Get excited! The long-promised Penelope Clearwater Revival has arrived. You can expect two new things from my blog:
1. More frequent posts. Now that I have more followers, and not all of you are people who know me and are willing to put up with my slacking, I feel I owe it to you to post on a more regular basis, perhaps weekly. I can’t promise these will be long posts–after all, I’m supposed to be working on my dissertation as well–but that may be for the best. (“Amen,” says the chorus.)
2. A better organizational scheme. Yes, it’s true: I’ve had this blog since December 2011, and only just this past weekend did I start adding categories and tags. I did this retroactively for all my posts, which was a fun exercise for me; I especially enjoyed seeing my most commonly used tags as calculated by WordPress. (“Charles Dickens” was the winner by far, but there were some surprise runners-up. Who knew I’d written so many posts about Moneyball?) I’d love your feedback on this endeavor–if you notice a common theme among two or more posts that I haven’t seen, let me know so I can add a tag or possibly create a new category.
I hope these changes will enhance both your and my enjoyment of the blog. So that this post won’t be completely boring, here are some fun “if” statements. I’d love to hear how you’d complete the statements for yourself.
1. If I could write and illustrate a comic book series, it would be called . . . The Adventures of Sigyn, Intra-Yggdrasil Diplomat. I’ve actually thought quite a bit about this. Sigyn is a minor character in Norse mythology whom I discovered while reading Edith Hamilton. She (Sigyn, not Edith) is Loki’s wife. So I thought I could make a pretty fun comic series–and also send positive messages about world peace and women’s empowerment–out of the idea that Sigyn is going around trying to negotiate satisfying compromises between her husband’s world domination schemes and the contrary purposes of people like Odin and the Avengers.
2. If I wrote a screenplay, it would be called . . . The Darlings. I’ve thought even more about this one, and I might really write it someday. The Darlings is about Wendy, John, and Michael after they’ve grown up. To my knowledge, this particular Peter Pan variant hasn’t been done before. The basic premise: Michael doesn’t believe they really went to Neverland or that it’s even real (he was too little to form his own memories of the event); John knows it really happened but has only negative memories and doesn’t like to talk about it; Wendy has happy memories of Neverland and is still enamored with Peter Pan but has married a man who’s the opposite of Peter in pretty much every way. Plus there’s a bunch of other stuff going on with careers, university studies, romance, and sibling rivalry. Maybe I’ll write this when I’m finished with my PhD.
3. If I were on a roller derby team, my derby name would be . . . Tess of the Disturbervilles. This is never going to happen, folks, so you can just use your imagination.
I would definitely go see The Darlings. And even though I am not the world’s biggest roller derby fan, I would certainly cheer for Tess of the Disturbervilles…you would cause mayhem.
I decided to follow you because you said “Penelope Clearwater Revival”. That was enough for me. “Tess of the Disturbervilles” is just icing on the cake.