I‘ve been meaning for some time to write on the subject of writing and procrastination, but there’s always a few other things I just need to get done first. Reading, research, annotating. Following up interesting links. Finding images. Looking up word origins (such as: “crastinus” is “belonging to tomorrow”). Reading about books you ought to read and then buying them. Not reading those books properly, feeling worried about the other ones you haven’t read and distracted by the fact that there’s some other thing you should be doing (like writing).
Since leaving his home in New Jersey in April 2015, the 32-year-old has rescued a puppy named Lulu in Texas whom he now calls Savannah, been held up at knifepoint in Panama, and halted by life-threatening sickness in Scotland. He has celebrated the nuptials of strangers in Turkey and waited out a global pandemic in Azerbaijan, returning to the U.S. multiple times along the way, for recovery following his illness, for rest, for visas, and for a COVID vaccine. What he once expected to be a continuous five-year journey will be a piecemeal seven-year one.
It’s a tricky business, basing a novel on a real-life relationship between two people. Obsessives will demand facts rather than fiction. Hew too closely to the record, however, and you choke off the imagination.
Emma Brodie toes this line with zest and balance in her debut novel, “Songs in Ursa Major.” The book is very much based on the love affair and mutual muse-hood of Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, leading lights of the folk-rock world and onetime residents of L.A.’s Edenic Laurel Canyon. But from the very start, it stretches out and becomes its own thing. Brodie works with big themes — individuation, mental illness, legacy, self-destruction and redemption — but her touch is lighter than an onshore breeze.
Scientists are still studying exactly how our nerves’ collective activities transcribe our experiences into memories and, while a noble study, a certain question persists: isn’t memory so intoxicating because it’s so elusive? Memory’s pliability makes it a rich playing ground in fiction; it can manipulate and subvert what characters think they know and is fodder for ruminations. While Elias Rodriques’s debut novel, All the Water I’ve Seen is Running, can be described as a meditation on memory, what makes it stand out from other novels is how Rodriques uses memory as a conduit for revealing and exploring identity.
Vaughn's novel is not just a tribute to its many beloved influences; it's her love letter to the very human and universal need for fandom itself, no matter what it is that we stan.
Professors tend to scoff at books written for more general audiences. Anything that becomes popular is taken as potentially not serious. But the truth is, most professors simply cannot write, talk, and perhaps even think in a manner which can engage non-academics. Having gone through years of rigorous, specialized training, scholars find it hard to communicate their insights to anyone outside their narrow fields. Gray does not. Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life© is broadly appealing. Even more impressive, it has readers seriously consider radical ideas.