41 Landscape

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 think this is done well enough in Summerlands but I can do it better and better in the Becca book. Every scene needs to be in a location that carries multiple meanings. Every scene ought to be doing three things anyway!

Feeling extremely adamant about all this. Adamant!

 

 

40 Battlestar Galactica miniseries

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 leaves endless open doors for you to go through on your own. It’s such fertile ground for storytelling. I couldn’t not do it.

Loving something this way is always a good thing, no matter whether you almost die of respiratory nonsense or don’t get your dream job that almost nobody ever gets or whatever else. It’s all good material, right? And oh it was SO MUCH FUN. Always chase awesomeness. Always. The pursuit itself is a wonderful thing.

Sacred cheese of life!

 

 

40 Battlestar Galactica Miniseries background information

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 out of there

The way the miniseries is structured, people have to deal with a stepped series of major conflicts in general. It's beautifully laid out. It's also full of truly excellent characters, so we care about the people themselves, not just the overarching sci-fi storytelling. 

I'm generally hooked by character more than plot, though even I will pay attention to an apocalypse. The characters I liked immediately were the leads: Adama, Roslin, Starbuck, Apollo, Tigh, Sharon, Helo, Chief Tyrol, Dualla, Billy, Gaeta.

Thinking about how to introduce all of this when writing something makes me want to go lie down. But they do it in such a way that it's never overwhelming or confusing. Step by step by step. I should get hold of the script. (I may have the script, actually.)

Okay, the thing I worried about was that I'd absolutely freak out. Falling in love with a TV show is kind of terrible because it matters SO MUCH to you and it's completely out of your hands. And it will end. I fell crazy in love with this show. It was crushing to me when it ended. But I also got to be around a little bit of the process of it in a fringe way. 

This is the part that's hard to talk about. It really was like falling madly in love with someone and having them say, "Oh, that's nice," and walk away. The show mattered to me. I did not matter to the show. That's in the nature of all fiction, though! As the Tumblrinos say, "Wuthering Heights is not going to f*** you." It's a one-way thing, even when you get to meet the writers and cast and various crew. It's still one way. You look at the screen. The screen doesn't look back at you, whatever Nietzsche might think. 

Unrequited love hurts, right? 

Anyway that's all wrapped up in Battlestar, such that certain episodes make me completely freak out because I watched them with the writers on the big screen at that place where one lived, or went to screenings at that mall, wherever that was, or on the lot at Universal.

I think it must have been pathetic on some level to see this person show up everywhere, madly in love with your show, when to them it was just their job. I was so into it. They were not. 

They were so nice to me. Producers, effects people, actors, writers. Except that one guy, haha. Even the cheerful man from the network was lovely to me. Everyone was so nice to me. But it's excruciatingly embarrassing to remember because I was in love with the show and the show was not in love back, what with it being a show.  

So that's why watching this show is never just watching the show for me. 

You invest in fiction sometimes. That's what this is about, really. And I'm literature faculty, so I know too well how all of us invest in fiction--that's part of the job, that you pick an era and authors and you dig deep and write about them and know everything about them. Literature faculty are in fandoms. What others do with Chaucer (my old flame) and Shakespeare and Austen and Eliot and all of them, I did with Battlestar. I was a Battlestar scholar. I approached it the way a literature professor would, what with how that's who I am. 

Except I got to go to screenings and meet all the people and whatnot. Like that one time I spent a couple of hours with the Ch manuscript at the University of Pennsylvania Library Rare Books Room, where I worked. I studied that thing. I looked at all the annotations and notes in the manuscript. The question always was: did Chaucer himself make these notes? People go back and forth. I studied the notes and decided, though did not bother proving to anyone, that he did. They looked like the kind of notes a writer makes on their own manuscript. You can probably find scholarship out there discussing this point. 

That was me about Battlestar. 

The miniseries was safe to watch because I saw it first, before I ever went out there and chased the dream. But look at what it did for me! It motivated me to go places and meet people who were so cool and smart and awesome. I had experiences I never could have imagined. I really had a fantastic time out there. One day I'll release that volume of The Geographic Cure. Like, volume two, The Battlestar Galactica Years. It's a killer story. Unless you know the ending. Then it just wrecks you. It's still wrecking me.

A friend and I were talking about how therapy for PTSD works, that what you have to do (I know this, but) is take the terrible thing out into the light and make it part of regular life. 

I'm using all of this in the Becca book (that she won't shut up about) so I have to grapple with it. But ohhhhhhhh it's so hard. It's so hard. I don't want to. I didn't even want to watch the miniseries. But I did it yesterday and then watched it again with the commentary. 

Good job, me. 

I'm going to wreck Becca with this like it wrecked me, I'm afraid. But she will come out of it, because it's one of my books. I came out of it with the redirection to write books instead of television. And I stuck with it long enough to write books that were actually good. It takes a lot of books to get good, I'm afraid. Stay strong! And a LOT of rewriting. And looking at what doesn't work and finding better ways. Yes. It's a process. 

It also occurred to me that I almost never got any flow state in Los Angeles, in my tiny apartment with people noise constantly intruding. I think I was in a panic the whole time I lived there. Except, you know, when watching MY SHOW. 

Oh dear. It's good to love things. But when it all ends it hurrrrrrrts. Still, it was the right thing. It was! I was chasing the whole sacred cheese of life and that is always worth doing, even if it doesn't turn out the way you wanted. It was still the right thing! I wouldn't trade all those experiences and memories for anything. Well, maybe one thing. A spot on the team back then. But linear time doesn't work like that, hello! And writing now is AMAZING and glorious and a full time powerful good thing. The work I'm doing now is infinitely better than the work I was doing back then--also excruciating to think about, but you have to start somewhere. 

I will exorcise this and foist it off on Becca and make her story turn out the way I wish mine would have, except she has to go through that hell first. Sorry Becca! You know I love you! I gave you rugby and my friend and a fabulous life-giving obsession with a show! And you get to meet FINN which I never will except that day he was in my kitchen commenting over my shoulder on my spinach salad. Stop that. You're fictional. Get back in the book.

Battlestar Galactica is a NET GOOD in my life, no question about it. There, we solved it. It's a net good.

Sacred cheese of life! 

39 I Am the Cheese

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) that much? But was so secretive about it? What did they do with the books? I just kept getting another copy in homeroom the next morning. 

The funny part is, someone stole things from me at the local orchestra rehearsals, too. Probably the same person, right? But I just thought things disappeared, until years later when I put it together. They stole two different hats of mine, for example. Who steals hats and Faulkner paperbacks? Someone who is aggressively NORMATIVE, I would say. Stop being different! Stop being noticeable! 

Funny memory to assemble itself so many years later.

But if you've read this book, you know why memory and seeing things differently years later will come up for us. 

Anyway I'm reading I Am the Cheese for the second time because once I got to the end and had that WAIT, WHAT? moment, I had to see things again.

Trauma and memory and altered mental states. It's such an educational book for me to read right now as I'm trying to rejigger the Becca book before I dive into rewriting it. 

I tend to write poorly about people grappling with their childhood trauma. No way, right? Like they just go blank. They never face it. They never even really articulate things from their own experience, only from an adult perspective. That's not great. Cormier is extremely good at articulating childhood experience vividly and accurately. 

This book is perfect for me right now. I'm glad I own a copy finally, even though it's upsetting to the nth degree to read. 

Look at these various covers! The one is a little kid. One a little older, maybe junior high. The last one he's about fourteen or fifteen. In the book he seems like he's in his teens, so why this young child? And what is that matchbox next to him? 

38 Scamanda

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 deliberate fakery. It’s just a grift. Grifts are common. So why does this one capture our attention?

I highly recommend listening to Scamanda, even just for the brilliant actress who reads her blog posts. How does she create that amazing smarmy self-obsessed trite tone?

Once upon a time I considered writing a blog from a fake persona, as fiction, but it seemed really iffy to me. It would be fun, but I wasn’t interested in tricking anyone. But blogs in general tend to come from a sort of fictional persona or voice, no matter how much we try to be straight up truthful. There is no easy truth. Everything is filtered. There’s straight up lying, though. Let’s not do that. 

An oncology nurse details how the fakery could have been done here.

I finished proofing both Summerlands and The Nerve, hallelujah indeed, because wow, that was a hard job. I hate proofing. I’m not even sure why. Now they’re done and should be live on Amazon in another day or two. The Nerve is hung up because they think the title blends with the background too much. That’s AI talking, so shut up. It’s fine. I’m arguing with AI. I might end up redoing it a little. We’ll see. Don’t want to! Published it in December with this cover and it was fine! Got the proof copy and the cover looked great! Come on, AI, let's not fight, just because I hate you and you're wrong.

I’m now working on the Becca book and doing a lot of intensive story development, changing one character into another, adding people, changing arcs and complicating things, making it INFINITELY BETTER in every way. Now Becca’s from a troubling band of hippies who got arrested and left her and her best friend alone at this campsite until the authorities rescued them! Gaaaaaah! Thinking about things a whole lot improves them. Win!

You know “first thought” ideas? Where you wish they’d put some time in and come up with something cooler? We’re on about fifth thought now. How many do we need? Ten? Ten is a nice round number.

Sacred cheese of life! 

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 them human and earthly. So what are they in a story, if you have the gods there? Like in The Iliad and The Odyssey, Athena is always there. How do we see her? Thetis, Zeus, Hera, Hermes, all of them. I have to be able to visualize people or I can't write about them. 

What did you do today? Tried to visualize immanence. NBD. 

This will sound funny but it's an oddly religious thing to do, imagining gods, even like Athena and Apollo and Artemis and Hestia and the local gods of the place. I mean, they're characters in the book. But imagining them is like finding another floor to your house that you didn't know was there, or forgot about.

So they have specialized areas of excellence but generalized awesomeness. Power far beyond the human, but not infinite. What do they think of humans? They're interested but not always invested. Curious in a passing way. They can stop and take a minute to do this thing. Why not? They're eternal. 

ANYWAY.

Other possibilities:

Tuuli and Stijn, the chapters chopped out of Summerlands, their whole story, even though we know how it ends. 

I'm totally tempted to write Millicent and Rosalie at like 26, ten years after the events of Summerlands, engaged in some huge perilous venture. If you had this giant house, what would you do with it? Well, they'd get Stijn and his band to come play there, obviously. Hilarious idea, to have a festival on the grounds. There's a huge stone-paved terrace that would be a perfect stage. Why not combine that lost material with the future story? Though alternating chapters kind of exhaust me. One's a filmmaker and one writes musicals so there's potential for all of that. 

Hard to let go of the world of this book after all this time. Also I want to see who they become. The baby will be eleven. The oldest cousin fifteen. Imagine Millicent with a houseful of teens and tweens. 

SORELY tempted to have them connect with the Thrushcross people since they're in the same universe. You have Millicent, a filmmaker, just down the road from the Thrushcross Studios? Or whatever it's called? She's going to go over there and work with Finn. And we know I adore Finn. But that also means Harriet is there and needs a story. My head hurts.

WHAT ELSE?

Now that I've succeeded at overcoming one of my longest-running draft disasters, I'm tempted to tackle another one, maybe Perfect Monster, but sheesh it has some really big basic premise issues. I wrote half of this book maybe five times? It always ran aground on the premise. So I could change the premise and see if that engine runs.

OR???

There are all these variously terrible scifi novels I wrote or started years back. I don't know that the world needs that. There's a series with one complete, one far along, one started, one just an idea, one a tangential story line.

ALTERNATIVELY

There's a near future one with a space station run by a megalomaniac oligarch, but don't worry, he dies in the first scene. But DO worry because his death was an assassination that both locks down and blows up the station, so everyone is in Immediate Peril and has to work together to solve all his I'm The Only One Who Can Be In Charge Of Everything terrible control issue management systems. 

I mean, I love it? And current politics mean I would have constant driving rage to use to fuel it. Maybe it just needs further development. Got lots of notes. Sort of tempting. Love Boat Poseidon Adventure Anti-Oligarch story. 

ON THE EIGHTH HAND

There's the lightning book, which is about two people with paralyzing phobias trying to get unstuck in their lives on a road trip in some kind of RV or school bus thing.

PERSONALLY

I'm in love with the St. Sparrow book, but it's a giant undertaking and there's nothing so far, just a few notes and an extremely cool idea. 

Playing with ideas is very fun and I still don't know what to do next, but there's plenty of time because OMG the Becca book is eating my entire brain.

37 Rimrunners

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 like a dude hero from twenty years before." She's tough! She kills a would-be rapist guy with her bare hands (and bootheel) when starving to death! She murders a creepy molester guy slowly and camps out in his apartment! She doesn't have nerves of steel--she's a wreck--but that's how we know she's not a hero dude from twenty years before, I guess! She has sex with everyone because that's what the dude hero would do! She takes care of the crazy man who needs her help, ditto! She's strong and mighty and everyone's equal in the future but there are still rapists around every corner! WHY. In the end she saves the day despite being persecuted and repeatedly beaten up by the mean lieutenant because she has the special skills they need!

Sometimes genre conventions are exhausting to me. You can just tell a story. You don't have to Taco Bell it up, rearranging beans and cheese and meat and tortilla chips and salsa in umpteen forms. 

Guess who really wants Taco Bell right now.

It's been a thousand years since I've been there. And one of my students was the drive-through cashier when I went. Oh, hi.

Rimrunners used to seem so awesome to me, but then I too am from the past and it wasn't overdone yet then. I would never in a million years write a heroine like that. I'm not sure anyone would now. Okay, not true, there's a review of a book on this site that does a lot of those things and some much worse ones with a heroine who's supposed to be cool because she's gross, I guess? And doesn't wash? And lives on coffee and cigarettes and whiskey and has blood under her nails all the time? Sure, okay. I mean, absolutely not. It's so TRITE to do that. C.J. Cherryh has the excuse that it wasn't trite yet when she did it. This person, no. 

I finished Summerlands, had a massive migraine from it, kind of don't remember a lot of the week after the moment I posted the formatted version to KDP. Where you can now buy it! But don't because my friend read it (and loved it, YAYYYY) and mentioned two errors I need to fix. Give me a minute. 

Never yet seen a published book without a typo or error of some kind, but I'd like to eradicate them in my own work, if possible. Much like OneDrive. 

I'm working on the Becca book, aka Forty Days and Forty Nights, aka Gone Away, aka I haven't figured out a new title quite yet. I'll know I have it when I can imagine good cover art. 

Speaking of which, it's fascinating to look at all the variant covers for Rimrunners over the years, as they reimagine what a cool mighty 37 year old space Marine would look like. It's worth a look through the image search if you're curious. This is my paperback's cover. Isn't it atrocious? Strong forearms! Rolled up sleeves! True to story haircut! Pencil thin eyebrows! Surprising chest for someone literally starving!

Anyway, it's sad when one of your old favorites ages out of awesomeness, but so it goes. 

 

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

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 always troubled me because I don’t really see people giving up that need for dominance over others. But that led me to think a lot about the ending to Summerlands that I’m trying to write. During this recording I realized some huge things that need to change about the ending. We have to listen to a novel to see where it wants to go. It feels like I was fighting it and trying to steer it one way when it really wanted to go the other way. So we’re going the other way! You win, novel! And everybody lives happily ever after.

Sacred cheese of life!

 

 

35 The Almost Year

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.

Nobody’s writing anything, either. Maybe this coming week! I sure hope so. I need the dopamine, or do I mean serotonin? Whatever it is, that good chemical that floods my brain when I write. Ahhhhhh.

Hope you’re hanging in there! Read to avoid things you can’t change! Sacred cheese of life!

 

 

34 WYSIWYG

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 complications, thinking out what comes next, considering lies and half-truths and mistakes and all.

Also? Don't preach at your readers. Nobody wants that. We don't get persuaded by preaching. Either we already agree or we get defensive and resentful and don't listen. Most preaching is to the converted, as it turns out.

Even a preachy story like a parable can make people defensive, though less so than this WYSIWYG type of writing. 

Suppose someone really is wicked racist. Are you going to talk them out of it by showing them scenes of the people they hate not doing the things they say they do? Or scenes of racists being racist? The logic is a problem. They'll just agree with the racist people and they'll argue that those people do those things when we're not looking. 

It's a hard job! So many ways to do it wrong. I'm not even sure how to do this right, and can't think of any examples offhand that do, except maybe The Almost Year, a chapter book that I loved and own in hardcover. Good book. Maybe next week, since this turned up as a theme in this week's random oh this is on my phone, why did I dislike it again reading.

Well, a rhetorician would be able to convince someone that it's in their own best interests not to be that way, but I'm not sure that translates into fiction.

Mentioned in podcast: this brilliant taxonomy of Yankee Candles, 100% applicable to on the nose writing and flat scenes.

 

33 Objective Reading

Yeah, I accidentally read the Thrushcross trilogy this week and ended up with startling new insights into what makes writing work, so let’s talk about objective reading.

The novels are: Leaving Thrushcross, The Icarus Triptych, and Mazewood.

I always forget just how much I like these books.

I also always forget that I did not write the books you and I read. I wrote DRAFTS. Then I had to turn the drafts from giant messes into actual books, through many many many rewrites. It’s a long process. It’s hard. It sucks. It’s not as rewarding to the brain chemistry as writing a first draft, at least for me.

As I’ve been doing rewrites of Summerlands and was getting all bummed because it wasn’t as good as those books, this was an enormously helpful reminder that we don’t write books. We write drafts and make them into books.

And the only road between drafts and books is objective reading. It’s true. How do you do it? Here’s how.

 

32 Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Coming soon to an auditory system near you!

I read Laini Taylor's brilliant and category-defying novel Daughter of Smoke and Bone. 

It's part one of a hefty trilogy that is on my must-keep list. Like if I imagine moving to Norway or Finland and only taking a few books with me, this trilogy is on the list. Even though e-book is probably smarter. Definitely lighter. 

These books! Are so! Good! They're like literary high fantasy science fiction young adult. See what I mean about category? I think they get shelved with Young Adult. 

Fine, I'll list the books I'd take:

these three and Laini Taylor's duology (is that a thing?) that followed, about Lazlo Strange

Rainbow Rowell's collected works except for Landline because I hated it, but maybe should reread

Joan Aiken's collected works (except the Jane Austen continuation ones and the cynical New Yorky modern ones)

probably a lot of William Mayne even though he turned out to be a convicted serial child rapist (super went to jail and now deceased) because they're wonderful (Also there's a bizarre thing where what he did to those little girls happens to a character in one edition of one of his books [off screen obviously] but it's been removed from later editions so it's very weird to read that book now and know that this awful thing happened, so to speak, in a narrative sense, but got expunged from the record. RIGHT???)

Jane Gardam's Bilgewater

Hammerfall

The Hobbit and LOTR

Rimrunners and a bunch of other C.J. Cherryh because I love them even though they're flawed and boy does she have certain kinks that keep cropping up

The Raven Boys series, despite the atrocious Latin and the way the plot falls apart in book three

Dorothy Sayers, all of her books

The Time Traveler's Wife

Code Name Verity

certain Agatha Christies

my books OBVIOUSLY

Well, I can't think of the rest right now, but I'll work on it. That's already a suitcase full. 

If I were a true minimalist (hahahahahahaha I'm so not) I'd only have those books and nothing else, but guess what. Nope. 

I just bought a whole lot of those black binding Bantam editions of Agatha Christie from Goodwill. Can I take a truck when I go? A largeish boat. How do I take my various beloved pieces of ludicrous furniture? Can I move somewhere non-fascist very soon indeed, though? I will learn the language. I already speak German, French, Norwegian, and a tiny bit of Finnish. Mostly I can talk about how the bunny is adorable and the dog is black, but I grasp the partitive and I've already been there and liked it and I AM READY is what I'm saying. Germany! Sure! I speak it first when my brain reaches for a second language! I like quark! I'm related to absolutely everyone in Steinbach-Hallenberg!

Too much coffee today. Zu viel everything, like I'm saying. Maximal instead of minimal. I'm having flight of the "fight or flight" variety due to the terrible state of things, though of course here where I live nothing at all has changed. I mean, I never leave the house, so. But a powerful urge to get rid of everything and flee has taken me over. Despite a dislocated shoulder, I'm clearing things out.

In German newspapers, the image of that stupid oligarch doing that fascist salute was blocked out because it's illegal to show that there. I would much rather live there, in that case. I lived in Germany for two months! I'm practically a local! Let's talk about Brecht! Let's talk about Günter Grass! Why did I read and see so many plays there? Every time I pick up a chair by its arms (I am always reupholstering chairs) I think about the Max Frisch play Andorra, in which a character is told never to pick up a chair by its arms.

Anyway I'd take Laini Taylor's trilogy with me, that's what I'm saying. That's how good it is. I'm halfway through the second book, so have to record this episode quickly before I get completely muddled about what belongs to which volume. 

Sacred cheese of life!

 

31 Liar

Justine Larbalestier’s Liar, at last!

This is such a good novel. You have to read it before you listen, though. I will RUIN it for you by spoiling every possible thing. This is a book you have to experience unspoiled! You only get one chance. So please go read before you listen.

I usually take five class meetings to discuss this novel, so I talked really fast and didn’t get to say most of what I would have wanted to say. Gaaaah! What can you do.

I would love to hear what you think of the novel once you read it, before you listen to this, so in the event you are that person, please get in touch! The students have more than once thrown their books across their rooms! More than one has come up to me after we’re done reading it and given me their copy to give to someone else, because it made them so wild. Yes, it’s frustrating. Yes, Micah is the champion unreliable narrator. And no, there is no narrative truth that’s out there!

This is a book that makes you question everything about the reading process itself, one reason I love to have classes read it. Such good times.

Features multiple guest appearances from Eleanor the cat and Tallulah the dog. So verbal today, those two.

The old cover art, the current cover art. You'll know when you listen. 

30 How to write a novel

Oh boy, I keep seeing people wish they could write novels but don’t know how, or where to start, or what to do, so here’s some advice about that.

You do not need to know how to do this before you start. You need a person with a problem. And you need specificity: what that person is like, their skills and weaknesses, their particular situation, plus the geographical location and things like time of year.

Then go ahead and go buck wild. Tell a story. They want to do this thing or solve the problem or find the answer or whatever it might be. Good! Take STEP ONE. Then take step two. What happens? Do it one step at a time. Listen to yourself. Is there a random mycologist in the forest? He turns out to be important later, so if he shows up, write him in!

Also, if you’re writing about a real place, like Eustis, Maine, the place in Landslide whose name I can never remember, then GO THERE. Reality is so much richer than your imagination.

Otherwise, get okay with making mistakes, being bad at things, and making a great big mess. It’s not just okay, it’s essential. You’re not writing a novel but a DRAFT. It does not need to be perfect. It can’t be perfect. You’re making the material now you will turn into a book later on.

Follow the story! Be there! Notice what things are really like! You’ve got this!

Sacred cheese of life!

 

29 A Worn Path

This week I get into the strange linear narrative of Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path,” not in the sort of high school New Critical way of x symbolizes y, but in the sense of episodic versus serial narrative structure.

It’s a very strange story in a lot of ways because we have no idea where Phoenix Jackson is going or why she’s going there. And in fact when she arrives, she doesn’t know either. This story subverts narrative so thoroughly it’s almost like Tom Stoppard. Ooh, we should talk about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at some point. And stories told from the other side in general.

I discuss what makes us get and stay interested in a story with NO PLOT and see how I can apply that to other writing. Normally we assume the plot is what makes us stick around, but it sure isn’t in this case, since we don’t know what it could even be.

Still one of my favorite stories, even if (or because) it’s so strange and in some ways baffling.

Sacred cheese of life!