Skip to main content

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 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Turn Away

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse , for #193. Turn away, like the moon, listening... Listening to the planet that rumbles with a hundred million slaps. All the feet, all the rockets, all the  pistons in the cars on the asphalt over the chasm where the veins run deep, blue in sunlight, black at night. Running over the chasm.  Once or twice they ran to you. Once or twice they ran by. Greetings and salutations. The sky is an entertaining shade of concrete yellow as the rain promised earlier in the week makes good on its arrival. It's a disturbing bright sallow sky, the kind of sky that puts you in mind of old movies and degraded film stock and the pops and crackles incidental to the main story.  Several years ago I made a resolution to journal more and last year I came across a video that suggested I actually re-read those journals, at least those of the previous year, at the beginning of each new year. Technically, I have kept the journal resolution, making daily notes in...
15 comments
Read more

Treacle Season

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #190 ,  hosted this week by Carrie. Keaton was great in that show—the one with wings— Where he was constantly a [man]child on a ledge  dreaming an angel who became a superhero.   She was a sarcastic (fake?) angel—it was the 80s— But always good, on time, her lessons easy, Easy as it would have been for him to fall.   The metaphor so obvious...but I didn't get it. Nor the easy and obvious good. (/s)   I watch the TV movie every other December Remembering believing in easy And crushing on this character, that city...   Angels should be sweet, sarcastic figures, knowing (like nurses and social workers) we prefer Sleeping on the ledge, reckless to call for "heroes." To clear up any confusion:  there is no Michael Keaton movie we watch every holiday season. Although, if there were...I'd probably watch it.  -- Chrissa
16 comments
Read more

The Soul and The Spine

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #195 . Come and share! When it blew out the candle, It began to speak, voice low,  eyes dimmer than flame. Jenn believed, once upon a childhood (she's still there... but it's waning), it inhaled fire. Spines, tonight. Gears ladder bones and metal and plastic, all that lived, rungs to heaven. Heaven is a level of space where you can't breathe  so they used to send the dead. When the flame goes, it takes our memories with it. But not bot files. Maybe it believes  she'll sleep easier if bots go breathless, too. It continues murmuring and she pretends she's hearing a confession in a box Like the song her mother plays when the dark stretches  between signals We can handle shocks. She can handle the dark, the small  not-flame of its eyes. It's finally winter!! Which means bitmapped frost on the roofs, cold mornings, and a table full of succulents that are pretty much glaring at me because the kitchen window isn't the same as full su...
14 comments
Read more