Dubious Creatures, Episode 3: The Weird Raccoon

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 2: Dubious Creatures

Episode 3: The Weird Raccoon

Brooding YA Hero Review

This week's book is Brooding YA Hero: Becoming a Main Character (Almost) as Awesome as Me, by Carrie Ann DiRisio.

This is the book version of the Brooding YA Hero twitter account.  Broody, the brooding YA hero, sets out to write a how-to book to explain how supporting characters can become main characters.  These how-to sections are interspersed with narrative interludes where his evil ex-girlfriend, Blondie, drags him around to meet various supporting characters in an attempt to get him to show some empathy.

A lot of what Broody says is repetitive, but that's the joke.  He also never answers the question or gives any actionable advice on how to become a main character, but this is directly addressed and is also kind of the point: he has no idea what he's talking about.

There is some pretty good stuff in here about how toxic the typical brooding YA hero is, how "not like other girls" is problematic, and how female characters who are assertive and know how to wear makeup are always antagonists.  IT doesn't go very deep, but it's based on a twitter account.

Power Writing

My friend Dani recently introduced me to power writing, which she learned from her professor, Goldberry Long.  Dani introduced it by saying that it sounds juvenile, but it's the most useful thing she picked up in grad school, so give it a try before judging it.

The rules go like this:

1. Write by hand.  You're not going to get the same flow, and you're going to back track too much if you're typing.
2. Set a timer.  I do 5 minutes. Dani does 16 minutes.  It doesn't really matter as long as it's not too long for you to keep it up and long enough for you to get something out of it.
3. You can't use periods.  A period ends a thought and you don't want to end a thought.  You want to keep going, just spewing ideas.  Instead of a period, you can use a comma and the word "and".
4. You cannot stop
1. You can write slow
2. No crossing things out, fixing, or editing.  You can say "That last bit should be crossed out" or "that's not the right word" or "No, no, I don't like that because..."
3. If you get stuck, you can repeat the last word or the last phrase until you know what to say next.

Power writing is not meant as a way to write your story fast.  Instead, it's an idea generator.  It's good to start with a kind of prompt.  So for example, the other day I power wrote on what my main character's job would be.  I rambled off options and wrote about the pros and cons, and by the end of five minutes, I had stumbled upon something that would work.  The next day I rambled about things that would change from one verse of a story to the next, and stumbled upon some things that were going to happen that I hadn't anticipated. 

The power write is pretty much unreadable when you're done, but there will probably be one good thing in there that's going to make it into a story.  Dani suggests chaining your power writes, so the one jewel you got out of the first one becomes the prompt that you can use for a second power write.  I've found that after a power write, I can make an action plan, or an outline of what I'm going to actually write, so I spend a few minutes doing that.  Then I'm ready to go and make the most of the time that I have.

It's pretty cool, and you might want to check it out.

Dubious Creatures, Episode 2: The Gremlins

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 2: Dubious Creatures

Episode 2: The Gremlins

Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods Review

This week's story is Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods: Twenty Chilling Stories from the Wilderness, by Hal Johnson.  I read this for research, because I'm trying to find a second story about a squonk.  While it did have the one squonk story told in the most engaging way I've found so far, it didn't give me anything new.  It was, however, a fun read.

So this is twenty short stories about "fearsome critters" or cryptozoology of North America.  Most of them come from old lumberjack oral traditions, and they are all whacky tall-tales to explain why so-and-so disappeared in the woods.  I love lumberjack folklore, and this had the appropriate level of whackiness that captures the spirit of the tales told aloud.  A lot of the sources I've been through lately are...dry.  The animals are presented as they would in a beastiary, with basics about where they can be found and what they look like and what they do.  If the author was talking about an elephant, I'd call it factual, but when they're talking about a squonk...I don't know.  This was not like that, and it was a pleasant experience.

What this is is a set of short stories, each about a different absurd animal.  They are very short--maybe eight pages at most with big type and illustrations that glow in the dark.  Yeah.  It's that kind of book.  While the narrator is attempting to tell you about the animal in question, he usually does it by detailing an incident, and that incident was where there was a narrative aspect missing in a lot of written accounts of these animals.  The narrator also inserts himself into the stories more often than not, either as a main character or as someone whose opinion nobody bothered to ask or to compare someone in the story to his arch-nemesis.  He's the same narrator in each other the stories, so we learn more and more about him as we work through the book.  Not enough to piece together some sort of larger narrative, but enough to get to know him.

On an incident where a boyscout troop was eaten: "Five of these scouts were tenderfoots, and hardly missed, but the sixth, Beauregard Shugtemple, had earned the coveted merit badge in phrenology, and so search parties combed the area for weeks to no avail.  Beauregard Shagtemple was my nephew, and the young scamp had hidden the keys to my strongbox a week before disappearing, so it was particularly important to me that he be found..."

The thing I liked most about this was how it played with time and expectations.  Most of these stories come from logging days, where the world was much less connected and they didn't have the technology we have today.  So in a lot of writing about cryptozoology, the narrator is set in that time and is a kind of pseudo-scientist who didn't know any better.  Here, the narrator has all of those trappings, and he's often telling stories set back in the day, but then he'll throw in something modern, and the juxtaposition will be funny. 

For a beast in California: "We hired several native guides, mostly surfers and out-of-work actors..."

After a while his whole existence itself becomes strange.  He's a kooky anachronism, who studies animals that don't exist, except they...do?  And the Smithsonian recognizes them.  But still call the study of these animals cryptozoology.  This is not a nitpicky complaint or me pointing at continuity errors, but it's purposefully silly.

The whole thing is pretty silly.  At one point they're being chased by a monster, who can't penetrate a shield they've  finagled, so the monster turns around, shoots in the opposite direction, and the projectile goes all the way around the Earth and kills the guy our narrator is with.  At one point, he's describing an encounter with an animal that's half bear, half deer and confuses people into thinking that it's one or the other so they're not prepared to face both.  In response to being cornered by this beast, "But it could not have foreseen that I was not just a hunter but also a fly fisherman." And thus he escapes.  It's this level of absurdity that's present in the oral tall-tales that I've been missing in my other research. 

***

Next week, Brooding YA Hero: Becoming a Main Character (Almost) as Awesome as Me, a satirical look at YA heroes, by Carrie Ann DiRisio.

Totoros Are Everywhere

My son gets stickers as rewards.  He gets them for things like cleaning up and getting in and out of the bathtub without making a fuss. 

I'm the one who picks the stickers, so I got a pack from My Neighbor Totoro a while back.  They're high quality stickers, the puffy kind that have some heft to them, but not the slick puffy kind that are stiff, these are the mat puffy kind that can bend and curl.  We used to put them on a cardboard long box from the comic book store, but lately he's been peeling all the stickers off so that he can give them to himself again.  He sticks these stickers to his shirt and walks around the house.  And while the less hefty stickers get shed all over the place because they're not sticky anymore, the Totoro stickers get peeled off his shirt and put in strange places, where he presses them down enough and they are still sticky enough as to be hard to remove when he's not looking.

The other issue is that he saw My Neighbor Totoro for the first time a few weeks ago, and his little mind was blown at the idea that Totoro exists outside of his sticker collection.  So he's been targeting the Totoro stickers in his re-stickering. 

This is a long way of saying that I've been finding Totoros all over my house, and have consequently started taking photos of them.

The Bathroom Floor

Bedroom

Living Room

My Desk

Inside His Crib

Hiding

My Closet

Dubious Creatures, Episode 1: The Wooded Island

The Twenty Percent True Podcast

Season 2: Dubious Creatures

Episode 1: The Wooded Island