Book Review: THE RESIDUE YEARS and the cycle of addiction

On By Steven D'AdamoIn On Storytelling, ReviewsLeave a comment

I don’t read a lot of literary fiction, so I tend to pick these stories without knowing exactly what to expect. If I don’t know the author or haven’t heard or read much about the book, then I’m basically just going in blind hoping I find something to connect with.

I just finished listening to The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson on audiobook. I primarily chose this book because it seemed like a perspective on drugs and addiction I had never really been exposed to before.

The Residue Years switches between the points of view of Champ and his mother, Grace. Following Grace’s stint in court-mandated rehab for her crack addiction, she and Champ try to reconnect with each other, with their family, and with the previous life and home they’d lost touch with. Champ, meanwhile, sells crack to support himself and his family, even as Grace tries to recover and find a new path in life.

Champ and Grace appear to want to change their lives, but they keep making poor decisions. As protagonists, you want Champ and Grace to succeed in reclaiming themselves and each other. However, Champ is too self-aware for his own good, convincing the reader that he knows that dealing crack cannot be his end-all-be-all, while continually making choices that pull him deeper into that life. Grace does all the right things on the surface. She gets out of rehab, finds a job, attends NA, finds a new church. She recognizes that she needs to stay away from the toxic people of her past and establish a new life, but she too easily allows herself to be dragged backward.

Jackson does an incredible job of making the reader root for these characters, to hope against all odds that they will break the cycle of crack, and to envision a better future for them. He does all this even as the characters make baffling decisions that just repeat the cycle.

This story is ultimately an intimate portrayal of the vicious cycle of addiction and how it erodes those bonds to family, stability, and love.

I don’t recall what made me buy this book initially, but I’m glad to have read it.

Steve D

A Mild but Hopeful Reaction to Rey’s Return to STAR WARS

On By Steven D'AdamoIn On StorytellingLeave a comment

Disney hosted Star Wars Celebration over the weekend and, as expected, made several announcements about upcoming projects for their TV and film slate.

I’m still behind on The Mandalorian and Bad Batch, so I don’t have much to contribute in terms of where Star Wars is at the moment and where it may be going.

However, the announcement of a new post-sequel-trilogy film featuring Rey is the best news I’ve heard about this franchise in quite some time. Evidently, the film will focus on Rey trying to rebuild the Jedi order. Here are my probably not-surprising reasons why:

  1. The Rise of Skywalker, and the sequel trilogy as a whole, was botched, and those characters and actors deserve a reboot (Finn, in particular, but I don’t think that’s likely). I greatly enjoyed The Last Jedi, but Disney didn’t stick the landing in the final film.
  2. Daisy Ridley is great.
  3. After seeing The Force Awakens, Rey instantly became one of my favorite Star Wars characters. She was funny, intense, relatable, and packed a believable punch in fight scenes.
  4. I’m always curious about what comes after the Big Bad is defeated.
  5. The sequel trilogy did not know what it wanted to say about the Jedi or the Force, and this could be a chance to correct the narrative.
  6. Overall, I’m glad Disney waited to do something different with Rey, but I’m also glad they didn’t scrap her and the sequel trilogy stories entirely. That trilogy had a lot of characters who are worth exploring, so why not start with the main protagonist?

That’s about all I have for the moment, because we know so little about what this movie will be like. Recent Star Wars entrants have been hit-or-miss for me, so I can’t say I totally buy into Disney’s own hype. I hope they get this movie right. I hope it revives Rey’s character and brings Daisy Ridley back into the fold as a staple Star Wars actor. And I hope it has something interesting to say about this universe.

I’ll be looking out for the first teaser.

Steve D

April Write Day: Same Goals, Some Progress

On By Steven D'AdamoIn Fantasy, On StorytellingLeave a comment

March felt like a long month. I spent a week in the office with my entire team, some of whom I haven’t seen in person in years, and couple of whom I was meeting in person for the first time. We’ve had a busy month with the boys, not for any reason in particular other than the fact that an eighteen-month-old and a four-year-old will occupy a lot of your time and energy.

It was a halfway decent month for my goals, as well, until I got sick and was thrown off my rhythm for over a week.

Last Month’s Goals

  1. Revisions for Uprooted, The Herb Witch Tales #1.
  2. Read three books. Pretty straightforward. I also want to continue making good progress on A Memory of Light. I’m at the point where some narrative chips are starting to fall, and it is both dreadful and exciting.
  3. Exercise at least three times a week. The app is making me do three workouts per week, at minimum. So that’s baseline. I also want to start adding in other forms of training, so I’m mentally aiming for 4-5 workouts per week, and I’ll see how my routine develops from there.

Revisions for Uprooted?

I did not complete my revisions, but I’ve made some good progress in the last week. One thing I can say for certain is that I have a really good story on my hands. That is not something I would have been confident in saying before this revision phase. There are a couple minor plot threads I had forgotten about in the long hiatus since my last revision phase (as I was drafting New Earth), that highlight the struggle for survival in interesting ways. Not just describing the characters as tired and hungry again and again, but demonstrating how conflict can smolder from that basic tension.

So, I just need to be more diligent in revising. I still want to finish my current read-through to look at overall plot and identify areas that need more work, and then read through again to reverse engineer my outline and ensure the scene and chapter structure makes sense for the plot and pacing.

After that, I’m not sure. Maybe a third read-through to look for smaller details I want to fix, before deciding whether I have a solid manuscript to send to an editor, or even beta readers.

Read three books?

Yes! And my reviews have been fairly active on Goodreads and here. I might have read four, actually… I lost track a bit, because I updated a few of my reviews on Goodreads, which changes the where they appear in my “read” list.

I didn’t read much in A Memory of Light, but I’m about halfway through. I’m still very much interested. I’m just at a point in the story where some chips are starting to fall, and I’m dreading losing characters I love.

Exercise three times per week?

I started off strong, and then this very minor but very nagging cold I got in the middle of the month threw my off.

I had been using Asana Rebel to find yoga-type workout videos, but I’m not thrilled with the app. After the introductory program, there’s not really much guidance. There are just a bunch of videos from various trainers. I can watch yoga videos for free on YouTube, so I’m not quite seeing the value in the app at this point.

I’m also starting to consider different types of workouts. I just don’t know how and where I want to exercise. I haven’t belonged to a gym since COVID lockdown, and it’s difficult to see an opening in my day-to-day schedule for that at the moment — getting changed, going to the gym, stretching, working out, getting home, changing again. I need a solid hour or hour-and-a-half, and that time is difficult to find as it is. My office has a small workout room that I might start using, just for the convenience. We’ll see how that goes.

Goals for April

  1. Finish two revision cycles for Uprooted, the Herb Witch Tales #1. I definitely want to finish to two read-throughs I mentioned above. If I make real progress doing so, I can aim for a third.
  2. Read three books. I’ve been able to stick to this one so far, this year.
  3. Exercise three times per week. Still in flux what my real workout routine looks like, but I’ve been doing alright for now.

Steve D

Book Review: THE EMPTY THRONE gets the series back on track

On By Steven D'AdamoIn On Storytelling, ReviewsLeave a comment

Book #8 of The Last Kingdom series, The Empty Throne returns to form after what I felt was a bit of a mid-series lull in The Pagan Lord, the previous installment.

This book started with a point-of-view section of Uhtred, the younger, the son of the Uhtred who carries the series to this point. I really enjoyed this glimpse into the mind of the young man who is trying to follow in his father’s footsteps as a warrior and a future lord.

Uhtred, the elder is older now, wounded, but wiser. Some of the bitterness of the previous story has fallen away, and Uhtred is starting to truly recognize his own limitations. In one battle sequence, Uhtred recognizes to himself, and the reader, that in his younger years he would have been one of the fierce young warriors in the fray of the fighting, but he stays back to be a leadership presence for his, knowing that his wound would make him a liability in the thick of the fighting.

This story focused quite a lot on Uhtred’s relationship with his children, Uhtred and Stiorra, and Aethelstan, the (non-)bastard son of Edward. While Uhtred’s regard for Aethelstan as an adopted son has become clear over the last few stories, his mentorship of whom he believes is a future king is on full display here.

This shift in tone is greatly welcome for a character whose brash decision-making was becoming tiresome, for the other characters, and for the reader. Uhtred is still confident, daring, and courageous, but he seems to have truly come into lordship not just as a warrior, but as a leader, and that transformation continues to be fascinating.

I’m also quite intrigued by the introduction of Sigtryggr. His character on The Last Kingdom TV series was a frightening and admirable, and I look forward to seeing how his character, and the Norse threat overall, develop going forward.

I was never out on this series, but I took a break after the last book. Now, I’m fully back in.

Steve D