BatB
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Picoreview: Beauty and the Beast
Picoreview: Beauty and the Beast: exceeded my expectations by a considerable margin.
(Also, irrelevantly, I was sitting between two little girls who sang all the songs they knew, and an older woman who kept wiping her eyes, both of which I found pretty charming. :))
The showing I went to go see originally was sold out, which meant I basically spent four hours wandering vaguely around downtown Drogheda (spoiler: it hasn’t got 4 hours worth of entertainment in it) so I could go to the next one. I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be worth four hours of puttering around.
I was, in fact, feeling pretty…cautious about it, overall. I hoped I’d like it. I wasn’t sure. The animated film has problems, especially with the timeline, that I figured would be extant in the live action version as well. I mean, obviously it was a *chance* to fix those problems, but every time I think an adaptation is going to take advantage of BEING AN ADAPTATION and FIX PROBLEMS WITH THE ORIGINAL, it doesn’t. So I didn’t have much faith.
But the screenplay was actually much stronger and dealt with…basically every issue I had with the animated movie. I was astonished. It had *other* problems, new ones of its own, but that’s what I want out of an adaptation, as expecting perfection is unreasonable. :)
Having JUST written my own version of BatB ([begin shameless self-promotion] ROSES IN AMBER [end shameless self-promotion]) there were moments early on where I went “oh but that’s not the way the story went,” but I got over those swiftly and settled back in to this being a new, improved version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. And I really do think it was improved.
I shall have many thoughts, but not many spoilers, behind the cut.
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Roses in Amber is ALMOST HERE!!!
guys
GUYS
GUYS!!!!!
LOOK WHAT ARRIVED
I STARTED WRITING THIS BOOK ON JANUARY 1, GUYS
LOOK AT IT
LOOK AT IT
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Tomorrow is Official Launch Day. I don’t know if print editions will automagically show up on B&N/Amazon IMMEDIATELY or not or it’ll take some time to work through the system, but e-book editions for Kindle, iTunes, Kobo and Nook either are or will be available as of Valentine’s Day, 6 weeks after I started writing it!
I have to say this is one *seriously* cool aspect of the whole self-publishing thing. O.O
11.5 years of brag shelf:
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Cover Reveal: ROSES IN AMBER
AAAAAH *FLAILS*
Tara O’Shea, my wonderful cover artist, got me the final draft of the ROSES IN AMBER cover last night!
It’s SO GORGEOUS! And SO PERFECT! And EEEEEEE *FLAILS*!!!!
There is a story of a beast, and a merchant’s daughter, and a curse that must be broken.
This is not—quite—that story.Amber Gryce believes in magic the way anyone does: as a thing of the past, marked now only by the long reign of an ancient queen sworn to live until her stolen son is returned to her. Such stories are romantic but distant for Amber, surrounded by family and wealth.
But like magic, wealth can disappear. Left destitute, Amber’s family retreats to a forest holding far from their city home, where Amber’s love of roses leads her into the heart of enchantment, and draws her into a retelling of the tale as old as time….
ROSES IN AMBER will be out in e-book this very week! If things go very well indeed the print edition and thus the Official Launch will be late next week!
EEEEEE!!!
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I accidentally wrote a book.
I started a novella on January 1. It was gonna be a quick & dirty little retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and it was gonna be 25-30K and written in a week, and I was gonna slap a cheapie cover on it and fling it up onto the interwebs in a Surprise Novella Drop!
When, at the end of a week’s writing and 23.5 thousand words, I had only just gotten to the Beast, it was pretty clear that this was not going to be a novella, and that in fact it had gotten entirely out of hand and maybe it would be worth getting my magnificent cover artist, Tara O’Shea (Fringe-Element.net) to do a proper cover.
At the end of TWO weeks, it was 60,000 words long, a proper (if short) novel, and *finished*.
I sent the dreadfully rough draft off to some beta readers last night and by this morning was convinced I had made the worst mistake in the world, giving it to ANYBODY in that format. But then I had email from one of them, who’d made the mistake of checking her email after midnight when she’d gotten home from an event, and stayed up all night reading it. She said, “It is utterly charming and completely engrossing and very difficult to put down,” and that made me feel better. :)
I’m giving it a week to rest while a few other betas have a go at it, and then it’s going to go through the fastest revision process known to me, and then I’m gonna start the year off with a bang:
ROSES IN AMBER drops on or about February 1!
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a Beauty and the Beast tangent
So I’m on a Beauty and the Beast kick right now and I mentioned to Ted yesterday morning that if your favourite fairy tale is BatB (as mine has always been), that it is very likely that at some point quite early on you realize that having the Beast transform back into the Prince is a terrible disappointment. The thing is you (we, Beauty) have fallen in love with the *Beast*. We want the *Beast*. We don’t want a stupid prince.
Ted’s response to this was pretty much O.O
So he mentioned the topic to his (all women) gaming group last night.
(An aside: he said this morning, with a sort of weak grimness, “Talking about blood magic w/a bunch of women is…a whole different thing. Thank god I’ve been married almost 20 years. Teenage me would have run away screaming. I almost did anyway.”)
ANYWAY, not the point!
The point: he mentions the falling in love with the Beast, not the prince, thing.
The entire gaming group, at once, with explosive hand gestures, cried, “YES!!!”
Ted is like, “That story is apparently just a completely different experience for boys than girls…”
And, I mean, look: that was part of the appeal of the 1980s TV show, right? Vincent was never going to turn into the prince. He already *was* the prince, but he was *always* going to be the Beast. HOW CAN THAT BE ANYTHING BUT PERFECT?
