1408 is Great

When I first saw this poster, browsing Blockbuster Online, I thought maybe John Cusack and Samuel Jackson had been teamed up in a historical drama about the year 1408. Maybe John Cusack would put on a corset, and Samuel L. Jackson would stare into middle distance and contemplate oppression. As it turns out, not.

I sometimes feel hesitant about movies based on Steven King stories. After all, Lawnmowerman. You know? But I have never been disappointed in either John Cusack or Samuel L. Jackson, so I trusted these actors. And 1408 was fantastic.

Here's the premise: John Cusack is a writer who goes around debunking hauntings. He publishes books about the "Most Haunted Country Houses" and "Most Haunted Mansions" etc. but he does not believe in ghosts, he has only eye-rolling for wide-eyed proprietors and their warnings of locking your door against spooks. In the first scene we see him investigating a bed and breakfast that's supposed to be haunted but turns out to be about as spooky as a mushroom omelet. Then he gets an anonymous tip: Don't stay in room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel in NYC.

When he arrives in New York to stay in room 1408, after having to sue the hotel for the right to do so, hotel manager Samuel L. Jackson gives him dire warnings against it, as well as a whole dossier of pictures and case files from suicides in that room. Many, many suicides, usually after less than an hour in the room. John Cusack rolls his eyes and marches upstairs, enters the room, and closes the door.

After this point, all the other actors and actresses in the movie fade into the background, and it's John Cusack's stage. Whenever I see a great performance like this, I think, "Who else could have pulled this off? Nobody!" This may or may not be true, but Cusack's natural sneer, his indifferent posture, and his cool factor really made this character work. Totally, totally amazing. It was so creepy, so ghastly, so horrifying that I almost crawled into my husband's armpit for safety.

There was no gore. No decapitation. No severed leg flying through the air. This was not Saw or Hostel or Grindhouse or any of those bloodbaths. This was pure, tight, excrutiating psychological thrill, and it was perfectly, perfectly executed. Okay, well, the ending was a little loose, but... I'm glad of that. I needed a little breathing room by the end of the movie.

I wholeheartedly recommend this. It's the best kind of horror movie. No disgusting tearing apart of flesh, nobody burned alive, no goofy monsters, and you can go to bed and sleep well, because the situation is so specific (just in room 1408!) that you don't have to worry subconsciously that the horror is going to get into your house.

Five pumped fists for 1408.

Nanowrimo Day 21: A New Goal

Categorize this under "Excuses, Excuses, Whatever."

I made a few changes this year which hurt my output:

1. Going to Disney World in the middle of November. Not only did this throw off my writing during the trip, but it also threw off my children's schedules, which made them more needy after the trip, and my husband's work schedule, which made him less available to help me all month. It's critical to Nano-ing that he take the children away out of the house for hours at a time during the weekend, and while this happened multiple times last year, it did not happen at all this year.

2. I did not ask for help. Last year and the year before, Ahno took the children during the week at least one afternoon per week so I could be alone in the house and pound out some words. I didn't ask her to do that this year.

3. I decided to write literary fiction instead of a children's book or genre piece. I knew it would be harder to get volume on a piece of writing that I actually care about and want to be perfect. I should have known I was in trouble when I threw out so much of the first chapter and started over. This was in week 1, before Disney World, before whatever else happened.

For these reasons, and more importantly my belligerent unwillingness to just overcome everything and write anyway, I am not going to reach 50K this year. I am, however, going to set myself a new goal of 25K and see if I can do that. I have already written the hardest part of the book, and I have also edited as I go along so that I'm very happy with what I have. If I can end the month with 25K that I'm proud of, I will call that a personal victory.

Writing About Death

It's hard to write about death. I didn't realize how hard it was until I tried to really do it myself. There was a professor at my college who did it well: Richard Messer. When I had him as a writing teacher, I was 19 and 20, and writing saucy, trouble-making things. He responded positively to something about my writing, which gave me confidence to keep doing it. Here is an excerpt from his book Murder in the Family.

*****

I kept her old leather coat--but she had that brand new beautiful yellow one,
why was she wearing this, her father's castoff, shabby and too big? I put it
on and feel the hairs on my neck rise. Something has fallen out of the
sleeve and under the table, then under the bed, as if it were alive. Down on
my knees, I feel into the darkness under the box springs. The soft whorls of
lint dust. It is at this moment I know again that someone else is in the
room. At the table by the window in the other room. Someone who sits writing
down everything I do with a black pen on white paper. And if the leaden pen
stops its slow-motion scrawl, the wall of language will dissolve, and there
will be nothing between me and the writer, between the writer and the
terror.

Together we watch a name appear on the white surface: Bruno.

The one on his knees rears up as though struck. And so he has been
struck--by the thought of his children dying. Where are they? They have to go to
school, tell curious playmates what has happened. They don't want to stay home.

He explains this to himself and it is to Bruno he speaks, the one who sits
like a bear, the one who records, the one who listens. All week he has only
been going through the motions; he knows it now. People around
him try to act as though nothing has happened; so does he. But Bruno knows
better. From the moment he recoiled in the hospital morgue after seeing her
body, he has been split in two. The part of his life he lived through her
began to recede into the past, calling out to the rest of him like someone
buried alive. That it will always be this way is what he fears most. That he
will never feel wholly involved, wholly there in the world again. That,
diminished, preoccupied, he will drift on in the prison of an unreal
present-past, always reaching back inside himself, trying to save her.

*****

At the time I knew him, I thought, wow, what a dark, kind of melancholy person, what a grey and haunted person. He was kind of scary and cool. Now that I'm older and I'm trying, myself, to write about death, I respect the writing he was doing. Death is really physical and low, and the awfulness is grinding and slow. The part right after the death is so breathless, how mundane, but your legs keep moving forward. I am not entirely sure what made me dig out this book and look at his work, but I'm glad I did.

Another one of his line that I have never forgotten is about how he wondered if he had spent his life trying to wake up, or trying to go to sleep. And in another, he says the dawn came through the window searching for survivors. Pretty amazing stuff, and it sticks with me after lo these long fifteen years.

Nanowrimo Day 19: The Sentence that Could Not Be Written

Yesterday I did it.

Maybe it was Marta's comment that pushed me over the block. She said, and I paraphrase, that if there seems to be a chapter that cannot be written, then maybe there is really just a sentence that cannot be written, and if I could identify that sentence that could not be written, then I could get over myself and just write it. After all, *identifying* the sentence is practically writing it. I would have to write it in my head in order to identify it.

So I thought of the sentence that could not be written, and by thinking of it, I wrote it. And then I wrote the whole rest of the chapter. It was nightmarish to write. At one point I leaned over to Dan and said, "I can't write any more of this chapter. It's too awful. You have to help" And Dan's response was, "Would you like to hear some dead baby jokes?"

I did punch him. But I also put it in the novel. Hehehe. I have now accomplished what I really needed to accomplish with Nanowrimo, which was to force myself to write that chapter/scene/sentence, which has been hovering over me for years. I feel better.

Thank you, Marta! For your inspired comment, you will receive one Bookbeast. You may choose which one you like, and tell me, and I will mail it to you, with my effusive thanks.

Best Car Game Ever: In and Out

This game will keep you awake when it's two o'clock in the morning, and you've already been across four state lines, and another latte will make you vomit, and another mile will see you in the ditch, because you've been hitting those wake-up strips, and you can smell death. It is a good game that can last for 100 miles or maybe even all the way home. You do need a partner to play. A living partner who is also awake.

Here's how you do it.

The first person says a book title or song title or something... like:

Hard Day's Night

Then the next person takes one of those words and says another title with that word in it, like:

The Night We Never Met

Then the next person takes one of *those* words and says *another* title with that word in it, like:

I Met You

The next person says:

Crazy for You

Like that. Sounds easy, but it gets hard. There are certain titles that seem like a dead end, but there are of course really very few. If there's a way in, there's a way out. You may find yourself cycling past "Baby Love" by the Supremes or "One" by U2 a couple more times than you'd think.

There are three levels of play:

Level 1: Competitive. Limit your play to only movie titles, or only book titles, or only song titles, or some other tight category. Try to stick your opponent with a hard one, like "Layla" or something. Try to win by putting them in a spot they can't think their way out of. Another way to make it harder is to decide that you can't play out on the word you played in on. Like you can't follow "She Loves You" with "All you Need is Love" and then "Love Actually." You have to go to "All of Me" or "Need you Tonight" or whatever. A super-hard way to play is to go for two word titles, play in on the first word, play out on the second word.

Level 2: Casual. Song titles and movie titles and book titles and even tv shows. Still try to win, but don't be as vicious.

Level 3: Ridiculous. Song titles, movie titles, book titles, tv shows, idiomatic phrases, stuff you heard on the radio an hour ago, etc. The point of playing at this level is not to win, but to keep the volley going as long as possible. More collaborative than competitive.

The next time you're going from one end of the country to the other and you need a way to make the miles fly by, turn off the show tunes and try "In and Out."

This game was invented over a decade a go by me and Joshilyn Jackson while we were on a car trip from Chicago to Atlanta. I feel compelled to disclose that other games we invented on that trip included impersonating NPR nuns, and turning Madonna songs into FAQs.