in a certain mood or at a certain hour & if a certain type of song is playing, this little wisp of an idea alights upon my skin like a feather, tickling, and it occurs to me, I start to think: maybe i should try & write That One Book again… the one that i’ve written start-to-finish approx 4x in the last fifteen years, started rewriting at least 25-30x, re-drafted endlessly in my head, endlessly, and furiously, depressedly thrown in the trash approx 500 times… the one that i once printed off a physical copy of and literally buried in the backyard and planted a melon-sized rock on top of its grave, to try & put it to rest once & for all… the one that i keep swearing off, that keeps haunting me (it’s never gonna leave me, is it?) (wtf is it about that one?!), but man, i tell you what, literary agents everywhere can count themselves lucky, LUCKY!!, that i quite literally ain’t got time nor the thickness of skin to deal with all of that right now, who can relate?
Category: writing
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Daily writing promptWhat change, big or small, would you like your blog to make in the world?
That’s the question, isn’t it? This is the heart of the whole question of why do we write. The “so what” thing that my favorite writing professor used to go on about, that still haunts me to this day.
When I was a kid, I used to love to write just for the fun of it. Up until I was eighteen or so, I churned out pages and pages of fiction, easy-breezy, whenever and whatever I pleased, and never gave a passing thought to the “so what.” I assumed that one day I would be a real writer, but for the time being, this was just fun, and I was good at it – I was so sure that I was so good at it! (Not so sure about that anymore, lol. Oh to have that kind of confidence again! In anything!!) It felt, back then, like liquid gold just flowed out of my hands at will, and I crafted for myself and my friends all manner of treasures and delights.
But then we grew up! For whom am I writing nowadays? And why? I’m not just killing time between classes in middle school anymore. Not passing notebooks around the lunch table, laughing at each other’s little stories, dabbling in juvenile delight, anymore. Gone is my lunch table friend circle; nobody cares, anymore, to read my stuff just because it’s there! I’m an adult now; things matter; so what am I doing with my limited time? And why?
That same professor, Professor So What, always talked about how crucial it was to know your audience – to have a specific person in mind that you were writing for. One time, he even assigned us for homework a page-long character description of our target reader. I can’t remember what kind of person I described. Probably a sad and confused female millennial like myself.
We’re adults now. For me, becoming an adult was essentially one and the same thing as converting to Catholicism. After a liberal/atheist upbringing, I started looking into the faith at age 22-23, when I was, for the first time, living far from home, in an entirely different state from my family of origin. After a couple years of waffling, I was finally confirmed Catholic at 25. Today, almost eleven years later, I’m far from an exemplary Catholic, and frankly feel more like a beginner at it than I did at 25, sometimes. Even so, becoming an adult meant converting, because it meant becoming aware of the significance of things, of what actually matters, of morality and the world outside of myself, than I had been before.
But so am I writing only for Catholics? Definitely not! In fact, I daresay most Catholics probably won’t relate much to this blog. I’m a misfit Catholic — what I like to call a Weird Trad, lol. I wish I fit in with my fellow Catholics, but I don’t. That, I suppose, is the kind of individual that I’m picturing myself talking to as I write this junk: some other Weird Trad. Some other girl who doesn’t feel like she fits in among her fellow Catholics.
But not just her! Really I’m writing for any misfit out there; for anyone who’s weird and overthinks about stuff – about what it’s okay to do, about spiritual matters and ethical matters. Or someone who struggles with disorder in their life, whether an ED or AvPD or just not being the person that they’d like to be, and is trying to figure out how to be in the world. Or, another mom who doesn’t feel like she has anything in common with all these other mommies at play group.
Maybe just someone else who’s lonely and likes to watch TV and came to discuss her favorite shows!
Maybe, someone who maybe kind of wants to convert but doesn’t feel able to because she just can’t relate to religious people as she perceives them. Or even someone who thinks religious people are stupid and, as a weird/overthinking type of person, can’t relate to them at all, but enjoys talking about ethical problems and is up for a debate.
Maybe this is arrogant, but, I’d love it if I could show such a person that it is possible to be both weird and Catholic. Or that it is possible to have a happy and fun little life as a disordered person. How is it possible to be a functioning adult, a wife and mom, with AvPD/an ED/an alcohol addiction? “How can you be a Catholic with a personality disorder?” “So wait, you’re a Catholic and you also have tattoos and listen to mainstream rock and hip-hop? How does that work?!” I’d love to talk through this stuff with someone! I’d love it if someone came to debate me and ended up becoming a pen-pal or even a friend. I’d really love to help people see the light about Catholicism, but even if they’re not interested in that, I’d love to just find people to chat with about any of the topics on this blog. I guess I’d love to just make connections with people, even if it’s just about a show that we both liked. Maybe this is how I fill the void in my life where healthy adult friendships ought to be, lol.
Are you a Catholic convert or thinking about becoming one? Is your personality disorder or other mental health condition keeping you from converting? Do you see Catholicism and weirdness/sadness/anxiety as incompatible? Are you interested in a friendly discussion or debate on religious/ethical matters? Are you perhaps in recovery from something? Or are you a weird mom trying to masquerade as a normal mom? Do you lose sleep worrying about how or who you ought to be? Do you love the Baking Championships on Food Network?! Are you just bored and lonely and looking for friends to chat with online?? If you answered yes to any of these, then congrats! You are my target audience, and I’d love to receive your comments or emails.
So, I guess that is the small change that I’d like this silly little blog to make. To help people connect with the faith, or at least just to connect in general. Good connections are something that, as someone with AvPD, I’ve always yearned for.
Years ago, when I had MiTHology 2.0, I remember connecting via WordPress with another blogger, a fellow convert, who also struggled with emotional stuff and also wrote about Christian topics, and was working on his first book. We traded emails back and forth, and for some reason he seemed to like my perspectives, and he even gave me the privilege of beta reading his manuscript; and then, when a family vacation took his family near my city, we all met up IRL for lunch; and when his book was published, he even dedicated it to me with a lovely message. I still cherish it to this day. I haven’t heard from that friend in many years (have tried to find him online, alas!, to no avail), but, that experience was one of the coolest things ever, knowing that I, stupid little me, was able to help someone with something important. And my silly little blog was what helped make it happen!
In recent years, the internet has helped me connect (and re-connect) with a few really good friends, who have been a hugely positive influence on my life in very real ways – in more ways than I can describe, in ways that influence the world beyond just me. But even just a little friendly connection over a movie or favorite book or something, even something like that can make such a difference. That’s the kind of connection I’d love to have more of; that’s the kind of thing I’d like to facilitate with this blog; that is, I guess, why I write.
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Core memory time!: growing up, I was often told the tale of how, when my mother was pregnant with me, the family house caught fire in the night (an outdoor tiki lantern not properly extinguished, I think it was) and was completely destroyed. No one was hurt, but the house, and a lot of belongings inside of it, were lost forever.
I thought about that story a lot, as a kid; my anxiety really latched onto it. The way I saw it, already, by the time I was born, I’d nearly died in a fire. Mortal danger was imminent. A ruinous house fire, I presumed, could truly strike at any time, any one of these nights, and I needed to be prepared. And thus, I have always, my whole life, kept a mental list of which objects I would grab on my way out in the event of a house fire.
The items on the list have changed over the years (at one point, my copy of JTHM: The Director’s Cut was #1 on the list, lol), but two things on it have been the same for most of my life; and currently, these two items are really the only things I think I’d grab, realistically. If there were more time, I might try and save some of the sacred art and icons on the walls, the crucifixes, my children’s certificates of baptism, the handmade quilts my mother and MIL have gifted us, or some of my framed counted cross stitch projects, or maybe my laptop. But, probably, there wouldn’t be enough time, after ensuring that all of my kids were safe. Luckily, my top two must-save items are small and close at hand, kept in my bedroom at all times. And they are:
1) My teddy bear. Yep, as a mom in my mid-thirties, I still sleep with my childhood teddy bear. My mother gave him to me when I was two or three years old – just a basic cream-colored teddy bear with black eyes and a brown nose and a serious little mouth; nothing fancy – and the moment that I received him and gave him his name is one of my earliest memories. Since then, he has slept in my bed every night, almost without fail (there was one particular trip for which I forgot to pack him, which made sleeping in that motel bed even more uncomfortable, and to this day I superstitiously believe that my forgetting the bear probably should have been a red flag that I should not have taken that ill-fated trip in the first place). I cannot sleep comfortably without him under my arm – nothing else will do – and if, in the night, he escapes and rolls out of the bed, I inevitably wake up and need to find him. This bear has been just about everywhere with me, and has, as they say, seen some shit. At times, my husband will look at him, sitting there on our bed with all his wear and tear and floppy limbs and patchy fur, and be like: “we should probably consider retiring that bear soon, putting him somewhere safe, to preserve him,” to which I always respond absolutely not, over my dead body. In the event of a house fire, this bear is escaping with me, no question.
And:
2) The USB drive that contains all of my writing. I’ve been storing all of my major writing projects on a flash drive since I was old enough to know what a flash drive was and how to use one. Even the projects that I wish I could get rid of. Some of the earlier ones are… ugh, you don’t want to know. I shudder to even think. I never look at them, never, and never ever plan to; it’s too embarrassing, even though no one but myself has ever laid eyes on any of this junk.
Why can’t I get rid of them? The thought that, one day, after I die, my children or grandchildren will discover these files and look at them, makes me positively sick with dread. I cannot let that happen. I’ve seriously considered having the USB somehow implanted in my body so that it’s destroyed with me when I die, almost like Himself in Infinite Jest (although, that didn’t work out according to plan for him, did it).
Why can’t I get rid of these stupid old files from like 2003-2006, which I wrote when I had no idea what anything was, and didn’t even realize that I didn’t know? (One of them is a “novel” of literally about 300k words, the longest thing I’ve ever written – all of it, just pure vomit!) They’re so mortifying to even think about! But, I can’t bring myself to delete it!
Is anyone else like this, with their old creations??
What’s weird is, I was pretty okay with destroying my old drawings. I used to keep sketch pads, during my teens and early twenties, in which I drew billions of little pictures that were just as cringe as some of my writing (if not more so); at some point, though, I threw all of these out, and it was not even that painful or difficult. But the writing! I can’t delete it! – Is it because I poured so much of my little heart and soul into the writing, whereas the doodles were just little snapshots, representing tiny fragments of what was contained in the writing in its horrible fullness? There was a time when I really loved to draw, but writing has always absorbed me and fulfilled me in a way that drawing does not. Writing was, for me, like the consummation of what drawing suggested.
Looking back on my life, I can organize it into sections according to what I was writing at the time, because my writing life has always been just as vivid and real and important as my real life. I guess, to sound super cliché and drippy, throwing away these old artifacts would feel like throwing out pieces of myself. Which, perhaps I ought to be okay with. Those horrible stories are pieces of my self, of what makes me Mith. But, I shouldn’t love that! Why should I be so attached to my little individual self? “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world, keepeth it unto life eternal.”
Maybe one day, when I am closer to holiness, I will be free, and finally be able to purge this USB drive of all its cursed contents. But, until then, it stays with me, and will definitely be escaping with me in the event of a house fire.
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Seriously, what a silly prompt! Right? Does anyone actually care what anyone’s five favorite fruits are? Like, how is that supposed to make you want to read my blog (which is, after all, the purpose of this whole “daily prompts” thing, isn’t it?)? I would bet a substantial amount of money that no one, not one single soul out there in the world, will see a link to “Mith’s Top 5 Favorite Fruits” and go “oh wow, hot damn! I gotta know immediately! What are Mith’s top five favorite fruits?! I don’t even know who Mith is, but what fruit does she like?!” Literally, unless it’s someone you’re madly in love with, or your own child, or maybe your BFF or your mom or something, I cannot imagine anyone really caring about what some someone’s top five favorite fruits are.
“So what.” That is one of the big ideas that got drilled into my head, back when I was a Writing major in college. “So what? Why are you telling me this?” is always in the back of my mind when I’m writing anything, or saying anything, to anyone. Which, combined with my AvPD, makes communicating with a person pretty stressful. When speaking, I often find myself trying to abbreviate my thoughts and phrases to get to the point already. Make it relevant. No one cares about my personal thoughts and feelings! “If you want to just write about your little thoughts and feelings, get a diary and tuck it under your pillow,” my favorite writing professor said, condescendingly.
So, I keep most things to myself; sometimes to a fault.
But, hell! Right? This is my personal blog! I can post what I want! No one reads it anyway! I may as well! – but still; I cannot stand to just post “here’s my favorite xyz” without trying to make it meaningful or significant in some way, or like something that I think/hope might potentially be mildly interesting to someone who doesn’t know me. So, instead of just “the top five yummy fruits that I like to eat” (because that’s so third grade), I’m going to list the “top five most meaningful and inspiring fruits for me as a wannabe writer.” Which is still pretty silly and personal and probably no one gives a single iota of shit, but hey!, at least it makes for a slightly more in-depth and engaging discussion than just “mm I liek banana cuz it taste good.”
And I know a lot of us on here on wordpress are writers or wannabe writers, so maybe this little concept will resonate with some of you. Does anyone else find inspiration in little things, like fruit, sometimes, or is it just me? If anyone cares to join me in this game, let me know!
ETA: One fruit has been removed from this list for personal reasons.
So without further ado:
5. Peach. Obvious generic choice, for someone from the American South: but, it gets more personal. In my childhood hometown, which btw is a very scenic and beautiful place (and which has, unfortunately, in the last couple of decades, become very self-aware about what a scenic and beautiful little small town it is, and is becoming increasingly bougie, overpopulated, and overdeveloped, thereby sacrificing its authenticity, but that’s a whole ‘nother story), there is this peach orchard. This peach orchard is probably one of the most beautiful places in the whole world, IMO, if not the single most beautiful. Especially in early spring when the peach trees bloom: a delicious shade of bright pinkish violet. You drive around a curve in this wooded, windy, rural road, and the forest clears and then the orchard opens up before you, sprawled out over the rolling hills: just fields and fields of these pinkish-violet trees, surrounded by farmland, and off in the distance, the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s the kind of place that makes you homesick for the place while you’re already there. The kind of landscape that you just want to kind of lay down on and melt into, to really be a part of it. It’s my favorite. This is a location that I’ve fictionalized and worked into numerous stories and books. It’s kind of central to my little fictional world. And over the years, I’ve always gone there, often solo but sometimes with family, to celebrate personally-significant days. It’s something of a tradition. And but so peaches, in general, always remind me of this place and give me a little mood boost.
4 and a half. Cranberry. The quintessential Christmas and Thanksgiving fruit, i.e. the official fruit of my the most wonderful time of the year. I couldn’t not throw it in here, because, as you know if you read this blog (which no one does, lol), I’m an absolute simp for Christmas. It always makes me want to write new stuff, and is one of my most productive times of the year, writing-wise. And especially holiday baking. I’m not much of a baker myself, I prefer watching it on TV and reading about it to actually doing it; but one thing I make just about every year is a cranberry-pumpkin-nut quick bread with orange zest. So the mere mention of cranberries gives me a little shot of inspiration any time of the year.
4. Apple. Again, this one’s a bit of a personal nostalgia thing. When I was a little child (like four onwards), my family made an annual fall pilgrimage to this apple orchard in the city near our home. I say “city” because it was technically in that city’s postal code, but this was a rural area, up on a mountain. Typical fall family stuff: we’d go for a hay ride, pick apples, eat donuts and drink hot cider (this was back in the day when fall days were cold), and buy a pumpkin. And so apple orchards also have a special place in my little heart. My dream house has always been an old white farmhouse adjoining an apple orchard. Also because apples are basically the perfect fruit. I know I said I wasn’t going to ramble about my little personal flavor preferences, here, because that’s stupid and uninteresting, but, if I could only eat one fruit for the rest of my life, it would 100% be apples. Like eggs, hummus, and peanut butter, they’re just one of those naturally perfect foods.
3. Blackberry. Are you tired of me rambling about my childhood yet? (“So what! What’s the point,” my professor is screaming at me in my head right now! Aah!) Anyway, real quick: I grew up in a literal log cabin on a little dirt road in the woods, and said cabin was surrounded by wild blackberry bushes. I’d pick and eat them all the time, sometimes so many that I’d make myself sick! And in late summer my Mom would pick all of these blackberries and make jars and jars of homemade jelly. The really cool thing was, instead of using the store-bought pectin, she’d use underripe green apples from the little baby apple tree in our backyard (which tree is, in itself, a whole ‘nother story, but anyway); did you know that tiny unripe apples are rich in pectin? So the smell of blackberries and sour green apples and sugar is like the smell of my childhood summers. Also, another anecdote: blackberries were like the signature fruit at one of the little casual-dining restaurants off the Parkway where my family would stop sometimes on our little family outings. They did a really cool blackberry ice cream. Thus, blackberries are one of the fruits that sing to my heart the most.
2. Blackcurrant. What an underrated fruit! What a thing of beauty! I didn’t discover blackcurrant until traveling to Europe for the first time, a trip to Ireland in ‘07. They like to flavor things with blackcurrant over there. It’s such a different flavor from any of our typical American fruity flavors. So dark and alluring and mystical. I got rather hooked on it, especially in drinks and beverages, but also in spreads (my favorite Irish food?: brown soda bread with blackcurrant jam in the morning, what a happy memory). In Germany, you see a lot of “forest fruits”-flavored desserts and spreads, which usually feature blackcurrant, and being obsessed with the Black Forest region and all its fairytale associations, this is another flavor that brings me inspiration. Cassis (what a fun word, too) is also one of the fragrance elements is my all-time favorite perfume, which has sadly been discontinued; and it’s the signature scent of one of my favorite fictional characters I’ve created.
And finally:
1. Fig. Another underrated gem of the produce world. Did you know they’re not actually a fruit, but a syconium, i.e. an inside-out bouquet of flowers? And that, in the wild, figs actually ingest wasps? They’re one of the most interesting “fruits” out there, for sure. I first got into figs when, in 2010-11, dried figs mysteriously became one of my daily “safe” foods during a restrictive phase of my ED. For a long time, figs were my go-to thing. Then later, around the time of my conversion, I learned about the legend associated with Saint Rita, to whom I developed my first devotion. My obsession with them might also be related to the word “figment,” as in “a figment of your imagination,” which word/phrase has always been pretty personally meaningful to me. Anyway, I’ve featured figs in at least one or two of my major fiction projects, because they’re just so freaking cool. Maybe I’m a dork for thinking figs are “freaking cool,” but, so be it.
I hope this has been at least mildly interesting for you, lol.
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I used to dream of being a published novelist. And, if I’m being honest, I still sometimes do.
As some of you may know, I have, in the past, tried to get my fiction published. I think I’ve tried with three, four, maybe five different novels at different points in my life (only really seriously tried with one of them, though). I’ve also submitted a little bit of short fiction to a couple of places, but the only place that ever accepted me was my university’s literary journal, because they had to, and they were short on submissions. Lol.
Maybe this is just because my fiction is not that great. I think that’s honestly pretty likely. My junk is tons of fun for me, but maybe it’s not for anyone else. Or, maybe I just never tried hard enough. I have pretty thin skin, and am all but allergic to self-promotion (see: AvPD), so, every step of the whole querying and submission process is, for me, basically like going before a firing squad, or like having the flu and being in labor at the same time, or going before a firing squad while you have the flu and are in labor. Which is to say: I hate it! I know everyone hates it, but I’m not being egotistical when I say I think I probably hate it even more than the average person.
But there’s no getting around that process. (Unless you’re already a celebrity.) So, I’ve pretty much given up on that childhood dream. Which is fine. Totally. I once saw a viral Tweet on Writer Twitter that went something like: “watching the book of my heart die in the trenches will be my villain origin story” – and damn, if that ain’t the truth. But it’s fine. I’m fine! Lol.
It’s hard out there! If you’re currently in the thick of it (“in the [querying] trenches,” as they say), God help you. During my brief forays into submitting fiction to agents, I learned that the publishing industry in 21st century America is freaking brutal. It’s merciless. Trying to get published sucks. I definitely got a bit bitter about it, after so many ghostings and form rejections.
But, to be fair: the stuff that I love to write is not highly publishable. Maybe one day I’ll write something normal and marketable enough to be published. But, I dunno. I have some pretty unpopular opinions about fiction and prose in general, which probably make my junk nobody’s cup of tea but my own. I took a lot of writing classes in college, back in the day, and between those classroom experiences, mingling with other aspiring writers, and my attempts at getting published, I’ve encountered a lot of ideas out there that are, imo, just straight up stupid, and thereby affirmed my own sometimes-unconventional beliefs about writing:
11. Genre, and comp titles, are overrated. “What’s your genre,” everyone wants to know. And if you don’t fit tidily into one single genre, or can’t say for sure what genre you are, it’s just because you don’t read enough and don’t know the field well enough. You have to be able to compare your junk to someone else’s (someone who’s selling well right now, of course – but not too well, I mean, come on, clearly you can’t compare yourself to a bestseller, you arrogant prick, who do you think you are?). Your book should be basically be able to be described as “what if this popular book and this other popular book had a baby.” Personally, I hate genre fiction, hate the labels associated with it, and hate the constraints of genre and comp titles. But I get that they’re necessary in the industry.
10. Plot is overrated. I mean, my favorite book ever is “Infinite Jest,” which is famous for having the most unintelligible plot of all time, so clearly plot is not that big a deal for me. I love it when an author can get you sucked into a moment or a character regardless of the conventional “plot arc” or the “stakes” of the problem. I tend to also love introspective books that sit still and contemplate, like Katharine Weber’s “Still Life with Monkey.”
9. “High-concept,” plot-driven stuff is overrated. I get that that’s what sells, but it’s disappointing. To me, this obsession with things that grab you fast and just don’t let go!!! is just a symptom of a culture that’s obsessed with Netflix and TikTok. If you want to watch TV, go watch TV, but if you’re going to read a novel, be willing to have some patience, use your brain, and commit to something, am I right?
8. That being said: mystery/suspense is the hardest thing to write, and authors who do it successfully deserve the utmost respect. I know I said I resent genre and genre fiction, and that plot is overrated, and those are all true; but I do like a good mystery novel, and this is one genre that I know for a fact I could never even attempt to write. I mean, how do they do it? How do they create a whole multi-layered mystery that you can’t figure out? Just, out of their brain??! It’s fascinating to me! One of my absolute favorite writers of the last few years is Shari Lapena, who writes domestic crime thrillers. Also, Stephen King is a genius at this. The ability to create such a plot and make it suspenseful is seriously like a magic power. Not every book has to have it! But when a writer does it well, it’s sorcery.
7.Sex scenes are gross. Even if it’s not smut. I can’t stand sex scenes, even in literature. I put down “Hamnet” by Maggie O’Farrell because of a sex scene. I put down “The Fraud” by Zadie Smith because of sexual stuff. Seriously. Just. Leave. It. Out! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: be an adult; fade to black. It’s easy to do. Unless there’s some crucial detail that you cannot reveal otherwise, in which case, you can be subtle.
6. Telling, not showing, is fine. Speaking as an amateur here: the whole “show don’t tell” thing is for amateurs. If you have backstory to tell, then tell it, don’t waste the reader’s time going back in time to show it all happening! And sometimes it works to just tell your actual story! There’s a time and place for telling, don’t let anyone tell you there’s not.
5. The passive voice is great. Again, as an amateur: the advice to “never use passive” is for amateurs. There is absolutely a time and place for passive voice (just ask the Germans, they love their passive voice!). “This was given to me” has a whole different emphasis and tone than “Someone gave me this.” “The pie has been eaten” is more compelling, and has more gravitas, than “they ate the pie.” “Saint Lawrence was martyred by grilling” keeps the focus on Saint Lawrence, and is more interesting and pleasant and logical to read than just “They grilled Saint Lawrence.”
4. Adverbs are great. I once knew an aspiring writer who eschewed all adverbs as a rule. How silly! Adverbs exist for a reason. Yes, you could say “sprinted” instead of “ran quickly,” or “dragged” instead of “passed slowly,” or “devoured” instead of “ate voraciously” or “lethargic” instead of “cripplingly tired”… but sometimes an adverb makes a sentence more beautiful, or rhythmic, or adds a whole new element of metaphor to a phrase. Again with the whole TikTok mindset of “shorter = better.”
3. Descriptions are great. I love in Victorian literature when they would take paragraphs, or even pages, to describe a character’s physical appearance when introducing that character. Give me all the details about what they are wearing and what shape their nose is! I’m here for it! I also love descriptions of rooms and places. But then I got to college and took 300 level writing courses, and learned that descriptions of characters’ appearances are considered juvenile and cheesy, in serious circles nowadays. What a bummer. Bring back Victorian prose!
2. Long sentences are great. You probably know I feel this way if you read my blog. I love to try and pack as much stuff into one sentence as I can, using parentheses, dashes, semicolons, colons, and, of course, commas on commas on commas. Again, I’m a huge fan of DFW, whose sentences sometimes go on for pages. A long and well-composed sentence is a work of art!
And finally:
1. Word count constraints are dumb. If you want to get published, and you’re writing literary or mainstream fiction for adults, you’d better make sure your manuscript is precisely 80-90k words, no more, no less. (The number is bigger, but equally constraining, for certain genres like high fantasy.) And short fiction has a specific word count expectation, too. As someone who vibes with novellas, novelettes, really long short stories, and all the in-betweens, this has always frustrated me. I’d like to see the novella become popular again!
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My favorite restaurant – this is not really about the restaurant at all, though. Restaurants aren’t really as much about the food as they are about the experience, are they?
I don’t go out to eat that much – hardly ever, actually. I have a 5, a 3, and a 2 year old, and my family’s on a single income, so restaurants aren’t really a part of our life unless it’s a special occasion.
Which is completely fine with me. I don’t even honestly really like eating at restaurants. One of my ED-related quirks is that I’m self-conscious about eating in front of other people. Even people I know well. I feel awkward asking the waiter for what I want to eat – it feels like such a personal question, “what do you want to eat?” Ugh, cringe.
And I’m vegetarian, and just generally particular about what I will and will not eat. Also, I kind of hate eating at the standard dinner hour, anymore. I can do breakfast – but when the heck am I ever out to eat at breakfast time? The idea is pretty laughable, lol. Lunch is okay if it’s light, like a salad or something, so if you’re planning on inviting me out to eat, please make it a lunch. I honestly hate “dinner.”
So when I think about my “favorite restaurant,” I don’t really think about places that I actively go. In fact, the one place that really comes to mind is a place I went one time, over twenty years ago, with my family.
It wasn’t even memorable for the food – I wasn’t even hungry, I think, when we went there; I was still basically a child, with a very intuitive, unworried, even bored perspective on food. My ED didn’t start to kick in until a few months later, early eighth grade.
It was evening, April 7th, 2003, and the first night of a family mini-vacation that we were taking to Washington, DC, three hours from home. For whatever reason, that three-day, two-night trip is sealed in my memory bank as three of the best days of my life.
But why was it so great? It shouldn’t have been, actually. Things were hectic. My family was in the middle of buying a new house, back home. We had come to this vacation straight from the home inspection on the house that we were buying, and the inspection had been abysmal. I remember in one room my father could literally poke his finger straight through the floor, that’s how rotted it was. So, my parents were stressed, but doing their best to have a happy family vacation (I remember my dad getting the drunkest I’d ever seen him at the hotel bar that evening; he wasn’t incoherent or wobbly or anything, but he was noticeably goofy and his eyes were glassy). My older sister was pretty miserable the whole time, and seemed like she very much didn’t want to be there with her parents and dorky little sister; normally, I was very influenced by her moods, and kind of took my cue from her as to how I should feel or act. But I, age 13, was not at school, was on vacation, and felt cute in my new little red Marvin the Martian t-shirt from Kohl’s, was just having a great freaking time in my own little world.
I think it’s because I was in a good mental place, that spring. That was the spring that I first began writing about my four characters, whom you may know from this blog if you’re a regular. I’d just written or was just about to write the first story I ever wrote about them; about 20 or 30k words, I wrote it by hand on notebook paper, sitting on my bed in my childhood bedroom, listening to my Walkman. Doing this was like discovering a new drug. I was feeling pretty on top of the world about it. And, in a sort of childlike way, I felt like those characters were on that trip with me, and even kind of wove it into my little headcanon, telling myself that two of them actually met that very day, April eighth, at the same FYE where I went shopping at the mall there in DC. (Millennial moment: I so miss CD stores!)
There are so many memories of that trip that you’d think would be lame or even shitty, but they are all colored by the mood/headspace that I was in at the time, so they are wonderful: like, we’d booked a hotel online without knowing anything about it, and that hotel turned out to be, to my father’s horror, “extremely gay,” i.e. all decked out in art deco style, and he swore that the bartender was hitting on him (I don’t remember much about this, and did not have much of a concept of “gay” at the time, but did think the pink-and-black, 1920s-ish décor was pretty funky). Also, it rained. We got stranded in the rain, walking around the city, a few times. My poor sister, who was very goth at the time and had a ton of metal accessories all over her, got stopped a million times in the metal detector as we were entering the Washington Monument. I don’t think she even ended up coming in. I don’t remember. Stuff like that.
There are certain songs that I associate very much with that trip, too. At the FYE on April 8th, there were three CDs that I bought: The Exies’ first, self-titled CD; “Faceless” by Godsmack (which had, apparently, just come out that same day; I was so hooked on the song “Straight Out of Line,” and tbh it still slaps); and, you’ll laugh, but the self-titled album from Trapt (“back off, we’ll take you on!!!” I thought that song was so freaking hardcore, when I was 13, and my besties and I used to like to “mosh” to it at school dances, lololl). But, most of all, the songs that I associate with that trip are by the band Stage. My sister, who was extremely uninterested in everything else about that trip, requested that my parents drop her off so she could stop in this weird, funky, punk-rockish little shop before we left, on our last day of the trip, which I guess she’d read about online or heard of from friends, and was eager to check out; and while in there, at the register, she picked up a free EP from this band we’d never heard of, called Stage. And on the way home, she let me listen to it on my Walkman. It was only three songs, but they were all straight fire, especially the second one, “The World Has Come Between Us.” To this day, that song affects me really strongly. It made me nostalgic, even at the time. I kind of think of it as one of the anthems of my life.
But, all of this to say that this whole awkward trip is weirdly idyllic in my memory. Back to the restaurant thing. On night one of this trip, my tired parents decided that they wanted Mexican food, which I was not interested in. I wasn’t even hungry, but it was whatever. So they found this restaurant – I can’t remember what it was called, but it was a really big restaurant with covered rooftop seating. And we got to sit up there on the roof.
I think I ordered a couple of soft tacos with no meat. Weird, I know, but when I was younger that was my go-to order, whenever I got taken to a Mexican restaurant. I wasn’t interested in spicy meat, so I would literally get flour tortillas with lettuce and cheese, and I thought it was freaking delicious. So I was pretty pleased with the food, but the best part was that it came with this little green plastic sword.
I was still a kid, at 13. I loved the little plastic sword. It delighted me. I was playing with it, goofing around with it, I don’t even remember. Then at some point I dropped it, and it fell between the planks on the floor and was gone. I was bummed, but, true to form, too shy to ask for a second one. So, without my permission and to my great embarrassment (I was still a kid, but enough of a teenager to be mortified), my sweet Dad asked the waiter for me if he would bring another green plastic sword.
I can’t remember, exactly, if the waiter brought me one and I managed to miraculously recover the original, or if the waiter, in a display of generosity, brought me two. I think the latter. I remember sitting there being like I HAVE TWO OF THEM NOW!! and just being over the moon. I didn’t even finish my tortillas; and not because I was watching my weight, that hadn’t happened to me yet. I was okay with my body! The food was fine but uninteresting. I was happy. It was the best dinner ever.
I still have those two green plastic swords, in a little box in my closet.
I’ve mentioned on this blog before that AvPD is not a death sentence. Some aspects of it are not all bad. Living in the company of your made-up people that you came up with as a coping mechanism, can fill you with so much joy and delight, and it’s a happiness that nothing and no one can take away from you. It’s a happiness that can turn even the most basic circumstances into a fairytale. At least, that’s been my experience. Probably I also feel that way because, in addition to having AvPD, I have in the past been a true maladaptive daydreamer, and I enjoy writing and doodling very much – so that was pretty much the defining trifecta of my formative years. I wrote myself this little world to escape into. And, tbh, it still works for me, a lot of the time. I actually feel lucky and grateful to have had this trifecta of weirdness, because it gave me this made-up world that brings me so much joy. I used to think I would outgrow it one day, but here I am, 35 and a married mom and it’s still a huge part of me. I’m sure I will keep it forever.
It’s funny: almost all of my other memories of seventh and eighth grade are miserable and bleak, or are at least colored by that feeling of discomfort and awkwardness and loneliness. But this one silly little trip, which was not even objectively that great, remains logged in my memory as a golden time of pure joy. And that dinner, as one of the most memorable meals. May that generous waiter be abundantly blessed! Like my made-up people in my head, I will keep those green plastic swords forever.
MiTHology (4.0) 