What goes around comes around…

January 31st – just squeaking in under the wire to write the blog post that I challenged myself to do once each month for the first quarter of the year.  I was thinking of writing something else entirely when an Armitageworld friend brought this to my attention:

If I had to paint a picture of my reaction to the publication of this book…a sequel 20 years in the asking…it would be something like this:

Once upon a time, almost four years ago, Jazzbaby and I found out that we both had really enjoyed Anne Rice’s The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned.  Rice is perhaps best known for her vampire novels and I’ve read and enjoyed a number of the adventures of Rice’s generations of vamps, but I really, really loved The Mummy, so it was fun to talk about the book with someone who also shared another interest with me.  *cough*  This other shared interest led us to a common Armitageworld occupation – dReAmcasting.

Jazz and I worked our way through the main characters in The Mummy and by the end came to the conclusion that Richard Armitage would be a great choice to play an ancient king turned immortal wanderer who still suffered acutely from all too mortal emotions and decisions.

Looking back, I stand behind all of our dReAmcasting choices, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the new book so I can read it with Richard Armitage in mind as Ramses the Damned. Move over Matthew Clairmont (as it happens, apparently that role has been taken anyway) there’s a new supernatural being in town!!

DReAmcasting Richard Armitage…

Last night, I was chatting with a couple Armitageworld friends about various and sundry happenings.  A conversation about “Banana-gate” over in Hiddlesphere led to a conversation about Anne Rice’s (writing as A.N. Roquelaure) Sleeping Beauty series.

This transitioned into a discussion of Ms. Rice and her multiple mentions of Richard Armitage as a member of her dream cast for any future film iterations of The Vampire Chronicles (she has mentioned RA as being suited for both the characters of Lestat and Louis…I’m not sure about Lestat, but broody Louis is right up the Armitage character tree.)

On the topic of Anne Rice, it came out that at least two of us were very big fans of another of her novels,

Can you guess who’s piercing blue eye I’d like to see peeping out of Ramses’ wrappings on a movie poster?

It is a fantastic story…set in Edwardian England and Egypt.  It’s a veritible case study in human folly as it twines together themes of greed, lust, wrath, envy…I haven’t read it for a while, but I’m sure that I can find all seven.  With talks of a third film version drawn from the vamp corpus, I expressed my longstanding desire to see The Mummy come to the screen.

Let the dReAmcasting begin!

Julie Stratford – the female protagonist of the story…

Source

We like Natalie Portman…she embodies a sort of deceptive fragility that encloses some serious acting chops.

Julie’s urbane but increasing desperate cousin Henry Stratford?

Left: Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Source) Right: Aidan Turner (Source)

I’m leaning toward Rhys Meyers for the boozy Henry.

Here as Capt. James Nicholls in War Horse (my cap)

We were in agreement that Tom Hiddleston would be great as Julie Stratford’s fiance Alex Savarell, Viscount Summerfield…all pleading eyes and genial charm!

Who then could play Alex’s father – Lord Eliot Rutherford – attractive to Julie despite being a contemporary of her father’s?  Hmmm, fiftyish, British, lordly, sexy

The Fiennes has it…does he ever!

Ralph Fiennes is perfect for the sexy, but cardiac impaired Elliot Savarell, Earl of Rutherford.

One actor came immediately to mind to play the female antagonist of the story…Cleopatra (yes, that Cleopatra.)  Beautiful, brilliant, but dangerously damaged…who can, and has done that?

She does dangerous and damaged really, REALLY well!
Source

Who else but Angelina Jolie? (she’s also the PERFECT age for the role!)

There are several other minor roles, but that pretty much covers all of the major characters with one exception…the title role of course.  I imagine that you have a pretty good idea of who we immediately hit on to play The Mummy – Ramses the Damned…a tall, strikingly handsome man with piercing blue eyes…

From The Old Vic

Well, duh!  Of course we picked Richard Armitage.  I like him a lot for this role….a whole lot.  Ramses is a conflicted character…an immortal with a lust for life, but a huge amount of angst about his past.

 

If you haven’t read The Mummy, I encourage you to do so…and get back to me with your casting suggestions…I think we have a winner here!  So there you have it…in the immortal words of Jazzbaby:

“This could be the single sexiest movie ever.”

 

et alia: So you want to write RAcy fan fiction? Caveat scriptor or “Don’t try this at home!”

As a fiction reader, I have always been drawn to authors who pay attention to details.  One of those details is plausibility of situations.  Obviously, the range of what is believable varies by genre.  Science and fantasy fiction push the boundaries of believability deliberately, challenging people to open their minds to new possibilities.  In more straight forward contemporary fiction, and especially historical fiction, it seems to me that at least basic plausibility is necessary.  If I can’t understand why a character would do something or if I can’t believe that the action is even possible, I generally lose interest in the story.  “Death is in the details…”

Since they inhabit the same general corner of my brain, my reading preferences were close by when I began writing.  Over the years, I’ve probably read more than my fair share of erotic fiction.  Looking back, I realize now that the bulk of what I’ve read falls into the “Romance Novel” category, with fairly euphemistic descriptions of sex.  I did take a foray into BDSM fiction in college.  I was a huge fan of Anne Rice at the time, reading everything of hers I could get my hands on including the Sleeping Beauty Trilogy written under the pseudonym of A. N. Roquelaure.  At that point in life, I was aghast, titillated, but aghast.  I’ve since learned that what was so shocking to me at 21 is pretty vanilla in comparison to the variety of erotica that is out there.  Erotica is a rapidly growing literary genre today – the enormous mainstream popularity of the Fifty Shades series illustrates how far it has come.

But I digress…I was talking about basic veracity in fiction writing wasn’t I?  When I started to read RAcy fan fiction, I often found myself wondering if particularly acrobatic positions were humanly possibly without double joints and a spotter.  (I’ve long wondered the same thing about some of the positions in the Kama Sutra.)  When I started writing my own stories I decided that in addition to believable basic elements of the story, I’d like to know if the intimate positions I was about to put my characters into were actually possible.  Enter the caveat scriptor:

Some of you may remember me complaining about an injured knee a few months ago.  The official story, the one I told my doctor and everyone else with the exception of my RA (Research Assistant that is – that’s my husband for writing research purposes 🙂 ) and my BFF, was that I slipped on some ice in my driveway.  I did slip on some ice, but that only aggravated an already injured joint.  The real story was that I was testing out a prospective “storytelling device” and sprained my knee.  The moral of my story is that before you try to test out “veracity” of this variety, make sure you stretch!

PS…I determined that this “device” was imminently believable for my characters since they are in much better physical condition than me 😀

PPS…if you’re considering a foray into erotic writing of your own, you may find Cosmopolitan magazine’s take on the Kama Sutra:  The Cosmo Sutra, quite useful!