All Eyes on Me

Was kind of disappointed with this one, since the premise sounded so intriguing, a short horror based off of the Fall of the House of Usher. I guess it's only real sin is it took a long time to get going for a short novella. I think it was trying to build atmosphere and tension, but I found myself impatient for narrative movement.

The other part that didn't work for me was more subjective. I know this was a reinterpretation, and I may be overly attached to my own interpretation of the original Poe story. But it's a favorite of mine, one I teach in my literature and writing classes, and I always felt the true horror in it was the mundane, human weakness and unkindness-- a brother so miserable he knowingly sacrificed the only person suffering more than he was, the sick and helpless sister who depended on him, to relieve something of his own burden. This has Roderick attempting to destroy a dangerous monster rather than an innocent under his protection. Of course a retelling is going to go in its own direction, but this was so much a departure I thought it kind of defeated the point of iterating on the original. I prefer when new versions speak to the big themes that make the original special, although I acknowledge that others may interpret Usher differently.

Also I listened on audiobook and the narrator's style was not to my taste. That can sometimes influence my impression inordinately. I wonder if I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read it to myself.

I'm off to a strong start this year with reading books. I'm actually a very fast reader once I get over the initial hump of picking a book to start, and my biggest barrier to book-reading is getting interested enough in any one in particular to open it. So this year I'm trying to make a list of books I'm actually EXCITED to begin-- not just ones I think I'd like to have read, or that I expect I will probably enjoy once I get going --so that as soon as I finish my current one, I've got another to jump to.

I've read eight books in just these first two month of 2025 already, and most of them I enjoyed at least one some level. A few, like The Sixth Deaths of the Saint by Alix Harrow and Circe by Madeline Miller, are among the best works in their genres I've ever read. A few were less amazing, but still engaging page-turners, like Tatiana Schlote-Bonne's Such Lovely Skin and Grady Hendrix's The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires. There was at least one disappointment, in Jamison Shea's I Am the Dark That Answers When You Call, since I quite enjoyed the first in the series and found the sequel to kind of run out of steam, but even that wasn't bad.

I'm not loving the current thing I'm working through, Paul Tremblay's Horror Movie. Lots of eliding conversations and moments, as well as obscure motivations, make it weird and a little alienating, but it's not terrible. But I am using it as something to alternate back and forth with Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which I've been meaning to get to for years. I love the movie, and the novel is not bad so far, but it's VERY dense and requires a lot of focus to follow the philosophical detours, so I've been taking it in a small bit at a time. I've heard that's intentional on Eco's part, to weed out scrubs who were just expecting a medieval potboiler, but I'm not sure how much I think it's overburdening the novel's real interest. We'll see as I get farther.

I’ve always been fascinated with the story around My Immortal. But I've never actually read it.

My Immortal is, if you don’t know, an infamously terrible Harry Potter fanfic written on Fanfiction.Net in the late aughts, full of gratuitous goth-ification of the characters and setting, a nonsensical plot, and rife with spelling errors. It became extremely well-known because of a certain so-bad-it’s-good charm, particularly because the ostensible writer, who identified herself as a goth girl called Tara Gillesbie, demonstrated so much personality in the poorly spelled, melodramatic author’s notes.

There’s been a lot of debate whether or not it was serious, as on one hand its badness was so beyond the pale and seemed to be an exaggerated parody of the tropes of bad fanfic, but on the other, fanfic can get pretty ridiculous in its badness. There’s also the shockingly strange fact that nobody has ever managed to identify who the author actually was— whether Tara Gillespie is a real person, or whether she was an invention of the actual writer, we still don’t know. Because of the fic’s fame, several people have tried to falsely claim authorship for Internet clout, but the actual person to this day has never come forward, nor been plausibly identified.

I would not call myself a My Immortal fan. I have actually never read the whole thing; I actually tend to not enjoy things on the “so bad it’s good” level, so I’ve never really wanted to. But I am fascinated by the circumstances around it, all the questions and controversies. The fact that we don’t know who wrote it, in this day of everyone on the Internet, blows my mind. Hell, people are still divided as to whether it was sincerely written, or deliberately desired to stir up outrage because of its level of fan ficcy badness. I love reading analyses of it, documenting the drama around it and examining the prose for clues as to the intent. If I find a Tumblr post or a Youtube video about it, I’m all over it, trying to form an opinion.

Still, I’ve avoided it all this time because I expect it to be a real drag; things that are so terrible don’t amuse me the way they do some people. I also tend to feel secondhand embarrassment strongly, so I expect to cringe to the point of pain. But I think it’s time to finally read it. I spend all day telling my students that they can’t create a useful opinion in the absence of facts. And I do believe there is value in absorbing things as cultural touch points.

But ugh. I might cringe my face right off.

I am deeply enjoying the Libby app. Liz Salazar pointed out to me that you can use your Boston Public Library card to get access to reciprocal library networks, which I have now done for as many places as would let me. That combined with requesting a card for my dad’s address, I now have NINE LIBRARIES I CAN BORROW BOOKS FROM. I am ridiculously delighted.

I still can’t get over what a well-designed app Libby is. It’s easy to use and the interface is really attractive and intuitive. If you’re not on it, I highly recommend it, and in doing the trick to maximize your library access. The fact that I can put myself on the waitlist for a book I want from multiple institutions is wonderful. I’ve already been able to get MANY books I couldn’t find in the libraries I originally had cards for. Lately I’ve been trying to have a written book and an audiobook going at all times, one so I can physically read and one to listen to as I go about my day, and all these cards in Libby have been great for that. I’ve blazed through the first three Rivers of London books, an urban fantasy series that Matt Kamm recommended to me years ago and it finally struck me to dug into. They’ve been my audiobooks because the narrator, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, is so excellent, capturing the characters while doing all the regional accents.

I’ve run into a bit of a snag, since the fourth book in the series has a waitlist at all the institutions that have it. It’s also not on Hoopla, which is disappointing. And apparently only ONE of my nine libraries has Ruth Goodman’s How to Be a Victorian, which got taken away at the end of the borrowing period before I had finished it. But it only makes me want to have MORE LIBRARY CARDS, until I can have all the books I wanted!

Continuing with the V.C. Andrews biography written by her ghostwriter. I appreciate the respect with which it discusses her as a person and an artist. I feel like it would be very easy to patronize her, fail to acknowledge her talents, or judge her as pathetic for the limited life she led. There is a real solid effort in here to pin down what the appeal of her craft was, and to my surprise, Niederman does seem to have a sense of that her way of depicting coming into adulthood, specifically womanhood, captured that sense of simultaneous power and vulnerability. Strange, since that is the quality that I’ve heard his ghostwritten novels fail to capture about her style.

He also seems to have a strong sense of how ableism curtailed her life. She was not very mobile due to spinal injury and deterioration, and she lived in a world where there was both a lot of shame over it and not a lot of adaptive accommodations. I think the book may not always be using the correct terminology, but there is a lot of time and effort given to making it clear that her limited knowledge of the world, deficiency in social relationships, and immature perspective on life were the consequences of that ableism.

At the same time… it is also, at least thus far, wholly uncritical in any manner. I don’t mean of her as a person, I mean of anything about her work. Because while I believe it would be unfair not to acknowledge the appeal and verve of the thing she created… the books are not good in a global sense. Or even if you wouldn’t go that far, I feel one has to acknowledge they are deeply flawed. So far there’s no acknowledgement of anything in that direction at all. I’m only like a quarter through, so maybe that changes. But seeing as this guy has made his career of the Andrews brand, selling books for decades under that name, I doubt he’s going to say anything to bite the hand that feeds him. It’s a bit disappointing, as I mostly like author biographies as perspectives on their work.

Got a hold of that V.C. Andrews biography, The Woman Behind the Attic, written by her ghostwriter, Andrew Niederman. I’ve always been curious what kind of person could have produced the kind of stories she did.

I’m not far in, but he is complimentary and respectful of her so far, emphasizing her gifts and talents and the things tha made her special. I was oddly surprised; I was somehow expecting it to be a little more patronizing, which may or may not be fair.

I think it comes from this keen sense I have that it’s tricky to honestly represent how simultaneously talented and flawed she was as an artist. I feel like there’s a lot of nuance that needs to be acknowledged to really capture a writer like her, one who had real skill and charm to be captivating, and yet whose work was marred by what probably was a fundamentally arrested, adolescent perspective. It’s probably easy to fawn (especially since her brainchild is this writer’s bread and butter) but also easy to hold in contempt.

I wonder if he’ll get the balance. I’ve seen people characterize his vision of her work and style as missing the component that made it remarkable despite its failings— the understanding of how many girls feel coming into womanhood is at once gaining a power and a vulnerability, the girl hunger and the girl rage. If he didn’t grasp her work, will he have the ability to grasp HER?

Apparently Agatha Christie was an avid surfer? Wow. Cowabunga, old bean.

I’m reading a biography of Agatha Christie right now, by Laura Thompson. I enjoy it, but it’s strangely written. How to describe it? The language is on the flowery side, and it talks about her and the relevant people in her life like they’re literary characters, being narrated about like every statement needs to be a profound and poetic insight on their inner nature. It’s actually quite enjoyable to read… but it makes me wonder if it’s possible to really know such things about real people with such certainty.

I honestly mostly picked it up because I always wanted to know what the deal was with her strange breakdown when her first husband left her. I can’t wait to get to that.

Also I’m curious what it will make of her idiosyncratic midcentury racism and misogyny— there’s been no acknowledgement of it yet, which troubles me. It’s taking a lighter touch to her than I would prefer. It mentions her not “seeing round the class question the way she would later do, although probably never to the satisfaction of modern readers.” Uh, come on. While she is hardly the worst offender, she is QUITE classist, and she only depicts admirable lower class people when they are modest and know their place.

Also, “She also threw out the odd, casually xenophobic remark,” with some defensiveness about how this is a product of her time. I think this is specifically referring to her letters from a period of world travel early in her marriage… but again, COME. ON. In her work she is even more racist than she is classist. She clearly is only really comfortable with English people, and anyone else is either a weirdo, untrustworthy, or a savage. This is a constant throughout her stories— from Mr. Paravicini being suspicious for literally no other reason than because he is Italian in THE MOUSETRAP, to even her celebrated hero Hercule Poirot being kind of a weirdo because, y’know. Foreign.

I really like Christie’s work. But it’s so ridiculous to try and pretend these things aren’t problems throughout it.

I wish there was more analysis on Christie’s development as a writer. It feels kind of like she just skips from dabbler to slick and commercially popular professional without much elucidation of how she grows. But there’s a lot of overall assessment of how perfect the structure of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is without many specifics about what makes it perfect, or about what developed in Christie’s work. I would hope, should I ever be important enough that somebody so analyze mine, my biographer would do more to pin down my developmental throughline.

There is an interesting device throughout of using An Unfinished Portrait, a fictional work of Christie’s acknowledged to be an autobiographical novel, as a sort of Rosetta Stone for how she felt about the events of her life. It’s interesting and evocative, but as a writer myself I wonder how true a comparison that is. I mean… writers create. Fiction is made up, even when it’s inspired by reality. Maybe it’s because personally that I tend to shy very deliberately away from autobiography, but I’m inclined to wonder if it’s an oversimplification. Still, as a creative device, this occasional referring back is effective.

Archie Christie has left her. Good riddance; I never liked the dude, as I never like any dude who fears a baby will mean his wife has less attention for him. The breakdown I came for is at hand.

Thompson approaches it VERY novelistically. She basically describes Agatha’s movements and experiences in the wake of her husband leaving like she were a fictional character, which… sorry, no, there’s no way you know that. These details are famously not known. The whole thing about this disappearance is that people know basically nothing about what she did during it. She never said, and most people seemed to accept when she said her memory was blank. I can believe a skilled researcher and detective could piece some things together, but this is way beyond the pale. Again, compelling to read, but in the interest of understanding a person I feel like it’s pure fantasy. I guess she could be drawing this from some later writing of Christie’s, as she does in other places where she believes the writing autobiographical? But I don’t know what writing that is supposed to be that would supply SO MANY specifics. I believe Christie herself left this breakdown out of her own memoir entirely. This has to be a fabrication.

And it goes on for A LONG TIME. HOW CAN SHE PRETEND SHE KNOWS ALL THIS?

Thompson does depict what I figure is the most likely explanation of her time during her disappearance— that she did what we all wish we were rich enough to do during a breakup, fucked off to a nice expensive hotel to eat well, shop, and let other people take care of her while she moped. But there’s also this undercurrent running through that she was trying to get her husband to figure out where she was and come after her, which he never did. While an understandable impulse for a bereft person, here it gives her a kind of unreasonable, petty, almost passive-aggressive quality that I’m not sure is fair. Like it was part of a manipulation rather than just somebody feeling bad and trying to take care of herself a little. Honestly she probably just wanted to chill somewhere while she was sad, rather than engineer circumstances to make her husband so worried about her he came running back into her arms.

I’m a writer of intrigue too. That’s for making good stories. I’m not going to plot my way out of my very real emotional devastation.

Also. HOW DO YOU KNOW ANY OF THIS?

Okay, after this EXTENDED FORAY INTO SPECULATIVE FICTION, she does go into the historical record. Her suspicions for the broad strokes are mostly justified by publicly known details. But I can’t help but think the supposed overtures toward Archie finding her are a bridge too far. And again— she novelized the entire time she was away with very immediate experiences. I don’t like that in biography. WRITE A DAMN HISTORICAL FICTION if that’s what you want.

On Facebook, I frequently see ads for different companies that provide... let’s say romance content. Novels, comics, stuff like that. They’re clearly self-published and not high quality— they give you a sample chapter in the post, and they are too amateurishly written and poorly edited to be anything else. Whatever, there’s a lot of self-publishing in the Internet age. But even across different companies or mediums, there’s one element they absolutely all have in common without exception— a really prominent and explicitly codified element of coercion.

All of them. Every single one. They’re all heterosexual, and the woman is always sold, obligated, carried off, or biologically destined for the male romantic and sexual partner. I know this sort of thing has always been at least an undercurrent in the romance genre, at least the “sexy ravishment” kind, where the butch hero absolutely has to have the female protagonist, and his desire is part of the measure of her personal value. My view on the appeal of it is well explained in a line of Meredith’s in Dream Machine episode 2: “Sometimes... when you’ve spent your life afraid of being a slut... the only way you can enjoy yourself is when the decision is taken out of your hands.” It’s a way for women, the usual target audience, to indulge in a romantic fantasy like when they have a hard time conceiving of themselves taking any kind of sexual agency,

But in these on Facebook, the element seems even more literal and spelled out than that traditional “sexy ravishment.” The coercion is front and center, an explicit part of the scenario— “I am assigned to this man and there’s nothing I can do about it.” She’s sold to him. She’s in an arranged marriage. She’s marked by pheromones. Et cetera. Et cetera. I know there’s a market for that... but do these online romance novel companies produce no other kind of romance? Why are they ALL like that? It seems really... retrograde? Like, even less conscious of rape culture than the romances of generations past, as if it assumes that all women just really want to be relieved of the responsibility of choosing their own mate and just want to be handed over to a dominant man.

And I’m really not getting the draw here. I can get the “I’m flattered by how badly he wants me” aspect. I can even grasp the “he is the instigator and I am not responsible” or “we don’t need to discuss or establish consent for this because we are just so compatible” aspects. I DO NOT understand the appeal of the “I have literally no choice or say in this at all” idea. What is speaking to women in that? Is it the notion that you don’t have to look for your soulmate or doubt that you’ve found him, because that’s been pre-decided for you? Is it the assumption that more appealingly masculine men just take what they want? Is it just a thinly-veiled submission kink it’s assuming of the entirety of its readership?

I guess everybody’s got their kinks. I don’t even think there’s anything wrong with enjoying problematic storytelling tropes, as long as you understand what their meaning is outside of the world of fiction. But these are so SPECIFIC to something that seems to make such an unfair assumption of what women are like or what appeals to them. Is the product designed for a market that niche? But it certainly shows up for me just because I’m a woman, and I can’t imagine they would have so little variation in subject matter unless they thought that’s just what all or most women wanted.

This has been a hard year for everyone, and one we’re all happy to see the back of. But for me personally, I will admit it could have been a lot worse. I like solitude and dealt with social distancing a lot better than more gregarious people did, and my job was able to adapt to the work from home model fairly well. It meant I was able to keep safe and relatively happy even during difficult times.

I was also able to stay productive and creative. I used my increased time at home to make things, and I’m actually really proud of the things I made. I added in several activities I’d been wanting to make a habit for a long time. The end result was a lot of which I’m very proud to have done:

- read 38 books this past year.

- wrote a TON of things with Bernie.
— a new pilot script for an hour-long sci-fi show called From Dust.
— four episodes of a half-hour comedy called Dream Machine
— a radio adaptation with Jeremy Holstein of the Jeeves and Wooster story Pearls Mean Tears
— almost 20,000 words of a prose fan fiction about Steve Rogers’s post-Endgame life, His Part to Play.
— a new full-length Mrs. Hawking play, the Justin Hawking-centered comedic spinoff Gentlemen Never Tell.

- put together four staged readings recorded on Zoom of the four episodes of Dream Machine, which were incredibly fun and funny to perform.

- shot two full-length socially-distanced versions of the current Mrs. Hawking shows, part VI: FALLEN WOMEN, and the new spinoff GENTLEMEN NEVER TELL, by using a system of my own design

- increased my charitable giving by almost three hundred percent, to environmental and social justice causes.

- drew 251 portraits of various people, to practice my ability to recognizably capture human faces

- got into very good shape by taking on a challenging at-home workout routine

- successfully taught two classes entirely online, allowing most of my students to succeed despite the challenges

I didn’t do everything I wanted to do this year. But I did a lot, and I’m very happy that I managed what I did.

I have been keeping track of my book reading since I decided upon my latest strategy for making sure I do it on a regular basis. In order to combat my difficulties focusing on long-form text (which I think stem from a combination of depression and smartphone use) I have added a bullet point to my daily to do lists where I have to read a book until a ten-minute timer goes off. And I’m marveling at how well it has worked for me.

It doesn’t seem like much. It hasn’t solved my focus issues; about half the time, I can’t force myself to keep paying attention past the ten minutes. But it does have me reading books, consistently, on a regular basis. And it adds up. Where once I was reading maybe two books a year, in 2020 I’ve already read 23 books, once of which was the behemoth Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. It’s such a small change, but it’s made so much difference for me. It brings so much into my life, and lifts such a weight of shame.