Abigail Barnette's Blog, page 38

True Blood Tuesday S05E12 “Save Yourself”

This show, you guys. Please, I beg of you, if you haven’t, read the books. So much better than whatever this has become.

You can find the file here, press play when the HBO sound and logo fade.

Jealous Haters Book Club: Handbook For Mortals Chapter 15 (part 2) The Tower or “This is the part where adapting the screenplay into a book got hard”

Every time I think, “You know, I’m going to run out of Handbook For Mortals shenanigans before we get to the end of the recaps,” I am proved wrong. So, this installment brings us…

REBRANDING!

Awesome tweeter Aron alerted me to this press release, tweeted by an account called ADA IT Solutions. Since Handbook For Mortals has nothing at all to do with either the Americans with Disabilities Act or improved access to technology as outlined in the Americans with Disabilities Act, it’s pretty clear that Cision PR Newswire’s strategy seems to be “throw something at the wall and see if it sticks.” Which falls right in line with Handbook and Lani Sarem, who both receive a generous re-branding as we steam toward the release of the movie.

Really.

Author Lani Sarem, whose initial offering Handbook for Mortalsdebuted at No. 34 on the USA Today Bestseller list, continues promotion on the national Comic Con circuit alongside American Pie, Rookie of the Year star Thomas Ian Nicholas. The film is scheduled to shoot later this year, based on the book.  In a year of empowering females within the industry, it’s important to note that the film is not only very female-driven, but also includes a strong female protagonist, female director, female line producer and Sarem herself as the author.

No longer billed as a New York Times bestseller, this bulletin is content to celebrate the (also scammed) success of the book as a USA Today bestseller. I mean, who needs a big flashy label when you’re suddenly, out of absofuckinglutely nowhere, a juggernaut of feminist power? I mean, a female director (probably Lani Sarem), a female line producer (also probably Lani Sarem), and a strong female protagonist who never has to work to get anything she wants because her daddy gives it to her? Hold onto your pussy hats, ladies, we’re going to the theater!

Handbook for Mortals is about a young woman with supernatural powers who joins a Las Vegas magic show only to find that love is more dangerous than magick.

It certainly is for the girl at Hot Dog On A Stick who’s covered in broken glass and lemonade.

Sarem and Nicholas took an interesting approach to find an early audience for the franchise. Nicholas was booked as a celebrity guest at many conventions including Motor City, Alamo City and all the Wizard World Comic Cons starting early in 2017. They promoted the story and pre-sold Handbook for Mortals all across the country before the book even had a cover. In fact, it was at Wizard World Comic Con Philadelphia where they met comic book artist Ryan M. Kincaid, who ultimately drew the cover art.

If I’m ever accused of a crime, I’m going to use that line. I didn’t burn that house down. I “took an interesting approach” to building redesign. I didn’t murder that guy. I “took an interesting approach” to interpersonal conflict resolution. I didn’t steal that loaf of bread. I “took an interesting approach” to capitalism.

You know. Just the same exact way Ryan M. Kincaid “took an interesting approach” to drawing the cover art by literally tracing another author’s work.

On creating a story centered around a female lead, Sarem notes, “That was always the idea. Even at a young age I noticed what was going on.”

According to the feature on her on Vulture, the thing she noticed that was going on was that she couldn’t get parts as an actress, so she wrote this one specifically for herself. This isn’t empowering to women. It’s empowering to one woman.

About the comic conventions where she allegedly sold one book every forty-six seconds, per the math done by commenter Maths GCSE Graduate on the last recap, Sarem says:

“It’s a great place to meet fans looking for the next source of entertainment,” Sarem explains. “They’re excited to find something new and there’s nothing like watching them walk away clutching the book like it’s the most valuable thing they own.”

Nobody has ever felt that way about this book. And most people don’t go to conventions looking for “the next source of entertainment.” They go to see the people who are already making the entertainment they like. They want to meet the artists and illustrators and celebrities they already know.

You might be thinking to yourself, “How did Lani Sarem get this far into the press release without namedropping?” Well, don’t worry. Thomas Ian Nicholas is there to do it for her:

Nicholas also says, “It’s fun getting this project off the ground by connecting directly with people in the right environment. Plus, spending the weekend with other guests like Gregg Sulkin, Jason Momoa, Holly Marie Combs, Bonnie Wright, Sebastian Stan, Ian Somerhalder– it’s starting to feel like one big supportive family.”

Okay, but they’re no Carrot Tops, are they?

The press release goes on in an attempt to tie Sarem and Handbook to Disney via Thomas Ian Nicholas and John Heder’s Disney trivia panel that Sarem moderates and that a Disney artist showed up to hand out prizes for. One thing you can say for Lani (who absolutely wrote this press release herself, as no one who does this as their job would write a press release that included so much information completely unrelated to the main point), she sure knows how to starfuck in public.

Lest you think the entire thing is about the famous people Sarem and Nicholas sometimes stand next to, oh no, dear reader. We haven’t forgotten that this is a work of fearful and staggering feminism:

 For several years, she was one of the youngest female band managers with two platinum selling, Grammy award-winning acts nestled in her roster of bands. Music is another area of the entertainment business that is typically a boys club. Sarem is no stranger to breaking down those walls and says, “It’s always an interesting challenge to find your place as a woman in a male-centric business. I hope I’m one of the many people that bring about positive change to the film industry. I want to inspire young girls to know they can dream big and achieve whatever their heart desires.”

Yes, young girls, you can dream big and achieve…wait, what the fuck has Lani Sarem ever achieved, aside from being fired from the bands she managed because they apparently grew tired of her schemes and going on to expose herself as a clumsy fraud in the literary world? Watch out, film industry. Lani is on her way to fix you the way she fixed publishing. Sit down, women in Holywood who have been fighting for equality! Lani Sarem has it handled.

Obviously, now that Handbook For Mortals is burning its bra, everyone is going to stop mocking it, right?

Nope! Sorry, Lani Sarem, but your scam has never been about “empowering women.” It’s been 100% about you getting famous by any means necessary. It’s been about empowering you. Now you’ve been slightly sort-of kind of notable in a fully non-important way for almost a year. That’s all people are willing to give you in all of this, which is honestly more than you deserve.

Anyway onto the blistering female empowerment of Handbook For Mortals

When last we saw Lani, she was dying on stage. So the rest of the chapter is obviously going to be in someone else’s POV, right? The italics with the little triple goddess picture, right?

That’s the last thing I personally remembered from that day. Later, after I’d had some time to rest, I pulled out the memories of waht everyone else saw and what happened.

In one sentence, any sense of suspense over Zip’s fate is obliterated. She’s just collapsed backstage doing this chaos majik thing that’s so super dangerous, but don’t worry, reader! Everything suspenseful that happened from that point on turned out totally okay and the book will be narrated by the heroine after everything inevitably works out.

But what does she mean by “pulling out” memories?

When you “pull out” memories using magick, they pretty much feel like they are your memories––but you’re also seeing yourself from that other point of view. This means that you’re only seeing what the other person saw, though––so you might not get a full picture of the information you’re looking for.

Yes, but where are you pulling these memories from? Just right out of the heads of people around you? Did you ask their permission? Is there a reason you needed to do this or were you just curious to see if everyone was appropriately devastated when you collapsed? Right now seems like the point in the author’s rewrite of her screenplay where she got bored turning it into an actual novel and now she’s just setting up camera angles. It’s okay that this entire sequence makes absolutely no sense, that we’ve been given no indication previously that this is a kind of maghikk that Zart can do, and that the POV shift is inconsistent with the third person omniscient we’ve seen POV changes handled with so far. I’m perfectly fine with being trapped in a first-person omniscient hellscape.

Now that Labia has done her illusion and it’s all gone terribly, Mac returns.

After completely leaving the theater during the show, he had finally come back into the venue just as the commotion was at its peak, and heard that someone had gotten hurt. His own intuition must have kicked in, because he instantly knew it was me. Hoping he was wrong, he pushed his way through the crowd, panicking.

Imagine if this scene were written not in first-person omniscient past-perfect tense. Also, imagine it was in a better book. What if we’d seen this as it was happening? What if the author had trusted readers enough to let them into a deep-POV third person when they were with other characters? The only reason we haven’t had any deep third-person POV and always stay in omniscient third and now first person is because Lani Sarem can’t stand that her reader, who should be paying attention to her, is sparing even a single brain cell on someone who isn’t her. I mean, who isn’t her direct avatar.

Mac pushes everyone aside and finds Tad and Zeb holding onto Zuckerberg, who is throwing up her own blood.

Mac instantly grabbed me and pulled me towards himself. Zeb let Mac take over holding me, but stayed in the same spot, protective and close.

Hey, remember when that evil bitch Sofia fell sixty feet into water and her heart stopped and none of these people treated that with any urgency?

Tad tells Mac what happened to Zazu:

“I don’t know. I looked over. She just collapsed and started bleeding,” Tad said, at a complete loss. He was distraught, shattered.

Distraught and shattered. This same character consoled Riley after Sofia’s fall by saying basically, hey, it wasn’t your fault, she should have known better, while Sofia was still not breathing.

Zeb weighs in, too:

“I turned around, and she…she…uh…she just collapsed in my ams,” Zeb offered, still stunned, with glazed eyes.

How many times are we going to have to hear about her collapsing? What new information is this imparting? The reader knows she’s collapsed. Let’s move on.

Poor Riley couldn’t talk as tears began to well in his eyes and he began to hyperventilate. He didn’t have anything to add as far as information went. Zeb grabbed him and let him lean on him as he started to collapse on the floor.

Now Riley is collapsing, too? None of these people are up to code.

The paramedics arrive and start working on her:

Little did they know that what was happening to me wasn’t anything they had ever seen before.

They’re paramedics in Las Vegas. I guarantee that they’ve seen someone spontaneously collapse and vomit blood before.

“No signs of external trauma. Must be something internal,” […]

No shit?

Mac asks what hospital they’ll take her to, and Charles says––hey, that’s right, Charles has been in this scene the whole time, standing by without being mentioned! Anyway, he says he’s going to the hospital, too, and of course, it leads to a steely moment of eye contact between the two men, one of whom believes the other is a romantic rival when in reality the other is really her father and possibly, okay, also a romantic rival.

Before they leave, Tad tells Mac that the last thing Lint said was to call her mother, and Mac, who has been dating Zwieback for like, what, half a year now? Has no idea how to contact her. Now, I’m not suggesting that Mac should have met Dela or Delilah or whatever the fuck she’s called, but I am suggesting that in the amount of time we can estimate that he’s known her, wouldn’t he at least know if she had a cellphone he could find the number in?

Zeb and Tad both had blood all over their clothes and there was even blood pooled on the floor. Riley stood there just staring at the floor, pretty shaken and distraught. As everyone started to disperse, Riley couldn’t take his eyes away from the red pool of blood.

Thanks for clearing up that blood is red and that it’s not a red pool of some other liquid. At this point, I’m going to just imagine Lugnut’s dramatic collapse as a Capri Sun being squeezed too hard. My favorite part of this is that we started out in Mac’s memory, but now Mac is gone. So, Zam Chowder has taken over someone else’s memory not to advance the story at all, but to show us how affected her coworkers are by her incident.

Zeb finally looked down, noticing he was covered in blood, and in an almost daze, followed after the others.

And then she does it again! It’s not enough that everyone immediately worried about her and screamed for 911 while they were previously content to just see how Sofia’s whole falling-sixty-feet-and-not-breathing thing played out. We have to see everyone’s PTSD developing in real time. No forgetting how beloved Lilly Zane is in this story, no sir!

There’s a paragraph break and Zunder Lunt explains that it’s hard to sift through everyone’s memories because of how sad they were about her:

Feeling the pain they felt as I combed through their deepest thoughts was incredibly hard for me, but I needed to know what happened during the time I was “gone.” So I kept sifting.

Does anyone have some god damn wood so we can fashion a cross for this true martyr? I mean ’tis the season, right?

I want to know how this memory sifting thing works. There’s no indication anywhere that she’s been given consent by any of these people to look into their minds. She’s never been able to read people’s thoughts before. If she could do this all along and had no qualms about doing it to people without their knowledge in order to gain information for herself, why didn’t she do it to clear up her dating conflicts? I’m not saying she should have, but the reader needs to know why she hasn’t been using this power if she had it all along? At the very least, it would have explained the hideous POV skews.

Because no one close to her was in the ambulance, she can’t get memories from that time.

I had to assume that not much happened that was important (to me, at least), so I skipped trying to pull those moments, which seemed to be more work than they were worth.

The thing that would have been happening in the ambulance would have been like, people saving her life, but that isn’t important to her. I wish the paramedics would have decided that saving her was more work than they were worth. I’m not saying I want to know every tiny detail from the ambulance ride and that no author should ever skip shit like that, but all this does is open up more questions about the “pulling memories” ability that we’ve never heard of until this chapter. Where is Zoloft while she’s “pulling memories”? Is she in a coma doing this? Is she at home? Does she have to be near the person physically when she does this? Can she grab anybody’s memories, even if she’s not involved? It’s “more work” to try to get a total stranger’s memories, but she doesn’t say it’s impossible. Is this heroine walking around just reading other people’s minds? Are there majhikal controls in place to stop her from doing so? Does she have ethical standards that prevent her from doing it? Are we going to get any sort of explanation for these powers, or what?

Anyway, she focuses on Charles and Mac driving the hospital not talking, then going to the ICU waiting room.

As I compared their memories, two things were consistent: you could cut the tension with a knife; and the pain they both felt for me was so strong it was pretty unbearable.

Two things were consistent: the author’s total lack of understanding regarding simple punctuation and the reassurance that her avatar is still the center of the universe.

A doctor comes in to talk to Mac and Charles:

By his white coat you could tell he was a doctor and obviously well experienced––most likely the head doctor of the hospital.

The head doctor…of the hospital. This is the way a child would write a story. THE VERY MOST SPECIAL AND IMPORTANT DOCTOR WHO WAS THE BOSS OF THE WHOLE HOSPITAL.

“Are either of you family?” Dr. Schmidt asked, cutting into Mac’s panic.

“I’m her friend…um…I’m her boy. I’m her…boy…friend,” Mac stammered.

Are you, though?

The doctor informs him that he has to talk to someone in her family because she can’t consent to the release of her medical information. Charles is standing right there, of course, but he can’t say anything because it’s not time for The Big Reveal.

“Her mother lives in Tennessee,” Mac answered realizing he wasn’t even sure exactly where in Tennessee; the best he knew it was near Nashville, but he knew Nashville wasn’t it. Acutally he vaguely remembered Zade saying something about the fact that Nashville was at least an hour away from her mom.

Since we’re in Zumple Liltskin’s brain, wouldn’t it be “at least an hour away from my mom,” and “he vaguely remembered me saying?” And does the internet not exist in this world? Couldn’t he just search for her mom’s phone number online? Or even try to look up Zully’s name, since she used to live with her mom? Is anyone making an attempt to find her next of kin at all?

Charles asks if he can speak with the doctor privately but Mac makes it some big deal about “whatever you can say, you can say in front of me” kind of male posturing. So you know what it’s time for.

“I’m also her…” he paused, glancing at Mac. “I’m her father.”

And I’m fucking her.

He does not say, because it’s not that kind of book. Or so we’re supposed to believe.

Mac is like, what? So Charles has to break it down Barney-style:

Charles looked directly into Mac’s eyes while spoke slowly and purposely: “Zade is my daughter.”

First of all, he did it purposefully, not purposely. And yet again, we’ve got someone looking “directly into” another character’s eyes. This gets used more than I use “look to” in my books and that is really saying something considering how much I use “look to”.

Wherein Mac becomes all of us:

“I saw you kiss her!” Mac protested.

“What are you trying to imply?” Charles said, flabbergasted.

Charles asked.

Mac began to breathe heavily […]

Again, no one is this chapter “did” anything. They all “began” or “started to”.

He pressed his lips together and looked directly at the floor. Mac pulled his gaze off of Charles and turned to the doctor, who seemed to be more confused than ever.

As am I, considering Charles is apparently on the floor or has become a part of the floor himself, as per the order in which Mac’s eyes do their thing.

I’m sorry, “began” to do their thing.

Mac asks the doctor to give them a moment, because Zunk bleeding out isn’t nearly as important as clearing up this conflict with his boss. The doctor goes away, and Mac asks if Charles just said he was her father so the doctor would talk to them.

“It’s 100% completely true.”

“Does she know?” Mac queried

“Yes,” Charles said, nodding slowly and in a flat tone.

A note on queried (and yes, the period is actually missing, it’s not my clumsy fingers doing that): people, especially first-time authors, get hung up on word repetition, but over the wrong words. “Asked” would have been an invisible word here, but chances are that Sarem thought she was doing the right thing by avoiding it. Those lists that make their way around the internet with all those alternatives for “ask” and “said” usually don’t point out that some of their substitutes are used less often than others and as a result might stick out as stiff and archaic, interrupting the flow of dialogue. “Avoid ‘said’ and ‘asked’!” is such bad advice because it makes new writers feel like they have to consult a thesaurus. Here’s a writing tip: If you’re writing a fast-paced conversation like this, don’t be afraid of ‘asked’ and ‘said.’ This one isn’t Sarem’s fault. She just fell victim to some bad writing advice.

What is her fault is not realizing that nods don’t have tones.

“I am not aware of anyone else knowing. Besides her mother, of course.”

“Why?” Mac asked, still very confused, his stomach in knots.

Because she gave birth to her, Mac.

“I cannot explain most of it to you, but I can say that…well, it was her mother’s wish, and I had no choice but to respect it. ‘Wish’ is a polite way of putting it, honestly. It was only recently that Zade found out that I was her father; and that’s when she came to work with us,” Charles responded in a very matter-of-fact tone.

In other words, the motivation we were given for why Lazi went to Vegas is missing a big chunk out of it. We were told that she was going to Las Vegas to try to become a magician because her mother had trapped her in their small town, possibly with a spell of some kind, and now she was going off to live her dream. In reality, she was “trapped” with her mother because she didn’t know there was a better option. Was it ever really Zandy’s dream to be an illusionist? Or was this just a way to get out of her small town? We’d speculated that Hey There Delilah had put her daughter under a spell, but in reality it was just that she never told her daughter that she had a father?

None of these questions are answered right now, of course.

Mac tells Charles that it’s funny that Zalaska Lunderfuck grew up to become a magician, too, and Charles makes a comment about how her mother does “something similar.” Then Mac explains that he thought she and Charles were having an affair, based on the amount of time they spent together.

He was thinking over all the things that in the past few days hadn’t sat well with him but now made total sense.

Does it? Because that’s not the experience the reader is having. This entire story would have made a lot more sense if we had known Charles was her father from the very beginning. It still wouldn’t have been a good story, but it would have at least made more sense than a story where the main character decides she’s going to be a big Vegas star and then it just happens without any conflict.

Ways this story would have been improved if we’d known Charles was her father all along:

There would have been clear motivation (“call to adventure”) for her to leave her hometown at the point in time when the story begins.
Her ability to easily get an audition with a top Vegas act would have been more believable.
Wanting to impress her father and not disappoint him would have given her motivation, which has been wholly missing from her characterization.
If it remained a secret to the rest of the cast and crew, the conflict could have arisen from trying to keep the secret safe.
If it hadn’t been kept a secret from the rest of the cast and crew, the conflict could have arisen from trying to prove her worth.
Wanting to walk in her father’s footsteps or make him proud or take her place in some magical dynasty would have given her a goal, which she lacks.

You read that right. Zade lacks a goal. And motivation. And conflict. Those are three crucial intersections between characterization and plot. Without those three, neither the character nor the plot can be sustained. Letting the reader in on the secret of Zade’s parentage wouldn’t have just saved the plot. It would have created one in the first place.

Mac tells Charles that he saw them kissing and Charles is like, are you sure?

“Well…” Mac thought through what he had actually seen, sort of thinking out loud. “Well, no. I saw you lean in to…what I thought was to make-out with her, then I couldn’t bear to watch, so I turned away. It was when you were in the office earlier, and you both were saying how you loved each other.”

Charles nodded and smiled; he knew exactly the time frame Mac was speaking about.

“If you would have spied on us just a moment longer you would have seen her kiss me on the cheek. I am sorry you misunderstood, and that it caused you pain.”

These characters talk about “making out” so much that this might as well be a high school AU of itself written by a thirteen-year-old who can’t go spicier because her mom might read her notebooks. On top of that…is Charles suggesting that his employees should spy on him more thoroughly?

“That conversation you had with me that one day makes much more sense now, too,” Mac said thoughtfully, then his whole attitude sank. “I yelled at her tonight. We got into a big fight right before the illusion. Now everything she said makes sense.

Whoa, slow down. Let’s not make wild claims here.

She wasn’t lying and I wouldn’t listen. I just walked away. I was so upset, I couldn’t even run main during the show––I had Cam do it.”

“You weren’t on the board when we did the creation illusion?” A panicked look crept across Charles’s face when he echoed what Mac had said.

“But you were supposed to capture the homunculus! Where is it now? Did it escape?!”

“No. Why?” Mac asked, wondering what not being on the board had to do with anything.

True love. I’m making my bet right now. True love grounds her or some shit.

Charles swallowed and paused for a moment before responding, “I think I may have had an idea of what’s causing Zade’s health issues.”

Oh my god, it’s really going to be true love, isn’t it?

So, keep at mind that at this point, neither Mac nor Charles actually know what Lumbar’s health issue is, because rather than find out whether or not she’s alive or dead or dying or doomed or just fine, they have to hash out the romantic drama and the Big Reveal. And they don’t get to find out if she’s okay just yet, because something else really important is happening:

Something else really important and alarming happened at that exact moment.

Sorry, really important and alarming.

The girl who had stopped me that day in the parking garage of the mall, the one who pinned me to the wall using magick, arrived at the hospital. Not only did I find out that she was there but she seemed to make a point of being seen when she didn’t have to––which led me to believe she knew I would look later (or at least someone would) and would see her. I still have no idea why she was there––or why she purposely wanted to be seen.

Okay, so the Lambo girl did show up again in the story. I mean, she just shows up in a random memory and the main character is like, shrug emoji, IDK, but she does show up again. Load sees that in the moment that Dr. Schmidt returns, the girl pushes between Mac and Charles, who’ve previously been described as standing very close and having this super intense conversation. So, there’s no way they couldn’t have noticed her there.

She had made sure to burn a spot in Mac’s memories, and that was only because she actually pushed him out of her way. As I looked through Mac’s thoughts and tried to process them, her presence sent a shiver down my back. It was really bizarre and had me very worried but there obviously wasn’t anything I could do after the fact.

But…Charles was there. And he knows about majihck. Was there a hole burned into his brain, too? Why isn’t he suspicious about the girl?

Oh, right, because he desperately wants to find out how Laura is doing. I mean, he and Mac sent the doctor away so they could have a long conversation about their feelings, but now they’re finally getting around to wanting to know what’s happened to Zint. Like, is she alive, or…

“She’s stable for the moment, but I can’t guarantee that to be a permanent situation unless I can figure out what’s causing this––and right now I really haven’t a clue. There is internal trauma and bleeding that I can’t even figure out––we can’t seem to place where it’s coming from, or why. I just have no idea. There is nothing broken and––frankly––it doesn’t look like she even bumped into anything hard. It’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen.”

I’m not a doctor, but I feel like a patient isn’t stable if they’re still bleeding uncontrollably and seemingly without any reason. I’m also really skeptical of any doctor wandering into a waiting room and saying, basically, “I have no idea what’s going on.” Are malpractice suits not a thing in this universe? Because I feel like, “He admitted he couldn’t figure it out had no idea what was going on,” is probably not a sentence the hospital’s legal team is going to want to hear in court, especially coming from the doctor who is the boss of the whole hospital. That’s why they keep shit vague and say stuff like, “we’re still waiting on a few tests,” and “we’re doing what we can to get her stabilized.”

Mac asks what their options are.

Dr. Schmidt swallowed hard and flattened his lips in frustration “I never thought I would say this, but I am currently wishing Dr. House was a real person. It’s definitely the kind of case he would solve.”

“The defendant made irreverent remarks to the distressed family, indicating that only a fictional doctor would be able to cure the patient.”

Daviles Copperman doesn’t know about House, M.D., and it’s somehow important to note that in this scene.

Charles never watches TV and lives in in his own world to a certain extent in that regard.

“He’s a fictional doctor on a TV show,” Mac explained. He knew that Charles was pretty out of the loop on subjects of htis nature no matter how popular or well know they were to most people. When Charles goes to big events with famous people he frequently must be told by his assistant who someone is––and why they are considered famous. He’s good at pretending he knows in those cases.

THE MAIN CHARACTER OF THIS BOOK IS DYING RIGHT NOW. IS THIS INFORMATION NECESSARY IN LIGHT OF WHAT IS GOING ON?

The doctor reiterates once again that he has no clue what he’s doing, and they ask if they can see Zort. Which means, of course, it’s time for another self-indulgent look at how emotional and sad everyone important would be if the author was tragically ill.

Oh please, you know that’s exactly what this is.

The image of me lying on the bed unconcious, with IV lines and tubes sticking out of me was hard enough for me to bear, but the scene was far worse for Mac and Charles. Mac stopped in the middle of the room and for a few moments couldn’t move; he had never seen anyone he cared about like that––and it was pretty shocking for him.

What about all the blood that’s going to be everywhere because she’s still hemorrhaging all over the place because they can’t find the cause for it?

While they’re in the room, Charles gets a phone call from Dela, which causes him to look “directly at Mac.” I didn’t feel like I needed to include the entire excerpt, but it’s important to me to point out how often someone looks directly at someone else. It happens thirty-four times in the book overall, and that’s excluding the times when people get “directly” in someone’s face or point “directly” at someone or direct their attention directly in the direction of someone else. It may not seem like a lot, but this isn’t a very long book and when coupled with all the times those same actions are repeated with “right at” subbing in for “directly,” it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Dela and Charles have a tense conversation about how the doctors aren’t going to know how to cure Zingardium Leviosa, and Charles suggests that Dela come to them in Las Vegas.

“No. You need to bring her here as fast as you can. Tell them whatever you want. Just get her down here, and bring that boy, Mac, with you. I may need him, too.” Dela’s voice had shifted to sounding sure and strong, drawing on a talent she had to always sound confident, no matter the situation.

“Why can’t you come to us? That would be safer for her,” Charles pleaded.

“Charlie, I need my tools and my altar––all that is here. Do you understand? I can’t do what I need to in a hospital room with people everywhere. The best thing for her––and her best chance––is for you to bring her to me as soon as possible.”

There’s a lot going on here. Right off the bat, I’m wondering why all of Dela’s dialogue is written in italics just because she’s on the phone. This isn’t a screenplay convention, as far as I’ve ever heard. But let’s talk about “I need you to move my critically ill, still-bleeding daughter out of the hospital and bring her to my house across the country because that’s where my altar and tools are. Let me put on my witchy pants and explain some shit:

Tools are helpful, but not critical
Tools travel
Hospitals tend to be accommodating (within reason) of patients’ and their families’ spiritual practices
Many witches have travel altars, like this:

In fact, if you go on YouTube, you’ll see lots of videos where witches discuss their travel altars. Mine is made out of a Sucrets tin (and yes, those are incredibly small tarot cards) and includes only the stuff I think I would need out of my purse in a pinch to do like, a reading or some scrying or a very limited ritual, but there are so many people making bigger, suitcase-sized ones that are far more complicated. Traveling altars are 100% a common thing, and even if they weren’t, it’s still easier to transport magical tools and herbs and shit across the country than it is to transport a person who’s bleeding all over the place.

But whatever. I didn’t write this book. Thank god.

It’s okay, though, because Dela has had a vision or some shit and she knows exactly how this is all supposed to shake out.

What Charles couldn’t see was that Dela was sitting at a table with her cards out. I had to assume that she had a lit candle on the tabel as well, and some cards already laid out.

Screeching brakes. Why does Zug keep referring to her mother by her first name, when in the past she’s called her mom? Pulled memories or not, we’re still in Laparoscopy’s POV. Second, if she’s pulling memories and she can see that her mother is sitting at a table with her cards out, why can’t she see the candle or if her mother has laid out cards?

Dela closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, shuffling the remainder of the cards in her hands. She aid out three cards and placed them on top of another card that’s already lying on the table. She examined the cards carefully as if she were deciphering a code. That’s kind of how reading cards goes.

I’m sorry, I’m really confused as to what object, exactly, Dela is dealing with at the moment. Is she reading runes? Tea leaves? I feel like it could be cards, but I’m not sure because it hasn’t been mentioned enough.

You know what hasn’t been mentioned often enough in this book, either? Exactly what reading cards is like. I’m glad we have a page-long block paragraph to guide us:

For everyone it’s different, but there is a mixture of reading the cards and what they mean indiviudally––but also how they relate to each other. How they come up and in what order and what situation––and even how the question was asked––all make a difference in what they mean and say. Your guides are sending messages and it even depends on what all they want to tell you versus the lessons you may need to learn on your own. Beyond that when you are someone like my mom, and to a lesser extend me, who can actually see the future––or at least what is mixed in with what you can see and hear. Sometimes you can get very clear and direct answers and other times they can be much more vague. We all have Destiny to deal with. We all have some of that, some things we are just born to do. It’s not all Destiny, though––some things are open and subject to freewill. Only sometimes can you change your destiny but that is hard and is a subject for another time and a later book.

So, wait, is Lumbar Zuncture actually aware that she’s a character in a novel? I mean, I guess I can see that, but I don’t feel like it’s been consistently written that way. There I go again. Expecting consistency.

It is possible to change it for the better or mess it up. When you learn your lessons you move to new ones, kind of like levels in a video game. There are simply so many variables, which is why sometimes readings are crystal clear, and others are almost like educated guesses.

This is all information that a) has been repeated at least twice before in this book and b) is being inserted into what should be a tense and suspenseful scene as our HEROINE IS LITERALLY DYING.

Dela tells Charles that the cards won’t give her a clear answer and that Charles has to get Larvae to her as soon as possible, because of the moon phase:

With some kinds of spells and the whatnot, if the moon is waing then it will affect what you are doing in certain ways and when it is waning things will be effected in the opposite way. Waxing means it’s “getting bigger” on its way to becoming a full moon, and waning means it was already a full moon and it’s “going away.” If you are trying to start something with a love interest for instance, waxing moons are best. Though, for getting rid of, say, a broken heart that’s “taking away,” a waning moon is good.

Okay, but how about like, healing? Since that’s what the spell is going to be for? Or…wait. Dela said Mac should come, too, because she might need him. Please, please tell me that Zagat’s internal bleeding isn’t from a literal broken heart. I don’t have a hardcover copy of the book to throw in frustration.

Also, thanks, Lani, for explaining to your readers what “waxing” and “waning” mean because they couldn’t have figured it out on their own. Those are super mystical terms only really witchy people would understand and definitely not common terminology that’s been used to describe the moon for centuries, even in a non-magjikahl sense.

Also, side note, while the moon phases do have magical correspondences, if you need emergency healing magic, you can do that spell whenever. It helps if it lines up with the appropriate phase, but you don’t have to wait for weeks to try to help.

So, Charles tells Dela he’ll bring Zunk on his private jet, then tells the doctor that they’re going to take Lazi to a specialist in Tennessee.

“Your daughter is dying and you want me to discharge her so you can take her to a private practice in Tennessee?” Dr. Schmidt was obviously appalled that Charles was even suggesting such a thing.

Considering how Dr. Schmidt was just like, “I don’t know anything, gosh, I wish I was Hugh Laurie,” why would it surprise him that they want to take her to another hospital? Plus, why hasn’t he suggested a specialist in the first place if he doesn’t know what’s wrong with her? Charles even points that out during the argument.

[…] the words “Get her here as soon as you can or she can die” kept echoing in his head. Even though my mother never said those exact words Charles knew that was what she meant.

I guarantee this line sprung from an editorial note. “You have him thinking about Dela’s words here, but she didn’t say them.” Rather than scroll up a page and insert them, Sarem chose to just write that she never said them. It’s moments like these that I’m torn between not believing that there were any editors, let alone three, or if there were three different editors because the author didn’t like what they had to say and their changes were just too hard when writing the book was the smallest part of the overall scam she was planning.

We POV skew here:

He also thought about the idea of losing his daughter so soon after she had come back into his life and that thought crippled him.

No, he also thought about losing “me” so soon after “I” had come back into his life. Because you, Ziple Lutz, are the one narrating this part.

Dr. Schmidt looked at Charles dubiously. He didn’t think this was a smart idea in any regard. He stared directly at Charles and deeply into his eyes and, after a long, hard look, responded: “You have to sign a release that you understand this may very well kill your daughter.”

He looked at Charles, but then looked at him again, directly, and in an oddly romantic fashion.

He muttered something about how he didn’t need a lawsuit from the whole situation.

Which, as a doctor, he should know that signing the form declaring that you’re knowingly going against medical advice would remove pretty much any chance he’s going to get sued.

This whole thing, by the way, probably wouldn’t go down this fast. Despite the fact that Charles is Zani’s father, she’s an adult. The hospital is going to do whatever they can to dissuade Charles from making this decision, and they might even go so far as involving adult protective services. Getting all this done within a few hours is pretty unrealistic unless Zani was conscious and able to sign the papers herself.

Of course, maybe Nevada law is different. Maybe they let people just check their adult children with uncontrollable internal bleeding out of the hospital like it’s no big deal. There’s clearly a lot of painstaking research done in the rest of the book, so I’m sure that’s the case.

Mac argues with Charles about this, too.

“Zade’s mother can do quite a bit, son. Far beyond chicken soup. You have much to learn about this family. For starters, as you will soon see, I am actually the one with the least amount of ability.”

Alternately, Charles, you could just lie and stick with the specialist thing. But cryptic dialogue convinces Mac that Charles is right, and he says he’s going to go with them.

“Of course. You definitely should come. You’re needed, anyway.” Charles nodded and was thrilled that Mac had come to this conclusion on his own. Charles realized that convincing Mac to tag along was far easier than he thought it would be. Charles was about as pleased with himself as he could be considering the circumstances.

Then Sarem states again that Dela told Charles to bring Mac, because we forgot from a few pages ago.

“Needed?” Mac asked. He was beginning to feel like he had walked into something bigger than he expected.

Charles nodded confidently. “Needed.”

And that’s where the chapter ends. Join us next time for yet another chapter where the heroine is unconscious but somehow still narrating this boring as fuck story.

True Blood Tuesday S05E11 “Sunset”

Aaaand we’re back! You can find the file here, start listening when the HBO sound and logo fade.

Autism, parenting, and my silence on recent “autism mom” memoirs

I had planned to sit down today and give you guys the Handbook For Con Artists recap you crave, but a Twitter conversation prompted me to write this post, which has been coming for a while. I’ve talked on social media (and maybe here) about the fact that my teenaged son is autistic. And I’ve finally got the courage to say that I am, too. I am autistic.

This might have been why I didn’t consider the possibility that my son was autistic until he was seven years old and someone suggested it to me. A lot of the things he did at a young age, like flapping his hands and walking on his toes, melting down when he was overstimulated, becoming passionately engrossed in specific singular interests that could change in an instant, and other behaviors I won’t go into just, you know, because it’s not entirely my stuff to share, were things I had done when I was child, and I wasn’t autistic, so it never occurred to me that he was anything other than neurotypical. Even after diagnosis, I assumed that those were things neurotypical children all had in common and that other things “made” him autistic.

Now, I look back at my own childhood, much of which I don’t remember accurately due to my inability to recall what parts were real and what parts have been obscured by the elaborate fantasies I’d constructed. I was the weird kid in middle school, so I retreated into my head. While I sat at my desk physically, in my mind I was in my “head house,” a space that I constructed after learning about something called the method of loci (not to be confused with the genetics term loci). To this day, when I’m stressed almost to my breaking point, bored to the edge of literal tears, or caught in a situation I don’t want to be in, I fully check out of reality and go there. It’s not a case of idly daydreaming; I am completely immersed in that world and fully absent from this one. It has evolved over time, the decor has changed slightly, and there’s a big giant button on the wall that turns off intrusive thoughts if I push it. It’s a great self-preservation strategy that had a disastrous effect on my education. Teachers asked me why I wasn’t paying attention, why I wasn’t turning in my homework, why I wasn’t completing tests. I couldn’t give them an honest explanation. I told them what they wanted to hear because I already knew I was “a handful,” but lying to them because I thought I was giving the right answer made me even more of a handful, and I couldn’t figure out why.

“Jenny’s a wonderful girl. So imaginative. But she’s a handful.” I’d heard that so many times. Once, back in my elementary school days, I was playing with my cousins after Sunday dinner at my grandmother’s house. Seemingly out of nowhere, one of my uncles became furious at me. I didn’t know why; his kids and I had been playing a game where I was a mad scientist, one of us was an Igor, and one of us was a zombie creature that didn’t have a brain. To this day, I have no clue what I did wrong. Maybe I was too loud and obnoxious. Maybe I hurt one of my cousin’s feelings and didn’t notice, which I was prone to do because I didn’t understand which actions resulted in which reactions. What I do know is that one second we were playing and having fun, and the next my uncle stood up and said, “I’ve had it with that god damn kid!” and stormed out. Everyone sat around stunned. I was humiliated, but I didn’t feel like I deserved to cry, though I wanted to. My mother was furious with my aunt and uncle for weeks. My grandmother fielded hours of mediation phone calls over the incident. That became kind of a hallmark of my otherwise happy childhood: somehow, I would do something wrong, an adult would shout at me in front of people, and I would go off on my own away from the other kids because I saw how much my badness hurt the relationships in my family.

In second grade, I was diagnosed with ADD, like so many kids of my generation, and fed a steady diet of Ritalin. I’m not anti-pharmaceuticals as they’re used today––for god’s sake, take your pills, no matter what indie movies say––but I do believe that Ritalin was over-prescribed in the 1980s as a sort of “make your kid a behave” pill, based on anecdotal evidence from other people my age. Though Ritalin was supposed to make me focus, it did basically nothing. I ended up in some kind of group therapy situation where we all learned coping skills, and that worked better than anything. It was like a guidebook on how to be a normal kid. All I had to do was painstakingly imitate the way other people were acting? I could do that! I loved acting! It didn’t fix everything, but adults stopped yelling and I didn’t get into trouble as much, except where education was involved.

Again, this is stuff I still do. I recently told a friend about one of my most secret desires: to successfully say, “Don’t eat that, it’s horrible,” as a compliment. You know, the way people will tell someone, “Oh, don’t eat any of that, it’s just horrible,” in a joking way that implies they don’t want anyone else to eat it because they want it all? If you’ve never botched the landing on this particular phrase, trust me: there is no coming back from it. I’ve tried it on a few occasions and it did not go over well. I end up replaying it over and over like a gymnast watching themselves on video to see where they made a mistake in their routine. I spend a lot of my time studying neurotypical humans and their interactions as though I’m a complete outsider to the entire species, trying to figure out how to best camouflage myself. It’s just as much work and just as alienating as it sounds. I’m always woefully behind by a decade or so of social development, it seems like. But one day, I fully believe I’ll be able to pull off a chuckle and a “don’t eat any of that, it’s just awful.” I was gently informed that most people don’t practice these types of easy social interactions with the goal of someday doing them correctly.

When my son was diagnosed, I began to seek out other parents of autistic children, because it was something I was told would be very important in helping me “deal” with my child. I didn’t see what I needed to “deal” with; as far as I knew, he was growing up exactly the way I did. I mean, how could I really be sure he was autistic? He was just like me and (all together now), I wasn’t autistic.

One of the things I noticed very early on was that “autism warrior mommies” (and yes, there are people who call themselves that) were easily sorted into three camps. One type became so obsessed with their child’s autism that having an autistic child became their identity and the kid was kind of an afterthought if they were a thought at all. Or, they suddenly started diagnosing their neurotypical children with autism in a sort of Munchausen-by-proxy-by-proxy kind of deal; when the kids would be evaluated and deemed neurotypical, whoever administered the evaluation didn’t know what they were talking about, didn’t listen to parents, shouldn’t be in that profession, had a personal vendetta, etc. Then there was the third kind of parent: the self-diagnosing autism mom.

A note here: Some parents do have to fight to get their kids a diagnosis when resources are denied by schools and government programs. Some parents are autistic and don’t know it until their children are diagnosed, specifically because healthcare providers and educators weren’t as familiar with autism in previous generations as they are now. But as someone who has spent a lifetime carefully studying humans, I feel I can say with confidence that some people are just insistent on being the center of the universe. And that’s pretty evident with some of the self-diagnosing autism warrior mommies. I became highly suspicious of some mothers who would self-diagnose, then start speaking with authority on their children’s’ experiences, even if those children were able to communicate their ideas, feelings, and opinions themselves. They asserted themselves as experts on autism and would become intensely defensive if another autistic person contradicted them or suggested they not share intimate details of their child’s life online. One self-diagnosed woman in a Facebook group graphically described her seventeen-year-old son’s toilet accidents and admitted that he didn’t want her to continue doing it, but she asserted that she was “far more autistic than him,” and therefore had the right to do so. I began to see self-diagnosis as fake and selfish, an attempt by a parent to center themselves when their child was getting too much attention or starting to rebel in the ways children are supposed to rebel.

I wondered why any of these “autism warrior mommies” couldn’t understand that their kids were people. That no tragedy had befallen their families. That they had never been guaranteed a neurotypical child, and that the idea of an autism “cure” was abhorrent when there were already constructive therapies and special education programs that could improve the quality of life for autistic people living in an unforgiving and aggressively neurotypical world. So much of their “activism” was performative and self-pitying. It was never about autistic people at all, but all the ways neurotypical people were burdened by the existence of them. Why couldn’t they see that?

Earlier this year, someone tweeted a link to a diagnostic tool being developed to evaluate adults for autism. I’m not entirely sure about all the specifics about it, but from my understanding, they were looking for both neurotypical people and people on the spectrum to take an online test to…I don’t know. See if their test worked? I’m not a scientist, so I have no idea. I thought, “okay, I’ll bite,” and took the test. When I say “online test,” I’m not talking about some kind of thirteen question, Buzzfeed-esque “design your dream wedding and we’ll guess how autistic you are” quiz. I recognized a lot of the questions from the tests administered to my son and the exhaustive questionnaires my husband and I’d had to fill out during the process. When the results were displayed, it didn’t say “YOU GOT: AUTISM!” with a twee description and a gif from The Gilmore Girls or anything. It just suggested consulting a professional and showed me that my final scores were about a hundred points over the threshold they were using to describe neurotypical people in their diagnostic criteria.

I called my friend Bronwyn Green immediately. “Do I seem autistic to you?” I demanded, and she said yes. I asked why she didn’t tell me: “If I thought you seemed autistic, it would have been the first thing I said to you! I would have been like, ‘hey, you seem autistic!'” She said, “Jen?” and waited silently for me to make the connection. And then the connections kept coming. I showed my husband the scores and he said, “Yeah? You’re autistic.” It was some kind of open secret I had never been in on. And soon, I was a self-diagnosing autism mommy. And I hated it.

Here’s where things really go sideways to me: I believe it when autistic people tell me they’re autistic, even if they’re self-diagnosed. If someone is suffering from anxiety, depression, OCD and they self-diagnose it? It makes perfect sense to me. But it picks away at me to think that maybe I’ve gaslighted myself into becoming self-diagnosing autism mommy. Occasionally, it occurs to me that maybe there’s such a thing as autismdar. Like gaydar, but for autism. I maintain that LGBQA+* identifying people have an innate ability to tell if other people are straight or “one of us” after years of painstakingly pretending to be heterosexual while we’re closeted. Is the same true for autism? Is the reason I resent and doubt the mothers who use their self-diagnosis as both a weapon and a shield because I’ve spent so many years studying neurotypical people as a means of protective camouflage that I can now spot them from a mile away? I’ve met parents who self-diagnosed and thought, “Yeah, sounds about right,” while others I’ve rolled my eyes at and thought, “Yeah, right.” What creates the difference? I can’t diagnose them, so why do I doubt some people but not others?

At this point, you might be rolling your eyes at me and thinking, “Yeah, right.” Because a lot of the times, I’m doing that, too. Despite all the evidence, despite it seeming absolutely natural and right to me to think, “I am autistic,” I worry that those moms who say, “Well, I’m autistic and I support Autism Speaks!” or “I was autistic, until I started focusing on my gut health,” feel like it’s natural and right, too. I’m not the gatekeeper of autism. I don’t know who is. Do I have the right to doubt some self-diagnoses but believe others? Do I even have the right to diagnose myself?

In the middle of all of this soul-searching, two books have been hot topics in the literary world. One of them, written by a woman referred to as the Elmo Mom, details all the ways she’s using “exposure therapy” (i.e., dragging her screaming, terrified child into situations that traumatize him) to right the wrong the universe did when it saddled her with an autistic son. In it, she daydreams about abandoning her son to have a new and better life with her neurotypical daughter. She expresses open hatred and abusive, neglectful behaviors then tries to justify them by imploring the reader to consider her own pain. She relates “and the whole bus clapped”-style anecdotes about kindly strangers coming to her rescue and praising her for her saintliness. She recently wrote an online essay about bystanders cruelly judging her for bodily wrestling her resisting, screaming child into a Sesame Street Live performance, asserting that her son has every right to be there. She never considers that he has every right to not be there, as well. In the end, he does sit through the performance, and she receives her reward: an hour or so of being able to deny that her son has autism.

Another book, the title of which I’ve forgotten, is the memoir of a woman who has no qualms about stating that she plans to have her autistic teen sterilized, lest he impregnate someone and she’s forced to deal with it. You’ll have to forgive me for not looking up this title and author; I just can’t handle reading her sickening garbage, yet I’ll still find myself compelled to.

Several readers of this blog have contacted me about these books, wondering if I would write a post about them or bring attention to them on social media. Like a coward, I ignored those emails. If you were a person who contacted me and didn’t receive a reply, I apologize for my rudeness, but this is all fresh and raw to me. It’s not that I’m struggling with the tragedy of finding out I’m autistic. That part of the experience is very much like the time I found out I have a deformed blood vessel in my brain. It was a thing I didn’t know, then I knew it, but ultimately it hasn’t demonstrated any impact on my life, so it’s just a thing that is. Realizing that I’m autistic was just a moment of, “Oh. Okay, that actually explains a lot of stuff.” It didn’t change who I am as a person or how I view myself. But it very much changes the way I view the people in my life during my childhood.

Now, when I read the disgusting thoughts of the autism warrior mommies who write their memoirs about how sad and tragic their children have made their lives I see myself in the role of that child, rather than as a parent criticizing another parent. I read about Elmo Mom fantasizing about abandoning her child for a better one and wonder if my mother had those same thoughts. Being the consequence of an unintended pregnancy had already put those seeds of doubt in my mind with regards to whether my mom ever regretted having me because of the life she might have had otherwise. It never occurred to me to worry that she might have regretted having me due to me not coming out as advertised. It never once crossed my mind to view my family with suspicion, to think that they might not have been annoyed or disdainful of my behaviors because I was a handful, but because of circumstances that were out of my control. And never in my life have I ever considered that I might have been in danger from the adults who had to care for me. All of this has made me think things about people I love that I don’t want to think. And for that reason, I’ve been unable to write about or think too deeply about these horrible, abusive women who have monetized hating their children.

This post might be super ableist. I can’t tell. It might be unfair of me to opt out of autism activism when other people can’t. That’s a valid criticism. Right now, I’m not even entirely comfortable labeling myself as autistic without some kind of paperwork or certificate to prove it, but I’m unable to separate myself out as an ally, either. I’m interested to hear from those of you who are actually autistic if you’re comfortable sharing your thoughts on self-diagnosis in the comments, whether you’re formally diagnosed or self-diagnosed. It’s a strange experience to be the same person you were yesterday, yet doubt everything about the narrative of your life story today.

 

 

 

*The “T” in LGBTQA+ was removed because I was speaking specifically about sexuality and I don’t know if transgender people have a gaydar equivalent. I excluded the T from the acronym so as not to make assumptions or erase heterosexual transgender people.

The Worst Person I’ve Ever Met, Part 9 “The Doppleganger”

I’ve changed the title of his installment, as I realized I had swapped some things on the timeline. “It’s All Right Here Waiting For Me” will be the title of part ten.

If you’ve missed installments, here are links to Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, and Eight

On Cathy’s last day in Kalamazoo, she wanted to meet up to return some things she’d borrowed from me. Because my son attended school downtown, I suggested we meet for coffee. She arrived with my things, and an addition: copies of my books that I had signed and given to her, with personal messages about our friendship written inside. She didn’t need them, she explained, because she didn’t have room to take them with her. She needed that space for “real” books.

Two things happened during this meeting that made the entire ordeal worth it. The first is incredibly petty on my part, but I’ll never get tired of remembering it. Cathy, who prided herself on her intelligence and her vast knowledge of the English language, admitted that she had no idea what “dichotomy” meant, despite seven years of studying and writing papers on literature.

The second was…I don’t want to say it was magical. Because it was more horrifying than anything. But it did provide me with some small measure of intense satisfaction.

We met Cathy’s behavioral doppelganger. And she treated Cathy exactly the way Cathy treated everyone else.

Cathy was in the middle of recounting how she’d gone to say goodbye to her son and how he’d “manipulated” and “tried to trap” her by crying and clinging to her as she left for what would likely be the last time he would ever see her, when the door to the coffee shop opened and a woman a little younger than us stepped inside. She spotted Cathy. Cathy spotted her. And while it’s somewhat misogynistic to compare competitive women to cats, there’s really no other metaphor for the way they looked at each other, like two strays who don’t care for each other much and must maintain frozen eye contact to judge the other’s intentions.

After a beat of this very unfriendly glaring, both of them pasted on identical smiles and uttered extended, upward tilted, “Hey!”s of forced enthusiasm. They hugged like old friends and Cathy invited the woman to our table.

I don’t remember much about the other woman besides that she was blonde and had a lot of anti-capitalist slogans on pins and patches on her coat, but she was carrying a giant Coach bag. She––I’ll call her Tori, which I hopefully haven’t used yet––and Cathy had been roommates before we’d ever met, so they chatted a bit about mutual friends from days gone by. Of one of them, Tori said, “Oh, he got married to Maggie. But it lasted less than a year. Can you believe that? What kind of a loser can’t make their marriage last more than a year?”

My husband nearly choked on his scone.

It became obvious to me from the way Tori steered the conversation that she knew much more about what was going on with Cathy than she let on. “I heard you were moving,” she said, and then, with a laugh, “If you met him on the internet, can I slap you?”

Watching their exchange take place was like seeing the face of God and finding out that God is a huge a-hole. Because I was so entranced, I took notes on my Blackberry under the guise of answering an urgent email. When Cathy informed Tori she’d be moving to Colorado, Tori had to top her.

“Oh, well, I’m moving to L.A. on October first. And then my face is going to be plastered everywhere because I’m going to be famous. We just finished a new album and we’re going to release it when we get out there and wait for someone to snatch it up. It’s so good. Everyone who’s listened to it has just been––” Tori opened her mouth wide and made jazz-hands while imitating a choral “ah!” “––So, I’m pretty much going to be mega-famous.”

I looked up. “So…you’re moving to L.A. with your band and you hope you’re going to get a record deal but you don’t have one yet?”

She shook her head vehemently. “Oh, no, we already have a record deal. There’s a billboard and everything on Sunset. I would show you a picture, but it’s supposed to be really hush-hush until the record comes out.”

To this day, I have no idea how she thought I was going to buy that a billboard in L.A. would be considered hush-hush, but perhaps it is a truly different world out there. I also wasn’t sure how they already had a record deal but they had to wait for a label to pick them up, but I wasn’t about to stop her from digging. For once, I was able to observe Cathy’s species in the wild without danger of being mauled, myself.

“It’s not really a band,” Tori went on. “It’s just two of us. But I’m the cute and talented one.”

Unable to stand another moment of not being the center of attention, Cathy jumped in. “Well, I just finished writing my first book. It’s really long, it’s like eighty-two pages of poetry. I submitted it to a very small and exclusive press, and my old English professor says he knows it’s going to be published.” She didn’t mention that the small, exclusive press was her MySpace boyfriend’s zine. Or that the praise her old English professor––the one she’d been so convinced she would bed––had heaped upon her staggering work of incredible literary merit had been a curt, unsigned email warning her that if she continued to send him sexually suggestive materials, he would take action.

Then, with an indulgent smile, Cathy turned to me and said, “Just think, by this time next year you can come to Colorado and be an assistant to a world-famous author.”

I had to restrain myself from sarcastically gushing, “Golly, a real author with real books!”

Her purpose fulfilled, Tori stood and announced she had somewhere to be. She got her coffee to go and left, and once the door closed behind her, Cathy said, “Ugh, I can’t stand her. All she can do is talk about herself and how wonderful she is. But you know, I’m just like, ‘You win,’ because if it’s so important to her to be better than me, I don’t really feel like competing.”

It was, nearly word-for-word, something I’d said about an author I’d been on the outs with the month before. But that was Cathy’s way; she would hear someone say something, the repeat it to them weeks later as though she’d come up with it. Someone could say, “Cathy, I said that yesterday,” and she would insist that they were wrong, that it had always been her personal philosophy. Then, she would shake her head and smile fondly, as if lamenting the folly of her less enlightened friends.

We said goodbye. I forced myself to hug her. She promised she would call. I hoped that she wouldn’t.

Later that night, I met with Cristin and we compared notes. She’d seen Cathy a few days before to say goodbye, though she wasn’t as warm as I had been. It hadn’t seemed to bother Cathy, though. She’d chatted away as though everything was still fine between all of us, stating that it would “be nice” to see her son one last time before she left for Colorado, but, “If that doesn’t happen, well, I’m just really busy.” Though she’d claimed she was all set to attend the low-residency writing program in Massachusetts in a couple of months, her tune had changed slightly. “Writing is the most important thing in my life,” she had explained to Cristin. “If I’m too busy with this book, school is going to have to take a backseat.”

My theory is that there was no such thing as a low-residency writing program for people with associate’s degrees and in the days between leaving for Colorado and actually arriving there, her two fake worlds collided. Cathy prided herself on being the most intelligent, well-read, and educated person in our social circle. Though Cristin was a former journalist who’d gone from private school to a top 100 university, Cathy easily dismissed Cristin’s major as not “creative” and therefore not on par with her seven years studying English in a community college. I never completed my degree and grew up in a rural area, so I was the endearing yokel who thought she could be a real writer, bless my delusional heart. And Sam had been forced to withdraw from school in the wake of the divorce, so he was a “loser.” But her smarter, more urbane and witty friends in Colorado were all highly educated, with advanced degrees and had published papers in the fields in which she considered herself an expert. With no hope of topping their credentials, Cathy now dismissed formal education as an unnecessary, expensive, mind-numbing waste. The fact that this new attitude directly contradicted everything the people who’d known her for nearly a decade knew to be true didn’t matter, as she would be leaving and we would all cease to exist without her presence.

She’d also lamented the breakdown of her marriage, telling Cristin that people didn’t understand how hard Cathy fought to make her relationship with Sam work. They’d gone to counseling. It hadn’t worked, she’d explained, because he’d been unwilling to make changes like not spending enough time with her between his several jobs and classes. They’d been sexually incompatible, as she enjoyed rough sex, including choking, and he was never able to truly get into the spirit––a claim unsupported by anecdotes from female friends who’d enjoyed S&M activities with Sam. And, she’d confided in Cristin, she hadn’t been in love with Sam for over three years.

Total time of marriage and engagement: one year and five months. But she hadn’t been in love with him for three years.

She’d also vented her frustration over the fact that, due to their noncontested arbitration, she couldn’t demand alimony payments. Her plan had been to move to Colorado and immediately resume the assistance programs she was on in Michigan, but she’d learned that she would have to be a resident for six months before she could apply. Now, she wanted Sam, who’d worked sometimes three jobs to support them while she napped on the couch reading Harry Potter, to make court-ordered alimony payments, and the system was unfairly stacked against her. On top of it all, Sam refused to continue paying her cellphone bill, and she was in danger of disconnection. And that was very important because she’d already made arrangements to interview Warren Ellis over lunch when she arrived in Colorado. Interview him about what?  Who knew. Why was he flying all the way to Colorado from England just to have lunch with Cathy, who wasn’t a journalist and who didn’t write for any publications? Don’t question it. And there was, of course, no connection between the phone bill, her sudden, important meeting, and the fact that Warren Ellis was one of Sam’s favorite writers.

The next day, Cathy left Kalamazoo with no fanfare and only what she could carry in a backpack. Though she’d told me she would call me to let me know when she arrived safely, she didn’t and I really didn’t care either way. As far as I was concerned, she’d dropped off the planet and life was the better for it. We were finally free.

Next Time: Part Ten, “It’s All Right Here Waiting For Me”

The Dos And Don’ts Of Pseudonyms And Author Personas

There is a story that has been developing rapidly in the romance world, about author Santino Hassell. Hassell has been accused of conspiring to hide their true identity and using their false persona to gaslight and catfish readers. People began to investigate the author’s personal life and background and making various information public, resulting in initial defenses of Hassell’s privacy. As more details have come to light, one publisher has canceled the author’s contracts after the allegations gained traction. This story is still unfolding, so I’m not going to try to explain everything going on. But I am going to write about some aspects of it in a post that has been a long time coming. Because Hassell isn’t the first to do this, and definitely won’t be the last.

Many of the repeat questions I get in the Big Damn Writers’ Question Box are about pseudonyms. Why do you need one, how do you pick one, how do you hide your tracks if you need to? It has never occurred to me to ask the question, “Where is the line with regards to an author persona, and a pseudonym?” So, I’m going to go ahead and lay out what should be common sense when building your author brand. Not all of these apply to the Hassell situation, and not all of these have happened within the romance genre, but they are things people have done and will probably continue to do until we as consumers and professionals make it clear that there is no room for this kind of behavior.

 

The Dos And Don’ts Of Pseudonyms:

Do: Use a pseudonym to protect your identity if you’re more comfortable doing so. If you don’t want your family or employer to find out about your writing career, a pseudonym is a perfectly ethical way to maintain your privacy.

Don’t: Use a pseudonym that will mislead publishers and readers into believing you’re a member of a marginalized group. For example, Marvel’s C.B. Cebulski fostering his early career under the name Akira Yoshida despite not…being…Japanese. Cebulski’s work as Yoshida leaned heavily on Japanese themes and style, leading many readers to believe they were supporting a Japanese writer and not, you know. A white guy hiding, branding himself as a Japanese man.

Exception: Many writers of color who find that their names are “too ethnic” use pseudonyms that sound “white”. Many women write in male-dominated genres under initials or with male-sounding pen names. This is not a case of appropriation, but a means of protective camouflage to help an author succeed in a sexist, racist industry. Cebulski could choose to be Akira Yoshida because he could become a white man again when an opportunity for advancement presented itself. Meanwhile, a Japanese author might find themselves forced to use a “whiter” sounding name to open those doors already flung wide for a white man like Cebulski. In a society where Cebulski can afford to be Yoshida but a Japanese person cannot, there is no equivalency between privileged writers hiding their privilege and marginalized authors hiding their marginalizations.

 

Do: Chose select details about your life to share with your readership on social media, within your own comfort zone. Maybe you don’t want to mention that you’re a teacher, but you have no qualms about publicizing your passion for building ships in bottles. It’s up to you what to reveal or not reveal about your private life.

Don’t: Fabricate details about your life to share with your readership on social media as a means of creating a “brand.” I knew an author once who talked about her cats nonstop on social media, even posting pictures of them. Then an author friend visited this person’s home and found no cats at all. No hair or scratches on the furniture, no food or water dishes, no litter boxes, no cats. Even though lying about having cats is harmless in comparison to, say, lying about being Japanese or having cancer, it’s still a lie. And it’s really creepy. It’s one thing to say, “I really love cats.” It’s another to make up imaginary cats and post status updates and pictures about them.

Exception: Some authors adopt personas which are clearly not based in fact. For example, Chuck Tingle, who writes parodies of M/M romances, is clearly not a widowed man whose ghostly wife torments him from beyond the frozen lake where she drowned. And Lemony Snicket is, unfortunately, not a shadowy figure investigating the many maudlin tragedies of a family of orphaned children, but is, in fact, a racist and serial sexual harasser. Both of these personas are clearly affectations to set a tone for the reader and are employed as such. Daniel Holder doesn’t deny being the man behind Snicket, and Tingle has built such an outlandish and muddled backstory for himself that he simply can’t be assumed to be real by any reasonable person.

 

Do: Feel free to use your author platform to speak about issues you are passionate about, even if you’re using a pseudonym.

Don’t: Use your pseudonym to Dolezal your way into conversations you don’t belong in. Whoever Hassell was not only presented themselves as a bisexual man within the book community, but they also gave interviews, quotes, and even wrote articles about living as a bisexual man. New details are emerging by the hour, so I’ll shift back over to C. B. Cebulski. If Cebulski had given interviews or written articles as Akira Yoshida, claiming to be a Japanese man and offering the perspective of a Japanese man on issues that affect Japanese people, it would have been a reprehensible action. It should go without saying that if you’re not a member of a marginalized group, be honest about it. You can be passionate about the rights of marginalized people. You can’t pretend to be a marginalized person.

Exception: I’m not talking here about being closeted in some way and wanting to speak your truth without revealing yourself. That’s a tricky area that a lot of us navigate constantly. But we need to be careful that when we do that, we’re not adopting a persona that harms other people. As a bisexual woman, it wouldn’t be okay for me to present myself as a bisexual man, write nonfiction articles about being a bisexual man, give interviews about what it’s like to be a bisexual man because I’m not a bisexual man and all genders experience prejudice and biphobia differently. It would be okay for me to be Erin Stevens, bisexual woman. It would not be okay for me to be Aaron Stevens, bisexual man.

 

Do: Be transparent about your pseudonym or author persona with readers, authors, and publishers you befriend in real life. That doesn’t mean you have to reveal your real name to them, but they should know what is and isn’t real about you.

Don’t: Maintain your author persona in private conversations where people are revealing real life, personal details to you. Be honest that you can’t reciprocate on that level. Saying, “Oh, I write under a pseudonym to protect my job,” isn’t something an author or a reader or a publisher is going to look askance at, and people learn to form personal relationships within boundaries all the time. Bonding with someone over your difficult childhoods while they think you’re their good friend Leslie from Pawnee but you’re really Derek in Cincinnati (who had a lovely childhood, thanks for asking) is dishonest, creepy gaslighting. You’re presenting a false reality that will cause irreversible psychological damage should that illusion shatter. Hassell engaged in this type of manipulation more than once with their readers. Another particularly terrible author I knew was outspokenly anti-LGBTQA+ in her private life (up to and including suggesting conversion attempts on a mutual friend’s sister, attending a church that preached anti-gay rhetoric, and voting for politicians who supported anti-gay legislation), but who had no qualms about writing as a M/M author, attending LGBTQA+ literature conferences, and befriending queer authors and readers under the guise of being an ally. These people trusted her when she was actually a threat to and actively working against their rights and safety.

 

Do: Ask for help from readers and friends should financial or personal catastrophe occur. If I found out tomorrow that I donated to an author’s GoFundMe for their cancer treatment but I didn’t realize they were using a pseudonym, I probably wouldn’t care. They still have cancer. Likewise, when a popular blogger who received financial support during a lawsuit was revealed to be a bestselling author, some of us weren’t angry that we’d made donations to her fund. The woman was still being sued, and the lawsuit still affected the romance community at large (although it should be noted that she also catfished some readers).

Don’t: Falsify a financial or personal catastrophe as part of your author persona to bolster sales or solicit donations. This is another big issue in the current revelations about Hassell, who claimed to be a single father struggling to pay for cancer treatments. Readers not only supported Hassell by buying books and encouraging others to do so, but they sent direct financial donations, which the person or people behind the Hassell identity accepted. Now, someone behind this persona has made a statement to say that they did, indeed, have medical bills, but they did not confirm that they had cancer. Cancer survivors especially are saying they feel cheated and manipulated.

 

Do: Form friendships with readers, if you want to! In this day and age, it’s not unusual to have online friends and not know their legal names. I was friends with one author for years before I found out that he was writing under a pseudonym. He didn’t hide it, he just thought I knew. But I don’t need to know his real name. I’m not buying him a plane ticket, and he’s not lying about his life. He just can’t have his employer knowing what he writes.

Don’t: Form friendships with readers under a false persona in order to research your books. Another accusation against Hassell is that the person or people behind the persona used the Hassell character to court long-distance friendships and even romantic relationships with readers, then later used private information about these readers’ pasts and sex lives in Santino Hassell novels.

Do I really need to elaborate on that one? These people are psychologically wounded now because someone used their personal struggles and experiences for financial gain.

 

There’s a lot more tied up in this debacle and I’d wager more will be forthcoming. But as the several examples here show (as well as prior controversies that I didn’t touch on), this isn’t a new phenomenon. Yet when another of these situations arise, the conversation will once again prioritize author privacy over the safety of readers and authors. Hopefully, this has been a helpful primer on how you, too, can maintain your privacy as an author without causing massive amounts of psychological damage on the people around you.

Unless you just don’t give a shit. Which is probably what’s happening in every single one of these incidents. Because people are gross.

Jealous Haters Book Club: Handbook For Mortals Chapter 15 The Tower or, “The first time the card in the chapter title was actually applicable to what happens in the plot” (Part One)

I’m cutting this chapter into installments, as the recaps will be long. Because there is…a lot.

When we last met, Lani Sarem had just clearly purchased five-star reviews on Amazon and GoodReads in some kind of weird bid to…I don’t know. I have no idea what she felt a hundred or so five-star reviews were going to do for her clumsy scam six months after the fact, but she did it.

At least one of those five-star reviews was real, though, and author Heidi Heilig (The Girl From Everywhere, The Ship Beyond Time) happened to notice something…interesting about two books that were reviewed by the same account:

Since you can’t read the entire glowing review from the screencap, this is what Hendricks has to say about Handbook For Mortals:

I loved this book! It’s such a fun read. The characters are well written and the story is unique. I don’t want to give anything away but I love how the magician is tied to story. She’s a strong female protagonist and I love that about it but it’s just a cool story. I can’t wait to see what happens in the next book and I’m also stoked for the movie. The chapters being based off of tarot cards is also fun and if you are into tarot and magick this is your kind of book. It’s cool that it’s set in modern day. I like fantasies but get overloaded with complicated lands and names and I really don’t like dystopian. I know there was also this hubub about if it is or isn’t YA…seriously? who cares…It’s clearly meant for girls who are teenagers to read and have someone to look up to and if you are older you can still relate…I think it’s weird the only ones that care about that seem to be actual adults who aren’t “YA” either if we are saying that’s 13-18 year olds…I think this is a great book and if you are into THIS kind of thing you will love it…if you aren’t then of course you might not love it but stop hating on those that do.

So what. Lisa Hendricks has bad taste, right? That’s nothing to do with Lani Sarem. After all, they are two very different books and not everyone is going to like every single thing, right?

Except, you may remember from, oh, this entire fucking time that Lani Sarem has had it out for Angie Thomas ever since Handbook For Mortals was removed from the New York Times bestseller list and The Hate U Give was returned to its rightful spot. From the legendary “It’s not my fault that Angie is black!” comment to the fact that she has continually alleged that forces behind The Hate U Give have sabotaged Handbook For Mortals out of jealousy, Lani Sarem cannot stand to see Angie Thomas authentically achieving something that Sarem feels should have been handed to her just because she wanted it.

Still, how is Lisa Hendricks connected to all this?

She’s thanked in the gargantuan and self-congratulatory acknowledgments section of Handbook For Mortals:

To Lisa Hendricks for being my second mom, and for more things than I could ever write into words. Some girls need more than one mom, and lots of guidance, and I would probably be curled up on the side of the road somewhere if it weren’t for you. Thank you for letting me make your home mine, for being the voice of reason, for just being awesome, and for showing me who I should always strive to become.

Lisa Hendricks one-starred a book about a black teenager who sees her best friend shot by the police as “depressing” and it just happens to be the book that was knocked out of and later returned to the coveted #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list during this fiasco, and she’s the person who shows Lani who she should strive to become? Checks out. Your work here is done, Lisa.

In case you remain unconvinced that this is a personal strike on Sarem’s behalf, Hendricks has only reviewed three things on Amazon: The Hate U Give and Handbook For Mortals on February 14, 2018, and then a camera tripod four years ago.

Though Sarem didn’t offer an explanation as to why these reviews suddenly started popping up (and she didn’t disavow a relationship with Hendricks, which to be perfectly honest, I thought she would do despite the overwhelming evidence that she does know her), she did make it very clear that Heidi Heilig’s grasp on reality would not be tolerated:

Making things up to get tweets is really bad. Making up sales, reviews, celebrity connections, that’s all totally okay. But taking screenshots that clearly show the truth is really bad.

Chapter fifteen surprisingly does not begin “a few weeks later.” Instead, it picks up right at the start of the show, which goes well despite Mac bailing (which Liver and Zonions isn’t aware of). Then, we arrive at the finale. The big illusion that Zuckerberg and Spopperfield have been working on in secret this whole time.

I  took a deep breath and tried to focus and clear my head. I needed to; I had to have a clear, focused mind to pull it off.

I’m putting that there because it’s important and it hardly ever gets mentioned again in this chapter.

Now, at this point, we don’t have a real sense of where Zagnut is in relation to any action happening, so when she says “Charles came on stage,” in the next paragraph, my assumption is that she is on the stage. She says he stands in the middle of “the platform,” by which I assume she means the stage. Anyway, wherever the fuck Chuck is standing, he says:

“This is perhaps the hardest illusion anyone has ever attempted to do. I ask that everyone stay completely quiet while my gifted performer makes her very first attempt at this.” I had heard his speech hundreds of times (and even helped to write it) so needless to say I knew it well.

Let’s not start polishing that Pulitzer yet. It was literally two sentences. Also, which one did you write? The one where you basically called yourself a better magician than your boss or the one where you described yourself as “gifted”?

Plus, what does he mean “for the first time”? They’ve been doing this over and over for months. Is that just magician theatrics? If I’d edited this book, I would have suggested a line with Zonk thinking that “for the first time” was just showmanship, or I would have had Charles say “in front of an audience.”

The water around  the stage below me began to bubble, and the lights changed color with dramatic precision on cue.

Yeah, I should fucking hope they changed on cue. Since light cues are a thing. Of course, maybe there aren’t light cues in Las Vegas. I wouldn’t know since I’m not an Olympic magician and so much of this is totally true.

In simplistic terms, the illusion used complex deep chaos-based magick; not the simple kind I typically used.

Again, I’m not majhikhaaal like our protagonist here, but I feel like if I wanted to do a big, dangerous thing in an auditorium full of people, and I wanted to do it with precision exactly the same way every time…maybe complex chaos-based majix wouldn’t be the way I’d go with it.

It was dangerous because, if not done correctly, it could backfire.

This is so vague that it could be about anything. Riding a horse is dangerous because if not done correctly, it could proverbially backfire. Cutting your own hair is dangerous because if not done correctly, it could proverbially backfire. Loading a cannon is dangerous because if not done correctly, it could literally backfire. We need detailed consequences if you’re trying to up the stakes.

I had never actually done an illusion that was so hard or complex, and–outside of work–I rarely did them at all.

Um, yes, you have done an illusion this hard and complex. You’ve told us over and over and over and over that you’ve been rehearsing this for months in secret. You and Charles have been designing it and spending all your free time together perfecting it. What the hell were you working on if you weren’t actually performing it?

I took one more long deep breath to clear my head as I listened to Charles continue entrancing the audience.

Again, I’m just calling attention to the bit where she clears her head, as it’s super important and goes woefully unmentioned.

Sofia starts singing–I’m surprised her song wasn’t cut from the show–and we finally get an idea of where Zue Lellen is. No, she’s not on the stage. How silly of me to assume that. She’s up in the friggin’ catwalks again, getting ready to descend from the ceiling like Our Lady Of The Wynn Hotel And Casino for probably the twelfth time of the show.

My hair and clothes rippled as the wind caught them, making a familiar popping noise. My red velvet cloak fluttered as well, but since it was made of heavy velvet it only softly fluttered.

Now, as the illusion goes on, there’s not really any indication as to what, exactly, Load is making happen through her maghik, but thank god we have at least some detail with regards to the intensity of flutter exhibited by her various costume pieces.

Whatever. She says her “feet hit the platform on the stage,” but I don’t know if that’s the platform that Chud Sporperman is yapping on or what. She unhooks her harness, which…uh…she’s fucking maehjikal and the illusion is super secret, but she can’t just dive down like her other illusion? Or fly down?

You know what would have made this book better? A lot of things. But specifically, in this instance, what if all illusions required chaos magic and that’s why Dela or Delilah or whoever is responsible for pushing Zink from her reprehensible loins didn’t want her to go be a part of the show? Because chaos magic-MAGIC WITH A C-is so dangerous and something happened to Chuck and that’s why he left and why he’s so weird with other people?

Whatever, I don’t care, this book is unsalvageable no matter how much rewriting you guys do in the comments.

Even as I sat in front of a packed audience, my mind kept drifting to my conversation with Mac, and I had to keep telling myself that I couldn’t think about it. I coudln’t let myself get distracted  or the whole illusion could go completely sideways. My mind had to be clear and I had to focus on the spell.

See what I mean? If only we had some indication of what state of mind she needs to be in. I feel absolutely lost on that key detail.

I closed my eyes and shook my head a little as I tried to push aside the thoughts of my argument-and what I should tell Mac about who Charles really was to me-aside.

Okay, so again we’ve got confirmation that Zade knows exactly who Chunky Spizzleman is and that Sarem is intentionally keeping the information from the reader in her own point of view. Even in a screenplay, this would be clumsy because the viewer wouldn’t realize there’s a Big Misunderstanding without being in Lim Zimmer’s head.

So, Zart starts waving her hand and that makes the water choppy. The music starts getting heavier to go with the illusion that the band has never seen or rehearsed with before and the lighting changes despite no one being allowed to see the illusion to program it. And Chuddles Sportsman is still running his mouth:

“This illusion has never been performed in front  of anyone, including the crew. It’s a very dangerous illusion for the lovely Zade. If anything goes wrong while we are doing the illusion, she could be lost forever, never to be seen again! So, please, to help her we ask you hold your applause to the end of the illusion.”

Did Zade really write this, or did Lani Sarem breach the barrier between fiction and reality to replace “until” with “to”?

Remember when I said we needed something specific to raise the stakes? Yeah, if it comes in the middle of showboating magician dialogue, it doesn’t work. Again, we don’t know if he’s saying all of this for dramatic effect, or if she could be in real danger. Putting this consequence in the dialogue also doesn’t work if you immediately undermine the danger in the next paragraph:

Though, as I’ve said, there was real truth in what he was saying: it really was a very dangerous illusion, even if his words were mostly scripted to get a specific reaction from the audience.

But what do I know? I’m just a fucking writer.

I was messing with a particular kind of magick-a kind of magick that was both strong and volitile.

I was messing with a particular kind of magick, which I hadn’t quite yet mastered. Chaos magick, is both strong and volitile, as its name implies and is by nature very unpredictable.

No, you’re not experiencing deja vu. Those sentences really do say the exact same thing with many of the exact same words. And yes, they’re presented exactly as they are in the book, without anything left out between them. She just repeats the sentence and dresses it up a little the second time.

Three editors.

It involves pulling power from sources that are, to a certain extent, uncontrollable-kind of like trying to ride a wild horse. In either case, you can do it-and if you really know what you are doing and you do everything right it may go off without a hitch, but one wrong move and it can all go to H-E-double-hockey-sticks real quick. I wouldn’t be “lost forever” as Charles put it (that was there for dramatic flare) but lots of things could go very wrong-and even I really didn’t know just how wrong they could go.

Again, they’ve been doing this for months and she’s never gotten anything wrong? She’s done it exactly right every single time? She has no idea what happens if you don’t get it perfectly right every single time?

The tension in the audience had become palpable, causing a ripple in my concentration.

Maybe you should have planned for the audience being there, what with the fact that you intended to perform this in front of an audience? If there was only a way to try something out before you did it in front of a large group of paying customers. Like, some kind of practice where you’d DRESS in your costume as though the REHEARSAL was a real show. What if you INVITED the people who worked in the theater or a handful of their guests to watch while you did this? Like some kind of, oh, what’s the term a non-theatrical dope like me would make up on the fly…an invited dress rehearsal, maybe? Or even, gosh, a preview for the press who are clamoring outside?

I mean, what do I know? Those probably aren’t even things.

Chandor Spordster tells the audience:

“We call this illusion ‘Creation’, because that is  what we are doing,” […]

All I can think of when I read that phrasing is the scene from Bridget Jones’s Diary where she’s desperately trying not to call her boss “Mr. Titspervert” while introducing him at a work function and she ends up saying he’s the man they all call Mr. Fitzherbert, “Because that…is his name.”

The next part of the illusion is a thunderstorm that sends shivers through the audience and confuses the fuck out of the reader with regards to where the hell anyone is standing on this stage:

The water around the platform I was sitting on began to lap even harder and began to soak into my clothes. I knew this was supposed to happen but, even though I knew, the water still shocked me a little and I shivered. Here we go, I thought, as a huge wave washed over me. From the audience perspective, I had just disappeared, leaving only my cloak, which looked like something that had washed up on a beach.

Did anyone else think she was on the stage with Charles and not some previously unmentioned, fully separate platform in the pool? Because did, because that’s how the scene is written. But there I go, quibbling over nothing, I guess.

Before we get too far, let’s tally up what we’ve seen in this illusion up to this point:

Zade floats down from the ceiling on wires
The water in the pool turns into waves
There is the sound of thunder
Zade disappears

We’ll add to that list as we continue along.

The audience’s attention shifted as they began to notice rain beginning to fall, very lightly, from the ceiling to a spot in the middle of the stage.

On-stage rainfall

So much in this chapter “begins” to do something rather than just doing it. The water below her begins to bubble. She begins to make a waving motion and the water begins to move. Then the water begins to lap and begins to soak her clothes. The audience begins to notice that rain is beginning to fall. It’s not just a matter of word repetition here; she’s labeling immediate actions as ongoing processes when it’s not necessary. She doesn’t need to begin to make a waving motion with her hands. “I made waving motions with my hands and the water began to move,” is fine. “The water began to lap even harder and soaked into my clothes,” is fine. “The audience’s attention shifted as they noticed rain falling very lightly from the ceiling to a spot in the middle of the stage,” is fine. If everything is always “beginning” to happen, you’re setting up a delay between the reader and the action. At this point, the illusion might as well have been written in present tense.

As the water hit the ground and splashed up, it turned to sand and started to pile on the stage. The pile grew larger and larger, and I heard someone in the audience scream as lightning rippled from nowhere and one bolt struck the sand.

Like, how dramatic is that audience member that lightning during a thunderstorm portion of a theatrical presentation would cause them to scream?

But let’s add these to our total:

Zade floats down from the ceiling on wires
The water in the pool turns into waves
There is the sound of thunder
Zade disappears
On-stage rainfall
Rain turns into a sand pile
Lightning strikes the sand pile

Out of the sand rolled a glass sculpture: a life-sized statue of me.

How big is that sand pile? Jesus.

(I wasn’t too fond of the statue part, to be honest–I though it was weird and creepy–but Charles thought it would be a good effect.)

Zimple didn’t want to see a life-sized effigy of herself revealed dramatically on stage? That’s a characterization inconsistency if I’ve ever read one. And we have no indication where Lunk is right now. We know she disappeared from the platform, but where did she disappear to? Where is she narrating this scene from? Just off-stage? Under the stage? Up in the catwalks because the height of theatrical wizardry is, in Lani Sarem’s mind, descending on wires? Where is our protagonist?

At about this point in the illusion, I just barely began to notice that I was starting to feel not-so-great.

 

 

I thought it was because I was allowing the thoughts of what had gone on with Mac to enter my head, and I started to get mad at myself for letting it happen.

So, she began to notice she was starting to feeling a way and then she started to get mad at herself. And none of those filter words are required to make that section work. But let’s not overlook that at least here, she hints at the need for concentration. So far, that hasn’t really been emphasized.

Another bolt of lightning struck the stage, and then an apple tree began to grow quickly and high out of the sand, with apples already heavy on its branches. I heard the audience gasp again. (The apple tree was my idea and I thought it was a great part of the illusion, so their gasp gave me a good boost.) The tree branches began to rust and move before a crack sounded as one of the limbs at the top fell and a handsome young man suddenly tumbled out of the tree and landed at Charles’s feet.

Are you sure he didn’t begin to tumble out of the tree before beginning to land at Charles’s feet?

Illusion so far:

Zade floats down from the ceiling on wires
The water in the pool turns into waves
There is the sound of thunder
Zade disappears
On-stage rainfall
Rain turns into a sand pile
Lightning strikes the sand pile
Glass statue
Another bolt of lightning
A tree grows
A guy falls out of the tree

Trust me, I’m keeping track of all of this to make a point later. I’m thinking you probably can guess what it is.

Not many people realized it, but the boy looked just like what Charles had looked like when he was a teenager.

So narcissism runs in the family.

Though I assume the guy who fell out of the tree was made out of Khaos Mahajaik or whatever, that’s never mentioned. For all we know, it could just be a dude who bears a striking resemblance to Charles. There’s never any line about how he’s not really there or he’s been conjured by Zamboni’s powerful talent. It’s just, “Oh, there’s a dude here now.” So, a reader could be thinking to themselves, “Wait, isn’t this something only Chunders and Zortly have been working on?” and be as confused over that as I am over someone picking up this book with the intent of reading it for pleasure and getting this far into it.

The guy pulls some apples off the tree and throws them into the audience because hey, why not lob food items pulled from the void via chaotic forces at an audience of unsuspecting people?

Charles continued his narration, letting the audience know that the people who were lucky enough to catch the apples should feel free to eat them and see that they were real. He made sure that they knew that they would be the best apples they’d ever eat.

The best apples. The absolute–look, I’m tellin’ ya. You have never tasted apples like these ones, okay? Believe me. You haven’t. Nobody has. Because they’re the best apples. And I know a lot about apples, okay? Maybe more than the apple farmers do. Trust me.

The magical teen dreamboat cuts down the tree with an ax:

The tree fell straight onto the stage and, as it hits the ground, sparks and fire blew through the wood of the tree.

Sarem wrote the first part of the sentence in past tense and, as she nears the middle of it, flipped to present for no reason and then back to past.

The tree burns up and the sand rises in a big swirl to obscure the burning tree, putting us at:

Zade floats down from the ceiling on wires
The water in the pool turns into waves
There is the sound of thunder
Zade disappears
On-stage rainfall
Rain turns into a sand pile
Lightning strikes the sand pile
Glass statue
Another bolt of lightning
A tree grows
A guy falls out of the tree
The guy throws apples into the crowd
The guy chops down the tree
The tree catches fire
The sand blows around

When the sand had settled, the fire was gone and in its place there was a beautifully carved wooden wardrobe–he kind that looked like it should have been in the book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. That had always been one of my most favorite books, and I had added that touch as an homage to that story. The young man pulled the doors all the way open to show that the wardrobe was empty, he then shut the doors and reopened them to reveal a guitar. He removed the guitar from the wardrobe and then put the glass sculpture that was sitting next to the wardrobe inside it and closed the doors.

Yes, please, send her ass to Fillory, FFS.

PS: There are a lot of typos in these excerpts. Those aren’t me being careless. This chapter is peppered with them. The three editors had probably already died from exhaustion at this point.

He picked the guitar back up and sat on the ground and began to play a haunting melody that complemented what the band in the theater had been playing.

Anyway, here’s “Wonderwall.”

Zelda listens to him and Sofia singing together and thinks how beautiful Sofia’s voice is, but Zink can’t really enjoy it because she’s in horrible pain through this entire section.

I struggled to bring it all back together and bring the energy and focus back to what I had to do.

Ohhhh, the problem is that she’s not focusing. I get it now. Why wasn’t this mentioned earlier?

 

The wardrobe was struck by lightning and split in two, and the crack of the wood echoed through the theater, giving chills to the audience and momentarily breaking their concentration.

Well, shit, the audience needs to concentrate now, too?

I was now visible again, standing in the middle of the two broken pieces of the wardrobe.

This would be a lot more impressive if we’d had any idea where you were in the first place, Lindt Zuffle. Seriously, she disappeared and reappeared but could see everything happening on stage the entire time, but never once do we hear that she’s in the wings or above the stage or just where the fuck she goes at all.

Then Zade pulls an apple from her pocket and the crowd goes berserk:

I smiled and everyone jumped to their feet, bursting into thunderous applause.

Imagine being so drunk and easy to impress that you give someone a standing ovation because they can fit an apple in their pocket.

Even though we’ve been told several times that Zamantha is in horrific pain and just barely holding on to finish the illusion, she describes giving the audience a “devilish grin” and a wink as she continues. Basically, Zunk is suffering unimaginable torment and performing the illusion is killing her, but she’s super, super good at being tortured, so she toughs it out.

This is the literary equivalent of the last sixteen minutes of Braveheart.

I then playfully took a bite of the apple, and “fainted”. The crowd gasped in horror, not knowing that it was part of the illusion. They thought something was really wrong–just like they were supposed to. The boy caught me as I fell and kissed me, waking me from my “slumber.” I gave the boy my apple, and he took a bite. Suddenly, with a flash of light, he disappeared and the apple fell to the ground.

One of my favorite things about this chapter is how Zwork slowly becomes omniscient as the story goes on. She speaks for the thoughts and feelings of the entire audience at this point, but in the next recap, it will have spread to literally knowing the inner thoughts of every character.

Keeping track of the illusion, we’ve now seen:

Zade floats down from the ceiling on wires
The water in the pool turns into waves
There is the sound of thunder
Zade disappears
On-stage rainfall
Rain turns into a sand pile
Lightning strikes the sand pile
Glass statue
Another bolt of lightning
A tree grows
A guy falls out of the tree
The guy throws apples into the crowd
The guy chops down the tree
The tree catches fire
The sand blows around
A wardrobe appears
There’s a guitar in the wardrobe
The glass statue goes into the wardrobe
Real Zade comes out
She pulls an apple from her pocket
She eats it and faints
The guy kisses her awake
The guy disappears in a flash of light

Charles picks up Lorne’s cloak (which I guess is just on the stage and not on its own separate platform as described earlier) and puts it on her.

I kept going with the routine, although inside it felt like I was dying.

 

 

Then lightning hits her and she disappears, leaving the cloak behind again.

From the audience’s point of view, this was going exactly as it should. But I had taken the impact of the lightning and I could feel my body burning–which was not supposed to happen.

IDK, from what I understand that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen when you get struck by lightning.

As the lightning strike faded, another apple rolled out on the stage from the arm of the cloak. Charles walked over and picked it up. He took a bite and then he, too, disappeared with a spark of light as the apple fell to the ground.

Obviously, the audience is in raptures, practically tearing their faces off with wonder and cursing God for ever showing them such perfection or whatever. Charles goes out to take his bows (and for a brief cameo by the Wynns), but Lord Of The Zings can’t summon the strength, as she’s being ripped to shreds internally by chaos magic. But put a pin in that for now, because that’s the end of the show and we need a look at our final tally:

Zade floats down from the ceiling on wires
The water in the pool turns into waves
There is the sound of thunder
Zade disappears
On-stage rainfall
Rain turns into a sand pile
Lightning strikes the sand pile
Glass statue
Another bolt of lightning
A tree grows
A guy falls out of the tree
The guy throws apples into the crowd
The guy chops down the tree
The tree catches fire
The sand blows around
A wardrobe appears
There’s a guitar in the wardrobe
The glass statue goes into the wardrobe
Real Zade comes out
She pulls an apple from her pocket
She eats it and faints
The guy kisses her awake
The guy disappears in a flash of light
Zade disappears in a flash of light
Charles disappears in a flash of light

I’m actually surprised at how well this illusion keeps to the creation theme, to be honest. There’s not a lot to pick apart there. Sarem started out with imagery of the firmaments, the creation of man, the tree of knowledge, she even throws some C.S. Lewis in there with the wardrobe. Of course, the glass statue and guitar playing are out of nowhere, which suggests to me that I might be giving Sarem way too much credit to sticking with a theme when she could have just been throwing together stuff she considers “cool”.

But my major beef with this entire dangerous illusion is that it didn’t need to be dangerous. There isn’t one thing on that entire list that couldn’t have been faked with technical wizardry. Light, sound, and special effects could have created all of this without all the secrecy hoopla. They probably could have even found a carbon-copy of her dad for her to make out with on stage instead of pulling one together from cosmic forces. It would have been…wait for it…an illusion.

What Zoritos and Chuck have done here is just make real things out of magic. They’re not tricking the audience into seeing things that aren’t really there; the things are there. Being able to pull this trick off by making everything real with magic isn’t anywhere near as exciting as it would be if all of it came together through carefully crafted effects. If Lung had simply used magic to correct something or prevent some catastrophe from happening during the illusion, she could still suffer ~*majixkhal*~ consequences and the rest of the chapter wouldn’t have to change.

Plus, it would have been more believable. Right now, Sarem is asking us to believe that all the performers and technicians who have never been allowed to even see this “illusion” are capable of carrying out their jobs perfectly while performing it for the very first time. Is the band making apples appear out of nowhere? No, but they still need to be able to at least rehearse so their playing is timed with what’s happening on the stage. Someone needs to be up in the catwalk at the beginning so Zerp can bend into naively sexy poses while they adjust her harness. There are too many people involved in this for the reader to buy that everything came together without a hitch the first time the whole company performed this.

On top of that, there are incredibly skilled technicians in that theater watching as the stuff they usually do happens without them, and without them having been replaced by other humans operating the controls. Is the lighting effects guy not wondering how all this lightning is happening without anyone doing anything on the board? Is the floor crew confused as to how all these set pieces they’ve never moved or seen backstage are just suddenly appearing? Are all of these people sitting there going, “Well, there must be an entirely separate crew working somewhere we can’t see them?” It wouldn’t make any sense.

But, as this is Zandbook For Lortles, of course, we believe it. We have to, because it’s what Lani Sarem wants and she’s writing this book, not you. And you’re just jealous.

I knew I wasn’t going to be able to hold on much longer, the pain had become overwhelming and my whole body was burning like I was on fire from the inside. It was burning all the way through me to my fingertips and it felt like I had swallowed gasoline and then lit a match inside my throat. Somehow I managed to walk–or more like drag–my body the five feet or so over to Zeb–the only person I was in arm’s length of reaching.

In case you were wondering, it’s a burning pain she’s feeling. It burns.

 

Zeb was definitely not my first choice for the person whose arms I would want to collapse into–after all, I’d had some practice with Jackson–but surprisingly there was something about his arms that made me feel safe.

She’s dying from internal majik burns or whatever, but she has a moment to spare a thought about how dreamy Jackson is.

Zeb mumbles words that Zink identifies as not being English and Tad arrives on the scene, followed by Riley.

Tad pointed at Riley, “Riley, call 911! Now!“

While I am annoyed to see “pointed” used as a dialogue tag (you can’t point words out of your mouth), I’m more annoyed with the response to this incident as opposed to the one where Sofia fell sixty feet onto standing water and went into cardiac arrest. Everyone, everyone, except Zade stood around and acted like Sofia was inconveniencing them by dying. They did more work trying to console Riley than they did trying to save Sofia’s life. But Zani faints in the wings and people are screaming for 9-1-1 immediately.

I got my eyes to open and there was Charles standing in front of me, panic stricken. I heard him say, “Oh, God, what do we do?”

Why is Charles a) panic-stricken and b) confused as to what to do next? He knows Linda is maghikal. He’s been aware of it this whole time, and I assume he is also super majikhhhal as well (since they have to bone their own kind or whatever). Did they never, in all their discussions about how dangerous this illusion was going to be, stop and think about what they would do if things went wrong? Why didn’t they have the forethought to make a plan for the worst case scenario?

Zug begs Charles to call her mother, then she passes out, and we’ll pick up the next section in another recap.

The Worst Person I’ve Ever Met (Part 8) “The Parting Gifts”

You may have missed a lot. Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven.

As I’ve mentioned in earlier installments, a lot of my issues with Cathy involved my spirituality, which I’m a bit guarded about. As a result, I’m setting this part out on its own. If you’re the type of person who rolls your eyes at hauntings, spells, curses, any of that stuff, this will probably not be a post you’re going to enjoy. If that’s the kind of stuff you’d like to skip, you can do so without missing any big revelations that are crucial to the story overall.

If, on the other hand, you’re the type of person who runs toward stuff like hauntings, spells, and curses, this is going to be right up your alley.

Around the time of Cathy’s divorce from Sam, my son, then five years old, asked me a question. “Mommy, where do the other stairs go?”

At the time, we lived in a ranch-style house with a basement. There was no attic and only one set of stairs. However, my son had an interesting way of describing things, so I asked some probing questions. Where were the stairs? At the back of the basement, right under the real staircase. Then maybe he’d seen a shadow? No, he insisted. He’d seen other stairs.

Frustrated that I wasn’t understanding, he demanded I follow him down to the basement. He led me urgently to where he’d seen the other stairs, but we got to the spot, he was perplexed. Not in a “clearly pretending” way, either. He was genuinely confused as to where the stairs had gone. I decided that he’d probably seen a shadow, somehow. The light had played tricks coming in from the high basement window. I told him if he ever saw the other stairs again, he should come tell me immediately. I wanted to see it for myself, so I could explain to him what he was seeing.

A few weeks later, my son called me into his room screaming. He didn’t want to sleep in there because his favorite doll had “looked at” him. Again, I said it must have been a trick of the light that made the doll’s eyes appear to glance toward him. But he was adamant. The doll didn’t just flick its gaze toward him. It turned its head. He was so spooked by what was once his favorite baby doll, he couldn’t stand to be near it. I don’t know if he ever played with it again.

After that, strange things started to happen all the time. Doors slammed. Kitchen cupboards would suddenly stand open. The dog would bark at nothing and the cats aggressively avoided the basement, which was delightful considering that was where their litter boxes were. I began to wonder if our house was haunted. But that was silly. I’d lived in that house with my mother when I was a teenager and nothing paranormal had ever happened there. I’d grown up in my grandparents’ haunted house before we’d moved out on our own, and anyone who has ever lived in a haunted house knows that they just feel different. The house had never felt haunted before, but now it displayed all the hallmarks of a haunting.

These weird occurrences became more sinister. My son was the soul of unflappable calm as he explained “the green, drippy people” to me. They were in the basement, he said, hanging from the ceiling. Their eyes were red, like the ghost mouse’s eyes.

“The ghost mouse?” I asked, trying to convince myself he’d just seen an albino rat on tv or something.

“The ghost mouse.” He acted like it was something I should have already known about. “The ghost mouse I can follow to the other stairs?”

I made him promise me that he would never talk to the green, drippy people or follow the ghost mouse. And he would never, ever go down the other stairs. I stressed the importance of that, and he solemnly promised that he would never have gone down the other stairs because they were so scary.

My husband, ever the skeptic, thought I was reading too much into our son’s imagination. He was rarely present for the conversations we had or the weird things that happened. Once, we arrived home and my son and I were the first people in the house; my husband was still getting something from the car. We’d no sooner stepped inside than a bowl of candy flew from the chair it was sitting on to smash across the room. No matter how my son and I both argued, my husband insisted we must have somehow bumped it, though we’d been nowhere near it at the time. Then one night, as my husband and I laid in bed, the bathroom door slammed shut, hard.

“It’s the wind, Jen,” he said, irritated, as he got up to go prove I was being a baby.

“How is it the wind when the window in there is shut?” I demanded. “Every window in the house is shut.”

“I don’t know, it could be a draft up from the laundry chute when the furnace comes on.” He went into the hall and opened the door again.

“Yeah, I’m so sure it’s a draft that has never happened before in the whole history of me living in this house,” I muttered as he got back into bed. He’d no sooner pulled the covers up when the door slammed shut again.

“See?” he asked. “Listen. The furnace is on.”

He got up again and went to open the door. This time, it stayed open.

Then the furnace clicked off. And the door slammed again.

“Probably a change in air pressure,” he said, but he didn’t sound quite as certain. And he didn’t get up to open it.

There was never another “air pressure” problem like it again in all the years we remained in the house.

Once, I was putting a load of laundry into the dryer when a dripping, skeletal hand in a tattered sleeve reached out of a shadow, grasping for me. I screamed and raced upstairs, shaking. I lived in terror every day. To my son, these occurrences were normal. To my husband, they were non-existent. I thought I was losing my mind.

So, what link does all of this have with Cathy?

As mentioned previously, Cathy and I were in a small coven. We did rituals and spellwork together, much of it at my home. Any of my spiritual practice that didn’t happen outside or during group gatherings happened in my office. Before we’d put down our wood laminate flooring, I’d drawn a permanent circle on the subfloor, both with a marker and with some low-level energy. I always knew where it was, and any spells or meditation or chanting happened in that circle.

Cathy knew where it was, too. Shortly before she left for Colorado, she told me how blessed she felt by all the positive changes in her life. “I knew it would happen, ever since I did that ritual.”

Only half-listening (because at this time I was just waiting our “friendship” out), I asked, “Oh yeah?”

She took a drag off her cigarette in the annoying way she did, puckering her lips and pressing the filter against the yellow half-circle target that stained her front teeth. “Yeah. One night when I was staying over at your house, I went into your office, where your circle is? And I said, ‘Okay, universe. I want you to send everything I’m putting out into the world back to me three-fold, right here and now.'”

I realized then exactly what had happened. I hoped the weird occurrences would end when she left, and they did. Eventually, we lost the house to a foreclosure after my career floundered. We moved into our new house, which I’d recognized instantly as being completely non-haunted. Living through those weird events was just something that had happened to us, and soon we never even talked about it.

Shortly after I wrote the first of this series of posts, my son came to me and said, apropos of nothing, “Do you remember the other stairs?”

All of the hairs on my arms stood up. I hadn’t mentioned the subject to him in years. “I remember you thought there were some other stairs. Did you figure out what they were?”

“They were other stairs,” he said. “But there’s stuff I didn’t tell you about them.”

He described the other stairs to me, in more sophisticated detail than he’d been able to at five. They were old stone, uneven like ruins. They led down into a dark hallway with shadowy doors along its side. A dim orange light came from one of the doorways.

“And there was someone at the bottom,” he said in an uncharacteristically quiet, serious voice. “They had a person’s body, but their head was like an animal skull. With horns or antlers or something.”

This is where I rocketed from my temporary atheism and back into Hyper-Pagan mode. I typed every possible description into google to see what entity my son had encountered and made him look at depiction after depiction of ancient Gods and creatures and demons. “Did it say anything to you?” I demanded. “Did you say anything to it?” My son swore the figure never spoke and he never spoke to it or went down the stairs. I headed directly to the new age store and grabbed obsidian for both of my kids to keep on them at all times. I did a banishment and fumigated with Dragon’s Blood resin. For the first time in almost a decade, I set up an altar.

Why had I stayed away so long?

 

After we’d moved into our current home, I’d begun to wonder if our run of bad luck hadn’t been caused by whatever it was that Cathy had invited into our lives. I decided to do a cleansing spell while I had some alone time. I put some new age music on Spotify and set about doing the ritual. But I’d forgotten that Spotify had ads. Just as I was getting ready to begin, one of them came on. A woman’s voice cheerfully called out, “Hi! I’m [Cathy’s real name]!” It was an advertisement for a movie, but it still spooked me badly. I rushed through the ritual and didn’t feel any better when it was over.

I decided at that point that I was through with witchcraft and dove back into Catholicism. But Cathy’s manipulation and betrayal had made it impossible for me to share anything spiritual with anyone. If I couldn’t have faith in other people, I just wouldn’t have faith at all.

It was easier to give up my soul than deal with the damage Cathy had left.

 

Next Time: “It’s all here just waiting for me.”

Jealous Haters Book Club: Handbook For Mortals Chapter 14 Wheel of Fortune or, “Fifty Shades of Mac”

Hello, everybody! Things are still hectic over here at the Trout House, but I’ve been stealing bits of time here and there to work on my true passion, which is, surprisingly, not calling and canceling accounts for a deceased person. Who could have guessed? No, I’m talking about my passion for ripping bad books to shreds. It soothes me.

Before I go too far, I want to thank everyone who has donated money to us in the wake of this unexpected death. I won’t go further than that because Mr. Jen wants to thank you guys directly via video (when he’s able to do it without choking up) and I don’t want to steal his thunder. But you guys have really saved a huge chunk of our asses. Disposing of someone’s body and material life is expensive, even when you go super basic.

As of right now, posts here are going to be thin on the ground. I’ve got two novels I’m trying to get out while also doing death-related responsibility. But I’m so glad to at least give you guys this, and thanks for sticking around!

Okay, so, in Lani Sarem news, someone was very, very busy. Or, the people someone hired on Fiverr to write five-star reviews for Handbook For Mortals. From February 12 to February 14, over fifty unverified reviews flooded into Amazon for Handbook, all proclaiming it a wonderful book, a great read, that it should be made into a movie, or, in one case, just “A,” which fifteen Amazon customers found helpful. These reviews are being called out and roundly mocked on social media (and in the comments on my previous recap), as they’re clearly purchased. Next time, Sarem should consider writing a better book and getting good reviews that way.

But what do I know?

Over at Switzy Thoughts, Amanda J. Surowitz describes her experience in Sarem’s “How I Navigated The New York Times List” session at the Agile Writer’s conference in Virginia earlier this year. Sarem apparently spared some time to slam Phil Stamper, one of the key figures in uncovering Sarem’s scam, and continued to insist that because the world of publishing isn’t run like the far superior music industry, it’s broken.

With that, let’s go see what Shitbook For Shortles has in store for us this time.

We had just finished our final rehearsal of the newly revamped show, including the new illusion we had kept under tight wraps.

Wow. Imagine. An illusion that’s really super secret.

Everyone had had to sign agreements stating that they wouldn’t share what they knew and that meant that they couldn’t even talk about it with any of the other cast and crew.

I don’t know if this is being used to set up just how secret and important the illusion is, but it’s not unusual for professional magicians to make their crew sign NDAs.

That clause also kept me from having to answer questions that I really couldn’t answer, because no one was allowed to ask me.

Which is sort of implied by the part where nobody’s allowed to talk about it. I’m wondering, though, if Zarf is including herself among these plebs who have been sworn to secrecy.

One of the things that’s difficult to tell with this book is when the author is making way too big a deal out of something simple. Okay, back up. There are obviously times when it’s very easy to tell. But there are times like this when, due to the author’s braggadocio regarding her real-life show business career and privileged knowledge no reader could ever be party to, that I just can’t tell if something is being included for extra detail or to further glorify her avatar. Am I reading about how unusually secret this illusion is, or am I reading about how secret illusions are in general? Is this supposed to impress me or just inform me?

Zib describes what the work schedule has been like and how everyone needs rest and stuff, and Charles offers to take everyone out for dinner in a pre-celebration. Charles Spellman is an impressive billionaire illusionist who we have already established is definitely not David Copperfield with his new Lego piece hairdo, so he can do things like that. They go to The Peppermill Lounge, which from what I understand from everyone who insisted I eat there for breakfast (I never did), is the kind of place I could afford, so that seems a bit anticlimactic considering how rich this dude is.

Hey, you know what we haven’t heard about in a while? Show blacks.

The crew showed up all in show blacks,

Oh, thank god. The withdrawal was making my eyes sweat.

while the cast was mostly still in full hair and makeup above our street clothes, as we had all come from the theater to here.

So, remember: Linda looks really hot.

The restaurant hostess tells them that they have “the left side” of the restaurant to themselves. I put that in quotes because I want to make sure you’re all good and confused by the numerous directions given in this chapter.

“Right this way,” she gleamed.

That is not a dialogue tag. You can’t gleam a word. Unless you’re using flashlight signals or something.

As Charles pulled out his chair, Sofia instinctively took the only seat beside him.

I like how it’s some sort of primal, involuntary instinct that makes her sit in the chair next to her boyfriend. Like she wouldn’t just assume that he would want to sit next to her. Who else should have taken that seat?

Oh…that’s right. We’re reading Handbook For Mortals.

Charles leaned toward Sofia, likely trying to be subtle, but I happened to be standing close enough to hear what he said to her.

Take a moment to try and guess what he’s saying. There is absolutely no way you’re going to get this wrong.

“Sofie, darling,” he said softly. “I need Zade to sit next to me. Can you and Mac find seats somewhere else?”

So, Charles Spellman is a total dick. He treats his girlfriend like she’s nothing but arm candy. He hurts her over and over, first by taking away her illusion to give it to a random magician who just wandered in off the street, then by lavishing that random magician with thousands of dollars of makeup and trinkets. The reader is supposed to see Zade as pure and good and Sofia as evil and unreasonable, but when we consider the situation from Sofia’s side, Zade has shown up, taken her job, and now seems to be stealing her boyfriend. He’s taking Zade out to dinner and having secret, closed rehearsals, and now he’s like, don’t sit by me, I want to sit by this other woman. Sofia has the right to be hurt. She’s being humiliated in front of her coworkers and pushed out of her own life by this person everyone unconditionally worships. Charles could have easily taken a seat so there would be room on either side of him, but he didn’t do that because he’s thoughtless. Sofia is a fucking victim in this story and I’m furious on her behalf watching someone slide in to steal her life without a single person stepping up to defend her.

I may have issues attached.

But of course, in Handbook For Mortals, she’s just a slutty bitch and a bitchy slut:

“What?” Sofia hissed, shooting a look at me that could have killed.

Me:

 

“Don’t make a deal about this,” Charles warned, fixing Sofia with a stare that made it clear this was not up for discussion.

“Don’t make a big deal about the fact that I’m deliberately choosing another woman over you in front of everyone we work with.”

So, nobody was standing close enough to hear them except for Zurd. But then:

She crossed around to where Mac and I were standing. Mac, who had not overheard the conversation, looked confused.

Mac didn’t overhear it, but he’s standing with Zoof, who was close enough to hear everything over the sounds made by a cast and crew of like two-hundred people entering a restaurant and figuring out seat logistics all at once? Okay.

Charles reiterates to Mac that he “needs” Loofah to sit next to him, so Mac is like, sure, whatever and goes off with Sofia.

Sofia, stormed off to the very other end of the room, the only place at this point with open seats.

First of all, that comma doesn’t go there. Second of all, remember what I said about directional confusion? This is where it’s coming in, hard. We have no sense of how the room is set up, other than booths that are briefly mentioned, and there’s no real indication of the size of the room, other than it can hold everyone, so it has to be pretty big. So, Sofia has “stormed off” to the other side of what has to be a decent sized room.

As Mac caught up with Sofia, I heard him remark, “That was kinda weird, right?”

If Sofe-i-e-i-o is already way over there, how did Zade hear this? How close are they if we’ve already been told that they space they’re occupying is the whole left side of the restaurant?

I hadn’t expected this at all, and I didn’t know why I needed to sit next to Charles–or what we needed to go over. I had glanced over to Mac to give him an “I’m sorry look” when Jackson, who happened to be in the seat that had been next to Sofia, nudged me.

He happened to be there. Also, those are misplaced quotation marks. She’s saying something with the look, so “I’m sorry” is the description. “Look” is the noun it applies to and therefore should be outside of the quotation marks.

“Oh, good!” Charles said. “Jackson, my bandleader, I wanted you to be with us as well. Zade and I want to discuss intro music.”

Charles Spellman is a shitty boss. First of all, he’s like, “Let me treat you all to dinner,” and takes them to a place with like, fifteen dollar burgers instead of a place they can’t already afford, despite being a billionaire and obviously writing this off as a deduction. Second, he’s like, “Let me treat you all to dinner…which I will turn into a fucking business meeting so I don’t have to pay you for your time.” The most telling part of this is that LARP had no idea that she wanted to talk to Jackson about the music, so Chavid Spopperfield isn’t just scamming his employees into doing uncompensated labor; he’s also enlisting one of them to be complicit in his scheme.

And I wanna know why Charles didn’t just ask Jackson to move, then put Sofia on one side of him and Zint Loller on the other.

Charles had remained standing through all of this, and now lifted his water glass and tapped it with a spoon to get everyone’s attention.

I bet you can’t guess what he needs their attention for.

“I wanted to thank you all for all your hard work these past few months, revamping and–in my humble opinion–revitalizing the show with me,” he began. “I’m very excited for the premier, I hope you enjoy the next two days off before the big night. Your hard work is much appreciated and I am grateful and honored to have such a wonderful cast and crew. So…food and drinks are on me! And cheers to you all!”

Phew. I thought he was going to launch into a long thing about how geat Zlip-n-zlide is. Glad we avoided–

He paused, lifting his water glass higher in the air, and the cast and crew cheered loudly.

 

When the noise had died down, he continued. “Most importantly, I would like to thank Zade for coming to join our little family. She has made our show that much better and has elevated us all. She helped kick the dust off and brought in some new and much-needed blood. My little starlet.” He winked at me.

Everyone cheered again.

And then the whole bus clapped.

So, Charles’s full speech is basically, “Thanks everyone for working hard, but Zurk is the most important and she did the most,” and everyone is like, “yay, she fully did!”

Except, you know. For a couple specific people:

I then glanced back down to the far end of our group where Mac and Sofia were seated. Sofia was saying something to Mac, and Icould see that they were both frowning. Mac looked frustrated and upset. I was pretty sure that he wasn’t upset that I wasn’t seated next to him–after all, at work, things were still very much on the down low, so we couldn’t make a show of wanting to sit together–but I was sure he was less than thrilled to be seated next to Sofia.

Yes, I’m sure that’s it. I’m sure he’s not mad that the girl he’s been seeing for months now without any hint of even a casual commitment is sitting next to her boss, whom she has been spending long hours and private dinners with and who has a habit of dating the star performer of his show and who has just praised her, called her his “little starlet” and winked at her in front of everyone. Nope. Mac’s mad that he has to sit next to the bitchy slut who sluttily and bitchily hates Zippo for no reason.

Checks out.

On the other hand, I was also sure that Mac wasn’t thrilled that I was sitting with Jackson, who had already put his arm around me.

Shit at this point, I’m not even looking at Jackson as a competitor for Leslie’s luuuuuurve. This is down to Mac and Charles by this point, in Mac’s eyes.

Even though they’re in the same room and she can see him from where she’s sitting, Load decides she needs to text Mac to defuse the situation:

I finally picked a really sad looking emoji, [emoji], and sent it.

Yes. The emoji is in the book:

 

(Wake me up) WAKE ME UP INSIDE (I can’t wake up) WAKE ME UP INSIDE

There is… a lot to deal with here. Let’s get the small stuff out of the way, first. For example, the fact that emojis are actually copyright protected. Maybe this is considered fair use? Another tiny quibble? She says in the text that she’s going to send him an “iMessage”, but this is clearly an Android emoji. And while we could debate whether or not using an emoji in prose is stylistically acceptable or the downfall of English as we know it, I’d like to focus more on the fact that this is supposed to be the saddest emoji? There’s one that has parallel columns of water streaming from its eyes.

Now, let’s talk about what really matters. And that’s the shitty story.

Like I just mentioned, Zut is in the same room as Mac. And yes, Jackson has his arm around her, but why would that prevent her from getting up and going to talk to Mac? Charles’s toast is over. Everyone is there socially, so she probably wouldn’t be the only person getting up and visiting with other tables. But she chooses to text Mac from across the room, watch him receive the text and:

I then saw him text something back. I anxiously waited for my phone to go off and opened it to the iMessage. It was a slightly different emoji with no tet to help me undertand what he was feeling.

How dare he respond with just an emoji to your text that was just an emoji? Doesn’t he know you deserve a full explanation of what he’s thinking and feeling? And PS. That’s the side-eye emoji. He’s saying he’s giving you the side-eye, aka he doesn’t trust you and is, according to Miriam-Webster, looking at you with “contempt.”

In other words, Mac is not buying the bullshit you are selling him from your seat between two rivals for your heart. And he probably would tell you that if you got up and went over and just talked to him, rather than playing emoji games. As I read this book, more and more I get the feeling that Sarem thought this book fit in the YA category because her characters are more immature than most of the teen protagonists in YA books. But here’s the thing: teens are supposed to be somewhat immature. Adults are not. No, not even in a “YA novel”.

We time jump ahead:

The next few days were a blur for me, full of press, interviews, and no actual time off leading up to the big night. Charles and I had been working on an all-new show and most importantly a brand new and impressive illusion for the last several months.

We have been hearing about nothing but this brand new show and illusion for the past thousand chapters. You started off this chapter with this information. The lukewarm romantic drama is centered around the fact that you’ve been working on the illusion. THERE WAS A TOAST TO IT TWO PAGES AGO.

Let’s talk about the timeline of this book again. The other day on twitter, Dan Olson broke down the timeline of the Fifty Shades Of Grey series and pointed out that Ana meets Christian in May in book one, is married to Christian in August, and the last chapter before the epilogue in the third book takes place in September, making the plot of series move along improbably fast. This book has the opposite problem. Zade had already been in Las Vegas for months by the time she and Charles began working on the new illusion in the last chapter. Now, it’s been months that they’ve been working on it. Meaning that for either a year or close to it, Zade has been deciding between Mac and Jackson and both of them have been content to be strung along. No wonder Mac is suspicious about Charles because to Mac it’s probably been looking like she’s waiting for something better to come along for a while.

In the midst of it all, I did realize–and I’m not sure why it hadn’t dawned on me before, that Zeb might have had an issue with me because usually only he and Charles worked on illusions.

This is only occurring to her now? Of course, Zeb has a problem with you because you waltzed in, got thousands of dollars of goodies, are treating the show like a Tindr LARP, and, like you did with Sofia, stole his job.

The cast had just walked the red carpet for the premiere of the revamped show. I had talked to so many reporters on the carpet, and I could feel the anxious energy in my blood.

Yet again, we are reading Lani Sarem’s desperation for fame and not a fictional story. How has Zontar become an ultra-famous magician that the press is clamoring for in like, a year? The actual press in real life doesn’t give this big a shit about the real David Copperfield.

She goes to Charles’s office:

I pushed the door closed but I didn’t notice whether it had closed all the way because my attention quickly turned to Charles.

“By the way, reader, keep this in mind. I’m pointing it out for a reason.”

Chavid Spopperfield is nervous about the show, specifically LOL’s illusion. But don’t worry, she’s there to calm his opening night jitters. She’s like, it’s going to go fine and Mac is going to make sure it goes fine and you know how perfect and magical and good I am, so good news, again, it’ll all go fine.

He’s the professional stage magician with a decades-long career but she’s helping him work through his nerves.

Never has a Sue more Mary-ed.

Charles put his hand on my face and rubbed the side of my check before slowly moving his hand to my shoulder.

That’s a weird way for your boss to pay you, but whatever.

We were standing very close together and I realized that I loved the close attention.

To paraphrase the great Keanu Reeves in his legendary and career-defining role of Ted “Theodore” Logan…That’s your dad, dude.

I know that we haven’t had the big reveal yet, but this makes me feel gross in the same way the beginning of The Bird Cage made me feel gross when I first saw it. Like, the part where the son comes home but one of the dads thinks that the other dad is cheating, so it looks like the son is the possibly-cheating dad’s date? And then you find out ha ha, no, it was just the son and you thought it was romantic and it was like, excuse me, but that was a weird audience misdirect that seems very uncomfortable after the reveal? You know the part I’m talking about?

Anyway, it’s gross.

Chuds Spurdman gives Lana Del Zey a hug, and we cut to one of those astrological triple goddess signs and…

Again, if you think you know what’s about to happen, you are 100% right.

Mac walked up to the door to Charles’s office and watched Zade and Charles through a slight gap in the open door.

What is up with this creepy fucker lurking at every keyhole in the damn place? This is like the second or third time he’s just happened by a door and thought to himself, hey, I think I should spy on whomever happens to be in there.

He was about to knock when he noticed their long and loving hug.

Remember this when we find out Sperdzmerds is her father. Remember that someone once saw the two of them hugging and it was immediately interpretable as sexual.

And then go wash your hands like I’m about to.

Instead of knocking, he decided to take a moment to see what was going on with them, since he had been noticing something a bit strange between them ever since he’d found those David Copperfield tickets and thought he might beable to answer his questions that way.

With the David Copperfield tickets?

Anyway, all of a sudden Mac starts thinking about David Copperfield and how it’s weird that he’s never actually seen Spellman and Copperfeld in the same place at the same time and also how it’s weird that Spellman always wears a pair of glasses that don’t have any lenses–

Not really. But that would be a much better twist.

“It’s going to be the most amazing illusion the world has ever seen,” Zade exclaimed happily.

Lunk praising herself is a refreshing change from everyone else praising her, to be honest.

Charles pulled back and looked her right in the eye, his arms still around her.

Didn’t I mention “right in the eye” in the last recap? I should have started a counter or something. Or just jammed something sharp “right in” my eye.

“I’m just being an old man, I guess. I love you more than life itself. It would kill me if something happened to you.”

Zade was smiling as she put her hands on his face. “I love you, too.” She leaned in to kiss him, her face beaming.

Mac was disgusted and devastated. How could Zade betray him likee that? After everything they had together? Hadn’t he put up with enough with the whole Jackson situation? Angry and frustrated, he coudln’t bare to watch her kiss him.

It’s “bear” not “bare”. But I’m with Mac on having put up with a lot. We’re talking at least eight months here that he’s been seeing Zerg and she’s still not sure she wants to date him exclusively. I mean, move at your own pace, but asking that of a partner who wants an answer is ridiculous.

Had he only watched just a moment or two longer he would have seen Zade kiss Charles–innocently on the cheek. Mac didn’t see that, though, because he looked away before he saw the truth and therefore in his head he had turned aound right before he saw them make out with tongue.

I love how it’s almost constant head hopping in these, until we get a scene where it’s just Mac and then BOOM! Omniscient third, out of nowhere.

He needed to think before he did anything that he would regret.

Now, remember that line as we finish out this chapter. Because after a return to Limbo’s POV, she’s way up in the catwalks getting strapped into her harness and thinking about how cool Riley the rigger is when:

I pushed my hips out to make it easier for him to put the clips on me but, just as he started to grab the ring on the harness, his hand dropped and he started to back away. Without seeing him move away, I instantly could feel something was wrong. I looked up at his face and looked like someone was going to shoot him in the head. I turned around to see what had struck the fear of God into him to see Mac walking up with anger radiating from his core. He was furious. On his face he had the look guys get when they are somewhere between crying and punching someone.

“Before I launch into this description of the love interest as being so furious it seemed like he would shoot someone in the head or punch them, allow me to point out that I have to pose suggestively in front of this other desirable guy.”

Riley is afraid Mac is mad at him, but Mac is mad at Zani and sends Riley down to the fly-rail.

Because moments before curtain up, you for sure want to move things around.

What really gets me is that the show hasn’t started, Mac isn’t in position to do his job, and he’s sending Riley to the fly-rail to…what? What’s happening at the fly-rail before the show even starts? Even if it’s just “pull up the curtain,” that can’t happen until Mac is where he needs to be.

I could tell that Riley was unsure if Mac was telling the truth, so he looked again at Mac, who was staing at me with the most intense glare. Mac was breathing hard and his nostrils were flaring, but he was not looking at Riley, who finally concluded it really must not have been about him and started to leave.

“So, this guy is really mad, to the point that I’m afraid of him, and I think he might be lying to me when he tells me I need to leave…but I’ll leave him here with this performer, sixty feet above the stage with not another soul around.” Riley, you’re useless.

Lid tries to smile Mac’s anger away, but she fails.

He gritted his teeth at me for a few moments as if he was thinking about what he was going to actually say to me. He grabbed my harness and pulled hard, jerking me along with it.

“Have you got anything you want to tell me?” he finally said in the coldest monotone voice he’d ever used with me.

Yeah, Anastasia, do you want to explain to Christian why you haven’t changed your name on your work email yet? Oh, shit, sorry, wrong book with an abusive love interest. This suddenly felt so natural and just right that I thought I was recapping Fifty Shades Of Grey again. Which is actually one of my reoccurring nightmares, but you get where I’m going with this.

I ran through in my head any scenarios that might tell me what the hell he was talking about but came up with little to nothing that seemed to make any sense.

Much like the pose, plot, and sentence structure contained within this book. Little to nothing seems to make any sense.

He locked his jaw and angry tears welled in his eyes.

Mac needs a nightguard, but like…during the day, too.

He gabbed my arms with both his hands and was almost shaking me. He was too angry for us to be safe so high off the ground.

So now our heroine is afraid of the love interest to the point that she doesn’t feel safe standing with him at a great height. And he’s shaking her. She yells at him that she doesn’t know why he’s mad, and he’s like, I have a right to know if you’re in love with someone else. She thinks he’s talking about Jackson.

Mac cut me off and interjected, “So you haven’t told anyone today that you’re in love with him?”

I started to answer without really thinking about it. “That sounds like a pretty ridicu– Oh.” I sighed. Everything had finally clicked and I knew exactly what he was talking about. I shook my head. I wasn’t sure how, but he must have heard me talking to Charles. I dropped my head slightly. What could I tell him about what was going on? I didn’t know if I should tell him everything or not. I knew I needed to say something, because I had just acknowledged that something had been said that I knew what he had been referring to.

Aaaand now we’ve established that Zorp knows Spellman is her father and The Big Reveal is being kept from the reader in first person POV. And the lengths she goes to, the lengths, dear reader, to protect The Big Reveal:

“Yes. I told someone I loved him. Not that I was in love with him. It’s two totally different things.”

Yeah, so, let’s go ahead and argue semantics with the pissed off guy you’re afraid will get violent with you. You’re doing great, Lampshade!

The stage manager warns that they’re starting the show in two minutes, but hold your horses, paying audience, because there is a really boring Big Misunderstanding happening in the rafters. Mac tells Lucy that she’s just like the girl who fucked around on him before:

“You’re just like Clara. Maybe worse. At least she had the decency to come clean when I confonted her.”

I swear to god, I had this flashback of the time I thought I was getting back together with an ex and I went to spring break in Ft. Myers and when I got back he’d eloped with one of my friends and when I asked him why, he said it was because he believed I cheated on him but he knew she had cheated on him and she had more integrity because she admitted to it.

I hadn’t cheated on him, but he’d cheated on me like, constantly.

Yeah, Josh. I know you fucked that chick that lived in the upstairs apartment when we lived on Rose street. There’s your integrity.

Where was I before I revisted a twenty-year-old grudge? OH! Yeah. I was recapping this alleged “book.”

I tried to calm the situation–and him–down as I spoke in a more subdued tone, “Sometimes relationships aren’t black and white, Mac. And sometimes what you see isn’t what’s really there. How about you let me do the show, then we can talk about this?” Hopefully he would hear reason. We both had a job to do and we both needed to concentrate on that and do it.

Right. In like, two minutes. This is kind of a long interaction going on here.

“So I can give you a chance to construct your story about why needed to sleep your way to the top? I’m such an idiot. We haven’t even slept together, yet.”

Well, I guess you weren’t important enough, then.

I was shocked and horrified that he actually thought I would ever do that.

I know she means the part about sleeping her way to the top, but this immediately follows him complaining that she hasn’t fulfilled her sexual obligation to him yet. So it’s like, “You haven’t slept with me yet!” “I am shocked and horrified that you think I would!”

Lump is like, if you think I would do that, you don’t know me very well, and Mac is like, yeah, I guess I don’t. Because Lani Sarem can’t write original dialogue to save herself from public ridicule.

Mac didn’t say anything but he grabbed the harness and clipped me in quickly, not doing a safety check like Riley normally would have.

Wait, wait. So, Mr. Safety, Mr. I-don’t-like-you-because-you-won’t-tell-me-your-illusion-secret-so-I-can-keep-you-safe is just like, yeah, I know we had a performer fall to her clinical but not permanent death earlier this year, but I’m pissed so this bitch can eat stage for all I care?

He jerked me around some more while holding the harness; it hurt a bit but I refused to show him it caused even an ounce of pain.

Literally, he’s assaulted her. He’s causing her pain on purpose because he’s angry. You can’t even make a wan excuse about it being BDSM or his troubled childhood that makes it okay. He’s just putting her in an unsafe situation and hurting her while he’s doing it because she made him feel sad.

Mac gets in Lizard’s face and tells her she’s like everyone else, and as he storms away, she yells after him that he needs to get over Clara, and she tries to get her emotions under control to perform. We flip back into Mac’s all-italics POV and he’s all pissed off as he heads to the automation control boad.

Mac paced around the board for a minute, but realized he was not emotionaly together enough to run it for the show. And why should he? He was only doing it because Zade wanted him to for reasons he wasn’t actually sure about. She had asked and he had just said okay, but he wasn’t even in automation–he was the technical director. Screw that, he thought. Running the main board meant many performers’ lives would be in his hands–one wrong move and someone could get seriously hurt, or worse.

This is the type of shit you think about before it’s less than two minutes to curtain, Mac. And you didn’t care about someone getting seriously hurt when you were hurting Lando on purpose and not doing safety checks.

Mac radios to Cam and tells him to get to the main board, and like…this is the longest two minutes in the history of minutes.

Mac looked up and glared at him, hard. “You’re runnin’ main tonight.”

“I don’t know the cues for the new illusion. Heck, I haven’t worked in automation in over a year. I can’t–” Cam tried to argue.

“Run it on the fly,” Mac yelled as he stomped off, wrapped up in a flurry of emotion.

Uh…

In the very beginning of the chapter we were told that the new illusion is so complex and secretive that information was on a need-to-know basis. Charles is worried because it’s so super dangerous and anything could go wrong. And Mac is like, yeah, whatever I’ve already acknowledged that performers could die if someone fucks this up, but I’m going to leave and let everyone wing it. Because I’M MR. SAFETY.

And that’s what he does, Reader. He leaves, and we flip into Cam’s POV and he’s sweating and freaking out and just starts praying and pushing buttons and the chapter ends.

Hiatus After Hiatus After Hiatus…

I promised I’d be returning this week. I did not realize that my husband would find his mother dead in her apartment on Thursday afternoon. She hadn’t been feeling well, so he’d gone by after work to check on her. She’d died in her sleep the night before. She was only sixty-nine years old.

If you’ve been reading my “Worst Person I’ve Ever Met” series, this may interest you: “Sam’s” father was the medical examiner who showed up. One might have thought that would be the cherry on this shit sundae, but alas, it is a mere sprinkle. The complications that have been left behind are numerous. There is the time, money, physical labor for the monumental task of funeral costs, closing accounts, or cleaning the apartment. Mr. Jen and I have found ourselves the beneficiaries of several new full-time jobs.

The costs associated with even a modest funeral are astronomical. Some of you who heard the news on Twitter sprang into action and raised $600.00 to help us with the cost. We are so incredibly thankful for those contributions, as we are finding ourselves wiped out.

The worst part of all of this seems to be the numb practicality. Of course, my husband is grieving. But I feel nothing. Nothing but irritation and anxiety at the situation and at the number of things that require our urgent attention…later. Because everything waits on offices opening on Monday, death certificates arriving, signatures obtained from uncooperative parties. Hurry up and wait builds a wall between grief and the people who are supposed to be processing it.

I’m not going to promise that I’ll be returning next week. I have no idea if that’s possible. At the moment, we’re sifting through a lifetime of disorganized paperwork–here, a vital record from the retirement office, there a printed-off email joke from 1998–and sorting through useless brick-a-brack we feel guilty disposing of because it was precious to her in life. And the one person who should be allowed to step back and just not have to deal with anything other than his emotions is my husband, who absolutely will not get a chance to do that until all this other stuff is done.

For now, I’ll just say that updates will be sporadic and I’m sorry. Hopefully, it will only be in this immediate aftermath and not for weeks.