“I shall tell you what I believe. I believe God is a librarian. I believe that literature is holy...it is that best part of our souls that we break off and give each other, and God has a special dispensation for it, angels to guard its making and its preservation.”
Sarah Smith

Friday, October 24, 2014

The Diary

SATURDAY: Jami. I can hardly stand to think the words, let alone write them down in permanent ink. Jami is gone. Aunt Clare found her this morning, dead in her bed. I don’t know how I’m going to live without her.
Dead in her bed. Just dead in her bed.

SUNDAY: They found an empty pill bottle under her bed. So that’s it, then. Suicide. What was going on at that stupid performing arts school? She never told me. This never would have happened if she had stayed at Belmont High with me, with our friends. Where I could see her every day. Why wouldn’t she tell me?
I tried to get her to come out with us on Friday night. She wouldn’t, and I could hear in her voice that something was wrong. She said it was just a fight with Aunt Clare, and I believed her. Why did I believe her?

WEDNESDAY: The stupid funeral was today. Everyone always says how beautiful the dead person is, and how they almost look like they were still alive, only sleeping or something. She didn’t look alive. She looked pale and pasty and dead. It was the first time in as long as I can remember that she wasn’t singing.
Poor Aunt Clare had everyone over to the house after. Mom said she tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t listen.
When no one was looking I sneaked upstairs to the bathroom and pulled her diary out from where it was taped under the sink. I know I should have told Aunt Clare about it, but instead I brought it home. I just needed a little piece of her with me for a while. Only now I can’t make myself open it. It’s sitting next to me on the bed right now. But I can’t even touch it.

THURSDAY: This morning when I went to the closet to get dressed I saw the sweater she lent me on New Year’s Eve. I was stupid and didn’t even bring a jacket to the party. I thought it would mess up the “little black dress” look. She told me I was an idiot before we even left the house. But she still let me wear her sweater later when I got cold. I could never remember to return it. Guess it doesn’t matter now. But it made me think of her, and suddenly I missed her so bad I couldn’t stand it, so I grabbed her diary and started reading. That was three hours ago. And I still miss her so bad.

FRIDAY: I’m almost halfway through the diary already.
She talked about the disaster of a double date we went on last year, when those two artsy guys from her school took us ice skating. She never mentioned to them that we had both taken lessons for years, and these guys, well…I said they were artsy, right? We ended up skating circles while they sat on a bench with hot chocolates all night. Wusses.
She talked about last summer when I broke my wrist and couldn’t do anything fun, so she sat at my house for three months reading old Nancy Drew books with me, like we used to when we were little.
She said she hated my new haircut.
I had to stop reading, because if I read the whole thing, then it will be over. I’ll just think about this stuff for a while.

SUNDAY: I couldn’t stand it, I had to keep reading. I probably should have started at the end, to see if she said anything about why she did this. It’s not like she left a note or anything. But I wanted to remember her for a while, before I read about when everything went wrong. What went wrong?
I’m trying to pace myself, so I can make the diary last as long as possible. We’ll see how long I can hold out.
Mom went to see Aunt Clare today. She said Clare was crying and crying and couldn’t stop. It’s all I could do to keep myself from calling her up to tell her about the diary right then. Not yet. Soon, just not yet.

MONDAY: I went back to school today for the first time since it happened. It was weird and terrible. Everyone kept looking at me with these puppy dog eyes, and whenever someone spoke to me they touched my arm. They all knew her, before she changed schools, and nobody – not a single person – mentioned her all day. Funny, that just made me think about her more.

TUESDAY: The diary has started mentioning a guy named Rhett. Not mentioning, more like talking about non-stop. I was her best friend and she never even said the name Rhett to me, not when she talked about her new friends, or when she told me who was in her classes, or when we went through last year’s yearbook to rank all the cutest guys. But the diary says they went on dates. And kissed. And talked on the phone every night. There’s a rose petal pressed in between two of the pages. I never saw any roses in her room.

WEDNESDAY: I don’t think I like this guy, Rhett. She kept gushing about him all over the pages, but he seems kind of…creepy. She thought it was cute that he was jealous, but I think it’s possessive. She says how sweet it was that he drove home behind her “just to make sure she gets there safe.” Sounds weird to me. The last couple pages mentioned that he’s trying to get her to have sex with him, but she’s not sure. I wonder if she ever did. I thought she would have told me about it if she’d done it.
  
THURSDAY: I can’t keep myself from reading now. It drives me crazy that I have to go to school all day, instead of staying here with the diary. I’m getting close to the end now, and I don’t know if I can stand to finish. It’ll be like losing her all over again. But also, it will mean that I might find out why she did this. I have to know, but I don’t want to.
I can tell by the dates at the top of the pages that what I’m reading is several months after she met Rhett. It’s so strange, she doesn’t mention him anymore, but I can tell he’s still there, like he’s lurking in the background of everything she writes. The entries have become melancholy, and I can tell that something happened, but she doesn’t say what. She doesn’t write anymore about how much she loves that stupid school, or wanting to sing on Broadway, or even fighting with her mom. It’s like she’s writing all these words, but not really saying anything at all.

FRIDAY: I can’t read anymore. I’m on the second-to-last page of curly-cue writing and heart-dotted “i’s,” and I can’t make myself turn the page. The last thing I read was labeled “Wednesday.” Just two days before she did it. It’s strange. We’ve been best friends since birth. We’re blood related, and heart related, and I can hear the pain in her writing now. But I have no idea why, and she never gave me any clue. Every day on the phone with her, every day we talked. We saw each other several times a week. I should have seen what was wrong, should have heard it in her tone and the way her words deflated on the last syllable. But I didn’t. And that’s on me.

SATURDAY:
Rhett.
I swear on her grave, before the end of today, he will wish I’d never read that last page.

One of us will be seeing Jami before the sun rises.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Wherein I Fight Against the Man by Changing the Writing Prompt

My beautiful writer friend Leah has challenged me to a ten-minute prompted writing session. Since it's questionable at the moment whether I will be able to spend any time with my manuscript today, I think a ten-minute stretch of the old writing muscles is in order.


The prompt: Write something that begins with a screech.


Just so you know, I'm changing the screech to a scream. Because I want to and you can't stop me. (Is that against the rules? Too late now...) Here goes:


Some days she screams, she throws and bends and falls. Some days she blinks, and remembers, and waits. She's not sure which days are which anymore. There aren't really any days here, anyway, and she can't actually do any of those things. But she thinks about doing them.


She can recall certain things. She thinks about the weeds on the side of the road. She thinks about rollerskating. Once she thought about the way sunlight streams through a window thrown open, and the smell of spring filling the house, but only once.


She can't stand to think about light.


She can sing. No, hum. She wouldn't want to open her mouth. That's when the dirt comes in. But she can hum, and keep time with the words in her mind. Three hundred and twenty-seven different songs, before she can't remember anymore and has to start over at number one.


Once she was a fighter, kicking against the pricks. In the beginning she did kick, but the earth presses down on her legs and strangles their strength to move. She tried to beat against the heavy soil, but all she could do was curl her fingers into mud-encrusted fists. Her arms are caught too tightly for anything else.


There are too many pricks. She doesn't kick anymore.


But sometimes she thinks about kicking.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

THE HUBRIS OF WRITER-KIND or, That Time When I Knew Better Than All The Experts


The Question comes up at every single writing conference, in some form or another. I've even been the one to ask it once or twice.

How can you predict the next trend in books?

In other words, how can I write a book about the 'next big thing,' so that I can get published?

And the answer is always the same, no matter which professionals you ask: You can't.

You can't predict the market. No one, not even the agents and publishers themselves, know for sure what will be the next really big seller. And even if you do watch the market to see what types of books/subjects are on the upswing in popularity, by the time you conceive and write and revise a manuscript, and find an agent for it, and sell it to a publisher, and go through the publishing process, and get your book on the shelves, that type of book will no longer be popular.

You can't do it.

So stop trying. That's what all the pros say, anyway. They always tell us the same thing. Just write what you have passion for, and if it's good, you will find someone who wants it.

Remember that time when I knew more about publishing than those editors, agents, and professional authors?

Yeah, neither do I. But at the time I thought I did know better. I thought to myself, you know what will definitely get me published? I'll chase the market!

Yup.

Thus the reason why I have spent the last six months (and more) writing a story that wasn't really how I wanted it to be, about characters I didn't really know, in a style and genre that I don't really write well.

Ask me how well that's been going for me.

I have plodded along, practically forcing myself to write, and getting nowhere. I took all the enjoyment out of writing for myself. I got skewered again and again in critique sessions. I began to dread my own writing sessions, and then feel guilty because of that dread, all to produce something that I didn't love and wasn't proud of.

And guess what? I haven't even been able to force myself to finish the first draft, and already the market is saturated and the trend has moved on.

Crap. I hate being wrong.

But the good news is, I have recognized my folly. I have seen the error of my ways, and am already infinitely happier for it!

For now, I have returned to a previous project. It's one that I truly love and have passion for, but when I first wrote it, I didn't have the knowledge to really do it justice and make it good. So I'm redoing it.

That's right, I'm rewriting and book that I've already written.

It may not ever get me anywhere. It may not ever be published. But I love it, and frankly, I need to get my writing mojo back. And it's making me happy. I've written more words in the last three days than I have in the last three weeks on the "chasing the market" project.

And while I rehash and beautify my previous work, I am also brainstorming and outlining something new. Well, it's actually another version the doomed project, but it's going to have the storyline, characters, and genre that I originally intended for it.

And finally, after months of writer plodding, I am finally writer flying again!