THE MAGIC OF FRIENDSHIP_Genre Favorites Blogfest

Genre Favorites Blogfest, September 17, 2012

One blogfest, four favorites!

List your favorite genre of:

Movie

Music

Books

And a guilty pleasure genre from any of the three categories!

“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”
― Bob Marley

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“The magic in this world seems
to work in whispers and small kindnesses.”
― Charles de Lint

What do those quotes have to do with Alex Cavanaugh’s Genre Blogfest?

http://alexjcavanaugh.blogspot.com/

Everything.

In mulling over my favorite genres in movies and books, I looked at the autographed movie posters lining my walls and realized

they had something in common although most would say they came from different genres:

FRIENDSHIP/MAGIC.

And that unique genre is reflected in my choice of favorite ...

MOVIE:

THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING -

Friendship was a theme of The Lord of the Rings and was something that Tolkien was very influenced by.

The answer to the riddle, 'Speak Friend and Enter' to open the gates of Moria was "Mellon", which is elvish for friend.

MUSIC:

SOUNDTRACKS such as Howard Shore’s work on LOTR: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING or John Williams’ work on the Harry Potter movies (the friendship between the 3 young students made the movies for me.)

Then, there is James Horner’s work on THE WRATH OF KHAN – action and the friendship between Spock and Kirk and Bones.

BOOKS:

DUMA KEY –

Yes, it has horror but what brings me back again and again to King’s book is the friendship and banter between Edgar Freemantle and Jerome Wireman. “When it comes to memory, we always stack the deck – that’s what Wireman says.”

GUILTY PLEASURE:

DOG SOLDIERS -

A routine military exercise turns into a nightmare in the Scotland wilderness.

What began as what they thought was a training mission turns into a battle for their lives against the most unlikely enemies they would have expected - werewolves.

Yes, it is supernatural, but it is the friendship between the outmatched soldiers that brings me back to this movie over and over again.

NOTE FOR DUMA KEY FANS:

Perse: the evil force manifested on Duma Key -

full name, Persephone and her description and place are all generally influenced and taken from the Greek Goddess Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld

(although, like many of King's entities, she is also decidedly Lovecraftian). Perse's ghost ship (The Persephone) resembles the Caleuche, a ghost ship from Chilote legends.

NOTE TO THOSE WONDERING ABOUT BEST OF ENEMIES COVER:

END OF DAYS started out as BEST OF ENEMIES,

a tale of Ragnarok averted by seven young girls –

starting out first as enemies then growing into friends who will give up their lives for one another … and the world.

I received so much hate email over the cover, I changed both the cover and the title.

ONLY 2 WEEKS LEFT!! __ I HATE YOU entry encore _ I HATE YOU AS ONLY THE UNDEAD CAN HATE

ONLY TWO WEEKS LEFT!!

Actually 18 days left to write a review of one of my books on Amazon to enter ...

ROLAND'S FANTABULOUS CONTEST!!!

See? Even Megan Fox is writing a review.

(Of FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE by the way. She wants to play evil Maija or the revenant, Empress Theodora, or the ghost of Meilori just so long as she gets to play a scene where she kills Speilberg!)

Just think you may actually win an autographed copy of NEEDFUL THINGS, the last Castle Rock story. Someone has to win it. Why not you?

Sandra has already told me that if Megan Fox enters the contest, she is not letting me in the same room as the jar of entries! Sigh.
***


I HATE YOU blogfest entry : I HATE YOU AS ONLY THE UNDEAD CAN HATE!

http://tessasblurb.blogspot.com/

[From the soon-to-be published, THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH :

Victor Standish and his Victorian ghoul friend, Alice Wentworth, have survived more horrors than a Stephen King movie. Almost. It seems Victor has died saving his hero, Sam McCord.

The ANGEL OF DEATH has come for him. Despite his protests to save her, Alice insists on coming along, as do Father Renfield and the mysterious Sister Magda. They are standing at the head of the stairs leading down to the haunted jazz club, Meilori's] :


Everybody and their cousin could read my mind it seemed. Now, it was time to use it for me instead of it being used against me. I focused all the will I had and thought at Father Renfeild :

‘Now, Padre, now! Hold Alice. Hold her tight!’

“Ow, lad,” he snapped. “You didn’t have to shout.”

Alice frowned, “I heard noth ….”

She yelped as Renfield grabbed her from behind. Magda added her arms around Alice, too. I smiled bitterly. My girl sure struggled just the same. Then, she stabbed me with her words as I raced down the stairs.

“I hate you for this, Victor. I HATE YOU!”

She screamed, "I trusted you! Trusted! Do you know how hard that was for me after all these years?"

My steps slowed. "Yes, now you realize what you have done. I hate you, Victor. I hate you as only the undead can hate. I hate you so that there is no pity, no compassion, no ghost of the love you have killed by doing this! My hate will burn long, LONG after you die. I HATE YOU, VICTOR STANDISH!"

I stopped halfway down the steps and slowly turned to Alice, her neon blue eyes flaring and said, “D-Don’t let those be the last words I hear you say, Alice. P-Please.”

Black tears streamed from her strange eyes as she stiffened as if I had stabbed her as she mewed, “Dolt, imbecile, moron, dunce! Of course, I love you.”

I smiled despite my heart breaking. “I like it when you talk dirty to me, Alice.”

She whimpered, then managed to squeak out the words, “You are Victor Standish, and you will find a way back to me.”


***

THE MUD OR THE STARS?

“Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.”
- Frederick Langbridge

There are epic events in each person's life. What we make of them determines what we make of our lives.

Shelley F. Blatt

Laila Knight asked for a little personal information. I try to focus on writing and what can help all of us become better writers. But I said I would make a stab.

Hopefully, I will not sound like that starlet who said to an ear-weary Groucho Marx : "Enough about me. What do you think of me?"

Hurricane Katrina and Rita swept through New Orleans and Lake Charles. Neither city has fully recovered. And those of us who survived are changed forever by it.

Five years ago, Hurricane Rita was a category 5 hurricane. I spent the morning running rare blood to scrambling hospitals.

I drove back home to wolf down a hurried lunch. A mandatory evacuation was issued. I went downstairs.

Someone had siphoned the gas from my car. All the gas stations were shut down. I was stranded in the path of a killer hurricane.

Alone.

Or not so alone.

Freddie, my supervisor, called checking in on me. He offered me a ride in his car as he drove beside his wife's car containing his two children.

So with the clothes on my back, my laptop on my lap, and Gypsy in a carrier, I rode with my friend into the darkness.

The highways were shut down. We drove the back roads, the cypress trees bending down over us in the blackness as if listening to our whispered voices. Freddie's eyes were hollow.

As we passed his wife's car, I saw she was frantic, on the verge of panic.

I winked at the pale faces of Freddie's two children, Allison and Abigail, pulled Gypsy, my cat, out of the carrier, and picked up her front paw as if she were waving at the two girls.

They giggled. And the grip of panic on their mother seemed to break.

She waved back and gave a valiant smile with a thumb's up salute.

Freddie studied me for a moment and said, "Dude, you're like Job."

"How so?"

"I mean you got your gas siphoned out of your car just when you needed it most."

"I bet a lot of people did."

"Yeah, but if Rita hits Lake Charles, this will be the second time you'll have lost everything.

You lost it all when your home burned. And before that you closed your business. Your mother died before that. And before that your fiancee died. And your childhood best friend died before Kathy. Damn, it's like you're Job."

I nodded, smiling sadly, "As I recall Job ended up pretty well."

"You've got a strange way at looking at life, dude."

"You're not the first to say that."

We made it to Baton Rouge where I worked delivering rare blood to all the hospitals reeling under the impact of Katrina.

I drove to the hospital of Metairie, the first suburb of New Orleans. (It is a French term for a tenant farm.)

I saw people who had only thought they knew what having nothing meant. I smelled the stench of decaying human flesh on the breath of a too silent city.

I saw young boys in uniform trying to be men under impossible conditions.

Late at night I typed the first draft of FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE, alone in the spacious suite afforded me by the blood center for which I worked.

It had been leased for the board of directors to oversee the new center in Baton Rouge.

So for two months I slept in a prince's suite. Gypsy was, for once, satisfied with her accommodations, she being a princess and all.

I barely saw the suite. I was always driving it seemed --

down long, unfamiliar roads to strange hospitals protected by hollow-eyed young boys with automatic weapons and dry mouths.

On my days off, I would volunteer to drive vans for the Salvation Army, Red Cross, church groups, or out-of-state relatives frantic to find lost loved ones. There are stories in that time that haunt me still, but they belong to shattered, valiant hearts.

Finally, the blood couriers were allowed back to our devastated city.

It was like something from a post-apocalyptic movie. But these ruined streets and gutted homes I knew. Our city has never truly recovered. But my friends are a hardy bunch.

Me? I just fake it.

I've only mentioned one snippet of my life, and look how much I have written. Sigh. Like Freddie says, I tend to talk a lot.

But he smiles good-naturedly when he says it.
***

***