Rocky, Grace, & Andy Weir
Humans do love a great epic adventure... eat, story, bed; repeat.
In a recent essay about writing, I recollected moments of my childhood during which my father was writing his best known novel. That essay, if we ever see it published, is called A 17mm Socket Wrench because the essay explores the influences of being the child and grandchild of noted authors. The thesis is that we (kids) learn at the knee of our parents. In that recollection, I spied a copy of Moby Dick next to my father’s desk as he wrote the opening of that novel. My father, student, studied how Melville introduced his character. Ok, not tough I know and we all probably have that opening line memorized. As a Massachusetts kid, Melville rang in the ether. I wanna love the book but even now I struggle reading the entire thing. I need a bloody fast forward button. I’ve seen baby belugas and great blues. I’ve played with Orca and listened to Humpbacks sing. In fact, my across-the-street neighbor was the first to record those songs. I’ve sailed thousands of miles in both the North Atlantic and North Pacific. Whales? Check!
Last night yacking away with my 29-year-old editor, SarahBelle “SB” Selig, I dumped on myself for failing to write a great adventure story. I just finished reading Andy Weir’s Hail Mary recognizing my failure at being outrageous enough, bold enough, innovative enough. I failed to bring my level of tension to a full 10. To a woman less than half my age, I whinged saying “Why can’t I just keep writing short fiction? It is so powerful, so intricate, so lyrical? I just want to toss my 100,000 words out and start over.” Go ahead reader, say it: Oh authors. I couldn’t and wouldn’t have written Hail Mary. It isn’t my story. I never once played reluctant hero. I was always the dipshit that said: “Ok, I’ll do it.” Or others would say, “Let’s wait until Christina gets here.” I could never utter the phrase “but I’m just an analyst” or mutter Andy’s version, “I’m just a school teacher.” I’m the “if not me, then who” jackass.
Frankly, our chat was supposed to be about a 2000 word piece about Baghdad that I’ll publish next week. Instead, we talked about adventure novels.
Here we are at the opening age of A.I. rediscovering epic adventures and discovering that we humans love them, still love them. Hail Mary hit streaming the same month we were re-re-introduced to The Oddessy. SB reports that in LA (where she lives now now*) tickets for the movie are available only for 7am – you can’t get a ticket. New bookstores are opening, books sales are increasing, and I feel hopeful. I even feel hopeful about A.I. in general (while hating the fact that A.I. in the U.S.A. is owned by asshole billionaires possessed of failed morality who predicated their inventions on the stolen works of artists from around the globe). A.I. holds a mirror to humanity forcing us to look at ourselves for what we are not. Suddenly, we scan for humanity and for a soul in storytelling. “Captain, the tricorder reports no living beings present.”
We love a great story told well. We love enduring friendships (although I think Odysseus was a shit friend, a worse father, and a dreadful husband), but somehow Homer needed this guy to wonder the abyss alone while plagued by gods, demigods, semi-gods, demi-semi gods, nymphs, dryads, nyads, cyclopes, and tribbles seems like a fine night of listening by the fire.
In the same thought of great stories told well, I feel that Patrick Rothfuss is my own personal Scheherazade. Patrick, I have no idea where/how/if you will finish your story, but I can just listen during a dark night to a human reading me a story about purple hippos and the woman in living in the underthing (I can’t even parrot his world, but I can dream in it, thank you). I can drop my needle anywhere in the track of those stories and be happy.
Odysseus was a shit friend, terrible family member, and a dreadful military leader. “Hey honey, I am home but all of my men are dead.” My ancestor Bernard Joseph Aiken returned home fourteen years after his son was born. Between the begatting act and saying hello to Joseph Bernard Aiken, he went to the Philippines in 1910, and Alaska and back to the Philippines before marrying Annie Law in 1922. I don’t think Annie was surrounded by suitors given she scrubbed the floors of Harvard University on her hands and knees. The joke in our house was that Annie asked for the loaf of bread she had sent him for. We love Odysseus because he is that guy. He’s the guy that would rather romp with Circe in Juneau than struggle in Boston with a young family.
In Tao Ceti’s orbit , Grace prove loyal, loving, generous and entirely human. I could argue that Rocky is more human that Odysseus, sadly I’ve known more Odysseuses (Odyssii?) than I’ve known Rockies. My judgment of Patrick’s character Kvothe remains suspended by a thin thread.
What suckers we are for drama! I watch the spousal unit rub hands and lean forward during peaking tension even when we both know the outcome. It’s not someone magicked a fresh twist in an old plot. It is the same story I already know. But nope, we get pulled in each time. I find it freaky that I can laugh and cry at my own writing. I cried while reading the last chapter of my novel Captain Henry: 2 ½ Insurrections, 2 Wars, 1 ¼ Centuries, and a Story of Love on tape while recording it as an audiobook. I wrote it. I practiced reading it. I read it carefully and yet that horse crept into my throat and salty-wet-shit gathered on my lower eyelid. What a sap I am!
How do we humans to this to ourselves. Do we honestly say, “I’m bored, tell me a story that will raise my cortisol level, give me a squirt of oxytocin or dopamine.” Actually, I think we do. Kids lay in bed begging for one more story. We sit in comfy chairs surfing digital tiles for something that will engage us and entertain us before we also nod off to sleep. Eat, story time, bed. Wind the clock back or fore, it matters little: eat, story, bed; repeat.
I loved the ending of Hail Mary for the way it echoes Melville’s ending. Who was Queequeg if not the exotic alien of 1850 America? I can enjoy that over and over and over. I’ll feel thrills, chills, dread, hope, love, and fear at slightly different times during my next read and my next watch. Frankly, I fear the novel I started reading yesterday will land in my huge pile of DNF. Instead, I’ll return to a great human story told by a human.
I am an author. I know plot tricks and story telling rules. I can spot a McGuffin without a field guide. I know that any plan described with detail fails, while the unspoken plan always succeeds. According to some Russian guy, guns go bang. Oooh, foreshadowing, nice. And as for herrings of the rosé variety, I sometimes sniff them a bit too early. My writing can ruin my enjoyment of an other’s writing. So what!? I just need to keep finding stories I love because I need to feel it all – just to be human.
My answer, my frustration, with falling short of my expectation is to study more, read more, listen more. And find authors who do it better than I.
When talking with SB last night, I admitted to developing a writerly crush on Andy Weir. I love how Andy appears in my social media streams. Andy contacted Dennis at Four Keys Book Arts, a bookbinder I follow on YouTube asking him to make beautiful presentation copies of his three novels. This told me that Andy loves books. Andy loves watching other artists work through challenges we all know and share. This told me that Andy loves art and artists. Which is why watching Adam Savage present behind-the-scenes interviews done with the prop and art department during the filming of Hail Mary is so joyful. Someone said: let’s use as much practical as possible. Of course CGI is required but let’s make sure that what we we touch and see up close is real (at least “movie real”). In his way, Andy opted to celebrate art, artisans, and humanity by asking for real to be present in his land of fantasy.
Stories remind me that a hot, ammonia-breathing rock can be the most loving and enduring friend any of us could wish for.
* “Now Lives” means I started working with SB while she lived in South Africa. She then lived in Greece, then the Carolinas, and now LA.