Story on the Brain

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!    

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...

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...

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!  

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.    

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!