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Author of queer, wry sci fi/fantasy books. On Amazon.
Editor of all fiction genres.

Friday, 5 July 2024

Mortuary Files

 


I put on the locket

that I bought when my parents nearly divorced

and mourned you

although you had not died

 

I don’t rank the people I’ve lost

they’re just an archipelago of scars in my mind

 

In no particular order:

 

There’s K, the former stripper and aerialist

full of storms and fighting wit and pain

 

O, wry and small and deep-voiced

with beautiful insincere eyes

 

A different K, her fragrant hair like a summer storm

and shifting brown eyes

and heady cigarette kisses, her grey halo

 

T and L, a milkmaid and a fairy tale princess

one a competitor and one

a lost love

 

S, with hard firm eyes and

strong opinions;

tea, and tobacco, and a warm laugh

 

Some were friends, some were lovers—

or something like it—

 

I haven’t counted every fallen robin

(to steal from a better poet)

but the strafes and near misses score my heart anyway

 

And now my regard and respect for you

adds a headstone to the rows

perhaps I should have known better, but

 

whisper networks are like telegrams were; they travel fast

but sometimes, not fast enough

and when you need them, they’re too late

 

So the things that other people knew before

are things that I’m only learning now

 

If I’d known them then, would I ever have

seen the magic in your words

or just the plywood and glue and nails and paint

of hollow setpieces

 

Burning it all wouldn’t scour your fingerprints from my clay

I guess I’ll forever have to say “good art, bad person”

but now I wonder how good the art really was in the first place

 

All the awards in the literary world

don’t add up to therapy

 

(and on its own, therapy

Is not always good, or enough)

 

I don’t need for the people I love and admire

to be perfect

or even to know who I am

 

But I wish I’d trusted the madwoman in the attic

because you made your father’s mistake

and I guess it

Runs in the Family

 

I have my own stories and poems to write

and a beautiful new child to attend to

and beloveds

and friends

and an art collective

and an online community

and an immense, overflowing stack of books to read

by people that aren’t you

 

but the people I’ve lost pull me back to

grey and ashes and sepia

 

and sometimes, it’s important

to count what has been lost.

Thursday, 4 July 2024

An Open Letter to Neil Gaiman



The day I found out what you did
Silver lockets might as well have been
 piles of ash flowing between my fingers
Nothing was beautiful 
in my basement,  I curled up on a beanbag chair full of stuffing 
And slept until it hurt less 
It wasn’t just the assault allegations
Those were pretty bad, sure
It was the quiet whispers and casual mumbles that 
You’d slept with fans 
Young ones
And even if everything was above board, I couldn’t help but think
If I had lined up for hours or run into you in the right kind of club
With padded walls and restraints on the benches
Would you have ignored me because I wasn’t pretty enough
Or worse, paid attention because I was
We are not strawberries to snatch from the roadsides of life 
And now that I am older and past what Orwell called “the wild rose beauty” stage
And I am a rosehip 
If ever I was a rose, which is doubtful
All I can see are the lines and rows of beautiful tough mysterious Fey young women that 
Keep cropping up in your work 
and kept swirling in adoring eddies around your table at conventions 
You knew better 
You had the power 
You could crush any one of them in the palm of your hand 
Who would believe a young nanny over a famous author 
You used to be the person I most wanted to have lunch with 
Now all I want 
Is to write better than you.
I may never be as famous; odds of that are high and stacked against me 
But I can push myself harder and climb higher and feel something deeper 
And if I can’t, well,
I’m at least going to try.

Wednesday, 27 March 2024

Update


Hi! I'm not dead! In fact, the opposite. My wife had our baby, and he's beautiful and perfect, but also keeping me *very* busy. We're also planning to move soon. Yes, with a new baby.

Add to this - my brain is like, what if we had a bunch of new plot ideas for romantasy projects?

me: but brain, we have editing to do on our existing projects. Like Prairie Weather, and The Foundling City, and Monsters and Fools... brain: BUT NEW SHINY SPARKLIES!

Where are y'all at?

***

A writer and professional freelance editor, Michelle Browne lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partners-in-crime and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet: *Website * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * Amazon * Tumblr * Mastodon *Facebook * Medium * Twitter  * OG BlogInstagram * Paypal.me * Ko-fi

Thursday, 21 December 2023

Why Haven't I Posted Since July?

 Well - to be honest, I've been too busy!

 a) writing the Prairie Weather trilogy, which is now finished and on submission to publishers - wish me luck! It's 155K, and if you want to beta-read it, pick your favourite social media and contact me. 


and b) - finally, finally, finishing Monsters and Fools, the sequel to the Underlighters. That's right, that sequel. Yes, it really did take ten years. I'm also 13K into The Foundling City, the final book in the trilogy, and given the outline, I'm expecting to be finished that book some time in 2024. 

c) We're preparing for our first child (River, due in early March!) and I have no idea what that will do to my writing or publishing schedule. 

d) I haven't been writing many essays for a while, but I HAVE been posting lots of snippets and updates over on my Tumblr! Tumblr is definitely my most active platform, and it's unquestionably one of the best ways to contact me these days, as well as the best way to find out what I'm working on. 

So, yeah! Hit me up over there, or possibly on Facebook. I may get back to writing essays in the new year as well, but I plan to spend a bunch of time actually reading political theory, which may also result in a lot more essays and thinkpieces. We'll see! 

***

A writer and professional freelance editor, Michelle Browne lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partners-in-crime and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet: *Website * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * Amazon * Tumblr * Mastodon *Facebook * Medium * Twitter  * OG BlogInstagram * Paypal.me * Ko-fi

Friday, 28 July 2023

Back on Ash Tree Lane: Revisiting House of Leaves



Art by Michelle Browne, 2023. Yep, I'm back on my bullshit.


An abbreviated version of this appears as a review for the book on my Amazon and Goodreads accounts, but I realised I had more to say. 

Beware, because 

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS 

for this 23-year-old book (jeez) abound.

 I first read House of Leaves years and years ago, and then some friends suggested reading it for a book club this year. Naturally, I figured it was a good time for a revisit; it's probably been fifteen years or more since I picked it up. Maybe closer to twenty. (Jeez, I'm old.) 

Vibe Check

As much as parts of the book do genuinely deliver a dizzying thrill ride, the beginning of the book actually didn't quite hold up for me. But I have to admit, this is a book you have to binge - try to read it in long sessions. Also there's a ton of content warnings for this book - child abuse, sexual assault mentions, sexual harassment, mental illness, animal harm and death, infanticide, attempted child murder...plus some good, old-fashioned gore and body horror. Lots of horrible, excellent, spooky stuff, and it's generally treated with some respect. 

Once you start to "get" the book, the labyrinthine page formatting and the distracting footnotes - they're there for vibes most of the time, and to instill a sense of authenticity and realism - it's amazing. 

Is this book the most accessible thing I've ever read? Probably not. I don't even know how it is from a disability perspective - I'm not even sure how you'd make an audiobook that captures the vibe. (Maybe with lots of sound effects and clever editing tricks? Actually, if that exists somewhere, someone send it to me.)

And yet, the overall story, about the mental health issues of Johnny Truant, and the possibility of the entire thing being his invention? Or the invention of his mental health? And the subtle nested story meta-structure thing - is really sad and really cool. There's something very visceral about this sad, sad guy's lonely wandering and search for answers. 

A lot of people are tempted to skim Johnny's segments for some reason, but if at all possible, don't do that. Johnny's mother's institutionalization when he was young, his persistent struggles with poverty, mental health issues, substance use, and intimacy, as well as possible ADHD (just to take a few wild guesses), and the death of his "godlike" pilot father and the subsequent abusive monstrousness of his stepfather Raymond, are all essential parts of the narrative. 

Some griping

Yeah, it's at least borderline "dick lit," i.e. a book about man-pain bordering on the fetishistic (i.e., your On the Road, most Hemingway books, Crime and Punishment, Catch-22, Fight Club, plenty of other literary fiction titles - those are just some I've read that fit the bill). But this is "dick lit" that actually shares something scared, vulnerable, and alone, and shows the holes in toxic masculinity - as well as the dangers of mythologizing male figures in one's life. 

The creepy Oedipal stuff with Johnny's mother, as revealed in her letters from the mental institution, and the meta-fictional portrayal of Karen, as well as all the hookup girls, definitely fit too well into that Madonna/whore dichotomy. And it's worth saying that the book is extremely white and quite straight - for someone in LA, Johnny never seems to even encounter a queer person or drag queen/king, and homosexuality is only mentioned in a context of denigrating Will Navidson's masculinity, and questioning the fidelity of his wife, Karen. Even the book metatextually commentating on the mother/whore dichotomy, and having Johnny speculate on the inner lives of his hookups, does not succeed in fishing the book out of basic sexism. 

I can only speculate about ableism a little bit, but the character Reston felt like pretty good representation, and the mental health stuff - well, at least for me, it worked. The visceral horror of developing a family member's mental illness and recapitulating the cycle of trauma? Compulsive lying or avoidance of personal history to hide the horrors within? Yeah, I get it. Not all representation has to be Perfect (TM), and the institutionalization horror of his mother probably has some problems to unpack with it, but the cloying and suffocating nature of her attachment, as well as her desperate hunger for connection with the outside world, also shone through. 

I'll be honest - this is also a book that benefits from skimreading certain sections. I'm just not sure all the physics stuff actually adds to the narrative. I'm not a crunchy enough scientist to take value from it, personally. A lot of people hate Johnny, who is definitely not a Good Person, but I felt sympathetic towards the scrappy young man. I'm surprised Tumblr isn't all over House of Leaves, because he has "scrungly" disaster vibes for sure. (And possibly, considering how much he idolizes his friend Lude, a hint of coded bisexuality? For a book with a central focus on Greek mythology, it's agonizingly straight.)

The good stuff

My favourite sections are definitely the actual explorations of the house. It's no surprise that these are the segments that have resonated the most in pop culture - fans of the SCP (Secure, Contain, Protect) universe and HP Lovecraft have almost certainly run into the main concepts of this book already. 

I guess I'm a sucker for a good gothic novel, because there is something decidedly gothic about this one - it's a House, and it's Spooky, and it's about a Family and their mental illnesses. But in this case, the house is something that travels with Johnny, not just the physical location on Ash Tree Lane. The problems with the house for the Navidsons are all part of the baggage they carry with them. 

I've been sitting with the whole structural thing about the Minotaur, Theseus, Minos, and the whole stepson/stepfather hate thing, for a bit. There's this thematic element about Johnny being emotionally and mentally ill, and his mother being ill as well - that does seem like an intentional parallel? But there's also a thing about Zampano as Daedalus and a father figure, and Johnny as Icarus, soaring too high on his father's creation, only to be killed by it.

Is the entire thing an elaborate delusion? Is Zampano real? Who is this mysterious genius, this Daedalus-like figure whose invention - the book - ensnares and entraps Johnny, our humble Icarus and Minotaur? We certainly don't get answers, but he appears to be lonely, remote, and ripe for idealization. 

Is the Navidson Record meant to be real, or all Johnny's invention? The "editor" character is particularly interesting, especially because at no point do they clarify the reality or unreality of the manuscript.

When, throughout his extended mental breakdown, did Johnny possibly have time to pen this missive? It certainly seems possible that he was doing little else. But when was it accepted and submitted to a publishing company? The book definitely wants to give the vibe of just "appearing" in print. It's very "done" nowadays, but at the time, it was particularly revolutionary. 

Why does House of Leaves still work?

Well - in my opinion, HoL commits to the gothic and keeps you invested, but it also goes deep into the mental health issues that make up the backbone of both cosmic horror and the gothic novel. 

This, then, is probably why military takes on Lovecraftian fiction and the SCPs all kind of suck. I've watched a couple of Youtube videos and listened to a few Actual Play podcasts of Call of Cthulhu games with a Delta Green focus (that's a special forces take on Call of Cthulhu), and all of them just left me absolutely cold. (Maybe other people will enjoy these live-action takes on SCPs more than I did.) In addition to the fact that I'm just not much into jingoism, and I'm kinda critical of that whole carceral-state structure and the military industrial complex, conservative politics really don't work with cosmic horror or gothic novels. 

Sure, military elements can work great - in Lovecraft's Monsters, there's a rather good take on the story of Innsmouth that involves a military intervention - but it's also inherently critical of the role of said military. I do have some fondness for the Warhammer 40K universe as well, but that's also morally complex. 

Any kind of military apologia in the face of cosmic horror just absolutely sucks the scare factor right out of stuff. It's too objective and impersonal, when it should be intimate and invasive. And above all - really good horror must come from empathy. 

If you crave more

T Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon's What Moves the Dead, the HP Lovecraft stories "The Color Out of Space" and "Dreams in the Witch House" as well as the Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle are pretty excellent classic read-alikes; I haven't read Grady Hendrix's How to Sell a Haunted House yet, but I loved Horrorstor, and that's another decent read-alike for building-based horror. The "Endless Ikea" SCP is available on Youtube in multiple reading formats, as well as videos, and of course, there's always the original version on the website. 

The podcasts Welcome to Night Vale, TANIS, and the Rusty Quill Archives also all offer some good horror content if you want to savour the visceral fear of something breathing down your neck, too!

***

A writer and professional freelance editor, Michelle Browne lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partners-in-crime and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet: *Website * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * Amazon * Tumblr * Mastodon *Facebook * Medium * Twitter  * OG BlogInstagram * Paypal.me * Ko-fi
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