Talking at Night
On alternative awards categories, clutch-your-heart reads and notes to myself
The Oscars have come and gone and I feel fatigued. Awards season is long and I participate in every second of it, but this year felt especially anticlimactic.
Maybe I’m just tired in general, maybe it’s that I’ve already seen so many bad movies this year and now that I’ve see Dune 2, I have nothing else to look forward to until Challengers comes out in April, but I’m just like… who cares!!!
Except that I do…
There’s always a lot to say about the winners and losers but the full effect of the outcome never really sinks in until the next year, or like five years later when you’re still wondering how Rami Malek won an Oscar over Bradley Cooper (i literally just saw someone on hinge who said their best travel story is that they watched a star is born on a plane and they cried so hard that a flight attendant asked them if they needed medical attention... now THAT is legacy)
But what I really need to do right now is give out my own alternative awards to shout out some movies that did not quite get their due–
Best Scene: “Am I doing it right?,” Asteroid City
Near the end of Asteroid City (spoilers incoming), amid alien-related chaos, the actor playing Augie, a widowed father and war photographer, breaks character and says, “I still don’t understand the play.” He walks away from the action, through a door in the wall, into the black and white world of backstage.
He finds the play’s director and asks him, “Am I doing it right?” and he means his role in the play but also in life and what follows is so moving that this has easily shot to the top of my Wes Anderson ratings.
Margot Robbie leaves me BREATHLESS! And then it starts to SNOW! Wes has an Oscar now for his live action short,The Wonderful Life of Henry Sugar, but I’m going to pretend it’s actually for this.
Best Depiction of My Love Language: Past Lives
Past Lives is about the various shapes of love, but what really speaks to my love language is when Hae Sung brings Nora a bagel because he knew she’d be hungry, that she wouldn’t have eaten, and to me that is just…….. everything (if you’re wondering, i will accept an everything bagel toasted with chive cream cheese and avocado any time).
Best Represented International Locale: Italy!
The purity of Russell Crowe riding his scooter around Roma and saying actually, sugar is the devil in an Italian accent in The Pope’s Exorcist. The charming hilarity of Toni Collette becoming the head of a crime family and also the owner of a vineyard and the girlfriend to a hot, younger Italian man in Mafia Mamma. The joy of watching Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen try on wedding dresses and ride a speedboat through Venice and get locked in a Tuscan jail. Those gorgeous contrasting villas and family meals and Adam Driver saying Mille Miglia in Ferrari. The Fiat! Car! Chase! in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning.
Italy, I’m here if you want me to spearhead a new tourism campaign.
What I’m Reading
Talking at Night by Claire Daverley - Will is one of the most popular boys in school. When he meets Rosie, the twin sister of his classmate, at a bonfire, he’s mesmerized. He finds himself thinking of her often and when a snowstorm forces Will to sleep over after a study session at Rosie’s house, the two connect when they’re both up in the middle of the night, but whatever is blossoming between them is cut short by tragedy, leaving their feelings mostly unexplored.
They come together and fall apart over the years, trying to resist their attraction, their bond, but finding themselves unable to let go of one another.
This was giving Normal People meets One Day (i of course have not read the book bc it’s written by a man but if you have not yet watched the netflix show…. i beg you to carve out 6 hours of self care to do so). I could not be parted from this book. I was thinking of Will and Rosie when I wasn’t with them. It had me clutching my chest in both anxiety and delight.
Literally this–
A normal day, then, Rosie says, and Will looks so relieved, so grateful that her heart aches even more. She stands aside, let’s him pass her into the bedroom, and thinks how all the old songs are true, how love is so often just pain, still four letters, the flip side of the same feeling.
A book I never stop chasing or talking about:
Normal People by Sally Rooney - Marianne and Connell are from two different classes–socioeconomically and socially. They’re high schoolers attracted to each other in a way that’s confusing and begin to hook up in secret. It’s dramatic and painful but then they meet again at university and everything around them is different but between them, it’s mostly the same.
The way this book has imprinted on me! Not just because of their relationship but because of the way Rooney writes.
Like–
Her gaze unsettles him like it used to, like looking into a mirror, seeing something that has no secrets from you.
Memories though–
The whole trip felt like a series of short films, screened only once, and afterward he had a sense of what they were about but no exact memories of the plot.
This… truly… I cannot–
Outside her breath rises in a fine mist and the snow keeps falling, like ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake.
The same… infinitesimally… small…. mistake– haunting!!!!
Sally Rooney has also announced her next novel coming this fall and honestly, it’s giving Happy All The Time and I cannot wait to read it.
What I’m Writing
Unfortunately I am not always diligent about dating my notebook entries (or letters… sorry, alex) but I made my first notes on the concept of Novel 2 (which i vaguely titled “new notebook project” bc i didn’t know what it was going to be) on October 26, 2022, and on December 19th, I jotted down an exchange of dialogue around one of the climactic events and how it would all end.
A year after I wrote what the ending would be, I finished the second draft. That’s pretty insane, and I want to hold on to that, that feeling of being impressed with myself and the work I’ve done. Instead of focusing on things like my note from April 10, 2023 where I was jotting a sketch for a character and I felt the need to write “idk if I have a hold on this,” and then did a brain dump of possible jobs humans have that devolved into “someone with a phobia of ink works at staples” (????) and “haunted movie theater.”
So I guess in a way, I’m right on schedule, mentally.
On the one hand, I am feeling completely overwhelmed, but on the other hand, I am up to my old tricks– by which I mean, writing dialogue for new scenes in my notes app. It’s nice to feel inspired despite my harsh internal monologue.
The Next Steps of My Editing Process–
Re-read through all my original and current notes (my hope being that there are ideas i’ve already had that i can use to fix this draft)
Compile a list/outline of new scenes (i’ve already written snippets of dialogue for five new scenes so now i have to figure out where they go)
Decide which of my darlings to kill (it is already clear to me that i need to rearrange some of the action and possibly…. cut the entire second timeline… can i do it??? TBD!!!!!!)
Write a better opening (the way i am so dialed in to a great first sentence/paragraph… i do not have this in my novel rn, but i do have IDEAS)
I feel myself withdrawing, preparing to go into hibernation mode so I can get back to work. I know I’ll feel better once I start the edits. This is the fun part! So I just have to… do it.
That’s all from me this week. Stay Tuned!