Out with November

Am done! 53,246 words, and this year I even wrote a proper ending. Well, proper is debatable. Angst over the rewrite to start shortly…

But right now–hurray! I want champagne.

Where do you think you are going?

in Indy in '87

I told my dad it would be good for my career. I told my mom the truth. “I want to go where everything is my choice, where I can’t blame you or dad or give you the credit.” So it was I found myself at 17 on an airplane flying from Orlando, Florida to Terre Haute, Indiana, a state I’d never been anywhere near. I didn’t know anyone for 900 miles.

I shared a taxi–the Terre Haute airport had only one taxi–with a university senior. I arrived a week early to start a job and the dormitory was nearly empty. Once in my dorm, I called my dad. “Everything is fine…”

“If you change your mind and want to come home, you can,” he said. “Any time. It will be okay.”

“I’m fine. Okay?” I got him off the phone. The open window didn’t help the warm, stale air. I called mom. “I’m here,” I said. Before I left home, she’d said, “If you call crying and want to come home, I’m not going to let you.” Now when I heard her voice I broke into tears, insisted I was okay and not asking to come home. I wanted her to see the concrete baby blue walls, the metal framed beds, and view of downtown Terre Haute from my 6th floor window. In those days, I’d have to take pictures with my 35mm, take them to the drug store, wait a day, put them in an envelope and wait a week for mom to call back.

All I could do then was tell her I was okay. After I hung up I kept crying. I cried myself to sleep. Woke up at 2 in the morning and cried more. Went and got a Hostess Cupcake from the vending machine downstairs, ate it in the dark of my room, and cried myself back to sleep again.

In the morning, I knew I’d made the right decision. This was the right place.

In fiction it is hard to know if you’ve brought the story to the right place. At least it is for me. Did I go far enough or too far? And if it is the right place, can I describe it to the reader in old fashioned words?

Best Selling Books and Crimped Hair

You can try to write to the latest fashions, but what is the story going to look like 20 years later?

oh those 80s

What is it that makes a best-seller anyway?

What to Wear to Dinner

Her mother said to us, “I want you to dress formal. It’s Thanksgiving. No jeans.”

M. and I exchanged looks. Formal?

dressed for Thanksgiving dinner

Up in her bedroom, M. dragged out old prom dresses. “If she wants formal, we’ll do formal.”

The beautiful expressions on her parents’ faces! They made us go upstairs and change. Pity. I didn’t go to prom and I enjoyed the chance to flounce around in a fufi dress.

In fiction, you can try to give people what they say they want, but who’s to say you got it right? One person’s formal is another person’s uptight. One person’s free-spiritedness is another person’s debauchery. Or something like that.

I’m looking at my NaNoWriMo novel and wondering who on this planet would believe in a story like this? Well, I’m not at the point of caring today. It is the story I want to write. And if anyone wants to tell me they don’t want to read a story about a girl made of ink and paper, then there are many other deserving books out there.

There is the story you want to write and the story someone else wants to read. Of course, you don’t get published unless they enough someones will want your story, and what is that magic number? How much should we care when we put marks on paper?

I’m rambling. NaNo does that. In the end though, Happy Thanksgiving. Many thanks to you.

Stripping Outdoors

The sun was setting when, after dancing around the lawn and stripping off my clothes, I fell in the fire ant bed. I was two.

September 1989

Because of the angle of light, my mom said she couldn’t see what was wrong. She could only hear me screaming. She saw a shadow moving up my body and when she touched me the ants crawled onto her fingers. Dad rushed me to the bathtub where he threw me in a nearly drowned me. Then he threw me in the car–no car seats in those days–and rushed me to the hospital.

The doctor gave me shots and discovered I had ant bites outside my body and in. The clothes-flinging-in-the-sunset days ended.

Some days writing feels a bit like that.

How to Scare People

The bank teller’s eyes widened and she stopped speaking in mid-sentence. “What is it?” I asked. I’d just come home from getting four wisdom teeth pulled and couldn’t feel my mouth. The teller was looking down at the counter, and so I looked down too. Blood was dripping onto the green-black marble.

My stitches had come loose. I put my fingers to my lips and saw blood.

I imagine that teller remembers me to this day.

When you put your work out into the world, you have no idea how people will react. Something meant one way will be taken in another. How much would it bother you?

A few weeks ago I was crossing a busy street with two of my best friends. As we stood in the turn lane, cars whizzing by, L. blurted out, “Your novel scared me. I couldn’t read past the first chapter.” More cars. “The knife under the bed.” The way across the last two lanes was almost clear. “I had to stop. I’m sorry. I was scared.”

“It’s okay,” I said, watching the cars. “Don’t worry about it. Come on, let’s go.”

What is it specifically about your work that people will react too?

Furniture Polish Kills the Soul

My son draws on the dining room table. We brought it home a few years ago and I handed my son markers and said, “Have at it.” Squiggles and dots decorate the legs, color splotches the sides, random marks and doodles cover the top. When guests come over for dinner, this is the table we eat on. This is not an effort to turn my child into Baby Picasso (Guernica by baby anyone?), but more way to avoid a polished table top.

table top art by the kiddo

My grandmother refused to have a dining room table. They were too big, too much trouble, and ugly. If some terrible leering table lurked in her past, I shall never know. But when guests came over, everyone sat in a comfy chair with a TV dinner tray. The television wasn’t on, the food was cooked from scratch, the silverware was really silver, and the plates were china. TV dinner tray was no excuse to put your elbows on the table or forget to put your napkin in your lap.

I never thought her table animosity had survived through me, but as I confess to my husband no desire to ever sand down and refinish our table, I must admit to this strange family prejudice. It is like those gleaming polished surfaces of empty dining room tables suck out the soul.

our table in the middle of rearranging the room

Why do I believe that people with cluttered spaces are more imaginative, more interesting? This is probably not true, but it is hard to get rid of this idea. What about you? What notions of neatness do you possess? How polished is your table? And if your table shines, can you actually sit at it and write?

Hate Your Choices?

This may explain why you can’t decide. Listen.

Girls Before and After

“Cheer up,” S. said. “Dance with me.”

About three months had passed since my mother had died. My cancer-riddled grandmother would be gone a month later. Perhaps I was prone to sudden silences and fits of restlessness. S. and I were in his room. We worked together in the dorm and we were friends.

before getting ready

S. knew I liked to dance, and though I felt silly, I accepted his hand. We danced around his room until I was laughing, and then it was time to get to work.

A few days later I ran into S. at the front desk. “Hi!” I said, checking my mailbox. He crossed his arms over his chest and said, “You take that woman’s studies class, right?”

“Sure,” I said, looking at my mail.

“You take a lot of those women classes.”

I stopped looking at my mail. “Yes. That okay with you?”

“My girlfriend’s never taken those kinds of classes.”

“Oh. Well, good for her,” I said, thinking how I wanted to get to lunch and how he’d react if his girlfriend did take a women’s studies class. “Gotta go.”

A week later, we were at an employee retreat weekend. All of us were in this hotel conference room with paper, magazines, scissors, and glue. We were told to draw lines down the paper to make four sections, and then to cut out magazine pictures and words. Some of the cut outs were the way we saw ourselves and other pictures were the way we saw our coworkers. So, if I saw a picture of, let’s say, a carrot, and I thought of a coworker as healthy or rabbit-like, I would cut that carrot out and give it to my rabbity colleague. Okey-dokey.

S. had avoided me since our dance, but I hadn’t noticed. And while I sat on the floor flipping through magazines and joking with other Resident Assistants, he marched across the room and handed me two cut outs–one of two women holding hands and another of the words women love. “Here,” he said. “You.”

getting ready to leave for the party

I glued the two cut outs onto my page and when anyone asked me about them I said with a shrug, “Oh, that’s how S. sees me.” I didn’t have the energy to figure out why.

In fiction, characters often do not see each other clearly. That’s where conflict comes from. Right? But sometimes writers don’t see their characters clearly either. That may not be the conflict you want. Some characters I know immediately. Some hide from me for a long time. Sill others try to reveal themselves but I’m not paying attention or maybe I don’t want to see. Who knows? Maybe I should have my characters cut up magazines too. Ha.

Is there a particular type of character that you aren’t seeing fairly? Someone who shows up again and again but what you want from them isn’t what they want to give?

a lot of nothing

Some nights the brain will not make anything.