Midnights, March: 30
A HISTORY:
The first story I ever wrote was composed (and illustrated!) in heavy-handed pencil on red construction paper stapled together. Titled When I Was Small, it chronicled the misadventures of a girl who woke up one morning, Kafkaesque, to find herself shrunk down to roughly the size of a ripe strawberry. Much of the plot was devoted to the tiny character’s struggle to get down the stairs. I was six.
The second story I remember writing came about a few years later: a Christmas story about a funny pair of elves who appeared in a girl’s bedroom one night (I wonder who the girl was based on?). It was meant as a gift for my writer-professor grandfather, but it quickly ballooned into a whole adventure story—Santa was missing, and also there was some sort of White Winter Queen? The worldbuilding was admittedly…muddled.
Anyway. In typical Carrie fashion, I was still finishing the story in the car on the way to my grandparents’ house, stuffed in the middle seat between two of my sisters, typing ponderously on my dad's brick of a laptop with a rising sense of panic. “We can print it there,” my dad promised, but no one expected just how many tractor-feed pages the ancient dot matrix printer would spit out. A few weeks later, during my birthday celebration, my grandfather pulled out a marked-up copy of my story, gave me a book about writing short science fiction, and taught me about chapter breaks. It was the first time anyone had treated what I was doing like work that deserved critique to make it better. I dedicated my first novel to him.
After that I was always scribbling something but rarely finished anything. I wrote a musical about a cannibal restaurant…scrawled a series of Mary-Sues in endless spiral-bound notebooks…won a handful of awards and contests for essays in junior high and high school. I took a stab at songwriting, and I found out that poetry was not where my talents lie (though LORD KNOWS I TRIED).
When it came time to apply to colleges, my only career plan was to transition directly from undergrad to forest hag, scribbling in messy seclusion until I suffocated from the weight of so many spiral-bound notebooks. Maybe someone would unearth something amid the stacks of loose papers worth publishing posthumously. To this end, I went to a little school in Ohio and graduated three years later with a B.A. in English and a folk-fantasy novella that never got a second draft (reading it aloud put my boyfriend to sleep, which might explain that). Forest haggery proved a more difficult path than anticipated, however, especially because I had become accustomed to enjoying various fancy cheeses from time to time, and such habits require CASH. I tried Any Other Career in pursuit of that filthy lucre: teacher, bookbinder, temp, transcriptionist, receptionist, paralegal. I was fired from a telemarketing position at a nonprofit. I didn’t know charities were allowed to fire people. Writing was the only thing I could do halfway decently, though it was also the least likely to keep me in the aforementioned fancy cheeses.
So I did what any modern, independent woman would: I got married. Not only did this guarantee me health insurance, but for some reason he happily supported my writing habits (which overlapped suspiciously with the habits of a feral raccoon). Eventually I did self-publish a young adult novel to little acclaim and, in theory, am about halfway through a second draft of the next book in the series. I expect even less success this time around, if it ever gets finished.
You see, when it comes down to it, I’m one of those writers who Doesn’t Actually Write. I’m in it for the lifestyle. The late nights and under-eye circles, the unkempt hair and threadbare robe…the muttering. What else is all this self-loathing good for?
Now that the Tiny Wee’un has come along—the Miniature Knucklehead—DJ Li’l Pipqueak—I’m cursing myself for my lackadaisical habits of yore. I used to have so much tiiime! An embarrassment of it! Enough to utterly SQUANDER!
But this forces me to make a choice. Narrowing a path really clarifies which direction the path is taking. Could these be the circumstance under which forest haggery is finally achieved? With a sweet little goblin playing at my feet?
I guess we’ll find out. In—
A History: The Sequel
(Alternative title: The Future!)
Oh my word, I just remembered—that second story was called A NORTHERN QUEST. So ambitious!