Storms in the Brain
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| Cora Carmack | |
There are more than 40 types of seizures, which sometimes go overlooked until they become so severe that your life is upended. I don't know exactly when mine started but it was clear something was wrong by the time edits came in for my YA fantasy novel Roar in 2016. The world of storm magic I'd created suddenly seemed too vast to understand. I kept a list of what to revise and what I'd written because I couldn't remember. I had difficulty completing sentences, I held my thesaurus like a lifejacket, I just couldn't... think.
In October 2017, four months after Roar's release, and 20 months after I started seeking answers, I was diagnosed with epilepsy. What I thought was a panic attack was actually a nine-minute seizure in my temporal lobe--an area of the brain that deals with sensory processing, memory, language, emotional responses and more. Before I could approach the sequel to Roar, I endured nine months of failed medications, three types of seizures and months of adjusting to medications. When I came back to the series, I looked at my heroine and her storm-filled world and was surprised to see echoes of my epilepsy in her story. Neurologists have described seizures as electrical "storms in the brain"; the intrusive bursts of emotion Aurora experiences during storms were reminiscent of my temporal lobe seizures. We both grappled with feeling like our bodies had turned against us.
Sometimes I felt like I'd written Roar for future-me, for hurting-me, healing-me. Like my princess born without magic, I wondered if I could meet the expectations placed on me. Could I still write with a healing, heavily medicated mind? Slowly, with the support of loved ones, therapy and my publisher, I found a way through. As one of my characters said before I knew I needed it, "Sometimes you must make answers when there are none." --Cora Carmack (Rage, book two in the Stormheart series, is available now from Tor Teen)
Cara, when creating the costume, how much feedback did you receive from DC?
Louisiana author Ernest J. Gaines, whose experiences in the segregated South inspired his novels and short stories, died November 5 at age 86. Gaines was the oldest of 12 children in a family of impoverished sharecroppers living in old slave quarters on a plantation. He was raised by his crippled aunt, who moved around the house by crawling. For five or six months each year, a visiting teacher used the plantation church as a schoolhouse. At the time, education for African American children stopped at the eighth grade. At age 15, Gaines moved in with his mother and father in California. He wrote his first novel at age 17 but burned the manuscript after it was rejected, later rewriting it as the basis for his first published novel, Catherine Carmier (1964). He earned a literature degree from San Francisco State University, a writing fellowship to Stanford University, and was a writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette between 1981-2004. In 1996, Gaines taught the French university system's first ever creative writing class at the University of Rennes.
