The movie had long since finished and the DVD player shut itself off, leaving the TV with only a blue, empty screen. Holly had dozed off even before it ended, her head cradled by a cushion she had purposely put halfway on my lap. I looked down at her affectionately, then shook her lightly.
“C’mon, Holly, I’ll take you home.”
She half-pulled herself off the sofa and blinked at me a few times. Then she dove back onto the cushions, wrapping her arms tightly around her pillow.
Great, I thought ruefully. “Wake up!” I said again, shaking her.
“Mmfggh!” she mumbled through the pillow.
“What’d she say?” Brent asked blearily from the table in the kitchen. He had extracted himself from his room since he couldn’t sleep and watched the movie with us. But he looked on the verge of dozing off at this point.
“I think that was a ‘No, I’m not going anywhere!’” I answered. I gave an exasperated sigh. “What am I going to do with her?”
“Why not just leave her there and cover her with a blanket?” Brent yawned. “She’s not hurting anything.”
I took about a second to think about it, then answered. “You know how bitchy she is anyway. Do you really want to deal with her in the morning? Ouch!” I flinched away as Holly, apparently awake enough to defend herself, pinched me. I looked down at her, snuggled against my leg, a half smile on her face. Of course, I added to myself as I ran my hand gently through her hair, that’s one of her good points.
“Well, you can tell me about the fight in the morning. Night.” Brent trudged off to the bathroom.
He turned the light out and the TV off, but I didn’t move. After a few minutes I heard the toilet flush and the door to his room creak open, but still, I didn’t move. It was really kind of nice, sitting there in the dark, Holly beside me, completely silent except for her breathing. But it was almost five in the morning, and even I was getting tired.
“You awake?” I whispered.
Holly didn’t even murmur a response, too fast asleep to even notice.
The hell with it, I thought. Gently, I rolled her over and, one arm under her shoulder and the other under her knees, I picked her up. She muttered something incoherent and tightened her grip on the cushion. “You can keep it.” I said softly, walking her to my bed.
* * *
“Hey.”
I pried one eye open to find Holly’s face right beside mine.
“Morning,” she said, smiling gently.
I groaned and sat up. “What time is it?”
“Almost noon. I’m hungry.” She put her hands on her hips. I noticed she had slept in one of my t-shirts. “You didn’t have to sleep on the couch, you know.”
“Well, you had the bed.”
“So? Lots of friends sleep together. Uh… I mean,” she stuttered, before I could get a smart remark in, “sleep in the same bed. Like on road trips and at conventions and stuff. And nothing happens. Especially,” she added, “if they sleep in their clothes.”
I straightened my rumpled shirt. “Whatever.”
“Anyway, can we get something to eat already?”
I rolled my eyes. “Look, its way too early to be talking about breakfast. Can’t you just go back to sleep.”
“Look,” she answered, “some of us are diurnal.”
I frowned, but she had me there. “Tell you what; why don’t you go take a shower, and you can wake me up when you’re done. You know where the towels are, right?”
“Hmmph!” she said. I couldn’t tell whether she was actually mad or just pretending to be. “Fine, I guess I’ll go take my hot shower then.”
I watched her walk off and then rolled over, closing my eyes again. “By the way,” she called from the hallway. “You better be up when I get out or I’ll pour cold water on you.”
Holly didn’t pour cold water on me, which was good. What she did do was to drag me, quite literally, off the sofa. I think she would have even dragged me to the shower, had I let her.
Breakfast was a sticky matter. There was nothing in the refrigerator, and most places stopped serving breakfast sometime around ten. I wasn’t about to risk Waffle House, so we ended up at Marty’s Diner, a questionable establishment I’d normally avoid, and ordered lunch. She got some kind of soup and salad, barely enough food, and I ordered a hamburger, the cheapest thing they had on the menu.
“See,” she said, once the waiter left, giving me her most charming smile. “I’m not bitchy in the morning.”
“Oh… You mean you remember that?” I said, feeling a little nervous. Well hell, she didn’t seem mad. “Well, from the way you act at Baskin Robbins…
She waved her hand. “That’s BR, and those are BR customers, whose IQ’s apparently drop about a hundred points when they order ice cream.”
I couldn’t help but grin at her. “How in the world do you not get fired?”
She shrugged. “Nothing big. Whenever anyone complains, whoever answers just tells them I’m a schizophrenic, and that BR is supporting a movement to get the mentally ill into the workplace. Then they just feel too guilty to keep complaining.”
I laughed out loud. “And they let you get away with this?”
She looked a little embarrassed. “Well, I am a manager. And besides, we all agree they deserve it.” I gave her a skeptical look. “Anyway,” she said, sensing she was on unstable ground, “how’d the movie end?”
I grinned. “What? And spoil it for you? Why’d you fall asleep before it ended?”
She shrugged, but her face turned red. “I was comfortable.”
You mean using me for a pillow? I gave her a smug grin. “ ‘They lived happily ever after.’ ”
“I know that; that’s how all stories end. I want to know how it happened. So he wasn’t dead?”
I leaned back in my chair and kept the grin on my face.
“Tell me,” she complained. “So was he just faking, what?”
I gave her a shrug. She glared at me. “Well, you should have stayed awake,” I said, nonchalantly.
“I was tired.” She faked a sulk, tracing patterns in the water from her glass onto the table. “And you were comfortable.”
“That’s hardly and excuse,” I teased. “Maybe I should have just taken you home.”
Her finger hesitated. When she spoke, she didn’t look back up, but it sounded like her smile was gone. “Yeah, maybe I should have just gone home.”
The catch in her voice made me pause. Did I say something wrong, I wondered. Aloud, I forced a laugh, trying to make a joke. “I mean, if you were just going to fall asleep on me…” I didn’t finish the punch line. “Holly?”
She looked up at me. Her eyes glistened and her mouth was tight.
“Is something wrong?”
She shook her head. “No, no. I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine, obviously, but it didn’t seem like she was going to tell me what the problem was. I went back to focusing on my water, waiting for her to say something. She didn’t, just kept looking at the table, tracing water with her finger, until the food came. Then, at least, I had the meal to focus on, but she still hadn’t spoken. By the time I finished lunch, I was tired of the silence. “Holly…” I began.
“What?” she snapped at me. I bit back what I was going to say. Holly gave me her worst glare. “Well?”
“Nothing,” I muttered under my breath. Dammit girl, pick an emotion!
She went back to stabbing at her salad. Me, I just watched in confusion until I caught the waiter’s attention and signaled for the check. He brought it by and dumped it on the table. “I’ll get it,” I said, standing up.
“No,” she said suddenly, reaching over. I looked at her, surprised. “No, I’ll pay for mine.” Now she sounded contrite. What the hell? And why would she suddenly be throwing down money? We usually just traded off who paid.
The ride home was just as awkward as the meal. I briefly considered going back to my apartment and forcing her to talk, but then decided that would probably only make things worse, as stubborn as she is. When we got to her apartment complex, I parked the car and shut it off. When she reached for the door I hit the lock button. She stopped, surprised, then looked over at me.
“Do you mind explaining to me what the problem is?” she didn’t say anything, and I was getting angry. “Look, if it’s about the comment about taking you home…
She shook her head. “No, no that wasn’t it.”
“Look, it was a joke.”
“That wasn’t it,” she said again.
“Then what the hell was it!” I actually shouted. I don’t think I’ve ever actually been mad at her enough to shout before.
“I… I…” Her countenance crumbled, and I saw a few tears fall before she unlocked the door and bolted.
I watched her flee to her door, then I re-started my car and drove back home.
Well, shit. I thought.
”Comment
I have had an epiphany that I’m sure others have already had. But I would like to share this one with you, anyway.
The question of “What use does literature serve?” isn’t a new one. Back in 1579, Sir Philip Sidney wrote “In Defense of Poesy”, an argument for the virtue of fictional literature. Because pre-dating that time, it was seen simply as fluffy entertainment, of no real value in and of itself.
My, how things have changed.
Still, if you’re not working on “high” art, you sometimes find yourself having to justify the relevancy of what you’re working on. Sometimes, “entertaining” simply isn’t enough. I remember going rounds in high school with a friend of mine over this, especially since I was working in a fantasy novel at the time, and he was challenging me as to why he should take it seriously.
I don’t know if I ever really produced an answer that satisfied him. Or that satisfied me, for that matter.
I saw a poster in high school that always resonated with me. It said, roughly paraphrased: “I read to see that I am not alone. And I write to show others that they are not alone.” At the time, I was a properly angsty, emo teenager and I instantly realized why I had been drawn to so many of the books I had been reading, that as I read through them, the author shared something with me and, somehow, made me feel not alone.
As a writer, I feel I have acquitted myself well on that score, at least concerning 1001Insomniac Nights . (Which if you’re not reading it, you SHOULD.) And when I write fantasy, I hope that I am giving my readers a reflection of the world, that I am giving them something to think about. I don’t know if I succeed, although simply telling a good yarn is usually satisfactory.
My epiphany, however, concerns science-fiction.
Now, this is one genre that, since high-school and reading Fahrenheit 451, I realized would never need to justify itself. Science-fiction is modern prophecy, a warning. “If you continue on this path, this is where you will end up.” The whole cyberpunk sub-genre is a critique of 80’s culture. Go back and read Brave New World and see if you don’t feel a shiver go down your spine when you realize just how close we are to becoming that hedonistic, self-centered, amoral world.
But even on top of that, there is the inspirational factor, and that was my epiphany. Science-fiction points to the sky and asks you, “Why not?” It paints a future of interstellar travel and other life and challenges you, challenges the whole human race, to make that future a reality. And really, that’s all the justification it needs. If Star Trek pseudo-science makes a child interested in interplanetary travel, if that child is then drawn to sciences in school, and if that child then grows up and figures out how to construct a nuclear-fusion based engine that gets us to near light-speed and a probe to Alpha Centauri in six-years, hasn’t it justified itself? And with the Constellation program now cut, this inspiration just became even more important.
Of course, can’t this inspiration be found in all genres? That’s the crux of Sidney’s argument – that fiction can inspire a person to virtue. Human advancement and development has always been pushed by inspiration. And if a fantasy can inspire a person to seek to make the world a better place, this isn’t that justification enough?
So, while pondering the usages of twitter as an advertising tool, I wondered whether or not “web-serial” could justify its own hashtag. So I do a search for it – and find entries. And somewhere among these entries, I see reference to a wiki-page. A WIKI-PAGE! And go check on it.
And sure enough, there’s a new wiki-page. New because there was already a wiki-page in 2003 or 2004-ish, thanks to an enterprising friend of mine, which mentioned that I exist. But I digress.
Anyway, so on said wiki-page, there’s links to web-pages that are devoted to reviewing and linking web-serials.
So I go to the first two, I’m sure there’s more to find and I’ll do that some other night, and of course I submit my web-serial to be approved to be linked.
But it’s dumb-founding, to be honest. When I first started 1k1in, there was nothing on ‘net about web-serials. I think there was one other that popped up around the same time. But for the most part, no one had heard of, nor read, a web-serial. And now, seven years later, it’s here. Wiki pages, web-serials, reviewers, everything. Where the hell was everyone, seven years ago.
Here’s a free tip to all aspiring writers: If you want your readers to love your characters, you better love them too. Because your reader will know. Believe me, they will know.
This was the lesson Holly taught me, in all her passion and charm. When I was writing 1001 Insomniac Nights, Holly was my favorite character. And in the end, she was the favorite characters of my readers, too. When you love a character, it will come out in your writing, and your reader cannot help but love them, too.
Who is Holly? Well, for starters, she’s the hot-tempered manager of the local Baskin Robbins. She does not suffer fools lightly and occasionally acts without really thinking through the consequences. But she has the confidence, and personality, to pull it off. She also won’t hesitate to toss an ice-cream cone at you, if you really, really deserve it.
I have a Twitter account! Follow me.
Okay, now that that’s out of the way, I had an epiphany a few days ago. It was the realization that one of 1001 Insomniac Nights‘ strengths is, if you’ll forgive me a little preening, the myriad of funny one-liners. I’m fairly sure I can find at least good one in every post. So sure, in fact, that I’m going to start a little weekly advertising tradition.
Every Friday morning, after the weekly post goes up, I’m going to “tweet” my favorite one-liner in the story along with a link to the post. And if you like the one liner, or the post, or just the web-serial in general, “re-tweet” the one liner. And if you find a line in there you like more, well, tweet that one instead.
I’m a firm believer in “word of mouth” advertising. Almost every book I ever loved was recommended to me by a friend first. And I’m hoping that people will like 1001 Insomniac Nights enough to recommend it to friends.
So – If you love it, re-tweet it.
The confessions of a semi-successful author
This was brought to my attention. It’s a the story of a mid-list author who was almost more, who only sold 10,000 copies of a book that, 10 years later, was still being brought to readings by people telling her how much it changed their lives. It’s about her almost success and the fight to survive as a writer afterward. It’s a must read for any and all aspiring authors. It’s brilliant, informative, and eye-opening. And utterly, utterly heart-breaking.
Even a day later, it’s still haunting me. Trying to sort out my thoughts on the article is like trying catch a cloud. It raises questions, and good ones, about the fate of publishing, the fate of mid-list authors.
I’ve often theorized that publishing is such a bitter industry because every agent and editor has had their heart broken at least once. That they’ve all found a book they loved, found one that they got printed, but watched crash and burn as society yawned and kept going. And I do think that’s why publishers are often so afraid to take risks. Because they’ve all seen sure-fire best-sellers go nowhere. And too many grand slams have come out of nowhere, that no one could have guessed would succeed.
It’s a little disheartening, but at the same time, it’s a bit of a healthy reality check. Everyone has always warned me that writing, and any of the arts, is a mean, mean industry.