The Big Crunch: A Book Report. Sort of.

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To reiterate very briefly, I am currently revising Paper Valentine. It’s new and exciting and lots of fun, BUT. It definitely cuts into the amount of time I can devote to other things. For instance, blogging.*

I don’t want to neglect the blog entirely though, because I like it, and I like you guys. So, here is what I’m going to do. I’ve been thinking for awhile that I’d really like to put together a short series on Books High-School Brenna Would Have Loved (except they didn’t exist yet), and this seems like a good an opportunity.

The thing is, when I was in high school, YA was kind of—kind of—gaining a foothold, but choices were still mostly limited to either A Separate Peace or I Know What You Did Last Summer.**

So I read those. And everything by Robert Cormier. And lots and lots of books that were technically for adults. And those were all good things to read, but there’s still a wistful little part of me that wishes I’d had the YA books that exist right-now-this-minute. I just would have loved so much of what’s been published in the last decade.

The book I want to talk about today is The Big Crunch by Pete Hautman . It came out last year, and I can safely tell you that it would have been 16-year-old Brenna’s favorite-favorite book of all time.

big crunch

It’s smart and complicated and romantic in the most unromantic way. It’s about people who are NOT good with feelings, who do NOT think or do or say the perfect things. People who are not outrageously beautiful or charming, who are intense and prickly and make mistakes, who really, really suck at emotional intimacy, and still have to bite the bullet and do it anyway, because that’s kind of how the world works.

It’s a story about love, but love as it appears to the aggressively-cerebral, messy and unmanageable, with all kinds of pointy edges. And as we know, that is my favorite kind.

So okay, let’s back up for just a second.

No, I don’t think the purpose of novels is to educate, but yes, I think they do that anyway, always, regardless of intention. When I was a teenager, I was constantly using what I read as a sounding board for what I thought and felt and what I suspected the world might actually be like, and it didn’t really matter what a book’s intended message was.

For instance, if One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest were meant to teach anything, its central lesson would probably fall under the heading of Standing up to Authority is Dangerous but Necessary, or else Mental Institutions Were Really Bad in the 60’s, but that wasn’t how I read it at the time. To me, the systematic breaking down of the inmates and the complex interactions between Nurse Ratched and Chief Broom and RP McMurphy—that was all just stuff I could use in my everyday life. It was like a really disturbing metaphor for high school. Yes, I learned about high school from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I actually just said that.

But the thing is, I didn’t find a lot of books that taught me pertinent things about relationships. Pertinent to me, I mean. Personal. Integral.

Here is the exact place where I fell in love with The Big Crunch. It is roughly ten pages in. So, love happened relatively quickly, is what I’m saying.

There were several alternate Junes: Sarcastic June, Scornful June, Guilty June, and Fearful June. She also had Pragmatic June, who could say, I did not choose to be here. I just want to have some fun, and get through the day, and move on.
     You have no true feelings, said Scornful June. You are hollow inside.
     “I do too feel,” June whispered.
     Like you would even know what real feelings are, said Sarcastic June.
     June feared that Sarcastic June was right. Her feelings lacked depth. She knew that some people experienced feelings of such power and intensity that they could do anything—climb a mountain, commit hara-kiri, sacrifice a loved one—anything. June could not imagine herself doing anything like that.

I’ll be honest, it’s pretty rare that I find emotional representations of myself in books. This is less a function of being a special, special snowflake, and more a function of being, as Scornful June says, hollow inside.

Now, obviously I am not and have never been hollow inside, but it took me a long time to figure that out, mostly because I wasn’t particularly aware of things like emotional intimacy and … feelings. I found them uncomfortable, irrational, and so, largely irrelevant. And yes, I recognized that this was weird (mostly because it wasn’t a condition I ever encountered in books, movies, or people who weren’t me). But I didn’t know what to do about it.

I don’t think it’s too big a stretch to say that at 16, this book might have actually changed my life. One of the really fantastic things about books is that they give you a chance to see someone else having your conversation—whatever that conversation is. That person can go places and make decisions you can’t. And even though you know it’s not real when the character makes a makes an astounding personal discovery, or arrives at an answer … it kind of is.

What about you? Do you have books you wish had existed earlier? That did exist when you needed them? That told you something important—about yourself or someone else?

*Also, wearing matching socks.

**This is not to disparage either title—they are both kind of spectacular in their own ways. I love shiny-glossy horror novels with a love that is more than a love, and to this day, my sister is bound and determined to have a son so she can name him Phineas.

But my point stands.

Sh*t Writers Say (also, I am a bad blogger)

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First things first, I am a bad blogger.

Things that have contributed to blog-silence, in order of occurrence, 75% work-related:

Final stages of Merry Fates anthology madness
Knee surgery
Edit letter
Writing retreat

With that in mind, I’d like to take this moment to assure anyone who might be wondering that—you know the drill—I’m not dead, and things will be returning to normal very shortly. At least, shortly when considered in the grand scheme of things (continents drifting, stars colliding).

But it still might be a while.

Currently, I’m revising the hell out of Paper Valentine. And that is always its own special kind of monster. I love and hate and love revising, because it’s where I get to see what I’m really made of. Which, no matter how exciting and rewarding the process turns out to be, is always a little bit disconcerting.

So, I had all these things that I probably wanted to tell you and now I don’t remember them. They went somewhere else. (My editing-brain ate them, is where.)

Instead, I’ll stick with this: I just got back from a really wonderful writing retreat with some really wonderful people, and as she is wont to do, Jackson Pearce made a video.

So here we are in all our pajamaed glory. Also, you can see me in a hat. Which, from November to March, is my natural state.

Brenna Revises

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Okay, so. This is the last post before Enforced Blog Silence, and I wanted to make it count. What I’m giving you now is what’s known as actual writing-related content. (I know, I know—we don’t necessarily see a lot of that around here.)

What happened is, Maggie Stiefvater recently wrote a wonderful and highly detailed post dissecting the intricacies of revision, and the response was tremendous. The resulting discussion involved a lot of people saying they wished more authors would share their process with this same level of detail, and since Maggie is by nature a helpful and motivated person (also, she is organized), she asked a bunch of us if we’d be willing to participate in what has essentially become a series!

When I signed up for this, I thought for sure that I’d be making an absolute fool of myself— possibly even revealing the depths of my crazy-looking writing process. But I’ve surprised myself.

It turns out that while my early attempts at story-telling are always plagued by rogue commas and brackets, full of strange gaps and cryptic notes, by the time I reach a completed draft, it actually looks pretty … normal.

The post that follows is really long.

Really.

Long.

Also, there is one F-bomb, just so you know. I try to keep this place at least marginally compliant with school and parental internet filters because I don’t want people being FORBIDDEN from my blog. However, since the F-bomb is contained in a screenshot of my manuscript, I think we’ll be okay. To put it another way: I don’t actually write very clean books.

I know—you are not surprised. But I felt I should probably say it anyway.

Here are two pages of The Space Between, documenting Daphne’s first moments on Earth. (Click to embiggen.)

ROUGH DRAFT

Rough draft 1

keep reading…

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

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Today is high-school post day. I know that.

But.

The thing is, it’s about to get very disorganized around here and I wanted to announce ahead of time that the next couple weeks are due to be pretty quiet.

The reason for this is twofold—first, I’m going out of town to work on the Merry Fates not-an-anthology with Tess and Maggie in an undisclosed location.* Secondly, the trip will immediately be followed by knee surgery.

Which, it’s cool. I’ve had knee surgery before and while I wouldn’t class it as fun, exactly, it’s eminently doable. However, based on my previous experience with the recovery process (specifically Vicodin), even typing out a series of four or five coherent sentences can take about twenty minutes. So, not only will blogging most likely not happen, it absolutely should not happen! I have one more fun thing that I’ll be posting on Monday, and then blog silence for the next two weeks.**

Okay, now I feel like I’ve just spent this whole post talking AT you, declaring things loudly and telling you how it’s going to be.

So hey. Hey, you. What’s up with you guys?

*Otherwise known as Tess’s living room, but it sounds way more glamorous if you imagine us working diligently in a dilapidated fortress. Or a rustic cabin above a fjord. Or anyplace else suitably isolated and weird.

**This might not work. I might disregard my own advice. I might subject you to incoherent post-surgery ramblings. Please, I hope not.

Winners of the Contest of Various Unspecified Stuff!

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Okay, so I poured all the entries in the randomizer, and I will shortly be contacting the following people for mailing addresses:

Kristina Y. Zavala
brookea_2006
Andrea
Meagan L
Meghan (@meghan805)
Aik
Marisa
Leigh Smith

After which, they will receive mailings of my choice. (I assure you, whatever I send will be tidy, well-packaged, and tasteful. But of questionable usefulness.)

And now to everyone, thank you so much for sharing your goals with me! It’s really wonderful to see what you all have in store this year—so go forth and accomplish! ♥

That Time When Brenna Was a Small Angry Nihilist

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Last week, we left seventeen-year-old Brenna post-breakup, newly single and increasingly cynical. And I don’t mean cynical in that desperate, idealistic way that her sophomore self was, where the disenchantment really meant just caring a lot about things she couldn’t change.

I mean cynical in the sense of Whatever. This is stupid.

It’s not a good look. It’s not a good feeling. But more than that, it doesn’t make any inherent sense.

The thing is, nothing bad has happened to me. Nothing much has actually changed, and yet I suddenly feel like the whole world is a giant lump of pointlessness. It is completely unprecedented that a non-traumatic breakup with a perfectly nice, perfectly decent boy could turn a girl into such an unrelenting pessimist.

It starts with my ill-tempered crisis about dating and relationships and beauty, but quickly grows to encompass All the Everything. And while initially it still seems recoverable, the situation is then worsened by a variety of factors. By the fact that Jane hasn’t been at school for four days.

At first, I wait by her locker, trying to look casual and like I belong there when Rooster and #4 come to get their books.

It doesn’t work.

Rooster and Dweezil laugh and elbow each other and tease #4 loudly about his inability to get a girlfriend. #4 just shakes his head and looks someplace else. Despite my newfound reluctance to take the world seriously, I feel excruciatingly out of place, and Jane does not show up.

After awhile, I don’t even bother with her locker anymore. She is never waiting for me outside my writing class now. I know that when I pass the speech and debate room after second hour, she won’t be there, and I don’t know what to do about it. It’s like she’s disappeared.

“What do you mean you don’t know her phone number?” Catherine says. “We’ve only been hanging out with her every day for the entire semester.”

I shrug. “I don’t know, I just hate calling people.”

This piece of intelligence is absolutely true. At this point in my life, I have never asked a single person for their number, due to my intense dislike of making calls. As far as I’m concerned, the telephone should die in a fire.

Catherine sighs and shakes her head, but by now, she’s very accustomed to my lax social skills. “Well, Dill used to go out with her, right? He’ll know.”

So I wait for Dill after lunch, leaning against his locker until the warning bell rings and he’s pretty much forced to come over and get his books or else be late. I smile and start to speak, but he just reaches around me to turn the lock like I’m not even there. keep reading…

The Break-Up

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Let me just start by saying, this is an uncomfortable one.

There are a billion things that seventeen-year-old Brenna doesn’t understand. And some of them—okay, most even—have to do with feelings. This makes her (me) feel pretty shockingly stupid, because theories and facts are what you’re supposed to work hard to master, and feelings are the things you’re supposed to be born knowing about. Instead, I eat up books with a vengeance, while struggling to grasp even the simplest emotional concepts. I kind of feel like a cartoon character.

Here is the story of how I break up with Dill, or else, he breaks up with me.

I’ve mentioned before that as a couple, we have a tendency to bring out the worst in each other. I wasn’t lying, and the interaction that follows is one I’m distinctly not proud of. While lacking in drama and vaguely surreal, it’s exactly the kind of break-up one might expect from teenage Brenna. Basically, I’m saying you’ve been warned.

*****

First, he picked me fifty violets. Wove them into my hair and around my wrists. The leftovers, I stuffed into the pockets of my hoodie.

Later, we stopped to get coffee. It was a warm night and I asked for ice in mine. I knew the boy behind the counter, a little. He was older and I’d had Spanish with him the year before. Here’s most of what I knew about him: Buddy Holly glasses, nerdy in an ironic, contrived way—and nice, always nice to me, even when the basketball players and the wrestling boys would sometimes take my things and tease me just for fun.

“I like your flowers,” he said. “Hey, you think you could spare one?” He gestured to his lapel.

So I handed him one and he slipped it through his buttonhole, while Dill stood against the counter and squeezed my hand more tightly than was comfortable.

“I picked those for you,” he said, as soon as we were outside.

“Yes.” (Factual, remember—so, so factual.)

“So, I didn’t pick them for you to give to someone else.”

“If you picked them for me, they’re mine now. Anyway, a flower is not the same thing as affection. I wasn’t giving your affection to someone else.”

We were at Dill’s truck by then. He was shaking his head as he unlocked the driver’s side. “You’re unbelievable.”

I climbed in, tucking my hair behind my ears. The violets were tickling me. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, I can’t be like you. You analyze everything.”

“Well, it’s a very good way to make decisions,” I said, but I understood suddenly that we were almost to that point where you can’t go back—not ever. “It’s the best way I know of.”

He turned and looked at me, and it wasn’t angry or possessive or aggravated. It was so, so sad. “Are you even into me at all? Because I can’t go through life putting two dollars in and getting a dollar back out. I just need to know if you love me.” keep reading…

Happy New Year and Now I Want to Give You Things!

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As you might imagine, I have a lot of books. Which is good, because I love books.

However, what I didn’t really understand until it was brought to my attention by D (who is far, far more organized than I am) is that I have a lot of MY books.

And I have to say, it feels amazing to have all these books—these physical reminders of what I’ve worked really hard on, what I’ve accomplished.

But the thing is … I don’t actually need this many.

So, in honor of my outrageous stockpile of books, I am going to implement what will henceforth be known as The Easiest Contest Ever.

I mean it. Easy-peasy.

Comment below, telling me a personal goal for the year 2012, be able to provide me with a US shipping address, and I will draw some names.

That’s it, the whole thing.

The contest will go for two weeks—now until Sunday the 15th at midnight Eastern—at which point I will draw something like six names, and each of those approximately six will get something in the mail. Probably a book.

(Really, a book)

What you need to understand: I’m not necessarily sticking to English-language versions. When I say I have a lot of books, I mean some that are in a language I can read, and some that aren’t.

Which means that you might receive one that isn’t.

You might receive additional prizes, such as buttons or stickers.

You might receive a book I didn’t write.

Honestly, this is a very freeform contest …

SO. That being said, good luck!

EDITED FOR CLARITY: No need to leave me a postal address here (I’ll get them later, if applicable), but if you could leave an email address, that would be fantastic!

Um, carry on.

Arts and Crafts

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And now for another narrative detour, in which I attempt to explain several things about my home environment, day-to-day priorities, and general upbringing. Also, my bedroom.

The thing is, if someone were to attempt to assemble a clear picture of teenage-me using only my journal, they’d most likely assume that I never did anything but go to school, be at school, and think about school.

This is remarkably not true.

In actuality, I pretty much only ever bother with the journal when I’m at school, because at school, I’m very, very bored.

Because of this desperate need to entertain myself when I’m in class, the entries are often recorded in real-time and capture the at-school portion of my life fairly accurately, but they don’t really reflect my home life at all, since when I’m at home, I’m busy doing stuff.

languid

*Except in this shot, where I am doing nothing

Home is eclectic, full of interesting things like baskets of miscellaneous bones, and animal skulls and vintage chemistry sets and forty-year-old dissection specimens in jars of formaldehyde.

Really, as far as bedrooms go, my bedroom is a very morbid one, and when I’m not watching hyper-violent crime movies, staying up all night, sewing beads and sequins on my clothes, or making buttermilk waffles, I spend a lot of time there.

To be perfectly clear, it’s not actually my room, because it’s also my sister’s room. And the animal room. And the craft room.

Venus

*You can’t really see, but the wall behind me is absolutely covered in homemade masks. Some are for Halloween. Most are Just Because.

The room is huge and drafty, with insanely high ceilings and terrible carpet, furnished with assorted bookshelves, a homemade work table, a store-bought tool bench, and a record player from the 1940’s. Also, two ladders, three aquariums, several hamsters, toads, salamanders, ferrets, and one rope swing.

It is basically the perfect environment—part cozy playhouse, part menagerie, part freefall. keep reading…