Story Ideas

I've had a couple story ideas peculating for the past several days.

I.

I've been watching Mystery Science Theater and the last episode was "The Earth vs the Spider."  Before it started, I pictured a spider that could take on the earth.  The ball of its body would be the size of the moon.  It would wrap it's legs around the globe and squeeze, then never let go.  It's hairy limbs would displace water from the oceans and devastate great swaths of land miles wide and thousands of miles long. 

So large portions of the population would be wiped out in the spider's first hug, and the remaining people would live between its legs.  They would have to sever each leg, one at a time, using massive fire power and multi-national efforts (or what's left of the nations for a multi-national efforts).

II.


I've been thinking about how supernatural creatures probably need a lot of therapy.  "I've felt really isolated and afraid since I turned into a werewolf.  What if I hurt my loved ones?  I ache all the time, and I live my life just counting down the days, dreading the next full moon.  I hate myself and I just want it to be over."  "I have really complicated feelings about my husband.  He stole my seal skin and now I'm bound to him.  I miss being a seal, but I love him, but I don't know...is that love even real or just an effect of him keeping my skin?"  "I just can't stop drinking blood.  I need my next hit.  I'm powerless."

But who are they going to talk to without being sent to a psychiatric hospital, which I'm sure wouldn't be the best environment for some supernatural creatures or for the other patients there when the moon is full and they're not set up to properly contain a werewolf.

How many sessions could a werewolf get in before their therapist is like, "Okay, let's talk about your delusions," and the werewolf sighs and knows this isn't going to help them.  When I asked about it (because these are the kinds of conversations I have) my therapist mom told me that she'd never say, "You're not a werewolf," but rather something like "You're telling me things that most people don't believe.  Could we talk about that?"  She said it'd be similar to the clients she gets who see ghosts.  Their delusions might be helping them, like if they can talk to their deceased grandfather.  And if it's not hurting them and not endangering others, there's really not a problem.

But then, what about werewolves?  From an outsider's perspective, their delusion is hurting them: they have violent urges and are worried they'll hurt others.  So we're back to our same predicament.

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender Review

This week's book is The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, magical realism by Leslye Walton.

This story follows three generations of women.  Emilienne, a French immigrant to Manhattan, closes her heart to love after she's betrayed by her betrothed, two of her siblings die, her mother becomes incorporeal, and her sister turns into a parakeet.  Viviane has a sweet childhood romance with Jack, the boy next door, and can smell the rain coming.  Ava, the narrator, is born with wings.

This book helped me put my finger on why I love magical realism: this is my tall-tale spinning Texan granddad's genre.  It reminded me so much of his stories and of my mother's stories about my family.  At times while reading this, I could hear the cadence of his speech.

"In his haste to flee the unpleasant scene, Rene ran out into the street, forgetting to take his clothes with him.  As he ran through the shop-lined blocks toward his family's apartment, he was followed by a growing crowd of women (and a few men), all wrought with hysteria over the sight of Rene Roux's naked buttocks.  The frenzy quickly escalated into a full-fledged riot that lasted four and a half days."

My granddad said you should do work you'd do even if they didn't pay you.  So he worked for the phone company, riding the trains.  A man sat down next to him one day--a tall man with a sad, lean face--and my granddad told him he looked troubled. The man sighed and nodded, confiding that his job was running him ragged and that he'd lost faith in this great country of ours.  "I'm sorry to hear that," he said.  "But you got it all wrong."  He then proceeded to go on about how this was the land of opportunity, how men fought and died for the freedoms we enjoy, and how it would be wrong of us to take their sacrifices for granted.

The part that got me about this story was the part that he didn't say, but my mom told me in her own stories.  Life was not kind to my granddad.  As a child, he was hit by a car, backed up over, then hit again, putting him in a coma for two weeks.  (When he woke up, he asked for a glass of water from the fountain outside his room.  He had heard people talking about it while he was in his coma.)  As a teenager during the depression, he and his mother were homeless.  (They snuck out of hotels without paying.  They stayed with single, female relatives who wouldn't allow my granddad in the house, so he slept on the back porch.)  He pulled himself out of poverty by joining the army during WWII, (where he filled in the holes in the pavement at Perl Harbor.  Where they once stopped the train to fire a machine gun into a field, then went through the field, collecting the quail they'd shot), where they fixed his lazy eye and sent him to college on the GI bill. 

The man on the train listened, his face clearing and some of the shadows fading from under his eyes.  As the train came to a stop, the man said, "Thank you.  You're absolutely right," stood up, put on his stovepipe hat, stepped out the back of the train, and gave the Gettysburg Address.

So I really responded to this book.  It has a family history, told with an ambiguity that makes it either magic or a funny hyperbole.  And that combination hits all my nostalgia buttons.  

***

Next week: urban fantasy with Shadowshaper by Daniel Jose Older.

Podcast Recommendations

Today I want to share some of my favorite podcast episodes.  They're moments of fantastic storytelling that you should check out.  Most of them are pretty short too.

• The Moth: Michaela Murphy "The All-Star Game"  A mad dash to get her little brother to the All-Star game 
• The Moth: Jeff Simmermon "Empathic Subway Screaming"   "You don't know what challenges he's facing in his life right now."
• Snap Judgment: Joe Klocek "The California Confederacy"  Don't make fun of the flag
• This American Life: "Mom Jokes" Go to 40:30. Mom tells the best/worst joke
• Reply All: Shipped to Timbuktu   The girl guides are hard core
• Reply All: This Proves Everything   Shipping is serious business
• Reply All: Zardulu   Pizza Rat was just the beginning

A Gathering of Shadows Review

This week's book is A Gathering of Shadows, the sequel to A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab.   It's going to be hard to talk about this one without spoiling the last one, so consider this your warning for spoilers.

Kell, our world hopping magician, is dealing with the fallout of his actions in the last book.  He's lost the king and queen's trust to the point where they have him under house arrest, followed by guards except when doing his official world-hopping duties.  He's restless and angry, and it's unclear if this is due to his confinement, his new bond with Rhy, or the after effects of his use of the black stone.  Rhy becomes a larger character, as he deals with his guilt and frustration over his bond with Kell and his residual fear over the fact that he died and now owes his life to Kell.  They decide they need to blow off steam and secretly enter Kell in the Element Games, a grand international magic contest. 

Meanwhile Lila has joined a crew of privateers captained by the suave, swashbuckling, and ridiculously named Alucard.  They return to London because Alucard is a contestant in the games, and Lila steals the identity of another contestant so she can join in as well. 

This kept the momentum of the first book, despite being the second book in a trilogy.  It didn't face the sophomore slump, and the added world building held together, expanding and enriching what we knew from the first book rather than pushing it into the realm of unbelievable.  The side characters were equally expanded and enriched without taking away from our old friends Kell and Lila.  I was especially taken with Rhy's development, Alucard's layers, and their surprisingly healthy relationship.

At the center of this book is the Element Games, a tournament where magicians face off in duels with the winner advancing to the next round.  But the games didn't start until two thirds of the way through the book, and the duels themselves were abbreviated or shown from the point of view of a non-combatant.  The lack of magical fight scenes disappointed me much less than I would have expected, because the real heart of the story isn't in who faces off against who and all the spectacular tricks they use while doing so.  The heart of the story is in how the games affect the characters, how and why they enter the tournament, and how they deal with secret identities outside the ring.

A side story about White London is sprinkled through the book.  It was isolated from the rest of the story, but Schwab had built my trust in the previous book that all the story lines would all come together in the end.  It did come together, but in a way that marked the end of one book and the beginning of another, hopefully carrying the series' momentum into the last installment.

This series is coming through as a solid trilogy.

***

Next week: magical realism with The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton

The Testament of Mary Review

A while back, I started reading The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin.  I love Jemisin's work and I was excited to read a new series from her.  The book is absolutely lovely.  However, one of the main story lines is about the grief of a woman whose young son dies.  She described how her baby used to laugh, what a sweet child he was.  Her pain felt real.  Honest.  And if that wasn't heartbreaking enough it's written in the second person. 

The second person. 

I couldn't do it.  I'd read a section and then have to snuggle my son.  It didn't take long for me to decide to put the book down and come back to it in a few years.

I find it shocking that this second person perspective worked.  Jemisin is so talented, I don't know how she does it.  I think it has to do with the honesty, or maybe it just worked for me because I related so strongly to the situation anyway that it being in second person felt completely natural.

I had to go away and read a half dozen goofy rom-coms I downloaded for free off the internet.

Then I remembered that I should write a blog post.  I looked through my to-read pile to see if I had anything short, and I found The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín, which my friend Eric recommended.

This novella describes the later events of the New Testament from Mary's, Jesus' mother's, point of view.  She looks back from the end of her life to describe Lazarus' rising, the wedding at Cana, the crucification, and her escape from Jerusalem.

You probably already see the problem here, in which case you are swifter than I was.  I'd switched from one book about a son dying to another.  About half way through, with the crucification looming, I put the book down and read another half dozen goofy rom-coms.

I did come back to it though, partially out of guilt about my over-due blog posts and partially because it's such a short book and partially because it honestly didn't affect me as strongly as The Fifth Season.

The Mary in this story is not the same character as the Madonna of the New Testament.  In the New Testament, Mary's in on it.  Angels keep her in the loop about the divinity of her son, and at the wedding at Cana, Mary's like, "They're out of wine, Jesus.  Help them out."  But in this story, that's not the case. 

Mary is skeptical.  She's not a believer.  This character is not the same Mary I love.  As my husband put it, "I'm not upset that it's blasphemous.  It's just that if this were fanfiction, I'd be upset she was out of character."

But once you get past that, it makes for an interesting story.  Mary doesn't like her son's friends and thinks they're a bad influence on him.  She knows the things he's up to are going to get him into trouble and she tries to convince him to stop for his own safety.  She's a parent concerned for her son.  She's a parent that doesn't understand how important his beliefs and activities are to him.  It's a situation that's relatable if on a larger scale.

The miracles are ambiguous and eerie.  Mary hears the story of Lazarus' resurrection second hand and sees him after he's been brought back.  He's sickly and creepy and the town is afraid of him.  Then, even though she witnesses the water turned to wine, the situation was chaotic and she couldn't be sure that it hadn't always been wine.

"You mean he will be crucified?" I asked.
"Yes," Martha said.  "Yes."
And then Mary [a different Mary] spoke: "But that will be the beginning."
"Of what?" I asked.
"Of a new life for the world," she said.
Martha and I ignored her.

The disciples don't like Mary's stance on this.  They want to hear her story, but they don't like the story she tells.  They want her to be someone she's not, and they change her character in their gospels to make her more like what they expected.  Then they tell her, "This is the way it was" and contradict her story.  It feels a bit like gaslighting, but it also feels a bit like maybe they're right and her memory has changed in light of her guilt and pain over her son dying.  But then I guess questioning reality is the whole point of gaslighting.

The is the most powerful when the disciples have the gall to tell her that his suffering was necessary.  They tell her that he was the son of God, which they consider more important than his being her son.

"I was there," I said.  "I fled before it was over but if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it.  It was not worth it."

It's harsh and jarring against a character I've always loved, but if it's taken for what it is, it's an interesting story about loss.

***

Next week: A Gathering of Shadows by V. E. Schwab, the sequel to A Darker Shade of Magic.