Who Am I To Argue With Fate?

Do you believe in fate? Sometimes I get all cynical and think it's a bunch of crap, that karma does not in fact pay you back for living a life that focuses on bettering the world for others,doesn't bring down the people who bring so much pain and suffering into the world.

Then I have days like today where I realize that there has to be something ... call it God, call it fate, call it good luck, but man ...

So last night, my computer suddenly went psycho. I mean, we're talking crazy. I was pretty sure it was a lost cause (whatever it was swept through the virus protection like wildfire), and Addie confirmed that this morning.

Of course, I had a decision to make. Should I go to a computer specialty store to see if they can repair the earliest version of a Netbook, or should I just get a new computer (which has been on the radar for awhile ... Netbooks have good points, but they also have severe limitations).

Anyway, I'm typing this on my beautiful, brand new laptop :-)

Back to fate for a minute, though.

I got this urge yesterday to print my novel. I have a hard time editing on a computer screen (it's kind of like why I don't have a Kindle or a Nook, despite my insatiable appetite for reading), and I knew I had a lot of work to do.

To make matters even more interesting, my printer is special and prints one page at a time. My completed novel is lengthy. Quite lengthy. It made more sense to just go to Staples, so I put it on a USB and paid far too much money to it printed.

Yeah, do you see why the "one page at a time" approach was just not feasible?

Anyway, while I was putting the novel onto a USB, I figured I might as well print out my current WIP, too. After all, it's in need of some editing as well.

When my computer appeared to be possessed by the equivalent of Charles Manson on acid, I was momentarily hysterical. Other than Addie and Belle (and possibly my dogs), those two pieces of writing are the most important thing in the world to me.

They weren't backed up until yesterday. (Stupid, I know)

Thank you, whatever force made me take care of that business yesterday. I owe you one!

And, if you're interested in exploring my novel in terms of critique or style or abject curiosity or whatev, you can read some of it here, and/or weigh in on a recent struggle I've had with it right here.

And, just because I'm excited about it, here's the hard-to-read dedication page (no pseudonyms there, but I don't think the people on the page would be offended ... interesting that I've written about most of them here under assumed names, though).

A Friendly (if Desperate) Plea for All you Writing Experts (or Those who Enjoy Reading)

As I've mentioned before, my novel Unbreakable is set up with two narrators. I posted the first page from the prologue narrated by one of them. By the same token, I figured I should post the first page of the prologue narrated by the other main character.

I'm hoping that you'd be willing to give me feedback in terms of which is a stronger opening for a novel. Thanks in advance <3
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II.
(Roy; Boston, MA; September, 2006)

I'm sure that to some people, memories are indeed the proverbial priceless gem that can be brought out to examine and relive with positive connotations.

My memories give me nightmares for a week.

That's not precisely true, of course. It's just that virtually all the good ones gleaned over the course of thirty years occurred after I was fourteen. It’s the years before then, though, that my mind is focusing on now as I sit alone in the study of the Boston penthouse where Addie and I have lived for the past five years, wishing randomly that I was a drinker. All sources I can find confirm that nothing helps tragedy like alcohol (until the next morning, anyway), but I can’t keep myself from holding true to a promise I made when I was just a kid that I would never drink.

Addie is in our bedroom crying. She doesn’t want my comfort; I caused every one of her tears.

Today, my life was inerasably altered forever. It started out as a typical day. I'm a professional baseball player, and we flew back to Boston early this morning after a two-week road trip. Although the stretch was highly successful (especially when you consider the roller coaster reputation of the Red Sox), we were instructed to report to Fenway for extra batting practice immediately after getting off the plane from Detroit. I was home at six o'clock, toting two suitcases and a dozen red roses for Addie. Because I can't read or write (a long, complex story unto itself), Ad and I leave "audio notes" on a tape player that sits on the kitchen counter, nestled between the toaster and the can opener and as inherently necessary as those two appliances. Sure enough, there was a fresh tape in it. Arranging the roses in a glass vase, I pressed the play button.

"Hello, my shortstop in shining armor," came Adelaide's sweet voice, and I smiled without even realizing it. She just had that effect on me. "I'll be home around seven. Take a look at the newspapers on the counter. Another Gold Glove for Pentinicci?, Pentinicci Leads Sox to Fifth Victory in Six Games, Can Roy Pentinicci Make Those Who Called his Team the Dead Sox Apologize?, Roy Pentinicci Takes the Growl Out of the Tigers. I am so proud of you! I'm thinking take-out for dinner tonight. I have a feeling it's going to be one of those days. See you at seven. I'm so glad you're home, Roy, and I have some wonderful news for you. Love you."

I picked up the newspapers on the counter, bemused as always with the media's obsession with me. I was named People's "Sexiest Athlete Alive" last year, an occurrence that tickled Adelaide as much as it embarrassed me. I hadn't wanted celebrity, hadn't asked for it, but somehow or other, it had happened. Addie's brother, Christian, my closest friend since we were five years old, jokes that I was born for the spotlight, but we all know it's just teasing. My personality is unquestionably extroverted and I’ve been known to be somewhat vain about my looks (to quote Adelaide, Roy spends more time in front of the mirror than I do), but inside, there is someone to whom celebrity is impossible, unattainable, unimportant, insignificant. I stared for a long time at the head shot accompanying the article discussing my candidacy for the Gold Glove; it was unmistakably me, hat askew, go-to-hell grin on my face, but I wondered if anyone could look at that picture, see through the windows of my eyes and glimpse the demons that lurk beyond, the darkness that plagues my nights.

I had forty-five minutes before Addie was due home from her thankless yet somehow fulfilling job as a social worker for the city of Boston, so I went upstairs to unpack and shower. After ordering pizza then throwing on jeans and a T-shirt, I put on a Simon and Garfunkel CD and dozed on the couch.

Twenty-Five Things About my Novel (Jumpin' on the Bandwagon : ) )

I guess this concept, starting from Samantha at Wuthering Life and picked up on by several other aspiring authors as I understand it (I found it myself on both Samantha's blog and on As the Plot Thickens), is starting to really make the rounds. More power to it ... I think it's really cool.

So here's what you do. Just make a list of 25 things people don't know about your WIP and post it. Hopefully it'll drum up some further interest ... and it's actually pretty fun.

So, I offer you ... 25 things you didn't know about Unbreakable

1. I had a really horrible nightmare when I was twelve or thirteen involving a group of kids being trapped in a house by an evil witch. That nightmare turned into the first book I wrote (it wasn't very good, but it was the foundation for Unbreakable).

2. As homage to my brother, Adam, and my sister, Mary, I changed the name of one of the secondary characters to Roy. There was a bet involving the purchasing of a porno magazine (it's really better not to ask ... Adam lost the best, we'll just leave it at that), and the mag featured an "article" about a guy named Roy. They didn't think I'd put him into my story, I was adamant that I'd prove them wrong.

3. The aforementioned Roy was originally a minor character, but he ended up being the ultimate scene-stealer and somehow became the leading male protagonist.

4. The book takes place in a small New Hampshire city (yes, we have them) that bears a striking resemblance to my hometown. That is not a coincidence.

5. My husband has said that Unbreakable is my life story, although many of the major events are completely foreign to me. And he's absolutely right.

6. I hate the way it ends, but it took my two years to end the book, so I kind of had to go with what I had. I still don't think I could come up with a better ending ... but I continue to hate it.

7. One of the characters, Addie, is very much like my fourteen-year-old daughter (who I refer to on this blog as Addie because of this similarity).

8. Although there is murder by gunshot in my book, I've never fired a gun in my life.

9. I spent a family vacation to Montreal sitting by the hotel pool editing the manuscript because the mood struck me. Although I was kind of a bummer in terms of vacation, it was by far the most effective edit I've ever done.

10. My stepfather--my absolute hero--used to say, "The universe works" all the time. That is the overlying theme to this book.

11. I tried very hard to portray a drug dealer sympathetically (I try to portray everyone with at least a degree of sympathy), but he was just too much of an asshole to let it happen. Writing the scene where his sister confronts him in jail when she is successful and happy and he's stuck there for life gave me warped pleasure.

12. This book is dedicated to my friend Jen, a gal who has somehow managed to be my friend for almost thirty years. I figured it was the least I could do for her : )

13. The book covers a span of twenty years or so, and there's a lot of bouncing around in terms of when things are happening. I worry that this makes it extremely confusing, but I've been told that this isn't the case. We shall see, I guess : )

14. There are two main characters (and narrators), Roy and Susy. Roy is kind of an asshole, but he's kind of likable in spite of it. Susy is a still water that runs deep. I had to make them very different in order to get the writing voice right depending on which of them was narrating.

15. My sister Mary has been my most constant reader (starting when she was ... oh, I'll say nine or ten), although several others (most notably my friend Roland) should get credit as well.

16. When I asked Pythagorus if he had any idea how one would connect with a police radio frequency from inside a house, I thought he'd give me his famous look that I get when I ask stupid questions (both things happen quite frequently). Instead, he explained it to me in a very simple and straightforward way. Sometimes my husband really surprises me : )

17. The parental figures, Brian and Belinda McKenzie, are loosely based on my mother and step-father. Brian McKenzie basically is my stepdad (except I made Brian better looking ... sorry, Gordo : )), and Belinda is my mother on her good days.

18. I've spent a lot of time observing the various relationships between children and their parents through my career as a teacher. I tried to use this to make a rather unbelievable situation seem more realistic.

19. I think the dialogue in this book is amazing. There, I said it.

20. I set the parts where the main characters are in high school during the same time that I was in high school because I wanted it to be as realistically portrayed as possible, and it would feel very awkward for me to try to imagine what being a high school student is like in this day and age.

UPDATE: As Marty pointed out, I owe you five more facts. So here we go ...

21. It's a very dark story (rape, child abuse, drugs, violence), but it's kind of happy at the same time. Not sure if that makes sense, but it's how I view it.

22. One of my current students, "Mariam", has recently read it (I've let a handful of my very advanced readers experience it) and has taken it upon herself to become my agent because she's pretty sure she can convince a publishing company to take it on. She's probably right--nobody gets in Mariam's way : )

23. The most horrible thing that's ever happened to me is expressed through my characters. I don't know whether this is cheating or therapy ... : )

24. It took me a long time to come to terms with my characters' names. I'm particularly lame at choosing last names. The phone book is a great tool : )

25. One of the main characters, Roy, has a learning disability that keeps him from being able to read, yet he's a mathematical genius. I have a learning disability that makes math very difficult for me (I can't play cribbage because I have to count on my fingers--it's very embarrassing), but I'm ... well, I'm not going to say a literary genius, but it's definitely a strong suit for me. Sometimes I worry that I went to far in the opposite direction ... plus, it's a good think Pythagorus is a mathematician because it was challenging at times to write as a mathematical genius when you're a mathematical idiot.

An Excerpt from my Finished and (Theoretically) Polished Novel

I'm not a huge fan of just slapping down a selection from the middle of a completed manuscript (this is from pages 313-318, in fact), but this is one of the main characters telling a story to another character. It is a very personal piece to me, and as such, it's hard for me to be objective. Please let me know what you think.

And while I'm in such a grateful mood, I'd like to thank everyone who reads and comments here. I'm very self-conscious in terms of sharing my writing, and I feel like I've finally found a place where constructive criticism reigns.

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On Wednesdays and Saturdays, Josh would drive to Boston with the distributor from Maine. His name was Dean, and he was originally from L.A. He took great pride in this, referring to “Cali” as often as possible. I often wonder how he managed to avoid detection as long as he did; Emerson is close enough to Massachusetts where he wouldn’t have been a complete freakshow, but he must have stuck out like a sore thumb in his small town in northern Maine. Dean was around Josh’s age, but there was a sensation to him that was like fingernails on metal. Fingernails on a chalkboard are annoying, but fingernails on metal … that’s frightening. Dean scared the crap out of me.

Every Tuesday and Friday nights, Dean would come down and spend the night on the living room couch. He and Josh would leave around the same time I left for the bus stop in the morning, always in Josh’s car, always with Josh driving. Josh had a police record, yeah, but there was humanity in his eyes where Dean’s were like black pits. If a cop pulled Dean over, he would likely get bad vibes and search the car. Josh always drove.

Because Dean gave me the creeps, I made myself scarce the nights he stayed. To give Josh credit, I don’t think he liked Dean any more than I did, but something had changed in my brother. He’d once been a ragtag kid dealing weed, small potatoes in the great scheme of things. He drank Pabst, wore his hair in dreadlocks, and slummed around in jeans, thermal tops under tie-dyed t-shirts, and sneakers. It was Dean who got Josh’s foot in the door, so to speak. After Dean came into the picture, Josh got a haircut and started wearing outfits that cost more than his entire weekly paycheck from Dunkin’ Donuts. With Dean came the Volkswagen Jetta and the spacious apartment. The exchange, of course, was Josh’s ability to transport huge quantities of drugs across state lines without getting caught. In his Gap ensembles and college-boy car, Josh looked perfectly innocuous. Dean was a biweekly irritation that Josh had to put up with to reap the benefits of the life he’d chosen.

One July night when I was thirteen, the door to my bedroom opened, awakening me. I didn’t think too much of it at first; although we never spoke of it, there were a lot of nights that Josh came into my room and crashed on the floor. I didn’t mention the tears I heard him cry on those nights, and he didn’t mention the vomit I cleaned off the floor the following mornings. The fact that the dribs and drabs of Josh’s nocturnal visits were now Glenlivet instead of cheap beer didn’t change their frequency, nor did it lessen the ferocity of the secret tears that he could only seem to cry near me.

When my single sheet was yanked away, I opened my mouth to cry out, but a hand mashed down over my lips and Dean’s voice said, “If you make a sound, I’ll kill you.”

Rape is just a word. It’s defined in the dictionary as The unlawful compelling of a woman through physical force or duress to have sexual intercourse and by Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as Carnal knowledge of a female without her consent. Boiling it down to that one word, that tiny little four-letter verb, cheapens what happened, almost makes light of it, takes away the physical agony, the emotional trauma, the ultimate horror of the situation.

But there it is. I was raped.

When he stood up after it was over, I saw blood that I knew was mine matting dark hair that he quickly pulled briefs over. I felt blood sticky on my thighs, and I felt a far more sinister wetness between my legs. The metallic taste and rush of saliva that precedes vomiting rose in my mouth, and I tried to stand but he pushed me back onto the bed. My stomach lurched and I dry-heaved, but nothing would come up, and he sat watching, laughing as I finally succeeded in regurgitating bile onto the front of the nightgown that he hadn’t bothered to remove.

“If you ever tell, I’ll kill you,” he said in a low voice. “You and your brother both.” He looked at me for a long time. “I’ll always own a part of you.” Then he left.

I didn’t move all night. I could smell vomit and blood and sweat and pain and fear. I didn’t get up, even to go to the bathroom, until I heard the front door close. I stumbled to the window and watched the black Jetta move down the street, Dean in the passenger seat. Alone, I stood in the shower until it ran cold, washing every inch of my body, reducing an almost-new bar of soap down to a little nub.

I was bleeding, so I stuck a maxi pad in my underwear and tried to tell myself that it was just my period. I threw away the nightgown that I’d worn the night before and the sheets that were on my bed. I took an aspirin because it hurt terribly to walk. I wanted to sit on the couch and watch television and not think about anything, but of course the couch was where Dean had slept. I flipped the cushions over and sprayed the entire couch with Formula 409, not caring if it ruined the fabric. Twice I picked up the telephone to call the police, and twice I returned it to its cradle. Before I told the police, I needed to tell Josh. I didn’t care what Dean had threatened, I honestly believed that Josh would be so angry that he would literally kill Dean.

I hid in my room when they returned that evening. I’d managed to take a small nap, but every sound seemed to be the bedroom door opening again. I listened to their small talk, held my breath when Dean walked by my bedroom to get to the bathroom, then let it out in relief when he passed by without making his presence known in a more forthcoming way. When the sky was completely dark, they walked outside to quickly and efficiently carry in boxes, divide them, then carry Dean’s share out to his clichéd dusty Maine pickup truck, where they fit neatly behind the seat.

When Dean had been gone for over an hour, I finally ventured downstairs. Josh was on the couch in front of the television set, a bottle of Sam Adams in his hand. “Hey,” he said, muting the TV with the remote control. “Where you been?”

“Josh,” I said. “Dean raped me last night.”

His hand tightened around the bottle, but otherwise he showed no emotion. He said nothing.

“Did you hear what I said?” I asked.

He nodded slightly and turned the sound back on.

“Josh!”

He turned the television off completely and snapped his head around. “There’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it, Susy, okay?”

I sat down, stunned. “I thought … the police …”

He laughed bitterly. “The police? And you’re supposed to be so smart.”

Five minutes passed. I watched the minute hand circle the clock on the wall. I said nothing. Josh said nothing. We didn’t look at each other.

“So that’s it, then,” I finally said.

“Yeah,” he replied shortly, standing up and heading toward his bedroom. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

Josh wouldn’t go to the police because it would be the same as announcing, “Hey, guys, I’m a drug dealer.” Money and power were more important to him than me. I considered running away, but there was really nowhere to go. I finally came up with three courses of action that I followed grimly until my brother and several of his associates, including Dean, were busted and tried and sentenced to jail terms that basically took away their lives.

First, I went to the hardware store and bought a top-of-the-line deadbolt. The old man working behind the counter showed me how to install it. He was very friendly and made silly jokes about my little sister reading my diary. I didn’t bother to correct him, but I did thank him profusely for his assistance. If it wasn’t a deterrent, it was a message, to Josh as well as to Dean: you come into my space again, I’m calling the police.

One of the good things about Emerson is that there’s a pretty good public bus system, mostly because of the town’s proximity to the university in Durham. That made my next stop that much easier, especially since the clinic was less than a quarter mile from where the bus dropped me off; walking was still pretty painful. A nurse gave me a gown to change into, and soon enough a doctor, thankfully female, came in. I stared at the wall the entire time that she looked and poked and swabbed. She informed me that the swabs were for the purpose of testing for the presence of any STDs. She gave me a prescription for a powerful antibiotic, just in case, then sent me to the lab to get blood drawn for an HIV test. She told me to make sure I set up an appointment in three months for a repeat HIV test, again just in case. She asked about my last menstruation, but what thirteen-year-old keeps track of that? She did tell me to return for a pregnancy test if I wasn’t menstruating in a month. I refused their repeated requests that I speak with a rape counselor. I made the three-month lab appointment on the way out. My period started the next week, and all of the tests came back negative, including the three-month HIV test. That was that.

And that was really my third course of action. I’d been raped. That was that. I hadn’t suffered any permanent physical damage, I hadn’t contracted any diseases, and I wasn’t pregnant.

That was that.