Gatsby

Posted on by

The story I am about to tell happened because of Hemingway. But it wasn’t his fault.

In English, we’d been reading The Old Man and the Sea for almost a week. For those unfamiliar with this particular book, it is 96 pages long. Also, we were on the block system. In case you don’t feel like doing the math, I’ll break it down: we were reading the same 96-page book for an hour and a half every day.

I finished on the second day, but complied with the mandatory Reading Time by bringing another book. M was not amused. She wanted to know where my Hemingway was. Then she sent me to go get it.

At my locker, I just stood there, looking at the inside of the door. I’d taped up pictures because other girls taped up pictures, but mine were sepia-toned and not quite right—postcards of Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe. They coexisted more or less peacefully with my locker-partner’s shrine to Brad Pitt.

I was standing there, seething over M, when Gatsby came down the hall toward me.

This is what I wrote about him a year later,* when we had the same history class, but I’m including it here because here is as good a place as any and sometimes you just need to know about a person:

First, about Gatsby. He is 16, and has black hair and blue eyes, and his teeth are crooked from being kicked in the mouth so many times. He’s not very big, but his body seems angular and tough, like if he were already grown up. He smiles a lot, is always nice to me, and sometimes tries very hard in class, although mostly not.

[In History] he always has something to say, and usually it is something so desperate and passionate and indignant that I envy him for being able to say it, like no one was going to laugh at him for caring so much.

Gatsby is a hard boy to explain to someone who hasn’t met him. Even hard to explain to the people around here, who know him. He’s rough and loud, but in a way, still very gallant.** I like him very much, in the only way I can. I like him in the way of a small girl in the back row of 4th hour History, watching closely, but never saying anything.

That day though, I didn’t know anything about him. I was still unacquainted with his character, his eccentricities. I was only a very quiet, very cautious girl looking at a stranger, limited to what I could see.

And what I could see did not look good. He was holding a red paper Coke cup against the side of his face. When he stopped at his locker, he opened it with a little flourish that was supposed to make me laugh. One eye was swollen part-way closed.

Continue reading →

UK Cover + Zombies

Posted on by

Maybe you’ve seen it floating around the internet—I know I have! Which means, I am tragically late to the party when it comes to revealing . . . my UK cover!

ReplacementUK

The Replacement will be out in the UK in original paperback in January, 2011, and will feature—as you see here—a hot guy on the cover. I wrote a book with a hot guy on the cover! Let’s sit with this a minute. Because it pleases me to an immense degree. And comes with a weird sense of accomplishment I can’t explain. But which is nevertheless quite satisfying.

Also, in other news, my near-future, mid-apocalyptic zombie story “Obedience” is featured on Fiction Daily today. You can find it under the Genre heading by clicking on the words not strictly cannibals. Of course, you may say. Of course you can.

Fried. For Real.

Posted on by

Okay, so I just sent my editor the first draft of Book 2. Ordinarily, this would warrant an exclamation point or several, but I am currently all exclamationed-out and all I want to do is eat Chinese food and watch Dexter. Sadly, I am also marginally responsible.

Now, while I await editorial feedback, I will turn my attention to other things. Like laundry. And the lamentable state of my inbox. And laundry.

However, because this is not a very informative post, and because I really love this book, and because it’s Friday, I will leave you with this video, which is basically my Book-2 theme-song of epic proportions.

The Curtis Brothers

Posted on by

Being almost-friends with Irish meant inside jokes and laughing all the time and singing harmony to “Yellow Submarine” and getting written up for stupid things like how many times we sharpened our pencils, and feeling like I actually existed. But it also meant spending a fair number of mornings sitting alone next to an empty chair because he was hungover or missed the bus or just didn’t feel like showing up to class.

I missed him on the days he didn’t come, but I wasn’t one to take his absences personally. I considered them to be the result of a kind of social impasse. He was not the kind of boy who felt obligated to attend Geometry on a consistent basis just to see a sometimes-friend, and no matter how many times he invited me to come with him, I was not the kind of girl who ditched class.

I started to notice the times I spent alone, though. It’s a strange phenomenon, but when you are used to being alone, the outside world starts to blur into the background. Alone means no intrusions, no distractions, and the page in front of you is the realest thing.

But when you are sometimes not alone, it gets hard to slip back into the trance you inhabited before, staring at the board while everyone else is giving each other French manicures with Wite-Out and flicking paper footballs. The sense of isolation was still there, but it had stopped being comfortable. It was with great reluctance that I came to a realization: I needed some more almost-friends.

Continue reading →

Drafting—Now With More Book-Two Action

Posted on by

Wow, I’ve been lamentably internet-absent lately! But—this is okay, because it has a reasonable explanation, which I will explain.

I’m hard at work on Book Two, and I’d talk more about that if I thought I could come up with anything coherent, but sadly I can’t right now because drafting is one of those things that takes over a person’s life and makes one’s brain start to lock up if one were to think about anything that isn’t demon-related for more than, like . . . two seconds.

So, in lieu of coherent content, I will now share a tiny glimpse into the Book Two process. Apparently, it involves listening to these two songs fifty trillion time on repeat:

(It should be noted that because I am somewhere in the middle of all this, the character relationships are so weird right now that this juxtaposition actually makes sense. I swear.)

Also, check out this page of process notes,* because not only is it vaguely teaser-y, it also makes me look like a straight-up crazy person.

Continue reading →

Telling Stories. Or, Brenna Talks Ethics (sort of)

Posted on by

Lately, I’ve been thinking about high school. (That’s a joke, by the way—I rarely stop.) Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the problem of what I want to say and how I want to say it.

There’s no legal precedent that says a person can’t write about another person. If you change names, blur faces, skip the libel and the defamation, it’s well within your rights. But that’s the legal stuff. The ethical concerns are more complex, and those are the ones that matter here. It seems presumptuous to turn the spotlight on someone else. Worse, it seems like bad manners. People feel exposed, even if no one can see them standing there.

Little Sister Yovanoff said, “I was reading your blog about Irish the other day. I was thinking how there are maybe five people in the world who would see it and even know who you were talking about.”

And this is the truth. No one will recognize the people in my stories. No one is going to stumble upon an isolated anecdote, then turn to a friend or a coworker and say, Stop me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s you.

But people will recognize themselves.* They’ll see their likenesses, hear their own voices coming from someplace else. The more personal the story, the more likely they are to recognize themselves, even seen imperfectly through someone else’s lens, and that recognition can’t ever be counteracted by aliases and clever nicknames. Someone might read a particular story and remember how the moment felt. It might not always feel good. I know that, and it raises some very important issues about responsibility.

Here is the thing about telling the truth. To write about someone honestly, I think you have to love them a little, even though loving is not the same as knowing. People deserve to be handled with care, and I have a responsibility to be careful, and also to be honest. And yes, that’s scary. (I have spent most of my life avoiding responsibility.)

When I can, I tell people what I’m doing, let them decide if what I’ve written is okay, or if it’s too much.** It’s not perfect, but it’s the most workable solution I’ve found. Of course, another solution would be to stop writing about other people, but that comes with its own set of problems. What I’ve found is that writing about yourself and writing about other people are not always separate. Because the thing is, sometimes your stories are also their stories.

Continue reading →

Irish

Posted on by

For the first three months of school, I had no friends. I realize how unbearably tragic that sounds, but it really wasn’t that bad. This is partially because I was so preoccupied with the novelty of my new environment, and partially because I was just a very un-tragic person. In fact, for the most part, I didn’t even realize I was lonely—I honestly assumed that what I was feeling was a general condition.

And to be fair, I did nothing to facilitate making friends. I had a different paperback for every class. I lined them up in order on my locker shelf and read them under my desk. When people tried to talk to me, it took all my mental faculties just to respond, and the effort of making small-talk was exhausting (since then, I’ve realized that it’s not strangers I find so exhausting—it’s small-talk).

No one was mean to me, or if they were, I didn’t really care. They ignored me, and I concentrated on my books and on writing things down as they happened. Once, a boy in my Spanish class licked my face, just to see what I would do. My reaction underlined the very thing that had made him want to shake me up in the first place. I did . . . approximately nothing. I turned in my seat and said in a dazed, dreamy voice, “Oh my God, that’s disgusting.” I still can’t picture the look I gave him, but I remember how it felt—quizzical, wondering. My heart was beating so hard I thought it might burst like a balloon, but none of the underlying shock was apparent in my face or my voice, and after that, he left me alone. Everyone left me alone. Then, this happened:

Continue reading →

The Big Fat New Orleans Post

Posted on by

Finally, my true, actual post about New Orleans—with pictures!

Now, I stole these from everyone involved (mostly Maggie) (really just . . . all from Maggie), so there’s a good chance we’ll be getting some duplicates around the internet, but they were too good not to share, so I’m co-opting them for my own use.

First, this group shot because it is . . . representative:

group shot
(Jackson Pearce, Carrie Ryan, Tessa Gratton, me, Maggie Stiefvater)

Continue reading →