Notes from Maine - 2023/10/29

Sad week in Maine. Wish I had something useful to say about it. I don’t, so I won’t.

Instead, I’ll tell you about some other things that happened this week.

I had a bunch of vaccines due, so I scheduled them all for the same day. That experience turned out to be everything I thought it would be. I was loopy, sore, and a little nauseous. I asked the nurse, “It’s fine to do all these at once, right?” 

The look I received in response was a clear, “Who cares?” 

Fair enough. I’m the one who scheduled everything on the same day. Sitting at my computer, thinking about making myself presentable (not just Feed Store Presentable, but someone who can walk into a pharmacy without significant side-eye), I read the disclaimer. It said, “You can schedule up to four (4) vaccinations in one appointment.” A more-clever eye might note that it didn’t say, “You SHOULD schedule up to…” There’s a big difference between CAN and SHOULD and I experienced that difference for about 48 hours. 

But, as the sarcastic glance from the nurse informed me—“Who cares?”

A friend came over on Friday and we watched a delightful movie called, “Talk to Me.” It’s an Australian movie that’s distributed in the United States by A24. I’ve rarely been disappointed by an A24 movie, and this was no exception. The concepts and execution were completely original. I loved every moment of it. Good scares, good gore, and really disturbing—everything I like in a movie.

I enjoy meeting characters who immediately resonate as real. Not predictable, overworn tropes, but authentic. The mother in “Talk to Me” is the only actor I recognized in the movie. Miranda Otto is familiar from a dozen movies. She is prominent in “The Lord of the Rings,” notably. Her parenting in “Talk to Me” movie doesn’t seem ideal, but it feels real in all its flaws.

Sometimes when I meet a person briefly, I file away their silhouette. The name and a few other details stick and form the shell of a person in my imagination. When I need a character for a book, I’ll often pull out one of those shells and start to fill in my own details. I give them conflicts, triumphs, childhoods, and biases. I paint their faces with worry, joy, or fear. Sometimes those characters live, but a lot of times they don’t.

My friend Brian once called me and asked, “Did you name a mouse after me and then have a lady psychically kill me?” Yeah, I did. I could try to deny it, but that’s exactly what I did. Later, in a different book, I gave Brian a lovely home, wife, and four kids. He was content and perfectly happy until most of his family died. Brian didn’t make it to the end of that book either. 

But most of the time when I turn a real person into a fictional character it’s because I barely know them. Then I’m free to make up all kinds of stuff. It’s a little awkward if I happen to meet them again later. I’ll be talking to someone and want to ask after their sister, or whether or not they ever got their certification in CPR after the last disastrous attempt. But, unfortunately, they don’t really have a sister and never took a class in CPR. Those were things that I made up for them. 

Lately I’ve been hearing the term “parasocial” a lot. 

From Wikipedia:

“Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms.[1][2][3][4] Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusory experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show hosts, celebrities, fictional characters, social media influencers) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956.[5]”

I think that’s what I’m doing. I have limited interactions with a person, turn them into a character in a book, and then imagine all aspects of their life. Over time, those invented details become just as real as the observed ones.  

It’s probably a good idea to always change the names but it’s much more fun to just leave them. If someone happens to read one of my books and then gets angry (because I turned them into a mouse and had them psychically killed), so be it. At least I can tell who’s paying attention.