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!