If you’re wondering what I think about the series… well, let me say this. Though it’s set in a high school, if I had high school kids, I wouldn’t want them to watch it.
In other news, we’re expecting about a foot (more) of snow this weekend.
I think I can speak for all Minnesotans when I say this has gone beyond a joke.
Sofia Helin (Crown Princess Martha) tries to persuade Kyle MacLachlan (Pres. Franklin Roosevelt) to support the Norwegian government in exile, in a scene from Atlantic Crossing.
I happened to check the IMDb page for Atlantic Crossing, the coming miniseries I helped translate, yesterday. I found the above picture there, and thought it might interest you. I happen to know, through my high-level personal connections in the industry, that this scene was filmed in Czechoslovakia, last month. My boss, who’s one of the script writers, sent me a picture of herself sitting at that desk, in the set replica of the Oval Office.
Don’t rush to pencil in a viewing date, though. The thing apparently won’t be released until early 2021 — and that’s in Norway. Heaven knows when it’ll be available here.
Oslo, where I work. OK, remotely. But this is how it looks while I’m working. Photo credit: Håkon von Hirsch@hakonvh
Sorry about not posting yesterday. That will happen from time to time, under the new regime. My schedule is not my own.
Last week I got zero assignments. Null, as we say in Norwegian. In the resulting vacuum, I went a little nuts. I developed a sudden mania I’d never had before – I went out to lunch every day, sometimes to restaurants I’d never visited. I felt I needed to discover my options, up my dining game a little. It passed, thank goodness. I ain’t made of money.
Yesterday a job came in – and, not surprisingly, it was a
big one with a tight deadline. I always get a little nervous when I take one of
those on, because I’m still uncertain of my powers. I live in terror of not
meeting a deadline – causing my boss to fail to deliver on a contract, bringing
the whole business down in ignominy. In fact, I’m better than I think, and I don’t
generally have much trouble. I got this job done before I expected to.
And today, another job and another tight deadline. But I
finished the first draft before supper, and I’ll give it a polish this evening
and send it off, so they’ll have it in Oslo when business starts tomorrow. No
sweat.
But I did sweat, a little. I’m a worrier.
General observations on the Norwegian film industry from my perspective: I’d say 60 to 80% of my work is on scripts concerning spunky single mothers trying to make it in a man’s world. (Even the one I can tell you about, Atlantic Crossing, is about a woman raising her children alone – though she’s a princess without many career worries.) That scenario appears to be what they think people want to watch just now. I suppose it indicates that the bulk of the audience, both for movies and TV, is women. Which is probably true. But is it cause or effect?
Not to say that these scripts are heavy with radical feminism
or man-hatred. They’re generally pretty good in that regard. It just seems that
the production companies want to see stories through women’s eyes.
Strangest new year of my life, I think. This one’s “driving me alee” (as I have a character say in my Work in Progress. I’m not even sure it’s a real nautical term).
It’s not a bad new year. Quite the opposite, so far as I can tell. I’m having a good time. But it’s going too fast.
A new year is a tug on the sleeve from Mortality, telling you, “You’re running out of time.” If my life were one of those rolls of receipt tape in a cash register, I’d be seeing the red borders they put on those things, down near the core, to warn you the roll is running out. It doesn’t mean the end is imminent. It would be wasteful to change the roll now. But it means you should check your supplies, to make sure you’ve got another roll ready, because The End Is Coming.
The other day it occurred to me – I’m living the dream. All my life I’ve wanted to write from home for a living. And that’s what I’m doing now (translating is a form of writing, and one I enjoy). I don’t dread Mondays anymore – in fact, I prefer weekdays to weekends in this new dispensation.
Which means the weeks whiz by.
Back when I was toiling my way toward an ultimately useless master’s degree, I had one consolation – the slowdown of time. Einstein is famously supposed to have explained General Relativity by saying that a minute goes a lot faster when you’ve got a blonde in your lap than when you’re sitting on a hot stove. (Nonsense, I think. It’s true, but that’s a psychological and perceptional phenomenon. It has nothing to do – so far as I understand it – with Einsteinian relativity. Much evil has sprung from this error.) Those two-and-a-half years in the salt mines of academe felt like five to me. There was some satisfaction in that, at my time of life. Now, every week feels like a day. And I haven’t got that many weeks left.
The solution, of course, is obvious. I need to suffer more.
In 1944: Left to Right: Crown Prince Olav, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, Eleanor Roosevelt, Crown Princess Martha, and Thomas J. Watson.
I don’t know how many readers of this blog are not also my friends on Facebook. If you’re one of those, you’ve gotten this news already. But if you’re not, I now have clearance to tell you about one of the translation projects I’ve been working on. It’s a miniseries called Atlantic Crossing, and shooting begins in December. Here’s a fresh article from Variety, announcing the casting of Kyle MacLachlan as President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The story is about the Norwegian royal family during World War II, focusing primarily on Crown Princess Martha, who was married to the future King Olav V of Norway, and mother to the current king, Harald.
After the German invasion, Crown Prince Olav and his father, King Haakon, fled into exile in England. Martha took the children to neutral Sweden, her native country, where her uncle was king. But the machinations of the Nazis there led her to make the “Atlantic crossing” to the U.S. There she was welcomed by President Roosevelt, already a friend. Roosevelt enjoyed her company very much – which gave her the opportunity influence him to assist the Allies while the U.S. was still neutral. Much of the drama of the series involves the way Martha, a shy woman, moved out of her “comfort zone” to champion the Allied cause.
The issue that will probably raise the most public interest, though, is the question of Martha’s exact relationship with FDR. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s marriage was well known to have been in name only, and Franklin loved the company of women. There are many rumors about affairs, and Martha is the subject of some of them. Continue reading Watch for ‘Atlantic Crossing’→
Today has been, and continues to be, a heavy work day. I have an assignment from Oslo, not for a translation, but a sort of research job. I’m scanning through a very long document, extracting relevant passages into a separate document.
Not uninteresting. And it will take a while. Which is nice, since my time for translation will be curtailed when I go on jury duty. That promises a healthier paycheck at the end of the month.
Today’s Writer’s Aggravation:
There’s an article in the current Writer’s Digest about finding time to write, and writing faster. And it’s a good article, all in all. Lots of handy tips that are likely to be useful to aspiring authors.
What annoys me is the closing line. It goes like this: “And with nine minutes a day, you can arrive at The Sound and the Fury (97,000 words) in just under four months.”
That’s inspiring, but overpromising, friend. I’ll grant that it might be possible to finish a first draft in four months, employing the methods suggested. But that first draft will not be a novel. You’ve still got another year (or six months, anyway) of revising. It’s great to finish a first draft. I’ve often said that getting that one thing done is (to my way of thinking) the most important milepost in the process of writing a book.
But books aren’t written – they’re re-written. Heaven help the agent who gets that 97,000 first draft in the email from some nine-minute-a-day writer who thinks that’s sufficient.
Surprise! I don’t have a book review today. I binge-watched Daredevil yesterday, to take my mind off… things.
One-paragraph review: Worthy of the first two seasons, superior in some ways to Season Two. I thought the climax a little contrived, but it was good. Odd to have a superhero season without the hero getting into his suit once.
I shall tell you how I live my current life. This schedule may change; in fact it’s likely to change.
My life kind of centers on free-lance assignments coming in from Meteoritt, my Norwegian employer. The business day in Oslo starts while we’re asleep in Minnesota, so one of the first things I do when I wake up (which is pretty much whenever I want to) is check my email for a notice. It’s always in the form of a request – sometimes a personal request, sometimes a general appeal to the group. Sometimes I miss out on those, though, since the local Norwegians have a time advantage. But the boss often offers me exclusives, because she likes my work. I have no complaints.
If I get an assignment, there’s generally a deadline. And I’ll already be a few hours behind. So my day is generally devoted to that work. I do take frequent breaks though (which accounts for the amount I’ve been reading lately). I can’t do translation steadily for several hours – it just wears me out and my body rebels. As the day goes on, though, I find I can usually work longer sessions, and the translation – for some reason – seems to get easier in the evening. And into the night.
If there’s no assignment for the day, I can work on my translation for the Georg Sverdrup Society. I’m translating quite a long piece for the next Journal. And, of course, I can work on The Elder King, the coming Erling book, though right now I’m pausing (which one needs to do sometimes when writing fiction anyway) to wait for feedback from my First Readers. I’m not sure if we’ll get the book out before Christmas, but we’re trying.
I’m living my life right now like a… I don’t know. I need a good metaphor. Like a duck hunter? I don’t know when a job is coming in, but I try to have my shotgun ready and my eye on the sky. The email arrives – “Can you get this episode done before the end of the business day tomorrow?” (8 hours ahead in Norway) – and I clear the decks for action. An episode revision takes about a day to do, but it can vary. I don’t plan on doing much of anything else that day.
I live a life of action, like a TV hero.
Yesterday I actually did have something else going on – one of those rare occasions when a family member drops in to crash on my sofa for a night. It went fine. I was able to go out to dinner with him and still get the work done by about 9:00 p.m. I wasn’t able to make much conversation with my guest, but hey, that was a plus for him. Continue reading How we live now→
I forget what the word “blogging” originally meant. I know it involved a conflation involving the word “logging,” but I can’t remember where the “b” came from. In any case, blogging used to be a pretty big deal, but now only a few of us are left, systematically throwing messages in bottles out into the digital sea, hoping somebody will find one of them washed up on a virtual beach.
The original blogs, as I recall, tended to be rather confessional, like personal web cams, but involving only psychological voyeurism. Not many do that anymore (though James Lileks still excels). But occasionally I still cast up the odd personal log here, and today will be one of those days. Mostly because I’ve been so busy I haven’t had much time to read, so I can’t do a book review. I may finish the book I’m reading now in time to review it tomorrow.
Today was my last Monday at my job – though I’m informed they’ll be wanting to bring me in as a contractor now and then in the next few months, to do the stuff nobody else knows how to do. In my free time, I’ve been surprisingly busy. Odds and ends that demanded attention. The first inchoate stirrings of a job hunt. I haven’t spent much time on the couch watching TV, though it’s what I really feel like doing.
Friday I got a message from the woman at Meteoritt, the media translation company in Oslo, asking me if I wanted to translate an 18-page document, due Wednesday. I said sure. No problem. I’ve begun to get a handle on how long it takes to translate a script, and 18 pages is no big deal. Script pages, as you probably know, are mostly white space.
But it turned out it wasn’t a script. It was what I believe is called a “treatment” in the industry. A treatment (unless I’m mistaken) is a narrative of the story organized in paragraphs. One paragraph per scene, I think. Which means that a treatment is a pretty dense document. 18 pages of a treatment is a chunk of verbiage. Continue reading Bilingual orientation→
Today I got my complimentary copies of Viking Legacy, the book I translated.
It’s always a strange and wondrous thing to finally handle a book you’ve only known in the abstract up till now. I’m not the author this time (in fact there are bits I don’t entirely agree with). But I worked long and hard on it, and did a lot of polishing. The translation still looks a little rough to me, especially at the very beginning, the worst place for it. The body of the text looks much better though. I like to think the “flaws” are the fault of the editors, but I’m not entirely sure of that.
Anyway, it’s grown up and left the nest now, and I look at it, not as a father but as a sort of uncle, I suppose. I hope it does well in the wide world.
In point of fact, this is an important, groundbreaking book. If it finds its audience it will be controversial.
