What I'm Reading
I Give It a Meh
Over the years, I've owned several Mary Roach books, but I've never read them. This week, I finally got around to plowing through Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. People accuse Roach's books of being formulaic. One Word Title. Semi-Colon. An Odyssey Through Something Weird. In Which the Author Relates a Lot of Facts. And Cracks a Lot of Jokes. Titter. Titter. At first, I was dazzled. I mean, this book opens in a room with pans in which human heads are sitting. Impressive! And there are all kinds of strange and dismembered things along the way, as Roach undertakes to answer the question: What happens to dead human bodies, anyway? A lot, apparently. But even though Roach is a significant presence in the book, she is sort of like a shadow figure. I mean, you never really get why she's standing there watching a transplant surgeon pry a still-beating heart from a woman's brain-dead body. I suppose if you don't want your author in your story soup, that works just fine for you. But if you're going to show me a still beating heart, I think you should get me to understand why I should care. And I guess I know that I do, but I don't know why, and Roach never says if she does, or if she does, why. The closest thing to an explanation that I happened across is that her father was sixty-five when she was born. So maybe that explains her fascination with bodies and death. Who knows?
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Working for a Living
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As usual, I'm for hire.
Here are a few things I can help you do:
1. Develop your reality TV show ideas (I've worked on true crime, adventure, and miniseries)
2. Blog (TIME.com named me one of the best bloggers of the year in '08)
3. Write (I'm a journalist with bylines ranging from Harper's Bazaar to Salon to Variety)
4. Advertising (I've worked with Publicis Groupe and Weber Shandwick)
5. Consult (I've helped cast feature films and TV shows)
My LinkedIn is here. You can email me here.
Order the perfect holiday gift today! Buy THE TUMOR, a "masterpiece of short fiction" by Susannah Breslin.
Recommend
Order the perfect holiday gift today! Buy THE TUMOR, a "masterpiece of short fiction" by Susannah Breslin.
What I'm Reading
H Is for Read This Book
Gorgeous. Stunning. Sad and beautiful. Uplifting and deranged. Startlingly intense. A woman loses her father and trains a goshawk to hunt. It's literary, and sing-song-y, and brilliant. Thanks to Justin Cohen for telling me to read it a year ago. Why did it take me so long? Who knows. Read it for the sadness. Love it for the prose. This isn't a memoir. This is something else altogether.
Order the perfect holiday gift today! Buy THE TUMOR, a "masterpiece of short fiction" by Susannah Breslin.
I Miss the 90s
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Order the perfect holiday gift today! Buy THE TUMOR, a "masterpiece of short fiction" by Susannah Breslin.
What I'm Reading
Brain on Fire
I really didn't care for this book. It's a fascinating story about a woman who suffers from what is unclear at first, but what it turns out to be is what twists and turns her mind into something else altogether.
The most interesting aspect of the book is that she cannot remember what happened when her mind went off the tracks for a month, and as a journalist she sets out to recreate and rediscover what happened to her.
But for some reason that episode remains unintegrated into the rest of the author's life, or so it seems. It's as if you spent several hundred pages reading a book in which the author skirts the subject, simply staring at it from far away, never reengaging it in a way that transforms her wholly. Perhaps this is the complication of the brain.
I certainly experienced a very minor version of this at one point in my life. And one thing I learned is that it's very difficult to be objective about a thing when the sick thing is the thing itself.
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The Difference Between Success and Failure Is Not Giving Up
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Politics
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Things You Can Hire Me to Do
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1. Develop your reality TV show idea
2. Create engagement-friendly ad copy
3. Blog about interesting/provocative/timely topics
4. Freelance journalism
5. Consult on your multimedia project
You can view my experience on LinkedIn.
You can email me at susannahbreslin at gmail dot com.
Support the arts! Buy a digital copy of THE TUMOR, a "masterpiece of short fiction" by me, Susannah Breslin.
Storm Clouds Over the State of Louisiana
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I've got a new short story up on Contrary Magazine. I wrote this story in 2004 or 2005. Enjoy it.
They were in a bar. They were in a bar with a woman and a man. It had been the two women, but they had made calls, and then the men had come. She knew when she talked to him that he was drunk. He was drunk and he was at a strip club nearby with one of his friends. Now, he was here. The other man and the other woman didn’t know each other as well as she and the man knew each other, even though the other man and the other woman had been dating for awhile. The other man had his arms crossed over his chest like he was trying to hide his heart. She looked at the man that she was with. She loved it when he was drunk. That was the only time he said what he wanted. Later, the other woman would tell her that her drunk boyfriend who had been at the strip club looked at her like she was his whole world. And, she thought: You bet.
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NYC
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I went to NYC last week and had a great time. One day, I walked through Central Park. It was raining lightly, and the leaves were turning, and it was all very grand and expansive and delightful. I miss it already.
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Do You Live in DC?
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Return
Scream
One Year Ago
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What I'm Reading
“Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.” -- Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Support the arts! Buy a digital copy of THE TUMOR, a "masterpiece of short fiction" by me, Susannah Breslin.