On copyediting, Love is Blind, Barbara Kingsolver, Jennifer Down, and the joy of failure
Dear fellow human beings,
How are things with you? Things with me are a little chaotic. The children have been on school holidays for the last few weeks, and I have also been trying to copy edit my novel, which is a fun combination of events that has lead to me experiencing waves of insanity and the kids playing a lot of Roblox on their iPads. I don’t really know what Roblox is?
rob lox
rob lochs
ROB’s mobile LOCK Service
…but whatever it is, it has allowed me numerous glorious hours to play online boggle work on the novel and I am very grateful.
The copyediting stage is, I think, universally acknowledged by the authors of the world as the 10th circle of hell that Dante forgot to mention. Basically, it involves your editor going through your manuscript line by line and finding everything that is wrong with it, highlighting all your bad writing habits, habits which you yourself somehow failed to notice on any of the 3000 occasions you read through your own work before submitting it for publication (e.g. turns out I like to describe everything as ‘little’ and/or ‘weird’?? it’s a little weird). After you have finished rolling around on the ground slapping yourself in the face for being such a little weirdo and writing such a weird little book with so many weird little descriptors, you then have to go through and decide how best to fix it.
It is a humbling process that I imagine is not unlike having all your pubic hair waxed off—you’re basically letting a beauty technician (your editor) inspect your unkempt nether regions (your draft novel) and brutally yank out all the untidy hairs (excessive use of the words ‘little’/‘weird’). The process is painful, but after you stop crying (crying), you realise that you are left with a much more polished mons venus (novel) which would fit right in on a pornographic movie set (bookshop new release display).
Television
Last week I dived in to a new season of one of my favourite reality TV shows, Love is Blind. The concept of this show is absolutely batshit: fifteen men and fifteen women spend two weeks going on ‘dates’ with each other, but instead of going on normal dates (e.g. hanging out at a vaping parlour learning tiktok dances and then engaging in some grim and mutually unsatisfactory sex acts—I’m assuming this is how young people date these days), they sit in two adjoining ‘pods’ and talk to each other through the wall—and never actually meet. In order to continue on the show, they have to not just fall in love, but get engaged to be married, without ever touching or even seeing each other. The couples that do get engaged (and on the latest season there are five couples that agree to do this) then live together for a few weeks, and at the end of the show they have an ACTUAL WEDDING at which they must either get LEGALLY MARRIED or break up.
Why are they so obsessed with marriage?? Why are they not making shows where strangers must prove their long term commitment to each other by buying a house together and conceiving a child?? Mortgaged at First Sight! Conception Island! I’d watch it.
Although this is clearly pure madness, it always surprises me how genuine a lot of the relationships seem to be. Unlike other dating shows (MAFS, The Bachelor/ette), all the participants have a pool of people with whom they can try to find a connection, and their initial relationships are based entirely on whether they like each other’s personalities rather than on whether or not they find each other hot (unlike, e.g., Love Island, or real life). The ‘dates’ they have when they’re in the pods mostly seem to involve long stretches of hanging out, flirting and finding out about each others’ lives, without the pressure of being in the same physical space. It is a surprisingly effective way to match people up.
The whole thing reminds me a bit of how much I loved meeting people online when I was a teenager. This was back in the days when nobody had digital cameras, let alone smartphones, and we’d all communicate through text based chats with no idea what the other person looked like. Being able to converse online with all these invisible strangers meant that I could be funnier, more confident, and much more myself than I was in person (I mean…it also led to me losing my virginity to a truck driver who was six years older than me, wore leather vests, and and was super into Metallica, but that’s…besides the point). I feel like something similar happens to the Love is Blind participants in the pods—they become less performative than people usually are on dating shows, or even just on regular dates.
This is not so say that they all fall in love and live happily ever after. Oh no, there is much delicious drama to be had, particularly when people who dated each other in the pods but ended up getting engaged to other people later get to meet in person and sexual chemistry ABOUNDS…or, in a more depressing way, when people who fell in love in the pods discover that they aren’t physically attracted to their beloved when they meet in person and can’t get over it.
Sometimes, the drama is provided by a good old fashioned reality TV villain who can be edited into showing just the right combination of kookiness, manipulativeness, and/or insightlessness to make for amazing TV entertainment. One of my favourite villains of any TV show ever was Jessica, from season one, who not only let her dog drink red wine, but who who also kept saying things like this:
There is nothing more suspicious than an emotionally available man.
This season, Jessica’s natural successor is Chelsea. She’s not a villain, but she has some of the same crackpot energy that Jessica sported. In one episode, she makes her partner strip down for a photoshoot in which the two of them lounge around sexily in matching underwear sets. On its own, this is a bit odd, but the moment that pushes it into ‘what the fuck?’ territory is when Chelsea says that this photoshoot is something she has wanted to do since she was a ‘little girl’:
Personally, the only fantasy I’ve had since I was a little girl is the one where I suddenly develop the ability to talk to animals. I just want to tell my cat that I love her and also that she needs therapy.
One thing that is very wholesome about this season is that then men are all smart, thoughtful people who are able to talk sincerely about how they feel, without embarrassment. They do this with their partners, they do it with their families, and they even do it with their friends! There are numerous scenes featuring a bunch of blokes standing around talking about emotions, and it kind of blew my mind. It made me realise how lacking this is on Australian reality TV, where men almost universally sport the ‘fuck no, I don’t have feelings, feelings would be incompatible with my testicles’ variety of masculinity. Anyway, I want less of that, and more of these nice men from Seattle:
Awww
Books
I’m currently reading Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, which is a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. So far it is brilliant—Kingsolver inhabits the voice of her narrator (a hillbilly kid growing up Virginia who ends up in foster care) in such a believable way, making him ordinary and extraordinary all at once. It explores themes of class, family violence, the long term consequences of historical oppression, and the pharmaceutical industry’s role in creating the opioid crisis, which all sounds extremely grim—and yet somehow the book also contains joy and fun and love.
It made me think about Jennifer Down’s Miles Franklin winning novel, Bodies of Light, which also explores the foster care system (albeit in an Australian context). Bodies of Light is an amazing feat of fiction, but I confess I found it a gruelling read—the sadness was too much for me. I think used to be tougher, but since having children, I haven’t been able to deal with books/TV shows that inflict terrible suffering on the characters, particularly child characters—I think maybe looking after a child made me realise how vulnerable we all are when we start out, how delicate the human heart is before our outer shell forms, and now I can’t bear to see it brutally knocked around. However, I am finding the Kingsolver much less difficult to read than the Jennifer Down—probably partly because it doesn’t feature child sexual abuse (it’s referred to, but it’s not a major theme), and partly because the narrator has a wry toughness, a sense of humour, that makes you feel like he will survive and be okay (although I haven’t finished the novel yet, so I guess I could be proved horrendously wrong).
In other bleak book news, I have recently been reading In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility, by Costica Bradatan.
He has a hilariously dark outlook on life. The first page includes this passage:
…human existence is something that happens, briefly, between two instantations of nothingness. Nothing first—dense, impenetrable nothingness. Then a flickering. Then nothing again, endlessly. ‘A brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,’ as Vladimir Nabokov would have it. These are the brutal facts of the human condition. The rest is embellishment.
The book is all about failure, how we think about it, how important it is in our lives—and not just as a step on the road to success. I am particularly interested in failure right now (I mean, my novel is called The Opposite of Success) and I loved this description of how it can startle you into a truer state of awareness:
Failure reveals something fundamental about the human condition: that to be human is to perform a tightrope walk with no safety net. The slightest wrong step can throw you off balance and send you back into the abyss. As a rule, we perform our tightrope walking blissfully unaware of what we are doing, like a sleepwalker. To experience failure is to wake up suddenly—and to look down.
Would definitely recommend reading this for anyone who has experienced failure and wants to find ways to think about it other than through the vaseline covered lens of toxic positivity.
Other things
For anyone who shares my Succession obsession, this reworking of Succession as Arrested Development does a great job of highlighting how deeply funny the show can be:
I also enjoyed this reverse version, in which Arrested Development is reworked as Succession:
This last one made me want the Succession theme song to be played non-stop at every family gathering I ever go to. Let’s UP the drama, baby!
Until next time,
Eleanor xx
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