Story on the Brain

I have infinitely much to say about Leverage . I tried to keep it within limits. Here is the scene from The Big Bang Job that is so gloriously over the top that it fills me with utter joy. The entire rest of the series is NOTHING like this so don't get the wrong idea! https://youtu.be/JdA2cdyGXb0?si=xhegxndOxCkYOXI2 Here's the list of my favorite episodes: In order of best beloved episodes first (yes, eight are tied for first place) 1 S2E11 The Bottle Job 1 S1E5 The Bank Shot Job 1 S3E11 The Rashomon Job 1 S5E9 The Rundown Job 1 S5E10 The Frame-Up Job 1 S5E6 The D.B. Cooper Job 1 S4E13 The Girls' Night Out Job 1 S4E14 The Boys' Night Out Job 2 S3E3 The Inside Job 3 S3E15 The Big Bang Job 4 S4E1 The Long Way Down Job 5 S4E6 The Carnival Job 6-7 S1E12-13 The First David Job, The Second David Job 8 S1E7 The Wedding Job 9 S4E18 The Last Dam Job 10 S5E1 The (Very) Big Bird Job   Favorite episodes in chronological order S1E5 The Bank Shot ...

I don't know why I pulled this off the shelf the other day, but what an amazing book. It's odd to read a book first as a child then much later as a professional literature analyzer person. You see things a little differently, put it that way.  Matilda is a book about terrible abuse, but we don't think of it that way. We think of it as a tiny girl who reads a lot who gets rid of the mean headmistress and then gets to go live with her nice teacher instead of her mean family. But back up a minute. Her family is horrible to her. Her dad tears up one of her library books. She starts punishing him for his meanness in various ways that are satisfying to us if we identify with a tiny powerless person in a household of people who don't care about her, but ultimately don't accomplish much. He does get cowed a little bit every time one of the punishments happen, but it doesn't ultimately solve her situation. I'm fascinated by this little novel (or chapter book technic...

Another episode is up! In it I get worked up over this insidious trope in fiction that dates back two thousand years to the earliest Greek novels that were the source for the narrative shape of virgin martyr stories, gothic fiction, and ultimately young adult fiction. Self-sacrificing and self-abnegating good girls. Sad boys who therefore deserve to get everything they want. But don't worry, I solve all that in 35 minutes.  Subservience! Doing things that aren't good for us! Training people to be doormats! STOP IT. And a whole lot of my computer freezing up on me and dropping the audio. "You bastard, computer," I said to it at one point. I have to take drastic steps with this thing, no lie. Possibly involving an axe. ALSO I have resolved the issue with Podcast Connects so you should be able to search and find us in Apple Podcasts any minute now. Any minute! I have no idea how fast it works, actually. But it is published and live and will be happening. OH BOY!!! There ...

Go get it! https://www.emmaburns.org/sacred-cheese-of-life-podcast Also: new intro and outro music by Shaolin Dub, a song called Dark Daze. Infinitely better! And I wrote the old one myself, ha. The website now allows you to access the podcast using podcatcher, including Apple Podcasts. Copy the URL. Paste into the window you get when you click the three dots at the top right corner of the Library page of Apple Podcasts. That was entirely backwards narratively. I apologize.  Go to Apple Podcasts. Click Library. Click the three dots at the top right corner. Paste the URL into the window. Now time is running forwards again. http://sacredcheeseoflife.squarespace.com/sacred-cheese-of-life-podcast?format=rss I believe this one also works: http://www.emmaburns.org/sacred-cheese-of-life-podcast?format=rss But if one doesn't work, try the other.  I'm working on getting it directly into Apple Podcasts but it's hung up on something about the cover art. I DON'T KNOW AND THEY WON...

Whoops, sorry about the delay--I'm not sure what happened there. I owe you a podcast episode! Possibly two! I need to pick a day of the week and stick to it. Probably Monday for the moment at least. I want to talk about mirroring in fiction as I've just read a book that was full of it, then realized of course I'm doing a ton of it in Summerlands.  I'm also fascinated that my subconscious goes to the bookcase and picks out a book for me. I mean, I go along with it. I am present in this situation. But I pick a book not really consciously thinking about why, then it turns out to be extremely pertinent to what I'm working on. I also got mildly wigged to run into someone Finnish on Blue Sky with the same name as one of the characters in Summerlands. I know it's just recency bias or something. Is recency a word? Why does that not look like a word?  Really nothing could be more likely than that I pick a name from a baby name list and then happen across a person with th...

I'm very interested in novels with alternating dual storylines when one is the past and one is the present. Who knows what when? How do they find out? And most of all, what does it even matter? I'm working with this in my current novel draft, using diaries to supply the past. That's helpful because it's set in stone, it's unreliable, and it's something that actually happens in the present, the reading of it. Also it adds a level of mystery in that someone is supplying photocopies of diary pages. Who the hell is doing that and why?  I can't really think of any that I've read except Code Name Verity , a BRILLIANT novel. But there are probably more. Wait, that one named for the road... Jellicoe Road ! EVEN MORE BRILLIANT. It's called On the Jellicoe Road in Australia where it's from. There's one more I am thinking of by a scifi author about a black woman who goes back in time but can't remember author's name or title, so that's not h...

I got excited about the tv series Andor! It's extremely good at making everything cascade, one event to the next to the next, everything causing what follows. I've only seen season one. Boy does it bother me when events a) are random or b) lead nowhere. No! It's fiction, not reality! Everything means something. Every choice causes the next consequences. Audio issues here: first, I was unwell when recording and was kind of quiet. Second, I used "truncate silence" when editing and that removed the ends of some words. I had already saved when I discovered this (I'm a constant saver) and couldn't undo it. Gaaaah! So here are some extra word endings you can add where needed: ing ing ing s s s There, that should do it. Sacred cheese of life! emmaburns.org