Charlie Brown: The Hero’s Journey

If you love “A Charlie Brown Christmas” as an ideal children’s story, you might not want to read this. Analyzing something beloved can take the magic out of it. If you’re afraid of that, you shouldn’t even look at this. Don’t peek.

***

SITUATION NORMAL: The Peanuts kids, in this case ice skating. Some children’s stories have children interacting with adults or magical creatures, but this will only have children.

CHARACTER IN A SITUATION WITH A PROBLEM: The situation was described above, with the overall context of Christmas. Our protagonist is CHARLIE BROWN. He feels depressed, but the deeper problem is he does not know the meaning of Christmas.

SIDEKICK: Linus, his friend who carries a security blanket, listens carefully to Charlie Brown. He will turn out to be the sidekick.

ANTAGONIST/EARLY CONFLICT: Snoopy, the antagonist, snaps Charlie Brown from ice skating into a tree. Note the importance of trees in this story.

MENTOR: Lucy plays a number of roles, but here as an amateur psychiatrist, she is the mentor. She tells Charlie Brown that his recognizing he has a problem is important.

HERALD/DENIAL OF CALL: Lucy is now outside her psychiatrist booth. She tells Charlie Brown he should be the director of the Christmas play. He is not sure.

DARKNESS PRESENTS ITSELF: Charlie Brown observes Snoopy decking out his doghouse with a multitude of decorations. Snoopy hands him a flier that announces the true meaning of Christmas is in decorations, and a contest will have “money, money, money” as the prize.

ACCEPTANCE OF CALL: Charlie Brown tells his little sister Sally that he will direct the Christmas play.

ALLY BECOMES ADVERSARY: Sally tells Charlie Brown she wants a multitude of gifts. As an alternative, she would accept a lot of money. Charlie Brown runs away in frustration.

FIRST INCITING INCIDENT: Charlie Brown arrives as the director.

THRESHOLD GUARDIAN: Snoopy howls disapprovingly at Charlie Brown.

FIRST TRY/FAIL: Charlie Brown tries to direct the play, but the children only want to do their own dances to music.

TRUE FACE OF DARKNESS: Lucy, as an antagonist, reveals to Charlie Brown that Christmas is a “big commercial racket. It’s run by a big eastern syndicate.”

MIDPOINT/SECOND INCITING EVENT: Charlie Brown decides to get a Christmas tree to establish the right mood. He sets out with his sidekick, Linus.

SECOND TRY/FAIL: Charlie Brown and Linus continue on their quest. Linus points out the numinous: searchlights in the distance. They enter the land of the fantastic: shiny aluminum Christmas trees. Charlie Brown sees a little wooden Christmas tree. He thinks it needs him, and out of compassion, chooses it.

Charlie Brown and Linus return with the little tree. The other children react with anger. Then they laugh at him.

REVELATION: Defeated, Charlie Brown cries out, asking if anyone knows what Christmas is all about.

Linus goes on stage, and in a soliloquy, tells the actual Christmas story. (This is Luke 2:8-14.)

Charlie Brown walks out with his little tree, happy.

REMINDER OF DARKNESS/THIRD INCITING INCIDENT: Charlie Brown sees Snoopy’s doghouse, which is extraordinarily decorated. He sees that Snoopy won first prize. 

THIRD TRY/FAIL/DEATH: Charlie Brown takes an ornament from the doghouse and puts it on top of the little tree. The top of the tree keels over to the ground. Charlie Brown says, “I’ve killed it.” More depressed than ever, he walks off.

CLIMAX:

Sacrifice; Linus, the sidekick, sacrifices his security blanket to revive the little tree.

The children despoil Snoopy’s doghouse and decorate the tree with it, turning it into a glorious tree.

Adversary reverts to ally: Charlie Brown’s sister Sally participates.

Antagonist become ally: Snoopy allows his decorations to be transferred.

Charlie Brown returns, and is astonished to see his little tree is now glorious.

The children cry out, “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!”

RESOLUTION: The children sing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” verse 1.

***

In writing this, I was not trying to make people mad by referring to Snoopy or Sally as adversaries. I am convinced that the staying power of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is based on Charlie Brown going through a mini-hero’s journey. It is not just a series of cute scenes, like a couple of the lesser efforts of Peanuts’ specials.

So if you feel an irresistible desire to watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas” every year, there is a deep reason for it.

Movie Review: Back to the Future

Back to the Future was recently screened in theaters for its fortieth anniversary. Suffice it to say, I never saw it in a theater until now. As for the plot: Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), a cool high schooler, goes back in time from 1985 to 1955. Hilarity ensues. I can’t think of any way to summarize the plot without giving away too much. If you see it, remember to say “Calvin Klein” at a certain point.

So just to give a few “meta” comments: Through a stroke of genius, they used a Delorean as the time travel machine. It’s probably the most well-recognized time machine, at least in America (no offense to Doctor Who). When many people see a Delorean, they think of the movie.

It’s hard to describe how this movie affected the zeitgeist of the time. Grown men in offices would imitate Marty’s skateboard moves (with their feet on the floor). Women would talk endlessly about how cute Michael J. Fox was in the role. People in business meetings would talk about scenes in the movie not just before the meetings, but during them.

As a minor note, the phrase “Great Scott” had pretty much died out, but Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) used it a number of times, which briefly brought it back into use. For some reason, I didn’t like Doc Brown at all the first time I saw it on TV, but I liked him really well while watching it in a theater.

Back to the Future had a massive influence on the culture of the 80s. No other movie was as influential until The Matrix came along in 1999. If you’re not old enough to remember Back to the Future when it came out, just think of the impact of The Matrix.

image by LSDSL

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Hard Words

I am having the worst time with my science fiction manuscript in the terminology and names.

I first called their version of the internet the ethergrid, figuring no one would combine an ethereal term with an abrupt term for something physical. But some years ago a company called their new product the ethergrid. I had to put in a lot of thought on what new word I would use. I finally settled on a word in common use, but which no sane person would use for their product. The common theme here is finding a term that is not copyright or trademarked.

I came up with a fruit called chuppa. But I didn't do my homework before using that in my story. So it turns out there is a fruit called chupa in the Amazon rainforest that looks nothing like the chuppa I describe. Also, it can be a vulgar slang term. So, after a little research, I changed it to a word that some people already use as a harmless slang term.

The name of the planet in my story was Vallannadren, and the inhabitants called Vallannans. But a gamer invented a fantasy land called Vallanna. I could not believe it. A friend suggested I use a name in his family that begins with a V. I was tempted, but decided not to. One might wonder what Finnish people named Härkönen think of the Dune book and movies. So I simply made up a name I can’t find on the internet.

Two hapless ensigns will be sent down to the planet. To humiliate them, their shuttle gets renamed "Space Cadets," and they have to use that as their call sign. But people pretty much agree that Robert Heinlein invented that term.

Now I have to invent some other demeaning term that has not already been taken. Believe it or not, Space Kittens, Space Puppies, Space Pigs, Space Beavers, and Space Unicorns have all been used. (I wouldn’t use Space Unicorns anyway, since they couldn’t handle the controls with their hooves.)

So be careful when creating terms for your invented worlds. All I can say is the internet is your friend for finding out if a word is taken.

PNWA Conference 2025

I attended this year’s Pacific Northwest Writers Association conference, organized by hard-working volunteers to help aspiring writers. Instead of a typical picture of the hotel, here is the pool I had no intention of taking the time to use.

Before the serious stuff, here is the omelet I ordered. It had cheese, mushrooms, bacon and pineapple. Yes, that’s right. The waitress laughed at my asking for pineapple.

The main conference room. Right now, tables are designated to discuss mystery, fantasy, science fiction, romance, etc.

These three writers have all had books turned into movie or TV scripts. (Sorry, I no longer have access to the conference guide, so I don’t have their names.) Once the contract is signed and the writer is paid, the writer no longer has any control of the story. The woman on the left was distressed when the main character in her novel was killed in the movie version.

The main events for many writers were the pitch sessions. Editors and agents sit along one side of a series of long tables. Writers stand in line for the desired professional. At the sound of a bell, the person at the head of a line has four minutes to walk forward, sit down, and pitch a manuscript. The usual advice is to summarize one’s novel in thirty seconds. I took forty-five, since I had to describe the science fictional setting. The rest of the time is spent answering questions from the professional.

This is half of the long conference room

I had an advantage, in that I could say that two developmental editors had looked over my manuscript. This showed I was serious about becoming a writer (it cost over three thousand dollars), and that I was willing to make changes (I deleted three scenes).

Here are the two agents I pitched to, Katie Reed and Lydia Caudill.

I was almost blinking

One of them requested I send pages to her. Which one? That would be telling.

I recommend going to conferences where one can pitch. It can be nerve-wracking, but since I had done this before, it wasn’t bad at all.

Book Review: Oshi No Ko Volume 5

I don’t think I’ve reviewed a manga before. I became interested in this one because the blurb said it was about a manga author who becomes horrified about how it is being adapted for a play. Looking inside, at one point she says, “This script … is full of characters saying things they’d never say.” (p. 82).  

This was intriguing, but I didn’t buy it for months, because I try to avoid impulse buying. I’ve bought only two other manga in the past, and after some months ended up selling them to a used bookstore.

So by the time I decided to buy it, the series had finished with Volume 24. I was warned on a book site that other readers had ordered this past issue, and they had received what were obviously used books, though they had been advertised as new. One buyer said his copy was damaged.

I took the risk, and received a copy in new condition.

Oshi No Ko Volume 5 by Aka Akasaka and Mengo Yokoyari is quite engaging, because it goes surprisingly deep into the nature of acting and having one’s writing adapted.

The main character is actually Akane, a seventeen-year-old actress. (She’s the one on the cover.) She reveals that actors for plays get about a month to rehearse. “We meet at noon, rehearse for six or seven hours, then go home at night.” (p. 43).

Her conflict comes from the direction and the script. She is told to be intense, like the other actors. She knows the character in the manga is quiet and has a lot of inner conflict. But the script changes her to a bold, unsubtle character (which explains the direction she was given). She concludes, “He’s flattened her character into a plot device.” (p. 56).

A friend encourages her to speak to the script writer. Surprisingly, Akane says, “We can’t break the chain of command.” (p. 65). She explains that if the cast gets instructions from more than one person, they become confused.

Akane gets an opportunity to speak to the script writer and the director together. The script writer says it is hard to portray a character’s feelings without a lot of acting, so he had to simplify this complex story. But he is open to fix things to help Akane.

The director cuts this short, saying, “Don’t spoil the cast.” (p. 69). He tells Akane her role is to be a “persuasive stage device.” (p. 70). Akane accepts this.

The author of the original manga becomes a main character for a while. But she is so anti-social and eventually so angry, she is hard to sympathize with. She is so upset with the play adaptation, she wants the script writer fired.

 Akane, who now sympathizes with the script writer, tries to prevent him from getting fired. Does she succeed? Take a risk and buy a copy.

Book Review: Susan, You’re the Chosen One

Susan, You’re the Chosen One by Lauretta Hignett

Susan Moore is a middle-aged woman going through a difficult menopause. She used to live an opulent life, but her ex-husband Vincent divorced her and is now living with an intern less than half her age. Susan’s meager existence is crammed into a half-studio apartment next to her building’s roof access. One night she sees four young people standing on the ledge. They look like Lord of the Rings elven warrior cosplayers. She tells them to get down.

 Later, they come a knocking. Cress, who looks like she’s just past her teens, assumes Susan is the Chosen One. Susan sends them off. When they return, the oldest, Prince Donovan (whom Susan thinks is hot, though he is in his late twenties), takes the lead. Connor simply makes her apartment door disappear.

Susan assumes this is another hallucination. And this is one of number of things that makes Susan so interesting. At first, we were very sympathetic to her, and ready to hate her ex-husband Vincent. But we learn more about her in dribs and drabs. Susan suffers from “Menopause-induced paranoid schizophrenia, intermittent explosive disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, acute psychosis, and rage.” (p. 19). Concerning the divorce, she thinks “I’d lost him, and it was all my fault.” (p. 22).  Even more disturbingly, “I’d hurt him. I’d almost killed him.” (p. 23).

At one point, Seraphina visits, the intern-turned-fiancée. A delicate young woman, she says she and Vincent were concerned about her and just wanted her to get better. Susan becomes so hostile, Seraphina “flinched, like a beautiful doe in a meadow startled by a loud noise.” (p. 147).

So this is not the average urban fantasy. Usually, we would expect the protagonist to look like the young Fae girl Cress, complete with a long sword strapped to her back and a dagger at her hip. After all, who doesn’t enjoy reading about some Buffy beating down some creature? But she and the Fae Prince Donovan and their two companions are supporting characters. Or, the protagonist could be more like Seraphina, who would eventually become bolder. But she’s not it, either.

How many urban fantasy novels have a middle-aged woman as the main character?

But is our protagonist good? Yes—mostly. Her ambiguous nature due to her past keeps us curious. And what hallucinations did she have? When the supporting characters tell her she is the Chosen One—among other things, that means she has inherited the bloodlines of all the species, including fae, humans, and mermaids—she thinks she is having an interesting episode.

When Susan is forced underwater, she finds she can breathe because she is part mermaid. She even talks a sea witch into revealing her spark stone. But all the time she thinks she is having a long hallucination. It’s not until halfway through the novel, when her two fae companions visit her office and talk to humans there, that she realizes all this is real.

As far as the plot is concerned, Donovan’s younger brother needs to be stopped. He wants to swallow all the spark stones—yes, swallow—and that would be bad. But the plot hardly matters. What matters are the funny interactions between Susan and her new companions.

 Cress describes one of the spark stones, saying, “It is a light blue, clear, like your mortal sky on a cloudless day.” After searching for a while on her phone, Susan waves an image of it at them. When asked where she found it, she replies, “On eBay.” (p. 44).

Donovan wants to steal this spark stone, instead of buying it. Susan knows the owner and warns he has a rottweiler as a guard dog. She tries to describe it, and Donovan concludes it is one of the “hell-hound familiars” that guard some of the fae. (pp. 48-49).

At Susan’s workplace, a sleezy guy knows about her mental issues. He threatens to use that to get the promotion she deserves. She calls him a “Loki wannabe.” And so, “Loki?” Cress gasped. “He is here? In the human realm?” (p. 62).

When going to lunch, Donovan says, “Make haste, woman. Gather your things.” (p. 86.) I’m sure all women like to be talked to that way.

Astute readers will notice these amusing quotations are from the first hundred pages of the book. But these moments don’t stop there. It simply becomes harder to come up with a pithy quotation without giving much more context.

For something less amusing, there is the moment Donovan confronts the jerk who is trying to steal Susan’s promotion. Donovan grabs him by the throat in the classic way, then says, “From this day forth, you will never look directly at the woman you call Susan Moore. You will not make eye contact.” (p. 128). The sleazy guy is so terrified, he does not contact human resources.  

Overall, Susan, You’re the Chosen One by Lauretta Hignett is a fun read with an unusual protagonist. Susan does use foul language, which her four companions do not, which is a disadvantage. But all the fish out of water experiences—on both sides—are constantly amusing.

Happy 4th of July

 Bellevue Square

Reprise of "Jury Duty – A nun, a security guard, and a writer walk into a jury room"

I'm going to write a detailed book review that I'll try to submit to a magazine. In the meanwhile, here is a reprise of a previous post. The only thing that needs correcting is that the underground tunnel no longer has buses go through, only light rail. 

NZ if you're out there, if you find the web version of this, you'll see a contact form on the right. 

_________________________

So I was on jury duty for the past two days. Here’s a hint: bring plenty to read and/or a laptop. It mainly consists of sitting around, waiting to see if you’ll be called in to be part of a jury pool. But first, let’s look at the scenery. First a friendly picture, then a scary one.

The tunnel also handles light rail

which accounts for the tracks

A Metro bus went from near my home all the way into the Seattle underground bus tunnel, where there was a stop right below the courthouse. After climbing the stairs (or using the elevator) one emerged with the King County Courthouse less than half a block away. That was handy today, since it was raining.

Now look at the structure below. Does it look like a huge rectangular block is connecting two tall buildings? You’re right. It’s a skybridge, but with no windows. It goes from the courthouse on the right, beyond the building on the left, and ends at the County Jail one building beyond. This is like Con Air, but without the planes. Prisoners can be frogmarched back and forth without using squad cars. This saves time, since downtown traffic can be bad, but it also prevents the prisoners from escaping during laborious loading and unloading from vehicles. If something bad happens in the skybridge, massive steel doors can be slammed shut, trapping the prisoner inside.

Why so serious?

If this doesn’t make you imagine interesting scenes, maybe you shouldn’t try being a writer.

Here’s Seattle City Hall, about a block from the Courthouse. It really looks beautiful during sunny weather, and sometimes they have people selling fresh produce—an offshoot of the famous Pike’s Place Market. Alas, it’s December, so the only noteworthy thing was me taking pictures.

Just beyond it is the Columbia Tower. It’s the tallest building in the state of Washington. It has numerous little restaurants on the first floor, so if you do jury duty in Seattle, I highly recommend it for a fast lunch. I had a nice turkey pot pie at JJ’s Gourmet Burgers.

I call it the Dark Tower

Guess why

So on to jury duty itself. Something like a hundred and forty of us waited around to see if we would be called to a jury pool. The waiting can take hours at a time, so I got a start on a new novel on my laptop (I won’t reveal the title yet). Then forty of us get called in to a jury pool. The lawyers take turns asking us questions to see if we’re biased.

On the way in, the potential juror in front of me recognized someone who happened to be sitting on a bench outside the courtroom. They were so jovial about being in the Courthouse I thought, “Oh great, they’re fellow criminals.” But after he sat down to the right of me in the jury pool, it turned out he was a security guard. They can be asked in a lot to be witnesses to altercations, so his friend waiting outside the court was probably also in security. I felt better.

As the lawyers tried to weed out biased people, they asked questions that didn’t apply to me, such as whether any of us had ever been shot at, would we use a gun in self defense, whether we had bad experiences with police officers. You can probably guess at some of the arguments they were preparing for trial by these questions.

A woman behind me said in a soft voice that she could not imagine using a gun under any circumstances, even if someone was shooting at her. Based on short bios we had filled out on ourselves, the defense lawyer asked her if she was a nun. I wondered what he meant, then he went on to say that he had trouble recognizing her as a nun, since she wasn’t wearing a habit. This was somewhat ironic, since I had watched the stage musical version of The Sound of Music last week and had just ordered the soundtrack.

Based on the answers to the questions, each attorney is allowed to excuse a certain amount of jurors, each hoping to end up with a jury beneficial to his side of the case. Enough people before me were excused that I ended up in the top twelve. Then, even though I replied to none of these general questions, the prosecuting attorney decided to excuse me from jury duty. That puzzled me until I guessed that he wanted the security guard to be on the jury, thinking he would be more likely to convict the defendant. I didn’t see him afterwards in the jury waiting room, so I think he stayed on and became part of the jury for the trial. 

As a last note, in the waiting room for potential jurors, I saw what I thought was a whiteboard for people to write on. It turned out to be some sort of art. If you see some rectangles on the lower left and some blotches of color in the upper right, you’re correct.

I still don’t see why I can’t write on it

There was another piece of art that was simply a photo of a door slightly ajar. Really, that was all there was to it. I wanted to take a picture of it, but since it’s near the entrance to the ladies’ room, I thought would get accused of being a pervert trying to take pictures of women inside. In that case I would have stayed longer in the King County Courthouse, but not as a juror. 

Analog Review

 The March/April 2025 issue of Analog had a number of mystery stories.

The novella “Murder on the Eris Express” by Beth Goder was a somewhat gruesome murder mystery with incredible comic relief by a couple of bots. The captain turns off his ship’s AI, then is found dead a few hours later. The AI, named Mo, is upset at the death and its own lack of memory. The grooves around the captain’s neck will be the key to solving the murder. Meanwhile, Cleaning Bot 444 is disgusted at all the blood and other human debris in the captain’s quarters. He vacuums it all up and disposes of it.

“Mr. Palomar goes to Space” is a funny short story by Hayden Trenholm. Mr. Palomar likes to fill out surveys. Then he is whisked off to Cape Canaveral. He is disappointed to find out he was chosen to go to space as an experiment, because he is very average. At one point he is taped to the wall of a space station to make sure he does not interfere with the professionals.

Kate MacLeod’s novelette “Heat Death” is a vividly written mystery. Although the murder victim is from Mars, this is not really science fiction. He could simply have been from a distant place on Earth. 

The most immersive novella is “The Return of Tom Dillon” by Harry Lang. A colony on Mars has entire cities under pressurized domes. The body of a woman is found frozen and buried from the waist down outside the domes. Detective Hector Kovack has his own stressors, since his brother murdered their mother, and Kovack had to kill him in a shootout. He drinks too much. But he is a dogged investigator, asking questions others don’t, and discarding false leads. He ends up acting more like a private investigator, disregarding rules in his search for the truth.

It's easy to blame a small terrorist group that has been operating on Mars, but Kovack points out the MO doesn’t match the terrorists. Despite the terrorists, Mars has had a low murder rate. A funny moment in this grim story is when a detective from Earth named McGill asks if this could be a copycat killing. The Mars detectives haven’t heard that term before. After the Earth detective explains, Kovack thinks, “What kind of asylum did McGill come from?”

So overall, if you like mysteries, either buy this on a newsstand or find it in a library.