Maybe it's the books I've been reading - really truly unique and wonderful books like The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin I wanted to write about so much. There have been a lot more that have been fine, but a little "meh." Why is it that I feel like I'm not connecting with when I sit down to write? How can I find my way back into feeling this writing again?
One, the answer is probably to let it be okay that some of the books I read are just fine and don't provoke me to deep thought or attachment. That is fine. Not every book can be a gem, or a complete pile of horseshit. Two, don't make it an unattainable goal that I am going to feel inspired every time I sit down to write.
Three, let myself take these weird digressions again? I feel like I used to bring bits of my daily life and experience into these reviews more, and sometimes let them meander away from "this is the book, what it is about and whether or not I liked it" format. Sure, that makes it more about me, but this is a completely subjective experience anyway, and I liked letting people in on why I reacted to some parts the way I did.
I think part of the problem has been that I started to think about writing these book reviews for an invisible audience, and somehow that feels like it has standardized the format. Maybe it's as simple as trying to shift my focus to writing the review for me - I was saying to a friend this last week when we were talking about this very book that a year or two down the line, sometimes all I remember about a book is what I wrote in my review and not a lot else. (This was in the context of said friend saying he'd read Wolf in White Van a year or two before and didn't remember it very well.)
I don't know that I've gotten anywhere with this musing, but we'll see. I'm not really down, and I'm nowhere near giving up. I just need to revitalize the format for myself, break out of my rut.
So, imaginary future Megan who may have to talk about this book to someone (as I dream of getting to talk about all books to someone), what do we want to remember?
Well, first of all, let's still do the synopsis. It's helpful, and I may want to remember it.
This is a book about a young (youngish? The book spans quite a while) man whose face is disfigured, and how that came about will be gradually but not entirely revealed over the course of the book. To support himself/to find something in his world he can control after he got out of the hospital, he wrote a play-by-snail-mail roleplaying game that he placed ads for in various magazines, and now, many years later, still has people who mail him their moves and wait to get back what happens next.
I'm an avid roleplayer, which I think is hidden from absolutely no one, and this was interesting. What struck me, and maybe the early play-by-mail games were like this, is how non-reactive the game is. The main character wrote every possible answer at the beginning, and so what he does is parse out which of the options he gave was chosen, pulls out a sheet of paper from a file, maybe adds a note, and sends it back off. This world does not change and evolve with story as the player does, and none of what happened is aimed at the character or their actions or who they are and what they want to become. The players are playing in his sandbox, and it's all already decided.
At the start of the book, he's also being sued by the parents of a young person who, like all the worst urban legends of "Things Roleplaying Could Do To Your Children," got too into the game, and came to personal harm.
But most of this passes him by - he is curiously detached from the world around him, and the world is mostly content to let him alone. Even the world he created exists outside him - there is no more creation in him, no new worlds, nothing to explore beyond it, no way to make it change to complement the players. It seems to be about control, but it's control of the sort that means stasis.
There are lots of things people get out of roleplaying, lots that they can get out of it, or play for. But this seems so far to one side of the spectrum it kind of baffles me. Our style these days at the table is to have character-centred play, high on the drama, and everything in the world is aimed not at the heads of generic characters, but these specific characters and their foibles, desires, and histories. It sounds awfully lonely to have created the world and then stepped apart, except for photocopying and mailing. It's very theist, if you want to bring theology into it. It says something about this character, though, who he was before the incident and how he reacted to his life after it.
One other moment that I'd like future Megan to remember: Stardance by Spider Robinson is one of my favourite books. If I had to give someone one book to read that would explain who I am as a human being, it would be that one. It looms large in my personal mythology, and there is a quote from the end of it that is as close as I will ever come to having a defined philosophy of life.
And so it was particularly weird for me when the main character makes a reference to Stardance, saying that it was a book he read, and that he remembers almost nothing about it, except this one thing that is not at all what I would put top of my list of things to remember about it. This said more to me about this character and his approach to life than anything else, that he could read Stardance and just take away a part of it, and phrase it in the most pedestrian way possible. The wonder and challenge and pain and humanity appears to have made no impact on him. (Also, his philosophy of life seems to come from Conan, but even the character recognizes he ignored some of the underlying philosophy of those books.)
Oh yeah, and you might want to remember that the title is a reference to the Satanic Panic and the idea of playing records backwards.
You know what? I haven't said anything else about whether or not I liked this book. And because this wasn't a book that inspired particularly strong feelings one way or the other, I'm not going to. Screw that.
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