Story on the Brain

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...

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...

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...

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) ...

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...

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 ...

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...