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evaglass · 7 months

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Adding More Backstory to Tang Shen

I wish 2012 had told us more about Tang Shen. Not much was told except that she was born in Fukuoka, was 1/4th Chinese, and was a woman both Splinter and Shredder were in love with.

Also, there's a line Shen says at one point, which involves her saying, "I can take care of myself; I've always have." Giving the idea, she grew up in tough circumstances. We never hear anything about her parents, if she was orphaned or not. We know her grandparents were present in her life, and I looked up information about the city of Fukuoka, which is stated to be a fairly safe place. I wish that line was explored more, but it just feels like the writers put it there for some brief moment of angst.

There was also a bit of writing inconsistencies. In season one, episode 26, there are these lines of dialogue I got from the episode's transcript when Splinter and Shredder are fighting

But then, in season 3, in the Tale of the Yokai episode, there's this scene

Yeahh, I believe I found a way to explain this in my rewrite of 2012, but for now, I want to talk about my rewrite of Shen.

I was thinking of making Shen a Taiwanese woman of 100% Chinese descent. She was really close to her father, but unfortunately, he died when she was still a child.

Shen's mother raised her and Shen's younger sister as a single mother with the help of Shen's older brother, who stepped up to provide for his family after their father died.

Shen was a very studious and hardworking young lady, but also a little bit rebellious as she was very set on the choices she made for herself, whether her mother approved or not.

She got accepted to Cambridge University, where she majored in history and minored in linguistics, as she had a passion for history like her father, and wanted to become a historian.

After she graduated from her undergraduate program, she entered her PhD. program for history, where in the last few years of said program, she worked part-time on her dissertation while also working as an English teacher in Japan.

During her time in Japan, she met Shredder and Splinter. Shen met Shredder first; they became friends, and soon both developed feelings for each other. When Shen tried to make a move, Shredder rejected it, as he wanted to focus on the future of the Hamato Clan and gain the approval of his adoptive father, Hamato Yuuta; he also wanted to respect her dream of becoming a historian, and not distract her from it. Shen was embarrassed but respected his decision and agreed just to be friends.

Shen and Splinter don't get together until a little bit later. Actually, when they first met, they didn't like each other at all as their first impression of each other wasn't great. However, they, of course, do come to respect each other after Splinter helped Shen when her car broke down at the side of the road. Shen and Splinter later become friends and then develop feelings for each other, which surprised both of them, especially Shen, as Splinter was someone she did not expect.

I like to think that as they spent more time together, Shen felt more comfortable talking about her passion and also introduced Splinter about the history of the Renaissance Painters.

She does graduate from her PhD. program, but also accidentally gets pregnant because the portrait Splinter has looked like a wedding photo.

I also thought about how Shen was able to find out about how brutal the war between the Hamato and Foot Clan before Splinter does, seeing how it involved the never-ending cycle of revenge. Finding that out, Tang Shen never wanted her daughter to get involved with ninjitsu.

Look at the way Shen looks at her baby daughter; she would've done anything for her.

She wanted Karai to have a normal life, and that's staying in my rewrite, but I also want to explain why she would push Splinter to leave ninjitsu to go to New York with her to raise their daughter; the history between both clans would play a big part with that, as well as her love for Splinter, but also Shen would still be traumatized from losing her father at a young age, and didn't want her daughter growing up without her father.

But unfortunately, Shen dies. I'm keeping Shen's death the same way it happened in the show, but yeah, that was my rewrite. Let me know what you guys think.

#tmnt 2012 #teenage mutant ninja turtles 2012 #tang shen #karai #hamato miwa #Splinter #shredder #hamato yoshi #Oroku Saki

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srbachchan · 3 years

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DAY 4655

Jalsa, Mumbai Nov 27, 2020 Fri 11:04 PM

Work takes away most of the day and the words that need to be expressed on this special day remain in the solitude of the being .. they cannot be expressed or put into thought ..

Yet , the most telling words came from the lady of the family ..

“ Family, let’s remember Dad today with gratitude for giving us this name & may we never forget it ..”

I called him Dad .. but when speaking of him, it shall always be ‘Babuji’

The tribute in Hindi has been very kindly given translation by the bearded recluse from the hills of the Uddhagamandalam ..

Most-venerable and most-revered Shri Amitabh Bachchan ji,

Heartfelt bowed greetings and salutations... charansparsh, 27 November 2020 ... Infinite respects to most-revered Babuji, Dr. Harivansh Rai Bachchan ji... for his 113th birth anniversary... On this special occasion, I dedicate a brief write-up, in my humble language, on the literary-poetic life of the great poet Dr. Harivansh Rai Bachchan...

The final truth of life is death... but there are some who are remembered for long due to their good deeds and good qualities... Dr. Harivansh Rai Bachchan was one of them who gave lovers of literature the taste of exquisite poetry in simple easy words... It’s his birthday today... Once again, countless salutations to him...

While narrating his own life story, Dr. Bachchan has crafted such an intoxicating reality of ‘Madhushala’ that connoisseurs of the Hindi language will continue to find oestrus inspiration forever...

Only in literature can one find unity and religious harmony in a drunken stagger which is normally cursed by people... Where else could it be found other than the magic of Dr. Bachchan’s pen... who presented the philosophy of life with such ease and straightforwardness, showing equal prowess in both prose and poetry…

Dr. Harivansh Rai Bachchan --- A thoughtful scholar, true thinker, a strong essayist, auto-biographer, commenter, translator, and story-writer... who was at once natural, simple, sensitive, and thoughtful... He was as sensitive as thoughtful... compassionate as well as humorous... he wrote free verse as well as metered... expressive as well as ponderous... conscientious as well as patriotic... and a lover of the world at large...

(His style of poetry was often called Cchaayaa vaadi - reflective)

Apart from advancing the reflective style of poetry, Dr. Bachchan had also appealed to literature in prose... Like a silver waterfall dropping down the Himalayas, his compositions had an uncommon insight into hearts and minds... his poems carry the natural expressions of human feelings that touch the heart... Dr. Bachchan’s works were very popular in the common walks of life... His prose in stories, memoirs, essays, radio-talks, commentaries, diaries, auto-biography etc. are not only among the most celebrated writings, but they remain a priceless treasure of Hindi literature…

Dr. Bachchan;s inclination is that of a sensitive poetic thinker... his writings present observations on social subjects... He has written in his autobiography, “Perhaps it is in my nature to be expressive, which if let loose can become hyperbolic...”

Dr. Bachchan did not expect too much from the society or life... self-confidence, dedication, honesty and discipline... these were the mantra of his life... and his entire literary world seems to be bound by these principles... Probably this was the way that kept him from becoming weak... In the most difficult situations in life, he did not lose his inspirations, nor did his competence fail... he faced them, suffered them... did not compromise his beliefs, nor was faith shaken...

Dr. Bachchan, in his auto-biography, has served such an intoxicating mix of reality that connoisseurs of the Hindi language will always savour its pleasures... Dr. Bachchan, as a story-teller, historian, writer and as a critic, is at his peak... Hindi songs found a new direction in Dr. Bachchan’s verses... “Madhushala”, pushing away the divisions of faiths and differences, even if only as an experience of coherent joy, establishes a unity... “Nisha-Nimantran” and “Ekaant Sangeet” are among his very popular anthologies... “Sat Rangini” and “Milan Yaamini” are anthologies filled with passion and flowing lyrics...

Dr. Bachchan writes, “I wish to write great poetry, not an epic!”... But, not only did he write great poetry, his autobiography is itself an epic... an epic poem in prose... epics have para-narratives... this one has his own story...

This can be said without hesitation that, not only in Hindi, Dr. Bachchan’s place is reserved among the most loved poets across India…

Sir ji, you are past the threshold of the 78th year today... Yet you complete all your tasks successfully with full devotion and enthusiasm... Without a doubt, there is the support of Babuji’s compositions which provide an inner strength... it is that mystery and relish which keeps your excitement and energy even today... ahead and victorious... May Babuji’s blessings always remain over you and your entire family...

Sending you some amazing pictures of father and son herewith... Do give your love, Sir ji, which we always need...

With respect, affection, and abundant devotion Your devotee, Rajesh Shrivastav EF

In gratitude and in the generosity of all the Ef that have given their love and respect to him ..

I present your greetings to him here in his room in Prateeksha .. where he breathed his last .. this room shall ever remain as is ..

.. Babuji and Ma .. Ma in her wedding finery .. Babuji’s ‘Rachnavali’ his entire works, in bounded collection on the mantle .. on the left of in the safron cloth bound his Ramayan and his JanGeeta , which he read each day and asked me to do similar .. the smaller framed picture is of my Nana and Nani - Sardar Khazan Singh Suri and Amar Kaur Sodhi .. Ma ji’s parents .. the diya flamed keeps lit ever .. below the mantle are two stone sculptures that he had picked up, lying wasted on abandoned road sides .. a lady in one in female form and the other which cannot be seen in the picture is of a lion ..

.. since he had done his PhD on WB Yeats , the great Irish poet, from Cambridge .. he referred to the two sculptures as the ‘the Lion and the Virgin’ .. it was either one of Yeats’ prominent works addressed thus or a reference that he had researched on during his dissertation ..

.. the flowers , fresh, adorn the pictures each day ..

.. a desk, his reading glasses , his wrist watch and some memorabilia on it on the other side of the room where he sat and wrote ..

.. in devotion .. in memory .. in admiration .. in inspiration .. in his wisdom .. in his learning .. in his will .. in his ever presence .. in his being Babuji ..

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

10 pranaams ..

... from his autobiographical title on one of the volumes ‘dashadwaar se sopaan tak’ .. from the room with dashdwaar , ten doors or openings , symbolic of the 10 openings in the human body , the room in our home in Allahabad , 17 Clive Road .. to Sopaan, our home in Delhi where he finished his writing of this autobiography as his last chapter ..

Amitabh Bachchan

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nanowrimo · 4 years

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Adapting Your Word Count Goals to Your Environment

For many of us, writing isn’t a problem—it’s finding time to write that can be a challenge. Thankfully today we have Tiggy McLaughlin here to teach us how to adapt our writing pace and word count goals to match our busy lives:

“Write a novel in 1667 words a day!” NaNoWriMo proclaimed to college-me in the middle 2000s: “Write on your lunch break.” “Write on the bus.” “Take a fifteen-minute study break to write.” That sounded doable. Then there was the advice from the forums: “Pack your freezer with thirty meals so you won’t have to cook all November.” “Print this ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign for your bedroom door.” “Your friends won’t see you for a month—they’ll understand.” Huh?

I did not begin to understand these conflicting messages until I attempted NaNoWriMo for myself, and realized how much our social environments impact how we write. Even on the micro level, the level of the household, our social surroundings do a large part to shape us into people who lock themselves away to write for hours, or people who write in fifteen-minute bursts. I’m a fifteen-minute writer. Here’s how I got that way:

NaNoWriMo 2010

It was my first year of graduate school. I had my own room in a house with roommates I didn’t see much, and way too much Latin, Greek, and history theory to read. I might have had the space to lock myself away, but I certainly did not have the time. Essentially living alone, I was able to wake up forty-five minutes earlier to hit my daily word count goal… most days. But, when push came to shove toward the end of the month, no one really noticed when I took a weekend and hammered out 12,000 words. The next time I won, in 2012, I was living with my partner and found it much more difficult to disappear for a weekend, so I had to prioritize those forty-five minute daily writing goals.

Camp NaNoWriMo, April 2016

I wrote the last chapter of my dissertation as my Camp project, but the only time I had to write was while my eleven-month-old baby napped. Thanks to six years of NaNoWriMo and a PhD advisor who promoted daily writing habits, I was able to write most of my dissertation while baby napped. Forty-five minute writing sessions became fifteen in the early days when a “nap” might only be twenty minutes long. But those fifteen minutes had to be productive, because I now lived with an infant, and there was no writing once he woke up.

Camp NaNoWriMo, April 2020

I have two kids now, one in PreK and one a potty-training two-year-old. They are both home, as is my husband, who, like me, has temporarily transitioned to teaching online. And I am busy, not only with work, but with having family around me all the time. I am not sure if I will even find fifteen minutes a day to work on my Camp project, seeing as every time I’m on my computer someone in the house wants me not to be. But I will try, even if the daily goal dwindles to five minutes.

This Camp NaNoWriMo, if you are part of a community practicing social distancing in an effort to control the spread of coronavirus, chances are you’re feeling your household environment more acutely than usual. Whether you live with roommates, a partner, your parents, your kids, extended family, a friend you’re giving a stable home to in this time of crisis, or friends who have opened their home to you, you’re all home. Hopefully you give each other space for creativity, even if all you can manage to sneak away for is fifteen minutes.

Tiggy McLaughlin is a historian of Christianity in Late Antiquity (200-600 CE), where she mostly asks questions about how ordinary people worshiped and prayed. She works part-time teaching History and Theology at Gannon University and is a full-time parent to two wild little boys. She has participated more or less consistently in NaNoWriMo for the past ten years, alternating between writing medieval historical fantasy and realistic fiction about contemporary academia. Besides writing, she also enjoys playing video games with her spouse, cooking, and, of course, reading.

Top photo by Essentialiving on Unsplash.

#nanowrimo #writing #amwriting #camp nanowrimo #writing environments #word count #word count goal #by nano guest #Tiggy McLaughlin #writer's life

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rosalyn51 · 5 years

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BOOKS NEWS

All Souls Trilogy: Harry Potter for Grown-Ups?

By Peter Haldeman Jan 17, 2019

Deborah Harkness’s best-selling series — brimming with magic, time travel and witches — has spawned an avid fan base, an annual convention, and now, a splashy TV adaptation.

Photo Credit Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times

“What is the book you pick up when you’re done with Harry Potter? I’d like to think you’d pick up a big set of chunky books like All Souls, which similarly talks about real issues, but issues facing adults, not teenagers,” said Deborah Harkness.

PASADENA, Calif. — On the patio of the Langham Huntington hotel here, on a sunny afternoon tinged with smoke from the recent wildfires in the area, Deborah Harkness swirled a glass of Jules Taylor sauvignon blanc, sniffed and sipped, then pronounced the wine “zingy. Really zingy. 2017, if I had to guess.” Not an unusual appraisal from an oenophile who once wrote a blog called “Good Wine Under $20.” But then came a less expected disquisition on the quasi-scientific history of winemaking: “There’s all kinds of lore about alchemists fortifying wines and liquors, boiling them down, evaporating, ending up with something they called the spirit of wine.”

Harkness’s wine blog may have won awards from Food & Wine and Saveur, but she is better known as a historian of science and medicine at the University of Southern California — and far better known as the author of a series of novels brimming with alchemy and magic, witches and vampires. All three of the books in her All Souls trilogy — “‘Twilight’ for the intellectually restless,” as NPR described one of the volumes — as well as her most recent novel, “Time’s Convert,” have landed at the top or second spot on The New York Times Best Sellers list.

The trilogy — “A Discovery of Witches,” “Shadow of Night” and “The Book of Life” — has also spawned a fan wiki, an annual convention attended by hundreds of adults who self-identify as supernatural, and a merchandise line that extends to duvet covers. “The series has great brand recognition and some of the most loyal fans on earth,” said Laura Tisdel, Harkness’s editor at Viking. “The books feel like guilty pleasures, but there’s nothing to feel guilty about, because with Deb you’re in the hands of a real honest to god historian.”

Until recently the All Souls brand lacked one critical asset — the splashy television adaptation. But on Jan. 17, Sundance Now and Shudder air the United States premiere of an eight-part series based on “A Discovery of Witches.” (Two more seasons, corresponding to the other books, have been greenlighted.) The show, produced by Bad Wolf and Sky Productions, stars Teresa Palmer as Diana Bishop, the Yale scholar and “reluctant witch” whose discovery of an enchanted manuscript attracts the attention of an assortment of magical beings, including Matthew Clairmont — a smoldering-eyed vampire scientist with designs on Diana — played by the suitably hunky Matthew Goode.

Photo Credit Robert Viglasky/SKY Productions and Sundance Now

Until recently the All Souls brand lacked one critical asset — the splashy screen adaptation. That’s just changed, with Matthew Goode and Teresa Palmer starring in the new series “A Discovery of Witches.”

“It’s a very character-driven story, which is why I’m glad it ended up with Sundance,” Harkness said. “It means we don’t have to blow up so much stuff and have so much fake blood.” As executive producer of the show, Harkness had a hand in everything from the casting to the edits. She has been busy promoting both the show and “Time’s Convert.” Harkness gives a lot of interviews in hotel rooms — which may be why her publicist stipulated that this one take place at the Langham Huntington, even though the author lives less than two miles away. In any case, Harkness, who arrived in jeans and well-worn cowboy boots, her blonde hair staticky from the Santa Ana winds, fairly radiated spontaneity and sincerity. Maybe it was the wine.

She was, for example, expansive on the subject of new projects, a topic many writers would rather submit to a tax return than discuss. All Souls groupies will be happy to hear she is now 200 pages into a book about Matthew grappling with the forces of religious radicalism in 16th-century Europe. She recently returned from a three-week cruise around New Zealand to research another book about Matthew’s nephew, the beloved soldier and mercenary Gallowglass. A deep dive into the history of witchcraft is also in the works.

Harkness is descended from a witch — or at least a woman hanged in Salem for allegedly practicing witchcraft. The supernatural seized her imagination at a young age. “I can still see ‘The Witch of Blackbird Pond’ on the shelves of the Horsham library,” she said. Horsham, a suburb of Philadelphia, is not a bad place to grow up if you’re interested in history, another early passion of hers. There were family picnics at battlefields, tours of historic houses. When she was 8, her father, the manager of a paint store, and her mother, who worked as a secretary, took Harkness and her younger brother on a trip to England — sparking a lifelong interest in Elizabethan history.

She went to college at Mount Holyoke, where she designed her own major, in Renaissance Studies. A class called “Magic, Knowledge and the Pursuit of Power in the Renaissance” was transformative: “It was like somebody had taken a can opener to my brain and peeled off the lid. The teacher opened up the class by asking, ‘How do you know what you think you know?’ I’ve never stopped asking that question.”

Harkness studied the history of magic and science in early modern Europe at Northwestern University, where she received a master’s degree. Her adviser, convinced she was a natural storyteller on the strength of a one-page writing exercise, suggested she try her hand at fiction. Instead she went on to get her doctorate at the University of California, Davis, spending a year at Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship and writing her dissertation on John Dee, the alchemist and mathematician who served as the astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I.

Photo Credit Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times

Harkness’s trilogy has spawned a fan wiki, an annual convention attended by hundreds, and now a television adaptation.

At Northwestern she also met Karen Halttunen, a professor of American history who has been her partner since 1995: “Nothing happened for seven years, but when I started my first teaching job she was like a mentor to me and within a year it was clear to me, at least, that I was head over heels,” Harkness said. In 2004 the couple moved from Davis to Los Angeles to take jobs at U.S.C., where Halttunen is the head of the history department.

One of the things about natural storytellers is that they can tell a tale over and over and it never gets old. Like this one: In the fall of 2008 Harkness took a vacation in Puerto Vallarta, where, at the airport bookstore, she was surprised to discover racks of books featuring supernatural characters (the Twilight craze was at its peak). “I bought a notebook and began sketching out ideas,” she recalled. “I think I thought I was writing an op-ed piece about why are we today as fascinated by these creatures of myth and legend as my research subjects were in 1550.” Five or six weeks later she had 180 pages — and they contained dialogue.

The three-part narrative she had begun started with a romantic tale that became “A Discovery of Witches,” published in 2011. It was followed by “Shadow of Night” in 2012 (Diana and Matthew time travel to Elizabethan England to unlock the secrets of the ancient manuscript), and “The Book of Life” in 2014 (the quest concludes at Matthew’s ancestral home in Auvergne).

Harkness calls “Time’s Convert,” which came out in September, a “prequelly sequelly book,” spanning the life of Matthew’s son Marcus, from his days on the battlefields of the Revolutionary War to his contemporary romance with Phoebe, a warmblood turned vampire. (Vampires, remember, live forever.)

The author said that her books do not cleave to the conventions of genre fiction. Rather, she sees her writing in the vein of J.K. Rowling’s: “What is the book you pick up when you’re done with Harry Potter? I’d like to think you’d pick up a big set of chunky books like All Souls, which similarly talks about real issues, but issues facing adults, not teenagers.”

The popular novelist Jodi Picoult — herself no stranger to best-seller lists — admires the intellectual heft of Harkness’s books. “Her storytelling may hook you first,” she wrote in an email, “but you’ll learn history, literature and science in the course of reading one of her novels.”

You will also encounter weighty themes. Differentness — the differentness of a daemon with a drug problem, say — is a dominant motif. “That’s sort of what the whole series is about,” Harkness said, washing down some wasabi peas with the last of her wine. “That eternal conflict between on the one hand knowing that difference and diversity is what makes us stronger and on the other being terrified of it.”

She is not a fussy writer. Her primary work space is her home office overlooking the swimming pool in the backyard of the English cottage-like house she shares with Halttunen. But she also writes in hotels and on planes. Playlists are essential — “a lot of period music, but not exclusively, so it’ll be like a loop of 16th century and then Mumford & Sons.” She relies on “a great team of beta readers” to review early drafts.

To clear her head Harkness rides her quarter horse, Blue. A year and a half ago she bought a getaway home, set amid the conifers on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, Wash. But she hasn’t been able to spend as much time there as she would like. In addition to her teaching and writing schedules, there are the demands of running a literary franchise — the TV series, the book tours, the social media.

From the FAQs page on her website: Q: Do you believe in magic? A: Absolutely. When asked about that claim, Harkness dialed it back just a bit. “I believe there’s more in the world that’s happening than we’re able to explain,” she said. “Do I believe that you could do something on the terrace of the Langham and it would have an effect on that tree over there? I’m not sure I do, but I could see why you might believe that.”

Maybe it was the wine again, but a skeptical reporter found himself focusing on the tree in question, a tall, skinny fan palm, and concentrating on movement: swaying trunk, fluttering fronds. The tree didn’t move — but that’s beside the point.

#matthew goode #teresa palmer #a discovery of witches #all souls trilogy #deborah harkness

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