Charlie Jane Anders's Blog, page 34

"I have gone out, a possessed witch,haunting the black air, braver at night;dreaming evil, I have..."

“

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind.

”

- Anne Sexton, “Her Kind”

Another awesome sign (at the amazing folio books on 24th)

Another awesome sign (at the amazing folio books on 24th)

I’m doing events in the East Bay, North Bay and SF this week!

I’ve only done a handful of appearances for All the Birds in the Sky thus far in the Bay Area, because I’ve just been traveling so dang much. But if you wanna hang out with me and hear me read from the book, you have THREE chances this week.

On Weds., I’m reading at the Berkeley Public Library (North Branch), 1170 The Alameda, Berkeley, CA, at 7 PM. I’m bringing cookies!

On Thurs, I’m taking part in the reading series InsideStoryTime, with the theme of “Superpowers.” Also reading: Seanan McGuire, Daryl Gregory, Elwin Cotman and Jessica May Lin. That’s 7 PM at the Armory Club (downstairs), 1799 Mission St. @ 14th., San Francisco, CA.

Then on Fri, I’m reading at Copperfield’s Books, 140 Kentucky Street, Petaluma, as part of their “Brave New Worlds” series, also at 7 PM.

So even if you don’t live in San Francisco, you have a decent chance to catch up with me this week. Hope to see you soon!

Another amazing book quote at green apple on the park. Love that...

Another amazing book quote at green apple on the park. Love that store so much!

TFW you came up with the best weirdest story and now it’s gone

Ugh. A few weeks ago after a particularly weird/intense day I was walking home and I came up with this super weird, crazy story idea that just totally took over my brain. I had to stop in a bubble tea shop and write it all down including the whole beginning and how it would get more warped as it went along. Then life got crazy busy, so it took a couple weeks for me to get back to it. Then I looked for it… and I had accidentally deleted the whole thing. It had been on my computer desktop and I must have nuked it along with some random image files. Spent a whole plane ride yesterday reconstructing it – I remembered the main idea and a lot of the weird moments, just needed to build it back up from scratch. I’ll never know what random turns of phrase or ideas were in that document tho.

Image: Benny Wong

"You often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong..."

“You often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”

- The Phantom Tollbooth by Norman Juster

Things People Were Thinking on Sunday Morning (from the notebook...

Things People Were Thinking on Sunday Morning (from the notebook where I wrote the first draft of #AlltheBirdsintheSky)

menreadingbooksbywomen:All The Birds In The Sky, by Charlie...

menreadingbooksbywomen:

All The Birds In The Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders.

First time I’ve seen someone in the wild reading a book by someone I know and like! Go Charlie!

"Being a writer is really, soul-crushingly hard. It’s hard for everyone. If being a writer was easy,..."

“Being a writer is really, soul-crushingly hard. It’s hard for everyone. If being a writer was easy, nobody would want to do it.”

- [INTERVIEW] Charlie Jane Anders on ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY, Publishing and More

The Secret Origin of HappyFruit

Here’s another thing that was included in All the Birds in the Sky until pretty late in the process – the details about HappyFruit, the defunct company whose office Laurence holes up in, along with all the other geeks. Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about HappyFruit!

Originally, in the book, you get this moment where Laurence and the other members of the 10 Percent Project are trying to make a super intense, life-or-death decision. And just when things are at their most emotional and taxing, we suddenly get all the details about HappyFruit, the company that we’ve been hearing about for a while. It’s a weird moment in an already super-weird scene:

Once again, nobody spoke for a
while, as everybody processed this.

HappyFruit
was started by a guy who’d worked at one of the pharma giants, developing the
next generation of antidepressants, and Cyrus was on a fruit kick. Cyrus ate
nothing but fruit, at every meal, and kept an ornate journal of his bowel
movements. He had boxes of organic fruit delivered to his office every day, and
he could go through ten pounds a week, just at work.

Cyrus’ wife Mimi also
started eating nothing but fruit because she felt uncomfortable eating other
stuff around him and he had sold her on the health benefits. But Mimi felt
draggy and exhausted on an all-fruit diet, and the more she forced herself to
keep eating apples and fresh berries all day, the more depressed she became. To
her protein-starved brain, life just didn’t seem worthwhile or even livable –
so she tried to kill herself.

When she finally got home after a month under
observation at the best hospital Cyrus could buy, Cyrus announced that he’d
figured out the solution to the problem: If the fruit contained chemicals to
make you happier, then Mimi wouldn’t feel so bad about subsisting on it. He
spent months and millions developing genetically modified fruit, with small
doses of SSRIs and NMDA-antagonists in every bite. Good for your mind, good for
your body. Mimi divorced Cyrus a few months after he founded HappyFruit, which
managed to stay in business two whole years.

Top image: Matthew Peoples