Story on the Brain

My most fun novel, The Nerve , is out now! Read and enjoy! Available on Amazon in ebook and print. 

This week I dig into Connie Willis’s time travel novel Doomsday Book . I love this book so much. The issues with time travel are many, but the issues with omniscient time travel computers that somehow know that someone will change things and refuse to send them through are on another level entirely. So you know it has to be good if I will read it over and over again with a fundamental logic hole in it the size of Antarctica. I also discuss another unnamed novel that has a tremendous betrayal of trust, in that the author lies to the reader. How can that be, when an author’s job is to lie to the reader? Yeah, but authors are supposed to lie in ways that tell the truth, not fake you out then go haha you believed me. I am so mad at this book still, for real. Like the whole premise gets undermined and therefore makes no sense at all. How to make me mad: undermine your own stupid premise. Gaaaaah! As I mentioned in the episode, if you want it, let me know, and I'll mail the hardcover cop...

Hello to everyone I met at the Bangor Authors' Book Fair or whatever its name was! It was fantastic to meet you and talk to you. I have so many great memories from that day. Truly, I can't shut up about it.  I put the books up for sale on the emmaburns.org website under Merch with the same prices I had at the book fair, cheaper than through Amazon. It costs $12 to ship Priority with their envelopes so that's what I used for shipping price. But if you're within about half an hour of the Bangor area, I'll drop books off for free. If the system fights you on that and insists on shipping, just email me and we'll figure it out.  That event was so much fun, but now I am a pale shadow of my former self and can only lie about going "unnnnnh" and doing absolutely nothing. So between that and family events I'm wrecked. Too much GOING PLACES and DOING THINGS yet AGAIN. I did more of that in the past week than in the past year. I'll have to tell you about...

I'm super sick and tottering around all confused. You do not want me to record a podcast right now. Why is everything so confusing? Why are my arms being weird and shaky? Nobody knows. I slept half the day on the world's biggest ottoman (one I built from scratch) in the living room, with the dog cuddled up against me. She loved it. I kind of loved it. Head and shoulders on the purple loveseat. Then I had a fantasy of turning my headboard into a loveseat kind of thing, upholstered and with arms built on. I absolutely could make that happen. Or adapt an existing loveseat to become that.  Well, not right now. Right now I'm baffled by applesauce. I might not make it this week. I apologize. Especially to new listeners, but you probably came from the book fair and know how overwhelming and germ-filled that was (alas, it's true) so you get it better than anyone.  I ate some applesauce and feel like I might shuffle off this mortal coil. I'm sure it's fine. But. Ooooh.  ...

This week's episode will be about Meg Cabot's three modern epistolary romance novels Boy Meets Girl, The Boy Next Door, Every Boy's Got One.

Let there be great rejoicing! Particularly from those who are tired of hearing about this particularly agonizing drafting process, haha. Seriously, I usually write a draft straight through in one or two months. This is not normal for me. It's because it's an old story idea that's been written out a bunch of times. I've been listening back to old episodes precisely to get those insights about the draft that I had while talking it out during the recording, but immediately forgot.  I've been working insanely long hours on this all week. But don't give me too much credit. It's really because my hands hurt too much to keep reupholstering the loveseat. I know! Stop using furniture as a displacement activity from your main displacement activity! Anyway I have a few more things to fix and then have to let it sit before I reread and start the rewrite. I want to fix/finish the novel 40/40 next, but ought to tackle the short story collections and send them out into th...

The entire series of Agents of SHIELD is about identity. No, really. Have a look at episode one, or any other episode, or watch the whole series over and over like I do. It's everything I love about YA and scifi, even though sometimes the season arcs are kind of ludicrous and things seem to go off the rails. Who cares! I love it! Episode posts at 6:00 a.m. Eastern on December 2. How is it December??? They put Thanksgiving too late in November this year. Thanksgiving also makes an appearance in this episode. Hope you had a good one!    

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...

I'm looking at story engine here in terms of the element that drives a series, whether TV or novel. For example, in the TV show Wonderfalls , there are little animal tchotchkes that give Jaye obscure orders about how to help someone. She has to help the person to make the animals shut up and leave her alone. That engine drives the whole show. So if I'm developing an idea for a series, what should I use as a story engine?  I get into all sorts of series here, from procedurals to cozy mystery novels. I think I might have solved my series idea, what with how I'm not in a sensible position to be writing a TV pilot these days. I mean. But what should I do with it? I think I've got a workable plan now. Also working on finishing the novel draft OMG. I have a couple of issues I have to solve. It would help if I would stop cutting down trees and injuring myself. Go sit down and write your book! Sacred cheese of life!

As someone who makes (often unwilling) young people read classics as my regular job, a question I get a lot is: how do I learn to like these things? They bounce off. It happens! Everyone has modern expectations of narrative, which is to say, fast-paced, fitting a certain pattern, full of cliffhangers and other excitement. The chunky cloth covers and small type put them off. The feeling that this is steamed broccoli meant to be good for you is definitely not helping. There are a couple great roads into finding ways to love the classics. And I say that as someone who makes people read them practically daily. I also adore them. I talk a lot about genre fiction and so on here, but the classics are my whole thing. The older the better. Here's how you get into them: One , try listening to an audiobook instead of reading. Truly, it counts exactly the same. The voice actors interpret for you and make sense out of the long sentences. Downsides: it takes a lot longer, if you read fast at...

Episode 16 Objects in Space is up! ******* Very strange to rewatch the series! Strange how much I'd forgotten about this specific episode, one of my favorites.  For ages I couldn't understand how the show didn't make it, because I loved it so much, but now I get it. The tone and angle of the episodes are all over the place. One heartfelt, one silly, one dramatic, one truly violent, one horror, one a heist, and so on. I could see how that would make the money people extremely nervous. How would an audience know what to expect? I suspect the fans like me were there for the characters and the world more than anything else. If you're a character person, you'll take anything that lets you spend time with those characters. Not that there's anything wrong with these stories! They're all wonderful. But they are unpredictable. Compare to a sitcom or a procedural or a regular drama. They deliver the same goods every week. This does not. Anyway. "Out of Gas" ...

Update:  Episode 15 is up. It turned out to be about "So much water so close to home" and Agatha Christie's novel The Hollow .   Previous post below: *****  I'm going to work on a short story I hate called "So much water so close to home" by Raymond Carver.  Here's why I hate it: it gets under your skin. And because it's a male writer writing from a female POV about a deeply upsetting topic with a powerful gender divide to it. But even that is different now from how it used to be, or else I think about it differently. The future! It's more nuanced than the past! I also hate how realistic it is. I hate how she goes back to him at the end. I hate the drive with the green pickup. I hate so very many things about it. Sometimes you're supposed to hate things about a story. That's the point of the story sometimes.  How can I get mad that Carver thought about the man's wife's point of view more than the man's? What is up with my brai...

In case anyone wondered whether I have ADHD, yes! This episode proves it, if there had ever been any doubt. Also I'd had five short nights of sleep in a row AND was having an asthma attack, which makes me panic and fear for my life what with how it can actually kill you. But no, I sat there quietly recording and then today edited out all the horrible wheezy inhalations. Jeebus. However! It's about great things! That terrible comma plus and construction that I hate so much! See this post for much more, in a much more articulate format.   It's also about the Murderbot books. I ADORE Murderbot. Just writing that makes me want to go read them. So good! Murderbot! It's mostly about connecting both grammatical thoughts and story ideas in a logical way that shows consequences, more so than just A + B + C.  We need both, this is what I'm saying. Take that nightmarishly awful but beautifully written novel I wrote about a while back. Gorgeous sentences that added up to nothi...

Yeah, I got super bummed out by the short story collections, didn't I? And since nobody is gasping for them, I am working on the blog-to-book pipeline.  Oh my giddy aunt.  Problem one: It's ENORMOUS. I knew it was enormous but I didn't really know. Like it's 106K words and I'm about to start my first temp job, I think? That's like January to April of 2006. Just in a physical sense this is an unwieldy quantity of words that is difficult to divide up into logical volumes. I have to figure that out.  Problem two: Actually problem two resolved itself. The problem was that it made me heartbroken to read about my excited hopeful trip to L.A. to become a tv writer, which you may have noticed I'm not and never have been, whoops. Well, I didn't know that then. I had hope!  Hope in retrospect, oh no. Except, no, hope is the whole point of it. You have to have that excitement and hope and believe in the possibility of things and keep on getting up when you get knoc...