What I intended to write about

and my new website and a sad/mad poem

I wanted to write about how films get away with plot holes that novels can’t. Or shouldn’t. And quite frankly, movies shouldn’t be able to either.

Photo by Eric Muhr on Unsplash

And I will. You’ll see.

But first, I want to veer away from the disaster of the US election and tell you about something that makes me happy.

My website. My brand spanking new website.

A couple of years ago, I received an email suggesting that this unknown-to-me person could fix specific issues on my website. I generally dismiss cold offers such as that, but he was correct about the items that needed attention and directed me to some work he’d done. He proposed a reasonable fee, so I took a chance and let him into my site.

Photo by Tavi White on Unsplash

He did a lovely job. I was delighted. Nothing bad happened—no sudden charges on a card or in my bank account—as one might suspect when they hadn’t sought out this service.

So, a couple of years pass and I try my best with all my new information about my novel and workshops, to wrangle DIVI on my website, but I make a mess of it. I’m busy and broke from the costs incurred marketing and promoting my novel. Several people suggested I make a new site with a more streamlined service—using AI technology. I gave that a whirl but it felt overwhelming. I wanted a clean-looking, elegant site so I queried some web designers who quoted thousands.

So I thought, why not give this fellow a shot?

He did a gorgeous job and I didn’t have to sell my grandmother’s China.

Here it is: Write Your Way In

I’m so happy. And we especially need these little bursts of joy right now.

---

Yesterday morning, my lovely American friend, Katharine, emailed several writers asking that we gather online and write. A few of us were able to and I think it helped.

She offered this poem as a prompt:

When You Ask Me If I Can Say Yes to the World as It Is

Today yes is made of lead.
You look at me
and I nod—
and together
we carry the weight.


—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

This was my response:

Yes is made of lead. Yes.

They believe they’ve done good;

the master will rule, evil exised.

They may wonder why corn or potatoes

cost as much as their children

or why there’s no one to clean their homes.

In empty hallways,

they will ask each other,

Where is he

now that we are hungry, burned, and drowning?

He’ll be on the golf course

calling PAR while his balls

land in the swamp.

They will bear the weight

when their daughters come home torn.

They will bear the weight

when their son takes a blade to his throat,

his taffeta gown in shreds.

They will bear the weight

of his fat ass

reared up to Russia, China, and North Korea

---

Onto what I initially wanted to rant about. (Not the election, but don’t get me wrong, it’s laid me out even though I might have some illusion that it won’t affect me.)

I may have addressed this issue in other posts but it reared its donkey head again the other evening. It’s about getting away with stuff in films you can’t get away with in fiction. (ie: good fiction)

I did enjoy looking at Rome in the film, Love and Gelato. I don’t think I’ll ever tire of films shot pretty much anywhere in Italy. I even enjoyed the slight twist in the love-ish story, as predictable as it unfortunately was. (Tropes are tropes, after all.)

But hear me out.

Let’s say you were a mother in the US raising a daughter alone. The only thing you tell your daughter about her father is that if you ever saw him again, you’d end up in jail. (Really? And the daughter lets it go at that? Kinda sound like rape, right? It wasn’t, but let’s move on here.) And the only thing you tell her about your year in Italy is that you took a photography course. But evidently, that’s where your daughter was conceived. It seems to me that would be of interest to said daughter. Anyway, then you get sick and die. Your dying wish is for your daughter to go to Italy to meet her godmother. There’s no indication you’ve ever spoken of this godmother before this, even though you and she were super-close. And you send a journal to said friend to give to your daughter when she arrives in Rome.

Odd enough. But now we’re in Italy and it seems to take weeks for the daughter to read the journal to unearth the seeming truth about her parentage.

So, spoiler alert, the guy she thinks is her father, isn’t. Her real dad is a real dick. But the guy she thought was her dad is a warm, kind, and loving man. Who loved her mom and had been a trusted friend. And who the mother (you, in this case) for some mysterious reason never mentioned. Viewers are supposed to believe that you are deeply bonded with your daughter.

I’m sorry, but if the film was created from a novel, they buggered it.

Just try that shit in a novel and see how that goes over with your beta readers. Sheesh.

Writers endeavour to get details lined up, to make our stories believable, relatable, and so on, until our heads want to pop off.

I’m thinking of my novel currently out on submission—fifteen years in the making. Part of my issue was that the genesis of the story was an event in my life and as most of us know, truth is much stranger than fiction and invariably harder to explain. I had to make many details up to create a believable story. And the dots, my friends, had to connect. A successful novel shouldn’t leave the reader lying in bed at night trying to figure out WHY the mother never spoke of the lovely man who supported her. Or why it took the daughter so long to read the journal. Or even why the godmother and the man-friend wanted to keep this BIG secret when the young woman knew her mother hadn’t married her father. Sheesh.

There have been so many films lately that leave me questioning the how and why of aspects of the story, that I wonder how anyone can suspend their disbelief in the face of plot holes and deux ex machina galore.

However, after the devastation of yesterday’s revelation south of the border, I needed to watch a good film that didn’t involve murder or car chases or plot holes. And I found one. I Used to Be Famous is a British film currently on Netflix. It pulled on my heart in a good way. Very human. No suspension of disbelief needed… except maybe they overdid it a bit in the final scene, but it worked and I forgive them.