Story on the Brain

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,...

  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 th...

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 ...

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 excelle...

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!  

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 materi...

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 inform...