I'm in another Murderbot reread. Happens several times a year. But it got me thinking why we love Murderbot so much. What is it about a depressive angry ex-slave cyborg with PTSD who's on the run that gets to us?

It doesn't know itself. It doesn't know what it wants. It's angry, justifiably so. It wants to be part of a team, to belong, and to connect with others, but doesn't know that and would deny it if asked. It wants to do its job really well and be noticed for it. It mostly just wants to watch tv all day every day and not get shot at.

I'm fascinated by the internal contradictions in this character, then noticed that's true about a lot of other great characters.

Oh no, it made me realize mine might lack that, whoops. I will work on that. As soon as I finish all these massive construction projects. Which might be stopping right now because OMG my knees.

I'm endlessly interested in the ways we don't know ourselves, misrepresent ourselves, think we're one way when we're another, and don't actually know what we really want that would make us happy. We're such a mess! All of us and Murderbot too.

Next week: probably Sarah Dessen's Lock and Key since I can't quit bringing it up. Woohoo!

Other texts mentioned: the usual suspects. Battlestar Galactica, Leverage: Redemption, Cold Comfort Farm, Summerlands, Landslide.

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!

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 term? Okay, tell me what it is.

There's plot-based writing and character-based writing. And I hate plot-based writing. Except in certain kinds of television where it's necessary, as for example procedurals. Otherwise, get out of here! Talking to you, my book, The Esker Road. I will shape you up. I WILL.

There's a movie I saw that I think was based on a book that I want to read next, except I can't remember anything about it except Amy Adams is in it and Frances McDormand is the main character who never gets anything to eat and is starving the whole time. ??? I'll find it. It had fantastic clothes. Period piece.

Other texts mentioned today: Bones, The Nerve, Summerlands, probably more. D.H. Lawrence and his tedious obsessions etc.

Sacred Cheese of Life!

William Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily" is widely taught because it's such a fascinating and complex collection of literary maneuvers in a small space.

We get the story of Emily Grierson, an upper class social exile who does some very weird things. Obviously I wanted to read it after We Have Always Lived in the Castle due to the major overlaps. But this story also features an unreliable first person plural narrator. So strange! They're unable to connect some very clearly linked dots A, B, and C, so how much can we trust anything else they say?

It's great fun to watch a class go from "we hate Emily, like the townspeople" to maybe wondering whether she might be the way she is because of how they treat her. Surely being treated like a freak show who's outside of all the norms can't be good for someone?

This week's episode brought to you by incredibly itchy black fly bites, the barks of Miss Tallulah Dog, too much drama, unspecified, and major progress on the draft of The Esker Road. Woohoo!

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.