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Fiction Goals

 


I spent yesterday afternoon and this morning scouring my shelves for Crime and Poetry, the book pictured in this post. I'm still recovering from last week's bout of whatever food crime I committed and I'm still mostly off caffeine (and finally sleeping through the night) and one of the things that being sick does is make me miss seeing my family. And if I'm read to road trip, then I usually turn to books. Things I read as a kid (lots of Susan Cooper and Dorothy Sayers) or stories that I've discovered since (the October Daye series) and remind me of sitting on my bed, reading and relaxing and knowing that everything was getting better. Yesterday, however, what I wanted was a book that my dad had given me, because he thought I'd like it. That it looked like my thing. 

But we rearranged the bookshelves last year. And despite the idea that "summer is a great time to do indoor things and a pandemic means we're both technically available to work on this"...the books were mostly just shoved in place. Some of them are in order. Most of them are in chaos. Shelved chaos, but still. Looking for a particular book meant making an assumption of where it might fall in categories like "I think I touched it yesterday" or "part of a nebulous October TBR." It took me time to pull things down, check them thrice, and then move on. I found the book this morning, in a stack behind another stack...and completely the wrong color (I thought the spine was hot pink). It's now on my desk complete with a bookmark from a book signing from a friend's book-signing event from years ago. 

Why haven't I read this before? Well, I discovered BookTube and the joy of assigning yourself books as if you're pursuing some kind of advanced degree in social reading and starting reading in support of the books I was working on and...well, it probably was in a TBR stack that gradually suffered a geologic compression to the understack in which I found it this morning. 

I'm going to start reading it this afternoon. But first:  Fiction Goals. I've known writers who would like to create worlds that spawn fan fiction. Writers who would like bestsellers, awards, genre recognition, to be able to use the word "writer" without qualification or the nagging feeling that it should be "hobbyist," instead. Writers who are trying to change people's lives. Writers who are changing lives. Writers who would like to be taught in school. And, sure, there are days my hopes are giant puppets devouring all those lovely possibilities. Wouldn't it be nice to read weird offshoots of my fiction? Wouldn't it be nice to have my own Cliff's Notes (is that still a thing? I am...ancient, people...ancient)?

Today, however, I'm still recovering and too tired for ginormous aspirations. Today, my hopes are that soon I'll finish this story. And that sometime in the future, someone will give it to a reader because it "seems like their thing." And it will turn out to be there thing. And, whether the story is truly for them or not, they will look on it fondly because it was a gift and because it makes them feel better. 

Hope you're having a calm day!

-- Chrissa 

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