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!

23 Code Name Verity and lies

This episode is up! 

Elizabeth Wein’s novel Code Name Verity is one of the best you’re going to find, so go read it before you listen to this because I’m going to spoil EVERYTHING.

ALL THE SPOILERS!!! Beware!

This is one of those novels where you can only get that first time reading experience ONCE. It is so worth it to read it unspoiled. Do yourself a huge favor and read this book.

Okay, then come back and listen, because there’s a lot of great things to say about it, including discussion of epistolary and unreliable narrators, but also outright lies in a narrative, how we know what’s true, how far we can go in wishing something wasn’t true even when it is (too far, if you’re me) and how much this book wrecks my life every time I read it. Oh, it’s so good. Oh, it destroys me.

I’m fighting Summerlands so hard but I WILL PREVAIL. Today I drove past two locations that appear in the novel in altered forms and got jolted by seeing both of them in reality instead of my fictional versions. One was The Lucerne Inn in Hancock ME and the other was the Dysart’s gas station at the corner of Rte 1 and 46. I lived near them one fall/winter/spring and totally lifted them as crucial locations for the book. A third location would be near there, down on Phillips Lake, but I didn’t drive down there because the fictional camps aren’t based on any real ones, just the general area.

I’m going to overcome this book draft. I am.

Sacred Cheese of Life!

 

22 Hammerfall and a bigger world

The episode is up!

I'm looking at the C.J. Cherryh novel Hammerfall, a completely wild story that starts with someone whose point of view is incredibly limited but then expands it over and over so the person repeatedly discovers that the world is completely different from what they had always known. 

This is such a mind-bending experience in a novel. I love it. Any time we get out of our tiny little worlds, we can replicate this, to an extent, but not the way people can in sci-fi. 

Unless we start thinking about fungus or slime mold, I suppose. They are all around us but so alien to us that it can completely blow your mind. I always want to write a sentient fruiting body slime mold civilization. But then I read A Mote in God's Eye at a formative age, apparently. 

The third mind-bending text in my mental list is Strange the Dreamer. If Laini Taylor ever gets over her frankly annoying obsession with rape, her books will get a lot better, but this one is excellent for taking a very limited point of view and expanding it tremendously. It has a lot in common with Hammerfall in certain important ways. 

I might be leading up to my next novel. Please oh please let it be a straightforward draft instead of this tortured experience that Summerlands always ends up being. I think I've finally gotten free of it, though. Thanks, podcast!

Sorry for going on and on about it in episode 21. It's literally the only thing happening in my life besides work and injury recovery and not upholstering things. I need to put a sci-fi epic on the tv (LOTR does this same world-expanding thing to the hobbits, btw) and reupholster these things right out of my life and especially out of my living space OMG.

Also features an undervalued desk in a shed in another county that turned out to be incredibly beautiful mahogany once I cleaned it up. And a lot about Finnish. And Finland. And the partitive case, which, much like the things discussed above, is something I didn't know that I didn't know, then knew I didn't know, then thought I got, then realized I really didn't get, then have just begun to grasp in a vague and inarticulate way. Why are the verbs that take the partitive so far: speaking a language, painting, fixing, cleaning, and realizing? THESE ARE MY VERBS. I bet teaching does too. Betcha. 

Sacred reupholstered cheese of life! 

21 Character Arc and Fangirl

Lots of discussion of how to resolve the problems with my draft in progress, not nearly enough discussion of Fangirl, one of my favorite books of all time.

This really helped jolt me forward on the work, though. Nearly done with the first draft.

Got draft problems? Send me an email at sacredcheesepodcast@gmail.com and I'll address them. It's so much easier when we have an outside view. 

Sacred cheese of life!

 

20 Outsiders

I think that fiction began articulating this well in the 50s and 60s, though I could be convinced it started earlier with the aftermath of WWII, or even WWI. I'll probably talk about alienation elsewhere, but this is about outsiders, particularly found family groups of outsiders, particularly in cult television series.

Outsider status is fascinating because everyone feels like an outsider while also fearing that more than just about anything, to the point that I suspect it has some kind of survival value to us as a species. Don't go off on your own! It's dangerous! Stay with the group where it's safe! It's so pervasive as a fear that it's easy to exploit, also. Threaten exclusion and you win.

In this episode I consider a lot of cult television shows in the context of the S.E. Hinton novel The Outsiders, the grandparent of them all. I also get into frontier thinking and all that American obsession with being the outlaw, not the establishment.

Lots of good material for my own writing here. I hope it's helpful to others. 

Sacred cheese of life!

19 Poker Face

I love this show! Another beautiful loser! Charlie has to lose at the end of each episode so she has to move on to the next place.

I have a lot to say about the show Poker Face. Some of it is structural. Some of it is character. Some of it is just viewing experience.

Let's start with what works.

Charlie! Highly engaging, empathetic, relatable, kind, cares about her friends, even the new ones she just met. This is so appealing. She picks up an obnoxious stray dog that won't stop barking at her. She befriends the obnoxious drummer boy who the rest of the band can't stand and kick out. She likes the old anarchist ladies who are kind of dicks to everyone. She's such a great character! She stops and talks to everyone along the way, people someone else might skip over or be rude to, such that this is a constant feature of solving her story of the week. She befriends everyone! I love her.

Also she sounds exactly like Marge Simpson. I don't know what to do with that information, except of course we love Marge Simpson. Maybe smoke less? I don't know. 

She's being Columbo, like really clearly is being Columbo, with a big sweater or jacket instead of his trench coat. So that might be part of the voice. It's so gravelly sometimes that it's distracting. And sometimes she's not doing that voice at all. I don't know that either.

So I love Charlie.

There are lots of big name familiar guest stars. That helps Miss No New Faces Face Blindness a huge amount! No lie, that makes it work for me because I can recognize those people. They HAVE faces for me. I can't always place who they are but I will identify them again even if they change their clothes. Look. I'll go, "Who is that lady in the glasses? I know her." And then later get on IMDb and go, "Ohhhh, S. Epatha Merkerson!" How in the world do I know her? Look down her list of credits. She was in Jacob's Ladder, which I saw in grad school in the 90s, but once I know your face, I know it forever. Actually it was her voice that got me.

Oddly I just discovered last night, reading the IMDb cast credits, that my no new faces face blindness is getting better. I looked down the whole list of cast and got pings of recognition from a bunch of people who were new to me in the 7 episodes I watched yesterday. That's awesome! Thanks, Poker Face!

Here's what works less well:

The Johnson Maneuver. You know how Rian Johnson loves to show you something, then turn it around and show it to you again only now you understand it a whole different way? Yes, that's very cool, except in Glass Onion where a lot didn't make sense after you'd seen it once, but see that post for that. 

Every single episode of this show does the Johnson Maneuver. It's exhausting. Because the things we see twice are all guest actors, which means we know they're only in it this episode. We can't get invested. Which means we're just sitting there watching some random people play out their drama. 

I can't tell you how off-putting this is. It's like getting fooled with the same card trick over and over and over and OVER. Stop it. 

Also yes of course you're going to be able to make us see things one way then another. You literally hold all the cards. Stop being someone's boring uncle at a wedding, doing the same card trick repeatedly to the same people. 

It's like lying to someone then going "Haha, you believed me!" Hi, I am punching you in the face right now.

So that's annoying.

Also the client drama takes up literally half of the episode quite often, by time, which means a lot of time where Charlie isn't even there. Except twist! It turns out SHE WAS THERE the whole time! We just didn't get to see her! THAT IS INFURIATING. Why do you have a drama where your main character is there but not seen until we've watched half of the episode???

So it's an open mystery. We watch the story unfold, then we watch it again from another angle as Charlie figures out what happens. But it's all dramatic irony. We know and watch her not knowing. I guess that's fun? It's fun to know and see someone figure it out, Columbo style.

I have to watch Columbo again and see just how long the client part is. In my memory it's quite short. I've been thinking of every other show I've seen that begins with client-only sections and they're never more than a minute.

Because--and this is essential--we don't know or care about these people. It gets to be like, "Oh boy, more randos to get bait and switched by, who cares?" Because we know they'll be taken away soon.

Look at a show like Wonderfalls where we meet characters *through Jaye* and care about them because she cares about them. We're here for Jaye, though. It's just bananas to me that this show is structured like that. It's not even history leading up to the point when Charlie joins the picture, either. It's flashbacks to a time when she's there but not visible. Why on earth?

Anyway.

The structure of this show is seriously problematic for me. Like I'm mad going into each episode because of the long client section.

How about you just tell a story without all the backfill? Do it from the point where Charlie joins them. Have the backstory just be backstory. Skip the Johnson Maneuver (sounds worse every time I say it) and tell a story instead of being tricky about it. It really is a gimmick. And although it worked in Knives Out, it did not work in Glass Onion, and it's not working here because it becomes annoying very quickly. Same card trick! Stop it!

Here's a show that tells every story twice every episode. How do you not see how terrible that is as a plan? That is a terrible plan. That is two-card Rashomon. 

The pilot also threw me immediately because it started with a flashback we couldn't possibly know was a flashback because we were new to the whole thing. You see (spoilers) a hotel cleaner see something and report it, then the security guy murders her husband and then her. I think? Hard to say--it's in darkness and you can't actually see the people. But then there she is again. I think? Again, face blindness. So then I thought he killed someone else and it was foreshadowing killing her. Or he got the wrong people. I was waiting to hear he killed the wrong people. And then the husband has that same recognizable pearl-handled gun from the murders. How did he get that? Did he go to the murder scene? Except no, it's supposed to be that that part was in flashback. 

Even if I could recognize faces, it would have been insanely confusing.

What threw me personally off was that the cleaner woman had her hair pulled back while working, then loose while going home. SO I DIDN'T KNOW IT WAS HER. OMG it's confusing being me.

I had to explain can't learn new faces to some new doctor person. I said: if I see you next week, I won't recognize you. That is just the facts. I won't! I can't remember my own doctor's face. I know she has blondish longish hair and is about my height, maybe a little less, slender build. I think glasses sometimes? Maybe not. Faces. Why do we even have them if I can't register them. 

So having big curly hair in one scene but a ponytail in another scene, also with a change of clothes, that means I don't know whether it's the same person. Especially given we already saw the one woman get murdered. So presumably this is a different one? No? See.

Try a chyron. 24 hours ago. Yesterday. Something.

Also the pilot was a thriller and the rest are cute and funny, which seems like a mislead. 

There's more to say about mysteries being honest and fair with the audience. A mystery has to play fair. It has to give you the information, even if you don't understand the significance at that moment. Withholding information is cheating. I have strong feelings about this drawn from reading all of Agatha Christie multiple times. Agatha Christie plays fair. Rian Johnson does not always play fair. I don't know who's in charge of this show, but the show doesn't always play fair either. 

It's okay if we don't know things, like if we lack expertise, but the puzzle pieces should all be on the table. Some of these episodes were fair and some weren't. 

Anyway, Charlie is super appealing. People like her and she likes people so we like her a lot. I want to spend time with her. Not, for example, a bunch of new characters we'll never see again after this. Like, every time, it comes out with: invest your energy in this--it is sure to be wasted!

I'm trying to break down in my head how many episodes are about busting the bad people for doing something bad. I think maybe all of them. That's awesome. I'm in favor of that. I think it would be better done straightforwardly without all the timeline shenanigans and hiding Charlie from us so we're misled and see things she doesn't see that she then has to figure out. 

However, I adore the helping people mandate. That's what I'm here to see! That's what I wanted the show for, to compare to Wonderfalls and the other helping people shows. How is it set up? What's the logic? What's the reasoning? What's the story logic for it? 

I like how Charlie just shows up and goes: hey, wait a minute, this is no good, what are the rights and wrongs of it? Who's the good guy here? Who's the bad guy? Asks questions, researches, figures it all out, then wreaks justice and vengeance upon the people who want to hurt or exploit others. My very favorite is the thing she does at the end of the pilot where she seems to be trapped in a tight spot, but she has set things up so that the villain totally loses just when they thought they won.

I'm watching a Columbo episode right now and it is EXACTLY like Poker Face, a very long first part where we meet the people and see the crime carried out. 11 minutes in already and no sign of Columbo himself. It's all setting up who did what and why they did it. Jeez, it's so seventies in look. 1972. Takes me back to my childhood, how people look. I was five. 12:45, Columbo appears!!

There is some hilarious background acting going on here. People talking and talking with bobbing heads. There is a ludicrously shirtless man in a hard hat on a construction site.

The criminals are underestimating Columbo. I remember this was a thing. He plays dumb quite a lot. 

There is also hilariously dubbed in dialogue without room tone. And all these rooms without ceilings. And that lighting they always have that makes big stark distracting shadows behind everyone. And so much smoking! So funny. A man playing tennis in long pants, a shirt, and a jacket, while the woman playing opposite is in her little tennis outfit. A hat with a bunch of obvious tomato sauce on it that is meant to be blood. Really it's like watching a play, where you have to suspend disbelief so vigorously all the time.

Anyway. Research continues. Columbo has to find out what happened because he's a detective. Jaye Tyler has to figure things out because the tchotchke animals make her or else they'll drive her crazy. Police or law or medical shows have obvious reasons for trying to solve problems. What reason do others have for working on these things? Charlie doesn't seem to have a reason and that's okay, but she also has this magic lie detector ability that needs a way to play out. That's an external reason, though. Don't we want an internal reason? 

I have only ever seen a little of My Name is Earl but it has a wonderful story engine. I like it when there's a strong internal story engine like that. But then I'm from olden times. Maybe we don't need it as much now? Like what drives Supernatural? Those boys driving around in their car. I only watched the pilot so I don't know what makes it go. Vengeance for their mother or something? 

Look what IMDb says: "John Winchester raised his two sons Sam and Dean to hunt and kill all things that go 'bump in the night' after his wife Mary was murdered by an evil supernatural being when the boys were little. 22 years later the brothers set out on a journey, fighting evil along the way, to find their recently-missing father; when they finally do he reveals he knows what demon killed their mother and has found a way to track and kill it. Meanwhile, Sam develops frightening abilities such as seeing visions of people dying before it actually happens. These visions are somehow connected to the demon that murdered his mother and its mysterious plans that seem to be all about Sam. When their father dies striking a deal with that very same demon, the brothers determine to finish his crusade."

Crusade! That's a good story engine. Fifteen years of episodes from that, huh? Cute boys and a mighty mission with practically infinite permutations for each episode.

Think think think.

18 Story Engine and Wonderfalls

I'm looking at story engine here in terms of the element that drives a series, whether TV or novel. For example, in the TV show Wonderfalls, there are little animal tchotchkes that give Jaye obscure orders about how to help someone. She has to help the person to make the animals shut up and leave her alone. That engine drives the whole show.

So if I'm developing an idea for a series, what should I use as a story engine? 

I get into all sorts of series here, from procedurals to cozy mystery novels.

I think I might have solved my series idea, what with how I'm not in a sensible position to be writing a TV pilot these days. I mean. But what should I do with it? I think I've got a workable plan now.

Also working on finishing the novel draft OMG. I have a couple of issues I have to solve. It would help if I would stop cutting down trees and injuring myself. Go sit down and write your book!

Sacred cheese of life!

17 How to read the classics

As someone who makes (often unwilling) young people read classics as my regular job, a question I get a lot is: how do I learn to like these things?

They bounce off. It happens! Everyone has modern expectations of narrative, which is to say, fast-paced, fitting a certain pattern, full of cliffhangers and other excitement. The chunky cloth covers and small type put them off. The feeling that this is steamed broccoli meant to be good for you is definitely not helping.

There are a couple great roads into finding ways to love the classics. And I say that as someone who makes people read them practically daily. I also adore them. I talk a lot about genre fiction and so on here, but the classics are my whole thing. The older the better.

Here's how you get into them:

One, try listening to an audiobook instead of reading. Truly, it counts exactly the same. The voice actors interpret for you and make sense out of the long sentences. Downsides: it takes a lot longer, if you read fast at all, and you can't make notes on it, unless you're following along on the page. Which lots of people do! If this is something you ever need to write a paper about, definitely follow along on the page so you can put a post-it note where it needs to go.

Two, slow down. Slow way down. The pacing is much slower than modern fiction. It takes some getting used to. Even the sentences are often longer and more complex. The language and vocabulary and usage is different. When someone in a book written in 1800 is "making love" to someone, they are not having sex, okay? They are charming or romancing that person. You might want a book with footnotes to help with this sort of thing. Get a second-hand anthology if it has full texts.

Three, prep. Read a synopsis first so you know who's who and what on earth is going on. There's nothing wrong with watching a movie adaptation of a text before you read it. If it's a play, definitely watch it first! I don't think people should read plays anyway. It's like reading a recipe and expecting to be full. Those are directions for a thing, not a thing. But at minimum hit Wikipedia and read a synopsis so you know what the hell is going on.

Four, learn the background and context before you even start reading so you're not totally lost or confused by a truly alien culture compared to ours. An edition with a good foreword can be great for this. 

Five, a more complex point: remember that people back then were just as snarky and sarcastic as we are. Chaucer was snarky as hell. Sophocles loved putting people in impossibly awkward situations. Jane Austen was extremely sarcastic about people and their flaws. They were the same as us.

Take the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife." Okay, does she mean that, or is she being ironic? 

We figure out very quickly she's being ironic when Mrs. Bennet comes flying in and says a rich man has rented a house in the neighborhood, what a great thing for our girls! She has all these marriage-aged daughters and an aging husband and NO MONEY, no security, not even a house as they will lose it if the husband dies. One of those girls needs to marry this rich man and be able to take care of everyone else! 

Does he want to get married? Who is he? What's he like? Nobody knows anything about him except: rich and unmarried. But it's a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife, after all, so let's go get him, girls!

I've had students say this makes everyone shallow and so forth. No! Women of their class could not go out and work. They had to get married to support themselves. Yes, you can be upper class and poor. This is also shocking to modern Americans.

So knowing that background changes the first sentence, right? Now we get it. The joke is that everyone assumes this guy who just rented a house wants to get married. Let's all go see him and see which sister he wants to marry! It's embarrassing to the two oldest sisters, but the younger ones are kind of idiots like the mom. 

Six, if it doesn't ruin the story for you, get spoilers! Who marries whom? How do we get from here to there? There are many obstacles in the way. How do Jane and Lizzy not absolutely die of embarrassment from the behavior of their mother and sisters?

It helps to get the tone and plot beforehand, truly. Like if I am teaching The Iliad as I often do, I tell the class: okay, spoilers, here's who won the war. So that lets us see one hero as tragic, the other as favored by the gods. And the gods literally show up and help or hinder these people! 

Seven, tone. Jane Austen is being funny. It helps to know that. She's writing about the serious business of finding a husband and having a life. She writes about Lizzy's friend making an awful choice, but a choice that lets her survive. But she's being very funny about all the intricacies of trying to find a person you could marry and live with when it's deadly serious survival, but also absurd. It's easier to see this in a film adaptation, where everyone is trying not to roll their eyes every time Mr. Collins goes on and on about Lady Catherine, who treats him like dirt even while he's fawning over her and pretending that his connection with her makes him something special. Look how complex and human and funny that is.

Eight, start with something you like. Do you like war stories? Henry V. Do you like the supernatural? Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Do you like stories about young people figuring it out? Austen, Dickens. 

Nine, take a class. Sometimes you just need someone to walk you through them as you go. I swear I have shepherded dozens (hundreds? oh no) of classes through the densest classics and showed them how they are awesome. You can take a class, but make sure the person teaching it loves these texts AND can show you what's great about them. (Not everybody does, fair warning.) Also ultimately you're going to have to sit down and read them.

Ten, I hate to say just do it, because I find it nearly impossible to sit through 95% of nonfiction and saying "just do it" doesn't help me. I will be up and doing something else within five minutes and I will not retain anything I've read. Yes, I've read lots of nonfiction, and no, it doesn't help me get any better at it. I have to MAKE myself read it. Put the phone far away, get a relevant beverage, and sit there. I find the hardest barrier to get over is the initial one where you have to turn everything else off and sit there.

A few more strategies to try: 

• Take notes as you go, even if it's like "p278 Genji is a complete perv about some new actual child and says he's not." Taking notes helps, for real. It makes you focus on taking info out of what you're reading.
• Ask questions as you read. Write them down. Is Genji ever going to realize what a horrible user of a person he is? (No.) Is Genji going to get attacked by wild dogs that eat his liver? (Alas, no.)
  
• Setting a timer helps because then you don't read to the point of failure, which makes you hate doing it. Read for five minutes and stop. Read for ten minutes and stop. 
• Read a set number of pages. Don't keep going if you're not absorbing it.
  
• Cast the roles in your head so it's more vivid. 
• Imagine texting what you read to a friend. Or if you won't get distracted by touching that phone, ACTUALLY text it to a friend. 
• Get a friend to read along! That can be fantastic if you're struggling equally. Team reading.
• Draw brief sketches of what you're reading. This works very well for visual readers as you have to convert the story into images.
• Get mad about it. This got us through what we called "Frigging Genji," truly. Want to read something maddening? Here's someone presented as a hero who's a terrible philanderer and pedophile and child rapist. But it's written so brilliantly that if the person portrayed read it, they'd be like, yes, I am awesome and justified, it's true. They wouldn't be offended. While others reading would be backing away in horror. We all hated Genji so much! Hating a character is surprisingly effective in driving your reading forward. Unfortunately he doesn't get murdered by a child as we all hoped. Oh well. In my version he would be. 
• Articulate what's working and what's not working. This is extremely effective for me. Not just "I don't like it" but "I hate how the author writes women in xyz ways." Bonus, you can turn this into a paper if you do it right. My first academic publication came from something like this.
  

Classics are classics for good reasons. That doesn't mean you will like them if you go in cold. Sometimes you need a guide or other strategies to help you get to the good parts. Never take it as a reflection on you if you don't like something, though. Some of these things are not for you. 

The reason to get familiar with the classics is that they're part of the conversation you want to understand. You know how every TV show has a Rashomon episode? You want to see the original Rashomon so you get it. 

Once my VW bus broke down in Grass Valley CA and I was stuck for a couple of days waiting for a part, with nothing to do but read the paperback Shakespeare collection I'd stuck in there for emergencies. A few years later, a friend and I were watching My Own Private Idaho. I gradually freaked out because it was absolutely Henry IV. They even quoted from it. I kept saying, "This is Henry IV." My friend got mad because he was an English major with a master's and hadn't caught it and I was a composer conservatory dropout in those days. So maybe this isn't the best anecdote, or possibly it's a brag, if being a dropout with a broken down VW bus is a brag. (It definitely is not.) But knowing those plays absolutely affected how I saw that movie. 

Can you enjoy it without understanding all that? Sure! But why not get the whole thing, not just a piece of the picture? It's good to know where you are in the whole conversation that is fiction.

16 "Objects in Space"

Episode 16 Objects in Space is up!

*******

Very strange to rewatch the series! Strange how much I'd forgotten about this specific episode, one of my favorites. 

For ages I couldn't understand how the show didn't make it, because I loved it so much, but now I get it. The tone and angle of the episodes are all over the place. One heartfelt, one silly, one dramatic, one truly violent, one horror, one a heist, and so on. I could see how that would make the money people extremely nervous. How would an audience know what to expect?

I suspect the fans like me were there for the characters and the world more than anything else. If you're a character person, you'll take anything that lets you spend time with those characters. Not that there's anything wrong with these stories! They're all wonderful. But they are unpredictable. Compare to a sitcom or a procedural or a regular drama. They deliver the same goods every week. This does not.

Anyway.

"Out of Gas" is the episode I wanted to look at specifically because it's about treating people like objects. 

There's a bounty hunter, Jubal Early, who is after River and Simon. He shuts the crew in their bunks and then runs into Kaylee. He says truly appalling things to Kaylee and threatens her with rape. There's no earthly reason to have that in the episode, obviously--he beats up Mal and Book and Simon, so non-sexual violence is on the table--so I have to wonder whether it's the treating people like objects theme that's doubled as Early treats River as an object to be retrieved and returned for the bounty, not as a person. 

In the end, Mal throws Early (in a spacesuit) off the ship and into space to die. He will become an object in space himself. 

Early says something about Serenity's design as he is forcing Simon to search the ship for River, something about how he likes the ship's design--people don't appreciate the shape of things, objects in space--but he says a lot of weird things in passing and Simon lets it go. 

Objects in space is such an odd phrasing. What ISN'T an object in space? Everything is. But I suppose what it means is: the way things fit into and belong in the spaces they're in.

I removed two chairs from my living room today. You think that didn't entirely change the nature of this space? It's astounding. Space and the way objects fit into it or obstruct it or clutter it. Mise en scene. Oh the relief when I take anything extra or awkward out of my house.

Early is an invader of Serenity when they're far away from everything. He invades the ship, but then when they can't find River, she gets on the comm and says she isn't on the ship, she IS the ship. Simon jokes that he can't keep track of her even when she's not incorporeally possessing a spaceship. It's River's disappearance and her mysterious takeover of the comm that lets her communicate with everyone, almost telepathically, and organize their resistance and attack and success.

Space invaders, crossing boundaries, obviously the overt spoken threat of rape, identifying the spaceship with a body and entering it against everyone's will, then River becoming the ship and organizing everyone to kick Early out and kill him. There's so much in this episode about bodily autonomy and violence. It's a simple story: invader enters, hurts people, locks everyone in or ties them up, but then they organize and kick him out and kill him. So is it a rape revenge fantasy? Maybe so. 

Early treats all of the crew as objects. Look what he does. Beats up Mal, drops him down into his bunk. Locks Mal, Jayne, Zoe, and Wash into their bunks. Beats up Shepherd Book. Threatens Kaylee with rape and ties her up to use as leverage. Knocks Simon around but needs him to find River. Beats up Inara and locks her into her shuttle. River is the ninth character but she escapes. We never see her go. She just disappears. 

Want to talk about the fantasy that Firefly thrives on, of being mobile and independent and able to get away from anywhere you don't want to be? This is a huge fantasy of mine. I used to have dreams of a shuttlecraft from Star Trek: The Next Generation. A runabout from DS9. Any mobile, independent self-contained space, with power, heating and cooling, a bathroom with bathtub, a kitchen, a couch, a desk/table, a bed. Make it a caravan of a diverse crew of misfits that form a found family. Just like DS9, Farscape, STTNG, Battlestar Galactica. No coincidence, all my favorite shows. 

Mind blown. I want it!

I never wanted to live on the Enterprise. Too antiseptic and too dangerous. Deep Space Nine, absolutely--I had invented a character for myself and everything. I dreamed multiple times I was on the Promenade. DS9 is found family while TNG is not. TNG people had it together far too much to be found family--and they were all Starfleet, anyway. Moya on Farscape would be the ship for me, though that gives me an anxiety surge just thinking about it. Never mind, DS9!

"Out of Gas" taps into something truly profound for a self-contained episode about a bounty hunter who breaks into the ship, beats up the crew, and gets booted right back out.

15 Treating People Like Things. "So much water so close to home" and The Hollow

Update: 

Episode 15 is up. It turned out to be about "So much water so close to home" and Agatha Christie's novel The Hollow.  

Previous post below:

***** 

I'm going to work on a short story I hate called "So much water so close to home" by Raymond Carver. 

Here's why I hate it: it gets under your skin. And because it's a male writer writing from a female POV about a deeply upsetting topic with a powerful gender divide to it. But even that is different now from how it used to be, or else I think about it differently. The future! It's more nuanced than the past! I also hate how realistic it is. I hate how she goes back to him at the end. I hate the drive with the green pickup. I hate so very many things about it.

Sometimes you're supposed to hate things about a story. That's the point of the story sometimes. 

How can I get mad that Carver thought about the man's wife's point of view more than the man's? What is up with my brain that I would even think that?

Anyway I recommend reading this story before listening to the podcast. 

Not that I've recorded it yet. Here is why:

The power company trimming back trees and chipping them.

The landlord building his house bang bang bang.

The road out front getting repaved.

Barky barky barky.

And the eternal road noise.

Also my innards were trying to kill me for the past few weeks but I have prevailed by way of Austerity and Not Being An Idiot. And Bloodwork. And next week a CT scan. Whee. They had another good go at me today, though, boy oh boy. 

The enemy within. Or something. The call is coming from inside the house. Inter arma enim silent leges? 

I feel like rewatching DS9 but the pacing is EXCRUCIATING now. Oh, olden times. So slow!

Goddamn, I hate this story. 

Want a quick synopsis?

Some guys go on a fishing trip and find a dead woman in the creek. But rather than lose their vacation, they just tie her to a tree and LEAVE HER THERE and spend the next two days or so fishing and drinking and washing their dishes in the creek RIGHT NEAR HER. They come back home and everyone finds out what monsters they are and the narrator silently freaks out, smashes some dishes, goes to the woman's funeral, gets chased and bothered en route, comes home, and for whatever earthly reason forgives her husband. WHY.

I mean, people do.

But that's horrifying to me. You're married to someone who cares so little for women that he'd leave a dead woman in a creek TIED TO A TREE so she won't float away for several days so he can GO FISHING.

If this were a class, I'd ask: would they have done that if it were a man? Obviously not. No way. To me that's what this story is about: how callous men are toward women. Pay any attention at all to true crime and this is the entire theme of it. Women's bodies are nothing but objects to be treated any old way these men want to treat them, then disposed of as garbage, not like they were ever people at all. They don't see women as people, alive or dead.

It happens CONSTANTLY. If that doesn't make you enraged, I can't begin to fathom why not. 

In the story, the narrator character sees this about her husband, is furious and repulsed by him, and then accepts him again by the end. Now granted it would be a very different story otherwise, but even within the story it's nauseating to have that juxtaposition of events. It's framed in terms of sex, refusing him, pushing him away, then inviting him back. That's super gross juxtaposed with the dumped naked corpse. Again with the true crime, but if a body is dumped naked, that's sexual assault.

I think it's okay to break up with someone when you find out that they don't think people like you are people. Put it that way. It's not everyone. (Not all men.) So if you find out he's one of the ones who doesn't think women are people, then get gone. 

I feel pretty strongly about this. Someone who doesn't think people like you are people--stay with me here--doesn't think people like you are people. And they will do whatever they want to you, because you're not people. Maybe it doesn't really become a problem until they're crossed or cranky or humiliated, but then there it is.

But there are a lot of ways to read this story. Maybe it's about forgiveness, or redemption (what has he done to deserve to be redeemed?) or gender imbalance, or eighteen million other things.

It would be a good story to teach because it's not clear what it's saying, so readers have to interpret for themselves, which also brings out biases and excuses and why some people get to behave certain ways and others don't. It would be a nightmare to teach because 18 year olds haven't articulated their assumptions yet or identified them as such and believe they're just truths. It would be easier to teach now than say 20-30 years ago because modern kids are infinitely more capable of talking calmly about sex and murder and violence and know infinitely more about it.

I'm just saying though, imagine four women on a camping trip alone with a naked dead man in the creek, tied to a tree by his hand. You can't see that to begin with. But also you can't see them fishing and drinking and hanging out like that. It's impossible. Because they would see that murder victim as a person.

Well anyway. That should be a fun podcast, between the nail gun and the wood chipper and the road paver. And the rage.

The road paver machines are fascinating and terrifying. They shoot orange flames out from underneath and cook the pavement as it goes down. The men working around them are in heavy gray clouds of choking fumes and incredible heat. Even driving by, I roll up all the windows and try not to breathe. How are they surviving that?

Nail guns and wood chippers of course feature in murder stories. There was a nail gun in a Bones episode. And the wood chipper is in Fargo as well as Bones. Want to talk about how the procedural-industrial complex treats women's bodies as objects and fodder for their machines? That's a mixed metaphor or three but so what. Also Bones tended to have gender parity for victims AND treated everyone like a person. I love Bones. 

If I were writing a Bones spec right now, I'd want to use that road paver. Imagine the terrible things it would do to a body for the geniuses at the Jeffersonian to figure out. But see the bones would have to be chopped up and mixed in with the asphalt, maybe using a cremation bone grinder. A challenge for Brennan and her team. It would make a great spec. 

Bones is always, always, always careful to humanize their victims and show grieving families and their current friends and relationships and so on. It's a good show to talk about in this context. Maybe I'll talk more about it in the future.

I keep coming back to Kaylee in Firefly, ship invader Jubal Early threatening her with rape, saying to her, "Ain't nothing but a body to me. And I can find all unseemly manner of use for it." Horrifying. "Objects in Space." Extremely good episode, though. One of the best.

The moral is don't treat people as objects, even when they're dead, OBVIOUSLY, stupid fishing guys in this story I hate. 

The wife is so astonished and horrified. But we know these guys, she thinks. Their kids are in school with our kids. And they could just do this. Just treat her that way. It's what you hear over and over about people who do horrible things to people. But he's a nice guy! Yeah, that's who does those things. Just other people. It's not some distant monster who does it. It's the guy next door. 

The moral is do the right thing or you're the monster. It's that easy. It's just a matter of doing the right thing or the wrong thing. There aren't actually good people and bad people, just people doing good things and bad things. Don't do the bad thing and excuse it by saying you're a good person so it must be okay. Maybe that's why I hate the story so much, because it comes down on that exact comforting exonerating cop-out at the end.

Really hate this story. Doesn't mean it's not good! Obviously it's a good one. But I still really hate it. Maybe I can record my episode tomorrow, inner rebellion and external cacophony allowing. 

Raymond Carver has another excellent story I hate called "Cathedral" about an utter asshole who gradually figures out how to stop being so prejudiced against a blind friend of his wife.

The thing is, I don't enjoy spending time with utter asshole characters. Tricky, huh?

Also: don't treat people like objects. 

Up next: Firefly in general and "Objects in Space" in particular.

14 Conjunctions, Consequences, Murderbot

In case anyone wondered whether I have ADHD, yes! This episode proves it, if there had ever been any doubt. Also I'd had five short nights of sleep in a row AND was having an asthma attack, which makes me panic and fear for my life what with how it can actually kill you. But no, I sat there quietly recording and then today edited out all the horrible wheezy inhalations.

Jeebus.

However! It's about great things! That terrible comma plus and construction that I hate so much! See this post for much more, in a much more articulate format.  

It's also about the Murderbot books. I ADORE Murderbot. Just writing that makes me want to go read them. So good! Murderbot!

It's mostly about connecting both grammatical thoughts and story ideas in a logical way that shows consequences, more so than just A + B + C. 

We need both, this is what I'm saying.

Take that nightmarishly awful but beautifully written novel I wrote about a while back. Gorgeous sentences that added up to nothing because the plot was atrocious and the character something you scraped off your shoe. 

We need to write well on all levels. Sentence level, character level, story level. All of it has to work.

I also get into that lovely duality of Murderbot, who thinks it's the worst (hence calling itself that) but will do anything to take care of its people, or even random strangers. Murderbot thinks it doesn't care about anyone but cares about everyone. I love that. I love it so much.

So enjoy!

The Geographic Cure is coming

Yeah, I got super bummed out by the short story collections, didn't I? And since nobody is gasping for them, I am working on the blog-to-book pipeline. 

Oh my giddy aunt. 

Problem one: It's ENORMOUS. I knew it was enormous but I didn't really know. Like it's 106K words and I'm about to start my first temp job, I think? That's like January to April of 2006. Just in a physical sense this is an unwieldy quantity of words that is difficult to divide up into logical volumes. I have to figure that out. 

Problem two: Actually problem two resolved itself. The problem was that it made me heartbroken to read about my excited hopeful trip to L.A. to become a tv writer, which you may have noticed I'm not and never have been, whoops. Well, I didn't know that then. I had hope! 

Hope in retrospect, oh no. Except, no, hope is the whole point of it. You have to have that excitement and hope and believe in the possibility of things and keep on getting up when you get knocked down. What are you going to do, just lie there in the dirt?

I always think I have been doing that, but no! I have not! I wrote a huge pile of books. I wrote a stack of short stories. I published things. I do all sorts of things constantly. Go go go! Work work work! 

Perception is a crazy thing, for real. 

Also if you're on the Titanic, it's going to sink no matter what you do, so you might as well have a good time. Just be aware of the lifeboat locations is all.

I'm editing as I go. Once I figure out how to make all the quotation marks curly instead of straight, and figure out how to break the thing into manageable volumes, I'll go ahead and put that out. I mean it's been out since 2006. But wouldn't it be nice to have a book in your hands? Or an ebook, where the entries are in the right order instead of backwards? I know!

Maybe year divisions are the way to go, come to think of it.

Anyway that's a good breakthrough in the retrospective sadness eradication department. It was so much fun being there. I was terrified and broke the whole time. But I kept on climbing mountains and doing bonkers jobs and going cool places and meeting amazing people. 

I just got accepted to the Bangor Authors' something or other in December. How cool is that? I already own a folding table. (They probably provide them.) I can have all these things out by then if I work like mad every hour of the day from now until then.

Seriously. 1.3 million words or whatever it was, that is just an unmanageable quantity of excitable prose. But it's delightful to read, truly, even if I say so myself. I mean I'm probably a harsher critic than anyone. At least I hope so. 

 

Episode 13: Character and Finn

Oh oh oh, I love character. I watch sports for character. I read for character. I watch television for character. And I certainly WRITE for character.

I have very strong feelings about character.

I recorded an episode of Sacred Cheese of Life yesterday about character and used Finn from The Icarus Triptych and Mazewood as my example, even though he's the least characteristic (sorry) example I could possibly have come up with, because I built his appearance and voice on an actor from a show I was watching. 

I never do that. Do you do that? I know plenty of writers do, but I'd never done it before. 

It gives your character so much more life and volume and specificity. It's also somewhat creepy, I have to admit that, because here you are focusing on someone YOU DON'T KNOW in order to write something that doesn't benefit them. I mean it's not like you're writing that person a movie they can star in or anything. He got nothing from it. Except a dedication and a set of the trilogy, and I'm not even sure they ever got there. 

Character has to run like an engine or your story dies. Give me a person who wants to do the right thing and can't. Or wants to do the wrong thing and can't! Give me anyone who wants anything and is thwarted for reasons of cracks in their own foundations.

My characters tend to want homes and security, because those are my own major drivers, to the point where I'm STILL in this very nice house in rural Maine with not enough work because giving up my home and security are more terrifying to me than anything else. That's bad! That's a problem! It's also character, for sure. I make choices about that not based on what's best for me but what I perceive as more important short term.

It's no wonder I always read memoirs about overcoming alcoholism, when I don't even drink. 

I like to write characters whose lives are somewhat out of control. It gives the story a great drive and direction. 

I also insist on internal conflict. That can be almost anything, but there has to be an inner reason they can't achieve their outer goal. 

Finn is tricky this way because I wrote a confident character who makes choices and feels sure about them, something completely alien to me but also means he lacks that essential wants things and can't get them element. But he also has a very upsetting past, things that he couldn't stop happening to people he cared about, especially when he didn't know about it. Wouldn't that give you a complex? 

A character in Agents of SHIELD--oh, Skye/Daisy, of course--said: "Mistrust of home is kind of my superpower." She was taken from her family as a baby and put in foster care, then constantly moved around. Any time she got comfortable, she'd get yanked again, on purpose, to keep her safe from those who were after her. The result is that she doesn't TRUST. It's a major feature of her character and it underlies everything. What's the worst thing you can do to a character like that? Make someone she trusts betray her. Of course they did that!

Find someone's weakest point and attack them there is pretty awful as a way of life, but it's what we have to do with character. So give them strengths, but give them a weak flank, a vulnerability you can use to take them down. 

 

Time to edit the Character/Finn episode. Whee! Bonus Eleanor content.

Episode 12: Roald Dahl's Boy and Autobiography

 

Biography is fascinating because: who cares? Who cares what happened in your life? 

It might be because you've done something interesting or terrible and we want to know how you got to that point. 

It might be because you lived through something major and cool or alarming and we want to know what it was like to be there.

It might just be because you're funny and tell about things nobody else would have paid attention to, but you make them cool and interesting. That's the only way my millions of words of blog will turn into a book so I hope this one flies.

With older autobiography, particularly diaries, I'm endlessly fascinated by the minutiae of daily life, but with modern biography, that's just not interesting to me at all. Excruciatingly boring, even, if the person is from the same culture as me. If not, tell me everything!

It might be because your work is cool and we're interested in how a person created such things. Why? To replicate that process, maybe? I don't know that that's possible or even why people read biography. 

I'm not really sure about biography at all, actually.

I just reread Roald Dahl's Boy so I've been thinking about how he approached autobiography. He says autobiography is full of boring details, so he just tells a few of the notable moments he remembers from his childhood. Excellent way to go about it! The stories are great. He goes: this was cool. This was terrible. Look at the crazy things these teachers did. Here's where my nose got cut off! Here's how we tortured our older sister's annoying boyfriend. Here's what we had for breakfast at our grandparents' house. It's all so interesting to me! I want to know everything!

Also he's probably responsible in part for my Norway obsession. You can't read that book and come away not thinking Norway is paradise, or was a hundred years ago, anyway. I mean, dour Calvinism aside. 

I'm not really here for facts so much as attitude and experiences, so for me it's autobiography yay, biography yawn. Diaries are especially good because they're not for an audience, so the truth is more likely to come out. Truth that is entirely subjective, of course, but it always is. 

Sometimes you have to come at the truth a little sideways. Or you might tell stories that you think are saying one thing, while they are saying something else entirely. There's also what's left out. 

I got the diaries of Pepys from the library, volumes 1-4 of 11. I was already sick and in a lot of pain from my legs I think due to a particular pair of boots that I had put my trust in but shouldn't have, plus a weird dude kept pestering me and I had to be rude to make him fuck off. I got the reference librarian to help me find them. He had never heard of Pepys. Lots of people have never heard of Pepys! It's okay!

Well, you can look him up in Wikipedia. Diarist! I think that sums it up. He lived through interesting times, as do we all. 

I have got to read all of the diaries of everyone ever. I love them so much. 

I probably have COVID based on having no sense of smell or taste suddenly, as of Friday afternoon, though it was waning in the morning when I went to Denny's and had flavorless eggs, pancakes, and sausage, along with flavorless coffee with flavorless vanilla creamer in it. Hmmmm. But it took making spinach dip and cutting up a whole flavorless scentless onion and five cloves of unsmellable garlic to clue me in. 

I kept putting cloves of garlic up to my nose and sniffing them. Nothing. Weird!

The spinach dip tasted like nothing at all but was cool and creamy so I ate it. 

I've been having a constant medium grade panic attack since Wednesday. I researched whether that's a thing with COVID and discovered: yes! Cytokines etc. I don't claim to know. But yes, it can definitely give you the major freakout. Phew! So that's what's going on. 

Wednesday I thought I was BAD and if I cleaned up my whole house I might escape RETRIBUTION. I fully panicked. Like hyperventilating and all. It has made it impossible to focus enough to record a podcast episode, not to mention that I'm super short of breath. 

Hang tight. I will get through it. 

It's very weird and gross to have food not taste like anything. I sniffed the bag of coffee and could distantly smell that. The bottle of iced tea tastes gross. Regular tea tastes just astringent. This has all been covered by everyone everywhere, huh? What a good example of experiences not being interesting to others despite being fascinating to myself.

However: in a month I won't really remember what this was like, not vividly, not with details, so it's great to write it down as an example of what I'm talking about. See what I'm doing here? Okay.

So I need to go through that absolutely massive block of text, truly millions of words, and pull out the interesting pieces. I don't think it tells a story, which bothers me as a novelist. But it does tell a life story and that's something, surely, depending on whether that life interests anyone. I think if it's the story of how someone got to be the writer they turned into, that could be very cool. Story of becoming! My favorite! Which would mean going back to get even earlier journals and finding the writing days there. 

I love Roald Dahl's story about how he started writing. He had lunch with an editor who basically said: give us the events but give us all the sensory details, what you saw, smelled, felt, heard. And go!

But that's not actually how he started writing. He says in Boy that he was required to write a letter home every single Sunday. He kept up the practice his entire life, writing home to his mother, who kept every single letter. So he had an incredible resource for writing autobiography, yes, but also he had all that incredible practice. Practice matters! Sometimes I message three people about something and watch how my way of telling that thing gets better each time, more vivid, more concise, funnier, improving every possible way. Which is why rewriting matters, obviously! But also it's practice in how to phrase things. 

Sensory details. The Olympics are on! I'm watching women's soccer, France vs. Canada. I expect France to win but it's been very equal. I gave the dog a bath before the game, then weeded the wildly overgrown garden while she dried off in the sun. I'm eating Tostitos and drinking that bottled iced tea because salt and sugar are things I can taste, just not flavor. 

Why in the world would that be? Why can't I SMELL anything? Not even wet dog! Or her shampoo! Not food, not fresh-cut grass, not tea. I love tea so much but it's just not there. The dog's food smells like chocolate to me. (It isn't, I promise!) I want to make chocolate chip cookies but a friend said not to bother as the smell is a major part of the appeal.  

The windows are open and the sun is shining in. The dog keeps lying on the blue bench under the windows to dry in the sun. I put the pink fleece on the giant ottoman so wet dog doesn't become a feature of the atmosphere, presuming my sense of smell returns, which it had best. 

Do tortilla chips ever taste like anything? Is there actually a flavor to them? I can't think what it is. Sticking with the crunchy foods. Celery, carrots, tortilla chips. Though I have cherries and lettuce in the fridge. 

Promise me the ongoing constant panic attack will go away. 

Editing that massive blog is going to be a work of CHAGRIN but also I find a lot of things in it extremely funny and want to share them. And unlike in real life, I get to leave out the boring or stupid parts. I suppose everyone who assembles an autobiography takes out anything that makes them look bad. I probably didn't write it in there in the first place. But if I go to the journals, I can do a very fun thing where I have two versions of the same event. That's worth doing, huh? 

SO MUCH WORK. But it feels a little like my containers of quilting fabric. Make it into a quilt! Go go go!

Walking around the biography section of the bookstore, I kept seeing biographies of people I'd met, which made the whole thing seem much more plausible. They're just people. I'm just people. I realize there's a logic gap there, but so what? It works. Turn it into books. Do your thing. 

All you really have to do is do your thing. 

Cobalt blue sugar bowl and creamer I had forgotten existed, surely packed away in the basement somewhere, plus of course bonus Eleanor content and slightly too much table.