After working with the two remaining Valley Stories (Victoria and Alyce) I realized enlarging Victoria just isn’t going to happen right away. The story I was trying to do stalled and I couldn’t seem to get it going. Any writer knows what that’s like and it’s abominably frustrating, especially on a deadline and with many projects planned. But stories have a will of their own. Perhaps I can pick it up after a while, months from now, but I have other books to deal with.

So I switched gears and dealt with the related issue of Alyce. I’m not sure that moving Alyce into Palladia will be required, because I’m only doing that to make sure it doesn’t overlap in any confusing or annoying way with The Prince’s Ball. As I’ve been popping back into the Prince’s Ball (so nice to be back) I am getting an idea that might just possibly make it separate enough that changing Alyce isn’t necessary. If this idea works, I might not have to change Alyce. In that case, I would release the story largely as the one that was published before, joined in a paperback to Victoria. (The two Valley stories other than Consuela could be packaged together.)

​The only difference would be very mild tweaks to update the fake-history setting to an actual historical setting. A historical setting is I believe what interested people about the story in the first place and the switch would be intuitive and a matter of a few sentences here and there. Another good thing about Alyce is that, unlike all other Milland versions, Lord Timson's castle is based on a place in Spain. So it would be effortless to make the story go with Victoria--actually more than it did in the original Valley stories release. Working with the story again has been fun and messing with the plot enough to have Lord Timson be from Spain made the story really interesting.
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Just a thought . . . planning . . . planning . . .
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And there will be more updates. 

With the 4th of May coming up—in other words, Star Wars Day—I’ll digress into a mini-review of a George Lucas movie. Although not Star Wars, Strange Magic was really fun, in part because it was filled with sly little references to all kinds of Disney-princess-movie clichés. Finding all these little pokes at the stylized, at times inexplicable, elements in the Disney Princess cult was more fun even than the actual plot of the movie. (Although it was pretty good—still humming, “Love. Love is straaange.”)

So here’s a list of things that recur in every Disney princess movie I’ve seen—some in one movie, some in another--and also in Strange Magic, though perhaps not in quite the same way. 

• The Prince (Roland) has no friends. The Princess always has “little” friends who are animals—the Prince doesn’t actually have friends even if he spends time with animated thingamabobs. Roland doesn’t have friends either, but instead of glossing over that fact, he is given 3 extremely motivated, obviously laughing-at-him fake friends. Aladdin is no exception, a whackadoodle genie being the definition, in my mind, of a fake friend.
• There are characters that literally serve no purpose and take up time. Why do we have gossiping mushrooms with swanky vintage theme music? Why do we have an unbelievably irritating comedy duo with a silly twist at the end about how one of them is actually a girl? Why on earth does that little elf guy have a friend who follows him around for about half an hour of action and contributes no character development? These aimless plots make me feel like screaming.
• The King. The King. The King. If there’s a queen too, it’s parents. They are eternally stiff, off in some weird dimension about your personal life, and completely unreasonable. They always want you to marry “for the good of the kingdom,” but they also hate it if you show any actual interest in anyone. So what DO they want you to do? Someone ought to hit any animated parents on the head with a rolling pin.
• A weird woman who resembles no one living dominates the screen. This woman is often shown opposed to the Princess, but in reality (at least in Strange Magic) it’s the men who don’t like her. This woman is belligerent, overconfident, extremely unusual, and often screams a catchy piece of music about her very vague goals. Actually, in this movie we actually have two such women—such an embarrassment, but not of riches.
• There is a little village. This village might be trolls, it might be peasants, it might be forest animals—but there is always a little village that yells at you in chorus about your personal life. They know who you should marry, yes they do. They think you are really are so silly, really such a funny one, you don’t know you’re supposed to marry, but they’ve got it all figured OUUUUT. They are bossy too. Very bossy. And they blatantly barely even know you so why are they so sure?
  

​I could go on and on, but that’s some of the highlights. May the Fourth be with you.

And there will be more updates.