Over on Facebook, a reader mentioned a scene in FC:1 that she really liked. I like to investigate this sort of specific feedback–the good and the bad–to see what worked and what didn’t work for my readers.
I remembered the scene she mentioned in general, but not in detail. The main reason I wanted to investigate, though, was that her description of it as dialogue-free was not my recollection; I remembered it as being chatty to the extreme, as two swoony teenaged girls prattled on about how divine it was going to be to see Sarah Bernhardt on stage. (For those of you out of the 19th-century loop, Sarah Bernhardt was the Lady Gaga of her day.)
So, I pulled down my copy of The Year the Cloud Fell and tried to figure out what this reader had meant when she referred to the scene’s “”
Now that’s a first.
American life has its rituals. Some are small. Some are big. Some mark a transition from one age to the next. Some are trials by fire, ordeals designed to break us and leave us whimpering, lying in pools of our own sweat and tears.
Names are interesting. They are (in general) the one permanent thing about us that someone else has chosen. Our parents, knowing nothing about us, saddle us with these monikers, and we grow up with them. How do they change us? How might we have been different, had we been given a different name? And for those who change their names, why do they change them, what do they change to, and why did they pick the new name?
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 