The End of a Beloved Series. Crap!

I just read Rachel Caine's newsletter stating Daylighters would be the last installment in the Morganville series. What!? No. Wait. I thought I had more time. I'm not prepared. I love this series.

I'm the first person to say a TV or book series went on too long, but rationalizing a series' end when it's the right time feels like a well thought out break up. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Friends, Angel, Monk, Stargate SG-1, Battlestar Galactica, all shows that ended on the right note at the right time, but that I still miss. Firefly and Wonderfalls are two shows that ended before their time and I still growl about it, mostly Firefly because that was pure awesomeness.

When Richelle Mead's Succubus series ended I paced around my apartment, book in hand, plotting the spinoff. I've never written fanfiction before, but that would have been my first if I knew what it was back then.

As a reader, what are we to do at the end of our favorite stories? Savor the experience? Spin the rest of the tale in our heads? Shrug it off and move on? Get on Goodreads and open a discussion? Whine in a blogpost? Sadness.

Think Out Loud [29] Bullying Starts Real Young

I planned to gush about the writer's conference I attended over the weekend because I had been thinking nonstop about the wonderful people, workshops, and awesome Butt In Chair Challenge meant to inspire writers to finish that damn book. I have a fun paranormal story idea and everything. Then bam. Life.

This morning I fired my younger son's school because they failed to protect him from bullying. Yep. I yanked him out and I'm homeschooling him until he's placed in a new school. My four year old has a bruise on his cheek. He's been punched in the eye, the stomach. He's been teased, had his things yanked from his hands and thrown on the floor. He's been spit on. All in one month. The school failed him. I failed him. My voice wasn't loud enough. My conversations and eye witness statements to the teacher were not enough. How come? I know the world of hitting. I was hit in school, not by students. My teachers had a fondness for paddles, wide and skinny, with and without holes. They liked metal rods and rulers. I developed my "fuck them" attitude before I was ten years old. I learned if you cry you could get away with five paddles instead of fifteen, but it's not worth how much you hate yourself for crying in front of the whole class. I learned to take it with my chin high and my mind wandering. I don't want John to learn that shit. So I fired them. Hard, with a hard voice. The girl who tried her best not to burn bridges because motherhood and divorce taught me to play nice burned a few in a matter of hours and more are lined up. I see a lot of tantrumming hugs in my future. A lot of conflict resolution. I see deadlines being pushed back and blog posts being neglected, but John will heal from this. We all will.

Think Out Loud is a mind freeing meme. Post whatever you want because we're paying attention. Promise.

(By Venera N. Lekaj - Lela (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

Deja Vu Storyline

I caught a repeat of the TV show Castle last week where Castle and his mom are taken hostage during a bank robbery. It's a great episode and it got me thinking about how many times I've seen a bank robbery storyline in all the shows I love (and I love many). Psych titled theirs "Gus Walks into a Bank" and it is hilarious. Not only did I laugh throughout, but there were fun twists and turns. Burn Notice had an "if you can't beat em, join em" take on it in "Bad Breaks." The list goes on and on, but my favorite rendition has to be "Monday" with Mulder and Scully in the X-Files. It's a deja vu spin on a TV series archetype.

Stories are constantly recycled, repackaged, retold. Very environmental. So how do we create something fresh and still remain loyal to the subject matter that draws us? I love bank robbery episodes because they're always life and death, "That's my partner in there!" type deals. Psych managed to crack me up so I love them forever. Mulder and Scully gave me a captivating puzzle. That's what we have to do, stretch our imagination and put our own stamp on it. Jeaniene Frost's Night Huntress series has zombies that keep their souls. They're called ghouls and to make another ghoul you have to go through this whole song and dance. Marissa Meyer gives us a post apocalyptic cyborg take on Cinderella.

So I guess I'm a reader/viewer/writer who loves story archetypes. How about you? On a side note, I wrote a guest review on the adult blog PRUF Reads for the awesome NA Romance novel Tragic by J.A. Huss. Click HERE to check it out.

(By Brocken Inaglory (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

We Love Our Girls That's For Sure! How Important is a Compelling Female Character?

Kick ass girls, broken girls who find their power, funny girls who can't help being assholes. Female characters run the show for me when it comes to stories. I don't care if the main character is a man like in my beloved Walt Longmire series by Craig Johnson. The girls have to rock it even in a supporting role. They can be wussy or stereotypical if they have something that compels me to know them. And I can ramble off names of a few new favorites so I'm gonna.

Kinsey Millhone, private detective, loves to be alone and at the same time is so keenly aware of her hunger to have companionship you root for to get...intimate. She's never catty, which I love, but almost always cranky (which I really love).

Mercy Thompson, mechanic, underdog loner with an unwavering moral compass and a habit to mouth off when others would duck their heads and hope no one sees them. She's loving and protective and scared at all the appropriate times. She gets her ass kicked and not because she makes stupid choices, but because she makes emotional ones. 

Cat Crawfield, killer, half-vamp with a chip on her shoulder and very little social skills, she doesn't always choose the right path for the right reason. She bounces between rage, lust, and rage more than anyone else. And she is the opposite of graceful when it comes to dealing with her jealousy issues. I love this girl because so far you can't pay her to behave.

Kate Daniels just recently made the list because I fell into a series marathon and now I have the biggest fangirl crush on her. Everything I wrote for Mercy applies to Kate minus the mechanic part. I want to be Kate, but not really because I would cry all the time. She almost never cries. I would screech at all the gore. She just shrugs her shoulders, gags sometimes. I would try to stab Curran too, so we're the same there. She's the perfect balance of emotion, fight, and compromise. 

Almost every book on my favorites list (not including children's books) has girl power. So I wonder, where's my list of favorite men? My mind settles on Walt Longmire, but part of that is how he regards women (which is so fantastic and self-effacing I love it). Is there a double standard that women have to be better even in fiction? Or is it just the simple fact that I am a woman reader?

(By Carl Thorborg [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)