[ SECRET POST #2666 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2666 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #381.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

03. http://i.imgur.com/GGVyEQl.jpg

[(Anonymous)]

Chris Crutcher is just generally awesome.

[feotakahari]

Seconded. He can write a serious book about serious issues and not have it come across as a Serious Book about Serious Issues. (Pete Hautman can do this too, but he goes a little farther afield into more philosophical territory.)

[meredith44]

He totally is! I met him at a library conference one year and I was totally star struck. :D

[(Anonymous)]

I'm sick of sentimental doomed sick people love stories, they can all go away to Lifetime where they belong. Isn't this exactly one of the things we mock Nicholas Sparks for?

[cushlamochree]

We mock Nicholas Sparks because he's a formulaic shitty writer. Not for sentimental doomed sick people love stories in and of themselves. It's a pretty thin distinction I admit

[(Anonymous)]

It's been years since I've read or watched one of those "cancer dramas" that wasn't shitty and formulaic. May give the book on the right a shot if enough people vouch for it in this thread but my hopes aren't high.

[cushlamochree]

Oh just to be clear I'm not really recommending TFIOS (or criticizing it either, I have no strong feelings about it). You might find it shitty and formulaic! I don't really know!

[(Anonymous)]

Yes. I was pretty underwelmed by TFIOS to be honest.

[(Anonymous)]

The Fault In Our Stars was fucking terrible, so yeah.

OP

[(Anonymous)]

I feel like I should apologize for how hard on the eyes this is. It looked a lot better in photoshop.

Re: OP

[(Anonymous)]

I've seen worse.

Might I suggest you add a black or white border to the font, next time? It helps keep the text apart from the background.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, so one of them is sick and dies at the end in TFIOS? I know next to nothing about it other than the male and female romantic leads play brother and sister in the movie Divergent so whenever I see a commercial I've been thinking of it as 'the incest movie'.

Anyway, maybe the movie will be less saccharine and more toward your taste?

[iceyred]

Don't give them false hope. I've seen a trailer. It's got Manic Pixie Dream Boy and The Girl He Saves From Herself.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, that at least deviates from the norm a little.

[iceyred]

Meh. A girl still needs a boy to save her. (At least that's what it looks like.)

[(Anonymous)]

That seems to be a no-win situation, though. Girl saves boy? She's a MPDG. Boy is the Manic Pixie? He gets to be the savior.

[iceyred]

We could just retire the Manic Pixie Dream Gender trope, and instead have stories about people who help each other, and are helped but still work to save themselves.

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't read that book, but in general cancer stories don't involve people saving each other (from cancer). They just lean on each other, it's all you can do.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, but what will John Green have left to write about?

[caecilia]

oh shit that's kind of hilarious

[weaselbee]

IMO, I don't think it would be that hard to do better than TFIOS. That book is very overrated.

Going a little farther afield

[feotakahari]

I haven't read either of these books, but my general impression is that the point when you've doomed your story about terminal illness is when you start making the illness feel like something that would inevitably happen to a person like this. Or in other words, like your protagonist is so pure and so perfect that God just had to take her back, but not without giving her time to brighten the lives of those around her. It's not beautiful, it's macabre and repulsive.

To give an example, the novel Safelight by Shannon Burke has an FMC who dies of AIDS. The last paragraph has the protagonist observing a string of lights. One light suddenly burns out, and the other lights all brighten slightly. This is the third worst metaphor I've seen in my life, behind the cake as lost love in MacArthur Park and the repeatedly stubbed toe as racism in Apex Hides the Hurt, and it caps off a novel I wanted to like, but couldn't, because it took so much pain and suffering and made it feel so neat and tidy.

Re: Going a little farther afield

[(Anonymous)]

"like your protagonist is so pure and so perfect that God just had to take her back, but not without giving her time to brighten the lives of those around her."

This is like the perfect description of The Fault In Our Stars >.< This is not, however, how Deadline is at all. There's a whole part where the protag realizes how terrible his death is gonna be for pretty much everyone around him and it isn't sugarcoated at ALL. The "happy" ending is basically just "well, the people he left behind managed to carry on with their lives although they miss him." AFIOS spends forever warbling on about how special and amazing the dying/dead person is and what a wonderful inspiration to everyone around them they were. It made me sick. Deadline, though, I thought was a really great look at a lot of heavy themes without making them maudlin or irritating. I actually got attached to the characters. But then imo pretty much everything Chris Crutcher writes is gold.

[masu_trout]

Oh man, Deadline! That was such a fantastic book. I've never read TFIOS, so I can't compare them, but I have a hard time imagining it measures up.

Deadline dealt with some seriously heavy subject matter, though. (That pedophilia subplot especially, wow.) I should definitely read it again sometime soon.