On my plane.
Heading to Brazil. My updating here will be sporadic for the next week or so. Don’t worry, Athena’s got some stuff planned for you. And now, off I go. — JS
Possible Happiness:
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop | Powell’s
Anyone who has been a teen
remembers the push and pull between hoping to be known, and the frozen-in-the-spotlight feeling of actually being known — and in Possible Happiness, author David Ebenbach adds a further dimension to that tension, a dimension that many readers will be all too familiar with.
DAVID EBENBACH: Adolescence is terrifying. Looking at my novel Possible Happiness now, I can see that that’s the big idea of the book: adolescence is terrifying. I didn’t go into the book with that idea in mind; I prefer exploration over being driven by an idea. But writing my way into the main character, Jacob, a sixteen-year-old who’s out of his depth trying to grow up in Philadelphia in 1989, reminded me just how harrowing the teen years can be. Exciting and fun, too—there’s so much newness and opportunity—but there’s a sometimes-overwhelming flip side to that bright possibility.
The root of all of it, good and bad, is independence. In Possible Happiness, Jacob falls into a social life basically by accident—he lets his sense of humor show in class one day—and now he has new friends, lots of stuff to do on the weekends, and even a girlfriend. Those are the exciting and fun parts. Have you ever seen how excited a housecat gets when you finally open the front door carelessly and they dash outside? That cat is thinking, I’m FINALLY FREE! This is my MOMENT! But then the cat takes in the enormity of the world, with all its strange light and sounds and sheer apparent endlessness, and it freezes in place, and its next thought is, Ohhhhhhh, crap—what have I gotten myself into? That was apparently the metaphor that was on my mind as I wrote Possible Happiness; thinking about his abrupt entry into the social world, my character Jacob feels “as shocked as a housecat thrust suddenly outdoors.”
Actually it’s from yesterday,
don’t tell. The picture is straight out of the Pixel 9 Pro, with no additional futzing on my part. But that doesn’t mean there is no futzing: Google runs every photo its phones take through its own proprietary blend of algorithms and choices to come up with its base response. In the case of Google, that generally means the pictures are sharpened up a bit, and the color cast is slightly “cooler” (i.e., the white balance is more blue) than it might otherwise be. Plus there are the various inherent aspects of the photo sensor itself, regarding to what it prioritizes over other aspects. It’s one of the reasons I remind people that claiming their photo is “no filter” doesn’t really mean anything these days. If you’re using a digital camera, your image has already been “filtered.” Hell, even if you’re using a film camera, there is still an initial visual bias, because each type of film has its own set of quirks in terms of color reproduction, grain, etc – which is why a lot of filters in photo software claim to be reproductions of a look one can get from a specific film stock. No photo ever taken does not show either the choices or the limitations of the camera and recording medium it was created with. (And then, in this case, there’s the fact that I’m using Flickr to store the photo on, and its compression algorithm subtly changes the photo, and then there’s whatever screen you’re looking at this on, which has its own technical limitations and biases. You will never see a picture I take exactly like I mean it to seen. This is life in the 21st Century.)
The days are getting shorter and the nights longer
as we head into the dark season of the year. For author Richard Thomas, that’s all to the good, because for his novel Incarnate, he wants dark. And cold. And lonely.
RICHARD THOMAS: When I started doing research for my fourth novel, Incarnate, there were a few big ideas bouncing around my head. I was fascinated by the long span of darkness that happens up in Alaska, and what might fester and thrive there. I thought living in Chicago would give me some insight into the cold, but I needed more than dark, cold, and isolated. That has been done to death in horror. In isolation there is desperation and violence, the communities up in Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), and the arctic, riddled with suicide and loss. When you have violence and death there are questions—and for some, it’s about what comes after.
In a dark, lost, broken place, might there be a need for absolution? Enter the sin eater. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of the sin eater—a shaman, a priest, a witchdoctor—who might absolve the sinner of the sin by eating a favorite meal of theirs. Beyond the eating and absolution, what might be created? During this time I was also curious about horror that took an emotion and had it manifest in form. So in some ways, this novel is inspired by Micaela Morrissette’s story, “The Familiars,” which I teach in my Contemporary Dark Fiction classes.
