BlakeCharlton.com

News Post: The Son-of-Two-Psychoanalysts

A quick fact about me: both my mother and my father are psychiatrists. (Yes. The answer to whatever question you’re wondering right now is ‘yes.’ Trust me.) More interesting still, they’re both psychoanalysts.

More than anyone, Mom and Dad deserve the credit for any success I’ve had overcoming my disability. Their devotion, kindness, and patience were truly amazing. I am keenly aware of how privileged I was to be born to parents with the both the desire and financial means to help me overcome dyslexia. The awareness of how much has been given to me inspired me to go to medical school and to write fiction that might, in some small way, give back to the world that has given me so much.

That said, Mom and Dad are way-out-there strange. For serious. She’s a Freudian; he a Jungian. If you know what that means, you’re laughing your head off right now. Add these two wonderful but really fucking weird flavors to a childhood already peppered by disability, special ed, and countless reruns of The Princess Bride and you have the primordial stew of a budding med student / fantasy author.

Obviously. How could you have anything else?

So then, let’s take a quick stroll through the labyrinthine neighborhood of my memory I call “Puberty.”

MOM: So, FIRST GIRL BLAKE EVER BROUGHT HOME TO DINNER, tell us about your relationship with your mother.

FIRST GIRL BLAKE EVER BROUGHT HOME TO DINNER: Umm…well…it’s good I suppose. She’s a lawyer.

DAD: A lawyer?

FIRST GIRL BLAKE EVER BROUGHT HOME TO DINNER: Yeah, she has to work really hard up in the city a lot. Which is too bad because I don’t get to see her enough.

DAD: So, your disappointed that your mother works so hard up in the city?

BLAKE: Guys, no Rogerian therapy at the dinner table.

FIRST GIRL BLAKE EVER BROUGHT HOME TO DINNER: What’s Rogerian therapy?

BLAKE: It’s more or less when they repeat everything you say in open question format so you’ll eventually reveal all major emotional processes going on in your head.

DAD: So you’re upset that I want to discover all the major emotional processes going on in your head?

BLAKE: DaaaaAAaaad! You’re doing it again. Oh, FIRST GIRL BLAKE EVER BROUGHT HOME TO DINNER, I’m so sorry about this.

FIRST GIRL BLAKE EVER BROUGHT HOME TO DINNER: Oh, no! I used to worry that my family was the strangest one ever. But…(looks around)…I’m feeling much better about them now.

So, I hope that gives you a flavor of how odd yet sometimes strangely wonderful it was to growing up with two headshrinkers for parents. “But, Blake,” you say, “I don’t think I understand it to the full experience yet. It might sound strange, but I’m craving the sum total experience of being raised by two psychiatrists represented in…say…oh…I don’t know…a brief, surrealist cartoon featuring a Victorian Englishmen and a Toucan.”

Well…funny you should ask…because I just happen to have found exactly that:

NEWS & ANCILLARIA

The manuscript for Spellbound is currently at 72,000 words. I’m feeling optimistic about it just now, but the characters are cooperating. As me again in a week.

Here in North America,

• you can hop over to Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist to win a copy of Spellwright.
• Stomping on Yeti puts the EYE on 25 authors to watch in 2010. I’m flattered to be among such amazing company. A more in depth look at my authorial kick off along with those of several others can be found here.
• Ellen Scordato of the Barnes & Noble bookclub Unabashedly Bookish is inspired by this website to write about Commas & Cannibalism!
• Sean Melican of BookPage puts Spellwright at the top of their Sense of Wonder feature.

Across the Pacific, Australians & New Zealanders still can enter a contest to win a copy of Spellwright from Voyager AUS!

Across the Atlantic, Temple Library Reviews reacts to the first 100 pages of Spellwright: “Spellwright’ exceeded whatever expectations I had about it. The writing is a balanced blend between scholarly and lyrical, which is all the while enthralling and kept me scrolling pages on the screen.”