Stephanie Gayle

Every now and then some kind person emails me to say that they enjoyed my book or a reading I've done. It's a nice surprise. Sort of like when you find a marshmallow Peep that you hid for Easter five months earlier, only less likely to break your teeth. Some time ago I got an email that began "I just finished reading your book." Aha! I thought! Peepish joy! Fan mail. But the end of that sentence confounded my expectations and the next sentences left me open-mouthed with amazement.

This was not fan mail. Quite the opposite. This reader did not enjoy my book. Oh, and this reader? Hated that other readers liked my book.

I thought, "Who takes the time to write to tell someone how much they hated their book?" I had never considered such a thing. Several friends expressed similar surprise. At best it's a cathartic exercise (you get to say 'I hate your story') but honestly? Why not stop reading? Wouldn't that save both time and frustration?

I got different feedback from people about this. Some pointed out that by inspiring anger, I had surely touched an emotional wellspring within the reader, and that was great. Others thought that I should send the reader a form email that read, "Dear Fan, I am so glad you enjoyed My Summer of Southern Discomfort. I would be happy to add your name to my mailing list so that you can be informed of the publication date of my next book. Thanks for your support!" That one gave me pause. Just snarky enough to appeal to me.

In the end, I let it go. There was nothing to be won by engaging said reader in conversation. The email contained questions but it was clear to me that no answer I gave would satisfy, except perhaps "Gosh I'm sorry I wrote such a terrible story. I promise never to do it again." And I sure as hell wasn't going to write that. Besides, I've heard and read horror stories of authors who got involved with angry readers. They never seem to end well. (Misery, anyone?)

Maybe getting the opposite of fan mail in my in box is exactly like finding a five month old Peep. No good can come of chewing it over and over.

Posted by Stephanie at 01:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Next weekend I am editing like no one has edited before, but tomorrow, I go to day job and the close of the three-day, 300 attendee Scratch@MIT conference I've helped organize. Sorry for the radio silence lately, but I promise I'll be more frequent with the posts once I stop handing out ID badges and directing people to their conference session rooms.

And for those of you really interested in Scratch, MIT or the Scratch@MIT conference (and who isn't?) here's some video compiled by the amazing Nobuyuki Ueda and his team who were at the conference and shooting photos and videos every second or so it seems. I luckily escaped the lens most of the time. However if you watch the Qube Meta video I appear about halfway through the blur. I'm wearing a very bright yellow jacket. I'm also grinning like a fool in the photos taken underneath the giant cat poster on the 7/25 footage. I swear it's the same smile I sported in my kindergarten school photo. Some things never change.

Posted by Stephanie at 09:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Advertising aimed at women makes me more than a wee bit hostile. I hate seeing anti-aging ads. (Guess what? You are going to age!) My roommate Tracey especially hates it when TV ads use pseudoscience to sell cosmetics or health treatments to women. "Free radical?" "Collagen?" "Omega-3?" Obviously these words added to my skin can only spell success. Um, yeah.

So imagine my delight when I discovered comedian and critic Sarah Haskins and her delightful series of reports called "Target Women." From yogurt to wedding shows to feeding your family, Sarah shows how modern shows and ads chide women and try to sell us (always with the selling!) a load of steaming patooty.

I've linked to a few of her reports below. Enjoy.

Target Women: Feeding Your F------ Family

Target Women: Wedding Shows

Posted by Stephanie at 04:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Damn it, Clive Owen. I just watched your film "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead." I'm planning a 300 person conference for work, so my free time? Severely curtailed. Spending 102 minutes over the course of two evenings (did I mention the minimal free time?) was an investment of sorts. An investment squandered.

Clive, your clean-shaven face on the DVD promised me the handsome visage I've grown accustomed to watching in superior films like "Children of Men." This? You have a scraggly awful beard. I kept shouting at you, "Shave it off! Please? Shave it!" You obeyed when there were but 10 minutes left in the film. I endured Malcolm MacDowell (ew) and some of the worst dialogue ever for a last minute physical transformation? No.

Damn it, Clive Owen. I know you didn't write the awful script, but when you read it didn't it strike you as a bit stilted? Slow? For a thriller didn't the story seem short on thrills? And I know, I know, it was supposed to be broody. You brooded the hell out of it, really you did. But, um, brooding alone does not make a film. A story usually helps. You know, a story that holds more water than most colanders?

Don't do anything like this again, okay? You deserve better. So do I.

Posted by Stephanie at 07:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A very astute reader (the only kind I use) pointed out that my manuscript for book #2 seemed a bit off. She didn't understand the ending in the context of the character's emotional and narrative arc. I understood what she was getting at. And I knew what the problem was: I had written the ending alongside the beginning. That is, when I was writing scenes before I began writing the book, I had two that I quite liked: the opening and the ending. I edited the beginning quite a bit but the ending not as much. I should have, because, as my reader noticed, it seems incongruous given all the events that lead to it.

That's the danger in artifacts. You can grow attached to them and lose sight of what they are supposed to represent. I've noticed I'm always much more receptive to suggestions such as "change the ending" or "remove that major character" when I haven't seen the story in a long time (several months). Physical distance somehow begets professional objectivity. I trust the first reader's eyes, perhaps even more than my own, because they're seeing the story new and I never can at this point.

So I'm looking forward to destroying some artifacts...

Posted by Stephanie at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The writing is not going so well lately. All my words seem insufficient. Really. They're not doing the job I'm setting them to do. Worse, I have a conversation that just is not the tense, crackling exchange of wits it was meant to be. I find myself arguing with my characters. "Why are you suddenly being likeable? I did not cast you to be charming. Be a curmudgeon, damn it!" The characters then turn around and say I'm the one who wrote them, so it must be my fault. It's a good point. The kind of point that pliable characters would not make. They would apologize for the error of their ways and start acting the way I expected.
You would think that as an author I would have total control over my work, that the prose would flow from mind to keyboard in a tranquil stream of genius. You would be wrong.

Posted by Stephanie at 08:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I found myself looking about my room thinking, "My, this area could use tidying." No doubt it could. But what my clever inner-self recognized was that the cleaning urge was a procrastination attempt disguised as a good impulse. I only want to clean my room so that I don't have to do the somewhat daunting writing work I have before me to complete.

While it would certainly be nice to move those ice skates out of my room (the same ice skates I had when I was a teenager and cannot fit my feet inside now--super useful) I think it might be nicer to have some of the work I've been agonizing over done.

And to sweeten the deal I'll only allow myself lunch if I go work on the book. Yup. Carrot and stick. But not carrot sticks. That, friends, is no lunch for a working writer.

Posted by Stephanie at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recently I watched the cinematic trainwreck "I Know Who Killed Me" starring Lindsay Lohan as both demure student Aubrey Fleming and potty-mouthed stripper Dakota Mars. Never mind the agony of seeing Miss Lohan play parts that reference her first great role, as freckled twin moppets in "The Parent Trap," in such startling and heatrbreaking contrast: this film is terrible. I knew it would be, but I was hoping for entertainment-level awful of the kind afforded by such masterpieces as "Deep Blue Sea" or "The Wicker Man." Nope, this is run-of-the-mill lazy awful.

But it made me think (that's more than we can say for much of the cast and crew). Specifically, it made me think about crime suspects in regards to mystery novels. When the suspects barely make it onto the page and their identity(ies) revealed, readers feel cheated and with good reason. Now, I could see who the villain of the film was a mile off but it was still annoying that he didn't have more than eight minutes on film. That there was no investigation so to speak. And there really wasn't. The cops? The federal agents? About as present and useful as the fricking tooth fairy when you're thirty years old.

This made me realize that my novel's cast of suspects has to be more than mentioned and revealed. And my cops? Going to have to be more present than I had planned originally. Why's that? Because I was planning on being somewhat lazy. It's always interesting when I catch myself out in lazy-writer mode. It involves me scolding myself, resolving to do the right (write) thing, and then bitching about my naggy ass self to myself. Yup. It's a regular carnival in my head.

So thank you, Jeff Hammond (writer) and Cris Sivertson (director) of the worst movie I've seen in a looooong time. You taught me something. How to ruin a story, and, hopefully, how to avoid doing so.

Posted by Stephanie at 06:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)