Absorbed in writing my version of Beauty and the Beast, I have lots of frustration, doubt, uncertainty, questions...in short, I'm worried that others might be better equipped to write this story. Do I know the story? Do I know Thailand? Do I know how to write?
That's a quandary; I'm not sure of any of it. I'm having a little fun with it, although I found, when I went back after a break, that very little had been saved successfully. It seems I'd been writing and writing, yet it wasn't anywhere on my old computer. Had I failed to click on Save every night? I'm a lot more careful now.
But it was a lot easier to just change a few things at the beginning, and start again on the story. The people who are in on this project with me tend toward all kinds of different angles - hard-core romance, which always leads to the sex scene (same-sex, reverse harem or whatever), and to them this gives them a challenge to put an old story into a modern romance format, mixing in ancient legends from whhatever country they chose. I chose Thailand because of my desire to work in the story of Tiger Temple, a place in western Thailand with a drama associated with it. But my style is clearly different from theirs. I will even have trouble making it a romance at all, let alone a steamy modern one.
Of course Beauty and the Beast IS a romance and I will be true to that. My main character is in love with a tiger but at the same time always questioning what is real and whether magic can exist in this world. Can it? I the author am a little cynical. He's a tiger! She's not going to have sex. with him.
And can or will thhe tiger become human, if he finds love? Good question. Let me finish and I'll show you the story.
Thursday, March 6, 2025
Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Beauty and the Beast
I've been asked to write a version of Beauty and the Beast: set in the 1700's, stressing the culture of a different country. Mine is Thailand. I'm all in.
First thing I did was to find this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140726163822/http://www.endicott-studio.com/articleslist/beauty-and-the-beast-old-and-new-by-terri-windling.html
It's a careful (I think) listing of different takes on the story. Naturally it has changed a lot over the years. One conclusion is that with the Disney version we gain the razzle-dazzle of the movie, and the beautiful songs, but we lose some elements of the story, some of the complexity.
Obviously I need to do some research into the jealous sisters, etc.
My beast will be a tiger, not an elephant. More later.
First thing I did was to find this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140726163822/http://www.endicott-studio.com/articleslist/beauty-and-the-beast-old-and-new-by-terri-windling.html
It's a careful (I think) listing of different takes on the story. Naturally it has changed a lot over the years. One conclusion is that with the Disney version we gain the razzle-dazzle of the movie, and the beautiful songs, but we lose some elements of the story, some of the complexity.
Obviously I need to do some research into the jealous sisters, etc.
My beast will be a tiger, not an elephant. More later.
Sunday, January 12, 2025
Mario's Dystopia
Sunday, June 20, 2021
Black Ice & the Seven Dwarfs
My name is Black Ice, you know, the opposite of Snow White. She was innocent and pure, easily loved by all the animals in the forest, especially loved by the Seven Dwarfs, Doc, Sneezy, Grumpy, Happy, Bashful, Sleepy, and Dopey, but I'm kind of the opposite. It is not easy for people to love me. I'm ugly, and gay, and a little overweight, and I've been an orphan since I was two.
Yes, that's right, I don't remember my father - he died in a car accident along with my mother - but I was taken in by this very wealthy man, my father's brother Max and his wife Thelma. I think Thelma talked him into it since she well knew he was my only living relative. He was an options and futures trader - he knew everything about how to invest a buck and make more money out of it. But that was his weakness. He was greedy, too. I don't want to say too much bad about him, because he took me in and all, and by the time I was a teenager he was all about how I spent my money, but he had in fact fed me and clothed me and got me into my teen years.
So anyway I used to buy Powerball tickets just to make him mad, and one day I won, not just thousands, but millions. Powerball authorities were negotiating with him, since I was still a minor, over such things as taxes and how the money would be delivered. Now my parents didn't quite know what to do with me. I was like seventeen, barely still in his care. It didn't mean that much to me right away because I was still in high school and not quite ready to think about independence, and because they'd always provided for me anyway. So there wasn't much I could say when they said such things as, "look, we're going to put the money here for a while." The end result was that I didn't actually have a whole lot of cash when I walked out the door every day.
But at night, Max would review the accounts and get more and more furious. He'd look at the bottom lines and here I was, a fat, ugly, pimply gay kid with millions and I hadn't even earned them. I had done nothing, and it made him mad.
Meanwhile at school I had some kind of notoriety, and everyone wanted to be my friend. But all of a sudden I didn't quite care for them, because I could see how false it was. I really had only one friend at school, this guy named Pierce, who I think was gay too but I never really knew, because I was too shy to ask. Pierce was the same to me before and after the news came around, so to me, what was good about Pierce was that he was just being himself, and liked me for who I was, and was my friend whether I was just an ugly kid or a millionaire.
One night Max was doing the usual, reviewing the accounts, and he exploded. He couldn't take it any more. He yelled and screamed and came as close to hitting me as possible. I say that because I don't believe he'd ever hit me, and I don't think he ever did. But on this night he almost did, and that was enough for me. I knew I had to get out of there, ready or not.
My one ally in this world was our driver Henry. Henry was told to take me out one night and I got the sense that something shady was up. But Henry, who might have been told to kill me and dump me in the river, instead bought me a bus ticket to Omaha, two cities over, and gave me twenty bucks for the trip, apologizing profusely that he couldn't give me more. He'd apparently spent most of his free money on that ticket and had to borrow the twenty from one of his friends. He had seen that explosion and knew I had to leave. He knew $20 wasn't going to be enough to sustain me but it was all he could do. And, there was that undercurrent there. Like he was not to bring me back home under any circumstances.
In Omaha things were tense because $20 didn't go very far. I figured I had to find a job while I still had some clean clothes (Henry had given me a small bag of them) and, surprisingly, I did. But I had to stay at this shelter for a while until I could figure out how to get enough money to pay rent. I didn't dare call my parents. I knew my mother was worried but she too would know that coming home was not an option. I just stayed at that shelter for a while and believe me it was not a great place. People were always rifling through each other's things and saying mean things to each other.
But I had a few good friends there. One knew how to heal different maladies; he just knew that kind of stuff. Another was always sneezing and we teased him a lot about that. Another was in a terrible mood all the time but was really one of the sweetest guys ever. Another was happy all the time, but that irritated the heck out of me because it couldn't possibly be sincere. I felt like slapping him sometimes and saying, "Hey! You're in a youth shelter with no money! Wipe that smile off your face!" But I didn't; instead, I tried to pick up some good mood from him for the purpose of survival.
There was one guy who was really shy, and we'd always try to get him to talk to some girl, but he couldn't. He had all these feelings but just couldn't express them when the time came; he was always too shy. Another guy was always sleeping. I figure it was because he was up all night, and it was his tactic to avoid interacting with anyone because he really didn't like it. I don't know, maybe sleeping in the evening was his way of guarding his wallet, because I think he might have had a job like I did, only with worse hours, but anyway, most of the time when we got up a game of cards, he'd be asleep, and couldn't play.
The last guy we called Dopey, because he really was Dopey in two different kind of ways. One was that he had that goofy sense of humor that always surprised you and made you think about things differently. Another was that he always seemed to find a way to find drugs and other kinds of things that were strictly illegal.
Mind you, we got into a lot of trouble for this kind of thing. It was a youth home, strictly guarded, and kids that did bad stuff got sent on to juvey or some place that had much better security. I actually liked it there; I liked these guys, and I started cooking and cleaning around the place because I even liked the people that ran the place. Sure, it was full of trouble, and lots of guys were getting into trouble all the time. But in the end, it was a good place for me. I aged out when I was there and still asked them to stay, so they made me a kind of cook and janitor and let me. It was an improvement in my living circumstance which now meant I had my own room.
My parents didn't even know I was there and so didn't come looking for me. You would think I would be mad about the millions of dollars, that they were still sitting on, but I was barely aware of it. I could only get at it through them, and had no intention of going back to them and telling them to fork it over. There was one point where Max had said I should pay him for raising me the fifteen years he did, and I'm sure he had it calculated all out to be worth several million, or just enough so that I would owe him all that money, because in his mind, I did owe it to him. He had done his best to teach me how to earn money honestly by doing options futures or currency broking or whatever, and it wasn't his fault that I didn't learn. But by washing dishes for a couple of years I felt like I proved that I could work for money, and would, whether I rightfully had several million in the bank or not. I have to admit that several times, I considered going back, hiring a lawyer, and getting it off him, since it was, legally, mine, and I'm not actually sure that he was able to rob from that fund or not; all I know is that I wouldn't put it past him and I figured he was probably able to justify it somehow.
Much to my surprise I saw him one time on the streets of Omaha in a particularly bad district. This was now four or five years after I'd disappeared and I was pretty sure he didn't know I was alive or was in Omaha. But there he was and he recognized me instantly. Actually the truth is he looked terrible, like he'd been on drugs steady for those entire four years. And in his pain I think he wanted to give me some of it, which I accepted as a kind of peace offering. It was a little pill of something that he said would make me very happy like I owned the world. I felt like I didn't really need to own the world, I just wanted to be his friend and then work on possibly getting some of that money back.
But unfortunately the little pill put me in the hospital, where I was in a coma for like a week, and when I woke up, Max was long gone. It's like he somehow got me there but denied any association with me whatsoever once we got there, and when I asked where he was, since he was the last person I had seen, nobody had even heard of him or knew anything about him.
They were glad when I came out of that coma because otherwise I'd be hanging around that hospital for a long time and I had no apparent family in the area or anyone who could help them out. They were also glad that I came out with a reasonable sense of who I was and the ability to take up my life where I had left off. I had all my friends at the youth home who were all glad to see me again and who accepted my somewhat altered version of what happened that I could be in a coma for a week. They by now looked up to me as a kind of leader, as I was older than most of them, and it kind of mattered how one portrayed things.
But the best outcome of the whole situation was that Pierce showed up one day at the hospital, and Pierce and I became an item, which was actually pretty good news, the best of all the things that happened to me. Life was pretty day-to-day in Omaha, and had been for years, and this was about the best thing to come along for a while, so I'll stop it here with "happily ever after."
Yes, that's right, I don't remember my father - he died in a car accident along with my mother - but I was taken in by this very wealthy man, my father's brother Max and his wife Thelma. I think Thelma talked him into it since she well knew he was my only living relative. He was an options and futures trader - he knew everything about how to invest a buck and make more money out of it. But that was his weakness. He was greedy, too. I don't want to say too much bad about him, because he took me in and all, and by the time I was a teenager he was all about how I spent my money, but he had in fact fed me and clothed me and got me into my teen years.
So anyway I used to buy Powerball tickets just to make him mad, and one day I won, not just thousands, but millions. Powerball authorities were negotiating with him, since I was still a minor, over such things as taxes and how the money would be delivered. Now my parents didn't quite know what to do with me. I was like seventeen, barely still in his care. It didn't mean that much to me right away because I was still in high school and not quite ready to think about independence, and because they'd always provided for me anyway. So there wasn't much I could say when they said such things as, "look, we're going to put the money here for a while." The end result was that I didn't actually have a whole lot of cash when I walked out the door every day.
But at night, Max would review the accounts and get more and more furious. He'd look at the bottom lines and here I was, a fat, ugly, pimply gay kid with millions and I hadn't even earned them. I had done nothing, and it made him mad.
Meanwhile at school I had some kind of notoriety, and everyone wanted to be my friend. But all of a sudden I didn't quite care for them, because I could see how false it was. I really had only one friend at school, this guy named Pierce, who I think was gay too but I never really knew, because I was too shy to ask. Pierce was the same to me before and after the news came around, so to me, what was good about Pierce was that he was just being himself, and liked me for who I was, and was my friend whether I was just an ugly kid or a millionaire.
One night Max was doing the usual, reviewing the accounts, and he exploded. He couldn't take it any more. He yelled and screamed and came as close to hitting me as possible. I say that because I don't believe he'd ever hit me, and I don't think he ever did. But on this night he almost did, and that was enough for me. I knew I had to get out of there, ready or not.
My one ally in this world was our driver Henry. Henry was told to take me out one night and I got the sense that something shady was up. But Henry, who might have been told to kill me and dump me in the river, instead bought me a bus ticket to Omaha, two cities over, and gave me twenty bucks for the trip, apologizing profusely that he couldn't give me more. He'd apparently spent most of his free money on that ticket and had to borrow the twenty from one of his friends. He had seen that explosion and knew I had to leave. He knew $20 wasn't going to be enough to sustain me but it was all he could do. And, there was that undercurrent there. Like he was not to bring me back home under any circumstances.
In Omaha things were tense because $20 didn't go very far. I figured I had to find a job while I still had some clean clothes (Henry had given me a small bag of them) and, surprisingly, I did. But I had to stay at this shelter for a while until I could figure out how to get enough money to pay rent. I didn't dare call my parents. I knew my mother was worried but she too would know that coming home was not an option. I just stayed at that shelter for a while and believe me it was not a great place. People were always rifling through each other's things and saying mean things to each other.
But I had a few good friends there. One knew how to heal different maladies; he just knew that kind of stuff. Another was always sneezing and we teased him a lot about that. Another was in a terrible mood all the time but was really one of the sweetest guys ever. Another was happy all the time, but that irritated the heck out of me because it couldn't possibly be sincere. I felt like slapping him sometimes and saying, "Hey! You're in a youth shelter with no money! Wipe that smile off your face!" But I didn't; instead, I tried to pick up some good mood from him for the purpose of survival.
There was one guy who was really shy, and we'd always try to get him to talk to some girl, but he couldn't. He had all these feelings but just couldn't express them when the time came; he was always too shy. Another guy was always sleeping. I figure it was because he was up all night, and it was his tactic to avoid interacting with anyone because he really didn't like it. I don't know, maybe sleeping in the evening was his way of guarding his wallet, because I think he might have had a job like I did, only with worse hours, but anyway, most of the time when we got up a game of cards, he'd be asleep, and couldn't play.
The last guy we called Dopey, because he really was Dopey in two different kind of ways. One was that he had that goofy sense of humor that always surprised you and made you think about things differently. Another was that he always seemed to find a way to find drugs and other kinds of things that were strictly illegal.
Mind you, we got into a lot of trouble for this kind of thing. It was a youth home, strictly guarded, and kids that did bad stuff got sent on to juvey or some place that had much better security. I actually liked it there; I liked these guys, and I started cooking and cleaning around the place because I even liked the people that ran the place. Sure, it was full of trouble, and lots of guys were getting into trouble all the time. But in the end, it was a good place for me. I aged out when I was there and still asked them to stay, so they made me a kind of cook and janitor and let me. It was an improvement in my living circumstance which now meant I had my own room.
My parents didn't even know I was there and so didn't come looking for me. You would think I would be mad about the millions of dollars, that they were still sitting on, but I was barely aware of it. I could only get at it through them, and had no intention of going back to them and telling them to fork it over. There was one point where Max had said I should pay him for raising me the fifteen years he did, and I'm sure he had it calculated all out to be worth several million, or just enough so that I would owe him all that money, because in his mind, I did owe it to him. He had done his best to teach me how to earn money honestly by doing options futures or currency broking or whatever, and it wasn't his fault that I didn't learn. But by washing dishes for a couple of years I felt like I proved that I could work for money, and would, whether I rightfully had several million in the bank or not. I have to admit that several times, I considered going back, hiring a lawyer, and getting it off him, since it was, legally, mine, and I'm not actually sure that he was able to rob from that fund or not; all I know is that I wouldn't put it past him and I figured he was probably able to justify it somehow.
Much to my surprise I saw him one time on the streets of Omaha in a particularly bad district. This was now four or five years after I'd disappeared and I was pretty sure he didn't know I was alive or was in Omaha. But there he was and he recognized me instantly. Actually the truth is he looked terrible, like he'd been on drugs steady for those entire four years. And in his pain I think he wanted to give me some of it, which I accepted as a kind of peace offering. It was a little pill of something that he said would make me very happy like I owned the world. I felt like I didn't really need to own the world, I just wanted to be his friend and then work on possibly getting some of that money back.
But unfortunately the little pill put me in the hospital, where I was in a coma for like a week, and when I woke up, Max was long gone. It's like he somehow got me there but denied any association with me whatsoever once we got there, and when I asked where he was, since he was the last person I had seen, nobody had even heard of him or knew anything about him.
They were glad when I came out of that coma because otherwise I'd be hanging around that hospital for a long time and I had no apparent family in the area or anyone who could help them out. They were also glad that I came out with a reasonable sense of who I was and the ability to take up my life where I had left off. I had all my friends at the youth home who were all glad to see me again and who accepted my somewhat altered version of what happened that I could be in a coma for a week. They by now looked up to me as a kind of leader, as I was older than most of them, and it kind of mattered how one portrayed things.
But the best outcome of the whole situation was that Pierce showed up one day at the hospital, and Pierce and I became an item, which was actually pretty good news, the best of all the things that happened to me. Life was pretty day-to-day in Omaha, and had been for years, and this was about the best thing to come along for a while, so I'll stop it here with "happily ever after."
Wednesday, December 2, 2020
One more Boy and the Bear
So the bear jumped out at the boy, and almost ate him. But the boy convinced the bear to go down into the town, and have a hamburger with him. He did this by describing the ketchup, the mustard, the relish, the pickle, the cheese, the onion, all the condiments.
The bear couldn't relate to the hamburger itself, since he had a pretty meat-based Atkins diet anyway, and wasn't especially hungry for just fried meat. But he figured, if someone would put all those condiments on it, it must really be something. So he came along with the boy, and down into town, through the woods, they went. The boy kept playing yo-yo as he walked.
Finally with a single swoop the bear grabbed the yo-yo and ate it. The problem was, the string was still attached to it, and attached to the boy's finger. And the other problem was, the yo-yo was one of those yo-yos that has a light that keeps going off and on, so now a little glow came from the bear's tummy where the yo-yo was lodged.
The boy got his finger out from the yo-yo just in time, though. There was no way he was going to let a bear eat his arm by accident just because of some yo-yo. And anyway just then a motorbike came up the dirt path in the woods and a ninety-five year old lady was riding it, with no helmet. She almost knocked them both over, but she was very cheerful and glad to have someone to talk to. She had bugs in her teeth from driving too fast.
She said they were having a freedom rally down in the town and everyone was bringing their guns, because they were in favor of the second amendment. The boy was happy about this because, missing his yo-yo already, he needed a new toy. He figured a gun would be just the trick.
The bear, on the other hand, was a little wary of guns, because of his PTSD from when he was a cub. The bear wasn't so much into gun control, as he was just staying away from them altogether, since he knew too much about what they could do. He was of course in favor of stopping in to the restaurant and getting a hamburger with all those condiments, but if there was going to be guns around, he figured he was too big a target to go messing with people. Besides, he still had a parking ticket from last time he went.
He was aware of those trick shooters who would throw a parking ticket into the air and then shoot a hole in it. He thought this was very clever and deep down he wanted to be a sharp shooter like that. But he was afraid that if he tried to use a gun he would just start shooting other people, or maybe other bears. Why not? He had a lot of repressed issues.
The old lady on the motorbike whipped out a pack lunch and they all shared it. The bear especially loved the pickles. But at some point she opened a can of sardines and that made him go wild. Something deep in his memory stirred him. It was not about fishing so much as being packed twelve to a can. But he couldn't quite remember when it was that he had been packed twelve to a can. He was a bear. Maybe it was something about eating twelve fish in one bite. Or having the whole thing packed away in a can of oil. He got a strange sensation.
The boy talked the old lady into going to the freedom rally, and they walked back down the hill. The lady lent the bear the motorbike, since he had some places to go, and they agreed to meet up later and he would give it back. Things were easy that way. She didn't need the motorbike as she, too, had gotten a ticket the last time she was there. She was interested in what kinds of guns people were packing these days, though. She was one person who could put a bullet through a parking ticket with her eyes closed.
TL, 12-20
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
Boy and the Bear Stories
The four posts below this are classic "Boy and the Bear" stories. I call them classic although they are really only classic around my own household, where everyone knows certain things about them. First, they usually involve a hamburger in a restaurant with a "no shirt no shoes no service" rule. They often involve parking tickets for a bear who basically doesn't feel like he's parking. And finally, whenever a listener (or reader in this case) comes to think they have a handle on the plot line, it features a sudden, unexpaected departure of any kind. Sometimes this involves the set being blown up. But in any case the surprise is built right into it.
Here are some examples:
The Boy & the Bear, the Pizza & the Parade
The Boy & the Bear and the Trump Rally
Boy and the Bear, and Amtrak
Yer Classic Boy & Bear Story
enjoy!
Here are some examples:
The Boy & the Bear, the Pizza & the Parade
The Boy & the Bear and the Trump Rally
Boy and the Bear, and Amtrak
Yer Classic Boy & Bear Story
enjoy!
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
The Boy & the Bear, the Pizza and the Parade
Once upon a time the bear was receiving a parking ticket downtown, as the boy watched with interest. The meter maid was a young woman on her first day on the job, and she wanted to be diligent and aggressive and get all illegal lollygaggers out of the public places as soon as possible, so as to keep traffic moving and keep general order in the village. The bear had now been in this particular parking spot for over twenty minutes, and it clearly said fifteen minutes only.
The bear pointed out that he could eat her in one bite, as a way of refusing to pay the ticket, and if he did, he could claim that she had never given him a ticket in the first place. He could use her little metal pencil as a toothpick and the tickets themselves as a napkin, he said. But the boy said that if you’re polite and friendly you can often get your way much more easily. For that reason he ordered a pizza and insisted that the young lady join him for a picnic right there at that parking spot. Surely she’s tired from working hard on such a hot day?
But just then a hot dog vendor strolled by pushing his cart on his way to the parade, and the bear just reached out and grabbed a hot dog. That was the bear’s way; he wasn’t used to paying money, or asking for food, or even for taking his time and putting mustard and ketchup on it. But he soon realized the error in his ways and grabbed another one, this one for the young woman, and he was about to get a third for the boy when the hot dog vendor started squirting him all over with mustard, using it as a weapon, as if to say, if you aren’t going to pay for it, at least I’ll make your life miserable!
Just then the pizza arrived, and even though it was pepperoni and sausage instead of the plain sausage that the boy had ordered, at least there was an entire pizza for the bear, so it didn’t look like he was going to have to beg or try to wheedle anyone else out of their fair share. The problem was, he was now covered with mustard, and the napkins that came with the pizza were only making it worse, since his fur was oily and the mustard worked its way down into it. Now what animals generally do in this situation is, they lay down on a log and lick themselves all over, but the boy was trying to train him in general etiquette and he wasn’t sure that he could do it downtown on parade day, with all these people standing all over the place, and the hot dog vendor still squirting the mustard all over the place.
In fact, the hot dog vendor was now trying to hit everyone, and had a special passion for getting the young meter woman who was trying to enjoy her pizza, and a librarian who just happened to be passing by and who decided that a piece of pizza might be a good thing on a hot day like this. The librarian was thinking maybe if some of the mustard landed on the pizza it wouldn’t be all bad, but in fact the mustard was landing all over the place, and when it hit a dog the dog shook himself and then it flew all over the place, hitting everyone. Finally the librarian pointed her umbrella at the hot dog vendor and said “Freeze” at which point the vendor, well trained, dropped everything and put his hands up.
Fortunately it started raining, but when the librarian opened up the umbrella it actually had mustard on it and the mustard went flying and hit the dog again. The boy had now made the perfect pizza construction: it had a few extra hot dogs on it, and some mustard, and pieces of a rose that he had torn up and put carefully on it. He didn’t want the pizza to get wet, so he stood under the umbrella, but the librarian got suspicious because the petals of the rose were bright pink and she questioned the boy about where the rose had come from. It was true that, somewhere in the fuss of the last ten minutes, some man had given him the rose and asked him to give it to the librarian, or perhaps it was to the young meter maid, or maybe it was the bear, he couldn’t quite remember. It was just because he was overwhelmed by the excitement of a picnic downtown, that he lost track of certain details. And the bear felt pretty much the same way, though he was now back at the hot dog cart putting one hot dog after another down, and enjoying the view. He had never even realized you could put mustard on a hot dog, but now realized that it tasted pretty good over all, and was trying all the other condiments on the cart, one at a time. The hot dog vendor didn’t seem to mind, since the rain was pretty much going to spoil this batch of food anyway. People were now running toward them from the direction of the parade, trying to get out of the rain or get to their cars, which were all parked downtown not too far from where this story takes place. They weren’t sure if it was going to be a huge downpour or just a sprinkle, but they didn’t want to wait around to find out, since a lot of times there was lightning involved, and last time the lightning struck the firetruck in the parade and caught the hose on fire, and nobody knew what to do, because it couldn’t put itself out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)