Small things to warm cold spaces: a letter

Dear grandma,

I did not have a good day today. I woke up aching, sore from cold and not enough sleep, and I went to work with a sense of quiet resignation: back to this, then, the same litanies of customer complaints and entitled do-this-for-me that in my darker moments I feel forms the boundaries of my job. I spent much of the day heartsick, for a variety of reasons.

And then I came home. I cleaned my kitchen: washed all the leftover dishes, scrubbed down the counters and the stove, and I made two apple pies. I used your knife, and your pie plate (although I confess, I cheated and bought pre-made crusts; it was a long day at work and I don’t have the patience today to make it from scratch. I’ll do better next time, I promise), and I thought of you while I made them. I’m thinking of you now.

It’s comforting to know that muscle memory doesn’t go away, or family memory, maybe, the sort of habit that is so thoroughly ingrained that we can’t help but inherit it: to sit, and chat, and let your hands do the work, slice-slice-slice-slice, wafers of white or yellow-gold apple flesh dropping into the bowl. My wife and I did it tonight, like I remember you and I doing while I was young enough not to appreciate it: sat down at our dining room table, and together peeled and sliced apples. Fifteen or sixteen of them, half Arkansas Black (a strong, tart, nicely crisp apple I just discovered; like a Granny Smith that doesn’t suck), and half my beloved Cortland (Cortland! Finally, I can find them here, at the farmer’s market – all the gorgeous natural sweetness that I grew up with, that is my favorite out of all the countless varieties anyone could offer).

There are pies in the oven now, and my house smells of apple and cinnamon and clove and pastry. And my heart, at the end of the day, is warm.

I miss you. But I have a pie plate, and a paring knife, and apples and muscle memory (because after all, the heart is a muscle, beat-beat-beating blood, and they say, don’t they, that pie runs in the family), and what that means is I still have you.

Love you, grandma. It was good to see you again. The mind’s eye is the sharpest.

 

O hapi dae!

Not bad for off the cuff. Moohahaha.

 

Afterthought:

Aforementioned story has found a comfy home at Circlet Press, lovingly taken in by editor J. Williams. Brief acceptance commentary made me preen; am pleased and proud.

So it looks like my career shall begin in what we shall coyly term explicit romance. If anyone’s startled by this, the line forms to the left; take a number. I doubt they’ll hit double digits.

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to bed I go.

 

The virgin prunes-

-her map of Tasmania. It’s her first show, and she’s terrified and ecstatic. Her mother watches, fretting with glued-on lashes a flurry of spiky black around gem-bright eyes. Sequins and rhinestones catch the cheap-lightbulb fluorescence that surrounds the makeshift dressing-room mirror as she puts her scissors down and picks up a pair of sheer stockings. The fleshtone nylon whispers and scratches as she unrolls it over her skin, encasing herself with a drag queen’s first line of defense.

She stands, smoothing her slitted gown over her bestockinged thighs. The slice in the fabric nearly reaches her naval, and slides as she moves, a shifting peep-show that shows far too much but never quite …everything.

“You all tucked up, honey?” her mother asks, and the virgin queen reaches between her thighs, giving the space there a quick once-over with cherry-taloned fingertips. Nothing comes loose, and she strikes a pose. The line of her posture is nervously perfect, from the tip of her glittering stiletto pump to the peak of her lace-front bouffant. Someone must have bled on her lips to get that color of red, and her lashes are a falsely modest line against her carefully porcelained cheek as she shyly ducks her head and blows her mother a moue of a kiss.

“You’re beautiful,” whispers her mother through proud tears that threaten to make her eyeliner run, and with all the frightened determination of a robin in late spring, she nudges the virgin through the curtained door, down the dimly-lit hallway at the end of which the stage is waiting, dollar bills in hands around it, waiting for a garter to receive them.

 

Wordses.

Putting together a list of wordses to possibly be used in building Strangeandsavage.com.

Fringe
Underground
Outskirts (Out Skirts! I love a pun.)
Alternative
Unconventional
Weird
Queer (so many definitions…)
Aberrant
Deviant
Freak

I learned a new word, as well, in digging for wordses: heterodox. Loff. Loff! Say it out loud. Heh-ter-oh-docks. Hedderohdokz. Mmm. Tasty word with mmmmmeaning.

Brain is apparently set to random, although given RuPaul’s Drag Race is on in the background, this is not startling. Ah, Ru. You are such a distraction.

 

Spreading like a plague.

So we registered strangeandsavage.com in my name tonight.

The project is… the secondary, parallel track to my impulses to make things. Stories come first, but images are a close second.

Watch this space.

 

Brain dead.

Story open. Words there; no words in head. Story stares at me. I stare at story. Story says, “wriiiiiite meeeeeeee…”!

Want write! Brain dead.

Sad.

Maybe brain work later? Brain work after moved. Moving eating brain-words, filling brain with ‘deposits’ and ‘large truck’ and ‘hodeargod I have too much shit, where did it all COME from?’ and ‘I do not want to lift that sofa’ and ‘we should get more bookshelves’ and ‘holy shit this is expensive’.

Brain work after moved.

 

Bridge-ghosts

I don’t have your email address anymore. Hoping the link finds you, and you click it, and you read all these words I’m scribbling while the thoughts are in my head. You’re in my head today, very much, and I think it’s time I let the ghost out.

I have unfinished business with you. No, don’t close the window! It’s not bad. Well, not really. Not for you. This is an apology.

I was horrible. I was broken, and not by you; grievously wounded, and not by you; deeply mourning, but not you. You were just… there. You, with all the innocence of a small bird fluttering to the ground inside a cattery, made yourself a target by doing what was unarguably best for you, and I was dreadful to you. I had a lifetime of fury and bloody gashes stored up and hidden away and I couldn’t hide the bloodstains anymore.

I am so terribly, terribly sorry. You recognised, probably entirely instinctively, what a mess I was inside, and understood that you couldn’t afford to get tangled up in it– and there were so very many threads to get snarled in. What a tattered, patternless spider’s web my head was… I don’t blame you for severing that particular tie.

And I realise for my own part that but for my stupidity and my unpardonable behaviour, we could still be friends. I burned that bridge. I stood in the middle of it and sprayed my acid bitterness like gasoline all over it and spitefully dropped the match that sent it uncontrollably blazing under my feet, and God help me, I welcomed the burn on my skin. The anger propped me up while I mourned… and again– I wasn’t mourning you.

You bore the punishment others earned.

I can only apologise, and this I do, here and now in the open, where anyone can see it, in the hopes that one of the anyones who do will be you. You deserved none of the vitriol I gave you. If I could take it back, I would. I spent a while not thinking about it all, because doing so hurt, and I wouldn’t look at why… but the why of it is simply that I’m ashamed of myself. I was dreadful to you. I am so incredibly sorry.

I’ve said hello a few times in the intervening years. Waved in passing, as it were, but nothing more than that, not really, because this has been in the way, the need for these words. I’ve kept tabs, a little bit, although it’s been difficult: you were always so private, and I’m closed out, now, so what I get are glimpses here and there, allowed me by mutual friends and acquaintances and what I can glean from the occasional writings I stumble upon. I hope you’re doing well. I hope you’re in a good place. I hope happiness for you, because I loved you once, and because I think of you fondly still. My regrets are twofold: that I behaved so terribly, and that the bridge is burned.

I wish sometimes I could build another, of different structure and design, one meant for longer friendship, rather than to close the gap I was trying then to define or, really, ignore. I don’t know if I can… but the wish is there.

 

It’s official.

My short story, The Fox Hunt, has been accepted for Circlet Press‘ anthology Like A Cunning Plan.

*asplode*

 

To brass tacks

When I began this blog, it was with the intention of using it to document my experiences as I felt my way along the breadcrumb path to becoming A Writer. Because I am a crack ferret of the first water, that purpose quickly fell to the wayside in lieu of… well, anything else, and long pauses in between updates.

I’m still me when I wake up in the morning, so I’m not going to delude myself into thinking that I can steer this ship back into that particular shipping main, but I will at least intersect with it now and again while I veer wildly and enthusiastically off course. Tonight, dear reader, marks one of those rare and probably not-highly-anticipated conjunctions.

So, then, some thoughts on this whole writin’ bizniss.

– I’m a little stupid sometimes –

Firstly, saying something akin to “I am going to become A Writer!” is just damned silly. I am A Writer. I know it. I have been for years now, because I have been writing for years. What I am not is A Published Writer, but that’s amendable, and indeed, appears to be growing ever more attainable as a goal. This thrills me, because it’s the only goal I’ve had that’s lasted lifelong. I’ve considered and discarded any number of varyingly-wild career and personal goals, but the absolutely unmovable yearning to publish has remained the constant anchor-star of that constellation.

It’ll be nice to sell stories or, ideally, someday, novels. It’ll be nice to have the extra income here and there and, if the stars align and the gods smile upon me and that bitch of a muse doesn’t desert me for a bottle of gin and a rent boy, perhaps if I’m very lucky and work very hard, it’ll be nice to give my day job a hearty, one-fingered fuck you, and live off the ill-gotten proceeds of, as NFG puts it, making things up for a living. It’ll be nice. I’m not counting on it, and I’m very aware of how difficult and uncommon reaching that happy state is, but if it happens, it’ll be nice. It’s not the push behind my ambition, though. This is:

Writers are my heroes. Stories formed the core and the foundation of my childhood, and I considered the people who wrote them something akin to demigods. They were special, set apart and possessed of talents and powers not granted to ordinary people like me. I learned about cultures that revered storytellers as priests and keepers of wisdom, and I didn’t see that strange or unusual at all: it made sense to me. It still does. Stories were religion, and writers my priests, because through them came the words. The Words. And as I grew older, I realized that I could make the Words do things, too. I could put them together and shape them around what was in my head, just like the writers could. Slowly, in a process that’s still ongoing, my image of the world began to realign itself, with me inside the circle inside which the writers stood.

I belong there.

That’s why I am determined to write, and to publish what I write. The money’ll be nice, if it comes. The notoriety’ll be nice, if it comes. If the money and the name-recognition never come, I’ll be just as happy, because they’re not what it’s about. What it’s about is being in that circle.

There’s just… nowhere else I fit.

– Sometimes, stars align –

I’m incredibly lucky.

I’m incredibly lucky because somehow, in the half-dream-state in which I spent the years between aged 19 and 30, I managed to become acquainted and even friends with a rather startling number of people involved in writing and publishing. I have met and befriended authors, some of them quite well-known. I have been introduced to and chatted with editors, some of them quite highly-regarded. I have been given, free of charge and with the most honorable of intentions, some astonishingly good advice about what I’m doing wrong, and what I’m doing right, and what I ought to be doing next.

I have a haphazard, highly effective, unofficial support group, in fact. I don’t entirely know how I came about procuring it, but accepted wisdom assures me that I shouldn’t count its teeth. I’m not gonna. I’m going to take every shred of this advice and I’m going to make it goddamn count.

You hear me, you lot? You miraculous, gifted, incredibly generous lot: I will not take you for granted. You are all a gift to me, and one I probably don’t deserve, but I’m selfish and ambitious enough to accept and make damn good use of it.

You know who you are. Goddamn, but I treasure you.

– Baby steps –

I suck right now.

Let me rephrase that: I’m good. I’m damn good, even. But I’m not good enough, not yet. All those people up there that I screamed my own particular promise to: I’m not good enough yet to be in that circle with them.

I’m better than a lot of people already in that circle. I’m so torn about those ones: part of me, the generous part, the part that uncompromisingly sees the good in all people and all things, insists that I cheer them on, pleased and proud of anyone who manages to join the People Of Words. The other part of me, the part that remembers when Words were a religion: it resents and despises them. They don’t belong there. They’re not good enough, not for me and not for that set-apart circle.

That’s unforgivably arrogant of me. Sometimes, I slip, and I’m a terrible person for a minute or two. Forgive me?

I don’t want to be in the circle if I don’t deserve it, and I am baffled by people who don’t feel that way. It’s one of the few places in which I am closed-minded.

I’ll be good enough, someday, maybe even someday soon. That’s part of my promise, too.

– Fin –

I’m too much in my own head tonight. This has all been a product of that fact: this is the kind of strangeness that roils around in there pretty much constantly, except that normally it’s layered over with the sort of thing I understand is normal: bills to pay, conversations I’ve had today, what I need to get at the grocery store next time I go…

I’ve tried to filter, or at least organize.

Done now. Back to the story. 1,645 words and counting. I hope it’s okay.