Calling it.

Okay so yeah this is going to be a 'here's where I'm at' post instead of a 'here's the awesome thing I've done' post. Sorry guys :(

Basically I've been working on this for most of the weekend, and it's just not done at all. The story was about 4000 words when I picked it up again this week, and since then it's grown to about 8300, and I STILL HAVE a whole bunch of other ideas for things to throw in there. But also I've been reading it through and editing a bit and realizing that what I have at the moment is just not close enough to the original thing I had in my head for me to be happy sharing it yet. Here are the basic problems with it:

1. Stream of consciousness overboard.

I love Eric to bits. At least I did when I started this. But even I'm getting a bit bored of reading every thought that comes into his head. This is probably also the reason this is threatening to push 10,000 words right now when the entire story takes place over two and a half days and not all that much actually happens.

2. Too much Eric, not enough of anyone else.

I feel like I have a really clear sense of Lydia and a handful of these other characters, but they don't really come through in the text because Eric is so stuck in his own head all the time. I need him to be less self-interested and more observational. This is hard to do, because I feel like he's telling us a story about something important that happened to him and so obviously HIS experience of it is going to be the one that emerges most saliently, but that doesn't mean that everyone else's should be absent entirely. I think this requires some more thought about WHY he's telling the story. So far I've mainly been thinking about what he has taken away from the experience of it, but the question that should also be asked is what he hopes to take from revisiting these memories in the place he's in now.

3. Too many ideas!

D: There's stuff about memory and childhood and weird thought patterns and fantasies and literary references and social anxiety and relationships, and then there's the actual action of the thing, and the aftermath (which I haven't even written/figured out yet) and I'm having a hard time telling which parts of it are integral to my intentions and which parts will actually mean anything to the reader. Hopefully you guys can help me out with that when I do eventually post a draft.

So this is what I'm going to do. Tonight I'm posting a series of excerpts, in the order they appear in the text, with quite a lot of material omitted between them, so that you can get a general sense of the story, if you care to read it. Sometime next week, probably sunday at midnight, I hope to post an actual finished ('finished' being a relative term here) draft of this thing. And if I can't do that, I'll just post whatever I have and we'll move on from it, because I have lots more unfinished things and many many projects to be getting on with.

Well, here we go then!

Sometimes I’m not sure my brain works the same way as everyone else’s.

                  When I look back on things sometime after they happen, it seems like I just remember the most random stuff about them. Like the song that was in my head at the time or the fact that my shoes were untied. The only memory I have of 9/11 is that nine of the kids in my class that day were wearing red tops. I can barely even remember talking about it. It makes me worry sometimes that someday I’ll be old and looking back on the stuff that’s happening to me now, the actual important real-life adult stuff, and all I’ll be able to remember is the way some girl kept clicking her neck in front of me on the bus or something.

                  I guess I kind of drift off a lot, and maybe while everyone else is freaking out about terrorism and whatever I’m just thinking about the colour red and how it’s such a weird choice when you know you’re coming to school that morning and Mrs Edwards said just like two weeks ago that they’ve done studies that show blues and greens are the most calming, creative colours and red is just likely to distract you from whatever it is you’re meant to be doing. And then I start thinking about whether they would say that the thoughts I’m having right now are proving them right about that, and how they even test something like that in the first place, and who they are and what colour shirts they were wearing when they were deciding what the best colour shirt was and what colour the men in the planes were wearing when they decided to fly them into the towers.

                  It used to get me in trouble in class, doing that. I kept missing questions and having to ask for things to be repeated for me. Mum kept saying I would grow out of it but I never really seemed to, and even when I got to high school teachers were still writing things in my reports about how I drifted off and didn’t pay attention in class. I got kind of worried about it for a while, just because I didn’t really know how to stop it, but mum said as long as I got good grades I could drift off wherever I wanted.

                  In high school I used to sit in the middle of the class, partly so I wouldn’t spend the whole of English looking out the window, and partly because four days out of five I knew I’d be sitting directly behind Lydia Pattinson. Sometimes she wasn’t there, but I didn’t mind that much. Honestly it was probably kind of good for my work ethic.

                  Lydia Pattinson had been in the same classes as me since we were like eight and she was all short and spritely with this blonde ponytail that would bounce behind her while she ran. Then at some point she kind of grew up and changed. I don’t mean physically, really, because she was still kind of small and wiry even in then, but when we were fourteen she’d cut her hair all short and started dying it weird unnatural colours. She had these big dangly hoop earrings she used to wear all the time for a while until the administration said they were a dress code violation and she had to take them off. Then she looped them round a chain and wore them as a necklace and said she was a Satanist and they were a religious artefact and they couldn’t make her take them off because it’d be religious discrimination. I heard she got suspended for that one.

                  Lydia’s not actually a Satanist, obviously. I don’t know what she is, except maybe an anarchist. But that’s not the point. What I wanted to say is that sometimes, when she’d come into class after I did, she’d be laughing at something one of her friends said and I’d see like a shade of her real smile under the one she put on for all of them, and in the light sometimes I could see little flecks of blonde in the pink of her hair, and sometimes – not often, but often enough- she would look at me as she walked past my seat, and for a second it felt like everything was going back to the way it used to be.

                  So this one day I was sitting in English listening to everyone talking and laughing at each other and waiting for Miss Lee to start clapping her hands at us like she always did when the bell had rung and we still hadn’t quieted down, and then Lydia and her friends came in.

                  There were four of them that I remember, and a couple more that could’ve been spliced in there without it making much of a difference, if you know what I mean. It was one of those dynamics where everyone is kind of vaguely their own person, but at the same time if one of them went away for a couple of weeks and then came back again nothing much would change. Like the friendships seemed to just close up around their absences and then make room for them again like it didn’t really matter either way. I used to wonder what that would feel like, if the people you talked to pretty much every day seemed to carry on and do everything just as well if you didn’t. I wouldn’t have known, because my mum was the only person I really talked to with that kind of regularity back then. I know that sounds kind of pathetic, but it’s not like I didn’t have friends. I did. I just didn’t cling to them all the time. I was fine just talking to people once or twice a week.

                  But not Lydia. Or not her friends, at least. I got the feeling that Lydia might actually be the kind of person who spends a lot of time in her head, even when she’s with other people, because it often seemed like she wasn’t listening to whatever her friends were saying to her. But her friends had this way of coming into the room and leaving without ever talking to anyone except each other, and it sort of made the rest of us seem like we were just extras waiting for the main cast to come onto the set or something and nothing anyone else said actually mattered except to fill in the gaps around their lives. And weirdly enough Lydia was in the middle of all that. Lydia was a special case, even within the group. She had a sort of hold over everyone else. The way she say leaned back in her chair, with her mouth just slightly open and her tongue between her teeth like it was holding something down. If she ever actually said something, or her fake laugh turned into a real one, everyone shut up for a minute and listened.

                  Lydia walked purposefully and she got to her seat a few seconds before the rest of them. She brushed against my desk on the way. She slouched way back in her chair straight away and the back of her pink head came ever closer.

                  Becky, her best friend I guess, was talking with Leon and James. Leon and Lydia had kind of a thing, you could say. I was never really sure what was going on there because half the time Lydia seemed to be totally mad at him, but then, half the time Lydia seemed mad at everyone, so that didn’t necessarily hold any weight. I don’t know. I just remember seeing them hold hands one day through a crowd and feeling my stomach sink way down like it was filling up with water.

                  Anyway Leon and James and Becky came and took the seats around Lydia, still talking about some party and how it was going to be totally legendary and epic and whatever. Leon had his hand on her knee and he was sort of stroking it like she was a cat or something. She didn’t look at him, but she didn’t shrug him off either. Becky was leaning over Lydia, laughing too loudly at everything Leon said. Lydia kept just staring at her nails, flicking bits of polish off onto the floor.

                  I was sort of watching all that out of the corner of my eye while I scratched at the graffiti engraved on my desk. I don’t remember what it said, just that it always seemed a little deeper and bigger every time I sat down there and looked at it, and as soon as I stood up to leave again I pretty much stopped thinking about it. Anyway Leon was going on and on about this dumb end-of-days party since it was just about the end of the school year by then, and he kept nudging Lydia like she was supposed to back him up or something, and all around the room everyone was still having their own conversations but you could tell they were all speaking a little softer so they’d be able to listen in on this one as well. And Lydia was sighing and tensing a little every time Leon touched her. Which was a lot.

                  And then the world stopped and she spun around in her seat and suddenly the front side of her face was staring directly back at me.

                  ‘Hi Eric,’ she said, her blue nails clutching the back of her seat.

                  ‘Uh. Hi…’

                  She glanced down and back up, like she was forcing herself not to smile or laugh at me or something. She passed and continued seriously, ‘you planning on doing anything tomorrow night?’

                  Tomorrow night. Friday night. So…

                  ‘No. Uh. I mean – well no, nothing,’ I stuttered.                 

                  Leon, who had been watching the whole awkward exchange, turned back around in his chair and shook his head at the floor.

                  ‘Well then. On behalf of Leon and, I’m sure, the rest of the droogs, I would like to cordially invite you to squat with us in Leon’s parents’ disgusting basement and drink insipid homebrews until entirely inebriated.’

                  I think I just stared at her for a couple of seconds then.

                  ‘Sure,’ I said eventually. I probably said it less smoothly and less confidently, but for the sake of the story let’s just say it went down like that. Let’s also say Lydia grinned at me, then, and turned back around, and let’s say Leon’s hands were kept firmly to himself all through the rest of English. It might not be true, but I was honestly so happy I might not have even noticed.

*The next day*

In History when we were supposed to be writing paragraphs about the French Revolution I was doing this thing I do where I go back over particular words in a sentence and fix up the letters that I wrote too quickly so they look right to me, and thinking about the kinds of bonds that seemed to spring up between people and the ways things had changed since primary school when ‘going out’ with someone just meant sitting next to them in class and grabbing their hand and maybe the ocassional, pitiful sort of attempt at a kiss if you could find time when no one was looking at you before you both got picked up at the end of the day. I had never had that, back in the day. Maybe that was what made it seem sometimes like it’d be enough even now that we were older and more mature and whatever. Then I thought about what it would feel like to be someone like one of Lydia’s kind-of-friends and build up these fast, intense relationships that seem to burn up and explode just as quickly as they develop. I thought it might be like that thing that happens sometimes when you dream up a really good idea for a novel or a movie or something and then find out some has already written pretty much the same thing. Like letting yourself imagine you have something really amazing and then beating yourself up when it turns out to not be real.

I was still thinking about that when the bell rang and we all rushed to stand up and push each other on the way out the door. I had my head down and I was looking at all of our feet when somebody elbowed me.

It was Lydia’s friend Becky. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘You still coming tonight?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. I couldn’t remember if she’d ever talked to me before.

‘Cool,’ she said. ‘Well, I’ll see you there!’

She started to turn back into the crowd.

‘Becky!’

She turned back around. ‘Yeah?’

‘Do you know where Lydia is today?’

She didn’t hear any of what I said because the hall was so full of people and everyone around us was moving. She mouthed ‘what?’ and I tried to raise my voice and said ‘Where’s Lydia?’

She shrugged, and then she said ‘away, I guess,’ as if I’d asked about someone she never spoke to or thought about instead of her best friend. She took a couple of steps backwards while she smiled goodbye at me and then turned and disappeared.

I walked up the hill a bit behind the crowds of other people who went home the same way and crossed the street and walked a bit further until I actually was on my own. I was going into a part of the suburb my mum described as a bit ‘rough round the edges’, unless she was talking to a client who could only afford something in that part of town, in which case she said it was ‘full of characters’. I told her the only characters I ever saw around there were kids who’d dropped out of school and started roaming the streets and having kids of their own. She said ‘Erky, don’t ever bring that stuff up when I’m trying to make a sale, okay?’ I said no one would do that unless they were totally idiotic. And she said she would’ve said the same thing about hanging out in that area in one’s spare time, but she didn’t seem to be able to stop me doing that. Which was a fair point.

But it wasn’t that I ‘hung out’ there exactly. I was always just passing through. It’s just that I pass through places more slowly than most people.

The liquor store – the only one I knew of – was almost half an hour away from school. Leon’s house was twenty minutes away from school but in the other direction and going back to school was the only way I knew how to get there, so I was going to be more than an hour late, but I figured it would take at least that long for anything to get going anyway, and I didn’t want to have to stretch my limited range of conversational topics any further than I had to, so I was walking slowly. No one else was around. There were a couple of too-skinny, underdressed kids sitting on the corner looking like the opening scene of an episode of 20/20. They looked up at me and stopped talking as I went past, but we didn’t say anything to each other. I didn’t see anyone else on the way there. Actually, I’m not sure if I didn’t see anyone or if I just don’t remember seeing anyone, or if there was no one there to see or if there was and I just didn’t notice them. I guess it doesn’t make a difference.

I got to the liquor store and tried to walk in without looking like I’d just stood outside for two minutes psyching myself up. The man behind the counter nodded at me and I gave a little wave, and then felt stupid for waving, but he was already looking down at his newspaper again.

I went straight to the stuff I recognised. I knew if I was going to be drinking at all, the only thing I would be kind of alright with were the flavoured 5% vodka things that came in shades of dark red and and green and looked like some kind of cordial. I also knew that no other self-respecting dude was going to be seen at the party with one of those in his hand. That’s something I never really got. I feel like if it’s a distinctly male mentality to make yourself suffer through whiskey or beer or something else you secretly hate just for the sake of looking good, knowing you’re eventually going to consume so much that it makes you look stupid anyway. But I didn’t think that now was necessarily the time to start contesting gender politics, so I just found a cheap six pack of beer and went with that.

My heart was pounding when I went up to the counter, and I hated myself for that. I swallowed down my saliva, thining about how any of the other guys at school had probably been doing this for at least the last year without feeling like the world was going to fall apart if they made too little eye contact or stuttered or something. I feel like that even when I’m not breaking the law sometimes, but that day it was a whole lot worse.

‘Hey,’ said the guy.

So... is that okay? I hope that's okay D: I didn't include any of the stuff from when he's actually at the party, and there's no real ACTION as of yet, but you can kind of see where it's headed and guess at what's going to happen. Or at least at what Eric thinks is going to happen.

If you have any ideas about how I can combat the problems I mentioned above, please leave them in the comments! General feedback and encouragement is also welcomed. I hope you'll all be patient with me here (I'm sure you will). I just need a bit of time to get into the swing of things and figure out what's realistic for me. Thanks for reading!