Two …

One …

(gone)

In lieu of that post, I have a fun thing: an announcement for all you bloggers headed to BEA in June!

(Also, my announcement presupposes that the bloggers I’m addressing are interested in what I write, or what Maggie Stiefvater writes or what Tessa Gratton writes, or a combination. But then, you’re here, so it’s probably safe to assume that you are, at the very least, aware that I write books.)

Now, the announcement—Carolrhoda Lab, who’s the publisher of our upcoming anthology The Curiosities, is going to be hosting a blogger breakfast, and right now, they’re holding a contest over on Facebook where you can enter to win an invitation!

If your name is picked, you’ll come eat breakfast with me and Tess and Maggie and a few other Carolrhoda authors, and ask us questions and participate in general merriment, and I will try so, so hard not to spill anything on myself.

(Which is something I do sometimes.)

(It’s problematic.)

Anyway, if you’re a blogger who’s going to BEA and hanging out with us sounds like a fun time, go and get entered, and hopefully I’ll see you at breakfast!

Ready . . .

Ready . . .

Are you ready for it?

Here we go:

I’ve been working on this particular meme for roughly two years.

Yes. I know. In my defense, though, it was a really hard meme.

The instructions are simple. (Deceptively so.) List five fictional characters you closely identify with, and then explain why. Not five characters you admire, or find attractive, or think are funny, but five characters that you personally—like, as a person—identify with.

Now, let’s be very clear. It’s not that I consider myself to be such a mystery that I’m unquantifiable, and it’s not that no one ever appreciates or writes about people like me. It’s just that my type hardly ever shows up as more than a peripheral role—the literary equivalent to a walk-on. (In fact, some of my personal five are walk-ons.)

The following list can be roughly categorized by tropes (okay, sometimes the tropes are stupid-specific ones that I kind of made up, but still, I am organized. Look how organized I am!)

Also, some of the character descriptions may seem to sit in direct conflict with each other, but that’s not really true. Because inside, I think that a person can really be a lot of people, depending on the situation.

My list of Brennaesque characters reads as follows:

The Comic Relief

Luna Lovegood—Harry Potter. So, when I was in high school, I had this very bizarre sense of fashion. It was heavily influenced by my nonexistent budget, but also, it was kind of made worse by my affinity for … trinkets. I mean, I decorated everything. I sewed plastic Christmas ornaments on my sweaters and glued tiny dollhouse clocks to my shoes. I went out in public wearing rubber monster finger puppets. Plural. More than one.

I didn’t usually volunteer opinions, but if you asked, I’d certainly tell you what I thought. Regardless of how blunt or inconsiderate or strange it was. And sometimes I knew that I shouldn’t, but most of the time, diplomacy didn’t even occur to me. Because honesty is a virtue and precision matters. Because when you are Luna Lovegood, things mostly seem to sort themselves out. Sometimes you’re mildly perturbed when people call you crazy, but there’s really no point in being tragic about it.

Also, in order to make people start taking you seriously, you’d have to stop doing all the things you like. And well, that’s no fun.

The Enigma

Foxface—The Hunger Games. I love action/horror/adventure to a embarrassing degree, but I have to be honest. A good chunk of my reading/viewing time is spent thinking things like, “Wow, they are terribly, terribly unprepared,” or, “I would . . . not ever do that.”

Narratively speaking, Foxface is super-minor. She doesn’t even have a real name. However, she’s the first character I’ve come across who approaches survivalism in what I consider to be a reasonable way. She’s measured. Meticulous. Her combat style is nonexistent, which means that it constantly takes everyone by surprise.

I hung out with boys growing up. The corollary to this is that I played a lot of paintball, laser tag, and cross-country capture the flag. And over the years, I’ve been called out again and again for not playing fair—not engaging, avoiding skirmishes and firefights, never giving up my position or forging alliances. Apparently, people who enjoy loud, messy shootouts consider this behavior cowardly. Another word for it is conservative. Another word is mercenary. Another is pragmatic. To me, these are all words for effective.

The Reluctant Strategist

Valentine Wiggin—Ender’s Game. She’s too passive in character and in action to ever take over the world, which is a trait I totally, totally relate to. She understands how power works, but it frightens her. She’s an archivist, not a leader, and her ambitious and psychopathic brother Peter constantly takes advantage of her, because he knows all her weak points. He knows she can help him get what he wants politically, because she understands how the game is played while not actually wanting any of the rewards for herself.

She isn’t oblivious to this, and there are even times when she secretly suspects she may be smarter than Peter. But she also knows it doesn’t matter. He’s still going to rise to power and crush the world, with her help or without it, and no matter how tragic the outcome or the consequences will be, (here’s the kicker, the thing that makes her complex and surprising and just a little bit scary) there’s this tiny, guilty, anarchistic part of her that finds the idea so, so liberating.

The Waif

Allison Cleve Dufresnes—The Little Friend. This is a little bit of a cheat, because I don’t currently resemble Allison at all. At sixteen though, I was kind of a dead ringer for her.

Allison is shy and vague and just a little … off. She might possibly be pretty, if she wasn’t so awkward. She might turn out to be smart, if she only made an effort. She could have friends if she ever made eye-contact or expressed interest or asked people questions about themselves.

But she doesn’t. Instead, she spends all her time alone or hanging around with her little sister or her aunts. She likes babies and animals and making candy from scratch. She hates conflict, noise, and the fact that things die. She never knows for sure if she’s awake, or only dreaming.

If boys call her on the phone to ask her out, she’s so mortified and confounded that her anxiety comes off as total indifference. In fact, my early to mid-adolescence can be pretty much summed up in her one-word response to Pemberton Hull’s invitation to come with him to the drive-in. She replies slowly, almost drowsily, “Why?”

The Heroine

Alice—The Magicians. This is the one I never in a million years thought that I would actually find. This is the girl-like-me who has more than minor bearing on the plot—the girl who actually does something.

In a lot of ways, Alice is the condensed version of a bunch of my character traits—worst and best. She’s good at what she does, but reluctant to put herself out into the world. She’s capable of an almost scary determination, but most of the time she just lets herself be buffeted around for the sake of keeping the peace. While everyone around her is busy acting ironic and sophisticated, and pretending so hard to be disaffected, she recognizes the whole performance as fake, but doesn’t really try to change any of them.

She’s timid, and because of this, her main-character boyfriend, Quentin, is always, always underestimating her. And most of the time, she doesn’t really prove him wrong. (Except this time. And some other ones.) Because the thing is, when she’s not actively destroying things, she looks pretty harmless.

(Also, sometimes when I don’t sleep for a long time, I get the very surreal feeling that [what happens to Alice at the end of the book] is going to happen to me. Any second. Like BLAM, it will be unavoidable.)

(Then I take a deep breath and eat some Sweetarts and go make a pie.)

*****

Okay, now that I’ve actually had a chance to look back through my list, I’m feeling slightly egomaniacal. I’ve picked just a slew of characters notable for their talent or their cleverness, which is something pretty close to fraud. After all, I am not nearly as smart as Valentine Wiggin. I can’t magically turn a marble into a tiny glass horsey and trot it around on the tabletop like Alice. I would die in two seconds in the Hunger Games.

The thing about fictional characters is, they’re kind of awesome.

Even the timid or the selfish ones. Even the ones who act impulsively or tell lies or make terrible decisions. Fictional characters never leave the house without brushing their hair or forget to do their laundry, or if they do, it’s kind of endearing, because it’s not real life. Even the irritating or the commonplace things start to seem a little magical in fiction.

So I think that maybe that’s the nature of the exercise—we just have to accept the incongruity between real and pretend, and pick the characters who most closely represent our better selves.

What about you? Do you have a fictional character you relate to? A handful of them? A motif or a type or a trope that speaks to you?

(I promise, even if they’re inhumanly awesome, it’s not egomaniacal to say that you see a little of yourself in them. That’s kind of what fiction is for.)

We’re two weeks from finals, and teenage Brenna is surprised to realize that despite her general lack of enthusiasm for public school (also, that right there is a gross understatement intended for comedic effect), she’s not really all that impatient for the semester to end.

This time last year, I was restless, annoyed, unsatisfied with pretty much everything. (I was probably a little insufferable.)

But now, I feel strangely light. I want to dance around and put lilacs in my hair, and toy animals and feathers and tiny paper cocktail umbrellas. I want to roll in the grass like a puppy. I’m just not the same girl I was at 16.

The change is mostly apparent in little ways, like how the underclassmen on the soccer team will sometimes look to me when it’s time to organize ourselves for relay drills, and the way my teachers have started treating me like they expect me to take charge of projects or volunteer answers, and the fact that my hair has grown more than five inches and comes down almost to my hips when I wear it loose.

Also, now I sometimes wear my hair loose.

I have a whole closet of eclectic DIY clothes, some of which are disastrous, but some of which are excellent. I have a sister who looks like a best friend. I have pastel-pink fingernails and cinnamon lipgloss and I get picked for things, group presentations and committees and teams in PE. People say hi to me in the halls—sometimes people I’ve never even talked to. They nod and smile when they see me, and even though I’m still marginally terrified of strangers, I keep my chin up and work hard to smile back.

I am (sort of/kind of) someone-in-the-real-world, and I don’t even know exactly how it happened.

Since my 3-D Design class last semester, I’ve been getting more and more interested in sculpture—specifically ceramics (which, up until I actually took the class, I was convinced I hated). Drawing has always been one of my hobbies. I enjoy it. I am proficient at it. When I draw a picture of something, it mostly looks like the thing it’s supposed to represent. However, while my drawing ability is passable … it’s not really anything special.

Turns out, sculpture is what I’m actually any good at.

Lately, I’ve been hanging out in the art wing during my off hour, even when I should be spending that time filling out all these mind-numbing worksheets on figurative language or doing the reading. Instead, I sit in the empty ceramics room, amassing an army of little clay people. It’s time-consuming and labor-intensive, but weirdly enjoyable in a way that Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is definitely not.

It’s pretty much my new favorite thing.

I left in the middle of English* today to go down to the art wing. I wanted to pick up a figure I’d done in my spare time. Tock had said he was going to fire it yesterday and that it would be cool by this afternoon.
     [ …]
     In the ceramics room, the cart was out and everyone was sorting through the pieces, looking for their own. I stood back and waited for the crowd to thin.
     Suddenly, Dweezil said, “Ho-ly shit.”
     A few people raised their heads, then went back to whatever they were doing.
     “Would you look at this?” Dweezil said to the boy next to him. “This is $%&@ing awesome!” He was holding my figurine in both hands, turning it carefully. “It doesn’t have a name on it. You know who made this?”
     The other boy just shook his head.
     “It’s mine,” I said very softly from the other side of the ceramics cart.
     Dweezil turned to look at me, kind of like he’d never seen me before. Then he set the piece very gently in my outstretched hands. It had cracked in all the places I’d expected it would.
     “That’s really good,” he said.
     I ran my finger along the cracks, feeling how rough the edges were. “It’s $%&@ed-up though, look.”
     Dweezil squinted down at me over the top of the cart. “Are you kidding? It’s bitching. You know that, right?”
     I just shrugged and looked away, which is not a gracious thing to do. My mother would tell me it’s rude, but honestly, I’ve got no idea how to act.
     I wanted to tell him that his spoon self-portrait was my favorite thing anyone in our whole drawing class had done. I wanted to tell him that I saw his wire sculpture** in a glass case in the library and that it was amazing. My voice was gone though. He called it $%&@ing awesome.

It’s weird to think that I have somehow occurred to Dweezil. That he’s noticed something I’ve done, taken the time to appraise it, and then just announced that it was good. Like, without being embarrassed for having a damn opinion. I mean, if someone were going to notice me for something real, I wouldn’t have expected it to be him. I always sort of believed he doesn’t notice anything.

Except, when I’m actually honest, I know that’s not true.

In the figure drawing unit last quarter, he was the one who volunteered to sit for the long pose. He spent three days sitting up on one of the art tables with a sheet tacked behind him.

I drew him on a big piece of gray construction paper, using charcoal and white Conté

Every day, we got a short break partway through the class period, and then he would climb down from the table and wander around the room, looking at all the half-finished drawings.

Mine wasn’t good. I hadn’t figured out how to build up the Conté in layers so that I was actually modeling facial features. I didn’t understand how to use contrast and highlight to imply depth, and in the end, the only part I got perfect was his hands.

Every day, he would stand at my easel, arms folded over his chest. The way he looked at the drawing was sharp and brutal, like he saw all the flaws and the inaccuracies, but thoughtful too, like maybe he also saw the perfect hands.

I would stand somewhere off to the side, not looking at him because when you’re not that good with people, even just looking at a person can be a very awkward thing.

He never spoke, just looked at the drawing like he saw everything there was to see.

It’s increasingly weird to me, this idea of looking. Of seeing.

Anytime I consider #4 (which is an embarrassing lot), I’m pretty sure that I’m doing it wrong. I’m being obtuse or missing something important, and so I keep telling myself I simply need to be more observant. Like if I just gather enough information and enough raw data, the details will eventually add up to a person.

The truth is, I’m afraid of #4. And not in one of those obvious ways where I think he will make me feel stupid or be mean to me or laugh at me or anything.

I’m just … afraid. And so I spend just a ridiculous amount of time jogging around the practice fields after school with the rest of the soccer team, trying to reconcile the fact that I’m Having an Actual Feeling, and also, I don’t know what it means.

Since that day at the fence, I literally cannot look at him. Even when I pass him in the halls and actually have to turn my head at an awkward angle to avoid it. Even when he’s not looking at me.

My bizarre impulse to avert my gaze makes it kind of hard to implement data collection, so in the absence of any new information, I mostly wind up revisiting the things I already know. Also, this is kind of just what you do when you’re seventeen and you like a boy you’ve barely ever talked to.

I’m stupidly charmed by the fact that he blushes. It’s just so fantastic and so novel and I’m endlessly intrigued by the biology of it. I’ve never been a blusher. Sometimes if I’m happy or excited or it’s really cold out, my mouth and cheeks get pink, but that’s about it. I wonder if blushing feels like anything, and what purpose it serves, and whether he just views it as a peculiar tic, or if he hates it, or if he even knows he does it.

(A quick note from Grown-up Brenna—A few years ago, I read an article that talked about the evolutionary advantage of blushing. For real. And what the advantage basically boils down to is this: blushing makes people trust you. It makes them like you. It tells people that you are deeply attuned to the expectations of others, and so you probably won’t violate the social contract because you’re too aware of how other people will judge you. Also, Darwin called blushing “the most peculiar and most human of all expressions,” which I find apt and kind of delightful.)

So, what I’m saying is, thanks to the magic of being a 17-year-old girl, I successfully gloss over pretty much all-the-everything. I make #4 into this blushing fictional construct that only really exists in my head. Pretend-#4 is all the things I wrote down so blithely on my list in 10th grade—shy, sweet, smart, strange (secretly sentimental?).

Entirely imaginary.

Which kind of seems like taking the easy way. Because it is.

*****

Do you feel like people notice you for the true things—the ones you actually value about yourself? Is that weird? Gratifying? Do you wish it would happen more?

Also, are you a blusher? If so, what does it feel like? Can you tell when you’re doing it? And if you do blush, do you mind it? Because according to science, you shouldn’t. You should embrace the fact that you are evolutionarily making people like you!

Which is sort of like a superpower.

*Let me tell you about my American Lit teacher. He is spectacular. He’s the polar opposite of M and her obsession with order. To the point that if I finish my reading early, he lets me get up and leave. He doesn’t write me a pass, he doesn’t ask me where I’m going or tell me when to come back. He just … lets me leave.

**Re: Dweezil’s wire sculpture, I still totally consider it to be exceptional. As I remember, it was this round little man, nearly spherical, sitting with his feet splayed out and drinking from a bottle, with a whole mess of other bottles scattered around him.

No one else really tried anything exciting with the project. They took their wire and then made these long, flimsy, wiry things with it. This was the opposite of that. Just like with his spoon self-portrait, Dweezil zeroed in on the most obvious parts of the assignment, and then ignored them entirely.

I like horror movies. A lot. Like … I really, really like horror movies.

It’s a condition that’s plagued me since childhood, and yes, I could probably even make some weird attempt to justify my obsessions or invent a cool little postulate as to why my little-girl thoughts were dominated by movie monsters, and not flowers or ponies or rainbow-dolphin-unicorns. (I was an English major with a psych minor—I’m uncommonly equipped to mangle theories into vague reflections of reality.)

But I just have this feeling that anything I could come up with wouldn’t mean that much. The true, honest thing is actually very simple. I saw my first horror movie when I was six (It was House. It was terrible.), and since then, I’ve just kind of been fixated.

As a result, I spent most of my childhood searching out terrible, hilarious monster flicks (Puppet Master, Leprechaun, Troll), and then talking my sister and my friends into to watching them with me. I saw the good, important movies, and the classics—The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Nosferatu. I saw All The Zombie Movies. I read special effects books about designing prosthetic wounds and watched documentaries about the rise and fall of the slasher film. If I happened to be wandering around looking oblivious and humming disjointedly to myself, there was a good chance I was bopping along to “Don’t Fear the Reaper” or “Pet Sematary.”

So it is with very little irony that I say, The Cabin in the Woods exists for me! Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard made it for ME. (Oh be quiet—I will tell myself this fantasy if I want to.)

I went and saw it on Saturday. And not just because I have a troubling, knee-jerk impulse to see every horror movie that comes out, regardless of whether it looks like it will be any good, and not just because I am in love with Topher Brink.

I saw it because it promised me something unusual and unexpected and fantastic.

These promises were not empty.

The Cabin in the Woods is my new best friend. It knows all the horror movie conventions, and it understands them, and loves them and cuddles them just like I do, and it still has the absolute temerity to flip them over and start poking around in the wiring.

Even now, three days later, I catch myself thinking about the narrative and the structure—taking apart ideas and stacking them in a neat little row like a set of morbid Russian nesting dolls. And no, I don’t think this movie will be for everyone, But I know enough to tell you that if you like the same things I do—if you get irrationally excited about zombie apocalypses, and the piano theme to John Carpenter’s Halloween makes you feel nostalgic, instead of just edgy or kind of annoyed (and yes, if you love Topher Brink)—then you need to go see it.

Because if you’re anything like me, then Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard are thinking of you.

They made this movie is for you, too.

To reorient: A long time ago, before hyper-productive writing trips and knee surgery and that time I revised a book, we left teenage-Brenna post-break-up, marginally assertive, and newly intent on locating the missing Jane. (And also a little bit of a nihilist—not even a regular, run-of-the-mill nihilist either, but like a fancy one. That’s old news though. She’s already growing out of it.)

Following my awkward showdown with Dill, I have Jane’s number. Like, physically have it. On a scrap of paper. In my possession. This is alarming, because it means that now I actually have to do something. Also, Catherine will not stop teasing me over my phobia of the telephone.

I call Jane’s house after dinner, hating the sound of the signal ringing on the line. My aversion to the phone is hard to explain. I don’t freeze or stutter, I don’t panic. It’s more like as soon as I’m in the true, tangible act of calling—as soon as I’m actually holding the receiver to my ear, I just … really, really want to hang up.

The impulse is bizarre and kind of embarrassing. Sometimes I consider the possibility that it might be neurological, but I don’t really think that’s the case. I think part of it might be that I sometimes have a really hard time understanding what someone’s saying when I can’t see them. Also, I’m beginning to suspect that I don’t have the greatest hearing and that’s probably why I sometimes have trouble understanding people even when I’m looking right at them.*

I’m about to just call it a wash and put the receiver down, when a girl answers. I ask for Jane and she says, “Are you her friend from school?”

It’s a weird question because it’s incredibly direct. Because it implies that Jane has only the one friend.

“Yeah, just—I hadn’t seen her in a while.”

“She’s not here.”

I have the unsettling feeling that this will be it. That I’ll thank the girl for her time and hang up the phone and that will be the end of the whole production and also of my friendship with Jane.

But the girl takes pity and says—pleasantly enough, “She’s in the hospital.”

I take a second to process that. I think about it. Sometimes people go to the hospital. I have never been in the hospital, but hospitalization is a known circumstance. It seems possible.

“Oh,” I say. “Will she be coming home soon?”

“Yeah. Maybe tomorrow. Or after that.”

I stand there in the kitchen, leaning my elbows on the counter, shifting from foot to foot. “Could you let her know I called?”

“Yeah, I will. She’ll like that.”

The idea of Jane in the hospital is a troubling one. I can tell, just from the way the girl says it, that it’s not hospital as that word would fit into the most basic equation of car accident or walking pneumonia.

If it belongs anywhere, it sits inside a set of brackets across from things like self-harm and malnutrition, totaling grimly to a whole-number sum of depression.

And because I can recognize the signs retroactively, I just grip the receiver tighter and nod. Later, I’ll wonder why I’m not more shocked, why I don’t feel disoriented or blindsided, but just then, standing in the kitchen, all I can think is that this has probably been coming for quite awhile.

Jane got out of the hospital yesterday. This morning, she walked over to meet me at school during my free hour.
     We stood in the parking lot, looking out at the soccer fields. They’d just gone over it with the riding mower so everything was short and flat, except for one yellow dandelion, jutting up, inexplicable.
     I shaded my eyes with my hand. “It took me a week just to get your number. Did you like how Dill was completely useless about the whole thing?”
     “I don’t like anything.”
     “Well, I like that flower,” I said, pointing at the dandelion. “It looks like it means business. Do you want to go get coffee?”
     “I don’t want anything.” Then she grinned at me. “Yeah, let’s go get some $%&@ing coffee.”
     She turned away and the sun on her hair made a rainbow, like light shining on a bird’s wing. I thought about that. I want lots of things, all the time. I just never say them out loud.
     I want Jane to be okay. I want her to be happy and the skin on her arms to be smooth and uninterrupted. I want Irish to come back to school and have it be like when we used to be friends. I want for Gatsby to not wind up in prison and for Dill to stop acting like I don’t exist, or like I somehow ruined his life.
     These are things I have no control over. My wanting them is unrelated to whether or not they happen.

Jane and I sit on the same side of the wooden booth at the coffee shop, even though I would probably never sit that way with Catherine or Wit. We talk a lot, but we don’t talk about where she was all week, or why, or anything like that. We talk about how our creative writing teacher might be a crackhead, because at least that would explain some of his more erratic behaviors. We talk about surrealist painters and how much we love the movie Grosse Pointe Blank and whether Jane will be locker partners with Catherine next year and why green pens are better than other kinds.

I’m a little unnerved that I could have missed so many of the signs leading up to her absence. It wasn’t that I glossed over things or ignored them, so much as I just didn’t find even the most telling symptoms to be worth remarking on.

Jane is really skinny.

But so am I, and so is Wit, and so are lots of other people who take decent care of themselves and get plenty to eat.

Jane is cynical, but this is high school, and so is pretty much everyone I hang out with.

Jane often has unexplained scratches running down her arms. But so do I and so does Little Sister Yovanoff, and so does anyone who plays contact sports and climbs trees and wrestles with dogs.

But the thing is, Jane doesn’t do those things. Jane is kind of a homebody. She paints and draws and drinks coffee. Sometimes she goes for walks. She pulls her food apart into tiny fragments and eats it like she’s doing science, and even taking into account her proclivity for saying hilarious things at inopportune times, I can’t ignore the fact that she’s been getting in trouble in class a lot lately.

She’s always been a little bit of a smartass, but in the last few months, her attitude has deteriorated drastically, mutating to include things like doing her entire persuasive speech in Farshivushian, and being sent to the office for calling our writing teacher a m*****f*****, and telling her guidance counsellor that she hoped his head caught on fire.

So I sit next to her, drinking my coffee and reevaluating all the data in the my mental Jane file in a diligent attempt to come up with a more accurate picture.

“Why aren’t you acting weird around me?” she says suddenly, like she can actually see my wheels turning.

And I just shrug and shake my head.

“I mean it,” she says, spinning her cup so that a little wave of milky coffee slops over the edge. “Why are you just acting regular and normal and not asking me a whole bunch of lame, cliché questions?”

“Do you want me to?” I say and wait for her to laugh or nod or look away, but in the whole time I’ve known her, Jane has always maintained excellent eye-contact.

“No,” she says, staring right back into my face. “It’s good this way. I just didn’t expect it.”

It crosses my mind that maybe I should be asking the questions anyway, trying to find out what’s really wrong, but the thing is, I’ve had enough time to redraw my mental picture of our friendship, and for all practical purposes, it doesn’t look any different now than it did two weeks ago. The café is still our favorite place to hang out, and Jane is still wry and funny and sardonic. She still slips her arm through mine and likes movies about contract killers and takes milk in her coffee.

The thing is, nothing has changed.

I just have more information.

*****

For discussion: Do you know how to talk to your friends? Do you know how to talk about the hard things, I mean? The uncomfortable ones? (The ones that would be much, much easier to ignore, except that they are also the kind of things that actually matter.)

Also, for my own edification—the telephone: greatest invention ever, or bane of your existence? Am I the only one? I can’t be the only one!

*Which has no bearing on this particular story, but I mention it here anyway because it comes back into the narrative later.

So, a cool thing about WordPress is that the site-stats feature lets you see a list of all the search terms and combinations that brought visitors to your site. (Don’t worry, I have absolutely no idea who visited the blog or searched for which various weird things, or even what geographical region the queries came from, so this is purely an exploration of the vagaries of the internet.)

Anyway, because I think the feature is just pretty awesome and because some of the searches are frankly hilarious, I’m going to do my best to address the concerns of the people.

In an attempt to prove that I am sometimes mildly responsible, the first questions I’m going to answer are the actual Brenna-themed ones that aren’t addressed in my FAQ.

Starting with a very popular one:

how old is brenna yovanoff
brenna yovanoff born
how old is brenna yovanoff ?
brenna yovanoff birthdate
when was brenna yovanoff born
brenna yovanoff date of birth

Okay, so yes. I know why this is even an issue. It’s because I’m very short, and when I talk, I sound basically like I am five. But I’m not five.

I am actually thirty-two, and I’m telling you this now for the sake of posterity, because I don’t think it does anyone any good to go around assuming that I’m some stray child who has catapulted into the professional sphere, when really, I’m just marginally childlike.

And in related searches:

where is brenna yovanoff from
where was brenna yovanoff born
is brenna yovanoff russian

So the most basic answer to this is that I’m from the United States of America. I was born in California and then my family moved to Arkansas, and after that, Colorado. However, if you’re wondering about my last name or my cultural heritage, my dad is half-Macedonian, which is why I have a pretty prominent bump on my nose. (Well, also because I’ve been hit in the face a lot by various pieces of sporting equipment. But it was always there—it’s just gotten more noticeable. By which I mean broken.)

is brenna yovanoff writing anymore books
is brenna yovanoff working on book 3?
brenna yovanoff new book
new book for brenna yovanoff

A good rule of thumb for this one is to just assume that the answer is always YES. However, the more specific answer to this question is, I’m currently working on Paper Valentine, which is scheduled to come out next February and you can read more about it here.

who is brenna yovanoff married to

Aw, you guys are a bunch of romantics! I’m married to this guy. Also, I’m not telling you his name.

brenna yovannof secret crush

While I suspect that most people were just trying to go to this post, there’s a small possibility that some of you are in fact trying to determine if real, live, grown-up me has a secret crush. In which case, I can’t tell you, because then it wouldn’t be a secret. However, I can tell you that in a dignified, mature, and purely rational capacity … I am an avid fan of both Ryan Gosling and Joseph Gordon Levitt. And that is all I’m saying on the subject.

brenna yovanoff bug phobia

Ooh, ooh—you’re talking about the centipede story! And yes, I totally have a bug phobia. But only centipedes. Because they are the devil.

Okay, I think that takes care of the more unusual cases where people still actually showed up to my blog on purpose. Now, I present to you The Random Searches—the ones that have nothing to do with me, but which somehow dependably bring visitors to my website anyway, starting with what has turned out to be far and away my most popular piece of content to date.

If I can take anything from the following data, it’s that I should bake surgery-themed desserts more often, because The Red Velvet Cardiac Event has been the conduit to just a huge amount of accidental site traffic. Like, pretty much unprecedented. It turned out to be such a long list that I had to pare it down significantly, but you get the idea.

halloween baking
cardiac cake
red velvet anatomical heart cake
creepy cake
dissected heart on table
cupcakes jumbo red hearts
cardiology fun cakes
how to make a human heart cake
cake pattern of side of fetal pig
kidney cupcake designs
red velvet cake halloween
halloween gross cakes red velvet
human heart cupcakes
how to make a cake look like a human heart

So, all you people out there looking for disgusting cakes? My blog is the place to come.

And then there’s this little anomaly—an interesting and oddly-recurring search that’s spawned a number of variations, like so:

i like my coffee black just like my metal
i like my metal like my coffee
coffee just like metal black
what movie says ‎”i like my coffee black, just like my metal-”
i like my coffee just like my metal
i do in fact like my coffee black just like my metal

Here, I will help you.

(Also, the song at the other end of that link has the F-word in it. I’m warning you because I am conscientious.)

Now, as anyone who’s ever kicked around the internet will know, people get up to some pretty strange antics in the name of making whoopie. I know this. And yet, I keep being completely taken aback by just how bizarrely specific these fascinations can be. And since I wrecked my knee and then talked about it, I’ve been attracting a certain … bizarrely specific element. Again, for the sake of brevity (and general decency) this is a heavily abridged sampling:

girl with a leg brace
one legged girl on crutches
girls in leg braces
crutches sex
women with legbrace
teenage girls legbrace
pictures of one legged hot chick on crutches

And now that you are vaguely unsettled and possibly need to rinse out your brains, watch while I turn my oracular powers to some of the strange, compelling questions that only ever come up once in awhile. By which I mean once ever.

tess and spank

To which I reply: No.

guess what day it is

Tuesday?

does marilyn manson has six toes on his one foot ?

While I have not personally had the opportunity to count Marilyn Manson’s toes, I feel pretty comfortable supposing that he probably has an average number.

open up secret crush to girlfriend

Don’t do that. Well, maybe if you guys have been together awhile and have rock-solid communication and she’s really secure, and your crush is on a celebrity who you will never, ever encounter in real life. Maybe then, but if you are sixteen and filled with hormones and crushing on your lab partner like I think you are, I would avoid it. Avoid avoid avoid.

can a high school girl be platonic friends with a high school boy

Yes, with a caveat. In the event that the friendship starts out non-platonic (as they sometimes do), I think it’s easier for girls to become platonic friends with boys they’ve previously been romantically interested in than it is when the situation is reversed. This is not based on fact or science, but only personal experience. However, boys are also perfectly capable of transitioning from wanting to make out to simply enjoying a girl’s company. So yes, it is totally, totally possible to be platonic friends with someone of the opposite sex. Even in high school.

Relatedly:

got this platonic friend who told his girlfriend not to park in a certain parking because its mine i never told him that was quite surprised about it now his girlfriend doesnt like me very much

This might be a good opportunity to talk to your platonic friend about consideration and thoughtfulness and what constitutes a reasonable boundary, and also to establish that he is not the boss of the parking spaces.

really don’t want to go back to varsity this year

Believe me, I know the feeling. While I’m certainly not familiar with your specific situation, my general position is that as long as you’re not actively damaging your body by overtraining and no one is treating you in ways that are abusive or demeaning, you should consider staying. It’s only for a couple more seasons at most, and in the long run, even though the day-to-day can be kind of grueling, in my own experience, it’s still worth it.

i found worms in my pop tart wrapper

That is not good. While sheer probability says that you’ve probably encountered one of the many varieties of worms that are okay to eat, I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to just avoid Pop Tarts for awhile.

Plus a few miscellaneous searches that have no real bearing on anything and yet are awesome:

neurotic inner monologue
creepy victorian babies
dreams with threats and hysterical laughter

I think I love you.

And now, at the risk of sounding slightly megalomaniacal, I’ll leave you with a small sampling of my favorite Brenna-specific searches.

brenna yovanoff interesting
the brenna yovanoff
Бренна йованофф
brenna yovanoff!

Soon (possibly very soon), I’ll get a second revision letter, after which I will probably disappear in a puff of smoke and go into hiding and eat only beef jerky and popcorn, and bake pies in the middle of the night.

But for now, we should have a week or two-ish of relative normalcy. I plan to get back on schedule (mostly meaning the official return of the high school posts) and in short, Be A Better Blogger.

But that’s next week.

Right now, I’m here to tell you about the third and final book in my Books-Brenna-Would-Have-Loved-in-High-School-Had-They-Existed series.

Pretty much anyone who hangs out with me, either on the internet or in real-life, has probably heard me talk about how much I love E. Lockhart. When YA readers ask me what smart, romantic contemporaries I’d recommend, I invariably point them toward the Ruby Oliver books . When professor-friends ask me for YA books to put on reading lists involving sociology or feminism or Marxist strong-containment models (or-or-or), I rave about The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks.

However—while each of these books is smart, hilarious, and wonderful, and while they are all inarguably excellent books for many, many people to read—there’s still this one book that I tend to keep to myself. Because it is weird and hard to explain. Because it is bizarre and uncomfortable and kind of abrasive. Because it is my favorite.

That book is Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything.

Reasons this is the best* book in the world:

1. Random, unexplained magic that is really a metaphor.
2. Boys. Real boys, without censors or filters (sometimes without clothes), afflicted with faults and insecurities and terrible, stupid defense mechanisms and crushing vulnerabilities and social hierarchies and everything that makes boys real, live people.
3. Frank, realistic discussion of physical attraction. Not sex. Not love. Not even necessarily kissing. (Although yes, sometimes.)

What this book is about:

1. A girl named Gretchen Yee, who is half-Jewish, half-Chinese, and the lone comic book enthusiast in an arts-intensive NYC high school where all her teachers want her to draw “real” things.
2. A girl named Gretchen Yee, who is secretly kind of a badass and doesn’t even know it.
3. A girl named Gretchen Yee, who, through a very Kafkaesque turn of events, is transformed into a house fly and spends the rest of the week trapped in the boys’ locker room.

See? This is why Fly on the Wall is a very hard story to talk about.

This is also exactly why it would have been seventeen-year-old Brenna’s Most Important Book.

In high school, I was just as passive, just as intellectually prickly, and just as desperate to understand people as Gretchen is. And I wanted so, so much for a book to magically come along and tell me about boys—not a book to tell me what it thought I wanted to hear, but to tell me the truth, in precise, unerring detail.

Fly on the Wall has that. Fly on the Wall is that!

Lockhart does an amazing job of exploring all these tricky, interconnected ideas, like how to be a good friend (by listening, communicating, being honest), how to talk to boys (like they are people), how sometimes an unspoken infatuation can kind of start to edge into awkward voyeurism, and maybe most importantly, how the way you feel inside is not what other people see—because most of the time, people only see what you show them.

Which was something that at seventeen, I had absolutely no concrete understanding of, and would have pretty much willingly died a thousand deaths for any book that could actually kickstart that conversation.

(Also, sometimes I still don’t.)

(Have an understanding.)

(But I try.)

*In my head, I have like 20 Best Books at any given time. This is always one of them.

So. Wow. Okay.

I feel like I’ve already been talking about this for a long time. No, seriously. For like a really long time .

But now, we’ve officially moved beyond the Realm of Vague Talk. We’ve entered the Land of Imminent Book, and I can finally (finally) give you a look at what’s been going on behind the scenes for months (years!).

As you may or may not be aware, Tess, Maggie , and I have been critique partners for a very long time. So long that when I post about something we’re doing, I often forget to give you any sort of context. So long that it’s hard to conceive of a time when we were not critique partners. My writing career has literally not existed in any significant form separate from the three of us knowing each other.*

Okay, let’s back up. Right away, from the beginning, before everything—before books on shelves—we started doing this thing.

At first, it was just a little thing.

It was a fiction blog shared between the three of us, and we’d write short stories really fast and post them the same day and egg each other on and get tons of practice at narrative structure and economic character development and not procrastinating.

And then, so slowly it was kind of hard to pinpoint, it stopped being a little thing and started being a big, awesome thing, and that wasn’t us—that was you guys, and the way you showed up every week and got involved and talked to us and talked to each other and made it less like three writers shouting stories into the internet, and more like a community.

And now, after four pretty incredible years, the Merry Sisters of Fate has grown into this:

For real.

The simple version is, here is a book that’s an anthology of our stories. And the complicated version is that it’s also way more than an anthology. It’s a retrospective and a conversation and a scrapbook and a diary, and it’s coming this fall from Carolrhoda Lab and we are so, so happy with how it turned out! And to celebrate our happiness, we’re giving away three shiny brand-new ARCs and the contest is very, very easy, so go enter!

Now, because it’s kind of hard to describe exactly how The Curiosities happened, here’s a video about our motivations, where we look neat and brushed and are wearing makeup.

Also, because it’s kind of hard to describe exactly how The Curiosities happened, here is a video about the behind-the-scenes. In this one, we’re wearing pajamas and making a huge mess and very little sense.

It probably goes without saying, but the finished product is kind of a synthesis for these two videos.

(But the manically-productive pajama part more.)

*Except for a few times when I sold some short fiction to horror markets, but I was totally flailing back then and really, really didn’t know if I was even pointed in the right direction.

Full disclosure: I put off reading this one for a really long time because I didn’t think I was going to like it. The premise—which could sort of be described as Groundhog Day meets Mean Girls (popular girl dies, only to relive the same day over and over again while learning to be a better person)—struck me as being at high risk for rampant sentimentality, complete with Lessons Learned, and even as a little kid, I was pretty resistant to cautionary tales and anything that smacked of after-school-special.

And then when I finally picked it up, I was duly chastened, because instead of being not my thing at all, it turned out to be exactly my thing.

For those who haven’t read it, Before I Fall is kind of a strange beast. Oliver combines a bunch of elements I really like, but don’t often see happily coexisting together. Even though the central device is thoroughly fantastical, this is a book that reads 100% like contemporary realism, (which is one of my favorite genres). The depictions of daily life are fully articulated and lovingly mundane, and the complex social interactions of the characters are the most important part of the story. The fact that our narrator is reliving the same day over and over again is not The Point, but rather, a way to get a really good look at the precarious dynamics of high school social schemas.

Before I Fall is widely acknowledged to be a book about mean girls. However, I’d make the case that Sam, the main character, is not a prototypical mean girl. At the outset of the story, she’s definitely a weak girl, but there’s nothing sadistic about her, which I think is in keeping with the realities of bullying—meaning that most people who act in antisocial ways are not sadistic. Rather, they’re bad at propelling themselves through society in a way that doesn’t damage or exploit others, and also prone to hitching themselves to those vicious few who have no reservations about using power like a weapon.

When I talked about The Big Crunch last week , I was mostly interested in what that book could have told teenage-me about myself. With Before I Fall, the more pertinent thing is what it might have been able to tell me about my world, because it completely debunks the politics of bullying as depicted by movies like Heathers* without taking the position of apologist. I’m not going to go so far as to say it necessarily functions as a guide book to the underlying messiness and paranoia of teenage popularity, but it has to at least qualify as a brochure.

(The kind with a map on the back.)

*Heathers was my favorite movie as a tween—taught me everything I thought I knew about adolescence. Then I got to school and had to unlearn half of it.