Sacred Cheese of Life

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!

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!

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!

The book I read is about a wealthy family in Scotland interacting with some Scottish Travellers and being Good and Right about things having to do with them and not Prejudiced and Bad and Mean. There’s a huge amount of unconsidered privilege that never gets addressed or resolved, even though that would have made a great story. The main character never develops at all. It’s all so weird. And she goes around kissing absolutely everyone, from a brother and sister both, to the guy fixing up her house, to a drag performer, to the violent authority figure threatening her friends. She never grasps anything about anything she does. It’s MADDENING.

So that’s fun. Let’s study how not to write flat, on the nose, what you see is what you get scenes!

Sacred cheese of life!

This week I read the Thrushcross trilogy, Leaving Thrushcross, The Icarus Triptych, and Mazewood. And yeah, I wrote them, but I also have no memory, so things were startlingly new to me, which I agree is weird.

But that gave me the idea to talk about objective reading and how we desperately need it to be able to rewrite our work.

I vividly remember being unable to do this. It was not that long ago. So it’s worthwhile to dig into this for the help of anyone fighting with a draft that’s fighting back.

We don’t write novels. We write drafts that we turn into novels. It’s true!

Sacred cheese of life!

Laini Taylor’s novel Daughter of Smoke and Bone is the first in a trilogy that will knock your socks off. Read it! Read it before you listen to this! There are SECRETS that I will give away and ruin things for you, oh no!

It’s a series that is literary high fantasy science fiction young adult romance. This series has everything! There are a few things I’d do differently, but Taylor is brilliant at high stakes and making us care—making the characters utterly sympathetic. Brilliant!

Some discussion of Liar, but mostly I stuck to wrangling the enormous task of discussing this complex world-building and who knows what when (seriously, it’s a complicated situation—one character doesn’t know she used to be someone else) and all of the ways things work.

They make people out of necklaces. It’s a whole thing.

But even though elements like that make me wild, I love these books beyond all reason. That tells you something. I almost never read fantasy anyway because of the excessive hand-waving, but I adore these. Even with the people necklaces, I’m fully on board.

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.