Inverarity is not a Scottish village

"Lila Zill and the Thorn Circle"

I've been looking back through the notes I made when I first conceived of Alexandra Quick, before I even started writing book one. I started out by writing lists of names for people and places. I'd actually forgotten most of these.

I have a long list of girls' names I wrote down. Then I have the three that made my short list: "Bonnie," "Lila" (short for "Lilian"), and "Alexandra."

Also, "Quick" was not the only surname under consideration. I have "Green" (which became Alexandra's mother's married name), "Stone," "Amber," and "Quick," and below all those, a circle around "Lila Zill."

Lila Zill? Really? I was going to name my main character "Lila Zill"? I swear I don't remember that...

( More names that didn't make it )

Torchwood: Children of Earth

Morally ambiguous heroes doing awful things for the greater good

This was a brilliant mini-epic. Seasons One and Two were "meh" for me. But Children of Earth was how sci-fi series should be: small and self-contained, tying up all the loose ends, and doing dramatic things that you can't do when you need to keep all your options open for the next season. (Though I understand they are planning a Torchwood Season Four now.)

( Spoilers )

Caprica

( I was a Teenage Cylon )

Alexandra Quick returns to Charmbridge Academy angry and in denial. Unwilling to accept the events of the previous year, she is determined to fix what went wrong, no matter what the cost. When her obsession leads her to a fateful choice, it is not only her own life that hangs in the balance, for she will uncover the secret of the Deathly Regiment.



Awesome banner made for me by JCCollier, of Mugglenet Fan Fiction. You should really read JC's story, Marissa and the Wizards.

The summary above is a rough draft. What do you think? (Keep in mind, it needs to be short. In fact, I need an even shorter version to fit fanfiction.net's measley 255-character limit.)

In other random news of randomness:

• Fandom Wank always brings the well-deserved snark, especially when it's Snapefen.
  
• I totally had the Monster Manual with that succubus picture. And you wonder why in the 1980s, mothers thought Dungeons & Dragons was going to lure their children into devil worship?
  
• WTF Netflix? I just finished the first episode of Children of Earth, and then discovered that while you can download episodes 1, 3, 4, and 5 instantly, episode 2 is disk-only! What is the purpose of a licensing arrangement like that? It's not going to sell DVDs, since I just put it in my regular shipping queue. Grr. (I'm still lukewarm about Torchwood after seasons one and two, but the start of CoE actually made me eager to see the next episode.)
  

Latest from my Netflix instant queue: The Host. (In Korean, it's 괴물, Gwoemul - "Monster" - and has nothing to do with the Stephenie Meyer book by the same name.) If you like monster movies, give this one a try. It's a Korean movie with a pretty cool monster, some endearing Everyman characters, and an ending that is satisfactory if not exactly happy. There are chases and escapes and people trying to fight the monster without having massive amounts of Hollywood-style ordnance, a brave and resourceful little girl, and quite a bit of satirical political commentary as well, including about the American military presence in Korea.



The bad acting of the American characters was the only thing that really made me wince. Korean filmmakers probably don't usually have the budget to fly a big name (or even a C-lister) over from Hollywood, and I doubt there's a large stable of American actors hanging around in Korea waiting for parts, so I found myself wondering if they just sent someone out to grab Americans off the streets of Seoul. "Hey? Want to play an American in a Korean movie?"

It wasn't entirely the actors' fault -- I could actually tell when Korean conversational idioms had been translated into English for their parts. They must have had fluent English speakers check the script, because the Americans' lines were grammatically correct, but when an American spoke, it just wasn't quite idiomatic in the way a native speaker would naturally talk.

I'm sure speakers of other languages get the same vibe when Hollywood has someone speaking their language in an American film.

Likewise, it's usually easy to tell in British dramas when they're having a British actor play an American. Besides the fact that Americans in British dramas always find some reason to bring up the Second Amendment, no matter how irrelevant to the plot, British actors trying to speak with an American accent sound like they are talking around a mouthful of oatmeal. (Hugh Laurie excepted.) Yes, I'm sure most Americans trying to do a British accent are equally painful.

I was thinking about this all through Torchwood. (I just finished Season Two.) I was undecided about John Barrowman. Yes, he sounds American, but was he really American, or was he a British actor who does a really good American accent? There was just something not quite 100% Yank in his idiolect, I thought. So I finally consulted his Wikipedia entry. Aha! He's Scottish-born, but raised in the U.S., and still uses a native Glaswegian accent with his family.