitying and I got almost no work done, barely any reading, etc. But the thing is, it had very little (perhaps nothing) to do with the current pandemic situation. It was more just my usual personal brand of brain chemistry bullshit rearing its ugly head at a most inopportune time.

I’m hoping (fingers crossed) that this week will be a bit better. At the very least I have more fun books waiting for me. And on that note, I wanted to share my recent acquisitions:

Docile by K.M. Sparza

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

The Empress of Salt and Sorrow by Nghi Vo

Sword in the Stars by Cori McCarthy and Amy Rose Capetta

When Gods Die and Why Mermaids Sing by C.S. Harris

I am looking forward to reading all of these! But I’m currently kind of stuck because I’m still reading both Artemis Fowl Book #6 AND The Queens of Animation, and I really shouldn’t be starting yet another book until I finish at least ONE of those. And I don’t even know which of my new ones I want to read first – I mean, I want to read them ALL first. So… (shrug)

In other news, I have managed to stay on schedule with Camp Nano so far. I gave myself a goal of 20,000 words (the official Nano goal is usually 50,000), which means aiming to write approximately 666 words per day. So far I have managed an average of about 700 words per day, so at least that’s going well for the moment. I am not looking for miraculous levels of writing, but I am hoping I can develop more of a consistent habit again.

As we all continue with this quarantine situation, one of the small things that makes me a little sad is birthdays. I mean, I realize that in the grand scheme of things this is a very minor issue, and its definitely up there in terms of “first world problems” but it still makes me a little sad for all of us who have birthdays during this situation. A couple friends of mine had birthdays in mid-to-late March, my brother’s fiance’s birthday is tomorrow, I have another friend whose birthday is in late April, and my birthday is exactly a month away. None of us have been, or will be, able to celebrate. I haven’t even been able to buy my brother’s fiance a gift: even ordering on Amazon doesn’t really work right now since they have mostly suspended non-essential shipping.

Admittedly, I haven’t done anything much for my birthday in YEARS. Since I started college, it has always landed right in the middle of Spring Semester finals – first as a student, and then as a professor. Besides which, I don’t really have any local friends I’ve been able to celebrate WITH in over fifteen years. Usually, the most I can hope for is a nice dinner with my mother and my brother – barely on my actual birthday but usually a few days or a week later, after finals are over and I can breathe again. This year, I won’t even get that much. None of us will.

Again, I know this is a very silly minor problem in the face of pandemic and death and people losing their jobs and economic collapse, but I’m still allowed to be a little bummed about it, right?

Anyway, how are you all doing? Everyone keeping it together ok? Anyone found themselves learning some random new hobby or doing anything particularly strange in the face of their isolation and boredom? I’m curious to hear!

One Favorite Movie: The Court Jester

Posted on April 2, 2020 by Amanda Rudd

I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you about one of my favorite movies. The Court Jester, released in 1956, starring Danny Kaye, Glynis Johns, Angela Lansbury, and Basil Rathbone. This movie is a musical comedy, like most of Danny Kaye’s movies, and it is probably his best one (though that is difficult to say since he was always excellent). I love this movie with all my heart.

Thanks to my mother’s excellent taste, I grew up with this movie and others like it. We had an old vhs copy of this movie when I was kid and for some reason we developed a funny little routine/tradition when we watched this movie (and a couple others). If we were watching The Court Jester as a family that night, we ordered takeout Chinese (and vice versa). Similarly, when we watched Ladyhawke (another of my favorites) we always made ramen (the cheap freeze-dried kind that is famous among college students and poor people and which my little brother and I ate on the regular – and still do).

I hadn’t been able to watch this movie in quite a long time. The vhs tape had deteriorated, and I hadn’t been able to find a copy on dvd in ages (there is one available on Amazon now but I haven’t bought it). However, I discovered a few days ago that it has recently been added to the Amazon Prime streaming videos which made me very excited, and I sat down to watch it immediately. (I did not, sadly, have takeout Chinese…)

The Court Jester, as I said, is a musical comedy: it features Danny Kaye as Hawkins: a hapless bumbling performer who has joined a group of rebels led by a Robin Hood-esque hero called The Black Fox. The rebels work to dethrone a king who has usurped the throne by murdering the previous royal family. An infant child of the royal family survived, and is being protected by The Black Fox’s group until they can find a way to place him back on the throne. Hawkins and a member of the rebel group, Maid Jean (played by the ever-glorious Glynis Johns) are charged with taking the baby into hiding, when a series of increasingly ridiculous incidents lead to: a) Hawkins going to the king’s castle disguised as the newly-hired court jester and b) Jean being taken to the castle as part of a round-up of women to be picked over by the king.

At the castle, Hawkins is supposed to get into contact with an agent of the rebellion who has infiltrated the staff. Unfortunately, he doesn’t realize that the court jester he is impersonating was actually hired by the King’s adviser Ravenhurst (played to scene-stealing perfection by Basil Rathbone) to secretly carry out several assassinations. On top of all of that, the king’s daughter, portrayed by a very young, heart-breakingly gorgeous Angela Lansbury (in a series of absolutely stunning gowns!), has been ordered to marry the brutish Griswold – but she doesn’t want to marry Griswold, and instead sets her sights on the new court jester. The witch who works for the princess therefore hypnotizes Hawkins to go off and woo the princess.

And folks, IT JUST GOES DOWNHILL FROM THERE.

This movie is, in my opinion, PERFECT. It cannot be improved upon. The songs are wonderful, the costumes are amazing, the script is hilarious, and the acting is pitch-perfect. Danny Kaye is at his finest in this movie – working through sharp, rapid-fire dialogue and high-energy slapstick with equal finesse. And the rest of the cast is just as great. Especially Basil Rathbone, who is always amazing. The scenarios of the movie get increasingly silly and ridiculous in the best way possible. And this movie contains some of the greatest comedic scenes ever put to film.

It features the now-famous exchange: “Get it?” “Got it.” “Good.”

And the oft-quoted “pellet with the poison” sequence.

And this scene, which I believe to be one of the funniest things ever done in the history of cinema.

And it wraps up with a fencing scene between Danny Kaye and Basil Rathbone that simply cannot be beat. It features both amazing fencing skills and hilarity in equal measure. A popular story goes that during this fight scene, Danny Kaye – who had just learned to fence for this film – was so much faster than Basil Rathbone – who had been fencing in films for decades – that the sword fight choreographer had to stand-in for Rathbone for parts of the scene. It’s an urban legend kind of story – my mother told it to me, and she had heard it from someone and so forth – so I don’t know how true it is. It could be completely made-up, but it’s such a fun story and I love it. (If you know this story to be untrue, please don’t tell me. I like my fantasy.)

This movie was the most expensive comedy made at the time (for about $4 million) but bombed at the box office. Yet Danny Kaye was nominated for a Golden Globe for this performance, and it has since become a beloved film. AFI ranked it #98 on its list of greatest comedies of all time (out of about 500 that were nominated). And in 2004 the National Film Registry elected to preserve The Court Jester for its cultural and historical significance.

In any case, it is one of my favorite movies of all time and I believe that everyone should see it at least once. Especially right now, with the world kind of falling apart around us, a good laugh can be very therapeutic and necessary. And since The Court Jester is finally streaming online for the first time I’ve ever noticed, it is easier than ever to do so! So get on it!

Camp NaNo April 2020

Posted on April 1, 2020 by Amanda Rudd

This is my public announcement that I am participating in the April Camp NaNoWriMo event this year.

Can I assume that everyone knows what NaNoWriMo is? Is that a safe assumption? Probably, but just in case: NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It is a nonprofit event and website that started… oh gosh… a long time ago, to encourage amateur writers (and everyone really) to put aside excuses, fear, hesitations, etc. and just sit down to write the first draft of a novel over the course of a single month. The official NaNoWriMo event takes place in November, and the goal is to write 50,000 words between Nov 1st and 31st (50,000 words being chosen ages ago, slightly at random, as the average length of a novel).

However, because some people simply cannot participate in November for any number of reasons – as a former professor, I can state that it is particularly difficult for teachers to participate in November – and because other people simply wanted more opportunities to write under the gamified conditions and community-building structure of the NaNoWriMo website, the organizers created two “Camp Nano” events: one in April and one in July.

Camp Nano is a little lower stakes than the official November event. The goal is not to write a novel, or 50,000. Instead you are given the opportunity to create your own writing goal: choose your own word-count goal, make an editing goal, work on short stories or whatever else you want. And you create writing groups (they used to be called “cabins” but that appears to be gone from their new revamped website now) to work with friends or any people you meet on the website.

I have participated in the official November event 4 times and have only “won” (ie, finished at least 50,000 words) ONCE. I have also participated in Camp Nano a couple times. But its been awhile.

I hadn’t initially planned on participating this year, but a friend of mine invited me to work in a cabin with her, and I figured “why not?” So I made a very last minute decision and just updated my profile on the Nano website yesterday – just in time to start officially writing tomorrow.

I have made a smaller goal for myself – just 20,000 words instead of 50,000 – and I will be working on a fanfiction piece instead of an original work. It has been a very very VERY long time since I have been able to write anything productively or coherently, and I am hoping that allowing myself to work on fanfiction, with a predetermined world and characters, will help shake my brain loose again so I might eventually move back into original work.

*fingers crossed*

I’d love to hear from others who are participating in Camp Nano this month! Or who have participated in any of the Nano events in the past! Why did you work on? How did you fare? Have you ever “won” in November? Do you win every year (my best friend often does and I am jealous of her…)? Sound off in the comments!

Amanda Haimoto Rudd

Writer. Editor. Book Reviewer.

Monthly Archives: April 2020