Greetings, all and sundry!

BELIEVE IN ME is out in the world and I have begun serious work on #RussianBluesWIP. I already have a solid draft to work with, fortunately, so I can get to my favourite part, which is expanding where needed and polishing and connecting threads and hiding Easter Eggs.

As I am writing #RBW, I am reminded of the first novel I finished as an adult. It was called Hide and it was about a Jewish lawyer with amnesia. Here's the problem: all I knew about law and lawyers was what old Hollywood movie courtroom dramas had to tell me. I haven't looked at it in years; I still know almost nothing about law and lawyers, BUT having had to write DadGeorge over the last few years I've become aware of this deficiency (unlike when I was 22 or whatever and thought I knew everything). Fortunately I have since acquired a friend by whom I can run things and she can "actually, dude" me all she wants.

What does that have to do with #RBW? Well, one of the main characters is a Royal Navy officer. Despite having a ton of relatives who were in the Navy (including my own parents), I actually know zip about life on ships and therefore I've handed over some of my newest sections (think of whatever is below "rare" on the steak cooking spectrum) to another friend who does. I'm sure she will be laughing/shaking her head/possibly yelling at me as she reads it, but no matter how embarrassing my assumptions and gaps of knowledge may be, the fact is, it's a good thing, because no writer writes in a vacuum. It's a community. We can google things all we want, but nothing can replace talking to someone with the knowledge we need. I've been able in turn to talk to people who want their autistic characters to be accurate, say, or look up WWI facts from my overflowing shelf of reference books.

Now, on to my top reads of February!

Nonfiction:

Black AF History (Michael Harriot): You NEED to read this book. Preferably the audio version, which author @michaelharriot reads himself.
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We all get taught things about the history of our country growing up, but there is so much that gets left out, downplayed, or revised, and this was an education. It's not always an easy read (real history never is), but Harriot's writing is clear, easy to follow, and delightfully snarky. Whether you're Black, brown, or pasty white like me, this is stuff we all need to know, and now more than ever. I laughed out loud SO many times. I also cringed a lot. White people are The Worst™️.

Fiction:

A lot of the fiction I started this month was DNF. Either the narrator annoyed me or the story didn't grab me or... endless reasons.

So I'm going with Jean and Johnny (Beverly Cleary). I devoured it in one sitting one night when I couldn't sleep (ebook from the library).

I can't say enough good things about this story. The strong sister dynamic was fabulous, and as always, Cleary's characters are so REAL. Often uncomfortably so, but also humourously (Jean's mother constantly entering sweepstakes was a running thread that was super funny to me). I loved that Jean wears glasses and realises that she doesn't have to NOT wear them to be pretty. The ending was very satisfying as well. Everybody got to know themselves a little better, A+, no notes.

And I promised volcanoes in the subject line, so if you've been impatiently waiting for that, HERE WE GO.

Since the summer of 1996, when I lived in Idaho and we would be caught in tangles of filming-related traffic on our way home from church on Sunday or Wednesday evenings, I've been curious about Dante's Peak. Almost 30 years later, I finally got around to watching it, and... I liked it?? A lot, actually.

Is the dialogue corny? Sure, sometimes. A movie like this is really about the drama and the special effects more than dialogue, and it did an amazing job with that IMO. But I am an absolute sucker for found family narratives and this delivers big time on that front. There's also a lot of banter amongst the team that comes to investigate the possibility of an eruption that was great.

But what really got me was this: I lived there. I lived not far from Wallace, which played the character of Dante's Peak. (Yes, I consider the town its own character.) I lived where the mountains hem you in on both sides of a narrow corridor, and it was like watching a place I was happy in get ravaged by disaster, so, there's that big emotional connection too that someone who hasn't lived there might not have.

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Here's a video of the actual locations vs how they looked in the movie.

And now I know what they were filming when we got tangled in all that traffic: any one of the bridge scenes. The bridge isn't in Wallace! The bridge was on my road (Old [Coeur d'Alene] River Road)! We crossed it at least six times a week for years! I KNEW that it felt eerily familiar! (I mean, so much of the movie DOES, but I was trying to remember where in Wallace there might have been a bridge like that and DIDN'T MAKE THE OBVIOUS CONNECTION)

SORRY YALL I NEVER PROMISED I'D BE **SANE** IN ANY OF THESE NEWSLETTERS

Okay, okay, this is long enough, but thank you for putting up with my randomness. Have you seen Dante's Peak? Did you hate it, love it, neutral?

Until next time,

Eva