Adaptation Alert! Anne of Green Gables

Ok, so, yes, 'Anne of Green Gables' by Lucy Maud Montgomery has already been adapted to the screen both in film and TV forms.  In fact, it's happened multiple times.  However, no matter how many times it has already been done there is one thing you need to remember: it is a classic, so it really doesn't matter how many times it's already been done.  Besides, new readers may never have seen the older films/TV series and while some will have no problem going back and watching older productions, others may prefer to watch a newer version.  After all, film/TV quality has come a long ways.  And so, here we are again awaiting a new adaptation of 'Anne of Green Gables.'  The new production is a joint effort between CBC and Netflix and was announced in January of this year.  As 'Anne of Green Gables' is actually a 9 book series (though the 9th was only published in its entirety for the first time only recently it was given to her publisher the day of her death), I don't know how much of the series they will be dealing with.  Often, they only do the first two books, so that may be the case here.  What I do know, is that it will be released on Netflix sometime in 2017 and will be an 8 episode drama (the pilot episode will be 2 hours long).  For more information, such as who will be directing, you can read this Yahoo! News article from August 22.

As a side note, they have some pretty big shoes to fill, as the older versions of 'Anne of Green Gables' (particularly the 1985 movie and is 1987 sequel) did a spectacular job. (Personally, I didn't much care for the book, yes I hear your gasps of horror; don't get me wrong, it's a lovely story, but it was assigned reading in school and, at the time, I found it a bit boring.  However, I did very much enjoy watching the '85/'87 adaptations of it.)  It will be interesting to see how this new one compares.  Hopefully, they do it justice. 

Feeling Extra Geeky

As the title clearly stats: I am feeling extra geeky right now.  Why? Because I have recently rediscovered one of my earliest hobbies (though at the time I didn’t know it had a name besides ‘craziness’)....... conlang.  For those that don’t know what ‘conlang’ is it is the art of constructed language ( i.e. all those crazy geeks that thought it would be fun to create their own language).  Yup, I was, and still am, one of them.  I have always had an interest in other languages.  To the point that I actually collect other (natural and fictional) alphabets.  My collection includes normal languages such as Cyrillic, Old Gaelic, various forms of Runic and Futhark, and even Cuneiform; but also Klingon, Romulan, Borg, Tengwar (for Quenya, Sindarin, and Mode of Beleriand), D’Ni, and several of my own invention.  Yup, I liked alphabets so much that I made several of my own. I then got the crazy idea (blame it on reading to much Tolkien) that, instead of just creating a new alphabet, it would be ‘so much fun’ to go the rest of the way and create a whole new language.  I worked on it for a while, but then regular life interfered and new hobbies emerged shoving this one into the background............  Until the other day when I was looking for books on font creation and came across this: ‘The Art of Language Creation’ by David J. Peterson.  I had already started back to work on the language (having some writing ideas that could actually use it) earlier this year, but it’s been off-and-on, however, after finding this book my interest in this is back with a vengeance!!  I’d already decided to use my language project as part of an alternative history/fantasy book project I’m working on, but now I have way more information than I’d had before about how to do it well! I know, as if wanting to learn Elvish (both Quenya and Sindarin) weren’t geeky enough, I had to go and jump the rest of the way off the geek cliff and decide to create my own.  Oh well! :D