27 Story and Plot

Hello to everyone I met at the Bangor Authors' Book Fair or whatever its name was! It was fantastic to meet you and talk to you. I have so many great memories from that day. Truly, I can't shut up about it. 

I put the books up for sale on the emmaburns.org website under Merch with the same prices I had at the book fair, cheaper than through Amazon. It costs $12 to ship Priority with their envelopes so that's what I used for shipping price. But if you're within about half an hour of the Bangor area, I'll drop books off for free. If the system fights you on that and insists on shipping, just email me and we'll figure it out. 

That event was so much fun, but now I am a pale shadow of my former self and can only lie about going "unnnnnh" and doing absolutely nothing. So between that and family events I'm wrecked.

Too much GOING PLACES and DOING THINGS yet AGAIN. I did more of that in the past week than in the past year. I'll have to tell you about the Duncan Phyfe sofa from like 1830 at the latest that I re-dislocated my shoulder wrestling into the house wrapped in a tarp (the sofa, not me) during a torrential rainstorm. Absolute madness. Cannot use my left arm without loud crunching, especially after my dog tried to remove it from my body lunging at her cousins yesterday. Anyway Duncan is a whole thing. I threw a mushroom fleece over it, even though it's going to get reupholstered. I say that in passive, but I'M going to REUPHOLSTER it once I can use my SEMI-DETACHED LEFT ARM.

I would not have said I'd give my left arm for a Duncan Phyfe sofa, but here we are.

I am on the job.

Today's episode is about story versus plot, what they are, why we need to think about both of them, and what they both mean.

I just read Hart Hanson’s novel The Seminarian yesterday, so it’s very much on my mind as that book does both extremely well.

Story and plot: different things. You could have the same plot tell very different stories. For example, depending on whose role you’re focusing on, things will change. But also think about how very many stories contain a hero’s journey plot but tell wildly different stories about the characters going through that plot.

Other topics: what is up with season six of Agents of SHIELD? The 40/40 draft continuing. This excellent novel The Nerve that I have to release from my clutches finally. And more!

Sacred cheese of life!

 

 

Fail!

I'm super sick and tottering around all confused. You do not want me to record a podcast right now. Why is everything so confusing? Why are my arms being weird and shaky? Nobody knows.

I slept half the day on the world's biggest ottoman (one I built from scratch) in the living room, with the dog cuddled up against me. She loved it. I kind of loved it. Head and shoulders on the purple loveseat. Then I had a fantasy of turning my headboard into a loveseat kind of thing, upholstered and with arms built on. I absolutely could make that happen. Or adapt an existing loveseat to become that. 

Well, not right now. Right now I'm baffled by applesauce.

I might not make it this week. I apologize. Especially to new listeners, but you probably came from the book fair and know how overwhelming and germ-filled that was (alas, it's true) so you get it better than anyone. 

I ate some applesauce and feel like I might shuffle off this mortal coil. I'm sure it's fine. But. Ooooh. 

Here, enjoy this photo of the most comfortable dog in the world on the aforementioned giant ottoman. And an afghan in progress you might recognize from The Icarus Triptych and Mazewood. I had to invent it to match the one Cole has. So there we go. 

26 The Boy Who... and modern epistolary

This week's episode will be about Meg Cabot's three modern epistolary romance novels Boy Meets Girl, The Boy Next Door, Every Boy's Got One.

Finished the draft of Summerlands, looking at the next book to finish, already in progress

Let there be great rejoicing! Particularly from those who are tired of hearing about this particularly agonizing drafting process, haha. Seriously, I usually write a draft straight through in one or two months. This is not normal for me. It's because it's an old story idea that's been written out a bunch of times.

I've been listening back to old episodes precisely to get those insights about the draft that I had while talking it out during the recording, but immediately forgot. 

I've been working insanely long hours on this all week. But don't give me too much credit. It's really because my hands hurt too much to keep reupholstering the loveseat. I know! Stop using furniture as a displacement activity from your main displacement activity!

Anyway I have a few more things to fix and then have to let it sit before I reread and start the rewrite.

I want to fix/finish the novel 40/40 next, but ought to tackle the short story collections and send them out into the world. 40/40 is short for Forty Days and Forty Nights. I don't even know how long that draft is right now. Ooh, 66K words. 

The route to a finished draft is: make it wildly epistolary, the way our lives actually are right now. This is a new freshman so she lives in a world of textual communication. Imagine a transcript of that day with all the text included. Podcasts (I have one on right now), texts, email, assignments you write, TikTok and all the other social media, Tumblr because that's the one I actually know and it's pretty text-based versus video or image, comment threads on things--oh boy!--feedback on assignments, transcripts of therapy sessions, notes taken in class (I just found some I wrote), letters from psychos, official documents, but most of all those texts sent back and forth between friends.

Meg Cabot does this SO WELL in the Boy series. Boy Meets Girl, The Boy Next Door, Every Boy's Got One, and The Boy is Back. Actually I can't remember whether that last one is still epistolary. 

Meg Cabot is absolutely brilliant at these romances because she writes characters who are so funny and so blind to certain things and so mad about other things and so on. People are bewildered by each other and confused and irritated and full of lies. I love the lies so much. 

I'm going to read those three but I might have donated the fourth as I did not really like it, though I can't remember why. It didn't fit with the first three very well. 

If I could write something CHEERFUL again, that would be amazing. Lord, Summerlands was grim, though it had funny parts, but overall it deals with very stressful things. Mandate: make it stressful and all, but also cheerful and fun. OKAY.

Remember how much fun the Thrushcross books were, even when they dealt with big stressful things? Yes. Do that. 

Because I'm me, I put this up on Amazon already as a preorder. WHY. It's a first draft. I will have to push this date, unless I miraculously rewrite this draft, edit, proofread, get a proof copy in the mail, fix whatever I missed, and get this up in time. If so, it'll be out January 6th. WHY NOT?

 

25 Agents of SHIELD and Identity

The entire series of Agents of SHIELD is about identity. No, really. Have a look at episode one, or any other episode, or watch the whole series over and over like I do. It's everything I love about YA and scifi, even though sometimes the season arcs are kind of ludicrous and things seem to go off the rails. Who cares! I love it!

Episode posts at 6:00 a.m. Eastern on December 2.

How is it December??? They put Thanksgiving too late in November this year.

Thanksgiving also makes an appearance in this episode.

Hope you had a good one!

 

 

24 The False Friend

Episode 24 is now up!

It's about Myla Goldberg's novel The False Friend. I wrote it up ages ago so you can read that here.

But read the novel instead! It's available via ebook so you don't even need to acquire stuff. HIGHLY recommended.

It follows Code Name Verity logically in that it's about best friends but also it's about narrative we can't trust, though for very different reasons. Such a good book. 

Update: rereading the novel, I'm surprised to find that I had forgotten nearly all of it. Very funny in a book about memory. Also, the main character is outrageously self-involved, which comes across slowly, but ultimately seems to be what's ruining her life--all of that stemming from the day she lost her best friend, Djuna. 

A friend and I were just talking about this, how it's not the emotion that gets you, it's the maladaptive coping mechanism that you evolve to avoid having to feel it again. I'm only about a third of the way through, but Celia seems to be keeping everyone in the world at sixteen arms' lengths to avoid that kind of loss again. It's very human, but very bad for her. 

I can't believe I forgot so much about this book. This is like forgetting that Code Name Verity took place in WWII. Or had planes.  

The last few pages of the novel absolutely made my hair stand on end. It's the most chilling thing in the world, to realize how much you've misread someone, and to see them for who they really are. To see all their casual cruelty and understand a world of cause and effect you had no vocabulary for twenty years earlier. The person dunking a cookie into a coffee cup that isn't there completely freaked me out. You know that moment when someone you're talking to slips up and reveals they're not all there, or they believe something truly bizarre, or their understanding of reality is wildly different from the rest of ours? It's that. 

Myla! She's so good at what she does!

ALSO: I mentioned my friend Sumara's website, where you can find an amazing voice actress! One of her audiobook samples is a book I started years and years ago about the god Apollo. Visit her at sumarameers.com! Click portfolio and scroll down to audiobooks. It's the first one, the last example in that one. 

I hear there are going to be more audiobook reading samples of my books to come. I am SO EXCITED! It's astonishing to hear my own words this way, especially from someone with such a lovely voice.

 

Bangor Authors' Book Fair and Literary Festival Saturday December 14

 

That lumberjack Paul Bunyan is everywhere in Bangor. There's a massive statue of him across from the casino where I worked briefly, a statue that I DID NOT NOTICE until someone pointed him out. Three stories tall! Look, I was focusing. 

If you're in the area, which you're not, come out and see me at the library Saturday December 14th! I will be selling books and giving away a ton of stickers. No, really, I think I bought 300 or so little stickers about reading and so on. But you should also buy a book. Books are good! We like books. 

Oh heck, I need to make postcards of each one with a pitch on the back. WELL, FINE.

I've been entertaining myself making cover art for books that aren't finished yet. Not a waste of time as it is extremely motivating. This one reminds me of some publisher I can't place. Also I wish the font were sort of sculpted, know what I mean? It's a work in progress. Are they not centered on each other? They're not. UGH.

That's the bay or inlet on the ocean as seen from the summer house I lived in one whole fall, winter, and spring. Pretend it's the lake in Summerlands. Pretend I leveled it so the ocean won't all fall out the left side. 

Here's a possible cover for The Geographic Cure, which is either in Acadia or Bangor City Forest. Nobody knows. The Geographic Cure Volume One could be ready if I read and edit and format it this weekend then upload and struggle with that and order a proof copy and get it proofed and ordered in time, which I could easily have done if I'd thought about it in advance, which I didn't. It's going to need black blocks for title and author also. Or green? Blue? We'll figure it out. I'm doing this in MS Paint so options are limited, though I really enjoy (as seen above) matching font color to the image colors.

Books! Sacred cheese of life!