I'm gonna blow up the ark, René!

Seriously; if I had to do that whole "desert island" thing and take only one movie, despite all my love of animated films, musicals, classic movies, indie films, and Titus, it would be hard if not impossible to beat Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even though G. Luc is better known for the Star Wars franchise, and though I totally dig that stuff too, man, you just can't find anything better than Indiana Jones. And even if I'm not a personal fan of, shall we say, "el cock", I would hit it. I would hit it with a whip. He could explore my temple and excavate my relics. You get the idea.

And you know what? Ask any woman, anywhere, and they would agree with me. Hey Mother Teresa, wanna do Indiana Jones? Yes, she replies from beyond the grave, and as soon as he gets here I'm putting on my white satin nun robe.

But still, man. Marion. When I was little, I wanted to be her, and now that I am older, I want to be her. And if I cannot be her, I would like to be her special friend. Special friend. The only downside is that I would have to be the designated driver all the time! She's so cool.

Anyway the reason for posting this is that my family, while I was off undereating in Norwich, bought Raiders of the Lost Ark on DVD. The film is fully restored and looks beautiful, and it's got nice little special features (how they made the guy's face melt!) that I'll be watching tomorrow. Have you ever seen any of the little blurbs that they do on the movie with Steen Spielberg in them? He talks about the movie like he's a little boy; his favorite parts are apparently when the little monkey salutes the nazis and when Marion says "we just don't get a break, do we?" because she's so cool.

I can't believe that I'm still drooling over a character Karen Allen played thirty years ago shut up.

A couple other things: in the previews for The Golden Compass, Dakota Blue Richards narrates a little piece about how we need to help the WWF save the polar bears, because they aren't as strong as Iorek because...sniff....they don't have armor to keep them protected. All this over pictures of bears lolling around in the ice, like they DON'T want to be killed by global warming.

I always feel so awful caring more about conservation than, like, humans. Something about it strikes closer to my heart, I guess. Hey, I might be a cynic who has no faith in humanity, but at least I'm a good cynic.

And I watched Jamie Lidell on Conan the other night (the video is up but I'm really too lazy to post a link). He and his quartet (keyboard, bass, sax, drums) played "Another Day", and though it was trés cutée, I feel like the live band kinda took away some of the fire that I was expecting.

Then again;

Why can't you just do both of them? Why is life this unfair?

Please notify my next of kin

There's something gratuitously fun about watching Absolutely Fabulous. I'm almost done with the first season, and I swear that I know it's bad, but there's something good about it. Everything is so predictable, so outdated, and yet, yeah. I'll watch it.

So funny that I'm more than happy to watch old BBC programs, but hell if I can get into watching Heroes or Grey's Anatomy or back into watching Lost. Apparently it's all gone haywire and crazy in that department, anyway. And TV dramas never did much for me, at least the network ones. On NBC or ABC or whatever, you're looking for ratings. With comedy shows, this is pretty simple: be funny. And that's excusable, since funniness is the essence of comedy (and social commentary too, blah blah blah, the point is if it's a comedy it should be there to be, well, funny). All you have to do is offer a few jokes for the next episode, and you're in the clear.

With drama programs, though, there's more that you have to keep in mind. There's the issue of continuity, which means that for most programs (save all the Law & Order shows) you want to have at least one unresolved cliffhanger issue at the end of each episode, so that the viewer has to come back and watch the next one. The need to have unresolved issue after unresolved issue means that you need to pile more and more drama onto each and every episode, and after a while the plot starts to get too contrived, the cliffhangers too cliffhangey, and the audience (me and the smart people) realize that they've been had by some dollar-chasing executives. Just look at soap operas to see the worst of it.

Of course in the UK it should be noted that soap operas are completely different animals; instead of being about beautiful millionaires who never grow old but seem exceedingly good at being possessed or incestuously pregnant with their amnesiatic brother's baby, British soap operas are about boring old people sitting in pubs and getting heart attacks.

Nothing has happened here for 50 years except age.

Moving on: I re-watched The Golden Compass with my brother just now, and I'm still enjoying it. The script, however, is starting to grate on my brain. The book was so much smarter.

Tomorrow I'll post an excerpt from Stick Silvertail, which should be done by then. The story is a southern fairy tale, and I'm actually pretty proud of it.

If I were queen then you and I'd be neighbors, I would pick you up each morning for doughnuts and tea

An album recommendation: My Brightest Diamond's output for this summer, A Thousand Shark's Teeth. Though it doesn't blow me away as much as Bring Me The Workhorse it's still got that great moody feeling that I love so much; and Shara Worden's vocals don't ever ever disappoint. I hate her for how good her voice is. Since I don't want to go into a long-winded review of the album, all I can say is this:

Have you guys seen the Romantics series on the BBC/PBS? No? Well, in the series, Mary Shelley was depicted as a beautiful woman writhing around crazily on her bed in a red satin gown. This gives you the impression that a night with Mary Shelly is full of opium and pretty colors, and the most mindblowingly physical sex you can imagine; the kind of sex that makes you question existence. This, to a somewhat lesser yet still powerful extent, is the impression that I got from Bring Me The Workhorse, it was just so different (to me at least) and had such a well-done cinematic feel that was beautiful in a polished but raw way, like madness that definitely had a method, a method so good that it seemed like madness all over again. With A Thousand Shark's Teeth, the method is still there, but there's less of the madness, though that works out just fine. The big orchestral feeling is more chamber-like, thanks to the help of a string quartet, and there's a thicker production quality on some tracks that seems reminiscent of Tear It Down, a group of remixes of the stuff. There's also a wider array of music here, and Worden is obviously borrowing from various styles, maremba, baroque, etc. It's all done as best as it could be done, albeit a little sleepier than I expected. So, to continue the metaphor, if Bring Me The Workhorse is the crazy rolling around on the bed Mary Shelley sex, then A Thousand Shark's Teeth is calmer but still fantastic after a few months of dating Mary Shelley sex. Yeah, that works perfectly.

Another thing of interest: I made Sachertorte! True, the chocolate glaze was not as thick as I'd want it to be, and making it was a giant mess of baking goods and abusing the standing mixer, but it was fantastically good and my mom, for whose birthday it was made, thought it was delicious. And really, if I had more time and wasn't trying to make it for a surprise, it would have turned out better and I would have had more time to enjoy the cooking, which I really did enjoy.

Oh, and I cut my hair. Ironically, on the same day that my 14-year-old brother was taken to a salon to get a $60 haircut. Yeah, I did it myself. Again.

Dr Crookedmouth to the OR, Stat!

It looks like it did while I was in France, only the front looks better. I took off about an inch from the bottom just to clean it up. Here's how it looked before, about two weeks ago:

Oxford, home of hot chicks and bicycles.

So it's less shaggy now. Also, I don't know who that girl on the left is. I look AWESOME.
And yeah, I promised Girl On The Left that I would grow it out this summer, which I might still do. The good thing is that the shortest layer in the back is down to my ears now, so it should grow out pretty even. Or keep it short, because that always looks good, right? Right?

God, I need to use this blog to talk about more interesting things. Like, why am I not writing right now? Because there are DVDs here. And I have torrents now? And........yeah. I'm gonna get going on that within the next week, for real. Right now I'm trying to get a job for the summer, and my expectations are being throttled by the boa constrictor of minimum wage part-time positions.

Gonna have to get along without ya instead of asking "where'd you go?"

Now that I'm back in a country that doesn't suck at things that are plugged into the wall, I finally managed to download Jamie Lidell's newest album. Jim is marketed as the product of one of Lidell's alternate personalities, who is sort of the conniving devil in the back of his brain, making him do craaaaazy things. Whatever. Anyway, the album itself is good, and fun, and pretty perfect for summer; just don't turn to it when you're looking for the perfect lyrics to write on your livejournal. Of course, the production is so good that you can't really care about the lyrical quality.

Jamie Lidell always gets accredited mostly for his voice, a Marvin Gaye/Otis Redding croon that you don't expect out of a guy from the middle of the UK; not to mention that it's his voice--run through a computer--that serves as the primary instrument for Lidell's live shows. He's got a great amount of control and breadth with his vocals, it's one of those voices that could read the phone book and make you want more and he knows it. And usually it's felt like Lidell is the only person in the recording studio; Multiply has a soulful yet electronic feeling where the music revolves around and is led by Lidell's voice. But with Jim, the music has a broader sound, backing vocals, bass, percussion; everything seems legitimate and real, like it was cut in a studio by a real person in the 1970s and not by a few guys with computers. It's this bigger sound that is the strongest part of Jim and makes it so damn catchy. There's such a sweet nostalgic feel to songs like "Wait for Me"and "Where'd You Go" that you don't think that you're listening to an album from 2008. Of course, the computer isn't gone forever, as it shows up to good effect in "Hurricane" and "Figured Me Out". All of the music blends with Lidell's vocals instead of just being a backing track.

But, as I said before, the only real weakness is Lidell's writing. I've seen him say in interviews that this album was going to be about the lyrics, but that just doesn't seem believable when you listen to them, I mean, really listen to them. On more upbeat songs this is never a problem, and Lidell does have a good ear for the words that fit with the lyrics. But some of them are just silly; "Out of My System" talks about exercising while "Wait For Me" declares " Don't you know you can't believe all that you've heard/I know it's rough when all you have is my word" and " Without you by my side I just can't sleep/That's why I'm up all night counting sheep". And yeah, this seems a little immature compared to the skill of the vocals and production, but it's those latter two elements of the song that make the lyrics irrelevant. But this really suffers in the slower numbers where we're forced to listen to what he's saying. "Rope of Sand" is a desperate attempt at existentialism which is too simple for its own complexity; and as an aside I don't think that Jamie Lidell has to constantly repeat how he just doesn't understand anything. "All I Wanna Do" is equally meh, "It's a world full of magic/It is never ever tragic". Not that it's bad per se, but I'm pretty sure that I wrote that when I was in high school and thought I was pretty deep. And I just don't understand "Another Day". I think that it's about a guy who was always afraid that he and his lady wouldn't have anything else to say to each other, but now they don't but it's okay because silence is now what can do the talking for them? I love you even though I have nothing to say to you?

All in all I like the album a lot; Jamie Lidell is one of those artists who seems to be full of an earnest sense of life that says that he's enjoying his work, not just doing it to fulfill a record contract or because he thinks he has some sort of artistic obligation. Jim doesn't resound with any "greatest album of a lifetime of work", but it sure as hell isn't a bad patch.

A battle of Arrondisments

So a few months ago, my mother and I had a conversation something like this:

Mom: We're so looking forward to our Paris trip! We rented Paris, Je T'aime. Have you seen it?
Me: Nope. Is it good?
Mom: Oh, it's wonderful. It's such a great Paris movie!
Me: Have you seen Amelie?
Mom: No, but I know that you want me to see it.
Me: Yeah, that's my personal favorite Paris movie, I guess. It's really sweet, you should see it.
Mom: Well, how about you watch Paris, Je T'aime and we'll watch Amelie before we all go to Paris!

Of course, that never happened. My family has a pretty wide lazy gene.

So tonight, almost exactly one month after we left Paris, my parents and I sat down in the basement to watch both of these movies. First up: Amelie.

.....okay, I'm a woman between the ages of 15 and 25. You know exactly what I'll say about Amelie. Aside from the initial "I want every aspect of Amelie's life, every article of clothing, every painting on the wall, every dark red throw pillow", the film is a wonderful whimsical feature, with a romanticized Montmartre as its back round. When my dad asked me what it was about in the video store, all I could reply was that "it's about this girl who lives in Montmartre and it's really pretty and I love it", which is the closest that you can get to the plot description. It's a story not just about Amelie, but the small yet colored lives around her that she watches and influences.

Now, there are three ways that a setting can work in a story. First, it can be there simply by virtue of things needing to take place somewhere. This is the sort of "anytown USA" setting; it's just somewhere to put your characters so that you can focus on the other stuff. The second is the type that Amelie uses, which is when a setting becomes a sort of character in the story, the place makes the characters or plot fit better. In Amelie, Montmartre is a place of artistic absinthine fantasy and childlike joy, coupled with the obvious yet still playful sex trade; we cannot imagine a character like Amelie Poulain living anywhere else, they are so fused together. In the end, Amelie is a cute film, a feel-good film that doesn't make you feel like you had to make yourself dumb or anesthetized to feel good, it's one of the most earnestly happy feelings that you can get from celluloid.

Paris, Je T'aime is the third type of film; one that tries to be the latter but ends up being the former. The film sets out to be a series of eighteen shorts, all based in a different area of Paris, all supposedly about love. Because, you know, Paris is the only place that love exists. What should be happening is eighteen stories that are distinctly and completely Parisian; but what happens instead is that we get eighteen stories that just happen to take place in Paris. I can let that slide, of course; after all, Sleepless in Seattle had nothing to do with Seattle itself, but it still worked as a film. But Paris, Je T'aime is constantly reminding the viewer of where the stories are with transitional clips that focus on the many monuments and recognizable sites, as though to say "hey, pay attention, this is in PARIS. Isn't that CREDIBLE?" Yeah, sure, but the truth is that without the Parisian location, each vignette would be nothing more than a short play put on by high school students (seriously, a lot feel like that). There are several about falling in love in five minutes, a few about long-term relationships, a handful about death or life generally sucking, and a couple that focus on tourism there. Actually, that's a pretty good breakdown of what Paris, Je T'aime says about what your experience in Paris is: you fall in love, your life sucks, or you are a tourist. And the worst thing is that, if you didn't worry so much about the languages used (thankfully, mostly French), then almost every single story could take place anywhere; there's nothing about them that says "only in Paris". It could happen in London or New York or San Francisco or Boise; which wouldn't make it very special at all. This means that, really, the only reason why I'm paying attention to the film is because it's in Paris. It's playing to one of my biggest weaknesses, which to me is a "bravo" coupled with a "fuck you".

The cast and directors were good enough for what they were doing, and there were no poor performances. But on the other hand, it sort of felt like one of those giant birthday cards that someone passes around the office. Sure you'll sign it, but you're not shooting for a penmanship award, nor are you going to impart any words of wisdom in it, after all, it is a giant Hallmark card, and Paris, Je T'aime, for all of it's glitter, is still just that: one big giant Hallmark card en français.

The only short that seemed to resonate with me at all as a really Parisian one was, ironically, about an American tourist named Carol (Margo Martindale) who delivers her narration in completely mispronounced French. Her story is simple; she's in her forties, has no children or spouses, and has always dreamed of going to Paris, so she studies French and packs up to go visit the city by herself; trying unsuccessfully to speak French to the locals who are only too willing to reply in English, following her guidebook that she keeps in her fanny pack to the letter, eating and sleeping alone. She sits in Montparnasse cemetery and thinks about her sister and mother who have died while she sits near the grave of Jean-Paul Sartre, she misses her now-married
-with-children ex-boyfriend as she looks over the city and realizes that she has no one to say "doesn't this look beautiful?" to. Finally, she sits in a park and eats a sandwich, and comes to a realization:

"Sitting there, alone in a foreign country, far from my job and everyone I know, a feeling came over me. It was like remembering something I'd never known before or had always been waiting for, but I didn't know what. Maybe it was something I'd forgotten or something I've been missing all my life. All I can say is that I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness. But not too much sadness, because I felt alive. Yes, alive. That was the moment I fell in love with Paris. And I felt Paris fall in love with me."

The thing is, I remember having moments exactly like that. What seemed to be missing from Paris, Je T'aime was not just that Paris is where people tend to fall in love, but where people have been falling in love for hundreds of years. The beauty of Paris isn't just it's sex appeal, it's the history, the muggy sense that it is a living, breathing organism that can hear and feel you. It is both magical and real, old and new, male and female, full of livelihood and tragedy. And though the other shorts seemed to have these elements somewhere in them, none resonated past their characters. I can tell you that only in Paris does Carol's reminiscence of sadness and happiness and life happen in that way; or if not only in Paris, then in very few places in the world. Unfortunately, most of the film seems to fall into too much of a clichéd set of love stories, held together by the circumstance of being set in Paris.


Of course in the end there's not really a battle between films here. My mother adores Paris Je T'aime, and though I think that she really liked Amelie (she was smiling the whole time!) she just called it "cute", which is still a perfectly fitting compliment. I, on the other hand, would never betray Amelie Poulain, and I lied about liking Paris, Je T'aime.

Things and things and things and things

It's time to start organizing my summer, since this one is gonna be a relatively short one, and I don't plan on wasting any of it. There's more to it, of course, than just getting a job; and I want to sort out the things that I'll be doing while I'm not sucking up to the man so that I don't go to school and go "ugh, I wasted my summer."

Summer is not a thing to waste, though of course a "wasted" summer is a matter of opinion. You might say I wasted my summer by not joining the Peace Corps or building a house somewhere. In that case, I'm a waster.

Anyway, I'm gonna break this down, and remember, I'm more or less making this up as I go along.

Things to Do
(This means all the activities that I could do without necessarily spending gobfuls of money.)

• Write as much as I possibly can of Secret of the Clockwork Mouse, and possibly even find a better title somewhere in my brain.
• Do more stamp-making, and make stationary for writing letters.
• Actually write letters to people this summer.
• Finish my oil pastel self-portrait and work more steadily with oil pastels in general.
• Same goes for charcoals.
• Practice guitar, saw, and (maybe) tin whistle.
• Pro-actively learn magic tricks so that I can amaze my friends and annoy my enemies.
• Experiment with that herbal tea set I got for Christmas.
• Do more outlining for Archer stories, get a big-ass calender and fill it in with story ideas.
• Repair my cowboy boots and my black flats
  

Things to Read
(Like, you know, books?)

• Goethe's and Marlowe's Faust
• Ulysses
• Orlando
• The Faerie Queene
• Jung
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces
• That Hermann Hesse book that Peter gave me, like, three years ago
  

Things to Buy
(Okay, this list needs to be short)

• Pants (3 pairs)
• Shirts (2?)
• Ballet Flats
• Art shit
• A watch (Fossil?!)
  
• More RAM for the lappy, if I end up keeping the lappy
• Elvis Costello, My Brightest Diamond CDs

That actually seems manageable, now that I look at it. I need to avoid overspending this summer, since that was the worst mistake of last summer. Of course I'm leaving an allowance in there for sale items (especially in the clothing department), and I'm sure that I'll buy a cheap Powell's copy of at least Ulysses, since I know that I'm more likely to read a book when I'm not thinking of returning it. And there's definitely a trip to the library to come in the next few days. I'm kicking myself for not bringing my Virginia Woolf book with me, since that had Orlando already in it; but oh well. I'm looking forward to Goethe.

And I guess I should think about getting that perfume from Anthropologie. Maybe.

Good news: the family is talking about maybe going to Disney this year! Bad news: they'll be going while I'm still 20. Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaame.

Find that dappled dream of yours, come back and see me when you can

I'm back in Portland, after one last wet but wonderful day in London and a couple of cramped but uneventful and decent flights. I'm back, and things already feel like I never left, and I hate that. By the end of today the afterglow of "I was in Europe yesterday" has faded away, and now it just feels like I never really left. It's the house and the room and the people never changing that much, not having friends who just want to hear you tell stories about your trip, so on and so on. I know that I always sound terribly depressed whenever I talk about being home; the way I always describe it is that I suddenly have to sit in the backseat, which just feels wrong after spending all that time taking care of myself and getting out of some shitty situations. Last night when I got in dad asked me:

"So can you believe that it's over?"
"No," I said. "but I still can't believe that I got through everything, I mean, it was tough."
"Haha. Yeah." He mocked picking up a phone with his hand."'Mom, dad, can you put more money in the account pleeeeeeeeaaase?'"

Anyway, that's basically how things have gone so far, but it's only been a day. This weekend is the Rose Parade and the Ballet, and then mom's birthday. By next week I hope to have some prospects of a job. My goals for the summer so far are:

• Get a job
• Make money
• Save 90% of the money I make
• Write a novel
• Read Ulysses
• Find a good place to live in Vancouver
  

Pretty simple, huh? I think that I can manage most if not all of it, I'm getting more and more comfortable with the writing that I've done for the novel (tentative title: The Secret of the Clockwork Mouse) Here's what I have so far:

PART ONE

Chapter 1
Bridget in Atlantic City. Meets Michael. He tells her suchandsuch, magic is a lie, la la la.

BEGIN FLASHBACK ARC

Chapter 2
Three years earlier
Bridget at home in Missouri with family. Description of family life, etc.

Chapter 3
Two weeks later
Some sort of community event (dance? something like that) where she sits with Michael, hint hint he’s shallow. Hint hint so is her family. Michael gives her a book or something that he thought was “pretty”.

Chapter 4
Two days later
Reads book, it blows her mind, tries to explain it but no one gets it, first real solid inkling of wanderlust.

Chapter 5
One day later
Has a sort of existentialist breakdown, makes plans to leave Missouri.

Chapter 6
One week later
Leaves Missouri. Is awkward but determined. Stays in a couple towns, locations TBD

Chapter 7
One week later
Gets into Chicago, creepy hotel, finds Gimbal poster and enough money for a ticket, decides to go, goes and sits down. MEANWHILE, Gimbal gets all pissy about performing, thinks about his wife leaving him, et cetera.

Chapter 8
That day
Performance. She’s blown out of the water. Sneaks down to the front of the theatre to try and see the magic stuff. Gimbal takes a liking to her, decides to take her on as a road assistant since she has nothing to do. Bridget goes back to hotel, meets other guest and tells her about new career as a magician’s assistant.




Chapter 9
Two weeks later

On the road. Learning tricks. Shows a serious knack for illusions. Gimbal lets her on as an assistant, first show, big success, she’s found a place where she belongs, la la la.

Chapter 10
Three months later

A few months later, she and Gimbal are BFFs, though he seems suspicious of her. She is probably falling in love with him, more or less. Tour has moved to Atlantic City, Gimbal gets a contract to play a show there every night for a month. A few days into the show a clockwork mouse breaks, he gives it to Bridget to fix. She does, and the next day he is gone. The theatre manager says that she will have to complete Gimbal’s performances, or else the company will owe everything back to the theatre. She does, and of course it’s spectacular.

END FLASHBACK ARC

PART TWO

Chapter 11
Two and a half years later

With Michael gone after saying that magic sucks, Bridget is totally bummed. She is up on her extended contract, so she closes the show and saves the money, while getting odd jobs on the boardwalk, like working at a soda fountain. Spends her extra time trying to figure out magic tricks without the aid of props. Notices cute blonde girl (May) sitting outside the Psychic booth across from the soda fountain.

Chapter 12
Two months later

Rainy day, May comes in to the soda fountain. She and Bridget get to talking. She reveals how she’s too scared to know her fortune but she still wants to find out anyway, she was a former winner of the Miss America contest a year back but has fallen into obscurity and stayed on the boardwalk anyway. More magic practice.

Chapter 13
Five days later

More flirting, more magic practice. Bridget has been trying to stay awake in order to make her unconscious more active in her conscious life (she doesn’t say it that way though). The girls go out to dinner and get cozy, there’s a kiss before Bridget passes out from exhaustion.

Chapter 14
The next day

Bridget wakes up in May’s room. Awkwardness followed by making up, just-being-friends attitude. Bridget thinks that she has enough to start rehearsing a stage show. May confesses about her financial woes to Bridget, and Bridget decides to let her stay in the guest room of her apartment.

Chapter 15
Three weeks later

Couple weeks later. Still working on magic act, quits soda fountain job and May takes her place there. They are living pretty cozily, though still just friends. MEANWHILE May finally gives in to her curiosity and goes to see the psychic. The old woman gives her a reading and tells her about her fear, lack of self-esteem, and says that it is all caused by a blockage to her heart (she doesn’t say it that way though). May comes home a bit half-crazed and shaken by the reading, Bridget comforts her and they just end up, well, you know.

Chapter 16
One month later

Happy couple-time! Though they don’t think of themselves as a couple. La la la, they’re still happy and all so that’s good. Bridget is ready for the magic act, and May is eager to be an assistant. So they rehearse a bit and everything seems to go fine. May keeps going back to the psychic, but doesn’t tell anyone what she hears there, though the readings seem to disturb her slightly.

Chapter 17
The next day

First performance of new show. Blows people away, but Bridget loses control of herself, accidentally setting the stage on fire and nearly killing May. May gets put in the hospital and then comes home, does not blame Bridget but still seems shaken by the event. Bridget, totally obsessed with her own guilt and disturbed by her own ability, leaves in the middle of the night.

PART THREE

Chapters 18-23
The next six months

Letters organized by month from Bridget to May. Describe the places that that she visits, the people she encounters, and especially the revelations that she finds and the new acts of magic that she is able to perform. Letters get more and more lovery-dovey emotional and confused and less logical and straightforward as time goes on, but not too much yet...these first five months are still mostly dominated by reason.

Chapter 24
A few days after the last letter

Returns to Missouri. Her family is overjoyed to see her, and don’t seem to be angry at her for leaving, especially since she has found her own success. She meets Michael again and he doesn’t realize even when she tells him just what an impact he has made to her life. He is only a few days away from getting married, so her family insist that she stay for the wedding.

Chapter 25
Three days later

Bridget has spent the last couple days trying to reconnect with home and she can’t really do that. She opts to leave in the middle of the night before the wedding so that she won’t get stuck. Her father finds her about to leave and tells her how hard it actually was for them the first time, and that it was wrong of her to leave them. However he does not object to her leaving this time, and they have a generally loving father-daughter moment before she goes off.

Chapters 26-28
The next three months

More letters from Bridget to May, explaining her reactions to the family visit. The letters are more manic, more emotionally written. Bridget begins to convey a real sense of love for May, and expresses how much she misses her and how wrong she feels in leaving. The magic becomes bigger and more abstract, suggesting that Bridget’s abilities go beyond the simple manipulations she thought she could do.

Chapter 29
The day after the last letter

In Las Vegas, Bridget finds a man fallen in the gutter, drunk and ill. When she realizes that it is Gimbal, she takes him to the hospital and then rents him a room to rest in. He explains to her how he lost most of his money, became alcoholic, got arrested for attacking his ex-wife’s husband. Explains more about their relationship before the divorce, how she was an assistant that cheated and left him.

Chapter 30
One week later

In taking care of Gimbal, Bridget has rekindled her affection towards him. Though he is still not well, he seems happy to see her. Finally, she asks him why he left. He replied that he was both afraid of her abilities and wanted her to have opportunities for herself without the influence of another magician. He explains how what she does isn’t illusions, but real honest-to-god magic, because she thinks that it is real and that somehow makes it real. He proves this by showing her the clockwork mouse that she fixed all those years ago. The inside of the mouse is still in shambles and doesn’t seems to be capable of working, and yet the mouse works better than any of the clockwork ones. He admits that he has always loved her, but that he also supports her relationship with May, and tells Bridget that she should go back to her. A few days later he is dead.

Chapter 31
Two days later

After sorting out Gimbal’s affairs, Bridget writes one letter to May, declaring that she is finally going to Los Angeles, but that she wants to come back to Atlantic City as soon as she has visited LA, but only if May will let her come back. She begs forgiveness, summarizes her trip and her meeting with Gimbal, explains how she feels about May.

PART FOUR

Chapter 32
One week later

Bridget arrives in LA. Finds place to stay. Should echo her first day in Chicago, though now she is more worldly. Gets a hotel room, wanders around, sees the Jazz Singer, explores around the studios, hears the name Mary Camden thrown around as she is apparently a former beauty queen and a new starlet. At the hotel she learns that a woman had come to see her, but did not leave a name, just a message asking her to stay in her room in the earlier parts of the next day.

Chapter 33
The next day

Bridget waits as per instruction. The woman who shows up is May, who moved to LA ahead of Bridget, knowing that she was going to be going there, and had her mail forwarded from Atlantic City. She did not get the last letter about Gimbal yet, so Bridget tells her, and May is at first cool with her, but then forgives her, though their relationship seems platonic at this point. MEANWHILE May goes back to her new Beverly Hills home and reads the Tarot cards that the psychic woman gave her when she left Atlantic City.

Chapter 34
Three days later

Bridget and May go out to lunch while she is shooting her new film. May suggests that Bridget use her skills in motion pictures in order to create special effects. Bridget explains in more detail to May just what she is capable of. May seems interested but also concerned for Bridget, and is secretly afraid that Bridget’s obsession about controlling her abilities is nothing more than an excuse to not stay in one place at a time.

Chapter 35
One week later

Bridget has her audition at the studio, after rehearsing her “effects” for the past week to make sure that they will be safe and work in a studio. The studio heads are stunned by what she can do, and offer a handsome paycheck, with the exception that she will be credited under a pseudonym, Herman Waite (Gimbal’s real name). Bridget and May go out to celebrate Bridget’s success, and spend the night together. Two days later, Bridget moves into May’s apartment.

Chapter 36
Three months later

Bridget is living happily, occupied both with her new job at the studio and her newly renewed relationship. She still practices the magic privately, but is no longer intimidated by it. She seems to have influence over most of the elements around her. MEANWHILE, pressure from the studio department forces to May to lie somewhat about her relationship with Bridget, and to create a pseudo-romance with her current co-star.

Chapter 37
Two months later

Bridget is still kept busy, but is feeling jealous of May’s co-star, especially since publicity seems to require him to come over to their house often, as well as be at every event or dinner that they attend. Bridget asks May if her getting her own house would help to ease the pressure from publicity, to which May reluctantly agrees. Bridget buys a house down the street from May’s. The two discuss how, when May’s contract expires in a few months, they could find a few investors and executives in order to fund their own studio that would exclusively feature Bridget’s effects.

Chapter 38
Three months later

The two women have found a few backers for their studio, and have scouted out locations for it in Beverly Hills. On the eve of May’s contract expiring and the night of the wrap party for the film that her and her fake boyfriend starred in together, Bridget has a crisis of conscience. She goes to May’s house and when she’s not there, Bridget waits for her to come back by randomly setting out the deck of tarot cards that May keeps on her table. The results seem to show that she is destined to be alone, so she panics and goes home to pack her things for another journey.

Chapter 39
The next day

May, having figured that Bridget was at her house the night before, confronts Bridget just as she is finishing her preparations for leaving. She begs Bridget to stay, but Bridget refuses, saying that her magic is still too dangerous to fund an entire studio for, that May would be happier with her fake boyfriend, that her life would be easier if Bridget wasn’t an active part of it, and that she is destined to be alone. May replies by bluntly declaring her love for Bridget, and that she can only be destined to be alone if she allows herself to. Bridget replies that her feelings are the same, but that she is still to worried about herself to be with someone. May replies that she’s staying with her anyway. The two agree to go to Europe or something for a few months while the studio is being constructed.


Next thing to do is character summaries! Then fleshing out the chapters. Those letters are gonna be hard to write.