Grand Plans

I rewatched Spaceballs the other night, reminded that I hadn’t seen it in years by the announcement of the decades-delayed sequel. Despite the fact that it has a fair amount of swearing in it, I decided to try it on my not-quite-seven-year-old, reassuring them that it was essentially like a long joke about Star Wars. (We love Star Wars, individually and collectively.)

Some of the jokes landed: my kid loved the opening crawl and thought it was brilliant that Spaceballs stole that from Star Wars; they loved the endless opening scene with Spaceball I, the Spaceball Star Cruiser that passed across the scene for, like, minutes. Barf, obviously, was a massive hit; Pizza the Hutt got a good reaction, even if the name didn’t land. (We don’t have Pizza Hut in the UK.) Many other jokes - combing the desert, for example, which I thought was hilarious when I was nine, jamming the signal (another fav from my childhood), even Yoghurt, specifically why Yogurt was funny - flew well overhead. Most of the other film references did as well, and put me in the unenviable position of then trying to explain Lawrence of Arabia to a kid.

But what my kid loved most is that they recognised elements of Star Wars in Spaceballs; a few days later, when watching Monsters Vs Aliens, a character swears by yelling “Oh, spaceballs!” and they nearly fell over laughing. It’s one of the most rewarding parts of being a parent, watching those connections build up inside someone else: Spaceballs is funny because it’s based on Star Wars; something else is funny because it is based on Spaceballs. Connections are being built, like red yarn on an evidence board, inside that tiny brain every day; it’s so much fun to see what happens when those lines get twanged.

Writing, for me, is a process of red-yarn-twanging, over and over and over again. I build the story, connect characters and places and events, and layer in all the other stuff, pulling them all together into one gigantic, mostly cohesive whole. Stay For A Spell, for example, contains (often very oblique) references to Plato, Aristotle and Dante; Forster, Sayers and Woolfe; Tolkien, the Grimm Brothers, and D&D. And billions of other things I didn’t even realise I was including (and probably still don’t). I hope it’s enjoyable even if you don’t get, say, the Lawrence of Arabia joke (pace, Spaceballs), but I hope that if you do it makes you laugh the way the Spaceballs joke in Monsters Vs Aliens made my kid (and me!) laugh.

It’s probably no surprise that I loved Mel Brooks’ films when I was young; I grew up on Westerns (my dad was a fan), so Blazing Saddles landed, even if I didn’t fully get the social commentary until I was older. I watched tons of classic horror (again, thanks to my dad), so Young Frankenstein also made sense as a parody, while still being enjoyable in its own right. While I can’t argue that Robin Hood: Men in Tights is a first-rate classic, it’s still fun, and the jokes come so fast and so furiously that you don’t have time to begrudge the film’s larger issues until after it’s over. My mom still claims that the original The Producers is the funniest movie she’s ever seen, and there’s a whole generation of boys (I only ever met boys who did this, though I’m sure there are girls too!) who can quote History Of The World Part 1 more or less from memory. Brooks’ genius is that he never, ever just sits on a single reference; his films might be a parody of some other film, but that’s not all they are: they’re piss-takes and love-letters and gentle ribbing and pointed commentary all rolled up into one. Mel Brooks freaking loves movies, even as he’s making fun of them. And he loves making movies about how much he loves movies. It’s great stuff.

I suppose my point is, as I amble gently towards it, that I love books, especially fantasy novels and fairy tales, and while my books are not in any way spoofs or parodies, I take a huge amount of pleasure in including endless references to other books while writing. And, rewatching Spaceballs with someone who’d never seen it before gave me a moment of clarity as to why that is. I love books, and I love making books about how much I love books. Long may it continue.

Speaking of books! There’s going to be a cover reveal for Stay For A Spell on July 16th! This will be for the North American edition; hopefully we’ll be able to follow with the UK cover soon.

And proofs have been heading out into the world! It’s been awesome - and terrifying - to be tagged on Instagram. Thank you so much, early readers!

Just one more thing: “We will grow old, but never grow up, and we will love dinosaurs forever” - Ray Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury promised this to each other when they first became friends.