Reviews have been coming out and it sounds like something I’d totally check out. Ok, that’s also because I’m a total Buffy nut and I think Amber is uber cool, erudite, and talented and all that. I mean, just read her blog. 

Death’s Daughter is an urban fantasy about a sassy heroine who wants to live a normal life but woke up to realization that she is the Grim Reaper’s daughter and that she must save her family (and perhaps the world) by completing three nearly impossible tasks in the realm of the afterlife.

I wonder, if you find out that you are Death’s daughter, wouldn’t you want to take a paternity test just to be sure?  Sorry, that’s so lame [the suggestion, not the book].

Update: There’s an awesome video of Amber’s Writers on Writing panel (taken on February 8 at the New York Comic Con) up at Buffyfest where she talked about the different media of writing and how blogging is changing the world of publishing. It’s pretty neat.Similar Posts:

None Found

Another person in that panel who has been working a lot is Amber Benson. Her credits include actor, writer, director, producer, singer, and humanitarian. She’s only 31.

From left to right: Amber Benson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Emma Caulfield (March 2008, PaleyFest)
 

I’ve been lurking around Buffy forums to read episode discussions and fans seem to love this girl even if she isn’t as well known as her costars, mostly because besides creating an endearing character on TV, she seems to be a genuinely nice person in real life. What impressed me is seeing the range of her work. The acting part seems to be the bread and butter (she’s been in some obscure movies I don’t think I’ll ever watch), but she’s also co-written comic books and books; wrote, directed, produced, and starred in two of her own independent films; cowrote and directed a cult animation called Ghosts of Albion for the British network BBC; written and presented her own stage play; composed and recorded two songs for her fans; and is about to release her first solo book series to be published by Penguin Books.

I would do anything to be able to have half of that. Well, anything that I can do, I mean, without having to pack a Zero Halliburton and travel the world to learn things. Anyway, I haven’t finished watching her first attempt at writing/directing – a movie called Chance (2002) – but I kinda like the opening monologue (voiceover):

All right, you live your life in a totally normal, full-on reality check kind of way. That’s good and cool. Things don’t get messed up. People you love hang around until you can’t stand them anymore. Things never change. But shit like that doesn’t happen in real life. Real life is just a movie with someone’s finger jammed on fast forward. The numbers change faster than you can count. When you’re a little kid, you never think you’re gonna die. I mean death is just some kind of esoteric thing you see on TV or read about it in a book. Then one day you realize what it really is, and nothing is ever the same again. From that day on, you’re f&*%ed.

Similar Posts:

None Found

Anyway, here’s an excerpt from an episode of, you guessed right, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. People in that show are depicted to be almost always self-righteous, which for some reason didn’t rub me the wrong way when it usually does, and Buffy, being the leader and the one carrying the greatest burden of responsibility, may be the most  pompous of them all, if rightly so.

Scene description:  Buffy is on patrol, waiting for a vampire to stake. When the vampire (Holden) turned up, he made himself known as a former classmate and the two engaged in a surreal conversation while resuming fighting with each other every chance they get. [From season 7, episode 7: Conversations with Dead People.]

BUFFY:
I have all this power. I didn’t ask for it. I don’t deserve it. It’s like… I wanted to be punished. I wanted to hurt like I thought I deserved. I sorta think—you know, this is, um, complicated. If you’d rather just fight…

HOLDEN:
(leans back) Tell me.

BUFFY:
I feel like I’m worse than anyone. Honestly, I’m beneath them. My friends, my boyfriends. I feel like I’m not worthy of their love. ‘Cause even though they love me, it doesn’t mean anything ’cause their opinions don’t matter. They don’t know. They haven’t been through what I’ve been through. They’re not the slayer. I am. Sometimes I feel—(sighs) this is awful—I feel like I’m better than them. Superior.

HOLDEN:
Until you can’t win. And I thought I was diabolical—or, at least I plan to be. You do have a superiority complex. And you’ve got an inferiority complex about it (laughs) Kudos.

BUFFY:
It doesn’t make any sense.

HOLDEN:
(sits forward) Oh, it makes every kind of sense. And it all adds up to you feeling alone. But, Buffy, everybody feels alone. Everybody is, until you die. Speaking of…(stands) you ready for our little death match?

BUFFY:
I suppose. (stands) Thanks, for listening.

HOLDEN:
Oh, you know, there’s some things you can only tell a stranger.

Similar Posts:

None Found

Where there’s life, there’s hope
Every day’s a gift,
Wishes can come true,
Whistle while you work,
So hard all day
To be like other girls,
To fit in in this glittering world.
Don’t give me songs,
Don’t give me songs.
Give me something to sing about.

-Buffy Summers

I’ve been thinking a lot about this song lately. I know, another sad song just by its lyrics. The irony of it is that the sadder I am, the more I crave for songs.  There’s something about haunting melodies that get me all the time. Even when I can’t relate with the exact lines, music touches me in away that mere words can’t. This, coming from someone who fancies poetry just a little too much. I can see myself in a deserted place, cross-legged in a yoga position and eyes closed under the Fig trees , mp3 headset in my ears. Geez, I’m watching too many fantasy shows.

Opening yourself to songs is not without ramifications, though. Sometimes they hit nerves you didn’t know you have. And that’s when you start to lose joy in happy songs.

But then again

Life’s not a song,
Life isn’t bliss
Life is just this,
It’s living.

You’ll get along,
The pain that you feel
Only can heal,
By living.
You have to go on living

- Spike

Similar Posts:

None Found

Reading episode shooting scripts, I was amazed how much input the writers have on the nuances of a particular scene. It’s not just about writing dialogues but even expressions and actions, which is not to say that actors don’t really have any creative input. The coming together of it all, the merging of talents and ideas, culminating in a single work of art for all the world to see, is something I’d like to be a part of.

Take my recent fascination with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example. [I know, it's an old show, that's why it's prominently featured at datedthings.com.] Here’s what Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com said about the show:

It’s pointless to spend much time wrestling with the question of whether TV can be art (of course it can be and often isn’t). But there have been many days when, after a particularly potent “Buffy” episode, I’ve found myself feeling vaguely off my game, my mind clouded with a gauzy, muted sense of dread. When a show jostles your equilibrium to the point of haunting your days or robbing you of sleep, when it finds a place in your imagination that also rubs, hard, at the core of who you think you really are, it starts to look like something more than what we simply call TV.

 

To be as effective a writer as those who are rained down by such compliments must be something so fulfilling. Another writer for Salon, Joyce Millman, described the show as

Buffy is an ode to misfits, a healing vision of the weird, the different and the marginalized finding their place in the world and, ultimately, saving it. … the show’s central themes [are] female empowerment, destiny vs. free will, the search for identity and the many varieties of families.

I agree to everything that has been said, but what I most appreciated about Buffy are the hidden and not-so-hidden emotional riches. You can look at it and go, “Wow! Tiny girls saving the world, cool!” and see nothing but that, and that would have been one objective – to have people enjoy watching the action unfold. But for those who look deeper into the many layers of meaning, the allegories, and the metaphors, the series has provided an entire universe of thought, so much so that scholars wrote tons of papers about it.  That’s what I love about the use of subtext; you can have one character go rummaging for an acne treatment, for example, but what’s really happening there in the scene is something bigger (like the demonstration of self-loathing perhaps?). Of course, there are times when subtext needs to be translated to text so as not to alienate the audience, and there’s a certain amount of satisfaction a viewer gets from being proven right when such things come into order.

There’s something about the play with words that fascinates me. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy, was described as someone who “writes people who are self-deprecating, pop-culture savvy, madly in love with wordplay, quick-witted, terrified of sounding pompous and with wells of emotion lurking beneath a shiny, protective layer of self-aware sarcasm” (Kristi Turnquist, The Oregonian). Which is why despite being so late in the game, I enjoyed his show immensely. I’m twisted like that. But at least it gave me my lightbulb moment, so I couldn’t ask for a better reward for spending hours and hours in front of the TV than that.Similar Posts:

None Found

Now if Fox will only give a nod to XF3 and Joss Whedon will seriously consider writing a fantastic script to a BtVS movie soon.Similar Posts:

None Found