I’ve now had multiple reports of Kitty’s House of Horrors being available in brick-and-mortar stores.  Online venues aren’t shipping until January, though.  I just knew it would be out by Christmas!

I’m kind of swamped right now, and my brain is about to split open.  I’m in the middle of revising my second young adult novel, and it’s going very slowly.  I’m at that point where the end isn’t actually in sight, and it’s making me want to growl and snarl and climb the ceiling.  And I’m also supposed to be enjoying the holidays through this.  Heh.

So, I’ve really got nothing of any depth to say right now, except BLEEAAAAARRGGGGGGHGHGHGHG!!!!!!!

Oh, and a horrible thought occurred to me late last night:  Will anyone show up to DragonCon or ComicCon next year costumed as Na’vi from Avatar?  I have a bad feeling about this…

The short review:  Part of me feels like I’ve been waiting for this movie my whole life.  And part of me wishes I’d seen it without knowing anything about Dances With Wolves.  Or John Carter of Mars, for that matter.

The long review, because of course I have more to say about it.  My expectations on this were very high.  Partly because of that, I was never able to entirely shut off my analytical brain, which made me a little sad.  Also, I felt the thing was pretty heavy handed.  However, the more I think about it (and it’s impossible not to think about it), the more I like it, and I want to see it again, for itself, instead of for my expectations.  A few things:

• This film is hard on its heroes, which I liked a lot.  They fail over and over and over again.  Badly.  It takes a deus ex machina to save the day.  But because this is James Cameron, who is very good about lining up his guns on the mantel and firing them at the right time, it’s set up fairly well.
• I liked Jake, the main character, and his arc.  We don’t often see a disabled hero in an action film, and that really rocked.
• I loved loved loved the pure science fiction of the thing.  Beautiful sapphire worlds in orbit around hazy gas giants, multi-moon scapes with four-winged dragons flying by.  Power suits and cryo-chambers and neural interfaces.  And a beautiful big spaceship.  The kind of SF bits I see in books all the time but rarely in movies, which seem to use SF tropes as eye candy rather than using them to build up whole worlds like this.
• This leads into an on-going rant about CGI in movies, and how for such a long time CGI wasn’t being used to its full potential.  But here (along with movies like Immortel, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and Speed Racer) we have CGI being used to make new worlds that we never could have seen otherwise.  We have twelve-foot tall blue aliens interacting with live-action actors — seamlessly.  I forgot it was CGI, which ought to be the whole point.
• The part of my brain that took a seminar called “Victorian Imperialism” in grad school twitched through the entire movie.  Because this story — the heroic European/American adventurer who meets the Noble Savage and goes native — has been around for a long time.  One of the reasons Dances With Wolves is such a good movie is because it’s almost an inversion of the story — Dunbar goes native, but the Sioux are just people, and he doesn’t lead them in a great uprising, he’s not a chosen one destined to save them.  In fact, he leaves the tribe in order to protect them.  (Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now also take stabs at deconstructing the trope.  Kurtz goes native but there’s nothing noble about it.)  Alas, Avatar gives us the version where Jake goes native because he learns how noble and wise the “savages” really are and is mysteriously chosen by some mystical energy to be the one to lead them all in a great uprising.  Seeing as how this takes place on another planet with aliens and all, I’d have liked to see a twist on it.  Some cool variation.  But the aliens here are suspiciously similar to the Sioux. (In fact, the chief of the alien Na’vi tribe is played by Wes Studi, one of Hollywood’s go-to actors for Native American roles.  And yes, Studi was in Dances With Wolves as a Pawnee warrior.)  And really, Edgar Rice Burroughs already did the “on another planet” version of the trope with the Mars books.
• There was a trailer for the new Clash of the Titans.  Yes, there’s a Clash of the Titans remake.  “Release the Kraken!”  Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!

UPDATE:  I purposefully write my reviews before reading any others.  I’ve just done a quick tour of the web to read other people’s reviews.  And wow.  People either love this movie or hate it.  The reviews are either, “Yeah, it’s heavy handed but WOW HOLY COW IT LOOKS SO AWESOME YAYAYAYAYA!!!11!!!!!!”  Or, “Holy crap could there be a more heavy handed worse written patriarchal blah blah blah…*This* is what’s wrong with western civilization!!!!11!!!!”

But I have a question:  Can’t I have both reactions at the very same time?

Dear Disney:  We, the fans of traditional animation, salute you!  Thank you for doing something to keep this art form commercially viable.

What’s interesting about this film is it isn’t a traditional princess fairy tale.  The thing is actually structured like a modern romance novel. (And I mean that in a good way.  Go read a couple weeks of the Smart Bitches and you’ll see what I mean.)  Both parts of the couple are well developed, fully-formed characters.  They both learn and grow and change in order to be together.  They have a journey, and the journey brings them together.  It’s kind of a change from what most of us think of as Disney princess movies.  And I like it.  Overall, it was sweet and happy, made me laugh, made me cry, etc. etc.

Over the last ten years Disney has done what I think are some amazing animated features.  They’re different, modern, cool, and totally off the rails:  Lilo and Stitch, The Emperor’s New Groove, Atlantis, and Treasure Planet.  (I have a theory about the Cabal of Unsupervised Animators I’ll have to tell you about sometime.)  The Princess and the Frog totally falls into this category of film — it has bits of horror, a setting we’ve never seen before in a Disney film, characters we’ve never seen before, and the music:  Dixieland, zydeco, gospel.  But it’s also pure, unadulterated sweet and happy Disney.  It’s a pretty cool trick.

Tonight I’ll see Avatar, and report back tomorrow.

Romantic Times has a review of Kitty’s House of Horrors in the print edition.  Key words:  “gruesome…claustrophobic…nail-biting in the extreme.”  Yeah, that’s about what I was going for.  Four and a half stars.  Woot!

I’m starting to really hate Lie to Me, and it’s because of dialog like this:  “It’s detonation cord.  For bombs.”  Um, really?  Are you sure it isn’t detonation cord for kittens?

In case you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a visual effects test for the new Tron movie coming out next year.  Now, I’d be the first person to groan at the thought of a Tron sequel nearly thirty years after the original.  (That’s right.  Thirty years.  Feelin’ old yet?)  But this got me all kinds of interested.  Because a) Jeff Bridges.  And b)  The effects look really damn good.  You know what I love about this?  It maintains the look and feel of the original — the ethereal glow, the sound effects, the setting, the gadgets — while updating the aesthetics just about perfectly.  It looks like Tron would look if it had been made right now.  Awesome.  Can’t wait.

I talked about this a bit at Mile Hi Con.  I will confess that I haven’t read Twilight and its sequels.  That means I’m in no position to comment on them, and I won’t.  But I will say, that I think some geek women of a certain generation — say, mine, for example — have trouble understanding the appeal of Edward.  Especially now that the movies are out and giving us a picture of Edward.  This picture, in fact:

And I’m thinking, meh.  Too broody, too emo, not my type.  I’m not understanding the fuss.

You see, geek women of a certain generation — including me — imprinted on another supernatural idol.  Fell madly in love with him, in fact.  He makes us swoon.  It’s this guy:

David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King.  Broody v. glam?  No contest, baby.

Swoon.

I know a little bit of Spanish.  I won’t even go so far as to say I speak it a little bit.  I stumble through it.  I get better at it when I’ve had a couple of drinks.  Speaking Spanish in Barcelona is complicated by the fact that there’s a second official language, Catalan, which looks to be sort of a bastard stepchild of Spanish and French — no surprise there, being so close to the border of France and all.  Many place names, signs, etc. are in Catalan.

When you know a tiny bit of a language and are trying to use it, it’s like a gaming code.  You say the words, and you hope it gets you the result you want.  But eventually, and usually rather quickly, things go off the rails.  You have actually fooled the people you’re talking to into thinking you understand the language as well as you speak it.  And, well, you don’t.  They reply with speed and confidence, and you stare at them thinking, Holy crap, what have I done?  Can I hit reset?

But then there are the times when it works.  On this trip, I was in charge of the Spanish; my friends were in charge of French.  So, we were on a Metro platform in Barcelona, and someone there called out to my friend, in Spanish.  My friend just stared — he had no idea what she said, and tried to speak French at her, because that’s what he does.  I tapped his shoulder and told him, “Say Gracias.  She said she likes your T-shirt.”

Now, what’s really funny is “Me gusta su camiseta” is something you learn in the second month of high school Spanish.  It’s basic, elementary, beginner Spanish.  But you know what?  Second-month high school Spanish is really useful!  It gets used!  People actually say those things!  And I got it!  For that moment anyway, I wasn’t just speaking Spanish code phrases, I was understanding it.  That felt pretty darned good.

Sometimes you can feel the history of the place. That’s one of the great joys of traveling, especially to an inveterate storyteller and history buff like myself.  When you walk into a place like York Minster or Notre Dame and you can actually smell centuries’ worth of incense burned into the stone.  When you see a ruined castle, with a fireplace hanging in midair, and underneath it the holes for where the beams that held up the floor used to be.  When you walk on Omaha Beach in Normandy, and look across it from one of the German gun embankments still in place there.  When you’re standing in the middle of a ball court in a Mayan ruin complex in Belize and can almost hear the crowd.  Yeah.  That’s why I travel.

We arrived at Le Cite, the old fortress of Carcassonne, pretty much after everything had closed, but we were able to grab crepes for dinner and had a walk around.  The space between the inner and outer walls is open and lit after dark, and that’s where we went.

At one point, where the space turned wide and flat, and I stopped and announced that I wanted to ride a horse here.  Just a nice, easy canter around the walls.  I could hear the hoofbeats of horses all around that space, echoing, and I imagined them and their armored riders loping by.

The next day, at the museum and reading up on the fortress, I learned that that space had in fact been used for mounted exercises and tournaments.  Of course.  So, I didn’t see ghosts, per se.  But it sure felt like it for a moment.

Hey, look what I got in the mail!

It’s a box of Kittys!  I think this is the earliest before the actual publication date that I’ve ever gotten my author copies.  I’m very curious now when they’re going to start showing up in stores.  All the books have appeared a week or so before the actual on sale date.  (January 4 in this case.)  But this one’s obviously shipping already.  In time for the holidays!

Today, I have a guest blog post at Magical Musings.  The topic is near and dear to my heart:  setting goals.

Also in my inbox (it’s been a very, very busy week for mail, both e and snail):

Kinda cool, yes?  This one will be out in July 2o10.  It’s the Cormac story I’ve been talking about.  And it just hit me, the horrible thing he does.  I mean, he doesn’t have a choice, he has to.  But he…well…I mean…  I’ll just let you read it.

This is me riding a Camargue pony.

I fell in love with horses when I was about 8, after reading Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty.  I went on to read all the Black Stallion books, including the really strange ones (like the one with the aliens, and the post-apocalyptic one) and everything by Marguerite Henry.  Christmas shopping for me became easy:  anything with horses.  I ended up with quite a few horse books and a lot of Breyer models (which I still have, though packed in a box).

A big part of a lot of non-fiction horse books is describing lots of the different breeds, and every one of the books I had talked about the Camargue ponies.  This is a very ancient breed of horse, and some of them still live wild in this marshy region in the south of France, the giant estuary where the Rhone River lets out into the Mediterranean.  Much of the area is designated as a regional nature preserve, one of the largest in Europe.  The domestic ponies are part of a distinctive “cowboy” culture that still exists here. (Ranchers in the region raise bulls for bullfighting.)  And they’re used to shuttle tourists around.

Mostly because of me, and because I’ve been curious about Camargue ponies almost as long as I’ve loved horses, we took a detour into the Camargue and went riding.

Like many ancient regional breeds (I’m thinking the Icelandic ponies and Scottish highland ponies, for example), Camargue ponies are hairy, stocky, tough, good-natured dudes.  They schlepped through thick black mud without a problem, and my guy had one of the nicest, peppiest walking gaits I’ve ever ridden.  (It may be because he was the alpha of this particular pecking order and had to be in front the whole time.  Whenever I go to tourist riding places like this, they always ask if you have any experience, and they always figure out that I have experience, and they always give me the ornery alpha horse.  They know experienced riders aren’t likely to freak out if the ornery alpha does something particularly ornery.  Once I figured out that Ton knew what he was doing, I just let him go and we got along great.)

This area is not what comes to mind when most people think Europe:  wide, flat, wet.  Primal, even.  Swarming with mosquitoes and birds — wild flamingos everywhere.  They chortle and gurgle constantly.  Wild flamingos in Europe — who knew?

I’d like to spend more time here, go hiking and do some bird watching as well as do more riding (we only had a couple of hours to spend on our action-packed itinerary).  But for now, that’s another check mark on the life list.