Barbara's Blog

Just a little shout-out, happy birthday Mom, on what would have been her 94th birthday. (This is her in the church hall before my wedding).  

Although forced to re-schedule my vacation trip, I DID get to keep my research appointment at the Margaret Herrick Library, i.e. the research library of the Academy of Motion Pictures. And thanks to the advice of a friend about the best way to get there that didn't involve freeways and rush hour (my appointment was from 10-3, i.e. going into downtown during the morning rush hour and leaving during the afternoon rush hour along with several million other drivers going in the same directions), getting there was fairly painless and un-stressy. The library itself is LOVELY. The staff is helpful, friendly, extremely knowledgeable and scrupulous about COVID protocols. And, I got to look at silent film scripts (which showed that my portrayal of them in Scandal in Babylon was accurate, insofar as at that point there were evidently SEVERAL different ways of numbering scenes), and sources that clarified various other small points. When you're writing a murder mystery, or in fact any fict...

It's been four years since I've had a vacation. I almost got to take one this week - and I apologize (as usual) for being dilatory about posting, because I was prepping to take a road trip to visit friends. I arranged some rather complicated scheduling of who was going to be home when, turned in my manuscript, tidied my house so the cat-sitter wouldn't think I'm a slob, arranged car rental because I don't want to worry about engine-trouble halfway between East Jesus and Mordor, arranged massively long playlists, re-arranged my research appointment and had the requisite number of nightmares about getting lost on cliff-tops or the cats escaping. Late in the afternoon of the day before my departure (which was scheduled for 9 a.m.), about an hour after I had cleaned out the refrigerator, horrible noises from within the walls informed me that the air conditioner had died. (Or that something extraterrestrial was attempting to materialize in the laundry-room). For a number...

  Way back in the day, I attended the University of Bordeaux (the campus outside the city, not the downtown campus). There were a whole gang of UC students living in the dorms on campus, and nearly every evening one or another of us would  "take a study break" and go roving up to the kitchenettes (on the 2nd and 4th floors of our building, Building B) to see what other UC students were also "taking a study break" - i.e. sitting around talking and drinking tea for an hour before going back to our rooms. The French students didn't do this. So, I'm taking a study break before going back to what I hope is the final polish of "One Extra Corpse," the second Hollywood murder mystery. (It's due in 2 weeks). Classes are done for the summer - I'm allegedly teaching a class in Fall, if it makes the minimum enrollment (community college enrollments are down substantially all over the country). After eighteen VERY crowded months, I'll be able to ret...

  As I'm going to be writing about silent-era Hollywood, I figured it was about time I did the deed, sat down, and watched these.  Intolerance was made over 100 years ago. There were almost no special effects (except probably the guy getting his head chopped off in battle) - that was really a bazillion extras storming the walls of Babylon on Sunset Boulevard. I was interested to see how sophisticated the filming techniques were, including a lot of stuff that's still being used (that little shot of speeded-up double-exposed ghost-figures scurrying around the villainess's office to indicate passage of time - that's still a pretty common short-hand for, "some time went by...."). The "barbarian soldiers" were pretty hilarious. Griffith had a beautiful sense of images, and the version I'm watching (in several installments - I don't have more than an hour or so of down-time 4 nights a week) isn't horrendously long. It's not like trying to s...

  A couple of nights ago, the amazing beauty of the lunar eclipse. And, co-incidentally, one of the fiddling little parts of writing a murder-mystery: time-lines. And the moon. Just finished the nit-picketty task of figuring out, How many days after the murder does the heroine realize she's been followed, and how much can she see once she leaves her car on the road and dashes off into the sagebrush of the Hollywood Hills? Where's the moon that night?   I often find myself clocking back the timeline on a story by figuring out, at what point do my heroes need enough moonlight to see what's going on when they're outside at night? In movies, being outside at night is often VERY well-lit. IRL, not so much. (Even more so when you're trying to read someone's expression by the light of a single candle, or see what someone's doing on the other side of the room.) I pin THAT event, then count forwards and backwards from there. (We won't even get into details like w...

  Things are finally calming down a little here - in time for the end-of-semester flurry of research papers and putting the final exam together. Having just finished the rough draft of the second Hollywood murder mystery - One Extra Corpse - I find that it's VERY hard to work on anything else, including stuff I HAVE to do, like give lectures about World War One, or sweep the floor, or feed the cats. Director Erich von Stroheim is a walk-on cameo role in Corpse, so the research is pretty entertaining. A minor slew of downpriced works through Open Road Media upcoming: tomorrow (Friday the 13th), Stranger at the Wedding (which Amazon counts as part of the Windrose series, even though Antryg doesn't appear in it: it's the same universe), and The Magicians of Night, the second half of my Magic Nazis du-ology (the first half being The Rainbow Abyss, which I think was on sale a short time ago). US and Canada, $1.99, digital. Saturday, the 14th, the Darwath Trilogy is on sale, $2.9...