steepholm: (Default)
steepholm ([personal profile] steepholm) wrote2017-09-27 07:51 pm
Entry tags:

Trails and Fails

Tomorrow is The Changeover day!



I can't tell you how important Mahy's book was to me when I first came across it in 1991 (seven years after it was published) - but suffice it to say that without what I learned from The Changeover I doubt I'd ever have managed to produce a publishable book of my own. It helped me triangulate my Garner and Cooper obsessions, and find an angle of approach that wasn't just a feeble echo of theirs. Where Garner wrote with fierce spareness, Mahy was linguistically munificent; where Cooper was writing about ancient places, Mahy wrote about shopping malls. And no children's writer before her had brought Wicca-style magic into a modern setting. (If you know of a counter-instance, I'd like to hear about it.) When this book was published, Buffy was only a twinkle in Joss Whedon's teenage eye...

So, I hope the movie does it justice. The trailer seems promising, and having watched some other clips on the same Youtube channel I feel confident that this is, at least, no The Seeker. I only hope it will be released in the UK, as I don't want to have to wait for the DVD.

On the other hand, for James Corden's Peter Rabbit I will happily wait until the second law of thermodynamics has rendered the universe a thin atom gruel.

the_rck: (Default)

[personal profile] the_rck 2017-09-28 09:12 pm (UTC)(link)
I tend to lose track of initial articles because I did library training at a point when stripping those off was pretty much automatic. Unless I have the book in front of me and can see that the article's not there, I tend to assume it is if it would sound right that way.

My daughter will complain that she has 'nothing to read.' I then point out that we own about four thousand books, and she looks at me and says, "Yes, but they're all boring and terrible." And then I try very hard not to bang my head on something because, of course, I kept all of those books because they were terrible. I only keep terrible books.