Confessions of the One and Only F.J.R. Titchenell (That I Know of) - Fiona J.R. Titchenell's Official Homepage

Day 1 of The Future Mrs. Brightside Blog Tour

8/10/2020

It's the first day of my month-long blog tour celebrating The Future Mrs. Brightside, and at the end of it all, there's a $10 Amazon giftcard up for grabs. Along the way, there'll be excerpts from inside The Future Mrs. Brightside, along with guest posts and interviews about how it was written, my fantasy movie casting, and my thoughts on the Contemporary Women's Fiction genre I've splashed my toes into so suddenly and without warning.

If you want to follow along, you can find the full schedule of links on the website of my gracious host, Silver Dagger Book Tours.

You can also read the very first excerpt there today.

And of course, whether you head over there or hang around here, you can peruse the lovely art and teaser text, and enter the giveaway at the bottom of the page!

The Future Mrs. Brightside

by Fiona J.R. Titchenell

Genre: Women's Fiction

After a year of making beautiful music together, Chloe Hatherly thinks she’s more than ready to make the age-old promise to her bandmate, Jon. In sickness and in health, for better or worse. When the sudden death of Jon’s father forces the couple to postpone their wedding in favor of a funeral, however, their relationship veers rapidly off course from the ever after they’d both envisioned. Now living in her intended father-in-law’s memory-steeped house and acting as round-the-clock caregiver for her fiancé’s worsening depression, Chloe finds herself afflicted with a songwriter’s block for which she’s only ever known one cure: leaving and writing a killer breakup song. Unlike the subjects of her past lyrical rants, Chloe can’t picture her life without Jon in it, and she begins to wonder if there’s a way to save the music she loves while keeping the vows she never had the chance to make — or if she and Jon have already been irrevocably parted by death, albeit not their own.

The Future Mrs. Brightside is an uncomfortably honest, sometimes hilarious, fiercely romantic prose ballad to the hideous beauty of love in good times and bad.

Goodreads * Amazon

FIONA J.R. TITCHENELL is an author of young adult, sci-fi, and horror fiction, including Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir, The Prospero Chronicles, and the Summer 2018 Feminist Book of the Month, Out of the Pocket. The Future Mrs. Brightside is her first foray into contemporary women’s fiction. She graduated with a B.A. in English from Cal State University Los Angeles in 2009 at the age of twenty. She currently lives in San Gabriel, California, with her husband and fellow author, Matt Carter, and has also published under the initials F.J.R. Titchenell. Find out more about her and her books at http://www.fjrtitchenell.weebly.com.

Website * Facebook * Twitter * Pinterest * Bookbub * Goodreads

$10 Amazon gift card

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The Future Mrs. Brightside Is Now Available

7/14/2020

Happy book birthday to me and The Future Mrs. Brightside!

Both paperback and Kindle editions of this tale of grieving and love are now live, and it's free on KU as part of this year's Kindle Storyteller contest.

Much as I'm looking forward to getting back to the stars, the future, and the dark corners of the imagination, this was a story that simply demanded to be told. I hope you all find it as powerful a journey as I did.

After a year of making beautiful music together, Chloe Hatherly thinks she’s more than ready to make the age-old promise to her bandmate, Jon. In sickness and in health, for better or worse. When the sudden death of Jon’s father forces the couple to postpone their wedding in favor of a funeral, however, their relationship veers rapidly off course from the ever after they’d both envisioned. Now living in her intended father-in-law’s memory-steeped house and acting as round-the-clock caregiver for her fiancé’s worsening depression, Chloe finds herself afflicted with a songwriter’s block for which she’s only ever known one cure: leaving and writing a killer breakup song. Unlike the subjects of her past lyrical rants, Chloe can’t picture her life without Jon in it, and she begins to wonder if there’s a way to save the music she loves while keeping the vows she never had the chance to make — or if she and Jon have already been irrevocably parted by death, albeit not their own.

The Future Mrs. Brightside is an uncomfortably honest, sometimes hilarious, fiercely romantic prose ballad to the hideous beauty of love in good times and bad.

Kindle (free on Kindle Unlimited)

Paperback

Cover Reveal: The Future Mrs. Brightside

6/15/2020

Announcement time! I've got a new book coming down the pipeline this summer, called The Future Mrs. Brightside.

It's my first foray into non-speculative contemporary fiction. No aliens, no zombies, no ghosts, just a complicated love story on regular planet earth.

Want to see?

After a year of making beautiful music together, Chloe Hatherly thinks she’s more than ready to make the age-old promise to her bandmate, Jon. In sickness and in health, for better or worse. When the sudden death of Jon’s father forces the couple to postpone their wedding in favor of a funeral, however, their relationship veers rapidly off course from the ever after they’d both envisioned. Now living in her intended father-in-law’s memory-steeped house and acting as round-the-clock caregiver for her fiancé’s worsening depression, Chloe finds herself afflicted with a songwriter’s block for which she’s only ever known one cure: leaving and writing a killer breakup song. Unlike the subjects of her past lyrical rants, Chloe can’t picture her life without Jon in it, and she begins to wonder if there’s a way to save the music she loves while keeping the vows she never had the chance to make — or if she and Jon have already been irrevocably parted by death, albeit not their own.

The Future Mrs. Brightside is an uncomfortably honest, sometimes hilarious, fiercely romantic prose ballad to the hideous beauty of love in good times and bad.

Coming July 14th, 2020.

This is a pretty personal one, as my friends and family can probably guess, and it's been in the works for a few years now, but it's finally ready!

So, where can you get it?

Well, the ebook's going to be Kindle-exclusive to start out, so if you have a Kindle or Kindle App, you can preorder it right now:

The Future Mrs. Brightside (Kindle)

It's also going to be on Kindle Unlimited for a while, so once it's out you can read it for free there if you're enrolled. I'm entered in this year's Kindle Storyteller contest, so your page reads really do make a difference for me.

If you're non-Kindle, or if you just prefer the physical touch, there'll be a paperback edition out at the same time, link coming soon.

In the meantime, you can keep it on your radar by adding it to your Goodreads shelf.

Love & Books,

-Fiona.

Book Review: Fangirl

6/24/2017

Book Review:

Rainbow Rowell

St. Martin's Press, 2013

A+

The Basics:

Cath is a fanfic writer beginning her freshman year of college. She's absolutely terrified to be away from home for the first time, especially after her twin sister and best friend, Wren, refuses be her roommate, sticking her with a stranger, Reagan, and Reagan’s perennial hanger-on, Levi. The only place Cath feels at home is in the world of her favorite author, Gemma T. Leslie, spinning new stories for her pre-made characters. She’s not sure she’ll ever be ready to create new characters out of her own deeply private thoughts, let alone open herself up to the uncertainty of feeling something for someone new who doesn’t live inside her head.

The Downside:

Levi can be condescending in ways I found slightly too easily brushed off at points, and the excerpts of Cath’s fanfic can run a bit longer than they need to be in order to complement her story and give insight into her mind, yet not quite long enough to have the chance to suck in the reader in their own right. The book also seems to run out of pages just before the story ends, something I can appreciate in an intentionally ambiguous ending, like Eleanor & Park, but in a story this wholeheartedly hopeful, I could have gone for a bit more closure.

The Upside:

Enough griping.

Fangirl might be the most stunningly accurate depiction of social anxiety I’ve ever encountered in any medium. Cath’s mental patterns, defense mechanisms, and fear of unfamiliar people and situations are presented in a level of vivid yet unembellished detail that anyone who struggles with social anxiety -- or who has ever struggled to understand someone who struggles with social anxiety -- should read.

Cath’s relationship with her father is a major highlight, brimming with mutual love, respect, and support, complicated by the fear that Cath may be inheriting her father’s mental health challenges along with his intensity and wit.

The subjects of fiction writing and fan culture are handled with great care as well, presenting both defenses and criticisms of the concept of fanfiction while discussing the great and worthy challenges of originality. The irreplaceable necessity of connecting with other thinking, feeling people outside the safety of fictional fantasy is a major theme of Cath’s story, yet it coexists harmoniously with a celebration of the positive power of fiction, to inspire, communicate, and even bring people together.

And of course, every one of the many themes Fangirl touches on, from family to first love to creativity to learning styles and the unpredictable uniqueness of each human mind, can be found woven through poignant yet laugh-out-loud blocks of sparklingly quotable dialogue.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Book Review: Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

2/21/2017

Book Review:

Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

John Green, Maureen Johnson, Lauren Myracle

Speak, 2008

B+

The Basics:

On the night of a Christmas Eve blizzard, Jubilee is trapped in a strange town after her parents’ arrest, Tobin and his two best friends embark on a quest for a Waffle House full of cheerleaders, and Addie is determined to prove her capacity for selflessness at least to her friends, if not to the ex she can’t let go. The three searches for love, each written by a different rightly renowned YA author, interlock and collide amid holiday miracles.

The Downside:

The last story of the three, Addie’s, falls into the unfortunate role of having to tie all the threads together for the others, making it the weakest in its own right, and leaving Addie’s personal epiphany feeling as though it’s sparked simply by reaching the point in her arc where she’s supposed to have an epiphany, rather than by natural progression.

The use of a Waffle House full of snowed-in cheerleaders as the unifying ingredient across the three stories doesn’t always come across quite as sensitively as is clearly the intent. After seeing them used as a symbol and canvas for several other characters to project their differing attitudes, I would have loved to see the multi-perspective format used to take us inside the life of one of the cheerleaders to see how she views herself, but no such luck.

The ultimate message seems to be that they’re not mystical creatures, they’re not property to be controlled, and that the coolest girls are the non-cheerleaders who don’t allow themselves to be used as sexual accessories to the more respected exploits of boys, which is all good stuff. However, the female perspective to this effect rings a bit hollow when the characters providing it are always in a position of jealousy, and the male dehumanization of the cheerleaders is harder to accept as the curable youthful ignorance and lack of communication it’s meant to be when those male characters are endowed with all the intellect, perceptiveness, and perspicacity required to deliver John Green dialogue.

The Upside:

Whatever accidental inconsistencies they may cause in the characters’ social awareness and aptitude, John Green’s sharp wit and evident heart are as enjoyable as ever in Tobin’s struggle with the terrifying prospect of taking a chance on the female best friend he loves, rather than searching for the next pretty girl he’s not afraid to lose. Lauren Myracle brings her usual vivid rendering of high school friendship in spite of the confines of the final story, and Maureen Johnson (the one whose other work I’m least familiar with), starts things off with a bang, or rather, with a double-dose of the humor and genuine sweetness that runs throughout all three storylines.

While the three stories are each capable of standing alone (the first two especially), and all three authors play to their own strengths, occasionally even with some gentle fun poked at each other, the snowed-in town and the tone of romantic holiday spirit are seamlessly cohesive.

Let It Snow is like a smaller scale, teenage version of Love, Actually, without the inexplicable fat jokes or creepy theme of powerful men exploiting female subordinates, but with all the unabashedly heartstring-tugging sentimentality and double the smiles.

Pity this review is going up in February, thanks to receiving the book as a perfect Christmas present, but… belated Valentine’s Day reading, anyone?

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Book Review: Unbecoming

10/2/2016

Book Review:

By Jenny Downham

David Fickling Books, 2016

A

The Basics:

Katie has always been the good, studious, reliable daughter that her mother, Caroline, knows she can count on. When Caroline’s own mother, Mary, turns up with Alzheimer’s, a lifetime of rebellion, passion, and loss spilling disjointedly out of her memory, and no one else to look after her, Katie discovers that there’s a lot Caroline hasn’t told her about their family, and that goodness as she’s always known it may not be her only option.

The Downside:

The weakest point is the overexplaining of the title. The word “unbecoming” is dropped early in its typical, sinister usage, essentially meaning something outside of what a woman is expected to be. The secondary meaning within the context of the book, a deconstruction of what a person has become, is clear enough by the end without Katie laying it out for the reader as she does.

Katie’s romantic subplot is also a little harlequin-esque melodramatic. Her love interest, Simona, gets a bit of a pass for being a lesbian in a highly repressive environment; she’s realistically had to develop a thick shell of one kind or another, and hers takes the form of extreme boldness to cover how much she’s secretly bothered by what people think of her, but if the same scenes were to take place between a straight couple without that factor in play, it would be difficult not to laugh at some of the over-the-top dialogue and mood swings.

The Upside:

The cover promises a family drama about three women, but it’s really about four. Actually, it’s about more than that, but within the family in question, it’s about two sisters, the “good” one, Pat, and the “wild” one, Mary. It’s about Caroline, the baby trapped between the two of them, and Katie, the granddaughter, isolated from the sordid family history and from any examples of how to grow into anything but the next version of her paranoid, joyless mother.

Unbecoming is a sharp, sad, and complex exploration of the choice set before all four of them – one that hasn’t changed in their three generations or in the countless more before – whether to do what’s expected of them, or to pursue what they want, and the price that comes with each.

Every one of the four is flawed, and every one of the four is pitiable, even Pat, who’s dead before the story begins. No one gets off easy, and no one is innocent. Whether by accident or by design, by selfishness or by compliance, they all hurt one another and themselves.

Though the story proposes no answer to how to be a good and happy woman, mother, sister, or daughter, the overall tone is hopeful, celebrating courage, self-expression, and understanding between the three remaining living women, in spite of their radically different strategies when faced with the same impossible conundrum.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Book Review: Dreamland

9/24/2016

Book Review:

By Sarah Dessen

Speak, 2000

D+

The Basics:

Caitlin has always been overshadowed by her big sister, Cass, and when Cass runs away from their parents and her acceptance to Yale to be with her new boyfriend, Caitlin’s invisibility only worsens. If she couldn’t compete with Cass, she certainly can’t compete with Cass’s ghost. It’s only when she meets Rogerson that she feels she finally has something of her own. He’s handsome and smart and only has eyes for her, but he’s also volatile, secretive, and possessive, and soon has her feeling more trapped and alone than she did without him.

The Upside:

The prose is competent, and the clash of love and rivalry between the sisters is decently captured, as is the paradoxical teen experience of feeling at once smothered by and isolated from even the most well-intentioned of adults.

The Downside:

Here’s one particularly indicative quote, regarding the “bad reputation” of Caitlin’s best friend:

“But I knew Rina. I knew she only chased boys because her father […] had refused to acknowledge her as his daughter, even after a blood test proved otherwise.”

That’s apparently what Dessen considers a compassionate and progressive defense of an underage victim of slut-shaming. Note that it doesn’t even specify that Rina only chased boys so casually or so desperately because of such-and-such. No, not only does Rina’s shocking habit of existing while being both exceptionally pretty and moderately sociable require accounting for, but apparently a girl needs the super special badge of traumatic daddy issues to be so charitably excused for displaying any sexual/romantic interest, confidence, or initiative whatsoever.

Under the veneer of empowerment surrounding Caitlin’s escape from abuse, Dreamland is fraught with revealing little tidbits like the one above. When Caitlin’s neighbor dares to suggest in a flashback that Caitlin’s Barbie could have a career as well as dating Ken, it’s treated as a radical perspective, acceptable, but only as a contrast to Caitlin’s mother’s belief that cheerleading is the height of accomplishment for a teen girl, which is treated as an equally acceptable view.

Even Barbie, one of the most notoriously shallow female stereotypes persisting in pop culture, has canonically been a “career woman” since nineteen-sixty. This is not a groundbreaking concept. No, not in 2000 when Dreamland was published either.

Possibly even more disappointing, given the back cover blurb, is the perfunctory nature of the abuse plotline. Dreamland promises a story about an abusive relationship. The abusive relationship is there, in a dry, textbook way, starting with Rogerson’s flattering attention, his pitiable past, then his temper and his manipulation, but there are only about four full scenes with Rogerson in them throughout the entire book. Before the first time he hits her, their courtship is generic at best, and afterward, he becomes a faceless, absent figure of terror.

Caitlin shares in snippets of summary what being with him is like, how scared she is, how she still cares about him, how she gets used to his rhythms of abuse and apology, but the audience is left out of this rhythm, never given the opportunity to share or sympathize with her feelings.

In place of any deeper insights into relationships and self-respect than what could be gleaned by typing “dating abuse” into Google, Dreamland instead spends its short page count making clear that men in general are unqualified disappointments, and expounding at length upon how quickly and utterly marijuana will ruin your life.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Fear, Serial Killers, and L.K. Hill, Author of Street Games

9/5/2016

Today, L.K. Hill joins me to talk about the release of her new thriller, Desolate Mantle, book two of the Street Games series, which hits shelves on September 13th!

Click here to preorder!

Naturally, I asked her what scares her and how it influences her writing. This might be especially fun, considering that the Street Games books are about serial killers...

Why Serial Killers Fascinate Us So

Good morning and thank you so much, Fiona, for having me!

Last weekend I watched an old, classical religious movie with my dad. He proceeded to tell me about the actors in it (most before my time) and their other work. Apparently many of the actors also did a lot of horror films.

That made me smile. It’s an observation I’ve made many times, though. Often the people who are the most traditional, sentimental, religious, family oriented (and you know, vanilla?) are the same ones who are drawn to the darkest kinds of stories. One question I get a lot is some variation on, “What’s a nice Christian girl like you doing writing about serial killers?”

My answer: “Erm…reasons?”

I’ve always been fascinated by serial killers, and I’m not the only one. So what is it about them that captivates us? There are some who say it’s the macabre nature of our society. It appeals to the darkest parts of us. Others say it’s a drama factor. Our lives just don’t have enough of it these days and we thrive on the hype.

Those could both be true, but I think the fascination goes deeper than simple morbidity. Human beings are fascinating creatures. Rich and complex and most are basically good. Here are three reasons I think the minds and deeds of the most twisted individuals in society continually fascinate us:

They’re evil. End of story. We’re told so often not to judge, which is usually a good thing, but it can blur the lines of who we are, what we should stand for, and what we should fight. I think the idea of something that’s evil through and through, that we can fight against without hesitation, is appealing sometimes. It creates a refreshing catharsis, and we just want to see evil vanquished, no matter what it takes.

We need to understand them. Killers are human beings too. We need to understand how creatures just like us became so evil while we didn’t. Our basic curiosity as a species drives us to figure out motivations. And serial killers present an especially tantalizing enigma.

They make us feel passion. Like empowerment. Yup, I said it. Serial killer stories can give us empowerment. If we (living vicariously through our characters) can defeat a serial killer, we can do anything. It gives us more hope and faith in our own lives. Let’s face it: not all real life killers are caught, so it’s a relief to read stories where they are. (Don’t knock escapism. It gets us through the day sometimes.) On the flip side, if the killer isn’t caught, the passionate emotion changes to tragedy, or perhaps obsession. My point is that they make us feel passionate emotions. Human beings yearn for that.

If you’re into the kind of emotional roller coaster ride that makes you fascinated by serial killers, you’d like my new book, Desolate Mantle. It’s the second installment of a crime fiction series, which makes it unique. (Most crime fiction novels are stand-alones.) It deals with a woman searching for her missing brother, a cop with a super-tragic past, and an elusive serial killer. Damn, that’s my kind of story. Which is why I love writing it.

About Desolate Mantle:

In the most dangerous city in the country, one controlled by the sadistic Sons of Ares gang, Kyra Roberts recently crossed paths with detective Gabe Nichols. She dismissed any liaison with him as impossible, but telling him the truth may prove inevitable...

Walking the Slip Mire nightly, dressed in her disguise and trying to infiltrate a homicidal gang, Kyra sees plenty of things she can’t explain. When she begins to suspect a serial killer might be at work, she decides to approach Gabe again.

Gabe has plenty to keep him busy: a bizarre missing persons case, a new development in his brother’s cold case, a new neighbor, and the grisly murders that are a nightly ritual in the Slip Mire. When Kyra shows up unexpectedly, he jumps at the chance keep her around, but it’s harder than he bargained for. She’s not an average source any more than she’s an average Mireling. Gabe wishes she would be sensible about her own safety.

Their partnership crumbles, but when things become even darker than usual in the Slip Mire, they’ll need one another get survive a hellish situation. If they can’t work together to shoulder their burdens, they’ll find themselves utterly alone. In Abstreuse, it’s not a matter of not coming out of the darkness, but of being absorbed by the darkness itself…

Click here to preorder!

About L.K. Hill:

L.K. Hill is a novelist who writes across three genres. Her crime and historical fiction are written under her initials, L.K., while her scifi/fantasy and dystopian are written under her full name, Liesel K. Hill. She lives in northern Utah and comes from a large, tight-knit family. She plans to keep writing until they nail her coffin shut. Or the Second Coming happens. You know, whichever happens first. ;D

You can find her on her blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Pinterest, on Tumblr, and on Google +.

Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Characters (That I Shouldn't Like) #3: Dharma Finkelstein-Montgomery (Dharma & Greg)

2/14/2016

Once again, for February this year, I’m counting down my favorite characters who by all rights shouldn't be favorites, and yet something about them never fails to win me over.

Click the links for Favorite Fictional Character (That I Shouldn’t Like) #4, and #5.

For those who don't know, Dharma & Greg is a sitcom revolving around the passionate but rocky marriage of an extremely New Age woman and a straight-laced lawyer born of old money.

It's a funny, clever, often heartfelt personal favorite of mine, but being a '90s sitcom, its thoughtfulness is often sacrificed in the name of the joke.

Why I shouldn't like her:

Dharma's the type of character who's very evidently written from the outside in, to her detriment. She comes into existence as the epitome of the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" archetype, giving the instant illusion of being a special gem of a character, as women onscreen go, by pure virtue of not being bland and wooden.

Dharma and Greg are presented as equal co-stars of their story, maybe even with a little extra emphasis on Dharma as the breakout character with Greg as her more understated straight man, but in practice, particularly in the early years of the show, her quirky wildness is clearly tailored for the express purposed of getting the desired reaction out of Greg for the sake of his emotional development, and then attached to the surface of her with krazy glue, rather than naturally extending from any organic part of herself.

In the pilot episode, for example, Dharma sees Greg, recognizes him instantly as her soulmate, and asks him out for pie... in another state. They jump on a plane, have the best date of their lives, and end up coming back married.

It's wild! It's spontaneous! It shatters the crushing weight of the rules of what's normal and reasonable that have governed Greg's suffocating existence up to this point!

And it's a completely unrealistic habit for Greg's social opposite, his economic opposite, to have.

Dharma's a yoga instructor at a struggling New Age co-op. She lives in a dilapidated apartment converted from a battery factory, but she loves her life, her parents, her work, and her friends, cares not one bit about financial success, and finds joy in everything. Contrasted with Greg, she's supposed to be walking proof that money can't buy happiness.

She's later shown to be irresponsible and impulsive with money on occasions when it falls into her lap, but the pie excursion isn't Dharma's reaction to suddenly having a rich boyfriend; it's played as a normal, semi-regular thing for her.

How?

And why is she best friends with a barely restrained psychopath?

We're told that things that seem normal to Dharma seem normal to her friend, Jane, as well. They have a shared cultural background and long-built rapport that Greg can't break into. Yet apart from her genuine regard for Dharma, Jane's primary character traits are all somehow related to criminal malice.

Dharma's the kind of person who cries inconsolably when Greg squishes a spider and gives impassioned peace-and-love speeches to powerless city hall paper pushers in defense of her right to put coins in other people's parking meters, but it hardly seems to bother her when Jane suggests poisoning a professional rival with antifreeze in total seriousness and with the not-so-subtle implication that she's done it before.

There's never any explanation given for what their friendship was founded on or why Dharma cuts Jane so much slack, other than someone at the writing desk wanting to give her a best friend who makes Greg as uncomfortable as possible.

Sorry for the minimalist and generic pictures this week, btw. Someone REALLY needs to release the complete Dharma and Greg in digital form, hint hint.

That's not even to mention the inconsistencies in the subcultures Dharma supposedly belongs to. Words like “Wiccan” and “Druid” and “hippie” and “New Age” get casually tossed around with no evident understanding of what they mean or how they're not interchangeable.

The show's representation of the lives of the 1% on Greg’s side may be equally erroneous, I have no way of knowing, but as someone who spent my middle school years in a Waldorf-style homeschooling cooperative, I can pretty confidently call out Dharma's lifestyle as a careless hodgepodge of half-understood mismatched elements seasoned with plenty of plain old making shit up.

Though it does occasionally hit the nail on the head...

Dharma: You know that stuff [cold medicine] doesn't do anything. It just makes you feel better.

Greg: That's what I want!

Why I love her anyway:

As a character designed to provoke a certain reaction from an outside perspective, Dharma's pretty effective. Her hopeless optimism is infectious, and her simple ability to have fun in daily life is something I want to study, isolate, and keep a syringe full of it on my person at all times.

And for a character created from the outside-in, the in part does eventually take effect as the series progresses, with Dharma becoming more consistent and less childish, and Greg's issues being played up as more extreme and trying for her, rather than average and only trying for him.

Dharma's positivity, compassion, and energy make her an influence we should all be so lucky as to have in our lives, but she’s at her best when we get to see the cracks in her faith, including in her own upbringing, with its stifling rejection of both conflict and commitment.

"Every time I get angry, I meditate, and it just bottles it up!"

During the hellish preparations for her parents' long-awaited wedding, she loses her patience and snaps at them:

"You always told me your way was better, because every day you chose to be together. But did you ever stop to consider that there was someone else in that house who woke up every morning wondering if this was the day her parents would choose not to be together?"

Even her faith in her own supposedly predestined relationship is tested. In the make-or-break argument for Dharma and Greg's marriage in the final episode, the crux of all their differences comes out in her exclamation:

"I don't think I can raise a child like that. I don't know if I can raise a child with you."

Those are the moments when she's finally, after her shaky origins, a true co-protagonist, and when I love her the most.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Guest Post: Mia Siegert, Author of Jerkbait

11/8/2015

Today I get to welcome some fresh blood to Confessions of the One and Only F.J.R. Titchenell (That I Know of), author of the upcoming YA thriller, Jerkbait. It's coming in May, but you can already...

Preorder it here!

As a first timer here on the blog, she has graciously agreed to answer my favorite question. So without further ado,

What scares you, and how does it influence your writing?

A lot of people get scared by traditional monsters and demons, but the real monsters I fear are humans. There are people who show no remorse, sadists who enjoy hurting others. To me, there's nothing more frightening than thinking about what humans are capable of because they're palpable and the same as us. While we might not be able to see certain creatures, we all have images in our heads of truly awful people, and envisioning what could either happen to us or what we're physically capable of absolutely petrifies me. So... naturally, I write about it.

I don't like to write about comfortable things. I never have, although more recently my work has shifted to the thriller side instead of very experimental, literary fiction. I like to write about the people who scare me and scenarios that are out of a character's control. For Jerkbait, I needed to go to a dark, horrifying place to write a story that deals with gay teen suicide and online predators, especially as the novel originated as semi-autobiographical. There's a story that one character, Heather, shares about a hanging and a house sale--this was something that my ex-bestfriend told me that has haunted me since I was sixteen.

About Jerkbait

Even though they're identical, Tristan isn't close to his twin Robbie at all—until Robbie tries to kill himself. Forced to share a room to prevent Robbie from hurting himself, Tristan starts seeing his twin as not an NHL prospect, but a struggling gay teen who is terrified about coming out in the professional sports world. Trapped together in their claustrophobic room, Robbie suggests they run away with "Jimmy2416," a guy Robbie has talked to online for months but never met. Tristan must decide whether to tell his parents about Robbie's plan, losing his twin's trust forever, or go on a journey that will put their lives and innocence in jeopardy.

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About Mia Siegert

Mia Siegert received her MFA from Goddard College and her BA from Montclair State University where she won Honorable Mention in the 2009 English Department Awards for fiction. Her debut Jerkbait (a YA coming-of-age thriller) will be released May 2016 by Jolly Fish Press. Siegert has been published in Clapboard House, Word Riot, The Limn Literary & Arts Journal, as well as a few other small presses.

Siegert currently works as an adjunct professor and a costume designer. She enjoys training horses and watching hockey.

You can find her on her website, on Facebook, and on Twitter!