Thursday, January 30: Femme Fatale
BLISSFUL BLANKS
by Deborah Elliott-Upton
After all the wonderful craziness of the scurrying around for the holidays and right before the New Year officially begins (along with those pesky resolutions!), I’ve learned to take time to breathe. Usually, I am content to sit quietly and read. Today I find myself feeling more like an empty sheet of white paper or a blinking cursor with no thought of moving to another space. I am a blank.
As it happens so rarely, I am not unhappy about this numbness. I am like a battery needing to be charged. The craziness of the past few weeks has caught up with me and I need a rest. The downtime of the last week of December is welcome. The frenzy of the holiday season has to end before the next whirl of a New Year can begin.
We have a calendar full of blank spaces to fill. Possibilities are as endless as a young child’s questions, a teenager’s access to angst and thoughts of what might have been.
To every good ending, a new beginning can emerge.
Most of us have watched a movie or read a book and said something psychic like, “I see a sequel in the future.”
A sequel is a continuation of story utilizing the same characters, as in the “Back to the Future” movies. There is a fine line between what is considered a sequel and what is a series. Ian Fleming’s character James Bond had many adventures portrayed in books and movies in a series. While one film or novel may have continued with the same characters, they are not sequels, picking up where another left off. Instead, they are separate, stand-alone units that include familiar characters.
Our sequel continues as mystery writers and readers unite, both enjoying the others company. Where will we end up next year? We don’t know. It’s one of the most intoxicating mysteries of life.
As one year relies somewhat on the history belonging to the year previous, we are likely to repeat some familiar themes in 2011. Opening a new book to page one of the new year, we are about to embark with a clean slate, ready to make it whatever we choose while using what we have learned in the past.
A blank page is a blissfully perfect place to start.
Loved this piece. Evocative, sincere, and thoughtful. But…
I disagree with your claim that series aren’t sequels. I think they are all sequels. The word “sequel” simply means “that which follows,” and was originally applied to mean the followers of some cause or purpose. Subsequently it came to mean one’s successors or descendants, and was usually used in the plural to mean a continuous line of succession or descent.
Its literary meaning popped up in the 16th century: “The ensuing narrative, discourse, etc.; the following or remaining part of a narrative, etc.; that which follows as a continuation; esp. a literary work that, although complete in itself, forms a continuation of a preceding one.” (Big surprise: the quote is from the Oxford English Dictionary, which after the Holy Bible is my personal Bible, as most of our Gentle Readers will probably be aware. Let us just say that if I only had three desert island books, the OED and HB would be two of them. The third would be a complete Shakespeare.)
In the dictionary sense, every book in a series is the sequel to its predecessor(s).
OK, maybe I got some points for pedantry. But the truth is that none of this matters in the long run. The only thing that really matters is whether a story is worth telling.
Actually, I like the distinction. I write several series of stories but i have recently written a story which is intended as the one-an-only follow up to a stand-alone story. It is a sequel but not part of a series.
Certainly a sequel doesn’t have to be part of a series, and a series doesn’t have to consist of sequels, e.g. if it’s a single serial story rather than a succession of stories. But independent stories that follow another story are all sequels, no matter how many of them there are.
So what about a 13-episode TV show? Are all the episodes sequels to the pilot? I’d say that in a technical sense they are, but that since a TV show is usually measured in seasons rather than in episodes, that the whole 13-episode corpus should be considered essentially one work. In that case, the episodes are only parts of the whole and not sequels at all.
I’m not very mysterious when intoxicating myself.
For such a blank page Ms. Femme Fatale you sure got a series of replies which constitute sequels (in my opinion) as they relate to one another.
As for the 13 series tv show, I think they are series as not many can stand alone on a given evening much less a season. They all leave you hanging each week and even at the end of a season.
I think it’s all apples and oranges anyway. You can have stand alone stories with other stories having the same characters but not having anything to do with the previous story.
So is that a series of sequels? Or serial sequels.
One would think I need that intoxicating brew right now!
As always, enjoyed the article.
Then there’s always that odd litle word “prequel…”
A favorite, The Prisoner, could illustrate a difference. The first two episodes were definitely ‘sequential’ as were the last two. The rest could be shown in any order in between and, in fact, were broadcast in different order in London and New York.
Happy new year, Deborah!
What difference?
Episode 2 of The Prisoner depends on episode 1 to make sense. Episode 17 depends on episode 16 to make sense, which concludes the series and precludes subsequent episodes.
It makes little difference what order the others are viewed in as long as they appear after 1 and before 16.
Should one group be called serials and the other sequels or something else if order makes a difference? I don’t know, but I strongly prefer reading Elizabeth Peters or Lindsey Davis or James Patterson novels in the order the authors intend.