Title Post: Birthmarked
Today's post comes from Birthmarked author Caragh O'Brien.
When I go someplace that doesn’t exist, like down a winding path into the great empty bowl of Unlake Superior, I make sure to look around me. Above, the thin blue sky of noon is cut by the line of a gliding swallow, and below, my bare feet search out the dirt between the boulders and pebbles. Shadows fall tight and narrow. The sun-warmed wild flowers smell heavy while the crickets fly at the red hem of my skirt. If I’m lucky, I’ll taste the smooth, pale blush of a blueberry before I bite into its sweetness. If I’m unlucky, my companion will strip the tiny leaves from a willow switch and whip it against my outstretched palm for a streak of pain.
My friends asked me recently how I wrote Birthmarked, and I’m afraid I explained badly, caught in the most obvious answer of how I came up with the first inchoate ideas. The truth is, writing Birthmarked was not about explaining my fears about a future wasteland or the dystopian society that might emerge to survive it. I simply wrote a story that called to me. I went there and saw it and tasted it. I lived Gaia’s story with her, and then I lived it over and over again as I revised.
Finding the right words to make that world seem true on paper is the real work of writing the novel, and also where the deepest pleasure lies. I took it as a lovely compliment when a friend told me she could feel Gaia putting the bread dough mortar between the stones. There’s a trick I’ve discovered. Just as we experience our true existence through our senses, we experience a book world through our senses, too. If words can bypass the normal input circuits and trick our minds into touching, seeing, tasting, hearing, and smelling Gaia’s world, then we will believe we’re there.
The real wonder is why we bother coming back to the extant world at all.
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We've been getting a large number of reviews from various bloggers, and we thought we'd post them all here:
Ya Books and More (Naomi Bates)
The Life and Lies of an inanimate flying object
Teens
Reader Comments (3)
So well said, Caragh! Your book is amazing!
Thanks, Laura. I know you adore the precise word, too!
I couldn't put the book down and yet was so disappointed when it ended. Please tell me there will be a sequel.