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Nineteen is a tough age to be.
It's not as tough as being twelve or thirteen. Those years were rough--you're transitioning into your teenage years. You're not sure what's expected of you. Part of you still wants to be a kid, most of you doesn't, but all of you is rather frightened of what's happening in your life. You have more responsibilities as you go into high school. I got my first phone and was finally allowed to stay home alone for extended periods of time. But as tough as being a teenager was, being an adult is a lot harder. Taxes. Laundry. Dishes. Housecleaning. Meal planning. Managing finances. Going to college or having a job or both. Not to mention the social aspect. Having friends as a teenager was tough enough. But having friends as a young adult? My college friends live at least forty-five minutes away, and not all of my church friends have their driver's licenses yet. And then, of course, you've got the whole family situation. At the moment, my aunt and uncle are in town from Chicago, and we're hosting a dinner party in their honor. Now, don't get me wrong, they're great people and I'm glad they're here. In fact, the majority of my family is pretty cool. But the majority of my family is also in their sixties, which narrows the topics of conversation around the dinner table to health problems, politics, and home remodeling. I smile. I nod. My dad brings up Trump's response to the Coronavirus and complains about the governor of New York for the third time. I start to tune out. But no. I'm an adult now. I'm supposed to care about politics. I might crack a joke or make a snarky comment, but for the most part, I'm quiet. Eating my dinner roll. Listening. We get some news about another relative. That's a welcome change of subject. But it doesn't last long. The topic of conversation shifts to the natural doctor most of my family sees and all the supplements he prescribes. I'm an adult. I can't excuse myself and run upstairs and play computer games no matter how much I want to. Can I bring my knitting downstairs? Is that socially acceptable? Of course, if I'm lucky, we'll run out of seats in the good dining room, and I'll be shipped off to the eat-in kitchen. It might just be me and my little sister. We might be joined by a few younger cousins, if their dad decides to bring them. That wouldn't be too bad, actually. I'd rather talk about dogs and online schooling and little league than hydroxychloroquine and sump pumps and crown molding. Well, enough complaining. I'll buck up and do what's expected of me. Sit and visit like a normal adult, chat and crack jokes and whatnot. It's a growing experience. Next time will be easier, hopefully. If I'm lucky. If you have any advice for making conversation, please leave it in the comment section below! God bless you, dear readers, and don't forget to review us on Amazon!
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--A parody of "Song" by Frank O'Hara
Is it messy does it look messy that's what you see in my bedroom does it just seem messy that's what you see in my bedroom you stay out of it don't you my friend comes over and we make a mess we promise to clean, we really do, yes, really we promise but we make a mess anyway that's what you see in my bedroom crushing polly pockets beneath your stockinged feet that's not a mess that's childhood and you make us clean up afterwards does it make us less messy. no we still have messes tomorrow you stay out of my bedroom don't you Good morning, dear readers! Or good afternoon, or good evening, depending on when you're reading this.
Mother's Day was this past weekend. It is a day of great sadness for most Disney characters and great happiness for a good deal of real-life people. Personally, I spent it with my own mother and grandmother. We went for a walk in the nearby park. Now, this is sort of a strange park. A good friend of mine refuses to go to this park unless she's accompanied by someone with a firearm because drug deals apparently happen there. I grew up across the street from a drug dealer (quite by accident, but you never know what sort of neighbors you'll have when you live near Chicago) so I'm a bit less wary. There's a splash park there. It's a lot of fun, especially when you're fully clothed and make a spur-of-the-moment decision to get wet anyway. Plus, watching little kids running through the sprinklers is always fun. There's also a normal park, which doesn't get used very often in the summer because we live in Texas and the world is too hot to enjoy unless it's six in the morning or you're at least partially underwater. There's also a .8-mile walking trail. Part of it is shaded, and it leads through some very scenic open fields. The best part of the walking trail, however, are the mulberry trees. It was only last year that I discovered the mulberry trees. I first noticed the horde of purple specks on the sidewalk. Then, I looked up to see a whole bunch of berries on about three consecutive trees. Red berries, purplish-black berries, green berries that looked quite a bit like caterpillars. I didn't know what they were, so I took out my cellphone and opened the handy-dandy Google app. I didn't die after eating them. And besides, 99% of composite (blackberry-esque) berries are edible. So cheers. It's always fun to pick berries. In fact, that's why I enjoyed growing tomatoes. I didn't like eating them--I still don't. But picking them was tons of fun. Picking mulberries with my mom was lots of fun. Making memories like that is kind of the point of life. It's the little things--watching the sun set while knitting, making little kids laugh, picking wildflowers--that add a little fun to life. What's something little that you enjoy doing? Let me know in the comments below! God bless you, dear readers, and don't forget to leave a review on Amazon! “If we had a dog, it would guard us,” I said. I’d wanted a dog since our last one died in a coyote fight, but Mom and Dad would never take us into town to get another one. Maybe they’d wanted to save it for a Christmas present, but from the looks of things, we weren’t having Christmas this year.
Mom shifted uncomfortably on the couch and rubbed her back for the fifth time since Dad left. “These are all good ideas, guys. I want you to write them all down while I go lie down for a bit. Listen to Daddy. Okay, Meg?” “Okay,” said Meg. Mom squeezed her and kissed her, and Meg ran off to play with the dolls I was quickly outgrowing. Mom went into her bedroom, which she didn’t do often now that the heat was out, and she stayed there for hours. Dad got dinner ready for us—a can of beans mixed with some ground-up venison, heated up over the fireplace and eaten with spoons and fingers since no one felt like washing forks. He took some to Mom, and he stayed in the bedroom for a long time. When he came out, he looked nervous. “Owen, Merryn, you’re in charge. Brooke, you’re my gopher. You know what that means?” Brook nodded. “It means I go for stuff.” “Right. I need you to go for some clean towels, and I want you to boil a knife and a pair of scissors. Can you do that?” “Are we having scissor soup?” Bennett asked. Dad didn’t answer and went back into the bedroom. I saw a glimpse of Mom through the open door. She was kneeling by the bed as if she was praying, her face buried in the mattress, one hand on her belly and the other squeezing a clump of the quilt. My heart caught in my throat before the door closed. Meg must have seen it too, because she grabbed my jeans. “What’s wrong with Mommy?” she asked. “Nothing.” I might have been lying. I didn’t know. Owen and I got a bunch of stuffed animals, and we helped the little kids put on a play with them. Normally, we didn’t like childish stuff like that. Today was different. We didn’t care. We played until eight o’clock, when we all took sponge baths with the warm water left over from the scissor soup. Then, since it was too dark to read and the fire was going down, Owen and Brooke and I took turns reciting poems and Bible verses and making up stories until the little ones fell asleep. Our voices covered the sound of Mom screaming into a pillow. The sound of Dad trying to comfort her. The sound of Dad’s voice growing gently louder, sterner, more afraid. The wind picked up just as the last story died down, covering the house in white and cold and silence. Good afternoon, dear readers! I'm going slightly crazy, so if this post is a bit disjointed, I apologize. So far today I've helped my sister with math homework, landscaped with my dad, picked up a print order at Office Depot, cut out and laminated a bunch of cards (I'll explain later), and cleaned about 60% of the house. I feel like I'm forgetting something. Oh well. Back to those cards. I'm about 90% sure that every writer shares one dream: the ability to take an entire wall and use it to plan out stories. I'm talking corkboards and red string. A magnetic whiteboard. Chalkboard paint. A mixture of two (or all three) of those things. We're creative. We like to think big. Being able to get ideas out of our heads and onto an entire wall is pretty sweet, too. So I bought a deck of cards. Not just any cards, mind you. I bought the Fabula storytelling deck. Except that I'm too cheap to spend $35 on the standard set, so I spent $22 on the digital download and another $3 to have Office Depot print them in color. I also don't have a laminator, so I'm using packing tape. It's working pretty well, actually.  Oh, and it was invented by some Italian guy. Shoutout to Italy, land of my ancestors and about five million different kinds of carbohydrates.
So these cards are pretty cool. Once you cut out and laminate them (if you're cheap like me), you stick them on your wall. It took me a while to find a decent wall to use. I ended up removing a whiteboard that I don't use for some reason. (The whiteboard was attached to my wall with some sort of adhesive that promised not to damage your paint. Guess what happened to my paint. I'm sorry, Dad.) Anyway, each card has a question on it. Some of them (the orange ones) highlight stages in The Hero's Journey. Things like "What's the hero's world like before the story starts?" and "Who helps them on their journey and how?" I don't usually think of my story in terms of The Hero's Journey, although it's a fairly standard storytelling structure. The good news is, most books fit into the structure or a variant of it. Each of those questions gets an answer, which you write on a sticky note and stick under the card. I'll go ahead and spill the beans: I'm working on a murder mystery. It bears no connections to the Clouds Aflame series. I'm only doing this because I've finished the rough draft of Clouds Aflame Book 3, and rough drafts need to sit for a few weeks (or months) before you go back and edit them. And, thanks to quarantine, I'm bored as all heck and need something to work on. Anyway, I'll go ahead and share what little I've got so far. The first card asks what the main character's ordinary life is like. I have written, in messy handwriting on an orange sticky note, the words "Kit Whitman is a journalist. He's poor and lonely. His long-distance girlfriend breaks up with him. {Currently he's working on a piece about the new Grand Lincoln Theatre.}" My notes, like my thoughts, aren't always in coherent English. I'll let you know when I've fully descended into the madness that is Planning Your Story On Your Bedroom Walls. I'll post pictures. What's the most creative way you've ever used a space? Let me know in the comments below! God bless you, dear readers, and don't forget to Like us on Facebook! I spent the next two weeks researching CMEs, never more thankful that we owned so many books. I found out that CME stood for Coronal Mass Ejection and that the electric grid, along with all the devices hooked up to it, had been destroyed.
Mr. Davis thought that the CME was actually an electromagnetic pulse bomb that one of our enemies dropped on us. Mom disagreed. The Russians would have just nuked us. The Middle East didn’t have EMP technology yet, and China had been so weakened by the recent fall of its communist regime that it could barely keep passenger jets in the air, much less a bomber. Most of our neighbors—if you could call them that—left for warmer climates before the temperatures really dropped. They left for the corn farms in Illinois, the fertile soil of the Ozarks. Anywhere but Wisconsin, where the snow heaped up so high it could bury entire houses. We stayed because of Baby Number Six, and Mr. Davis stayed because he was a Stubborn Old Coot, and a few other people might have stayed because they realized the gas stations would be full of inaccessible gasoline. We were huddled up by the fireplace one afternoon, after the mail run, when we heard gunshots from Mr. Davis’s house. Grabbing his rifle, Dad ran outside and was gone for at least an hour. When he came back, he was covered in blood and carrying a backpack full of bullets and firearms. Mom panicked, struggling like an overturned turtle to get out of her chair. “Jonathan! Lie down. What happened? Were you shot?” “Evelyn—it’s not my blood, Evelyn. Calm down.” Meg started crying and ran to Mom. She’d never seen so much blood before. Dad took off his parka and hung it on the doorknob. He’d wash the blood off later. “Someone broke into Ed Davis’s house. Ed’s dead. Thief’s dead. Everyone who didn’t have enough food to last the winter is getting desperate. We have to guard the house.” “How?” Owen asked. “We could make a bunch of traps like in Home Alone,” Brooke suggested. “We should hide the food,” Mom said. “Put it in the basement. It’s cold there anyway. It’ll keep longer.” Dad shook his head. “No, they could get in through the window well. Plus, the sump pump isn’t working, and it’s going to flood come spring. Maybe even sooner.” “Maybe we could make a sign for the front yard that says, ‘no thieves allowed,’” Bennett said. “Thieves don’t listen to signs, you idiot,” Owen snapped. “Owen,” Mom said, in that tone of voice that meant she wanted to kill you. “Apologize to your brother.” “Sorry, Benny. I have a confession to make.
You know how everyone's binge-watching Netflix right now? How the internet's going crazy over Carole Baskin and her husband? (Apparently The Tiger King is set in Oklahoma and, as a Texan who lives about 30 minutes from the Okie border, I'm not surprised.) I don't watch television that much. I've got my other vices. I spend too much time swiping through Instagram and browsing YouTube videos. I think I've played close to 200 levels of Candy Crush since quarantine started. I just won a hard level of Solitaire on my laptop. But Netflix? For some reason, I don't watch it very much. I tried watching the new Star Trek: Picard series. It has its good moments, I'll admit. But it's also super intense. People get sliced up. Picard himself is super old and dying of an incurable brain disease (not that he's told anyone about it). And when one of the characters attempted suicide for the good of the crew, I just about lost it. My hands were sweating from sheer terror. Anyway. In the evenings, when my parents are watching the news and my sister is killing zombies in PUBG, I tend to daydream. I heard that there's a new Marvel series coming out called "What If?". I don't know much about it, but I'm pretty sure it sees how things would play out if XYZ happened instead of ABC. Like, "What if Loki were in this situation instead of Captain America?" or "What if this person died?" I do that. But with my own books. Some of my alternate realities are pretty sad. What if Alynn had died in the Battle of Faith? What if (spoiler alert) she'd been poisoned instead of Drostan at the end of Where I Stand? Others are a lot happier--like, what if she hadn't fallen off the Darting Swallow in the first place? One of my favorite alternate realities is actually a mash-up of two different scenarios. First, fifteen-year-old Lukas McCamden decides to stay in Scotland rather than join St. Anne's Monastery. He gets married to a lovely girl named Everhild, and for a while, they live happily ever after. Unfortunately, the Norse massacre still happens. Lukas, worried about his friends, decides to go investigate. And, because Everhild is a particularly determined individual, she decides to go with him. They arrive at St. Anne's Monastery only to find everyone dead--and their ship torn to bits in Treacherous Landing. They have no choice but to live at St. Anne's Monastery. Things aren't so bad for the McCamdens. Lukas and Everhild have some kids and start to grow old together. And here's where the second "What if?" comes into play. Alynn is kidnapped by Konar instead of Caitriona. Lukas stumbles across Alynn trying to escape and takes her home to the monastery. Everhild loves her, of course, and they come to the decision that they're going to try and take her back to Limerick. They manage to get aboard a ship and make their way back home, where Alynn is reunited with her family. There's no point in going back to the Norse-infested St. Anne's Cleft, so Lukas and Everhild and their kids decide to stay in Limerick. They're hailed as heroes for bringing Alynn home, after all. Finally, surrounded by friends and family, Lukas and Everhild get their happily ever after. What's an alternate reality you'd like to suggest for Where the Clouds Catch Fire--or any book, really. Let me know in the comments below, and I might make a full-length story out of it! God bless you, dear readers, and don't forget to follow us on Twitter! Tonight, Dad said that we were The Remnant, and Bennett asked what that meant. He was five and always asking questions. Meg was three and she asked a lot of questions too, but Bennett’s questions were always more fun to answer.
“Well,” said Dad, “when World War Three wrapped up when I was a kid, there were two kinds of people left in the world. Most everyone decided that the only way to live was to stay under the government’s protection, so a bunch of federal- and state-commissioned communes popped up. But my parents, and your mom’s parents, both believed that the best way to live was in the middle of nowhere, where we’d be less of a target in case World War Four started up. “So little neighborhoods just like this started popping up in the woods of America. You’ve got across-the-street neighbors, and then you’ve got neighbors about two miles to each side of you, and you’ve got a backyard full of woods that’s about two thousand acres—plenty of land to hunt and farm on. And then when that solar flare happened, we ended up with better chances of survival than anyone else.” “What do you mean by ‘better chances’?” Brooke asked, twirling her honey-brown hair between her fingers. She was smart for an eight-year-old, and even Mom and Dad found it hard to keep secrets from her. “They say that ninety percent of Americans are going to die,” Dad said. “There’s a good chance we’re going to be in the ten percent left over. And that’s what makes us The Remnant.” I remembered the day the solar flare happened. Dad had been playing Monopoly with us in the living room when Mom called his name with terror in her voice. We all thought the baby was coming until she explained through tears that her computer had completely stopped working. We thought nothing of it until Owen said, “My phone’s dead.” His phone was plugged in. It had been for the past thirty minutes. We got Mom to stop crying over her computer (she was a children’s book author and all her stories were on it, so it was no easy task) and had Owen get the radio out of the attic. It was an antique radio from the 1980s; Mom and Dad had figured it would be worth a lot of money someday and were saving it to sell to a collector. That day, however, we took batteries out of the TV remotes and fiddled with the radio dials until we got a signal. “This just goes to show you, folks!” announced a man’s voice. “Everyone hustlin’ and bustlin’ about technology and productivity and crap like that. Now where’s it gotten you? Ninety percent of America’s population is going to die, just because you were too stupid, too self-centered, to plan for a CME. “And you knew it could happen, too! It wasn’t like this was some sort of unforeseen circumstance, no sir, you fools knew it could happen. You ignored it, and you laughed at those who didn’t. Well, have fun starving to death, because Leroy Hackensack and his family’s all hunkered down, ready to dominate the new world order!” And with that, he gave a cry of delight, and Mom turned off the radio I'm about to shock you with a strange but true fact.
I, a published author, send my college essays to the writing center for proofreading before submitting them. Well, at least sometimes. In one particular class--a class that's made me read nine entire novels this semester--I get extra credit if I submit my essays to the writing center. Since I'm persnickety about my grades, and because an extra eye certainly wouldn't hurt things, I go ahead and ship off my essays. I had two essays due this week. One of them was about gender in Henry James's novella Daisy Miller. Actually, it didn't have to be about gender. The professor let us pick the topic, and gender was one of the suggested ideas--because, you know, all books written before 1970 portray women as inferior and submissive, right? And it's important that college students understand the nuances of the patriarchy. (God forbid we're taught anything useful like how to write a resume or balance a checkbook.) I actually think that the females run the roost in Daisy Miller. In one scene, the titular character goes on a walk--scandalously--with not one, but two men. A better-mannered female friend drives up in a carriage and asks that Daisy come away with her to save her reputation. Daisy refuses, but one of the men capitulates. So much for the patriarchy. Anyway, that was the easy paper. The hard one was the one I shipped off to the writing center. The one I got a surprising amount of feedback on, because I simply gave up while writing it. The assignment went something like this: "Pick two or three of the five post-apocalyptic books we've read this semester, find a theme they all share, and write about it. And oh, by the way, you have to write about how COVID-19 has created an apocalyptic moment for you. (We don't care if the genetically engineered humans in Oryx and Crake give you anxiety. You're an adult. Deal with it.) Here's a page requirement and word count requirement that don't mesh with each other. Oh, and it's worth 30% of your grade for the class." (And the genetically engineered humans in Oryx and Crake DID bother me, thank you. Along with the child pornography, murder live streams, and freak-of-nature ChickieNobs. I echo the main character's cry of "F***ing Crake!") Sorry for ranting. I'm glad the semester's almost over. One teacher says we only have one more week of school; another teacher says we have two weeks. I don't know who to listen to. Confused is an understatement. I don't know what's going on in life at this point. The good news is, I was able to make a really fun parody of a poem in one of my other classes. I'll release it for you next Monday. What's the most ridiculous assignment you got in school? Let me know in the comments below! God bless you, dear readers, and don't forget to Like us on Facebook! Every day, Mom went out to check the mail. Dad tried to get her to stop. It was December; we needed to keep the door closed to conserve heat. She was eight months pregnant with Baby Number Six; she needed to rest more. But Mom wouldn’t listen to him, even though the mail hadn’t come in two weeks and it wasn’t coming again for the foreseeable future. So, when all else failed, Dad decided to make it a family affair.
Every day at two o’clock, we would wrap ourselves in every scrap of clothing we could find and run outside. Even inside we wore our winter coats and at least two pairs of pants. Even Owen, who at thirteen wanted to be as manly as possible, had borrowed a pair of Mom’s workout leggings to wear under his jeans. But when we went outside, all the clothes we owned went on. Gloves beneath mittens. Snow bibs. Hats underneath our hoods. We had to stay as warm as possible, because there were no vents blowing hot air or faucets delivering warm water to warm us up. When we’d go outside, Meg and Bennett would immediately start running around and playing in the snow. Sometimes, Brooke and Owen would join them—Brooke because she was young enough, and Owen because he was a boy and boys never really grow up. Mom would walk as if she was in a trance. Down the driveway a quarter mile to the mailbox. Up a quarter mile back. The silent forest surrounded us; birds and foxes watched us. And I would go with her, a pistol in my pocket, while Dad protected the house and the other kids with his rifle. Sometimes, we would meet Mr. Davis at the mailbox. He lived across the street in a ramshackle house that was always falling apart around him. Dad always offered to help him repair it, but Mr. Davis was often described as a Stubborn Old Coot and always declined. I always thought it was because he didn’t want us in his house. He’d started collecting guns and ammo after he served in World War III, and he didn’t want us stealing any of it. Today, though, there was no Mr. Davis. Mom opened the mailbox, shut it again, and began the trek back to the house. The trip back was always slower since it was uphill, and Mom would stop once or twice along the way to catch her breath and rub her back or her belly. I started to worry about her. Regardless of how much I worried, we’d always get back to the house safely. Then we might enjoy the bitter fresh air for a while, and I might even join Dad and my siblings in a snowball fight or a snow-fort-building competition. But we’d always go back inside and hole up in the living room again, our feet cold and our faces red, dreaming of what we’d do the next day at two o’clock |
AuthorM. J. Piazza is a Jesus-loving, dog-walking country girl who just so happens to write books. Archives
April 2020
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