Story on the Brain

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...

Oh oh oh, I love character. I watch sports for character. I read for character. I watch television for character. And I certainly WRITE for character. I have very strong feelings about character. I recorded an episode of Sacred Cheese of Life yesterday about character and used Finn from The Icarus Triptych and Mazewood as my example, even though he's the least characteristic (sorry) example I could possibly have come up with, because I built his appearance and voice on an actor from a show I was watching.  I never do that. Do you do that? I know plenty of writers do, but I'd never done it before.  It gives your character so much more life and volume and specificity. It's also somewhat creepy, I have to admit that, because here you are focusing on someone YOU DON'T KNOW in order to write something that doesn't benefit them. I mean it's not like you're writing that person a movie they can star in or anything. He got nothing from it. Except a dedication and a ...

  Biography is fascinating because: who cares? Who cares what happened in your life?  It might be because you've done something interesting or terrible and we want to know how you got to that point.  It might be because you lived through something major and cool or alarming and we want to know what it was like to be there. It might just be because you're funny and tell about things nobody else would have paid attention to, but you make them cool and interesting. That's the only way my millions of words of blog will turn into a book so I hope this one flies. With older autobiography, particularly diaries, I'm endlessly fascinated by the minutiae of daily life, but with modern biography, that's just not interesting to me at all. Excruciatingly boring, even, if the person is from the same culture as me. If not, tell me everything! It might be because your work is cool and we're interested in how a person created such things. Why? To replicate that process, maybe? I...

Yes! Fantastic! A book everyone should read.  Get it!      

I'm putting together a collection of short stories I wrote (as assigned in my MFA) about my abusive mother. It's so weird to read all these autobiographical novels about bad mothers and think...that's it? That's what you are so upset about? Also they got the good titles first. Like I'm Glad My Mother Is Dead. That's a killer title. That poor girl, though. Okay, she really went through it. But I got furious at Crying in H Mart because the author was clearly not self-aware enough to be writing that book. And was also clearly trying to spin things to sound like less of a dick to her mom. It's never going to come across great when you're a dick to anyone in autobiography.  My stories were extremely rough to read. It was horrible being under her control, especially before I went to school. The stories where I was very young made tears pour down my face. I remember all this so vividly, but what's weird is a lot of it is much less vivid than it was in 2017 ...

https://www.emmaburns.org/sacred-cheese-of-life-podcast/xi10otjy6gwtora43y8jiducelslwt Forgot! Look, I can forget where I was going and why I was going there between the office and the kitchen, so all this leaving the house and doing things has seriously interfered with my concentration. Or improved it? Hard to say. Matilda is just fascinating, though. I almost can't get over how much this little chapter book does. Though I was also just thinking about Where the Wild Things Are and how that book is much, much bigger on the inside. It keeps on giving the longer you study it.  Which incidentally was a truly boneheaded definition of literature I heard once: it keeps giving when you study it. Hi. That is true about EVERYTHING.  Back to my ranty feelings about high and low art and genre bigotry. Here, think about a play. Literature, right? (Don't get me started by arguing which ones are and which ones aren't.) If you film a play does it stop being literature? Obviously not. Ta...