(no subject)
Well going to grandma's wasn't so bad, I suppose. Got some new clothes. Went to see Little Miss Sunshine, which was positively delightful. I definitely recommend it. Saw my first episode of Walker, Texas Ranger and HAHAHAHA I really don't need to see more. Chuck Norris looks like a monkey. Also saw my first 5 episodes of M*A*S*H and I am kind of in love. If anybody owns the DVDs (however unlikely), I would love it if I could borrow them.
Um the next thing is something I wrote last week and I'd love to know what you guys think of it. Don't be afraid of the long blocks of dialogue at the beginning, or the long blocks of solid text at the end. Also don't be afraid to give really harsh/critical comments. I love those the best. thanks and I hope you enjoy!
****
"I've decided," Anna declared one day, "that Trey will get shot." She paused. "I think."
"Interesting," said Sally. "By whom?"
"I don't know yet."
"Okay." There was a horrid grumbling noise from the kitchen, followed by a fatal-sounding crunch. "Oh, shoot. I think I just broke your icemaker."
"Oh, that old thing? Just leave it. We're going to get it replaced anyway." Anna paused. "Well, when-or if-I can get this story to sell. You know, Bill insists that we use his father's money for replacing these little things around the house, but I'll have none of that."
"Good for you." Sally emerged from the kitchen with a scotch on the rocks-without the rocks-in hand. "So, what's the motive?" she asked, taking a seat in one of the high-backed chairs at the other end of Anna's elongated dining room table.
"Hmm? Oh-what? Sally, is that alcohol?"
"Yeah."
"Sally, it's one in the afternoon."
"Yeah," she said. She sounded a bit confused.
"Oh. Never mind, then."
"So, what is it?"
"What's what?"
"The motive? For shooting Trey?"
"Oh," said Anna. "I'm not sure yet."
Sally frowned and sipped her scotch.
"I'm thinking … sex," she declared. "Or drugs."
"Excuse me?"
"Why else would someone want to shoot someone else?" she asked simply.
"There are plenty of reasons," Sally said.
Anna looked at her quizzically.
"What I mean to say is," she sputtered, "is that sex and drugs are really all you ever read or hear about anymore."
"Is it?" said Anna. "I hadn't notice."
"Yes, and it would be terribly pedestrian of you to make that the primary motivation. Either way, I don't think it's wise to randomly kill off a character-"
"-neither do I-"
"-because of something as …" Sally paused. "Well, something like sex or drugs."
"What were you going to say? Cliché?"
"Predictable," she confessed.
"Ah."
The two were silent for a long moment.
"So," Sally said finally. "What's going to happen after Trey gets shot or … whatever?"
"You know, I don't know that yet, either," said Anna. "I've written that chapter, what, maybe five times now? and Trey always dies at the end, even though I don't mean for that to happen."
"That's the writing process for you, I suppose."
"So, should I?" Anna asked, leaning forwards.
"Should you what?"
"Kill off Trey, of course."
"Well, yes!" said Sally, surprised. "I mean, why wouldn't you? It sounds like the most natural outcome."
"Natural? Hardly! It's Trey's story after all; I can't very well just bump off the main character. The story would end right then and there!"
Sally snorted. "Oh-wait-you were being serious? Sorry."
"It's fine," said Anna, a little stiffly.
"It's just-it's not Trey's story. It's Trey's side of the story."
"Oh," said Anna.
"Do you get what I'm saying?"
"No," said Anna.
"Alright … say you die tomorrow. No, wait. No, that won't do. It's pretty simple, actually. Just think about it."
"Okay," said Anna, hesitantly.
There was another long pause.
Sally finished her scotch and checked her watch. "Well, I don't want to keep the good doctor waiting, so I should get going," she said, rising from her chair. Anna began to stand also. "No, Anna, it's okay. I'll find my own way out."
"Are you sure-?"
"Yep." She walked over to Anna and, leaning down, pecked her once on each cheek. She pulled away and smiled. "I'm really glad he introduced us," she said.
"Me too." Anna smiled sheepishly.
Sally gave one of Anna's hands a squeeze. "Will you call me, the next time you take a break from writing? I know this really great Thai place downtown. You'll love it."
"I'll pass," Anna said. "I don't particularly care for Asian food."
Sally shrugged. "Well, it's your loss. Anyway, thank you for letting me hang out here until my appointment. I'll see you later. Call me!" And she left.
Anna waited until she heard the front door open and close before she stood and padded to her study.
It was a smallish room, with a large window on one side and floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed to the brim with books. Her desk was pushed up against the wall with the window, though Anna was considering moving it to the other side; when she got stuck (which was often), she would gaze out over the finely-manicured lawn, and watch the clouds go by and the geese swim in the pond and defecate in her hydrangeas.
Bill, her husband (for now), would complain that she would waste weeks on end in that dreamy state and have nothing to show for it. Anna's reply (like every aspiring writer's reply) was that she simply had writer's block, and that sometimes these things happen. Even Coleridge got writer's block sometimes. Who the hell was Coleridge? Bill would snap testily, and, in time, Anna would realize that he wasn't interested in an answer. He would stare angrily at his crossword puzzle and refuse to listen, and so Anna would refuse to explain and return to her study. But Bill was right: Anna did spend far too much time staring out at the world, recently more than ever, and she knew it too.
After Anna popped out the first kid, the two had agreed that, for the next eighteen years, Bill would be the one putting the food on the table and Anna would be the one who stayed at home and raised the kids, maybe making a bit of money on the side by getting her pitifully amateur short stories and poems published in the occasional anthology. But ever since the accident that left Bill bedridden and with one leg less than before, Anna had been the sole provider for the family.
(Of course, she didn't count the inexhaustible inheritance Bill's father bequeathed to her and her husband after his death. Bill Sr. had written that part of his will with a smile, not knowing that five weeks later he would be dead, and five weeks and five days later, his daughter-in-law would threaten his son with divorce over how to manage his final gift. They should, Anna said, put it all away for the children's college funds and retirement, but Bill Jr. argued vehemently that there was enough for them to live like kings for the next thirty years, and goddamn if he wasn't going to take advantage of all that; after all, he said, who knows when either of us could go? After a fierce battle, they came to a compromise: they would move in to Bill's father's thirty-acre manse, put away the money for emergencies, and probably get a divorce once the kids left for college.)
With the sudden responsibility of providing for two teenagers, a kindergartener, and a deeply cynical invalid, Anna had a burst of productivity-but unfortunately, not of creativity. The stories she churned out were, though numerous and once quirky and convoluted, getting progressively duller and more banal. Bill would refuse to read even a paragraph of it.
"This is garbage," he would exclaim. "You'll never make any money selling this!"
"I have to try," Anna would reply. "I hated depending on your father when he was alive, and I hate it even more now that he's dead."
"Just use his goddamn money, Anna; that's what he left it to us for!"
"No," Anna would say, and Bill would throw his crossword puzzle across the room in frustration. Then he would stare at it, lying crumpled on the floor, for a moment, before bursting into tears, and Anna would have to retrieve it for him and settle it back into his giant hands.
"Thank you," he would sob, and Anna would return to her study, the sound of her husband's blubbering following her as she padded all the way down the great wooden hallway.
Now, Anna slipped quietly into the study and took a seat at the leather chair that perched in front of the desk. It was a grey day, and the air hung over the lawn like a great blanket, heavy and suffocating. As she watched Sally's car pull out of the driveway, she was silently thankful for the unpleasant weather. It was her secret that, when staring out the window, she wasn't feeling romantic or distracted or lazy like Bill accused her of being. She wasn't admiring how that cloud there looked like a curled-up kitten, or how the wind danced through the long tendrils of grass over by the pond, or how the colors of the garden flowers were looking especially vibrant these days. On the contrary; she was feeling inadequate.
She felt a lot like that pond, which she thought looked gross and stagnant even on the best days. In her mind, it could only stare up and gape at the sky, watching the billowing white clouds sail steadily away like giant ships, or dash and dip across the sky like seagulls playing in the spray, or slink through the darkness, crackling with the dangerous energy of pent-up fury. And the pond would just lie there, pressed into the ground by the heavy air, and choke with the smell of pesticides and waste, but sometimes when the clouds opened up over it, it would push back against the air and rise towards them, and bubble over its banks in ecstasy. And then the clouds would move on, and it would sink back into the ground, and it would continue staring down the sky, unmoving, until kingdom come.
Where were they going? Anna would wonder, gazing at the clouds like that sad pond. And where will they be? After that cloud, the one that looks like a curled-up kitten-after it passes over the tops of the trees and out of sight, will it transform into a turtle, or a pirate ship, or maybe into a bad-tempered husband without a leg who looked far too old for his age? Would another stagnant soul just over the horizon catch sight of that same cloud and assign it the same image? Would they, like Anna, wonder if, somewhere, someone was looking up at the same sky and thinking the same things?
Anna looked at the curled-up kitten. "If there is, I'd like to meet them," she told it softly. Her words bounced against the windowpane. She looked down at her desk. Papers lay strewn here and there, in stacks and piles and crumpled-up heaps. Most were covered with her messy chicken scratch, and Anna smiled slightly. At least there was no such thing as editor's block.
She picked up the nearest stack and began reading. It was the latest draft of her story about Trey, title pending. She had written the first thirty pages or so and shown it to Bill; he hadn't called it garbage or thrown anything, so Anna took that as a sign of approval and kept going. It had potential to be good, she knew, maybe even her best. But she didn't want to think about that, didn't want to jinx it. She just kept writing.
Trey was a troubled young man who often made terribly bad decisions but had a heart of gold, really. She called his story a mystery/melodrama and set it in a suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of Chicago. (She had never lived in Chicago, or even in the suburbs, but she had always wanted to and figured she was allowed to live vicariously through her characters. They were, after all, her characters.) Naturally there was a mystery in the neighborhood, and Trey and Teresa, his on-again-off-again girlfriend, were the only ones who could possibly solve it. Anna stuck in some shady characters that did shady things, just to throw off the reader, because who doesn’t love a good red herring? There was some gratuitous violence and a little gratuitous sex, because Anna had heard that both sold and, really, she was writing for the money. But she loved Trey and she loved Teresa, and she just couldn't figure out why Trey was always dying on her.
She finished skimming the chapter and frowned. Was it really Trey's side of the story? It's true that she could have just as easily chosen to write the whole story from Teresa's perspective. In fact, if her daughter, not her son, had entered the kitchen at the exact moment when this new idea for a story had begun to simmer in her mind, that's precisely what would have had happened. Yes, Anna decided, Trey would get shot and die. And Teresa would have to carry on without him.
Outside, a gust of wind picked up among the grasses and soared up, into the trees and beyond, and joined with a thousand other zephyrs to push the clouds beyond the horizon. They buffeted Anna's kitten, and just before it disappeared from view it split into two, right down the middle, and warped into something else. Anna didn't have time to decide what it looked like before it disappeared. That, she supposed, was for another person, hundreds of miles away and staring idly at the sky, to do.
Um the next thing is something I wrote last week and I'd love to know what you guys think of it. Don't be afraid of the long blocks of dialogue at the beginning, or the long blocks of solid text at the end. Also don't be afraid to give really harsh/critical comments. I love those the best. thanks and I hope you enjoy!
****
"I've decided," Anna declared one day, "that Trey will get shot." She paused. "I think."
"Interesting," said Sally. "By whom?"
"I don't know yet."
"Okay." There was a horrid grumbling noise from the kitchen, followed by a fatal-sounding crunch. "Oh, shoot. I think I just broke your icemaker."
"Oh, that old thing? Just leave it. We're going to get it replaced anyway." Anna paused. "Well, when-or if-I can get this story to sell. You know, Bill insists that we use his father's money for replacing these little things around the house, but I'll have none of that."
"Good for you." Sally emerged from the kitchen with a scotch on the rocks-without the rocks-in hand. "So, what's the motive?" she asked, taking a seat in one of the high-backed chairs at the other end of Anna's elongated dining room table.
"Hmm? Oh-what? Sally, is that alcohol?"
"Yeah."
"Sally, it's one in the afternoon."
"Yeah," she said. She sounded a bit confused.
"Oh. Never mind, then."
"So, what is it?"
"What's what?"
"The motive? For shooting Trey?"
"Oh," said Anna. "I'm not sure yet."
Sally frowned and sipped her scotch.
"I'm thinking … sex," she declared. "Or drugs."
"Excuse me?"
"Why else would someone want to shoot someone else?" she asked simply.
"There are plenty of reasons," Sally said.
Anna looked at her quizzically.
"What I mean to say is," she sputtered, "is that sex and drugs are really all you ever read or hear about anymore."
"Is it?" said Anna. "I hadn't notice."
"Yes, and it would be terribly pedestrian of you to make that the primary motivation. Either way, I don't think it's wise to randomly kill off a character-"
"-neither do I-"
"-because of something as …" Sally paused. "Well, something like sex or drugs."
"What were you going to say? Cliché?"
"Predictable," she confessed.
"Ah."
The two were silent for a long moment.
"So," Sally said finally. "What's going to happen after Trey gets shot or … whatever?"
"You know, I don't know that yet, either," said Anna. "I've written that chapter, what, maybe five times now? and Trey always dies at the end, even though I don't mean for that to happen."
"That's the writing process for you, I suppose."
"So, should I?" Anna asked, leaning forwards.
"Should you what?"
"Kill off Trey, of course."
"Well, yes!" said Sally, surprised. "I mean, why wouldn't you? It sounds like the most natural outcome."
"Natural? Hardly! It's Trey's story after all; I can't very well just bump off the main character. The story would end right then and there!"
Sally snorted. "Oh-wait-you were being serious? Sorry."
"It's fine," said Anna, a little stiffly.
"It's just-it's not Trey's story. It's Trey's side of the story."
"Oh," said Anna.
"Do you get what I'm saying?"
"No," said Anna.
"Alright … say you die tomorrow. No, wait. No, that won't do. It's pretty simple, actually. Just think about it."
"Okay," said Anna, hesitantly.
There was another long pause.
Sally finished her scotch and checked her watch. "Well, I don't want to keep the good doctor waiting, so I should get going," she said, rising from her chair. Anna began to stand also. "No, Anna, it's okay. I'll find my own way out."
"Are you sure-?"
"Yep." She walked over to Anna and, leaning down, pecked her once on each cheek. She pulled away and smiled. "I'm really glad he introduced us," she said.
"Me too." Anna smiled sheepishly.
Sally gave one of Anna's hands a squeeze. "Will you call me, the next time you take a break from writing? I know this really great Thai place downtown. You'll love it."
"I'll pass," Anna said. "I don't particularly care for Asian food."
Sally shrugged. "Well, it's your loss. Anyway, thank you for letting me hang out here until my appointment. I'll see you later. Call me!" And she left.
Anna waited until she heard the front door open and close before she stood and padded to her study.
It was a smallish room, with a large window on one side and floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed to the brim with books. Her desk was pushed up against the wall with the window, though Anna was considering moving it to the other side; when she got stuck (which was often), she would gaze out over the finely-manicured lawn, and watch the clouds go by and the geese swim in the pond and defecate in her hydrangeas.
Bill, her husband (for now), would complain that she would waste weeks on end in that dreamy state and have nothing to show for it. Anna's reply (like every aspiring writer's reply) was that she simply had writer's block, and that sometimes these things happen. Even Coleridge got writer's block sometimes. Who the hell was Coleridge? Bill would snap testily, and, in time, Anna would realize that he wasn't interested in an answer. He would stare angrily at his crossword puzzle and refuse to listen, and so Anna would refuse to explain and return to her study. But Bill was right: Anna did spend far too much time staring out at the world, recently more than ever, and she knew it too.
After Anna popped out the first kid, the two had agreed that, for the next eighteen years, Bill would be the one putting the food on the table and Anna would be the one who stayed at home and raised the kids, maybe making a bit of money on the side by getting her pitifully amateur short stories and poems published in the occasional anthology. But ever since the accident that left Bill bedridden and with one leg less than before, Anna had been the sole provider for the family.
(Of course, she didn't count the inexhaustible inheritance Bill's father bequeathed to her and her husband after his death. Bill Sr. had written that part of his will with a smile, not knowing that five weeks later he would be dead, and five weeks and five days later, his daughter-in-law would threaten his son with divorce over how to manage his final gift. They should, Anna said, put it all away for the children's college funds and retirement, but Bill Jr. argued vehemently that there was enough for them to live like kings for the next thirty years, and goddamn if he wasn't going to take advantage of all that; after all, he said, who knows when either of us could go? After a fierce battle, they came to a compromise: they would move in to Bill's father's thirty-acre manse, put away the money for emergencies, and probably get a divorce once the kids left for college.)
With the sudden responsibility of providing for two teenagers, a kindergartener, and a deeply cynical invalid, Anna had a burst of productivity-but unfortunately, not of creativity. The stories she churned out were, though numerous and once quirky and convoluted, getting progressively duller and more banal. Bill would refuse to read even a paragraph of it.
"This is garbage," he would exclaim. "You'll never make any money selling this!"
"I have to try," Anna would reply. "I hated depending on your father when he was alive, and I hate it even more now that he's dead."
"Just use his goddamn money, Anna; that's what he left it to us for!"
"No," Anna would say, and Bill would throw his crossword puzzle across the room in frustration. Then he would stare at it, lying crumpled on the floor, for a moment, before bursting into tears, and Anna would have to retrieve it for him and settle it back into his giant hands.
"Thank you," he would sob, and Anna would return to her study, the sound of her husband's blubbering following her as she padded all the way down the great wooden hallway.
Now, Anna slipped quietly into the study and took a seat at the leather chair that perched in front of the desk. It was a grey day, and the air hung over the lawn like a great blanket, heavy and suffocating. As she watched Sally's car pull out of the driveway, she was silently thankful for the unpleasant weather. It was her secret that, when staring out the window, she wasn't feeling romantic or distracted or lazy like Bill accused her of being. She wasn't admiring how that cloud there looked like a curled-up kitten, or how the wind danced through the long tendrils of grass over by the pond, or how the colors of the garden flowers were looking especially vibrant these days. On the contrary; she was feeling inadequate.
She felt a lot like that pond, which she thought looked gross and stagnant even on the best days. In her mind, it could only stare up and gape at the sky, watching the billowing white clouds sail steadily away like giant ships, or dash and dip across the sky like seagulls playing in the spray, or slink through the darkness, crackling with the dangerous energy of pent-up fury. And the pond would just lie there, pressed into the ground by the heavy air, and choke with the smell of pesticides and waste, but sometimes when the clouds opened up over it, it would push back against the air and rise towards them, and bubble over its banks in ecstasy. And then the clouds would move on, and it would sink back into the ground, and it would continue staring down the sky, unmoving, until kingdom come.
Where were they going? Anna would wonder, gazing at the clouds like that sad pond. And where will they be? After that cloud, the one that looks like a curled-up kitten-after it passes over the tops of the trees and out of sight, will it transform into a turtle, or a pirate ship, or maybe into a bad-tempered husband without a leg who looked far too old for his age? Would another stagnant soul just over the horizon catch sight of that same cloud and assign it the same image? Would they, like Anna, wonder if, somewhere, someone was looking up at the same sky and thinking the same things?
Anna looked at the curled-up kitten. "If there is, I'd like to meet them," she told it softly. Her words bounced against the windowpane. She looked down at her desk. Papers lay strewn here and there, in stacks and piles and crumpled-up heaps. Most were covered with her messy chicken scratch, and Anna smiled slightly. At least there was no such thing as editor's block.
She picked up the nearest stack and began reading. It was the latest draft of her story about Trey, title pending. She had written the first thirty pages or so and shown it to Bill; he hadn't called it garbage or thrown anything, so Anna took that as a sign of approval and kept going. It had potential to be good, she knew, maybe even her best. But she didn't want to think about that, didn't want to jinx it. She just kept writing.
Trey was a troubled young man who often made terribly bad decisions but had a heart of gold, really. She called his story a mystery/melodrama and set it in a suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of Chicago. (She had never lived in Chicago, or even in the suburbs, but she had always wanted to and figured she was allowed to live vicariously through her characters. They were, after all, her characters.) Naturally there was a mystery in the neighborhood, and Trey and Teresa, his on-again-off-again girlfriend, were the only ones who could possibly solve it. Anna stuck in some shady characters that did shady things, just to throw off the reader, because who doesn’t love a good red herring? There was some gratuitous violence and a little gratuitous sex, because Anna had heard that both sold and, really, she was writing for the money. But she loved Trey and she loved Teresa, and she just couldn't figure out why Trey was always dying on her.
She finished skimming the chapter and frowned. Was it really Trey's side of the story? It's true that she could have just as easily chosen to write the whole story from Teresa's perspective. In fact, if her daughter, not her son, had entered the kitchen at the exact moment when this new idea for a story had begun to simmer in her mind, that's precisely what would have had happened. Yes, Anna decided, Trey would get shot and die. And Teresa would have to carry on without him.
Outside, a gust of wind picked up among the grasses and soared up, into the trees and beyond, and joined with a thousand other zephyrs to push the clouds beyond the horizon. They buffeted Anna's kitten, and just before it disappeared from view it split into two, right down the middle, and warped into something else. Anna didn't have time to decide what it looked like before it disappeared. That, she supposed, was for another person, hundreds of miles away and staring idly at the sky, to do.