Whatever, Martha!

One of the television shows I’ve been enjoying lately is a revolutionary little offering from the Fine Living Network that viciously attacks one of the country’s revered figures. It dares to question America’s blind faith in, and deference to, one of its most celebrated characters, and asks the really tough questions that not even seasoned iconoclasts dare. Questions like, why is Martha Stewart entrusting her makeup to a scary Marilyn Manson-looking clown named Peanut Butter?

I am referring, of course, to Whatever, Martha!, which is essentially Mystery Science Theater with irreverent comments directed at episodes of Martha Stewart Living instead of at bad movies. The concept, in fact, was allegedly dreamed up by Martha Stewart herself while watching a late-night episode of MST3K . . . and yes, I know that it’s virtually impossible to imagine Martha Stewart watching television, much less that show, but that’s the way this particular legend goes. Over classic clips of Martha showing her viewers how to frost cakes, pack potted plants for transport from the city apartment to the summer home, and organize your room-sized linen closest, two hosts cackle and giggle and question her fashion choices.

Jennifer Koppelman Hutt and Alexis Stewart shriek and bicker with each other like two long-term friends. While Martha does her self-assured and maddeningly competent thing, they curl up on sofas and bitch about Martha’s anal tendencies, yell at her baggy sweatshirts and ugly shorts, and whoop over Martha’s tendency to flirt shamelessly with young interns on the set. When Martha invites her personal trainer to show viewers how to do crunches, Jennifer and Alexis are the first to point out when Martha is cheating at them. On those occasions when Martha hosts a cupcake decorating party and fires off delightful animal-themed cupcakes with suspicious ease, Jennifer and Alexis stand by with frosting bags and make piles of frosting that look like cow turds. And when Martha takes up her glue gun and makes bead-encrusted candles, Jennifer and Alexis stand by with craft equipment of their own and attempt to ape her, in real time—usually to give up in frustration and howl that they’d rather buy their beaded candles at Pier 1.

Jennifer is sweet and air-headed, but it’s Alexis Stewart, Martha’s daughter, that gives the show its bite. She originally appeared on The Apprentice: Martha Stewart in the Carolyn Kepcher role, and impressed me then as being unusually level-headed without outright kowtowing to her boss. (She must have made an impression on Trump as well, because he shortly thereafter canned Carolyn and hired his own daughter to stand in her place.) Alexis is gorgeous, impossibly leggy, foul-mouthed, and outright crazy—she makes no bones about the fact that she’s on anti-depressants and keeps a squadron of analysts on her speed dial. When Martha coos about her Turkey Hill farm, Alexis is there to point out that it was a pit with no heat or doorknobs, and that her mother’s idea of parenting was to use her daughter as free labor. She will rail against her upbringing at the drop of a hat one moment, then reflexively rattle off what makes a truly exceptional caesar salad the next. She’s like Martha Stewart’s dark shadow, all uncontrolled impulse and id to Martha’s carefully regulated superego. She’s frank about the fact that she’s slept around a lot. She curses like a sailor, is abrasive, and doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks about it. She’s also the first to laugh at what an ass she can be.

Yes, I secretly want to be Alexis Stewart when I grow up.

Whatever, Martha!, minor amusement though it might be, has a few things going for it—the not inconsiderable charms of its hosts, a chance to see that yes, other people think the same evil things as you when watching Martha Stewart in action, and the general irreverence of its concept. It’s difficult to conceive of America’s frostiest domestic empress green-lighting a show that pokes fun of herself, but it’s the one facet of Martha that I can appreciate.

Revisions, revisions

My new, cool editor contacted me yesterday wondering why I hadn’t responded to his questions about The Buccaneer’s Apprentice. The short answer? I hadn’t actually received his questions about the manuscript. In fact, I’d kind of wondered yesterday morning why I hadn’t heard from him yet.

A tense few minutes followed my response, in which I imagined everything that might be happening in the near future. Things like, Sorry, this isn’t working out, we’re canceling your contract, to Listen, this book sucks. Could you write another by the end of May?, to We like your concept and characters, but could you change the plot and setting and theme in your next draft? All bad things naturally, because lately my imagination has no room for anything else.

But no. New Cool Editor merely wanted to say that the manuscript was spot on, and that he wanted to know if I intended to insert epigraphs from imaginary books at the start of every chapter, the way that I ended up doing for The Glass Maker’s Daughter. And if I could draft up a map, of course. The only change he wanted, in fact, was a slight revamp of the first page. Other than that, he thought it was great.

Which means, of course, that I get to keep the scene in the brothel. And that the hero is essentially the adopted son of a same-sex couple. I like to think of myself as subversive in tiny little ways.

Booklist Review

A really nice review, this time from the American Library Association’s Booklist magazine:

The Glass Maker's Daughter
V. Briceland

This captivating fantasy takes place in a city rich in history and sensory detail. Cassaforte, reminiscent of medieval Venice, is protected by an ancient enchantment tying the king to the seven caza, noble families of craftsmen, by virtue of a nightly fealty rite. Missing the rite is disastrous, and when the king disappears and the prince stages a coup, imprisoning the cazzari and their heirs, everyone is in danger.

Risa Divetri, the youngest daughter of Caza Divetri, has always felt misunderstood: her glasswork is different from her family’s, and because neither god chose her during the ceremony all children of the Seven undergo, she can’t learn the Divetri’s glasswork enchantments. At first ashamed and humiliated, Risa is now the only one who can save Cassaforte, and she realizes that the gods have another fate in mind for her.

Risa is a willful, capable, and caring heroine, and her bantering relationship with a cheeky guard provides a nice touch of romance. With suspenseful plotting and a marvelous cast of characters, this is a strong addition to female-centered fantasies.

— Krista Hutley, Booklist

Locus Review

V. Briceland, The Glass Maker's Daughter

A heroic young woman saves a city in this charming young-adult fantasy. Cassaforte is a city of islands and canals, with seven noble houses, or cazas, each with a magical talent for a particular craft. Risa is a daughter of Caza Divetri, famed for its glass; she enjoys working with glass, and looks forward to going to one of the two schools that teach the children of the cazas the spells they need. But the gods fail to choose her for either school, something unheard of. Without the magic, her glasswork is unwanted, and Risa feels unwanted herself, despised as unchosen, looked down on as a mere female, and her innovative glassmaking ideas rejected. Then she becomes aware that things aren't right in the city, and finds the gods may have a special role for her, as with the help of an odd old man and a young guard she investigates an attempt to overthrow the rightful rulers of the city. --Carolyn Cushman, Locus

Yes, that's me in Locus, the science fiction and fantasy magazine, immediately next to reviews of Alan Dean Foster and Jody Lynn Nye and other people who have three names.

Your phobias are crazy. Mine are real.

Everyone’s phobias tend to look a little flimsy when exposed to reality’s harsh light. Airplanes? Bridges? They don’t really fall down that often. Clowns? Usually aren’t evil serial killers outside of sensational fiction. Meteors? They don’t usually strike just because you’ve stepped foot outside of your house for the first time in three months.

My phobia of car washes, however, is one hundred percent, unshakably, unquestionably genuine and grounded in nothing but fact.

I know, I know. It sounds silly to admit that I’m afraid of car washes, but there it is. It sounds like one of those silly little things one confesses over drinks at a party, hoping to endear oneself as a quirky oddball. But no. I genuinely am afraid of the things. I can’t drive into one to save my life.

What am I afraid of? I’ll tell you. The whole automated car wash is a Rube Goldberg contraption designed solely to reduce my car to a smoking pile of scrap iron. If I don’t align my tires perfectly with the tracks designed to grip them and run the vehicle through the tunnel of suds, if I neglect to put the gear into neutral, if I neglect to wait at the end and shift into drive before the track has let go of the car—well, it’s over, isn’t it? Not only will I induce the wrath of a dozen rag-wiping men, but my car’s wheels will fall off. It’s too much pressure, I tell you. Too much!

I also have an equally well-established phobia of oil change establishments. Frankly put, they scare the heck out of me. I know that when I drive over that pit below, where the men work, that I’m likely to swerve unexpectedly and send three thousand pounds of car crashing down blow, possibly killing someone. But while I really don’t have to wash my car, I do have to get the oil changed on occasion. So while other people rev confidently into their local Jiffylube, I’m the guy who’s creeping forward over the pit, inch by inch, while the fellow trying to guide me in impatiently beckons me forward and looks at his watch, hoping that I’ll make it inside by the time his shift is over.

So basically what I’m saying is that if you’re driving in the metropolitan Detroit area and you see someone with an impossibly dirty car, it’s probably me. But I have reasons.

Author Copies

Yesterday I sent The Buccaneer’s Apprentice off to my editor. Usually by this point in the creative process I’m sick of the book. Not so with the tale of Nic and his friends. That book was a joy to write.

And yesterday, by some kind of weird, fluky chance, I got my author copies of The Glass Maker’s Daughter. It’s a beautiful-looking edition. The cover’s gorgeous. The map is amazing, on the page. It’s a pleasure to hold and to look at.

When I wrote the acknowledgements to The Glass Maker’s Daughter, I dedicated the book to one of my former college professors. I studied playwriting with Dr. Louis Catron at the College of William and Mary for a solid year. His classes were rigidly structured; we wrote a couple of one-act plays per semester, and revised each play three times. Many of the best hours I spent in college were in Dr. Catron’s warm and airless little office, listening to other students read their plays, or reading mine while they closed their eyes and tried to imagine my words on the stage. My belief in the revision process comes almost entirely from the things he taught me. There were times, for example, that the third draft of a play was almost entirely unrecognizable from its original conception—and that can be a good thing. From him I learned that it’s possible and sometimes even desirable to lose entire chunks of text, or even pages and pages, in order to get to the important parts.

Naturally, after my handsome acknowledgements, I wanted to give him a copy of the book. But it’s been twenty-five years, and his website hasn’t been updated in a dog’s age, and I’d known he’d retired a long time ago. I knew I should call and try to find out his current address. In my head, though, I feared doing it. I could’ve made the call months ago, but dragged my feet. What I dreaded, actually, was that I’d ring up the department and have them say, “What kind of former student are you? Didn’t you know he died back in 1993?”

This morning I finally forced myself to call. And luckily, the scenario didn’t play out that way. The fellow who answered the Theatre Department’s phone was very helpful, and offered to forward on the book. Problem solved.

I need to fret less, and do more.

In the third person

One of the reasons I enjoy writing in the first person is that it allows me to leap into a story feet-first with a clear voice. A first-person narrative seems immediate. It can be as personal as a long letter from an old friend, and as intimate as listening to someone talk about his life late at night, while you lie side by side on a mattress on a hot night. There’s no mistaking what’s to come when one encounters a first-person narrative like this:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

All of Holden Caulfield’s disaffection with his life, his jadedness, his education, his precociousness—it’s all there in that lazy conjunction of strung-together phrases that opens the book. Whether or not you like him is a different matter. He’s laying it all out as plainly as possible, in the most intimate narrative manner possible.

What many new writers don’t often realize is that third-person chronicles have their own voices as well. The narrator is usually unnamed. He or she rarely appears as a character in the story. It’s therefore easy to assume that all third-person stories are much the same, dispassionately relating a tale without intruding.

This narrator, from For Whom the Bell Tolls, keeps his distance on the book’s first page.

“He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.”

There’s so much distance, in fact, that the reader doesn’t even learn the name of the ‘he’ until four pages later. What we have is a flat description of place and action. It couldn’t be more different from another famous first line, from Pride & Prejudice:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Both Hemingway and Austen employ the third person. Austen’s narrator is blatantly cheeky, though, forthright about both her own prejudices and those of her era, and as chock-full of personality as Hemingway’s is carefully devoid of it. You might hire Hemingway’s narrator for a reporting job, but Austen’s is the one you want gossiping next to you at a party.

One of the difficulties I originally had when I started The Buccaneer’s Apprentice was that I couldn’t get the narrative to flow. Using the third person seemed to impede my progress, rather than help me make any. After a couple of abortive pages, I had to stop and do a little exercise. I closed my eyes and tried to picture my narrator—to make him an actual person, rather than a simple device. I settled on the image of a crusty old mariner with weathered skin, surrounded by curious listeners. He carried a pipe, plenty of tobacco, and had nothing but time on his hands to share his tale. He would have a tendency to be garrulous, omniscient, and utterly in control of how he spun his story.

Once I abandoned my initial start and let him start talking, the story started to flow. And flow. His voice carried me through the book’s tougher-to-write stretches. I let him dictate the story’s pace. The decisions of what scenes to portray or elide were his. He’s a strong personality, and as a result, the narration is confident and vigorous.

Like any good narrator, my crusty old mariner might not have played an actual role in the novel’s action. He might be invisible to most readers. But he’s as important a character as any of the protagonists.