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Showing posts from 2025

50 Murderbot and Character

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Happy 50th anniversary of the podcast! Or something! I'm tackling the character of Murderbot, who's a depressive angry ex-slave cyborg with PTSD who's on the run. We love Murderbot, but why, specifically? I get into it, along with a lot of other examples that work the same way. Center internal conflict that drives them like an engine! How cool is that? I'm fascinated by the way we don't know ourselves, misrepresent ourselves, think we're one way when we're another, and don't actually know what we really want that would make us happy. We're such a mess! All of us and Murderbot too. Next week: probably Sarah Dessen's  Lock and Key  since I can't quit bringing it up. Woohoo!  

49 Harriet the Spy

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Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh is one of the best books ever. It gets into everything good: how to transition from a complacent child to a self-aware person, what it means to be a writer, who we write for and how it affects them and us, what it means to be aware of your own emotional state and how to articulate and manage that. Did you think this book was about a kid with a spy route who peered in people's skylights and windows and went up the dumbwaiter? It is, but it's about SO MUCH MORE. I get into all of that, as well as the song of the gray catbird, Leverage Redemption , Head!Finn, the ongoing sagas of a) reupholstering loveseats (all done!), b) building the screened porch (frame is done!), and rewriting The Esker Road , OMG feels like I will be doing it forever but have made MAJOR STRIDES this past week so hurray for that. Writing! Life! Having way the hell too many projects and too much stuff! Sacred cheese of life!    

Emma Burns Writes Books

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Hey! Go visit my new site, Emma Burns Writes Books .  I write the books. Every day I write the books. Books! Look. I am all about the books. I am here because I write the books. I would LOVE if you would read them and talk to me about them. They are a good time, these books. Well, you're going to read them and go "gaaaaaah don't do that oh no what are you doing nooo stop!" only you probably use punctuation even in your head. Even I feel that way when I read them. "Oh no! You're making a terrible mistake! Don't do it, Harriet/Ariel/Isaiah/Becca/Winston/Davy/Annamarie/Cole/Lisette/Millicent/Rosalie/Gregson/Zeke/Zach/whoever! Oh no, you did it! How are you going to get out of this now?" I really love to write young people getting themselves into impossibly terrible situations and then getting themselves back out of them.  Go on over there and pick out a book to read. There are links to Amazon where you can buy an ebook (so cheap) or a paperback (not muc...

48 Cold Comfort Farm

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Stella Gibbons's amazing novel Cold Comfort Farm features a main character without a real character art of her own, who walks into the lives of her messy dramatic cousins and solves all their major life problems. Flora Poste said from the beginning she liked cleaning up messes and making everything tidy and that's exactly what she does with the Starkadders. They are living with maximum misery and drama, each of them taking on a role where they can weaponize their misery to be the star of their own show. Flora goes methodically through the family, solving their problems and making each of them happy. I adore this book. I saw the movie first, many years ago, then read the book. The movie is very close to the book, if that worries you. I found so many things to use in this book, too. For example, I realized exactly what's wrong with my giant fluffy disaster of a draft, as well as how to fix it, so once again you've solved it for me, Sacred Cheese of Lifers! No? Not the te...

Apple Podcasts

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The old feed of the podcast is still up on Apple Podcasts (not sure for how long, also it's possible I downloaded the episodes) but you'll need to go to the NEW feed to get recent and future episodes. Go to search. Search for Sacred Cheese of Life. Pick the new one that has episode 47 A Rose for Emily. Follow! Hurray! I myself was baffled by this today, but shouldn't have been, in retrospect. It's a different rss feed. The new feed is: https://media.rss.com/sacred-cheese-of-life/feed.xml It will be included in many other podcatchers and venues going forward, but I don't use them so I'm not sure when they'll be live. Search for it on your favorite podcatcher! If there's one you want it added to, let me know. Except Pandora/Sirius because their contract was evil. A world of nope. Good times! Sacred cheese of life and whatnot!  

47 A Rose for Emily

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You have to read this before listening because the ending will be ruined otherwise. I will not be responsible for that! Read it! Gaaaaah! There is no rose! I can't remember whether a friend of mine or I wrote about the rose in the story for an exam in high school. Except there's no rose. We didn't get that online. There was no online yet. Goodness knows where it came from. But I always think about the rose that isn't there. Well, everything in the one room is rose, as in the color. And obviously the title suggests it! That's where it came from.  Also we were really tired. ALL THE TIME. Are we sure high school is a good idea, as it is currently imagined? I say no.    

Migration

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I've migrated the podcast to RSS.com so you will be able to find it there. The old website is down and gone, though I still own the domain so may put another one up there if/when I decide to do that.  However, you can still access the podcast through Apple Podcasts for sure. I'll be adding it to the other services as time goes by. But since it has never been on them, it's all new. And I'm not. So give me a second on those.  One bonus is that transcripts work on Apple Podcasts now. They insisted they were there before, but they never worked for me until now. Woohoo! I like transcripts. Subtitles for your ears. I might set up this other blog as my main website but that makes me fall asleep just thinking about it. I started. But it kind of sucks? So we'll see. BUSY WEEK, OKAY. Sacred cheese of migratory life!

46 We Have Always Lived in the Castle

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Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle raises questions like: what if my little sister was a murderous psychopath? And: how burned down does a house have to be before we’ll move out? And: Why do the villagers hate our family so much? The last question is because of the first one, really. Merricat poisoned most of her family and killed them. It’s not even really clear why. Because she got sent to bed without any supper? What had she done? None of that matters because Merricat is the narrator so we see what she sees. She hates and fears the villagers because they hate and fear her. She loves Constance, her older sister, who doesn’t like sugar on blackberries and so did not get poisoned, and Uncle Julian, who only got poisoned a little, so is stuck in a wheelchair with his mind wandering. It’s Cousin Charles she hates the most. He comes sniffing around after the family money and after Constance. Merricat wrecks his room, and when he sends her to bed without any supper...

45 I Capture the Castle

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This 1949 novel is one of the best ever. Do yourself a favor and read it before I talk about it. It seems criminal that I'm not writing a book about a giant unwieldy house while reading this. How could it be? I adore this book, then I got all mad at the ending, then when I went over it again, I had misread it—the ending is exactly right. Hurray! Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle is overtly a retelling of Pride and Prejudice except instead of being about either of those things, it’s about genteel poverty and what it’s okay to do to get out of it. The poverty is no joke in this book. Get ready to appreciate your fridge and pantry, as well as electricity and hot and cold running water. And that closet full of clothes. The characters deal with it, but aren’t about that, really, any more than the Bennets are about being on the edge of homelessness at any moment, if anything happens to Mr. Bennet. It’s huge and central to their lives, but they are about so much more. Cassandra is...

The Esker Road

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I'm naming the Becca book The Esker Road , so there, it finally has a title after what, a year and a half? It has had many titles through its previous incarnations, but they were all terrible, so let's forget them. At one point I had named Becca Saxony, but it kept on evoking medieval maps.  Once upon a time this book was set on Mount Desert Island, with a J.K. Rowling type author (minus the HATE) up in a mansion on top of one of the inhabited peaks near the shore, with the teen heroine living in a nearly abandoned house built by her dad (now divorced and gone) with a funicular up the mountain from the town where she went to school and where her exhausted mom worked. And there were toddler quintuplets she had to babysit, I believe. Anyway that might have to get written on its own one of these days. It's all part of the story about a girl avoiding reality by obsessing over a fictional world, see.  Quintuplet toddlers that a teen took care of full time. I'd escape too. AN...

44 Jellicoe Road

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Jellicoe Road is a novel by Melina Marchetta. It will ruin you, but in a good way. Also it's so complicated that you don't understand what's actually happening until the end, much like Code Name Verity . Half of the characters have two different names, one in the past and one in the present. But the past absolutely informs the lives of the important characters in the present. It's not really even over.  This book gives me such a feeling of tragedy, in the big epic classical sense.  We'll see how I do with it.  I was thinking about it because I named the Becca book The Esker Road finally. You know how roads are named for where they're going, at least around here? I think it's widespread but who knows. Well, the town of Esker is where all this action goes on, where the University is, the nearest town above a crossroads to Thrushcross.  Books that take place in and around the town of Esker, Maine: The Nerve Leaving Thrushcross Mazewood Summerlands The Esker R...

43 Jupiter Ascending

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It's dystopian space opera with a happy ending, right? That fits the bill.  I'm still trying to invent a show for my character to become obsessed with. This movie has so many serious problems. It's really not good, but it's amazing anyway. Take the main character, for example. She gets sucked into this giant drama but plays almost no role in its resolution. She's the most passive heroine ever. This isn't a character-driven story, at least not on her part. You could argue that the wolf man Caine's character drives it much more than she does.  It is a DELIGHTFUL movie to watch because of the flying and diving and falling and swooping through the air, because of the larger than life villains who are fighting with each other, because of the gorgeous settings and costumes and beautifully imagined scenarios, but most of all because of Caine rollerblading through the sky and moving with such profound grace and strength. He gets wings at the end. It's AMAZING. B...

42 Farscape and Space Opera

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Farscape is one of my favorite shows of all time. Historically it went Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , then Farscape , then Battlestar Galactica . I've been moderately into Agents of SHIELD over the past however many years, but not to that same depth. Look! I'm a total sci-fi nerd! We know this.  Farscape is space opera while the others are not. What is space opera? I get into that in the episode. What does space opera do for you? That's a much more interesting question.  I'm looking into this for the imaginary show that Becca is obsessed with in the Becca book. It matters so much what your character is super into, especially when she's going to get to meet the actors and writers and all. What are they making and why? So I did a lot of thinking about that here. In the end I kind of talked myself out of using this type of show, though. I actually think she should be into a dystopian space opera, if that's a thing. I came up with two examples: Mad Max Fury Road and ...

41 Landscape

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Episode 41 is up!  This episode is all about landscape and its uses in fiction. Turns out it's incredibly important, unless it isn't important at all. If it's there, it has to matter, that's the thing. I'm working on landscape in the Becca book and being bothered enormously by the lack of landscape, as in, not just scenery or that kind of thing, but understanding the physical surroundings in a visual and visceral way.  When I've done this well, it's fantastic, but when I'm not doing it well, I haaaaaate it. Have to step it up.   Nobody does this better than Joan Aiken in The Whispering Mountain and my favorite book, A Cluster of Separate Sparks. They're incredibly locational. Every spot has meaning and every action takes place in an important spot.  I really feel strongly that this is ESSENTIAL to excellent fiction. It can't be in some woolly "somewhere" or vague space. It's making me mad about my own work. Of course I don't t...

40 Battlestar Galactica miniseries

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I just watched the three hour miniseries for this. I have SUCH a complicated relationship with this show! We’ll get into it, don’t worry. I’m interested in what worked so well in this miniseries and what drove such obsession with the show in general. I was truly obsessed and it changed the course of my life for the better all kinds of ways. I had so many cool experiences that I never would have had without this show. Amazing. I’m also interested in the nature of obsession with fiction and how that affects us, not just for the purposes of writing this book (though that’s huge) but also in terms of what we learn and gain from that kind of deep study. All of literary academia is exactly this way—and of course I was an academic first, before I was a writer. Going deep with a text lets you learn a tremendous amount about it. Part of the brilliance of the show was that it set up a lot of characters and stories without following through on them, which can make you kind of crazed but also...

40 Battlestar Galactica Miniseries background information

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The three hour and three minute miniseries came out in 2003. If you loved the original Battlestar Galactica like me, you probably tuned in. I first saw it on DVD via Netflix and got completely hooked immediately. I watched it twice more the same day. Yes. Nine hours and nine minutes of show. Looking back, I don't know what exactly hooked me so thoroughly. But I can try to guess. It's an apocalypse story. The Cylon attack means the end of the world. They drop nuclear bombs all over the inhabited colonies and presumably irradiate everything to the point where everyone will die. I'm not quite sure of that, since people do survive, at least on Caprica, but the cities and infrastructure are destroyed. Anyway, apocalypse. Life as we know it is over. The people who were in space at the time are spared, but have to get out of there to survive. That gives us a bunch of tasks: 1. survive the initial attacks 2. gather people together 3. get ammunition to fight back 4. get the hell ou...

39 I Am the Cheese

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This week I'm reading the amazing novel I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. Please read it before listening!  This novel is so upsetting. And I remembered it very differently from the way it actually is. I didn't understand it fully when I read it as a child, no surprise there. It's a complex narrative method on multiple levels, not just that it's alternating interview transcripts and direct narrative and memory, but because understanding and younger memory is involved as well as altered mental states.  This book fits into a mental bookshelf that also includes A Separate Peace and Lord of the Flies and some others. It's also possible that the actual bookshelf belonged to my homeroom teacher (and brilliant English teacher) Mr. McDonald, who also got me hooked on Faulkner.  What a funny category those Faulkner books belong to...because I was reading one at some orchestra festival, but someone kept stealing my copy, multiple days in a row. Who hated me (or Faulkner) ...

38 Scamanda

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Kind of a departure this week. I listened to a whole long podcast series called Scamanda about a person who created a fictional situation for herself, lied about having cancer, and used that to bilk friends and family and strangers out of a lot of money. Thieves aren’t interesting, but this person wanted affection and caring and sympathy and a lot of help, and used her fake cancer diagnosis and treatment to get it. The podcast is journalism about someone creating fiction about herself and using it for selfish ends, but it’s also about another journalist who became obsessed with the case and researched it exhaustively for years. That’s fascinating, too. I’m so curious about the mindset of someone who can do this, who can lie and lie and lie, manufacture photos that represent medical treatments that never happened, set up fake scenarios to represent medications and chemotherapy that aren’t real. She even shaved off her hair, pretending she lost it to chemo. That’s not delusion. That’s de...

Next book after Becca

I'm thinking ahead about what to write once I finish the Becca book, which is a long way from being even anywhere near thinking about being done, but I like to enjoy the planning process as long as possible. Like there's this trio: Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle Emma Burns, Castle Full of Trees Okay, the last one doesn't exist yet, except in my own mind. But it's so vivid and clear and I have such a good outline (I never outline) that I feel like it's a book that needs to happen. Even though it's sort of mythological fantasy. So everything I don't do. Fun! All I have to do is develop the characters of the gods in such a way that they make sense and are memorable to me. Then we're golden. I've never seen the gods in the Battlestar Galactica characters, though they're the only ones with those names I can really put names to. Apollo is not Apollo. But I can't picture them. Doing that makes ...

37 Rimrunners

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Well, it's not a good novel. But it used to be one of my favorites. What's up with that? I spend some time grappling with genre conventions, the Taco Bell menu of genre-specific literary tropes, and OneDrive, which I want to kill with fire. While I'm typing this, I am restoring it, even though I just deleted it, because I discovered it was BACK after being deleted about six times this week--probably more--and I HATE IT. I carefully saved my new recording to the Desktop, out of its reach, only to discover that the Desktop is PART OF ITS REACH and it had deleted that too. Why won't it die??? I joked I was going to end up editing my win.ini file but truly I'm going to end up in a C prompt editing the regedit. I will destroy this thing.  It is 1997 over here in computer land. They drove me to it.  Maybe that's relevant to Rimrunners , which is really super From The Past in a way that's kind of unpalatable now, a time when "tough heroine" meant "is...

36 Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth

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That title has issues, but it’s a fantastic book. This is a middle grade novel by E.L. Konigsburg, one of my favorite middle grade authors—and we already know I adore middle grade. I think I have ten of her books. This is a book narrated by a funny, self-aware fifth-grade girl, Elizabeth, as she enters a new school and makes a friend, Jennifer, who turns out to be manipulative and controlling. Jennifer says she’s a witch and does seem to have abilities and objects that make no sense in the world Elizabeth knows. Jennifer offers to train Elizabeth as an apprentice witch, leading to all sorts of requirements for Elizabeth, like having to eat a raw egg every day one week, or being forbidden to cut her hair. Reading this as an adult is very strange because Jennifer is a whole field of red flags. But she also gives Elizabeth new self-worth and confidence. When things blow up finally, the girls become regular friends instead of this weird dominance and compliance game. The ending has al...

35 The Almost Year

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Florence Engel Randall’s novel follows a traumatized black teen who gets sent to live with a white suburban family in the early 70s. She didn’t want to go, nobody wants her there, and she has a bad time. She also will never say what’s bothering her or what’s wrong. Troubled teens as always lead to poltergeist activity. What a fantastic book! I loved it as a kid. It’s weird to read it as an adult. It’s beautifully written but also not much happens. She reads Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” in class. I had forgotten that’s where I first read that! I memorized it from this book. When I say this book meant a lot to me, I am not overstating. I didn’t even realize I had essentially quoted the girl’s mom to some students a few years back. Hey, it was good advice. I look at the fish out of water or stranger in a strange land story trope, with reference to The Martian which I also just read, even finished it, miraculously, since I’m so on edge that I didn’t finish about six books I started. N...

34 WYSIWYG

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Levels! Layers! These are traits of good writing that can be hard to talk about. I read a book this past Friday that drove me wild with its constant WYSIWYG 1:1 saying exactly what message it wanted to get across. Maybe it was a little more profound than that, but it was on the level of a grade school skit about bullying. Here's what bullying looks like. It's bad. Don't do it.  I know WYSIWYG is a coding term and has a specialized meaning there, but writers use it to refer to scenes that are extremely on the nose and say things flat out in ways humans very rarely do, but especially not in fiction, where it's so boring and bland and even embarrassing.  We like more complexity than that in writing, truly. Even in middle grade chapter books there is more complexity and more of a nuanced presentation of material. We like to participate, which means interpretation. We're really not passive absorbers of information from fiction. We enjoy the tricky puzzles of it, the comp...