Sacred Cheese of Life

Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle raises questions like: what if my little sister was a murderous psychopath? And: how burned down does a house have to be before we’ll move out? And: Why do the villagers hate our family so much?

The last question is because of the first one, really. Merricat poisoned most of her family and killed them. It’s not even really clear why. Because she got sent to bed without any supper? What had she done? None of that matters because Merricat is the narrator so we see what she sees. She hates and fears the villagers because they hate and fear her. She loves Constance, her older sister, who doesn’t like sugar on blackberries and so did not get poisoned, and Uncle Julian, who only got poisoned a little, so is stuck in a wheelchair with his mind wandering.

It’s Cousin Charles she hates the most. He comes sniffing around after the family money and after Constance. Merricat wrecks his room, and when he sends her to bed without any supper, she drops the lit pipe he left upstairs into a wastepaper basket full of newspapers, setting the house on fire, burning the upper floor, but getting rid of Charles, so it was worth it.

Jackson excels at letting people’s secret savagery out. She gives us incredibly nosy and inappropriate visitors, outrageously rude villagers, a fire chief who puts the fire out then throws a rock and smashes a window in the house he just saved, a raging mob of villagers who smash and destroy everything in the house they can get their hands on. But most of all she gives us Merricat, who calmly says that she wishes these people were dead—and that she would walk on their bodies.

What if we said what we actually thought and acted on our real feelings? What if we stopped being civilized?

This is a huge book to tackle and I still don’t know quite how to feel about it. I love an unreliable narrator so much, especially a true psychopath. And I love a Gothic house and a town that loses control of itself.

Other texts mentioned: The Esker Road, of course. The Last Word. Summerlands. Sarah Dessen’s Dreamland. I thought about Laurie Halse Anderson’s novels, especially Speak. Judy Blume’s novels. Lois Duncan. It’s no wonder therapists say that most of their job is getting people to say the things that need to be said.

I adore this book, then I got all mad at the ending, then when I went over it again, I had misread it—the ending is exactly right. Hurray!

Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle is overtly a retelling of Pride and Prejudice except instead of being about either of those things, it’s about genteel poverty and what it’s okay to do to get out of it.

The poverty is no joke in this book. Get ready to appreciate your fridge and pantry, as well as electricity and hot and cold running water. And that closet full of clothes. The characters deal with it, but aren’t about that, really, any more than the Bennets are about being on the edge of homelessness at any moment, if anything happens to Mr. Bennet. It’s huge and central to their lives, but they are about so much more.

Cassandra is one of literature’s best characters. The book is her journals about the time when “Pemberley is let at last,” as they actually joke in the book. Two eligible wealthy young men move into the neighborhood. They actually own the house and castle where Cassandra and her family are failing to pay the rent and going cold and hungry. Quite a setup.

Cassandra’s voice and interpretations of events are what make this a fabulous book.

Other topics broached: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the podcast Do You Need a Ride?, The Last Word, Castle Full of Trees, probably others.

Melina Marchetta’s novel Jellicoe Road will kill you dead, in a good way, but you only get to read it unspoiled ONCE, so please I am begging you, read it before you listen to this! I will ruin everything for you. This is one of the best books there is. Go read it now. Hup hup. Okay!

Jellicoe Road is the story of Taylor Markham trying to fix her past and her present, her family and her friends, which are all in such a truly tragic disaster that it’s almost unbearable. The plot sounds like a lot of YA, but it’s so much more operatic and fraught and a real tragedy a lot of different ways. She solves the mysteries, fights through the relationships, finds her lost mother and brings her home, resolves some roadblocks for others she cares about, saves two kids from a tunnel, has a meeting of the minds with a fantastic boyfriend, and fights her way to a new family.

It’s so much. And the book is full of mysteries from the past that she has to figure out.

If I could figure out how Marchetta writes such brilliant characters that we care so much about, I’d really have something. I think I got part of the way there at least in this discussion.

Other texts mentioned: The Esker Road, I Am the Cheese, Leverage: Redemption, The Prydain Chronicles, probably others.

It’s such high tragedy with a relatively happy ending. It’s exactly how I want my books to be. Only less confusing. This is a much harder puzzle to solve than the things I write.

It’s funny to be so impressed by a book I’ve read multiple times before, but I really am. The more I analyze it, the better I like it and the more impressed I am.

Highest recommendation. Go get it.

This is a little bit different as an approach. I decided to record while watching Jupiter Ascending, which made for slightly odd audio, though I turned the tv down a few minutes in. But it also meant a lot of silences, so I ran truncate silence, which rendered everything like an ADHD nightmare of jumping from one thought to another. Whee! It was fun to listen to, though. Just be aware.

I really love this movie for all the good Wachowski things: gorgeous action sequences, insane constuming, wild art direction, and so on. And of course Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum and Sean Bean are worth showing up for on their own. But there’s a huge flaw in that the heroine is almost entirely passive instead of choosing and chasing her course. She gets rescued endlessly. And I mean, carried in the arms of the hero. She starts to make her own choices later on in the film but is rescued each time anyway. It’s a movie with a rescue fetish for real.

However, it’s so gorgeous and funny and sweet, and the two leads are so good together, that I can forgive a lot.

Also it made me adamant that my own heroine in the current draft needs a MUCH clearer goal. More concrete, more clearly stated. Come on! Remember how much that changed Summerlands for the better? Infinitely. So let’s do that.

I’m coming out of a massive migraine and got six vaccinations Friday so really I’m not at my best, but it’s the truncate silence effect that I wish wasn’t part of the equation. If you’ve seen the movie, this should be a lot of fun. If not, it might be baffling, but you’ll still get the points. Characters! Need! Goals!

Sacred cheese of life!

Farscape is an absolute delight of a show. Space opera at its best.

I wanted to study it for space opera for Becca’s favorite show. Ultimately I talked myself out of it through this discussion and ended up thinking it should be a dystopia of some kind, possibly a dystopian space opera, if there is such a thing.

There’s a lot of talk about the Becca book in this. I’m figuring some stuff out. I wish I’d talked more about Farscape what with how it is my beloved but you should go watch it yourself and see what’s up. The first few episodes are a little awkward but you can already see the core of what’s coming. Everyone cares so much about each other and they’re all so screwed up and everyone is facing impossible conflicts and it all matters SO MUCH.

Imagine being part of that. Actually I did know someone who interned there. What ever happened to her?

Other texts discussed: Jupiter Ascending, Mad Max Fury Road. Which I think are both space opera dystopias, aren’t they? Maybe!

Joan Aiken uses landscape to encompass and embody the stories she tells—sometimes. When she does it, I find the novels incredibly compelling. It’s odd that she doesn’t always do it, though, come to think of it.

I want to use landscape that way. I’m impatient with fuzzy going nowhere stories, or rather one, anyway. I decided every location (or scene) has to be doing three things. Location and landscape have to have a role in the story, not just be a place things happen.

Landscape has to be integral to storytelling, that’s what I’m saying. I’m all adamant about it now.

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. 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!

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. 

I read I Am the Cheese twice 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 my characters 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. 

It looks like I might have to watch Battlestar Galactica next, not just to face the traumatic loss of a whole potential life connected to it, but because Becca is going to get both my obsession with a show and that loss. This is going to be an entirely different book. Also they’re shooting the show at the Thrushcross Studios, so I get to reuse standing sets. I MEAN. Something like that. I need her to have access and there’s the studio right there. Oh no! I hate to do this even to a fictional character! Plus I’m going to melt down watching this show. You don’t even know. Unless you were there with me and you know. Then you too are braced for impact. What happens to a person when they love something so much and then it’s gone?

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?

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.

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!

Rimrunners 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!

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. 

Rimrunners used to seem so awesome to me, but then I too am from the past and it wasn't overdone yet then. I’m not sure anyone would write a heroine like that these days. 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 Amazon.

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. Starting work on that was the only thing that cured the post-novel bad brains.

Now I’m going to destroy OneDrive again. Maybe for good? I hope so.

Sacred Cheese of Life!