Jealousy and Other Emotions 11/25/02

The last time I saw Selma Gray the hot noon sun was reflecting in her dreadlocked hair and the bright colors of her dress. The last time I saw Selma Gray she was standing barefoot on the cement in front of the passport building. The last time I saw Selma Gray she was smiling. I had noticed all of these things and I stopped to talk to her, imagining that she would have something interesting to say.

She was going to Panama. “I’m going to Panama,” she told me.

“Oh,” I responded.

Selma bent her leg up and dug her toes into the soil of a potted tree behind her. “Yeah,” she said as though I’d never even spoken. “We’re having a problem getting passports, though. They won’t let you in without shoes.”

She jerked her thumb towards a sign on the building next to her. I nodded. “Real bummer,” she said as she pulled her left foot out of the dirt and placed the right one in its place. “My boyfriend ran across the street to get me some flip-flops. I’m not allowed in there either.”

Selma lifted her chin and shook her head. “Things are going to be different in Panama. We’re going to live off the land be done with all this shoe-wearing commercialism.”

“How long will you be gone?” I asked.

Selma placed both her feet on the ground and brought her chin down so that she could look me directly in the eyes. “Forever, man. Forever.”

Selma’s boyfriend ran up then, toting a pair of seafoam green flip-flops. As Selma put them on her feet I made an excuse and turned to leave. At the street corner I looked back. The last time I saw Selma Gray she was putting her foot into a seafoam green flip-flop with one hand, and balancing herself against her boyfriend with the other.

That was the last time. This time, a mere three months later, Selma is standing so the doorway surrounds her like a box. Sunlight does not reflect in her dreads. They have been chopped off. Sunlight does not reflect off her bright clothing, her clothing is all gray. She is not smiling. “I heard you were sick,” she says. An odd remark coming from someone who I was never particularly close to.


This story is one that I was really focused on for a long time and I actually did finish it, but I don’t think that it came out the way that I wanted it. The final product was taken down by my own perfectionism. It was a long time ago and I’m sure that if I went through my notebooks I would be able to find the whole story, but I don’t have it all typed up and written down somewhere.

One of the main characters in this story, Selma, was based on someone that I knew. She had a different kind of life than I did and I was really jealous of it. I was also bitter about the fact that she could live in a different way than I could. I didn’t understand why she could live her life with so much freedom when I felt so completely trapped by the things around me. I wrote her into this story and made her a rather pathetic character.

I wanted to point out that even though she was free in some ways it was all bullshit. In my mind at the time, she was living in a way that just wasn’t sustainable. I thought that no one could live life in that way forever. I made her character rude and presumptuous. I wanted her to be unlikeable.

I’ve changed a lot since I wrote this story. I still know the girl that Selma was based on. She’s still living the kind of life that I could be jealous of, though she has calmed down quite a bit since the time when she was running off to live in a South American country. The truth is that she was always a really nice person and she still is. I was simply bitter and jealous that I couldn’t live the life that she could live. I didn’t feel as free as she felt.

The point is, when you’re jealous as a writer, you can make horrible things happen to the people that you are jealous of. I made something horrible happen to her in this story. I had all her illusions shattered. I have other stories that I’ve written where I let my jealousy take over and some of them are actually pretty good. All emotions are helpful when it comes to writing.

I don’t really worry about letting jealousy affect me in this way, because it’s not like I’m acting with blatant bitterness towards the people I’m jealous of. It’s more secondary and I find that it is helpful. It lets me work through a lot of different things that I’m trying to work through and it makes me feel better. It’s not just jealousy that comes through in my writing. If I really don’t like someone, I’ll write them into a story and make their life end up horribly or have them lose a limb or have everyone hate them or see them for what they truly are.

When I get my feelings out in my writing, it doesn’t hurt anyone and I end up coming out with some really good stories. That’s using emotions in a positive way.

Interruptions 11/25/08

He did not mean for it to happen. No one means for things like this to happen, but they do. It was a mistake, Fletcher would try to tell himself. Mistakes happen and this is just the way things are. He would not feel guilty and yet he did. He felt guilty. He felt guilt pressing outward against his rib cage. Guilt wanting to rip him apart. Guilt making him explode. It was a beautiful day. Winter was threatening but had not some yet. The streets were cluttered with the gold of recently fallen leaves. It was cold. Cold enough for her to be wearing a woolen cap. He did not know her, did not know her name, but he could tell you about that cap if you asked. He hopes that no one asks. It was blue, a dark blue nearer to indigo and it had a yellow trim. All over, in random spots, there were yellow stars. She was wearing the night sky right there on her head.

Fletcher liked it and he was in such a good mood and she was so pretty, coming towards him on her bit, smiling. As she approached him, and it seemed like she was so far away, he yelled out, “I like your hat.” She teeters with laughter as she came towards him. “Thanks!” she shouted as she passed him smiling, and she kept her eyes on him, so Fletcher did the same to her. She must have seen the smile disappear from his face. She must have seen him turn white because her own face became serious and she turned her head to look forward, but it was too late. She could not be saved.

Did she yell out? Fletcher could not remember, but he is certain that there must have been some noise other than the sound of metal against skin, metal, cloth, the ground. And there must be something other than the sound of spokes clanging against the pavement. The sound of a tire spinning endlessly into the air. There must have been something else? Was it him? Fletcher could not remember. Did he let out a strangled, high pitched sound reflective of the fear he felt. She was on the ground, her limbs askew, the cap still on her head. Maybe you could imagine her as simply sleeping, as though people always fell asleep in the middle of the roads.

It was the driver’s fault, making a left hand turn into a girl on a bike. The driver is out of her car now, her hand still holding her phone up to her ear. She is saying, “I hit something. Oh, God. Oh, God. I hit someone. I hit someone. Oh, God.”

Fletcher asks her, “Is that 911? Did you call the police?”

The driver, on her phone looks at him, bewildered. “What? Oh, God, I hit someone.”

“Is that the police?” Fletcher asks and he points at the phone.

The driver shakes her head. “I have to call the police. The police. Is she dead? Oh, God, I hit someone. I killed someone.”

The thought did not cross Fletcher’s mind until this moment. The girl in the hat could be dead. She could be dead even if it looks like she is sleeping, with limbs spread out, on the pavement. “Call the police,” he tells the driver before going to the woman on the pavement.

There is blood on her hat. That is the first thing that he notices. It is seeping from the inside out, blacking out stars. The night sky in a certain area is dark. He knows he should not try to move her. He leans into her and puts two fingers up to her neck, checking her pulse. It is light, but it is there.


I like this story. It is crammed into a notebook that was full of two other major projects. One comes before it and the other comes after it. The truth about this story is that it got forgotten because the day after I wrote it something very serious and very big happened in my life. It was something that I couldn’t ignore. It was something that I couldn’t even understand and when things that big happen to me I have to write them out in a way that makes sense to me.

So this story got pushed to the side because of a big event that I needed to understand. The story that came out of that event was actually pretty good, but very personal, and so it’s not something that I like exploring or looking over. This story, this little moment before the other event, really is something that I should look into again. I like it.

The story came out of an experience that I had one day. I live in a town where it’s really easy to get around on my bike and so because of this, I ride it a lot. I’ve also learned that there are a number of people who want to kill me because I am on a bike. Actually, I think I’ve only had one run in with someone who seemed to actually want to kill me. The other people were all just really bad drivers. There are a lot of people who need to pay a little more attention when they are on the road. People on bikes actually do have the right of way which means that you shouldn’t make left hand turns into them. However, there have been a lot of times where I’ve almost been killed by someone making a left hand turn. Once, it was so close that about four people who were on the sidewalks around me actually screamed in fear. The driver that almost hit me was on the phone. Typically, if I almost get hit, the drivers are on the phone.

So one day, I was riding my bike to work and what happened in the beginning of this story happened to me. Someone complemented me on my hat and I was distracted and I turned to find someone trying to make a left hand turn into me. Fortunately, I was able to stop in time and make the appropriate WTF face at the driver. This story was born out of the simple idea that if I didn’t that poor nice guy who was just trying to complement my hat would probably feel really guilty but it would have been the driver’s fault completely. The driver wouldn’t feel guilty, of course, because people on their phones are too distracted to feel guilty. Plus, the guilt of the innocent bystander is much more interesting of a topic.

It’s too bad that my life got interrupted right after this. I would have liked to have seen where this story went. I might come back to it but now I’m at a different place in my life and my writing. Maybe later.

Changing One Word 1/25/08

I left the letter on the kitchen counter. I had covered it in flour and was tracing new letters over it with my finger. Odd behavior, I know, but my own logic was twisted up in my actions. Maybe it is something I could explain to you, if I ever get the chance. I am all out of chances.

I was standing over your letter, tracing you a new one when it happened. I had the perfect view, from where I was, of the door as it swung open. It wasn’t as dramatic as I always imagined it would be. I had left the door unlocked, a completely accidental error in my judgment. It meant that there was no kicking down of the door. Nor was there a clever scheme that involved a lost child or some other made up thing designed to make me open the door. I heard an odd bump and looked up to see my door swinging open.

He was scrawny, not strong or thick in any way. I had always imagined that if this sort of thing happened, he would be strong. He would be the kind of big man who could overtake me with a look. The man in front of me was not the man that I imagined. He looked young. Younger than me. He could not grow a real moustache, though it was apparent that he had tried. I saw him and I wasn’t even scared. I was surprised. There is a difference, or maybe there was right then. I almost opened my mouth to speak, maybe to ask him if I could help him in some way. Then I saw the gun.

My palm fell flat onto the flour. No more letters over letters. Just a handprint surrounded by scribbles. A gun. A gun. He had it pointed at my head. I didn’t really even know what to do. My thoughts swam in desperation. Then I went blank. There was nothing left to think. Nothing to think about.


This is the beginning of a story I wrote that was basically all about how much I love my words and how much I love writing. It was a strange story and I wrote it at the very beginning of this period where I started writing a lot more than I had been writing before. I think that because I was out of practice it didn’t turn out very good. It certainly didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped that it would.

The story centers around this main character, the first person narrator. She is desperately in love with someone that she can’t have or who perhaps doesn’t want her, so she wrote him a letter. What happens in the story is that these guys come into her house, tie her up, and deposit her in the bathroom. Then they start looking around and they find the letter. Instead of just leaving it where it is, one of the guys takes it and makes her read it aloud as if she wrote it for him. He makes her write a new version of the letter, replacing only her former lover’s name with his. After she has done this he points the gun at her and makes her tell him that she loves him. These two acts take away all the power of the letter.

The thief leaves without taking any of the things that thieves are known to take, such as televisions and DVD players. The only thing he takes from her is this new letter, the one that he had her write his name into. She doesn’t want the old one anymore. It has been tainted. After she calls the police she sits down to have a cigarette. It is her first cigarette since the letter’s original intended recipient told her that he could never date a smoker. When the thief took the letter, he took away all hope of her ever getting her ex-lover back as well.

That explanation makes it seems very complicated and maybe it is. Like I said, I wrote this after a period when I hadn’t been doing very much writing, so I was out of practice. Anyway, this piece meant two things for me. First, it taught me that I need to write on a regular basis or else my stories come out all mushy. Second, it made me really think about the power that I give to my words and how crappy I feel when other people take them and switch all the meanings around. When she writes the new letter for the thief she only changes one thing, but that one thing is the one thing that makes all the difference. I think that I will always worry about people changing my words around. It won’t be the same as it is in this story. I don’t think that anyone is going to break into my house and steal my notebooks and make me change words so that things are all about them. I think that my fear is that people won’t understand what it is that I am trying to say and will take things to mean something other than what they are.

I guess that’s just one of the risks that come with my chosen profession. It’s just a hard one for me to swallow.

Numbers and Exercises 2/21/06

Someone’s playing the radio on the twenty seventh floor. I have the misfortune of hearing it one the twenty sixth floor. I imagine turning into one of those old cranks who bangs on the ceiling with a broom handle. At twenty five, I am too young to play those games. Instead, I decide to leave. The elevator stops at the twenty fourth floor where I am joined by a pair of elderly women wearing tract suits and weights on their wrists. They chatter aimlessly as we descend. Twenty three floors later we are in the lobby. The women begin speed-walking out of the building as I slowly follow. “Twenty two years of marriage and he just up and leaves her for a younger woman,” one of the ladies says. I hear the other clucking at this comment before I am unable to hear anything else from them.

I wonder about that situation as I walk away. My husband and I were married when we were merely twenty-one. “So young,” my mother had said at the time. “It will never last.” I thanked her for her unwavering support and went ahead with my wedding plans. Mike and I were married on the twentieth of June. The date was convenient because it was the only day the church was free that month. Things have been fairly uneventful since then but these old women had me wondering about the next nineteen years. Would Mike leave me for a younger woman? I found this unlikely as he hadn’t married me for my youth or beauty in the first place, or so I liked to think.

I ponder this for eighteen blocks at which point I relies that I have been walking aimlessly, doing nothing but avoiding the noise that was formerly coming from above me. Seeing as that is not far behind me I take the next few blocks much slower. I have no destination, just a seemingly endless supply of street before me. There is a bookstore at the corner of 17th street and Miller Avenue. I walk inside in hope of sitting down and resting for a while.

Sixteen minutes later I am back on the street. In the bookstore I found a book on the statistics for people who marry young. I grew morose as I flipped through it and quickly left.

Back on the streets I wonder if Mike has the same doubts as I do. It was unlikely seeing as he hadn’t heard the conversation that I had earlier. If he had been there would he have grabbed my hand and given it a light squeeze to reassure me that it would never happen to us?

Us. We. We had met on our fifteenth day of our freshman year at college. He thought it was magic that led me to him. I knew that earlier that night I had had too much to drink and wandered up to the wrong dorm room. When my key didn’t work for the obvious reasons I banged on the door yelling for my roommate to open it. Instead, I got Mike. Half asleep and barely dressed he agreed to let me sleep n his couch in the hopes that I would better recognize my surroundings in the morning.

Ah, numbers. I remember this story coming from a prompt which makes up the first sentence. I think that after that I just started counting down because it was happening fairly naturally after I had come up with the character’s age. I think that I was doing a lot of work out of a book of prompts at this time because I wasn’t writing all that much. I felt very stifled and when I feel stifled I have a difficult time expressing myself. I knew that I needed to write and so I was turning to prompts to help me through it. I still use prompts sometimes because they help me get ideas going when I think that I have none left.

I particularly liked this prompt because it gave me the chance to mix letters and numbers. It was a very interesting idea for me and I thought about expanding it, but I figured that if I were going at the rate that I was going I would have to start at something like 10,000 to get a novel and I couldn’t think of what I would use for 9998 or really any other number before I got down below one hundred. I also don’t like having to rely on devices like this. It would be one thing if I could write a story like this and make it work and make the characters compelling, but I’m not sure that I could. I think I would be too distracted by the act of counting down.

This brings me to an important point. There are a lot of times when I think it would be easier to rely on something other than my characters to move the story forward. I know that there are times when there are things other than my characters involved in the story. While I think that plot is important, I don’t want it to move forward simply for the sake of moving forward. Maybe this is why I don’t write mystery novels. I wouldn’t want the characters to suffer just so that they can solve the mystery. I think sometimes when writers rely on devices and plot they miss out on creating a character arc. I wouldn’t write a story without a plot but I also wouldn’t want to write a story where someone didn’t change something about themselves from the beginning to the end. To me that’s more important. The plot comes out of the character’s desire for something and the character’s need for a change.

I guess my stories are just more character driven. That’s just something that works for me. I like devices such as counting down and if I could ever figure out a way for it to work in a story without the story actually suffering I might use it someday.

The Issue of Trust 3/28/01

This wagon is different from most wagons. The sides are wooden panels a foot high. We could remove them if we wanted to, but we don’t want to. The bottom is plain wood. It differs from the sides in the fact that it is not painted bright red. Bryan wheels the wagon into the middle of the street with me right behind him.

“Get in,” he says as we reach the center of the road.

“What?” I say. I’m not going to get in an old wooden wagon aimed down a steep hill.

“Get in,” Bryan says again. He pulls one of the helmets out of the wagon and hands it to me.

“This is so dangerous. I’m not getting in. Let’s go home, Bryan,” I say. I grab his hand and try to drag him back to the house.

“Amma, relax, it’s not that dangerous.” He lets go of my hand and gets the other helmet out of the wagon and slips it on his head. “We have helmets. We’ll be safe.”

I’m still hesitant as I watch him straighten out the wagon so we’ll go straight down.

“Get in,” he says again. I slowly crawl into the wagon. It wobbles whenever my weight shifts.

“Don’t kill me,” I murmur.

“Relax,” Bryan says, “trust me.” He grabs the handle and pushes it back hard against the front of the wagon. “Get back,” he says to me so I scrunch myself into the back panel of the wagon, grateful that Bryan will be in the front.

Bryan gives a slight push and jumps into the wagon. He grabs the handle and pushes it from left to right until we have finally been straightened out. I am hugging myself in the back of the wagon, pulling my knees closer and closer to my body.

“Relax!” Bryan yells to me. His voice seems to stumble with the bumpy road. I close my eyes in a refusal to relax but without sight there is nothing to be afraid of and my entire body calms down. We hit a larger than normal rock and are airborne for one second.


This came out of a story which revolved around the main character (again named Amma) taking a road trip to find someone. Instead of finding the person that she is looking for, she finds a number of other people, including a free spirited young man named Bryan.

My freshman year of college I was doing a lot of things that young people do their freshman year of college. For me, even more so than having the general new experiences, I was making a whole new set of friends. I felt like I had been completely abandoned by the people that I used to know when I got up to University. It wasn’t that they weren’t around. They were. It was just that it had become apparent that we were heading in different directions in our lives. I have always wanted more than to just hang around the same town forever and to start a family right away. I wasn’t working on a career that was conducive to that. It’s not that I don’t think it’s absolutely lovely that they wanted families and that they were working on what they wanted, it just wasn’t for me. I have never wanted the career that I felt half-assed about so that I didn’t feel bad when I quit to have children.

Anyway, I was making new friends and one of them was this wonderful guy named Bryan who had a lovely deep voice and beautiful eyes and who listened to reggae and compared joining fraternities to joining gangs. He skated, which I thought was fantastic because it was something that I always wanted to learn how to do. I thought he was fantastic, so I wrote him into my stories as a person who teaches the main character a lot about herself. The first exercise was an exercise in trust. I think that trusting people is something that I struggle with. I never know who to trust and when I’m supposed to start trusting them. Should I trust that most people are good right away, or should I hang back and watch? I made the character of Amma the same way. She was worried about trusting people and then she goes on this fantastic cross country adventure in search of some guy and along the way she finds all of these people that she has to trust because they know her destination and she does not.

It’s an interesting situation. I still find it difficult to trust people, but I’m trying harder and I see my efforts making a difference in my own life. A positive difference, so that’s a good thing.

(Oh, and the wagon that I'm describing in the beginning is called a Radio Flyer Town and Country. We had one when I was a kid and I hadn't seen anyone else with one like that for years so I thought it was unique to my family. Kids are self-centered like that. Of course there were other wagons like it. The company wouldn't have made just one.)

Smoking in the Bathroom and Other Revelations 3/1/08

Caleb does not like it when she smokes in the bathroom. It doesn’t matter now. This is not his bathroom. She is in Mike’s bathroom and if he dislikes her smoking he has not mentioned it yet. She is always resting cigarettes on the edge of the sink, leaving them there as she fixes her hair or touches up her make-up. The ashes grow long and eventually fall off. She never bothers to clean them up, preferring instead to leave them for the next person who comes along and has some desire to wash their hands. Right now, her hands are on top of her head rearranging her hair and a length of ash has just fallen off of her cigarette and into the sink. The movement of the ash falling into the ivory abyss beneath her causes her to look down. As if seeing her cigarette for the first time she reaches down to it with her right hand as the left one remains on top of her head, holding her hair in place. She takes a quick drag from the cigarette and sets it down again. Both of her hands return to the top of her head and continue their work on her hair.

“What’re you doing?” Mike asks from the bedroom. She turns and looks at him. He is still sitting in the bed, propped up with pillows. She closes the door.

“I’m fixing my hair,” she shouts through the door.

This story came out of a first line that I really love. “Caleb does not like it when she smokes in the bathroom.” I love that first line. I love it so much that I haven’t given up on it yet and the truth is that nothing is coming out of it. I try and I try to write this story about how much Caleb dislikes it when his girlfriend is smoking in the bathroom but it never turns into anything that I like.

In nearly every version of the story that follows this first line she is not in Caleb’s bathroom and therefore doesn’t have to worry about him as much as she would have if she were. In this particular version she is in her lover’s bathroom. He lets her smoke in the bathroom. The smoking in the bathroom doesn’t even seem to be something that this particular character enjoys. She is always smoking in bathrooms but she does it more to get away from people than she does because she really wants a cigarette.

My favorite part of this excerpt from the story is the end, when she closes the bathroom door so that she doesn’t have to see Mike but continues the conversation with him through it. Closing a door on someone so that you can shout through it seems like something a person would do in a relationship that they aren’t exactly comfortable with. Maybe they don’t actually want to see the person so that they can imagine being with someone else or talking to someone else. I don’t think that my main character in this story really likes Mike. I think that she is just cheating on Caleb with him so that she doesn’t have to confront the commitment that he represents.

The truth is that people do things like this all the time. They become scared of the relationship that they are in and instead of confronting the issue head on by talking it over with their significant other, they decide to cheat or find some other way to sabotage the relationship, that way it will fall apart. It’s easier to destroy a relationship for an obvious reason (infidelity) than it is to worry over someone maybe leaving you for a reason that may not be so obvious (some kind of inherent character flaw that you never knew about but which is so obvious to everyone you attempt to enter into a long term relationship with). The main character in this story doesn’t like herself very much and does everything that she can to push the people that she cares about further and further away so that she doesn’t have to worry about them not liking her because she is simply who she is.

I understand her completely. Maybe that's why I'm so scared to write a final version of this story.

A Catalogue of First Lines

Today I'm changing my format for a moment to bring you a catalogue of first lines. I think that first lines are important to a story and I'm sure that a lot of people would agree with me. They need to pull the reader in and tell something important. I hope that I acheive that with my first lines. Here are a few of them and a bit about the stories that they come from:

Meredith Sampson always has exact change.

From “Touch.” This is a story about a young woman who suffers from severe burns over half her body. Because of this she has chosen to cut herself off from the world around her. However, life is never that simple and as much as we want to be islands there are very few people who ever are. Meredith craves affection and touch, but she doesn’t believe she is worthy of it. I like this story enough, but I think I read it and reread it too many times. Its shine has worn off, for me at least.

Exhibit A: She is facing the camera, looking annoyed, one hand on her swollen belly.

From “The Proof.” This story is interesting because I tried a different format. The story is told almost completely through a series of photographs that the narrator finds hidden in her boyfriend’s desk. The story came from a very personal and kind of ugly place for me. It’s harsh, and the copy that I sent out to people was toned down a bit from the first draft, which was almost unreadable because of the anger it reflected. I like this story a lot because it defines a feeling for me and it reflects a situation so well. It hasn’t been accepted anywhere yet but one of the editors from Willow Springs Literary Magazine sent me an email to tell me that it made it to the editor’s meeting and that I should email him if I send something else. I thought that was very nice of him and encouraging.

That Guy and What’s-Her-Face met in college.

From “The Tragic Yet True Love Story of That Guy and What’s-Her-Face.” This is another story that hasn’t been accepted by any magazines yet. I’m really not sure if it will be. As a writer, you want to be confident in all the work that you send out and I like this story, I really do, I just think that it might be a little too fable-ish. It came out of a Facebook page I saw of a person that I used to know. (I try to not be that cyber stalking person but, admit it, you do it too). In high school he was boring, but he thought he was the shit, and looking at his profile years later I could tell that he still held that opinion of himself. The thing is, his life wasn’t all that great. It was just really predictable. This story is about predictable lives and the way that it is that some people chose who they are going to love based on the people around them and not on the person that they truly are. It’s tragic and yet so true. These relationships don’t always fail, but what comes out of them doesn’t seem to be authentic.

It makes me sick. Absolutely sick.

From “Jasper.” Okay, so this is two sentences and not one, so shoot me. “Jasper” is about a man who works at a company that does something that is morally questionable to him and the way that he retaliates against it. It is also about the strange role that text messaging plays in our lives. I first went to college right out of high school, which was in 2000. I dropped out, went back, dropped out again, went back for the last time in 2007 and now I’m about to graduate at the end of 2009. It is amazing the technological advances that have been made in that small amount of time. I know that there were cell phones back in 2000, but very few college students had them. I never remember class being interrupted by a phone ringing. When we left class we had time to ruminate over what we had just learned because we weren’t immediately on our phones the second that we walked out of the classroom. Things have changed drastically since those days. This story came out of an introductory level Zoology course that I took in 2008. I was amazed by the amount of people texting during class. Some would even get up during class to take calls outside the door. It was kind of jarring. I didn’t understand who they were texting because I honestly couldn’t think of anyone who would want to receive a text from me that simply said “In science. Did you know that Watson and Crick discovered DNA in 1953.” I didn’t understand who they all had to be in contact with at that exact moment. It just seemed strange to me. Then I thought, what if they aren’t really sending texts to anyone? What if it was just a computer that pretended to be interested in their petty drama? It was an interesting idea and I turned it into this story. The only problem is that I don’t know how it ends. I’m close, I’m just not there yet.

On a Tuesday morning Muriel dreams of a bathroom covered in blood.

From “The Year of Dead Babies.” This is, undoubtedly, the story that I am most proud of (so far). I’m not at all ashamed to say that I love it. It also came from a very personal place, which is where all the best stories come from. It’s about two couple who both experience the loss of a child (one through miscarriage and the other through SIDS). One couple comes together and the other falls apart. I submitted it for workshop in my senior creative writing course and my professor’s response is full of praise, which made me very happy. One of my classmates said that it seemed as though I, more so than any of the other students in the class, had a clear understanding of the human condition and because I actually liked his stories, I took it as a complement. Now that I’m done bragging I’ll tell you what I like about the story. I like that I was able to create a story that was third person omniscient. I think that it is a very difficult thing to do and that there are very few people who do it well. Typically what we see and what I write is third person close. I wanted to break away from something that I was comfortable with and I think I did it well. As with “Proof” I like how much this story reflects a time in my life. When I read it I can see a lot of hopes that I had and a lot of pain that I was feeling. It moves me and it is good of me to be moved by my own story. I like the characters that I created in this story, even Isabel, who many of my readers seemed to be conflicted about. This story has received a lot of positive feedback from the places I have submitted it to. It hasn’t been accepted yet but I’m waiting to hear back from the Black Warrior Review still and my fingers are crossed.

Magical Realism 4/5/01

There was something wrong with the house. The wind was pushing a tree against the outside north wall of the room. Thumping, thumping in an always quiet house. Below Jason and Amma, in the kitchen, there was creaking. It sounded as if every cabinet and drawer was opening and closing on its own. Creaking, clacking in an always quiet house. Something scurried across the attic above them. A mouse, a rat, possibly a chipmunk. Something alive that wasn’t there the night before. Scurrying, scurrying in an always quiet house.

Amma groaned and rolled over. Jason got out of the bed and stomped his foot on the floor. “SHUT UP!” he yelled. The house silenced itself. No more scurrying, no more creaking, and no more thumping. Jason crawled back into the bed. He snuggled up next to Amma. Something isn’t right, Amma thought as Jason’s arms slid around her.

“Something isn’t right,” Amma said. Jason cocked his head.

“What’s not right?” Jason asked.

“Something.”

“The house is quiet now. There’s nothing wrong.”

“But something isn’t right.”

Jason grunts and pushes himself against Amma, begging her for warmth and affection. He closes his eyes and relaxes. Something isn’t right he realizes. His eyes snap open. “Brian.”

“What?” Amma murmurs.

“Brian didn’t wake up when I yelled. Something isn’t right.” Jason sat straight up in bed. Amma rolled over and snapped on the lamp next to her head. They fly out of bed at the same time.
Amma gets to the crib first because the crib is by her side of the bed.

Brian is lying peacefully on his bed. Amma stares at him. Jason stumbles over and stares at him. His fists are clenched. His chest is not moving slowly up and down. Amma and Jason hold their own breath in order to hear the breaths that aren’t coming out of Brian’s small mouth and nose.

“Call 911,” Jason says. But Amma is frozen. She grips the side of the crib so tightly that her knuckles turn white. “CALL 911!” Jason yells, he himself frozen. Tears begin to flow down Amma’s face. Her cheeks become red apples, shiny from the wetness of the tears. Jason hears her whimper and he takes a dive for the phone where he dials the three numbers that mean help.

Oh, this story. Oh, this story. I don’t even know where to begin. It was part of my first novel which was written in parts all over my notebooks. It’s something I always return to because I do love it so much. I’m sure that you noticed that the name of the woman is the same name as the character from my last post. They are not the same person. Sometimes I just get really attached to names.

I must tell you that I was surprised to find this part of the novel in my third notebook. I don’t like the third notebook very much because it reflects a very awkward period in my life. I like this part of the story. I like what I did with it.

This [unfinished] novel is incredible to me because I was so young when I started working on it but it was so well-defined. I knew the characters and I knew what they wanted. The main character in this story is not Amma or Jason. It is the house. I was trying to bring to life something that is normally not a living being. I’m sure that it has been done before, especially with houses. Ander Monson said in one of his beautiful tweets “A family, often itself contained by a home, is a mechanism for containing: secrets, pain, stories, beauty, the seeds of its own undoing.” I think, in the case of this story, I wanted to make a home that, not only contained a family, but reflected it as well.

It was my first attempt at magical realism. I think it might have also been my last. Magical realism is a tough thing to create and to put into a story for the same reason that I think stories that are written in genres such as Science Fiction and Fantasy are tough to write well. I don’t write Science Fiction and Fantasy because it too often relies on plot twists instead of character arcs. In magical realism you have to create a story in which the characters are believable. Despite what is going on around them and however crazy it may seem the characters have to behave in a way that any normal person would behave. They have to react correctly. It’s tough.

I remember submitting a draft of the beginning of this story my freshman year of college in my first ever creative writing course and I remember how my professor reacted when we read it in workshop. He opened the workshop by saying that I had created something really wonderful and that we have to take into account when reading magical realism that, so often, it is something that is used by writers who are describing characters who don’t live in the most ideal of situations. He asked us to consider whether or not we thought that magical realism worked within the realm of suburbia. He thought that it did. His comments made me feel both embarrassed and proud.

I am fairly proud of this little bit of writing in a notebook that I find difficult to read.

Things I Never Knew I Always Wanted 2/28/01

He sees her at a bookstore outside of Tallahassee flipping through a book of Monet’s greatest works. He watches her from behind a bookshelf because she’s not supposed to be there. She’s supposed to be in Oklahoma City at Oklahoma State University getting an Oklahoma worthy education. Of course she looks up and of course she sees him.
He pretends to be engrossed in a book he picked up from the shelf in front of him. He feels her next to him. She’s breathing on his shoulder. She’s warm. He puts down the book quickly, unable to take the silent presence any longer. “What do you want, Amma?”
“When did you start reading ‘Claudio’s Passion’?” she asks picking up the book he just put down.
“Don’t change the subject.”
“Why not?” Amma looks up at him with her big green eyes. She is innocent.
“What are you doing here?”
“I was reading and I saw you so I thought I’d come over.”
“No here. Here in Florida.” He grabs the book out of her hands and sloppily reshelves it.
“You don’t want me here?” She asks. “I can leave if you want. It was just for a vacation but if you can’t stand being in the same state as me I understand.” She’s walking away now. He’s watching her go.
“Amma, wait.” He catches up to her. “I’m sorry.” She smiles and takes his hnd and drags him out of the store.
“What are you sorry for?”
“I was rude.”
“I love you.”
“Don’t say that.” But it’s too late because she already said it and she’s pressing her body against his and she’s kissing him and he’s kissing her back.
“Can I stay with you a while?”
“Whatever you want.”

Wow, this is old and because it’s old it tells a lot about the kind of person that I was when I was younger. I think that there’s a difficult period for everyone when they leave high school and have to make new friends. I had an especially difficult time because the roommates that I had weren’t exactly the greatest people. I wrote a lot of what could really be considered fan fiction. It’s just that instead of writing fan fiction about other people’s stories I wrote fan fiction about my own life. I think that I really felt trapped at that point. I was in a place I didn’t like, with people that I didn’t like.
This story comes out of that. The main character, Amma, has the mobility that I lacked. She has someone who loves her. She is able to bring these two things together.
I wrote a lot of stories around this time with similar themes. The biggest one was the ability of my characters to travel. They had no commitment to the things around them and, in a way, I thought that was really nice and really liberating. I did realize at the time that I had the same kind of freedom. I could have gone off and done the things that I really wanted but there was something holding me back. I think that from a very young age I was taught to worry about the world around me. Instead of feeling like I could just go out and fly by the seat of my pants, I felt that I had to create an itinerary that planned out every moment. I didn’t have to do this for my sake, but for the sake of the people around me.
The biggest change between the person that wrote this and the person that I am now is that I don’t do things simply for the sake of people around me. I will help out the best that I can, but when it interferes with my own life I just don’t think that it’s worth it anymore.
I’m about to embark on a really great adventure. It’s the first time in my life when I don’t have even the vaguest idea of what happens next. There are certain things that I want, but time will tell if I get those things or not. I’m okay with that.

Relationships 5/4/06

I like falling in love with the wrong kind of man. I know I’m doing it, in the way everyone always knows what they are doing, regardless of what they might say to themselves. Thus far, I have put behind me two alcoholics, one pot-head, and five republicans. These are serious men. They are serious about the jobs they lose due to their hangovers. They are serious about the clothing they wear. They are very serious about their political affiliations. They are not, however, serious about me. I am sure that I amuse them at first. They shake their serious heads at my clumsiness, they complement the passion of my kisses, and they openly admire the way my legs pop out of vintage skirts. They like me, I hope, but they are too serious and eventually they remind me that I should be as well.
Where once my laughter made them smile, it begins to annoy. “Do you think this is a joke?” they ask, their faces wrinkling at the brow. We are required to have serious talks regarding the nature of my activities. “Don’t walk outside barefoot,” they chide. “Are you really wearing that?” they ask. Finally, and with the most anger, they merely say “No.” Then it is over and I must say goodbye, an event always harder for me than it seems to be for them.
I spend a lot of time crying. I write desperate poems and letters. Things that never reach their intended audience but instead remain half written on tear stained pages of my notebooks. Eventually, I muster up the courage to be honest with myself. I finally come to terms with what I always knew, that it would never work.
I’ve been doing this for years, and my problems don’t seem to be going away. The only difference is that where before I believed that there were no problems, now I allow myself some concessions. If now I know his drinking is excessive, I imagine we’ll have it under control soon. If his close minded right wing supremacy is driving me crazy, I take it upon myself to open his eyes. Before I just thought that my loving him was enough to keep up together, now I imagine my love is enough to make him change so that we can stay together. It is a minor difference, but even that is progress.
These men are not so kind to me. They do not see my compromises. They never see the things I am giving up, the things I don’t talk about. All they see is that it isn’t going to work. Perhaps they are more sensible than I. Maybe their serious dispositions have served them well in this regard. I think that it is perhaps the reason I so admire them. We both know from the beginning that it won’t work, that I am not the right kind of girl, but they don’t let their emotions get in the way of this. For them, when it is over, it is over. My smile no longer causes theirs. My clumsiness is an annoyance they must live with. They are exhausted by my old tricks, while I retain my fascination with theirs. I lag behind as they move on to some simple blonde who has no expectations beyond a diamond in a year or two.
I am wondering why I subject myself to these most certain heartbreaks. I wonder why I chose these men, when there are so many reasons why I should not. Now I say this. Now, when these men are locked inside some drawer in a faraway corner of my mind. Now, when my memories of them contain more sorrow than they do fondness. I know that sometime, most likely in the not-too-distant future I will meet another one of these men and I will forget the lessons taught to me by those that came before him. I will fall in love with his serious countenance and slowly creep towards heartbreak once again. After all, men don’t fall in love with girls who laugh when everyone else is straight-faced. They cannot actually be with someone who appreciates the fell of grass between their toes. Even the most passionate of kisses is not enough to bind him to me.

I wrote this post after a bad situation with a guy, which I’m sure you could have figured out. I think that writing it was very therapeutic for me. The part about me finding another guy I wasn’t compatible with in again in the “not-too-distant future” didn’t really work out. I actually didn’t meet someone I was even slightly interested in for two years after this. It might have had something to do with the fact that I had just recognized a pattern for myself. I think that I still fall into patterns. We all do.

At the time I wrote this I was going through a period where I was trying to write creative non-fiction. I wrote a few essays and was actually really big into blogging on myspace (I deleted the profile, so don’t bother trying to find me). This was my favorite essay at the time because I meant the things that I said. The other ones seemed really forced. I think that creative non-fiction is a hard thing for me to write because I tend to focus on themes and life just keeps on moving ahead so I don’t have a lot of endings. You need endings with essays. You need them with life too. I’m very bad with endings.

Lists 10/5/08

Things I Like
-Old people that smoke
-Highlighters
-Those little orange monkeys at the zoo
-Giving people presents
-Presents in general
-Notebooks

Things I Don’t Like
-People who are mean for no good reason
-The sound of vacuum cleaners
-The smell of cleaning agents
-When boys I care about do cocaine
-People who treat me like I don’t have feelings



I can’t sleep and therefore am looking up lists in my notebooks. These lists came out of a lot of things that I was going through at the time. I was having trouble trying to find friends in the town that I live in. I always seem to be having trouble finding friends. That is where the stuff about people being mean comes from. I think that my biggest problem is that I really, really want people to like me and so I make an extra effort to be nice. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in the world who will take advantage of that sort of thing. There are other problems with it as well. It seems that once you start off being really nice you always have to be nice. You never get to have days where you aren’t feeling so great and you need time to yourself. People will always want a piece of you and they expect certain things out of you. It’s not like they always come knocking when they need something. It’s a strange sort of dependence, as though they know they can come to you because you aren’t very good at saying “no.” I need to learn how to say “no” more often. I need to set more boundaries.
I really don’t like the smell of cleaning agents or the sound of vacuums. It makes cleaning things a really tedious job for me, maybe more than most. I have switched to using Dr. Bronner’s to clean everything. The smell of peppermint isn’t so bad.
I still don’t like it when boys I care about do cocaine. It really is a horrible drug that sucks the life out of people. I don’t care what anyone says about it, it’s something that I will never try. I wouldn’t even want to. I’ve seen it destroy a lot of people. I’ve seen it become something that they need. Interestingly enough, I once found an article in a magazine that talked about it. They were doing studies on rodents. There were some rodents that were given cocaine as part of their diets. The other group was given a choice of whether to drink water that either had cocaine or didn’t. When they took the cocaine away from the rodents that were given a choice those animals went through withdrawal. The other ones didn’t seem to mind the change. What the scientists were figuring out was that it wasn’t actually that addictive of a drug. It is one of those drugs that a person only becomes psychologically dependant on. I thought that was interesting. I don’t have enough people to tell these things to.
The list of things I like stays pretty much the same throughout the years. I think that we all find things that we like and stick to them. Old people that smoke became something that I enjoyed after going to Bingo. I used to play a lot of Bingo and, back when they allowed smoking at the Bingo hall, there were always a ton of old people there who knew just how bad it was for them but had been doing it so long that they didn’t care anymore. The little orange monkeys at the zoo have also always been one of those things that make me extremely happy. They are called Golden Lion Tamarins. I like their tails that they use to get from tree to tree. They used to have a whole bunch at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, but then they started having fewer and fewer. Last time I went I think that there were only two or three. It was very disappointing to see the little orange monkey population decrease in such large numbers. (I just found out that they are endangered. I shouldn’t do research on these sorts of things so late at night. It just makes me depressed).
The fact that notebooks are on the list is pretty self-explanatory.

Overdoing it With the Plot 12/30/02

Peter Jenkins walks with the kind of confidence one would imagine Frank Sinatra had. His chin was always up and his hazel eyes were usually squinted by the sun. Even on overcast he could be seen squinting up at the sky, as if her were waiting for something to fall or perhaps for the clouds to part so God could tell him all his sins will be forgiven and that he has no reason to worry. Peter smiles when he thinks these thoughts, for as much as he ignores Beth’s incessant chatter, he did worry more and more as his sins piled up like bad checks in the bank of eternity.
It was a beautiful sight, Susan thought when she would catch Peter squinting up at the sky and softly smiling. Little did she know that he was questioning his own morality. To Susan he merely looked happy and free. The freedom was really all Susan was in awe of, happiness would surely follow.
Today the day Susan was awakened with the reminder of her own painful imprisonment, it was difficult to find Peter beautiful as he stared smiling into the overcast sky. Today the sight angered her to the point of repulsion. It was unfair and unkind of him to flaunt his freedom in such an insensitive way. Susan’s thoughts ran to the juvenile idea of depantsing Peter, letting him feel the anguish of being stripped down, bare. Susan shook the idea out of her head, not merely because of the childish implications, but more because she was sure the whole event would leave Peter entirely un-phased. He would shrug his shoulders, pull up his pants, and walk away with a whistle. Susan knew this and so when she did walk by him on the way into the zoo, she simply gave him a hello that was only loud enough to divert his attention from the sky.
He turned to her with a smile that grew bigger with recognition. For all her ill thoughts, Susan could not help but to smile back and an overwhelming urge to hug him so that she could fell all the warmth that shone in his eyes. “How’ve you been?” Peter asked and Susan responded with small talk and gossip which kept Peter amused until they reached the main office of the zoo.

This is part of a story that I worked on for years. I came up with the idea my senior year of high school and I started writing about it my freshman year of college. This story went through a number of reincarnations with parts of the story being told from different perspectives. Finally, it became third person close with the focus switching from character to character. The real problem that I was having with this story is that it started out as something that was going to be short and simple but then more and more characters started coming on board and, next thing you know, I was working on a novel. I was definitely not ready to write a novel and this one was quickly turning into a convoluted mess.

The plot was really simple. An ape got loose at the zoo on Girl Scout day. There were just too many things that I wanted to get in there. The main character, Susan, was a zookeeper who was perpetually distracted by her secret life of writing romance novels (a career she wasn’t really proud of). Under her were Peter, who loved his life regardless of the situation and on this particular day was busy questioning his lifestyle, and Beth, a bible-thumping, born again Christian who spent most of her time attempting to convert the people around her. The visitors at the zoo that this story focused on were Virginia Belvedere, a former pageant winner and her daughters Sarah, who would rather be playing little league football, and Kaitlyn, who is following her mother’s footsteps into the pageant world and who only feels important when she is the center of attention. Other characters include Patrick Belvedere, Virginia’s estranged husband who only wants to be a good parent, and a pregnant hippie, who really didn’t have that much bearing on the rest of the story but who I think I was trying to make symbolic.

Anyway, the story didn’t work out but I’m keeping the plot idea just in case I decide to use it later. It might work, as long as I do a lot of trimming. If you read this blog more often you’ll probably see other parts of the story because I did work on it for so long. I just think that this is a great example of how things I really want to work out sometimes never do and how sometimes I sabotage myself by trying to achieve too much with such a little space.

8/17/06 Going to a Workshop

Jesus called Brian liked to disrupt church services. It was part of the reason that I believed in him, whatever he was. “It’s so diluted,” he would say while pulling open the door to the church lobby. A different church every week. This week the unfortunate souls at the First Methodist Baptist Church of Christ were going to be privy to his rage, and mine too, I guess, since I was tagging along. “First Methodist Baptist,” he spat, “These people can’t even make up their minds.” On he marched toward the doors, behind which held the dutiful, if confused, churchgoers.
He thrust the doors open with a bang, and rushed up the aisle. I rushed after him, unaware of what really, I was supposed to be doing.
“Attention, Meth Addicts,” he screamed. I caught the reference too late and after I had whispered loudly, “They’re Christians, not drug addicts.”
Jesus called Brian laughed over his shoulder, he would tell me later that I had added a genius comical touch to the event.

This writing comes from a writing workshop I went to at Barnes and Noble once. They would have this workshop once a week and I thought it seemed like a good opportunity to get some feedback on my work. I soon discovered that you probably shouldn’t just find random strangers to do this sort of thing. It’s not a good idea to find all of your best friends either because they are just going to tell you how much they love everything. The reason that you shouldn’t go to workshops with strangers is that you have no idea what they are writing or what kind of writers they are. It turns out that these people were romance writers.

The way that this workshop worked was that they would give us all little prompts and then we would go around the table and write about these things. Jesus called Brian was a part of a story that I was working on, or that I had been working on in some form or another since my freshman year of college. It never really evolved much and I think that I moved past it, though he does show up from time to time if I need something exciting to happen. I don’t remember what the prompts were exactly, I just know that there were three of them. I don’t think that anything really important came out of this group. There was no criticism what-so-ever. You would just read what you had just wrote out loud and everyone would not and say “That’s interesting” before they would read their romance story. No matter what the prompt was, it could fit into the plot of their current project.

There was also an eleven year old there. I think that was the weirdest thing about this whole group. The eleven year old. She shouldn’t have been there. I understand if she wants to be a writer and this is something that she finds fun, but a person can’t write the kinds of things that they really want to write if there is an eleven year old hanging around. Actually, one of the prompts inspired me to write a story that involved drug use. One of the characters sat on a bed rolling a joint and talking about Amsterdam. I got a lot of terse looks for that one. People were motioning with their eyes towards the little girl.

It was the first time and last time I went to that workshop (or really, I think that we should call it a group because nothing was really work-shopped). I couldn’t stand the idea of having my writing critiqued by someone who hadn’t reached puberty yet. I don’t write for children. I also didn’t want to listen to anymore chit chat about romance novels or the romance novel industry, which might be completely different than the book industry seeing as they will sometimes just hand you the plot and you don’t have to think about it at all. Maybe I was being snobby. I don’t care. I still wouldn’t join a group like that. I have other people read my work but I think that they are people who understand better the things that I am trying to do with my writing. You have to be able to trust the people that you trust with your work. It’s redundant, but true.

Beautiful Things 9/16/03

I am a model. Someone deemed my skinny arms and bony knees beautiful. Someone desired me. And as a result I stare out at you from glossy pages. I am there at the makeup counter. I am watching as you stand in line at the grocery store. I’m with you as you try on underwear. And as a result you feel inadequate. Or perhaps you think that buying will make you appear more beautiful or appealing. I am a double edged sword. I am the object of lust. Today, sitting in my studio apartment, staring out at the world, I am angry. I am chain smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes. My ex-boyfriend always complained about the smell. I ignored him. My hair is a mess. I’m not wearing makeup. There are bags under my eyes. I don’t know why I’m angry. I just am. And somewhere out there someone is looking at my picture. Someone desires me.

-->Tiny escapes from reality are a comfort to those whose are trapped in an unescapable horror.
--> I’m not a big fan of emaciation.

THINGS TO DO TODAY
1) Wake up (very important to the start of any day. Best to do at one’s own leisure).
2) Drink coffee (slowly. Be sure to enjoy it. If the day is sunny. I suggest looking out at the world. If the day is anything less than sunny it would be best to crawl back under the covers).
3) Brush teeth, Shower (tend to all hygene issues, really).

I thought that this entry was really interesting for a number of reasons. First, there is the initial writing. I don’t know what I was thinking about models like that for. Normally I am very generous to them. It would seem that there are a number of feminists who would like it if I was angrier at models, or the fashion industry in general, because they are giving me a false idea of beauty. I’ve never really felt that way. They are models. I am not. They have their bad days too. Maybe that’s what this is about, the ugly in the beautiful. Maybe it’s about the way that we can’t all be beautiful all the time. Maybe it’s about allowing people to not be perfect. Give them their days of being angry for no reason. Maybe I needed a day to be angry for no reason. I think I was kind of angry around this time. I was working at a job I was learning a lot at, but I didn’t like it because I wanted to be with people my own age. I might have also been thinking about the way that we idolize people without knowing the real them. The model is beautiful, but she doesn’t live a beautiful life. We don’t see that on magazine covers or in ads.

The rest of the entry kind of surprises me, especially the part about the tiny escapes. I wrote a lot about escape. I think that writing is a kind of escape for me. When I start feeling really hopeless it is reflected in my writing or my lack of writing. When I am hopeful I write more because, for some reason, I need the escape when I am most hopeful.

I also like that I put arrows into this text. I thought the arrows were a newer thing, perhaps something I discovered in the past couple of years, but it turns out I have been doing this for years when I wanted to change the subject.

The list of things to do is clearly not realistic, but wouldn’t it make for a lovely day?

I’m keeping all the typos from my original text in. I think that it makes it more authentic.

Escape and Return 12/10/08

…finally, Josh speaks. “I went to Peru for a little while,” he says. A little confession.
“Hmmm. And what did you do there?”
“I sold dream catchers on the side of the road.”
I want to stay angry with him, but the smile is already forming. “You did not.”
“Yep. I did. I sold dream catchers by the side of the road. I had a little stand made out of bamboo.”
“Bamboo? Really? Where did you get bamboo in Peru?”
“It grows there.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Sure does. It’s a little known secret, but bamboo grows in the rainforests of Peru.”
I don’t want to believe him but I know that he’ll insist upon it. I remain quiet, but he goes on.
“Then one day, I’m at my stand and this bus pulls up.”
“A bus?”
“Yup. A huge tour bus, carrying one of Peru’s biggest rock bands.”
“You’re so full of shit.”
“They bought all my dream catchers. Every last one of them. And they were so taken by me that they invited me to go on tour with them. I didn’t have any dream catchers left so I figured, why not? I left my bamboo stand on the side of the road and went. We travelled all over Latin America. We went everywhere. I mean everywhere. This band didn’t care what size the venue was, they just liked getting gigs and there were plenty of shady bars to go to, especially in Ecuador.”
“Oh, stop.”
“What.”
“None of that is true. Not a single word.”
He shrugged. “Maybe it is.”
“Well with maybes anything is possible. You’re right though, it could be true. How would I know?”
He sits for a while, messing with the cuff of his shirt, drinking. “I did go to Peru,” he says. “I stayed in a little house on the beach. It was pleasant. Very calm.”
“People were looking for you.”
“I know.” He seems to consider this for a while.
“I have clippings.”
“What?”
“From when you disappeared. I have newspaper clippings. I saved them.”


I wrote this almost a year ago. It’s a lot of dialogue, which I wasn’t thinking about when I picked it. I chose it because I liked the story about selling dream catchers in Peru. It was a mini story inside the real story. The real story was about a woman whose ex-husband shows up years after he disappeared. It came from a prompt about a woman hearing a key in the door while her husband is away on a business trip. I made up all the stuff about it being her ex-husband. I think I chose the topic because it was about escape and it was still hopeful. At the time, I was going through a lot of stuff in my life. I felt alone, slightly abandoned. I wanted to be rescued. Earlier in the year I had been left by someone that I really cared about. I don’t know if ‘left’ is the right word, but ‘deserted’ would really be the wrong word. Either way, I lost someone that I cared about (temporarily, I would find out later) and at the same time I was struggling to find friends in a city I had lived in for almost a year. I was having problems with people I worked with and I just felt really alone. I needed someone, but I didn’t know how to tell anyone.

This story came out of the hopelessness I was feeling at the time and the hopefulness that I wanted to feel. The narrator of the story was left years ago and spent time alone, then gave up on the idea of ever feeling love for someone the way that she felt it for her first husband. She finds someone new, but the idea is that she never loves the new man enough. Her life is a waiting game, forever hoping that the other man will come back. He does.

I never got past this. He comes back and they spend time talking about the old times and the changes that they have been through, but I never finished the story. I don’t know if they end up together or not. I think maybe I was scared to find out. I wanted so much for people to come back in to my life that I didn’t want to think about the awkwardness of having to actually say goodbye to those people, or what it would be like to discover that you had grown away from someone. I’m not ready to return to it yet, though I think that there’s a lot of good stuff in this story. I still don’t know how this story ends, but it did offer me an option if my writing doesn’t work out:

I’ll go sell dream catchers on the side of the road in Peru.

Writing Things Down 9/22/08

Written 9/22/08:

X things it’s funny that I want to be a writer simply because I like writing things down. I think X is funny.

This is from my eleventh notebook, a moleskine that I filled up from 7/26/08 to 11/12/08. I was doing a lot of writing at that time. Most of it was work on a story I wrote titled “Touch” which has been rejected by eleven different literary magazines so far. I remember what prompted this little note. Being an English major with an emphasis in creative writing I have met a lot of people who want to be writers. One day I was at the apartment of one of these people and he asked me why I want to be a writer.

I shrugged and answered “I don’t know, I guess I just like writing things down.” The ‘I don’t know’ stemmed from the fact that no one had really bothered to ask me that before and because it was something that I didn’t really think about. I love writing. I like writing things down. I thought that was why everyone who wants to be a writer picks it. I guess not.

The guy I was talking to kind of tilted his head at me. “That’s funny,” he said in a way that made me think that it wasn’t funny ha-ha, but he thought that maybe it was funny weird.

“Why is that funny?”

“Everyone else I’ve ever asked wants to be a writer so that they can write a novel that everyone loves and become rich and famous.”

Now it was my turn to laugh and I did. “That’s just ridiculous,” I told him.

He shrugged at me and then said, “That’s why I want to be a writer.”

When I realized that he was serious I tried to talk him out of it. I wanted him to want to be a writer for some other, better reason. I explained to him that there are plenty of people who will write and write and write their whole lives and never get publish. I told him that the ones who are lucky enough to get published hardly ever make enough money to really live on it. I asked him if he could name ten really wealthy writers who were immediately recognizable. He couldn’t but that didn’t deter him. By the end of the conversation I was frustrated and angry. Then, I just gave up.

I know that there are a ton of people out there just like this guy. They seem to think that writing is somehow a ticket to fame and fortune. I find it extremely insulting. At the same time I began to understand why I was struggling so much in my creative writing course. Why there were times when I wanted to yell at my classmates to take it more seriously. I started to understand why I read so many stories that were almost exactly the same. They were all following the formula. The goal for them wasn’t to become a better writer, which was what I looked forward to from workshops. The goal for them was to become rich and famous. It’s something I will never understand.

I’m not saying that I haven’t thought about it. I have and I think that everyone thinks about the day that they will become rich and famous. It’s just that I thought that when people thought about it they thought they would get rich and famous by doing something they love. I didn’t think someone would actually go into writing thinking that they will become rich and famous. That’s just silliness. You don’t hear about people taking a ton of zoology courses so that they can go live with the apes and become rich and famous like Jane Goodall. No one seems to want to spend years and years in the military so that they can become rich and famous like Colin Powell. Where are all the little kids thinking that they would love to spend years in college so that they can be rich and famous like Johnny Cochran?

Why is it that writing is something that everyone thinks they can do and be good at without trying? Where did this strange misconception come from that writing is somehow the ticket to the easy life? Most importantly, where are all the writers who are living the sweet life out there? Someone must have inspired these people and I want to know who it is! (I’m talking to you Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling).

Writing is something I work on every day. It’s something that constantly evolves. I keep all my notebooks because I want to know what I wrote before and how I can improve upon it. I really am trying hard and working hard.

If I were to somehow become rich and famous, that would be kind of cool but I imagine that it’s very time consuming. I’d much rather spend my time writing.

The First Notebook

The first notebook is one of those Mead composition books that continue to get made even though they aren’t really used all that much anymore. It is covered in little stickers that I got from a restaurant which depict Franklin the Green Knight and his friends. Franklin is a little turtle who dresses as a knight and who might even be a knight. I know nothing about him, really. I just had a bunch of stickers and no place to put them. Back when I started with these notebooks I would decorate them so the first four definitely have stickers. I’ve kind of outgrown drawing all over my notebooks. There is also some scotch tape in the upper right hand corner, a remnant from a time when I had written my name and class period down on there. I had to turn this notebook in. They were required for my first creative writing course, even though I started mine before the semester began and before I even knew that I was going to get an assignment like that. The dates are 12/16/00 to 2/1/01. The second notebook ended up getting turned in as well. I don’t think that my professor was expecting me to write so much.

The first notebook is interesting because I wanted to be very serious about writing but, at the same time, I seriously couldn’t finish a story. It was all just a bunch of starts. Usually, I used a prompt. I remember that I got this notebook because I had recently bought a book called The Writer’s Book of Days. It was full of weird advice and prompts and little things about writers and the writing life. They recommended getting a notebook to write in every day, so that’s what I did. I wrote in it every day. We even went on a family vacation to Las Vegas within ten days of me getting this notebook and I remember waiting until my sister had gone to sleep to sneak into the bathroom of the hotel room and write on the floor.

For all my dedication, the truth is that the writing in here isn’t that good. I was still trying to figure out what I was doing. I had just decided that I was actually going to pursue writing and I wanted to make sure that I was good at it. I needed a place to try things out.

I also don’t like that the pages are wide ruled. I would try to write to fill up the lines. It’s sloppy, childish really. I think that one of the biggest reasons that I eventually moved away from these composition books is that it is hard to find ones that aren’t wide ruled. I stopped liking them.

On 1/21/01 I made a little note in the margins of the page. It reads “Kid drowning in Baptismal pool?” I think that this was a story idea. I actually know that it must have been though there is no follow up. I didn’t write the story. I think the fact that I was thinking about something like this is indicative of the way that my mind was working at the time. I was in a really weird place. You’ll probably figure it out the further that we get into these notebooks.

A Short Introduction

My name is Becca and I have a ton of notebooks. I’ve been keeping them fairly regularly for about nine years now. Sometimes I write a lot, but there have been times where I haven’t written very much at all. For the most part, these notebooks of mine work as a space where I can write down first drafts of fiction. I was pretty true to that for the first few years and then pieces of my life started slipping into them. I still use them mostly for fiction, but even in that I think I see a lot of my life in my stories. Whatever I’m struggling with or dealing with in my life is reflected back to me in the fiction that I was writing at the time. There are, of course, fragments of my actual life slipping through. Sometimes I will write down notes to myself so I don’t forget appointments or meetings or important class assignments. Sometimes I write down things that I need to get for other people. Sometimes I write down things I need to get for myself.

The first few notebooks mostly consist of me trying to figure out who I am going to be as a writer. I took a lot of things very, very seriously when I was eighteen years old. What eighteen year old doesn’t do that?

Later I struggle through stories I am working on, sometimes writing and rewriting the beginnings of stories over and over again until I finally give up on them. After that I learned that first drafts are called first drafts for a reason and I started just plowing through the stories. If the beginning isn’t exactly what I imagined it to be I have learned to think that I can fix it later in editing. Usually, my stories turn out the way that they were supposed to be anyway and the beginnings that I thought were so horrible only need a little bit of tweaking in the end.

I have been looking through these notebooks a lot lately. This is mostly because they are currently sitting in a box on my bedroom floor and I can’t avoid them. I want to figure out a way to reflect on them without taking up new notebook space rehashing moments that I already lived through or wrote. That is what this blog is for.

I have no intention of using this blog to write down every single thing that is in my notebooks. I want to use this space to reflect back on the things that I have written and what they mean to me now, or what they meant to me then. None of it will probably mean a thing to you, but that’s okay. If you read it and you like it, then good. If you don’t, then it doesn’t really matter because the things that I wrote down were for me at the time and they will continue to be for me regardless of the opinions of others.

I might not post on here every single day because if I did that I don’t think that I would have time to write anything new, but I’ll try to post with some kind of regularity. Overall, my hope for this blog is that other people can enjoy and appreciate what I am trying to do with the things that I create.