Catherine Egan's Blog, page 7
March 11, 2013
The Long Secret
Dear Blog,
I was devastated by Aslan's Death when I was five. A few years later I read Anne of Green Gables and longed to be a red-haired orphan and go cracking my slate over the skulls of impudent boys. I had nightmares about the Horned King from The Book of Three. There are hundreds of books that expanded my world and my self far beyond the narrow confines of my own single life and my own safe childhood. Those books became a part of me and yay, you know, that's nice and fairly obvious, and all of them are surely a part of Why I Write and How I Write. Still, there are three books that stand out not necessarily as my favorites (though I loved and love them dearly) but because of how they made me think in new ways about the power of books and about my own desire to Be A Writer: The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh, Bilgewater by Jane Gardam, and I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith.
I read all three of them between the ages of 11 and 13, an important time of transition, I guess, from childhood to adolescence but also, I think, from being one kind of would-be writer (the child who says I'm Going To Be A Writer and begins countless tedious imitative novels and never finishes anything) to being another kind of would-be writer (the young teen who begins countless tedious imitative novels and never finishes anything but is nonetheless beginning to think about writing and books in a different and slightly more mature way and is not far from writing her first short story). I am rereading those books now and plan to blog about all three. This week: The Long Secret.
The Long Secret is the very strange and beautifully written sequel to the wildly successful Harriet The Spy. I read Harriet when I was ten, and I must have read it a hundred times. I loved it. I knew it by heart. I wanted to be Harriet. I was eleven years old when my mother found and gave me The Long Secret I snatched it up and read it at once, eager for more Harriet with all her brash, wacky confidence and her snarky notebook entries. I would have been disappointed if the book hadn't been such a revelation.
What I got was Beth Ellen. I mean, there was plenty of Harriet too, wonderful Harriet moments, Harriet becoming more and more the writer we know she is, with her unrelenting curiosity about human nature and her need to find words for feelings and stories about everyone. But it isn't only or even mostly Harriet's story. The book adopts both Harriet's POV and Beth Ellen's. Beth Ellen is Harriet's painfully shy, silent classmate from the first book, the one who will cry if you look at her funny, and while the two girls are not in any way natural friends, they are "summer" friends due simply to proximity, as their families holiday in the same seaside town. "Mousy" Beth Ellen, and Beth Ellen's rage, were what made this book so riveting, so shocking, to eleven-year-old me.
I really noticed good writing for the first time as I read the book. Rereading it 25 years later, I remember many inconsequential lines because they so impressed me at the age of eleven. I wanted to write like that. The way Louise Fitzhugh described things, people, feelings, thoughts, moments made the whole world more vivid and strange and alive. Things you might not think to notice, but Louise Fitzhugh noticed them, and made you notice them too. That impressed me. But mostly, I think I became aware that a book could offer more than feelings, more than an exciting story. Here was insight, truths about being human and about capital-L Life. Books and writing held a revelatory power I had never considered or imagined before.
It shook me to my core when Beth Ellen's grandmother says to her: "Shy people are angry people." I wanted to be Harriet, I pretended to be Harriet, but the truth was that I was closer to Beth Ellen. I was shy, and I was angry. It was something I'd never thought about clearly, a connection I had never considered. Over and over I read the scene in which Beth Ellen snaps, tears her room apart, floods the bathroom, and sits under the running water while her mother and her mother's lover and the maid bang on the bathroom door.
She hugged her knees. I will flood the house, she thought. Then I will begin to grow and be huge. I will get so monstrously big that I will break the bathroom out and fill the house, the yard, all of Water Mill. I will tower over the Montauk Highway like a colossus. They will all run away like ants.
I don't think there is another author who writes about a child's experience of rage as brilliantly as Louise Fitzhugh does. In Harriet The Spy, Harriet falls apart when she is not allowed to write in her notebook. Harriet knows who and what she is and when that self is thwarted and denied, she rebels absolutely. In The Long Secret, Beth Ellen has none of Harriet's certainty. She doesn't know who she is or who she wants to be until she learns who she isn't - her mother's daughter. Her meltdown when her mother decides to take her away with her is as breathtaking a portrayal of rage and despair as I've ever read anywhere.
The book includes candid and hilarious writing about the start of menstruation and the preteen struggle with religion, a good few years before Judy Blume wrote Are you there, God, it's me, Margaret? (and what can you say about a book that opens with a cashier getting an anonymous note that says "Jesus Hates You"?). But that aspect of the book only vaguely interested me, at eleven. Even the central mystery (who is leaving nasty notes all over town?) was periphery. What struck me more, both then and now, was the way she was writing about the ambition of children, and the rage children experience when they are thwarted or controlled in their attempts to be themselves.
Perhaps The Long Secret stands out as a book for children that is not really plot-driven (although there is a sort of plot, certainly). The story meanders here and there, exploring character, human nature, and the question of how to be and who to be. It was the first time I was aware of a book exploring these things, aware of the comic yet sympathetic perceptiveness in the author's portrayal of her characters, the sheer genius in her having made these people up. And how skillful she was, getting right to the heart of things, planting her story on that precarious edge between childhood and adolescence and opening it right up to bleed all over the page in such tight and lovely sentences. I had always wanted to be a writer, but this was the first book that made me think about what kind of writer I wanted to be, the first book that showed me what a book can do besides entertain, and the first book that pointed me towards painful truths about myself.
I don't know why it was never as successful as Harriet the Spy. Maybe it was just too strange a book. It is a strange book. "Accept yourself" sounds so twee and trite but then again it really is one of life's big struggles, isn't it? Especially for children, who have had less practice at it. At eleven, I recognized Beth Ellen's fear, self-loathing, and rage so acutely, and I will never forget my elation when she slides down the banister past all the portraits that used to scare her, refusing to be shaped, controlled, or frightened anymore.
Yours, still-a-little-bit-Harriet-and-a-little-bit-Beth-Ellen,
Catherine
I was devastated by Aslan's Death when I was five. A few years later I read Anne of Green Gables and longed to be a red-haired orphan and go cracking my slate over the skulls of impudent boys. I had nightmares about the Horned King from The Book of Three. There are hundreds of books that expanded my world and my self far beyond the narrow confines of my own single life and my own safe childhood. Those books became a part of me and yay, you know, that's nice and fairly obvious, and all of them are surely a part of Why I Write and How I Write. Still, there are three books that stand out not necessarily as my favorites (though I loved and love them dearly) but because of how they made me think in new ways about the power of books and about my own desire to Be A Writer: The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh, Bilgewater by Jane Gardam, and I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith.
I read all three of them between the ages of 11 and 13, an important time of transition, I guess, from childhood to adolescence but also, I think, from being one kind of would-be writer (the child who says I'm Going To Be A Writer and begins countless tedious imitative novels and never finishes anything) to being another kind of would-be writer (the young teen who begins countless tedious imitative novels and never finishes anything but is nonetheless beginning to think about writing and books in a different and slightly more mature way and is not far from writing her first short story). I am rereading those books now and plan to blog about all three. This week: The Long Secret.
The Long Secret is the very strange and beautifully written sequel to the wildly successful Harriet The Spy. I read Harriet when I was ten, and I must have read it a hundred times. I loved it. I knew it by heart. I wanted to be Harriet. I was eleven years old when my mother found and gave me The Long Secret I snatched it up and read it at once, eager for more Harriet with all her brash, wacky confidence and her snarky notebook entries. I would have been disappointed if the book hadn't been such a revelation.
What I got was Beth Ellen. I mean, there was plenty of Harriet too, wonderful Harriet moments, Harriet becoming more and more the writer we know she is, with her unrelenting curiosity about human nature and her need to find words for feelings and stories about everyone. But it isn't only or even mostly Harriet's story. The book adopts both Harriet's POV and Beth Ellen's. Beth Ellen is Harriet's painfully shy, silent classmate from the first book, the one who will cry if you look at her funny, and while the two girls are not in any way natural friends, they are "summer" friends due simply to proximity, as their families holiday in the same seaside town. "Mousy" Beth Ellen, and Beth Ellen's rage, were what made this book so riveting, so shocking, to eleven-year-old me.
I really noticed good writing for the first time as I read the book. Rereading it 25 years later, I remember many inconsequential lines because they so impressed me at the age of eleven. I wanted to write like that. The way Louise Fitzhugh described things, people, feelings, thoughts, moments made the whole world more vivid and strange and alive. Things you might not think to notice, but Louise Fitzhugh noticed them, and made you notice them too. That impressed me. But mostly, I think I became aware that a book could offer more than feelings, more than an exciting story. Here was insight, truths about being human and about capital-L Life. Books and writing held a revelatory power I had never considered or imagined before.
It shook me to my core when Beth Ellen's grandmother says to her: "Shy people are angry people." I wanted to be Harriet, I pretended to be Harriet, but the truth was that I was closer to Beth Ellen. I was shy, and I was angry. It was something I'd never thought about clearly, a connection I had never considered. Over and over I read the scene in which Beth Ellen snaps, tears her room apart, floods the bathroom, and sits under the running water while her mother and her mother's lover and the maid bang on the bathroom door.
She hugged her knees. I will flood the house, she thought. Then I will begin to grow and be huge. I will get so monstrously big that I will break the bathroom out and fill the house, the yard, all of Water Mill. I will tower over the Montauk Highway like a colossus. They will all run away like ants.
I don't think there is another author who writes about a child's experience of rage as brilliantly as Louise Fitzhugh does. In Harriet The Spy, Harriet falls apart when she is not allowed to write in her notebook. Harriet knows who and what she is and when that self is thwarted and denied, she rebels absolutely. In The Long Secret, Beth Ellen has none of Harriet's certainty. She doesn't know who she is or who she wants to be until she learns who she isn't - her mother's daughter. Her meltdown when her mother decides to take her away with her is as breathtaking a portrayal of rage and despair as I've ever read anywhere.
The book includes candid and hilarious writing about the start of menstruation and the preteen struggle with religion, a good few years before Judy Blume wrote Are you there, God, it's me, Margaret? (and what can you say about a book that opens with a cashier getting an anonymous note that says "Jesus Hates You"?). But that aspect of the book only vaguely interested me, at eleven. Even the central mystery (who is leaving nasty notes all over town?) was periphery. What struck me more, both then and now, was the way she was writing about the ambition of children, and the rage children experience when they are thwarted or controlled in their attempts to be themselves.
Perhaps The Long Secret stands out as a book for children that is not really plot-driven (although there is a sort of plot, certainly). The story meanders here and there, exploring character, human nature, and the question of how to be and who to be. It was the first time I was aware of a book exploring these things, aware of the comic yet sympathetic perceptiveness in the author's portrayal of her characters, the sheer genius in her having made these people up. And how skillful she was, getting right to the heart of things, planting her story on that precarious edge between childhood and adolescence and opening it right up to bleed all over the page in such tight and lovely sentences. I had always wanted to be a writer, but this was the first book that made me think about what kind of writer I wanted to be, the first book that showed me what a book can do besides entertain, and the first book that pointed me towards painful truths about myself.
I don't know why it was never as successful as Harriet the Spy. Maybe it was just too strange a book. It is a strange book. "Accept yourself" sounds so twee and trite but then again it really is one of life's big struggles, isn't it? Especially for children, who have had less practice at it. At eleven, I recognized Beth Ellen's fear, self-loathing, and rage so acutely, and I will never forget my elation when she slides down the banister past all the portraits that used to scare her, refusing to be shaped, controlled, or frightened anymore.
Yours, still-a-little-bit-Harriet-and-a-little-bit-Beth-Ellen,
Catherine
March 4, 2013
Interview with Karen Bass
Dear Blog,
I thought I'd try doing an author interview every couple of months, if I can persuade any authors to be interviewed by me. Here is my first attempt, an interview with Karen Bass, who so kindly agreed to be my first guinea pig!
Karen Bass is the author of Drummer Girl, Summer of Fire, and Run Like Jaeger, and is a fellow Coteau Books author.
Hello Karen! Thank you for agreeing to do my FIRST EVER AUTHOR INTERVIEW. If I'm doing it wrong, please feel free to slam your teacup (or whiskey glass) down on the imaginary table between us, snap, "What is this, anyway?" and flounce off. It will serve me right and it will be funny.
Actually, it would be a coffee cup or a wine glass, but I’m not good at the diva stuff, even at the worst of times, so you should be safe.
So the first thing I ever read of yours was actually some of your Star Wars fan fiction! Can you tell my legions of blog readers how you got into writing fan fic?
A good friend who wrote in Star Wars and other universes drew me into fan fiction, but also warned me, “Once you start down the fanfic path, forever will it dominate your destiny.” Despite that, I happily veered onto a two-year fanfic tangent. For an embarrassingly indepth accounting of how I got into fanfic, look here: http://dakshee.8m.net/confess.html. Yes, I have a fanfic website, long neglected yet still intact. My fanfic journey is a cautionary tale of obsession.
How did you decide to start writing your own fiction, and what were the biggest differences for you, compared with writing fan fiction?
Fanfic was a blast, but I never meant it to be so all-consuming. While I was writing fanfic, I was reading books on how to write a novel, which I wanted to do, but I wasn’t finding a method that worked for me. That changed when I read “On Writing” by Stephen King. Too many viewings of “Fellowship of the Ring” plus King’s outline-free method resulted in an 800-page clichéd fantasy that will likely never see the light of day. After that, I got the idea for Run Like Jager and forged ahead.
Fanfic gave me the opportunity to experiment with some aspects of story – plot, multiple POVs, dialogue, action – while the two major elements of character and setting were already fleshed out. It really can be a useful way to develop your craft. So the biggest difference is just that: when you’re writing original fiction, you’re responsible for absolutely every aspect of the story, including character and setting. It can be daunting to figure out how to juggle it all, more so for a fantasy writer like you, Catherine, who has to do such involved world-building.
So how did you end up switching from adult fan fiction to YA in your original writing?
That 800-page fantasy that will never be published was adult, but when I got the idea for Run Like Jager, which involved a high school exchange program, the main character obviously had to be a teen. Between having teenagers in the house at the time and having vivid memories of my own teen years, it was an easy point-of-view to slip into. Since then, it seems my inner teenager has been working overtime to provide me with more teen story lines. Which is fine. I love YA.
Do you have a favourite among the three novels you've published? Which was the hardest / easiest to write, and why?
Well, the standard writers response to the “your favourite” question is to say, “The one I’m working on, of course.” Seriously, I love each of mychildren books for their unique little selves. If I’m forced into a corner, I usually pick Run Like Jager. Its male perspective has made it more accessible in schools (that old thing about boys only reading stories with male lead characters), and a few schools are now using it in class novel studies. It was also the easiest to write.
The hardest to write was probably Summer of Fire, because I drew on a lot of my own emotional experiences for both girls’ emotional turmoil. However, the hardest to get started on, was Drummer Girl. It took me ages to figure out the premise.
What is Drummer Girl about?
More than anything, Sid wants to be the drummer in a band. When she gets a shot, things get complicated and she has to decide how much she’s willing to pay to get the gig.
I really enjoyed Drummer Girl, in particular because I loved Sid, the main character, who seemed so immediately to be a complete and interesting person. Can you tell us anything about how the character evolved? Did she spring fully into being all at once, or was "creating" her a more complicated process?
She definitely didn’t spring from my head, fully developed (Athena-like). In 2007 I saw two girls holding hands as they walked down the street in Hamburg, Germany, and a random thought hit me: what if someone thought you were gay but you weren’t? That was the seed. It took a lot of coaxing for Sid to reveal herself. But as soon as I knew she was a drummer, I knew her goal and the story’s main conflict.
There are also some great secondary characters in the book. I was impressed at how you pulled Cousin Heather, who helps Sid with her makeover, back from the edge of the nasty stereotype she might have been, and made her feel very human. Do you have a favourite secondary character and if so, can you tell us about him / her?
Confession time: Heather was pretty stereotypical until my editor gave me feedback. Thank goodness for editors! I do like her much better now.
My favourite secondary character is … I can only pick one? Fave teen: Brad, because he’s sweet and awkward, and genuinely nice. Fave adult: Mr. Brock, because I have a weak spot for a good mentor/guide (they show up in a lot of my fiction) and because he’s also nice, and awkward in his attempts to connect with the students. Yes, I know. How awkward that I like awkward so much.
Drummer Girl is contemporary YA fiction, and deals with a lot of "issues" common in adolescence: identity, sexuality, sexual assault, drinking, to name a few. To what extent were you conscious of having a responsibility to teenagers who would read this book, and did that affect the story you were telling?
I couldn’t bring myself to censor those elements because it’s the kind of stuff teens really deal with. Sid and her situation being true-to-life is hopefully what readers connect with. I always write at least a partially upbeat ending, so I would hope that teens vicariously find a way out of bad situations through that, or maybe decide to never enter sketchy situations because they read about them in a story (mine or others).
You mentioned that you are not a musician yourself, let alone a drummer. How did you decide to make Sid a drummer, and HOW ON EARTH did you write so convincingly about her drumming? (also, her musical passions - yours? if not, how did you decide what music she would love?)
I read books on drumming, watched “Anatomy of a Drum Solo” by Neil Peart, and had a long and very involved interview with my son’s best friend who drums (with odd questions like, “Does your butt get sore?”) But everyone has passion about some activity in their lives, and so I drew on my own senses (and a big dose of imagination) to create Sid’s passion.
As for what music Sid loves, I picked heavy metal because both my sons are fans and I knew from them about speed drumming, as well as some metal bands. Her love of jazz came from a comment by Neil Peart on that video about him re-training under a jazz drummer. And she loves Rush because of Peart’s mad drumming skills. I happen to enjoy some of Rush’s music so that’s the only direct connection to me.
What future project(s) can we look forward to from you?
I’m in the midst of revisions right now, a YA historical set in 1947 Leipzig, Germany, which was in the post-WWII Soviet Zone and a most unpleasant place to live. (Expect a story with lots of action!) And I have another WWII historical awaiting revisions. In other genres, I’m trying to get one manuscript started and one finished – both contemporary with fantasy elements.
Can you describe your writing process, from idea to book?
My ideas come from all over, though I’m particularly inspired by travelling. As for the writing, with earlier books I followed Stephen King’s model, taking a situation and characters and writing the first draft in 3-4 months. But with the story I’m currently revising, I had outlined it to a large degree – in my head only – before I started writing. I used to think that writing down an outline killed my desire to write the story. Now I’m gaining more confidence that I can write an outline and still get that first draft down.
Overall, I always write a fast first draft. I love the rush of discovering the story as I go, of living the adventure with my characters. After the first draft I revise several times. Get outside input. Revise some more. Then I look for a home for the story.
What is your ideal balance of writing / the rest of your life. What does that balance look like in reality?
Ideally, I’d spend an hour at most, online and promoting. Then I’d put in 4-5 hours writing, then I’d relax and read. I’d have my weekends free. What usually happens is that I’m obsessed during the first draft, writing upwards of 10 hours a day, pretty much every day, until the draft is done. Then I procrastinate horribly when it comes to revisions, having to bribe myself into opening that document and getting to work. Needless to say, I spend way too much time online when I’m in revision mode.
What are your lowest and highest moments, as a writer?
I’ve been involved in a lot of great events, met so many great people (other writers and readers), but the absolute highest moment had to be opening that first box of my first book. Euphoria!
Lowest. Hmm. It’s a bit of a let down when someone gives one of my books a bad review (like being told your baby is ugly, I guess), but I really can’t think of many lows. Moments of despair exist (Will I ever write another story!? My book is dreck!), but are fleeting and I usually overcome them by connecting with friends who also write.
Book recommendations please! Can you name a few of your favourite books when you were a child, and a few of your favourites now? What should my legions of blog-readers be reading?
Though I read voraciously as a child, I don’t remember titles other than a few beloved animal stories (The Bushbaby, King of the Wind). I did read To Kill a Mockingbird five times in my school career, first time in grade five. I still love it. After elementary school, I inhaled anything by Leon Uris (WWII stuff mostly), went through a Stephen King stage, loved spy thrillers, and liked some classics such as Dracula and The Scarlet Pimpernel. WWII, adventure and/or fantasy made me happy. Still do.
Now, YA (which didn’t exist when I was a teen) contains an abundance of riches and I love reading all sorts of YA (except maybe romance). A fave from the last few years is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, otherwise I like way too many to mention – including yours, Catherine! I loved Shade & Sorceress. For people wanting to try something new, here’s a partial list of Canadian YA writers (many of whom publish in the US): http://bit.ly/14T1spv
Adult authors I like: Lisa Genova, Steven Galloway, Ami McKay, and many others. (I usually read adult books via recommendation, so not very many NYT bestsellers.)
The best books I’ve read recently are Shade & Sorceress by Catherine Egan (truly), Cinder by Marissa Meyer, The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen by Susin Nielsen, Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, and Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese.
Thank you, Karen (who can be found in the following places: http://www.karenbass.ca/ and https://twitter.com/karenbassYA).
How was that?
Catherine
I thought I'd try doing an author interview every couple of months, if I can persuade any authors to be interviewed by me. Here is my first attempt, an interview with Karen Bass, who so kindly agreed to be my first guinea pig!
Karen Bass is the author of Drummer Girl, Summer of Fire, and Run Like Jaeger, and is a fellow Coteau Books author.
Hello Karen! Thank you for agreeing to do my FIRST EVER AUTHOR INTERVIEW. If I'm doing it wrong, please feel free to slam your teacup (or whiskey glass) down on the imaginary table between us, snap, "What is this, anyway?" and flounce off. It will serve me right and it will be funny.
Actually, it would be a coffee cup or a wine glass, but I’m not good at the diva stuff, even at the worst of times, so you should be safe.
So the first thing I ever read of yours was actually some of your Star Wars fan fiction! Can you tell my legions of blog readers how you got into writing fan fic?
A good friend who wrote in Star Wars and other universes drew me into fan fiction, but also warned me, “Once you start down the fanfic path, forever will it dominate your destiny.” Despite that, I happily veered onto a two-year fanfic tangent. For an embarrassingly indepth accounting of how I got into fanfic, look here: http://dakshee.8m.net/confess.html. Yes, I have a fanfic website, long neglected yet still intact. My fanfic journey is a cautionary tale of obsession.
How did you decide to start writing your own fiction, and what were the biggest differences for you, compared with writing fan fiction?
Fanfic was a blast, but I never meant it to be so all-consuming. While I was writing fanfic, I was reading books on how to write a novel, which I wanted to do, but I wasn’t finding a method that worked for me. That changed when I read “On Writing” by Stephen King. Too many viewings of “Fellowship of the Ring” plus King’s outline-free method resulted in an 800-page clichéd fantasy that will likely never see the light of day. After that, I got the idea for Run Like Jager and forged ahead.
Fanfic gave me the opportunity to experiment with some aspects of story – plot, multiple POVs, dialogue, action – while the two major elements of character and setting were already fleshed out. It really can be a useful way to develop your craft. So the biggest difference is just that: when you’re writing original fiction, you’re responsible for absolutely every aspect of the story, including character and setting. It can be daunting to figure out how to juggle it all, more so for a fantasy writer like you, Catherine, who has to do such involved world-building.
So how did you end up switching from adult fan fiction to YA in your original writing?
That 800-page fantasy that will never be published was adult, but when I got the idea for Run Like Jager, which involved a high school exchange program, the main character obviously had to be a teen. Between having teenagers in the house at the time and having vivid memories of my own teen years, it was an easy point-of-view to slip into. Since then, it seems my inner teenager has been working overtime to provide me with more teen story lines. Which is fine. I love YA.
Do you have a favourite among the three novels you've published? Which was the hardest / easiest to write, and why?
Well, the standard writers response to the “your favourite” question is to say, “The one I’m working on, of course.” Seriously, I love each of my
The hardest to write was probably Summer of Fire, because I drew on a lot of my own emotional experiences for both girls’ emotional turmoil. However, the hardest to get started on, was Drummer Girl. It took me ages to figure out the premise.
What is Drummer Girl about?
More than anything, Sid wants to be the drummer in a band. When she gets a shot, things get complicated and she has to decide how much she’s willing to pay to get the gig.
I really enjoyed Drummer Girl, in particular because I loved Sid, the main character, who seemed so immediately to be a complete and interesting person. Can you tell us anything about how the character evolved? Did she spring fully into being all at once, or was "creating" her a more complicated process?
She definitely didn’t spring from my head, fully developed (Athena-like). In 2007 I saw two girls holding hands as they walked down the street in Hamburg, Germany, and a random thought hit me: what if someone thought you were gay but you weren’t? That was the seed. It took a lot of coaxing for Sid to reveal herself. But as soon as I knew she was a drummer, I knew her goal and the story’s main conflict.
There are also some great secondary characters in the book. I was impressed at how you pulled Cousin Heather, who helps Sid with her makeover, back from the edge of the nasty stereotype she might have been, and made her feel very human. Do you have a favourite secondary character and if so, can you tell us about him / her?
Confession time: Heather was pretty stereotypical until my editor gave me feedback. Thank goodness for editors! I do like her much better now.
My favourite secondary character is … I can only pick one? Fave teen: Brad, because he’s sweet and awkward, and genuinely nice. Fave adult: Mr. Brock, because I have a weak spot for a good mentor/guide (they show up in a lot of my fiction) and because he’s also nice, and awkward in his attempts to connect with the students. Yes, I know. How awkward that I like awkward so much.
Drummer Girl is contemporary YA fiction, and deals with a lot of "issues" common in adolescence: identity, sexuality, sexual assault, drinking, to name a few. To what extent were you conscious of having a responsibility to teenagers who would read this book, and did that affect the story you were telling?
I couldn’t bring myself to censor those elements because it’s the kind of stuff teens really deal with. Sid and her situation being true-to-life is hopefully what readers connect with. I always write at least a partially upbeat ending, so I would hope that teens vicariously find a way out of bad situations through that, or maybe decide to never enter sketchy situations because they read about them in a story (mine or others).
You mentioned that you are not a musician yourself, let alone a drummer. How did you decide to make Sid a drummer, and HOW ON EARTH did you write so convincingly about her drumming? (also, her musical passions - yours? if not, how did you decide what music she would love?)
I read books on drumming, watched “Anatomy of a Drum Solo” by Neil Peart, and had a long and very involved interview with my son’s best friend who drums (with odd questions like, “Does your butt get sore?”) But everyone has passion about some activity in their lives, and so I drew on my own senses (and a big dose of imagination) to create Sid’s passion.
As for what music Sid loves, I picked heavy metal because both my sons are fans and I knew from them about speed drumming, as well as some metal bands. Her love of jazz came from a comment by Neil Peart on that video about him re-training under a jazz drummer. And she loves Rush because of Peart’s mad drumming skills. I happen to enjoy some of Rush’s music so that’s the only direct connection to me.
What future project(s) can we look forward to from you?
I’m in the midst of revisions right now, a YA historical set in 1947 Leipzig, Germany, which was in the post-WWII Soviet Zone and a most unpleasant place to live. (Expect a story with lots of action!) And I have another WWII historical awaiting revisions. In other genres, I’m trying to get one manuscript started and one finished – both contemporary with fantasy elements.
Can you describe your writing process, from idea to book?
My ideas come from all over, though I’m particularly inspired by travelling. As for the writing, with earlier books I followed Stephen King’s model, taking a situation and characters and writing the first draft in 3-4 months. But with the story I’m currently revising, I had outlined it to a large degree – in my head only – before I started writing. I used to think that writing down an outline killed my desire to write the story. Now I’m gaining more confidence that I can write an outline and still get that first draft down.
Overall, I always write a fast first draft. I love the rush of discovering the story as I go, of living the adventure with my characters. After the first draft I revise several times. Get outside input. Revise some more. Then I look for a home for the story.
What is your ideal balance of writing / the rest of your life. What does that balance look like in reality?
Ideally, I’d spend an hour at most, online and promoting. Then I’d put in 4-5 hours writing, then I’d relax and read. I’d have my weekends free. What usually happens is that I’m obsessed during the first draft, writing upwards of 10 hours a day, pretty much every day, until the draft is done. Then I procrastinate horribly when it comes to revisions, having to bribe myself into opening that document and getting to work. Needless to say, I spend way too much time online when I’m in revision mode.
What are your lowest and highest moments, as a writer?
I’ve been involved in a lot of great events, met so many great people (other writers and readers), but the absolute highest moment had to be opening that first box of my first book. Euphoria!
Lowest. Hmm. It’s a bit of a let down when someone gives one of my books a bad review (like being told your baby is ugly, I guess), but I really can’t think of many lows. Moments of despair exist (Will I ever write another story!? My book is dreck!), but are fleeting and I usually overcome them by connecting with friends who also write.
Book recommendations please! Can you name a few of your favourite books when you were a child, and a few of your favourites now? What should my legions of blog-readers be reading?
Though I read voraciously as a child, I don’t remember titles other than a few beloved animal stories (The Bushbaby, King of the Wind). I did read To Kill a Mockingbird five times in my school career, first time in grade five. I still love it. After elementary school, I inhaled anything by Leon Uris (WWII stuff mostly), went through a Stephen King stage, loved spy thrillers, and liked some classics such as Dracula and The Scarlet Pimpernel. WWII, adventure and/or fantasy made me happy. Still do.
Now, YA (which didn’t exist when I was a teen) contains an abundance of riches and I love reading all sorts of YA (except maybe romance). A fave from the last few years is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, otherwise I like way too many to mention – including yours, Catherine! I loved Shade & Sorceress. For people wanting to try something new, here’s a partial list of Canadian YA writers (many of whom publish in the US): http://bit.ly/14T1spv
Adult authors I like: Lisa Genova, Steven Galloway, Ami McKay, and many others. (I usually read adult books via recommendation, so not very many NYT bestsellers.)
The best books I’ve read recently are Shade & Sorceress by Catherine Egan (truly), Cinder by Marissa Meyer, The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen by Susin Nielsen, Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, and Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese.
Thank you, Karen (who can be found in the following places: http://www.karenbass.ca/ and https://twitter.com/karenbassYA).
How was that?
Catherine
February 25, 2013
Why I Write YA
Dear Blog,
When I was a kid, I would look in the mirror sometimes and get this awful, vertiginous outside-of-my-body feeling: is that who I am, am I real, is all of this even possible? There were no words for it really, but it scared me and I'd run away from the mirror, heart pounding, trying to find a way to feel normal again.
As a teenager I was drawn to extreme sensations, like most teenagers are, and I enjoyed the feeling. It didn't happen as often, but I sought it out, staring at my face in the mirror until it became strange, and myself in the universe was suddenly such an absurd and frightening proposition, my smallness and the mere fact of being this particular human being, flesh and bone and secret thoughts, seemed so miraculous and awful and hilarious.
I never get that feeling anymore. I can stare and stare at the mirror, and there is my face staring back, and all the feeling I can really muster is a bit of regret that I'm not as cute as I used to be. I see my face getting older, and I think to myself, how strange, but it doesn't really feel strange. Not as strange as it felt being young.
When I was in high school, I wrote all the time. A few short stories, but mostly long missives in my journal, dramatic letters, a lot of awful poetry, and random scribblings about anything, everything. I wasn't trying to make something for other people to read; writing was not yet a craft. I was trying to snatch life out of the air, grab hold of something you can't really hold onto and smash it into the page, so it would sit there, stilled and mine, something I could savor instead of something that kept slipping by me. Everything was so beautiful and so terrible and so very very very and I needed words for it, I really needed words for it.
I got older, maybe a little jaded, certainly more accustomed to being the person I had become. Writing became a craft rather than a kind of grasping. Still, the purpose of writing (and reading, too) was at least partly to bring back that sense of looking in the mirror as a kid: the familiar becoming eerily strange, the ordinary becoming magical and frightening. I take a lot more care with my life than I did during my reckless teenage years, but where books are concerned, I'm still going for the high, for the motorbike on the highway at three in the morning, whipped by the wind, the stars like points of pain, and everything too much and also not enough, never enough, for the appetite I had discovered.
I don't want to be that girl anymore, but I still want to write about her. I can't seem to stop writing about her. But instead of writing about the angst and self-destructive behavior, I find myself surrounding her with magic, turning all the emotion of adolescence into real danger and impossible can-this-be-so moments with terrible, terrifying stakes. In many ways, fantasy seems the best way to honestly represent adolescence.
For years I was writing "magic realism," as it's called, ostensibly for adults. It took a while for me to realize that most of my protagonists were teenage girls, and that I couldn't seem to write a single story without a ghost or a troll creeping in. My first novel, Shade and Sorceress, teeters a bit awkwardly between middle-grade and YA. I thought I was writing a middle-grade fantasy, the kind of thing I devoured with a flashlight under the covers when I was a kid. I would still like to think it is flashlight-and-blankets material, but in the subsequent Tian Di books, as my heroine Eliza got older, I found I was more sure-footed, the voice and the narrative a better match.
Now I would place myself firmly in the YA camp, and it is amazing to me, given that I was writing, essentially, about teens and magic twelve years ago, that it has taken me so long to figure out that YA fantasy is what I want to write. Or, not even what I want to write - it's just where my writing takes me, time and again. What I've slowly found my way to is the "craft" part of it - the knowing your genre and studying it and being deliberate about it. Writing YA fantasy on purpose, with care, instead of sort-of and by-accident.
Now I think that all along these young protagonists of mine have been an attempt to express a certain intensity of being that I could barely grasp at the time and which easily eludes me now, all the strangeness and newness of being a young person in the world: the mirror, the man, the open road, the sand and the sea at midnight, the isle of Skye at dawn, how every day was fight or flight and every night was victory and defeat rolled into one. I remember walking the dog and the way he’d bolt after a squirrel, then cavort around the bottom of the tree, looking up longingly at what got away from him every single time. And I know just how he felt, I feel the same way: it is moving so fast, and we can’t catch it, we can never catch it. He was used to it, like I am, but still it’s painful sometimes, like we are barely touching life. And what we want is the beating heart between our teeth.
Which is why I write YA.
Reflectively yours,
Catherine
When I was a kid, I would look in the mirror sometimes and get this awful, vertiginous outside-of-my-body feeling: is that who I am, am I real, is all of this even possible? There were no words for it really, but it scared me and I'd run away from the mirror, heart pounding, trying to find a way to feel normal again.
As a teenager I was drawn to extreme sensations, like most teenagers are, and I enjoyed the feeling. It didn't happen as often, but I sought it out, staring at my face in the mirror until it became strange, and myself in the universe was suddenly such an absurd and frightening proposition, my smallness and the mere fact of being this particular human being, flesh and bone and secret thoughts, seemed so miraculous and awful and hilarious.
I never get that feeling anymore. I can stare and stare at the mirror, and there is my face staring back, and all the feeling I can really muster is a bit of regret that I'm not as cute as I used to be. I see my face getting older, and I think to myself, how strange, but it doesn't really feel strange. Not as strange as it felt being young.
When I was in high school, I wrote all the time. A few short stories, but mostly long missives in my journal, dramatic letters, a lot of awful poetry, and random scribblings about anything, everything. I wasn't trying to make something for other people to read; writing was not yet a craft. I was trying to snatch life out of the air, grab hold of something you can't really hold onto and smash it into the page, so it would sit there, stilled and mine, something I could savor instead of something that kept slipping by me. Everything was so beautiful and so terrible and so very very very and I needed words for it, I really needed words for it.
I got older, maybe a little jaded, certainly more accustomed to being the person I had become. Writing became a craft rather than a kind of grasping. Still, the purpose of writing (and reading, too) was at least partly to bring back that sense of looking in the mirror as a kid: the familiar becoming eerily strange, the ordinary becoming magical and frightening. I take a lot more care with my life than I did during my reckless teenage years, but where books are concerned, I'm still going for the high, for the motorbike on the highway at three in the morning, whipped by the wind, the stars like points of pain, and everything too much and also not enough, never enough, for the appetite I had discovered.
I don't want to be that girl anymore, but I still want to write about her. I can't seem to stop writing about her. But instead of writing about the angst and self-destructive behavior, I find myself surrounding her with magic, turning all the emotion of adolescence into real danger and impossible can-this-be-so moments with terrible, terrifying stakes. In many ways, fantasy seems the best way to honestly represent adolescence.
For years I was writing "magic realism," as it's called, ostensibly for adults. It took a while for me to realize that most of my protagonists were teenage girls, and that I couldn't seem to write a single story without a ghost or a troll creeping in. My first novel, Shade and Sorceress, teeters a bit awkwardly between middle-grade and YA. I thought I was writing a middle-grade fantasy, the kind of thing I devoured with a flashlight under the covers when I was a kid. I would still like to think it is flashlight-and-blankets material, but in the subsequent Tian Di books, as my heroine Eliza got older, I found I was more sure-footed, the voice and the narrative a better match.
Now I would place myself firmly in the YA camp, and it is amazing to me, given that I was writing, essentially, about teens and magic twelve years ago, that it has taken me so long to figure out that YA fantasy is what I want to write. Or, not even what I want to write - it's just where my writing takes me, time and again. What I've slowly found my way to is the "craft" part of it - the knowing your genre and studying it and being deliberate about it. Writing YA fantasy on purpose, with care, instead of sort-of and by-accident.
Now I think that all along these young protagonists of mine have been an attempt to express a certain intensity of being that I could barely grasp at the time and which easily eludes me now, all the strangeness and newness of being a young person in the world: the mirror, the man, the open road, the sand and the sea at midnight, the isle of Skye at dawn, how every day was fight or flight and every night was victory and defeat rolled into one. I remember walking the dog and the way he’d bolt after a squirrel, then cavort around the bottom of the tree, looking up longingly at what got away from him every single time. And I know just how he felt, I feel the same way: it is moving so fast, and we can’t catch it, we can never catch it. He was used to it, like I am, but still it’s painful sometimes, like we are barely touching life. And what we want is the beating heart between our teeth.
Which is why I write YA.
Reflectively yours,
Catherine
February 18, 2013
Because in fact it can really suck being a kid
Dear Blog,
OK, so last week I got a bit drunk and went running around in the snow going I still believe in Narnia la la la! and then blogged about it. Now I want to clarify something here that might not be clear from my last post, but which I don't think contradicts it (not that I am against contradictions, per se, and I would never diss cognitive dissonance): I really don't have a lot of patience with nostalgia for childhood. I'm convinced that anybody who says how wonderful it is being a child doesn't actually remember being one at all. Not to say that childhood can’t be full of happy times and love and laughter and enchantment - mine was - but even the happiest children have no real choices or power in a world designed for people much larger and older than them, and they remain totally dependent on these whimsical, controlling Big People who must often seem not to have their interests (as children understand them) at heart. Small children are learning for the first time about death and loss and compromise and that the world is a planet and the universe is vast and they themselves not the center of everything after all but tiny and finite and temporary - in which case, eggs for breakfast every day and ONLY THE BLUE SOCKS AAAARGH NO NOT THOSE ONES THE OTHER ONES seem not such unreasonable demands, there's only so much wackiness a kid can take, after all.
LittleK is almost two, and he still enjoys books about things in the world, things that are familiar, without needing a lot of frills like, oh, plot. When you've been a person in the world for less than two years, the familiar is still new and still needs a lot of thinking about, after all. So trucks and frogs and parents and children and snow and trains and food are very, very interesting topics. A story about a little bunny going to bed, and all the things in his room, is great stuff. Pictures of animals are fascinating. A truck getting stuck in the mud is some serious drama. And then there are all those words, strung into all those sentences, and some of those words are words he's never heard so there is a lot to figure out and make sense of. The Gruffalo is great but LittleK doesn't really get the mouse's cleverness in fooling everybody, he just thinks it's awesome that THERE IS A MOUSE!
Now LittleJ, he is three-and-a-half so he knows about trucks and frogs and parents and kids and that's all fine, he is still happy to sit and listen to a story about a truck in the mud, or a caterpillar eating a bunch of different foods. But he will ask for a story again and again if it has MAGIC in it. Or dinosaurs. Or a horrible villain, or a battle, or something hilariously gross. He wants conflict, he wants plot. He is ready for the boundaries of the world to be stretched. He is ready to be scared and surprised and amazed. Soon he'll be ready to cry over Charlotte's death in Charlotte's Web, to cheer on Pippi Longstocking, to peer in all the small corners of our house looking for Borrowers. I am probably way too excited about all the books they have in store for them, and corny as it sounds, I really do believe those books will be their best guides through the tumult of childhood, nurturing their empathy and their sense of wonder and the life-saving gift of being able to put it into words, or better yet, put it in a story, all the things that amaze and terrify and overwhelm you at any age.
So here is something that happened one night a few months ago, at bedtime. LittleJ came to me with a burst balloon and told me, his voice shaking with tears he could barely hold back, that it had to go in the garbage. OK, I said. His voice broke: It’s too sad, he said. I told him he didn’t have to throw it in the garbage if it was making him too sad. He shook his head. It had to go in the garbage. OK, I said again. I held his hand. He put it in the garbage, and collapsed against my leg, sobbing. I carried him to bed and lay down with him. He cried for 25 minutes. Finally he settled down and lay still against me for a few minutes. I thought he might have fallen asleep but then he said, “I want to go get the balloon.” So we went back to the garbage and got it and I rinsed it and dried it, and he went back to bed clutching it in his hand, and fell asleep holding it against him.
Needless to say, over the next week or so, we read and watched The Red Balloon daily, LittleJ with his brow furrowed like it is taking all his concentration to absorb whatever that story has to offer, about friendship and loss and cruelty and magic. I think it gets easier with practice, this being human in the world thing. Which isn't to say it ever gets easy. You don't have to be three to have a hard time letting go even when you know it's time, and sure, there might still be nights you go to sleep clutching the ruined rag of something that was so big and bright and glorious in the beginning. But I have always armed myself with stories, to get me through the hard parts and to help me find the best parts, and it's all I know how to teach my kids, if I am teaching them anything at all. Balloons burst. People can be cruel and life can be lonely. But maybe all the balloons in Paris will come find you out in your darkest hour and lift you up into the sky.
(Crap. I'm teaching them the wrong things, aren't I?)
Anti-nostalgically yours,
Catherine
OK, so last week I got a bit drunk and went running around in the snow going I still believe in Narnia la la la! and then blogged about it. Now I want to clarify something here that might not be clear from my last post, but which I don't think contradicts it (not that I am against contradictions, per se, and I would never diss cognitive dissonance): I really don't have a lot of patience with nostalgia for childhood. I'm convinced that anybody who says how wonderful it is being a child doesn't actually remember being one at all. Not to say that childhood can’t be full of happy times and love and laughter and enchantment - mine was - but even the happiest children have no real choices or power in a world designed for people much larger and older than them, and they remain totally dependent on these whimsical, controlling Big People who must often seem not to have their interests (as children understand them) at heart. Small children are learning for the first time about death and loss and compromise and that the world is a planet and the universe is vast and they themselves not the center of everything after all but tiny and finite and temporary - in which case, eggs for breakfast every day and ONLY THE BLUE SOCKS AAAARGH NO NOT THOSE ONES THE OTHER ONES seem not such unreasonable demands, there's only so much wackiness a kid can take, after all.
LittleK is almost two, and he still enjoys books about things in the world, things that are familiar, without needing a lot of frills like, oh, plot. When you've been a person in the world for less than two years, the familiar is still new and still needs a lot of thinking about, after all. So trucks and frogs and parents and children and snow and trains and food are very, very interesting topics. A story about a little bunny going to bed, and all the things in his room, is great stuff. Pictures of animals are fascinating. A truck getting stuck in the mud is some serious drama. And then there are all those words, strung into all those sentences, and some of those words are words he's never heard so there is a lot to figure out and make sense of. The Gruffalo is great but LittleK doesn't really get the mouse's cleverness in fooling everybody, he just thinks it's awesome that THERE IS A MOUSE!
Now LittleJ, he is three-and-a-half so he knows about trucks and frogs and parents and kids and that's all fine, he is still happy to sit and listen to a story about a truck in the mud, or a caterpillar eating a bunch of different foods. But he will ask for a story again and again if it has MAGIC in it. Or dinosaurs. Or a horrible villain, or a battle, or something hilariously gross. He wants conflict, he wants plot. He is ready for the boundaries of the world to be stretched. He is ready to be scared and surprised and amazed. Soon he'll be ready to cry over Charlotte's death in Charlotte's Web, to cheer on Pippi Longstocking, to peer in all the small corners of our house looking for Borrowers. I am probably way too excited about all the books they have in store for them, and corny as it sounds, I really do believe those books will be their best guides through the tumult of childhood, nurturing their empathy and their sense of wonder and the life-saving gift of being able to put it into words, or better yet, put it in a story, all the things that amaze and terrify and overwhelm you at any age.
So here is something that happened one night a few months ago, at bedtime. LittleJ came to me with a burst balloon and told me, his voice shaking with tears he could barely hold back, that it had to go in the garbage. OK, I said. His voice broke: It’s too sad, he said. I told him he didn’t have to throw it in the garbage if it was making him too sad. He shook his head. It had to go in the garbage. OK, I said again. I held his hand. He put it in the garbage, and collapsed against my leg, sobbing. I carried him to bed and lay down with him. He cried for 25 minutes. Finally he settled down and lay still against me for a few minutes. I thought he might have fallen asleep but then he said, “I want to go get the balloon.” So we went back to the garbage and got it and I rinsed it and dried it, and he went back to bed clutching it in his hand, and fell asleep holding it against him.
Needless to say, over the next week or so, we read and watched The Red Balloon daily, LittleJ with his brow furrowed like it is taking all his concentration to absorb whatever that story has to offer, about friendship and loss and cruelty and magic. I think it gets easier with practice, this being human in the world thing. Which isn't to say it ever gets easy. You don't have to be three to have a hard time letting go even when you know it's time, and sure, there might still be nights you go to sleep clutching the ruined rag of something that was so big and bright and glorious in the beginning. But I have always armed myself with stories, to get me through the hard parts and to help me find the best parts, and it's all I know how to teach my kids, if I am teaching them anything at all. Balloons burst. People can be cruel and life can be lonely. But maybe all the balloons in Paris will come find you out in your darkest hour and lift you up into the sky.
(Crap. I'm teaching them the wrong things, aren't I?)
Anti-nostalgically yours,
Catherine
February 11, 2013
We are not who we were
Dear Blog,
One of my favourite people, a girl I’ll call L., was recently distraught about turning four. She was afraid of getting older because when she grew up she would not live with her family anymore. Her mother told her that she would never have to leave, but understanding as well as a four-year-old can the totality of the changes coming, L. burst into tears and said, “but I will.” And she’s right.
I remember feeling the exact same way when I turned five, and expressing the same fear to my mother, of growing up and having to function in the mysterious adult world with nobody to take care of me. She tried to reassure me: "You'll want to leave one day," she told me. But that was even more frightening, and got to the real heart of the issue: One day, you will want the opposite of what you want now. One day you will be so changed as to be unrecognizable to yourself now - what you love most and fear most and want most, so much of who you are, will fall by the wayside, forgotten. In other words: You are facing the obliteration of your essential self. No wonder Peter Pan is so appealing.
The final chapter of The House at Pooh Corner begins:
Christopher Robin was going away. Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going; indeed, nobody even knew why he knew that Christopher Robin was going away. But somehow or other everybody in the Forest felt that it was happening at last.
This is the chapter that makes grownups cry, because the children we are reading to will not be who they are much longer, and we too are not who we were. Christopher Robin takes Pooh Bear up to the Enchanted Wood, talks about the pleasure of doing Nothing, and other things, then knights him. Then he confesses to Pooh the awful, unavoidable truth:
"I'm not going to do Nothing any more."
"Never again?"
"Well, not so much. They don't let you."
Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again.
"Yes, Christopher Robin?" said Pooh helpfully.
"Pooh, when I'm - you know - when I'm not doing Nothing, will you come up here sometimes?"
"Just me?"
"Yes, Pooh."
"Will you be here too?"
"Yes, Pooh, I will be, really. I promise I will be, Pooh."
"That's good," says Pooh.
But Christopher Robin is not being entirely candid there, and knows it. A moment later:
"Pooh," said Christopher Robin earnestly, "if I - if I'm not quite - " he stopped and tried again - "Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won't you?"
But Winnie-the-Pooh can't understand it and Christopher Robin can't explain it.
While the chapter is partly nostalgia, for the lazy hours of Doing Nothing that children often make better use of than adults (the existence of facebook is alone proof that adults too have the time and desire to do nothing, they just aren't very good at it), what makes me choke up when I read it to my son is that Christopher Robin is facing the loss of everything he has cared about and all he has been until now. It's not that "They Won't Let Him" do nothing, it's that he won't want to, at least not in the same way, because he's going to become somebody different: an older child, an adolescent, and unimaginably but inevitably, a grownup. The Hundred Acre Wood will be forgotten then, and Pooh just an old stuffed bear. It can feel like such a deep and terrible betrayal of who you were, to let go and move on. To stop believing in Santa Claus, say. To stop loving what you loved.
This weekend a blizzard dumped 34 inches of snow on our city overnight. My boys are so young they will probably not remember this incredible snowfall, flailing and falling and being pulled back out of the deep drifts, holding on to each other on the sled while we lugged them through the transformed world of buried car-shapes and thigh-deep powder, how everybody was just out in the snow-filled streets marveling at it and grinning at each other, and the whiteness of it was so bright that when we went back inside it seemed much too dark for a while. They won't remember how we changed into dry things, put on some music, had lunch, and did nothing for a while, each in our own way. I don't know in what way these snowy days will become a part of them, or the exact ratio of joy to terror when falling into snow drifts as deep as you are tall, how sure they are of the arms that catch them and pull them out each time. Later on we went to a friend's house, where the kids had hot chocolate and the adults had sherry. By the time we left in the dark, a digger and a snowplow had been through and left a swathe of compacted snow down the middle of the road, like a tunnel. So I put the boys in the sled and ran home with them, the snow piled high on either side of us.
Who we are each day becomes, the next day, just part of the bridge to who we are next - and maybe in the end it really is a bridge to nowhere - but running through this tunnel in the road, through the dark and the snow, with the boys clinging to each other on the sled and screaming and laughing, the giddy, impossible joy I feel is like a thread connecting me to all my former selves. OK, maybe it’s the sherry, but I don’t really think so. Sometimes it seems there is so little of one’s early self that survives the fires of growing up, but at this moment I could be in Narnia, and I would not be so surprised to see a faun by the streetlamp over there.
Blizzardly boozily yours,
Catherine
One of my favourite people, a girl I’ll call L., was recently distraught about turning four. She was afraid of getting older because when she grew up she would not live with her family anymore. Her mother told her that she would never have to leave, but understanding as well as a four-year-old can the totality of the changes coming, L. burst into tears and said, “but I will.” And she’s right.
I remember feeling the exact same way when I turned five, and expressing the same fear to my mother, of growing up and having to function in the mysterious adult world with nobody to take care of me. She tried to reassure me: "You'll want to leave one day," she told me. But that was even more frightening, and got to the real heart of the issue: One day, you will want the opposite of what you want now. One day you will be so changed as to be unrecognizable to yourself now - what you love most and fear most and want most, so much of who you are, will fall by the wayside, forgotten. In other words: You are facing the obliteration of your essential self. No wonder Peter Pan is so appealing.
The final chapter of The House at Pooh Corner begins:
Christopher Robin was going away. Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going; indeed, nobody even knew why he knew that Christopher Robin was going away. But somehow or other everybody in the Forest felt that it was happening at last.
This is the chapter that makes grownups cry, because the children we are reading to will not be who they are much longer, and we too are not who we were. Christopher Robin takes Pooh Bear up to the Enchanted Wood, talks about the pleasure of doing Nothing, and other things, then knights him. Then he confesses to Pooh the awful, unavoidable truth:
"I'm not going to do Nothing any more."
"Never again?"
"Well, not so much. They don't let you."
Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again.
"Yes, Christopher Robin?" said Pooh helpfully.
"Pooh, when I'm - you know - when I'm not doing Nothing, will you come up here sometimes?"
"Just me?"
"Yes, Pooh."
"Will you be here too?"
"Yes, Pooh, I will be, really. I promise I will be, Pooh."
"That's good," says Pooh.
But Christopher Robin is not being entirely candid there, and knows it. A moment later:
"Pooh," said Christopher Robin earnestly, "if I - if I'm not quite - " he stopped and tried again - "Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won't you?"
But Winnie-the-Pooh can't understand it and Christopher Robin can't explain it.
While the chapter is partly nostalgia, for the lazy hours of Doing Nothing that children often make better use of than adults (the existence of facebook is alone proof that adults too have the time and desire to do nothing, they just aren't very good at it), what makes me choke up when I read it to my son is that Christopher Robin is facing the loss of everything he has cared about and all he has been until now. It's not that "They Won't Let Him" do nothing, it's that he won't want to, at least not in the same way, because he's going to become somebody different: an older child, an adolescent, and unimaginably but inevitably, a grownup. The Hundred Acre Wood will be forgotten then, and Pooh just an old stuffed bear. It can feel like such a deep and terrible betrayal of who you were, to let go and move on. To stop believing in Santa Claus, say. To stop loving what you loved.
This weekend a blizzard dumped 34 inches of snow on our city overnight. My boys are so young they will probably not remember this incredible snowfall, flailing and falling and being pulled back out of the deep drifts, holding on to each other on the sled while we lugged them through the transformed world of buried car-shapes and thigh-deep powder, how everybody was just out in the snow-filled streets marveling at it and grinning at each other, and the whiteness of it was so bright that when we went back inside it seemed much too dark for a while. They won't remember how we changed into dry things, put on some music, had lunch, and did nothing for a while, each in our own way. I don't know in what way these snowy days will become a part of them, or the exact ratio of joy to terror when falling into snow drifts as deep as you are tall, how sure they are of the arms that catch them and pull them out each time. Later on we went to a friend's house, where the kids had hot chocolate and the adults had sherry. By the time we left in the dark, a digger and a snowplow had been through and left a swathe of compacted snow down the middle of the road, like a tunnel. So I put the boys in the sled and ran home with them, the snow piled high on either side of us.
Who we are each day becomes, the next day, just part of the bridge to who we are next - and maybe in the end it really is a bridge to nowhere - but running through this tunnel in the road, through the dark and the snow, with the boys clinging to each other on the sled and screaming and laughing, the giddy, impossible joy I feel is like a thread connecting me to all my former selves. OK, maybe it’s the sherry, but I don’t really think so. Sometimes it seems there is so little of one’s early self that survives the fires of growing up, but at this moment I could be in Narnia, and I would not be so surprised to see a faun by the streetlamp over there.
Blizzardly boozily yours,
Catherine
February 4, 2013
Why Writers Should Watch Buffy, Part 2
Dear blog,
Last week you were angry with me for writing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You said some unkind things. You may have called me a low-brow loser still obsessed with a show that’s been off the air for almost a decade, and suggested I read more Nabakov. Fair enough. I should read more Nabakov. But first I am going to finish what I started, and give all the imaginary writers reading this a brief guide to the seven seasons of Buffy, and suggest what they, as writers, should be looking to glean from their viewing experience.
Watch season 1 for the giggles – they are so cute! It is so silly! – and for the poignancy of superhero Buffy striving for a normal life while also kicking vampire butt. This is urban fantasy (with a dash of paranormal romance!) at its best. More than that, watch it for the final episode when they (meaning the writers of the show) figure it out, the potential of this particular premise with these particular performers. Sarah Michelle Gellar rocks the simple line: “I’m sixteen years old. I don’t want to die.” The superhero quits, then unquits, then dies, then saves the world, then goes to prom. Watching season 1 is like reading a first draft, and seeing the moment when it all clicks into place, offering the first glimpse of the incredible story it’s going to become.
Watch season 2 for the paaaaaaain. While the show becomes more sure-footed and sharper in the following seasons, I still believe that nothing in the series tops the Angelus arc for sheer cathartic angst. Here is a primer in how to twist the knife, how to take your reader into far darker territory than they are expecting, how to show your character’s strength in adversity, how to let them be strong and vulnerable at the same time, how to shock your reader with just how far you’re willing to go. Do I need a spoiler alert for a show that’s been off the air this long? Well, if you have not seen the show, and intend to see the show, do not read the following because it is a major SPOILER: In my opinion, there is no moment in the series, with the possible exception of the spectacular ending to season 5, that matches the moment at the very end of season 2, when Buffy runs Angel through with a sword (Buffy at her strongest) and then crumples (Buffy at her most devastated).
Watch season 3 for its brilliant portrayal of a character’s descent into darkness (slayer Faith), and for the Mayor (played by Harry Groener), who is hi-larious, then can turn on a dime and terrify. This is possibly the strongest season in its confident blend of comedy, darkness, rich metaphor, and increasingly complicated, meaningful relationships. Also: an excellent how-to if you are fumbling around trying to write your villain.
Watch season 4 for the way the show moves out of its comfort zone (high school) and lets the characters tackle young adulthood. There are superb standalone episodes here, in particular the dream-sequence finale, which allows the viewer inside the psyches of our beloved characters, giving dark hints of what is to come. This is powerful stuff. Though it’s one of my favorite seasons, its uncertain arc is a “don’t-do-that”: a promising premise (our beloved Scoobies up against the Initiative, run by the ruthless Maggie Walsh – though I was uncomfortable with the One-And-Only slightly “butch,” non-girly woman in the show being Eeevil) stumbles mid-season, and we are left with the second-lamest villain the show ever concocted.
Watch S5 for how to get truly epic, how to keep on raising the stakes, and how to craft an ending so stunningly beautiful and so unexpected, you can rip out your reader’s heart and lay it to rest with a light joke that will only make them cry harder, if they can catch their breath to cry at all.
Watch season 6 for its experimentation with a much darker tone, and its exploration of consequences. The season as a whole is hit-and-miss, marred by the too-obvious magic-as-heroin metaphor, and lacking some of the sparkle of previous seasons, but I love it for the raw pain of Buffy’s return to the world, her twisted relationship with the vampire Spike, and for being brave enough to let our ever-quippy Buffy truly pay the price for her calling, not just in loss, but within herself. The takeaway: consequences are crucial to believability, your characters do need to pay for the things they do and the things that happen to them, and should change accordingly.
Watch season 7 for the brilliant episode Conversations with Dead People, for badass high school principal Robin Wood, for the return of charismatic slayer-gone-bad-gone-good-again Faith, and for the hilarity and hotness of Faith and Robin Wood getting it on. Oh, and for Buffy plucking the immovable scythe out of the rock, in her lovely King Arthur moment. There’s not much other reason to watch the scrambled and uneven season 7, but honestly, those are reasons enough, unless you’re really busy. Oh, and Nathan Fillion is in it, so there’s that, too.
OK, blog, you’ve been very patient and I really am done writing about Buffy. For now. At some point I do want to do a “close reading” of an episode or two, and write about character deaths in more detail. Until then, I will read some Nabakov and try to win back your good opinion.
Yours, obsessively,
Catherine
Last week you were angry with me for writing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You said some unkind things. You may have called me a low-brow loser still obsessed with a show that’s been off the air for almost a decade, and suggested I read more Nabakov. Fair enough. I should read more Nabakov. But first I am going to finish what I started, and give all the imaginary writers reading this a brief guide to the seven seasons of Buffy, and suggest what they, as writers, should be looking to glean from their viewing experience.
Watch season 1 for the giggles – they are so cute! It is so silly! – and for the poignancy of superhero Buffy striving for a normal life while also kicking vampire butt. This is urban fantasy (with a dash of paranormal romance!) at its best. More than that, watch it for the final episode when they (meaning the writers of the show) figure it out, the potential of this particular premise with these particular performers. Sarah Michelle Gellar rocks the simple line: “I’m sixteen years old. I don’t want to die.” The superhero quits, then unquits, then dies, then saves the world, then goes to prom. Watching season 1 is like reading a first draft, and seeing the moment when it all clicks into place, offering the first glimpse of the incredible story it’s going to become.
Watch season 2 for the paaaaaaain. While the show becomes more sure-footed and sharper in the following seasons, I still believe that nothing in the series tops the Angelus arc for sheer cathartic angst. Here is a primer in how to twist the knife, how to take your reader into far darker territory than they are expecting, how to show your character’s strength in adversity, how to let them be strong and vulnerable at the same time, how to shock your reader with just how far you’re willing to go. Do I need a spoiler alert for a show that’s been off the air this long? Well, if you have not seen the show, and intend to see the show, do not read the following because it is a major SPOILER: In my opinion, there is no moment in the series, with the possible exception of the spectacular ending to season 5, that matches the moment at the very end of season 2, when Buffy runs Angel through with a sword (Buffy at her strongest) and then crumples (Buffy at her most devastated).
Watch season 3 for its brilliant portrayal of a character’s descent into darkness (slayer Faith), and for the Mayor (played by Harry Groener), who is hi-larious, then can turn on a dime and terrify. This is possibly the strongest season in its confident blend of comedy, darkness, rich metaphor, and increasingly complicated, meaningful relationships. Also: an excellent how-to if you are fumbling around trying to write your villain.
Watch season 4 for the way the show moves out of its comfort zone (high school) and lets the characters tackle young adulthood. There are superb standalone episodes here, in particular the dream-sequence finale, which allows the viewer inside the psyches of our beloved characters, giving dark hints of what is to come. This is powerful stuff. Though it’s one of my favorite seasons, its uncertain arc is a “don’t-do-that”: a promising premise (our beloved Scoobies up against the Initiative, run by the ruthless Maggie Walsh – though I was uncomfortable with the One-And-Only slightly “butch,” non-girly woman in the show being Eeevil) stumbles mid-season, and we are left with the second-lamest villain the show ever concocted.
Watch S5 for how to get truly epic, how to keep on raising the stakes, and how to craft an ending so stunningly beautiful and so unexpected, you can rip out your reader’s heart and lay it to rest with a light joke that will only make them cry harder, if they can catch their breath to cry at all.
Watch season 6 for its experimentation with a much darker tone, and its exploration of consequences. The season as a whole is hit-and-miss, marred by the too-obvious magic-as-heroin metaphor, and lacking some of the sparkle of previous seasons, but I love it for the raw pain of Buffy’s return to the world, her twisted relationship with the vampire Spike, and for being brave enough to let our ever-quippy Buffy truly pay the price for her calling, not just in loss, but within herself. The takeaway: consequences are crucial to believability, your characters do need to pay for the things they do and the things that happen to them, and should change accordingly.
Watch season 7 for the brilliant episode Conversations with Dead People, for badass high school principal Robin Wood, for the return of charismatic slayer-gone-bad-gone-good-again Faith, and for the hilarity and hotness of Faith and Robin Wood getting it on. Oh, and for Buffy plucking the immovable scythe out of the rock, in her lovely King Arthur moment. There’s not much other reason to watch the scrambled and uneven season 7, but honestly, those are reasons enough, unless you’re really busy. Oh, and Nathan Fillion is in it, so there’s that, too.
OK, blog, you’ve been very patient and I really am done writing about Buffy. For now. At some point I do want to do a “close reading” of an episode or two, and write about character deaths in more detail. Until then, I will read some Nabakov and try to win back your good opinion.
Yours, obsessively,
Catherine
January 28, 2013
(10 Reasons) Why Writers Should Watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Dear Blog,
I vaguely remember watching my first episode or two of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with a friend who couldn’t shut off the running commentary, a long, long time ago. “She’s a witch,” he explained, in what I found at the time a peculiarly avid-with-a-side-of-sheepish way. “They’re both witches. They’re gay. That’s their cat.” Uh-huh.
It didn’t make an impression, at the time.
A few years later, in a dreary Tokyo suburb, That Guy sat me down to watch his newly acquired Buffy DVDs. (Reader: I married him). He showed me a few episodes from the early seasons, out of order, trying to find the right one to hook me with. The hook turned out to be the two-part episode Innocence and Surprise, in which Buffy loses her virginity and her vampire lover loses his soul (before such things were the stuff of cliché). Schmaltzy moments in the first ep notwithstanding, I was struck by the raw pain Sarah Michelle Gellar conveyed as Buffy, and entirely won over by this girl who had to save the world first and nurse her broken heart afterwards. The very end of the episode (rather embarrassingly, since That Guy and I were still a sort-of newish couple) actually made me cry. I was a convert. I told That Guy we were starting from the beginning, Season 1, episode 1, and watching the whole damn series. And we did.
Buffy is a show a lot of writers get quite frothy about (to name a few of my own favourites, Susanna Clarke, Patrick Rothfuss, and Justine Larbelastier are all self-proclaimed fans). It has absolutely had an impact on my own writing, and while writing for TV is, I’m sure (I’ve never tried it), very different from writing a novel, I think watching the show is a totally valid form of “study” for any serious (or non-serious) writer. Here, then, is a list of reasons for writers to watch, and rewatch:
1. The dialogue. Oh my god, the dialogue! The central characters manage to sound both like authentic teenagers, and also (importantly) far wittier and sharper than any actual authentic teenagers. Once you know the show a little, you could read any line in the series and know exactly which character says it. Their voices are so distinctive, so entirely theirs, that you could never mistake them.
2. The rrrrromance. The series has something for everyone, and provides great examples of how to fire up (and shatter) relationships that viewers / readers care about, without just doing the same thing over and over again. For Twoo Wuv, schmaltzy romance for supper and searing pain for dessert, Buffy and Angel is the ship for you. For the wreckage addiction can make of a perfect relationship, see Willow and Tara. For opposites-attract humor, some very real sweetness, and some very real sadness, see Xander and Anya, or for that matter, Xander and Cordelia. For a complicated adult(ish) relationship in which trying hard isn’t quite enough to make up for its lopsidedness (“she doesn’t love me” Riley says, without self-pity, in one of his finer, more clear-eyed moments), see Buffy and Riley. For hot sex and self-loathing, see Buffy and Spike. For Cute All Over, see Willow and Oz (“All monkeys are French – you didn’t know that?”). For creeps, see Spike and Druscilla. The romantic relationships keep moving and growing with the characters. They (usually) don’t work out, much as you (sometimes) want them to.
3. It is freaking hilarious, and it will also make you cry, often. The magical blend of drama, horror, sex, and sharp, brilliant comedy is a writer’s dream. Note to self: learn how to do that.
4. It is character-driven and never stagnant. The characters grow. The relationships change. This is a big part of what makes re-watching such a pleasure. It is so poignant going back to the first season to watch the characters you’ve grown to love at the beginning of their journey, before all the loss and change you know is headed their way. Nobody watches Buffy for the special effects. People will read your stories if they want to follow your characters. They will reread them (and recommend them to all their friends!) if they fall in love with those characters.
5. It takes risks. I think the show does this every season in its willingness to change, to shake things up, to end successful pairings and to let its characters grow up, move on, or die, but the most obvious, famous examples of risk-taking are the episodes in which the show’s creators try something entirely different. In Hush (season 4), demons steal the voices of everyone in town, rendering our characters mute for the entire episode, and the result is spectacular. A show more driven by excellent dialogue than anything else I’ve seen on television proves how entirely successful, how hilarious, how suspenseful, and how moving it can be, without any dialogue. (The remarkable actors provide comedy gold here – it is one of the funnier, scarier episodes in the series). In season 6, another demon (there is always a convenient demon on hand!) has the whole town breaking into song. Once More With Feeling is a one-hour musical of original songs. It is a fan favorite, and has spawned singalong viewings all over North America. It is entirely original and surprising, and like all the best episodes, it drives the action forward, offering laughter with one fist, loss and pain with the other. Plus, catchy songs! If there is a lesson here, it is not to get caught in a rut of “what has worked so far,” but to keep pushing your own comfort zone, trying to do something you have no idea how to do.
6. Death is Your Gift. Beloved characters can and sometimes should die. While the fandom is by no means in agreement on this, I felt nearly every death in the series was, in retrospect, essential. To up the stakes, to show us nobody is safe (no matter how popular they may be), to drive the other characters forward in necessary ways (I could write a whole separate blog post on this). And of course, to break our hearts, again, and again, and again. Buffy is nothing if not cathartic.
7. Villains are more interesting when they love someone, when in spite of ourselves we are forced to empathize with their desires and their suffering. While there is something to be said for almost all the Big Bads that make Sunnydale truly hell for Buffy and her friends, the most successful, in my opinion, are the villains we feel for most: Vampire Spike, with his devotion to his mad lover Druscilla, and the evil, immortal Mayor, whose fatherly love for bad-slayer Faith and her own uncertain, touching reciprocation shows us who she might have been if she’d been loved by somebody not bent on becoming a giant demon-snake-thing. Villains who love are richer and more interesting characters, and it complicates the viewing / reading experience, because we care about them, evil as they are.
8. The show is sometimes bad. You can see the cracks, and learn from them as well. For example, when trying to bring your epic series to a close, do not turn your main character into a boring, didactic bossy-pants and introduce a whole passel of distracting, annoying new characters (I hate you, season 7, except for the bits I love). For all that the writing is (rightly!) revered, there is a lot of sloppy writing too. I suspect this is the inevitable result of trying to hack out 22+ episodes a year. The series does not offer the perfectionist, finely wrought television experience of, say, The Wire or Mad Men. The romances in the early seasons can be cheesy, the plots sometimes providing little more than a weak scaffolding for overwrought emotional moments, the motivations on occasion imperceptible beyond convenience. There are plenty of “Don’t-Do-That” lessons in a show that I still maintain is more loveable and re-watchable than many less flawed shows.
9. This show knows pain, and how to deliver it. Joss Whedon wants to hurt you. True Fact.
10. Passes Bechdel’s Test with flying colors, and so should everything you write. A blog post for another time might be “Why Writers (and everyone else) should read Alison Bechdel’s graphic novels”, but anyway, in a now 20+ year old strip, the rule (about movies, but it applies to any story with characters in it) is described thusly: (1) It has to have at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, (3) about something besides a man. Yup.
I know, blog, I know. This is supposed to be a books-and-writing blog, and I am talking about television. But good storytelling is good storytelling, and like it or not, I’m citing Joss Whedon et al as major influences, um, if anybody ever asks. Next week: a guide to what writers can look for in each of the seven seasons of Buffy.
Yours, still pathetically missing the show ten years on,
Catherine
I vaguely remember watching my first episode or two of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with a friend who couldn’t shut off the running commentary, a long, long time ago. “She’s a witch,” he explained, in what I found at the time a peculiarly avid-with-a-side-of-sheepish way. “They’re both witches. They’re gay. That’s their cat.” Uh-huh.
It didn’t make an impression, at the time.
A few years later, in a dreary Tokyo suburb, That Guy sat me down to watch his newly acquired Buffy DVDs. (Reader: I married him). He showed me a few episodes from the early seasons, out of order, trying to find the right one to hook me with. The hook turned out to be the two-part episode Innocence and Surprise, in which Buffy loses her virginity and her vampire lover loses his soul (before such things were the stuff of cliché). Schmaltzy moments in the first ep notwithstanding, I was struck by the raw pain Sarah Michelle Gellar conveyed as Buffy, and entirely won over by this girl who had to save the world first and nurse her broken heart afterwards. The very end of the episode (rather embarrassingly, since That Guy and I were still a sort-of newish couple) actually made me cry. I was a convert. I told That Guy we were starting from the beginning, Season 1, episode 1, and watching the whole damn series. And we did.
Buffy is a show a lot of writers get quite frothy about (to name a few of my own favourites, Susanna Clarke, Patrick Rothfuss, and Justine Larbelastier are all self-proclaimed fans). It has absolutely had an impact on my own writing, and while writing for TV is, I’m sure (I’ve never tried it), very different from writing a novel, I think watching the show is a totally valid form of “study” for any serious (or non-serious) writer. Here, then, is a list of reasons for writers to watch, and rewatch:
1. The dialogue. Oh my god, the dialogue! The central characters manage to sound both like authentic teenagers, and also (importantly) far wittier and sharper than any actual authentic teenagers. Once you know the show a little, you could read any line in the series and know exactly which character says it. Their voices are so distinctive, so entirely theirs, that you could never mistake them.
2. The rrrrromance. The series has something for everyone, and provides great examples of how to fire up (and shatter) relationships that viewers / readers care about, without just doing the same thing over and over again. For Twoo Wuv, schmaltzy romance for supper and searing pain for dessert, Buffy and Angel is the ship for you. For the wreckage addiction can make of a perfect relationship, see Willow and Tara. For opposites-attract humor, some very real sweetness, and some very real sadness, see Xander and Anya, or for that matter, Xander and Cordelia. For a complicated adult(ish) relationship in which trying hard isn’t quite enough to make up for its lopsidedness (“she doesn’t love me” Riley says, without self-pity, in one of his finer, more clear-eyed moments), see Buffy and Riley. For hot sex and self-loathing, see Buffy and Spike. For Cute All Over, see Willow and Oz (“All monkeys are French – you didn’t know that?”). For creeps, see Spike and Druscilla. The romantic relationships keep moving and growing with the characters. They (usually) don’t work out, much as you (sometimes) want them to.
3. It is freaking hilarious, and it will also make you cry, often. The magical blend of drama, horror, sex, and sharp, brilliant comedy is a writer’s dream. Note to self: learn how to do that.
4. It is character-driven and never stagnant. The characters grow. The relationships change. This is a big part of what makes re-watching such a pleasure. It is so poignant going back to the first season to watch the characters you’ve grown to love at the beginning of their journey, before all the loss and change you know is headed their way. Nobody watches Buffy for the special effects. People will read your stories if they want to follow your characters. They will reread them (and recommend them to all their friends!) if they fall in love with those characters.
5. It takes risks. I think the show does this every season in its willingness to change, to shake things up, to end successful pairings and to let its characters grow up, move on, or die, but the most obvious, famous examples of risk-taking are the episodes in which the show’s creators try something entirely different. In Hush (season 4), demons steal the voices of everyone in town, rendering our characters mute for the entire episode, and the result is spectacular. A show more driven by excellent dialogue than anything else I’ve seen on television proves how entirely successful, how hilarious, how suspenseful, and how moving it can be, without any dialogue. (The remarkable actors provide comedy gold here – it is one of the funnier, scarier episodes in the series). In season 6, another demon (there is always a convenient demon on hand!) has the whole town breaking into song. Once More With Feeling is a one-hour musical of original songs. It is a fan favorite, and has spawned singalong viewings all over North America. It is entirely original and surprising, and like all the best episodes, it drives the action forward, offering laughter with one fist, loss and pain with the other. Plus, catchy songs! If there is a lesson here, it is not to get caught in a rut of “what has worked so far,” but to keep pushing your own comfort zone, trying to do something you have no idea how to do.
6. Death is Your Gift. Beloved characters can and sometimes should die. While the fandom is by no means in agreement on this, I felt nearly every death in the series was, in retrospect, essential. To up the stakes, to show us nobody is safe (no matter how popular they may be), to drive the other characters forward in necessary ways (I could write a whole separate blog post on this). And of course, to break our hearts, again, and again, and again. Buffy is nothing if not cathartic.
7. Villains are more interesting when they love someone, when in spite of ourselves we are forced to empathize with their desires and their suffering. While there is something to be said for almost all the Big Bads that make Sunnydale truly hell for Buffy and her friends, the most successful, in my opinion, are the villains we feel for most: Vampire Spike, with his devotion to his mad lover Druscilla, and the evil, immortal Mayor, whose fatherly love for bad-slayer Faith and her own uncertain, touching reciprocation shows us who she might have been if she’d been loved by somebody not bent on becoming a giant demon-snake-thing. Villains who love are richer and more interesting characters, and it complicates the viewing / reading experience, because we care about them, evil as they are.
8. The show is sometimes bad. You can see the cracks, and learn from them as well. For example, when trying to bring your epic series to a close, do not turn your main character into a boring, didactic bossy-pants and introduce a whole passel of distracting, annoying new characters (I hate you, season 7, except for the bits I love). For all that the writing is (rightly!) revered, there is a lot of sloppy writing too. I suspect this is the inevitable result of trying to hack out 22+ episodes a year. The series does not offer the perfectionist, finely wrought television experience of, say, The Wire or Mad Men. The romances in the early seasons can be cheesy, the plots sometimes providing little more than a weak scaffolding for overwrought emotional moments, the motivations on occasion imperceptible beyond convenience. There are plenty of “Don’t-Do-That” lessons in a show that I still maintain is more loveable and re-watchable than many less flawed shows.
9. This show knows pain, and how to deliver it. Joss Whedon wants to hurt you. True Fact.
10. Passes Bechdel’s Test with flying colors, and so should everything you write. A blog post for another time might be “Why Writers (and everyone else) should read Alison Bechdel’s graphic novels”, but anyway, in a now 20+ year old strip, the rule (about movies, but it applies to any story with characters in it) is described thusly: (1) It has to have at least two women in it, (2) who talk to each other, (3) about something besides a man. Yup.
I know, blog, I know. This is supposed to be a books-and-writing blog, and I am talking about television. But good storytelling is good storytelling, and like it or not, I’m citing Joss Whedon et al as major influences, um, if anybody ever asks. Next week: a guide to what writers can look for in each of the seven seasons of Buffy.
Yours, still pathetically missing the show ten years on,
Catherine
January 21, 2013
Revisions, Love, and being In It For The Long Haul
Dear Blog,
It’s time to abandon my fun, scraggly, unfinished draft for final (!!!) revisions of The Last Days of Tian Di book 2 (currently Unmaking, but we’ll see if that title sticks), and I am feeling all dramatic about it. Can I be a drama queen, in my blog? Where better to be a drama queen? Who else would put up with it as patiently as you, blog?
If a first draft is like falling in love, as I suggested here, the revision process is like going through several traumatic divorces and remarriages with the same person while trying to settle down and build that perfect, happy union. Staying in love is so much harder than falling in love, and takes longer too.
Revisions are moving beyond the infatuation stage, and now you are staring at the little hairs he didn’t clean out of the sink after trimming his beard. Revisions are getting stuck halfway up the stairs, looking at him over the sofa you are trying to move into your new apartment, the sofa you can’t really afford, and thinking, oh god, is this a terrible mistake? Revisions are moving to New Jersey after years of gallivanting around the world in that reckless, spontaneous, first-drafty way, making Long Term Plans now and Serious Commitments, while every evening you secretly go and look at airfares on-line, trying to pretend that anything is still possible. Revisions are failing to grow a vegetable garden, kneeling in the dirt trying not to cry over the stunted, barely edible, and too-symbolic carrots and radishes that you’ve pulled up out of the earth.
You do it for love, you are looking for the plot, for the thread that will hold it all together, but it was so much easier before, when your only goal was something new and the future didn’t matter. You are trying to build something that will last, but you are thinking about how free you were when you didn’t owe your heart to this attempt.
Revisions are working through it, the days when you fantasize about Some Other Life, Not This One – an early morning train, days that are yours alone, a sleek black cat with iridescent green eyes watching you from the wall in the courtyard. You stay, every day, you stay anyway. You rewrite it, you rewrite it. The following summer, the garden will flourish. You’ll come back with tender ripe squash and zucchini, handfuls of basil, bags of crisp beans, because you’ve learned what to grow in this earth. In the early evening, the fireflies will rise up in semi-synchronized masses, bright blinking lights filling the lawn outside, and you’ll be glad you are here, for the first time not secretly plotting your escape. You can almost see it, the thing you’re trying to make.
The thing you end up with is never as perfect as the thing you imagined when you had really barely started, when he made you laugh so hard in that cave covered in batshit in Malaysia. It’s never as perfect as all those other lives you won’t live and the books you won’t write. The black cat eyes you resentfully in your dreams, like it is sneering at you, Really, is that all you can do? But that cat is just pissed off because it isn’t real. Dumb imaginary cat.
Whatever. I have had some practice at this now. I know all about being disappointed in myself. I could teach a master class on self-loathing, blog. But it is worth it, every time it is worth it, either for what you make, or for what you learn about how to make something. Revisions, like love, have never not been worth it.
So I’m suiting up. Once more into the breach, or something. Tian Di, book 2, you’re going to wish you’d never met me.
Melodramatically, imaginary-machete-wieldingly yours,
Catherine
It’s time to abandon my fun, scraggly, unfinished draft for final (!!!) revisions of The Last Days of Tian Di book 2 (currently Unmaking, but we’ll see if that title sticks), and I am feeling all dramatic about it. Can I be a drama queen, in my blog? Where better to be a drama queen? Who else would put up with it as patiently as you, blog?
If a first draft is like falling in love, as I suggested here, the revision process is like going through several traumatic divorces and remarriages with the same person while trying to settle down and build that perfect, happy union. Staying in love is so much harder than falling in love, and takes longer too.
Revisions are moving beyond the infatuation stage, and now you are staring at the little hairs he didn’t clean out of the sink after trimming his beard. Revisions are getting stuck halfway up the stairs, looking at him over the sofa you are trying to move into your new apartment, the sofa you can’t really afford, and thinking, oh god, is this a terrible mistake? Revisions are moving to New Jersey after years of gallivanting around the world in that reckless, spontaneous, first-drafty way, making Long Term Plans now and Serious Commitments, while every evening you secretly go and look at airfares on-line, trying to pretend that anything is still possible. Revisions are failing to grow a vegetable garden, kneeling in the dirt trying not to cry over the stunted, barely edible, and too-symbolic carrots and radishes that you’ve pulled up out of the earth.
You do it for love, you are looking for the plot, for the thread that will hold it all together, but it was so much easier before, when your only goal was something new and the future didn’t matter. You are trying to build something that will last, but you are thinking about how free you were when you didn’t owe your heart to this attempt.
Revisions are working through it, the days when you fantasize about Some Other Life, Not This One – an early morning train, days that are yours alone, a sleek black cat with iridescent green eyes watching you from the wall in the courtyard. You stay, every day, you stay anyway. You rewrite it, you rewrite it. The following summer, the garden will flourish. You’ll come back with tender ripe squash and zucchini, handfuls of basil, bags of crisp beans, because you’ve learned what to grow in this earth. In the early evening, the fireflies will rise up in semi-synchronized masses, bright blinking lights filling the lawn outside, and you’ll be glad you are here, for the first time not secretly plotting your escape. You can almost see it, the thing you’re trying to make.
The thing you end up with is never as perfect as the thing you imagined when you had really barely started, when he made you laugh so hard in that cave covered in batshit in Malaysia. It’s never as perfect as all those other lives you won’t live and the books you won’t write. The black cat eyes you resentfully in your dreams, like it is sneering at you, Really, is that all you can do? But that cat is just pissed off because it isn’t real. Dumb imaginary cat.
Whatever. I have had some practice at this now. I know all about being disappointed in myself. I could teach a master class on self-loathing, blog. But it is worth it, every time it is worth it, either for what you make, or for what you learn about how to make something. Revisions, like love, have never not been worth it.
So I’m suiting up. Once more into the breach, or something. Tian Di, book 2, you’re going to wish you’d never met me.
Melodramatically, imaginary-machete-wieldingly yours,
Catherine
January 14, 2013
The Unreal World and a couple of Really Good Books
In her memoir-ish book, Life Among The Savages, Shirley Jackson hilariously nails the way the fantasy world of children can, when you are the parent or caretaker, start to take over your life. Once the reader has become acquainted with the dozen or more characters, each with their own ever-changing entourage, that might at any time be performed by Jackson’s daughter, Jannie, the following anecdote makes perfect sense:
There was the uncomfortable incident when my daughter trotted in to me and said, “There’s a lady outside named Mrs. Harper and she wants to know will you give her a dollar?” and I replied absently, “Tell Mrs. Harper she may take the penny off my desk and not bother me anymore.” My daughter told Mrs. Harper and Mrs. Harper went away furious and a little frightened, and I was entered on the PTA books as refusing to pay my dues.
Of course it would not at first have occurred to her that Mrs. Harper might be a Real Woman from the Real World – that being by far the least likely scenario. Likewise, I am forever laying out imaginary lunches, opening the door for dinosaurs and politely inviting them in, or apologizing to invisible characters I have slighted or stepped on, and can approach our closet door only armed and with great trepidation, so convincing is LittleK’s terror of the wolf within. This is a crowded and unpredictable sort of life, but one becomes used to it.
If you find reality tiresome, however, I don’t necessarily recommend raising children. It is a lot of work and complicates travel. Probably the easiest, cheapest, and safest way to remove yourself from your own real life is to read fiction. Or write it. If you are doing all three of those things and little else, then your life probably looks a lot like mine.
A few weeks ago, after putting the boys to bed, cleaning up the wreckage, and taking a load of laundry down to the basement, I opened up The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. It was the first book of hers I’d read, and I didn’t know much about it except that it takes place on an island where every autumn, a version of “kelpies” or vicious faery horses come out of the sea, and daring riders hold a water horse race.
I read the first page, getting comfy on the sofa and thinking, yup, this is good, this is good. It happened on the second page. That free-fall into another world. Two pages, and the world(s) I’ve spent my day in are obliterated, forgotten. I read it until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, then realized I’d left the laundry in the basement without transferring it to the dryer. I went to bed much too late and woke up thinking about the book. I opened it up at breakfast, the inevitable result being that most of LittleK’s breakfast ended up on the floor and (I discovered later) tucked into his pockets. I read it during stolen moments throughout the day while the boys pulled the lights off the Christmas tree and filled That Guy’s sock drawer with pennies (they are really getting the hang of teamwork, I’ll give them that). And I read it after putting them to bed that night, until I finished it.
There are a lot of reasons why I love to read. There are many ways in which a book can entertain, enrich, and interest me. But being swallowed whole by a story, willing to follow its characters anywhere, page after page drawing you in deeper so that if your phone rings and your husband says “Aren’t you going to answer that?” you only hear it in a very distant, background-noise kind of way, because you aren’t really there on the sofa at all, you’re somewhere else, you’re someone else – that is my very favorite kind of reading experience. It is also just the thing on a winter’s evening, if you’ve had a long day and found yourself at some point in the middle of the street while the light changes, holding a wailing Small Toddler made exceedingly slippery by his wet snowsuit and trying to help up a Larger Toddler, who just fell down and is screaming at you to pick up the plastic dinosaurs he dropped, and you think you might just have to leave the sled you dropped to help him up right there in the road because there is no way you are going to be able to get both soggy cold kids and sled and dinosaurs home in the snow and you can’t figure out how you all made it to the park in the first place. In that case, I strongly recommend collapsing on the sofa with The Scorpio Races as soon as you can.
Anyway. I’ve had a bit of time out of its spell now, and at some point I will reread it with an eye to why and how it is so engrossing, but in all likelihood I will just get swept up in it again and go tearing through it without noticing at all how the spell gets cast, too enraptured to pull my analytic eye out of my pocket (which is where I keep it, and usually forget about it, and it gets all lint-covered and scratched up by my keys). I will say that it is very hard to be a brontosaurus or dig pennies out of sock drawers when in fact I’ve got a foot in Thisby island and am so in love with Puck and with Sean and so afraid for them.
That free-fall into not-here, that can’t-hear-the-phone state of total absorption, reminded me of the experience of reading Lena Coakley’s Witchlanders last winter, another book that totally defies my linty, scratched-up analytic eye by seeming so effortlessly to combine all the most delicious elements of a truly great fantasy story. (And she had me at the first line, which, in case you’re wondering, is: “Ryder woke to the sound of clattering bones.”). I remember getting to the end of it and feeling like I’d been shipwrecked on the shore of my own life, bereft, wanting nothing more than to stay in that other world. Which, you know, is maybe not entirely healthy-sounding, but I figure there are worse addictions than story, and I do like my life, really, so it’s OK.
We live here in a storm of stories. The story I am trying to write, the stories we read, the stories we tell, the stories we dinosaur-stomp through from morning ‘til night. I reach for the doorknob of the closet and LittleK’s scream freezes me. “Wolf inside!” he shouts at me like I’m a complete idiot, and I back away from the door. We are chased to the park by relentless T-rexes, saved at last by a noble brachiosaurus. We collapse with relief on a damp bench for a snack. My mind drifts to the book I left on the table at home. LittleJ says, “Tell me a story.” LittleK says, “Story!” I begin: “Once upon a time, there were two little boys, brothers.” LittleJ corrects me, “One big boy, one little boy,” so I say, “Once upon a time, there were two brothers, a big brother and a little brother, and they lived in a land full of dinosaurs.” They sit and stare at me, rapt already, pretzels half-raised to their mouths, waiting for whatever comes next.
Yours, far from any reality that is really a real one,
Catherine
There was the uncomfortable incident when my daughter trotted in to me and said, “There’s a lady outside named Mrs. Harper and she wants to know will you give her a dollar?” and I replied absently, “Tell Mrs. Harper she may take the penny off my desk and not bother me anymore.” My daughter told Mrs. Harper and Mrs. Harper went away furious and a little frightened, and I was entered on the PTA books as refusing to pay my dues.
Of course it would not at first have occurred to her that Mrs. Harper might be a Real Woman from the Real World – that being by far the least likely scenario. Likewise, I am forever laying out imaginary lunches, opening the door for dinosaurs and politely inviting them in, or apologizing to invisible characters I have slighted or stepped on, and can approach our closet door only armed and with great trepidation, so convincing is LittleK’s terror of the wolf within. This is a crowded and unpredictable sort of life, but one becomes used to it.
If you find reality tiresome, however, I don’t necessarily recommend raising children. It is a lot of work and complicates travel. Probably the easiest, cheapest, and safest way to remove yourself from your own real life is to read fiction. Or write it. If you are doing all three of those things and little else, then your life probably looks a lot like mine.
A few weeks ago, after putting the boys to bed, cleaning up the wreckage, and taking a load of laundry down to the basement, I opened up The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. It was the first book of hers I’d read, and I didn’t know much about it except that it takes place on an island where every autumn, a version of “kelpies” or vicious faery horses come out of the sea, and daring riders hold a water horse race.
I read the first page, getting comfy on the sofa and thinking, yup, this is good, this is good. It happened on the second page. That free-fall into another world. Two pages, and the world(s) I’ve spent my day in are obliterated, forgotten. I read it until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, then realized I’d left the laundry in the basement without transferring it to the dryer. I went to bed much too late and woke up thinking about the book. I opened it up at breakfast, the inevitable result being that most of LittleK’s breakfast ended up on the floor and (I discovered later) tucked into his pockets. I read it during stolen moments throughout the day while the boys pulled the lights off the Christmas tree and filled That Guy’s sock drawer with pennies (they are really getting the hang of teamwork, I’ll give them that). And I read it after putting them to bed that night, until I finished it.
There are a lot of reasons why I love to read. There are many ways in which a book can entertain, enrich, and interest me. But being swallowed whole by a story, willing to follow its characters anywhere, page after page drawing you in deeper so that if your phone rings and your husband says “Aren’t you going to answer that?” you only hear it in a very distant, background-noise kind of way, because you aren’t really there on the sofa at all, you’re somewhere else, you’re someone else – that is my very favorite kind of reading experience. It is also just the thing on a winter’s evening, if you’ve had a long day and found yourself at some point in the middle of the street while the light changes, holding a wailing Small Toddler made exceedingly slippery by his wet snowsuit and trying to help up a Larger Toddler, who just fell down and is screaming at you to pick up the plastic dinosaurs he dropped, and you think you might just have to leave the sled you dropped to help him up right there in the road because there is no way you are going to be able to get both soggy cold kids and sled and dinosaurs home in the snow and you can’t figure out how you all made it to the park in the first place. In that case, I strongly recommend collapsing on the sofa with The Scorpio Races as soon as you can.
Anyway. I’ve had a bit of time out of its spell now, and at some point I will reread it with an eye to why and how it is so engrossing, but in all likelihood I will just get swept up in it again and go tearing through it without noticing at all how the spell gets cast, too enraptured to pull my analytic eye out of my pocket (which is where I keep it, and usually forget about it, and it gets all lint-covered and scratched up by my keys). I will say that it is very hard to be a brontosaurus or dig pennies out of sock drawers when in fact I’ve got a foot in Thisby island and am so in love with Puck and with Sean and so afraid for them.
That free-fall into not-here, that can’t-hear-the-phone state of total absorption, reminded me of the experience of reading Lena Coakley’s Witchlanders last winter, another book that totally defies my linty, scratched-up analytic eye by seeming so effortlessly to combine all the most delicious elements of a truly great fantasy story. (And she had me at the first line, which, in case you’re wondering, is: “Ryder woke to the sound of clattering bones.”). I remember getting to the end of it and feeling like I’d been shipwrecked on the shore of my own life, bereft, wanting nothing more than to stay in that other world. Which, you know, is maybe not entirely healthy-sounding, but I figure there are worse addictions than story, and I do like my life, really, so it’s OK.
We live here in a storm of stories. The story I am trying to write, the stories we read, the stories we tell, the stories we dinosaur-stomp through from morning ‘til night. I reach for the doorknob of the closet and LittleK’s scream freezes me. “Wolf inside!” he shouts at me like I’m a complete idiot, and I back away from the door. We are chased to the park by relentless T-rexes, saved at last by a noble brachiosaurus. We collapse with relief on a damp bench for a snack. My mind drifts to the book I left on the table at home. LittleJ says, “Tell me a story.” LittleK says, “Story!” I begin: “Once upon a time, there were two little boys, brothers.” LittleJ corrects me, “One big boy, one little boy,” so I say, “Once upon a time, there were two brothers, a big brother and a little brother, and they lived in a land full of dinosaurs.” They sit and stare at me, rapt already, pretzels half-raised to their mouths, waiting for whatever comes next.
Yours, far from any reality that is really a real one,
Catherine
January 7, 2013
On finding / making time to write
Dear Blog,
Here is something I have heard a lot since Shade and Sorceress was published and I started prancing around saying la la la I’m a novelist I’m a novelist to everybody I met: “I don’t know how you found the time to write a book while taking care of two little kids.” I enjoy hearing this, actually, because it makes me sound very disciplined, or like a time-management genius, although I am neither of those things. I generally reply breezily, “well, I write during naptime,” and leave it at that. I have more to say about it, but nobody really wants the long answer. Except you, blog! Right? You want the long answer, don’t you? Isn’t that why you exist? So here it is.
Everybody I know is busy. Last weekend That Guy took the boys to the park and I raced around trying to make our apartment look less like insane, drunken squatters live here (because that is decidedly not the case – we pay rent). While I was digging lego pieces out of the back of the dishwasher, I thought wrathfully about the expressions “finding time” and “making time” – like you could go rooting around in the basement and turn up some extra minutes somebody left there once– or like you could create it somehow, if only you had the right ingredients – and then while everybody else scrambled through their 24 hours and into the next 24, you’d have jars full of spare hours tucked away in the closet and could take one out when you needed it, for a nice long shower, a snooze, or a quiet afternoon to revise that troublesome chapter seven.
But there are no extra hours. There is always too much to do. If you manage to do one thing, it’s because you are not doing another thing. I write for two hours, every day, while LittleK naps and LittleJ has Quiet Time and then watches something on the kindle. The price for that time, of course, is all the things that don’t get done because #IAmWriting.
Around 4 o’clock, a sudden wail, Moooo-oooo-ooommyyy, comes from LittleK’s room, which means my time is up. The floor is sticky from who-knows what, there are crumbs under the table and dishes piled on the counter, toys and books scattered everywhere. I need to go to the post office, and I didn’t buy groceries or do any dinner prep. LittleK wakes up miserable and clingy, and LittleJ is clamoring to go out after his two hours of neglect. I contemplate going straight from the post office to the grocery store with both of them, then coming back and trying to keep them relatively happy while I cook supper, but can’t face it. So after the post office we go to the snowy park for half an hour until it is too cold and dark, and pick up chicken shawerma for supper at the corner market on the way back.
And I am annoyed with myself for doing takeout two nights already this week, I am embarrassed by the state of our apartment, I am depressed by the huge pile of laundry I need to get through this evening when really I just want to read or hang out with That Guy and I am so short on sleep and why does LittleK have to wake up at the crack of are-you-fucking-kidding-me in the mornings, and seriously, seriously, is somebody playing a joke and stealing single socks or single mittens from every pair we have?
Then That Guy comes home and does the dishes, and the boys climb all over him, and the three of them build a lego house for LittleK’s stuffed cat while I pick up a bit and then sit at the table and stare at them with glazed eyes, thinking, I should really sweep. The chicken shawerma is pretty good. After the boys go to bed I do the laundry, and That Guy sweeps. I make pancake batter, and he makes the pancakes so that I can wash the sticky floor, but instead I just stand there and watch him make the pancakes, offering commentary. We wrap up 25 little pancakes and put them in the freezer. There is a point in the evening when productivity runs aground, flops a bit, and dies. I say, “I should really wash the floor,” and sigh deeply. He says, “I’ll do it,” and looks dejected. We stand there a moment, and then I say, guiltily, “We could watch another episode of Game of Thrones. Just one, though.” “Right,” he says, cheering up. “Just one episode.”
There is a way in which we are always losing. There is no time to be found – down in the basement, under the floorboards, in the dragon’s lair, anywhere. There is no time to be made – no secret recipe guarded by dusty, dying wizards, no method lost to humankind from some early time-filled era. There are only things to give up, and battles to lose, in order to make room for some other, tiny victory. The floor is still sticky, it is closing on midnight, and LittleK will be up in five hours. But the kids are OK, and I am writing a book. I’m not proud of the filthy apartment, and I am tired, but I can live with it.
La la la I’m a novelist I’m a novelist,
Catherine
Here is something I have heard a lot since Shade and Sorceress was published and I started prancing around saying la la la I’m a novelist I’m a novelist to everybody I met: “I don’t know how you found the time to write a book while taking care of two little kids.” I enjoy hearing this, actually, because it makes me sound very disciplined, or like a time-management genius, although I am neither of those things. I generally reply breezily, “well, I write during naptime,” and leave it at that. I have more to say about it, but nobody really wants the long answer. Except you, blog! Right? You want the long answer, don’t you? Isn’t that why you exist? So here it is.
Everybody I know is busy. Last weekend That Guy took the boys to the park and I raced around trying to make our apartment look less like insane, drunken squatters live here (because that is decidedly not the case – we pay rent). While I was digging lego pieces out of the back of the dishwasher, I thought wrathfully about the expressions “finding time” and “making time” – like you could go rooting around in the basement and turn up some extra minutes somebody left there once– or like you could create it somehow, if only you had the right ingredients – and then while everybody else scrambled through their 24 hours and into the next 24, you’d have jars full of spare hours tucked away in the closet and could take one out when you needed it, for a nice long shower, a snooze, or a quiet afternoon to revise that troublesome chapter seven.
But there are no extra hours. There is always too much to do. If you manage to do one thing, it’s because you are not doing another thing. I write for two hours, every day, while LittleK naps and LittleJ has Quiet Time and then watches something on the kindle. The price for that time, of course, is all the things that don’t get done because #IAmWriting.
Around 4 o’clock, a sudden wail, Moooo-oooo-ooommyyy, comes from LittleK’s room, which means my time is up. The floor is sticky from who-knows what, there are crumbs under the table and dishes piled on the counter, toys and books scattered everywhere. I need to go to the post office, and I didn’t buy groceries or do any dinner prep. LittleK wakes up miserable and clingy, and LittleJ is clamoring to go out after his two hours of neglect. I contemplate going straight from the post office to the grocery store with both of them, then coming back and trying to keep them relatively happy while I cook supper, but can’t face it. So after the post office we go to the snowy park for half an hour until it is too cold and dark, and pick up chicken shawerma for supper at the corner market on the way back.
And I am annoyed with myself for doing takeout two nights already this week, I am embarrassed by the state of our apartment, I am depressed by the huge pile of laundry I need to get through this evening when really I just want to read or hang out with That Guy and I am so short on sleep and why does LittleK have to wake up at the crack of are-you-fucking-kidding-me in the mornings, and seriously, seriously, is somebody playing a joke and stealing single socks or single mittens from every pair we have?
Then That Guy comes home and does the dishes, and the boys climb all over him, and the three of them build a lego house for LittleK’s stuffed cat while I pick up a bit and then sit at the table and stare at them with glazed eyes, thinking, I should really sweep. The chicken shawerma is pretty good. After the boys go to bed I do the laundry, and That Guy sweeps. I make pancake batter, and he makes the pancakes so that I can wash the sticky floor, but instead I just stand there and watch him make the pancakes, offering commentary. We wrap up 25 little pancakes and put them in the freezer. There is a point in the evening when productivity runs aground, flops a bit, and dies. I say, “I should really wash the floor,” and sigh deeply. He says, “I’ll do it,” and looks dejected. We stand there a moment, and then I say, guiltily, “We could watch another episode of Game of Thrones. Just one, though.” “Right,” he says, cheering up. “Just one episode.”
There is a way in which we are always losing. There is no time to be found – down in the basement, under the floorboards, in the dragon’s lair, anywhere. There is no time to be made – no secret recipe guarded by dusty, dying wizards, no method lost to humankind from some early time-filled era. There are only things to give up, and battles to lose, in order to make room for some other, tiny victory. The floor is still sticky, it is closing on midnight, and LittleK will be up in five hours. But the kids are OK, and I am writing a book. I’m not proud of the filthy apartment, and I am tired, but I can live with it.
La la la I’m a novelist I’m a novelist,
Catherine
