Reading to Think: Hope and Horror (The Medium)

This is a thing I was doing on Tumblr for awhile, only now I can't be bothered to go on Tumblr because it sucks up huge chunks of my life. Essentially, it's odd thoughts about books from the perspective of a wannabe author-lit theory lover-avid reader-sf fan.

The book: The Medium by M.R. Graham


A brief summary, pulled from the series website:
Lenny is good at teaching physics. He is good at fixing things, making friends, and not attracting attention. He is good at being a medium, helping spirits pass beyond the Veil. But as a vampire incapable of violence, he has always been a bit of a joke.

All it takes is a drink in a hotel bar, a stumble into the wrong place at the wrong time, to run him afoul of Sebastian Duran, a lunatic who controls other people’s minds better than he can control his own. Torn away from everything he knows, trapped and starved and under constant mental assault, Lenny’s best hope is Kim Reed, a wizard tasked with bringing down Duran. Kim cannot believe that Lenny is evil, but neither can she hide him, and while she battles for his freedom, Lenny is forced to confront his own potential for monstrosity.


I am a huuuuge fan of M.R. Graham, because (a) she has this INCREDIBLE eye for detail that makes her fantasy worlds real and immersive, and (b) she self-publishes (which means she is her own agent, editor, cover artist, marketer, and goodness knows what else, unless she hires someone out of her own pocket) and I am generally in awe of anyone who can produce a nuanced and polished work while doing the work of entire departments. If this post piques your interest, I'd encourage you to give her books a try (and review them so she gets more exposure!).

Anyway: On to the vampires.

(no major plot spoilers below, but includes a discussion of the book's major characters)

Narratives

So I've just returned from a much-needed trip to my alma mater and a weekend of fabulous recitals*. A ten-hour round trip gave me lots of time to think about life, writing, and potential blog posts. I thought about travel and the writing process, then decided that a self-absorbed post about my brain and my life would be more fun for me to write. :P

I'm a person who makes a deliberate effort to live an interesting life. This is partly because I'm also a person who likes adventure stories and thinks in narratives (so, a fulfilling life for me is one that produces adventures) and partly just because it's not that hard. I have a formula: Figure out what you find interesting, figure out a way to incorporate a little bit of it into your life, and then TALK IT UP because the key to the story's in the telling. And enjoy the misadventures that happen despite your best efforts, because they're the most interesting of all.

This weekend's interesting story: college trip. My college is fairly small and chock full of wonderful people, so walking around campus with my face was a bit like wearing a sign that said "FREE HUGS IF YOU KNOW MY NAME" (or: hugs for existing!). This was the conversation that cropped up every time someone tackled me:

"Hi! Hi! How are you?"
"Boring!"
"But you went to England!"
"WENT now I am back and my life is boring. Also I'm applying for the Peace Corps."
"Wow that is interesting TELL ME ABOUT IT"

And we would go on to have a very interesting discussion about our respective lives or about who's seen who naked. After half a day of these I was beginning to feel vaguely like a fraud. Oh my goodness, I thought, distressed. I spent three whole years convincing people I was interesting and now they're brainwashed into it!

And then, uh, I took a second look at that thought.

I mentioned above that I tend to think in narrative. Let me clarify that a little bit. I frame my experience the same way I frame the stories I write -- not as Plots with a beginning, middle, and end, but as the interaction of flawed but essentially valuable people moving toward a complicated and temporary conclusion. (This is a nice summary of why I have trouble plotting and finishing stories, by the by.)

This is a useful way for me to understand other people, but there's a problem in that I am always in the middle of my own Narrative**. So when I'm in a phase that doesn't strike me as particularly interesting (for instance: copy-pasting, filing, and house-sitting while waiting for my diploma and whittling away at various applications) I start to think of my life as not very interesting.

Until, that is, people who've known me for three years are interested in my life. Because they're probably the best people to judge. They've seen me doing awesome things and also locking myself in my room with a book for six hours because TOO MUCH STRESS CANNOT HANDLE, which is about the closest I come to a breakdown.

There's a thing I learned at college that I tend to forget at inconvenient moments: We don't shape our lives around Truth or Reality. We shape our lives around what we perceive as true and real, and every day we choose what we believe to be True. I mean, not in a ridiculous way -- obviously, you can't take a green pillow and call it red, and now the pillow is red. But you can say, "That pillow belongs on the couch," because the pillow is your favorite and you sit on the couch all the time, and you can say, "That pillow does not belong on the couch," because it's neon orange and clashes horribly with the couch, which is a sort of dull yellow. Neither of these statements is inherently more True than the other, but in choosing one and acting on it, you make it your truth.

So the upshot of this rather long-winded post is that I need to stop telling people that my life is boring, and also that the entirety of Potsdam needs to come live in my house to give me hugs and occasionally whack me on the head.


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*This remark is in no way influenced by the fact that I was taken to a delicious and fancy dinner by the performers' families. They're wonderful people as well as excellent musicians ;)
**I've used the word 'narrative' for this way of thinking for years, but I've just finished Redshirts by John Scalzi, and now I can't stop thinking about that Narrative and it's making my brain hurt. (Also I will never be able to watch a long-running TV series again.)

Having (finally) finished A Dance with Dragons...

Here is my fantasy casting for the court of Westeros at the end of the series:

(Spoilers abound, so have a cut.)

Travel photos

So I'm wanting to keep this blog alive, as best I can! My goal is to post at least once a week.

I'm not just going to ramble on about my writing - that would get tedious awfully fast. I have a decent storehouse of fun stories from my three months abroad, as well as some photos. Here's a sampling of the latter:

The village of Dolgellau, Wales.

Calton Hill, Edinburgh.

Two friendly goofballs whom I met off the Appian Way in Rome, one of whom I named Anklebiter and the other White Bear. There's a story in how we crossed paths.

One of the mosaic floors in the Baths of Neptune, in ancient Ostia Antica. I went on a scavenger hunt for mosaics and frescoes in Rome, because I was running out of ideas for my novel. It was great fun. :D

The pictures are crap quality, because my camera was having an adventure separate from my person for the majority of the trips. /sigh. (It was my fault.) But I figure they'll hold the fort until I have time to write a longer post.