Merely Jamie; Merely Writing.

                “Morning Moose,” Kat says as she glides past me with a wide and genuine smile, the bright pink highlights in her auburn hair are catching the light of the used bookstore’s two flickering lights in a way that catches my attention every time and her green eyes are sparkling directly into my own.  That might be what I like the most about Kat, she really sees me.

                There are many things I’d like to say back to Kat.  I’d like to tell her how beautiful her hair looks today, or how the tiny smudge in her eyeliner is what makes it so perfect, or how much I appreciate that she looks at me and acknowledges me.  How she’s the only person that confirms I exist and am visible.  I’d really love to say good morning back to her, maybe ask her how her night was.

                I know what Dean Caffrey would say, he’d walk over to her, smirk a little, and tell her he was taking her out for wine and a movie after she got off work.  And she’d eat it up, because that’s the way women responded to Dean Caffrey.  Dean is the main character in my favorite series of books, he’s a conman and crook but he enjoys life to the fullest and he’s as charming and smooth as any conman ever was.  Everything I wish I was but know I’m not.

                So even though I’m standing there telling myself to smile and say something, anything, back to her all I actually manage to do is blush and try to inhale and swallow at the same time.  This of course results in the sort of noise one never wants to make in public, a sort of coughing snort that makes everyone look at you and wonder if you’ve finally choked on your own tongue.

                I feel my blush get deeper and I duck my head, hiding my boring brown eyes from her line of vision, and shift my weight a little until she laughs, not unkindly, and continues on her way to the tiny back room to set her purse down and clock in.

                I have a sudden mental image of Dean shaking his head at me, like he’d lost all hope in my ever being a normal fully functioning human being.  I have a sinking feeling Dean is on the right track.

                I grab the next pile of books that need to be re-priced for the firesale this weekend.  Store closing, all stock must go, everything up to 90% off, come now.  That sort of thing.  I’ll be out of a job come Sunday night and I can’t even bring myself to care about the loss of income.

                All I care about is my inevitable loss of Kat’s smile.  I have to face the facts, I can’t even speak to the girl.  The chances of me calling here were slim to none, even if I could somehow ask for her number without having a stroke.  Without this job, I’ll never see her again.

                As I stick the new price stickers onto the books, reading things like ten cents and four for a dollar, I’m musing over the fact that she probably thinks I have some sort of mental problem that prevents me from communicating properly.  I suppose in a way I do, if crippling social anxiety counts.  I’m not sure why she likes me if it isn’t out of some kind of pity.  She talks to me and I listen intently, I nod and smile when I can manage it but I’m pretty sure I mostly stare like a creep.  Sometimes I leave her a book that mirrors the story or problem she was telling me about, she always thanks me profusely but I doubt she reads them.

I’m trying to write from a more gender neutral view point.  I think when women write, there’s a noticeable emphasis on the romantic side of things.  And I see that when I write, I romanticize things a lot. 

Where a man would write something like “The blood from the gunshot wound quickly soaked through his shirt.” a woman would write something like “The blood seeped from the gaping wound in his shoulder, spreading out over his white shirt in an almost artistic pattern.” 

I think a lot of the best and most successfully written novels are written from a more masculine view point.  Sometimes I find it frustrating that I spend so much time crafting sexual tension between my characters that the story, at times, takes a back seat.  Or that a scene I mean to be horrific and terrifying comes out sounding watered down with flowery imagery. 

If there was ever a class that I actually would like to take it would be a class on the difference in word choice and sentence structure between men and women.

I think my ultimate goal in my writing career is to write a book where the love interest is the backseat goal of the story, or even a book where there isn’t a love interest at all.  That’s when you know you can really write a story, when you don’t need cliches like love to draw people in.

May 4, 2009.  3:49 AM.

Sometimes I think the reason I have trouble writing is that I’m afraid to finish something only to find out that the only people who enjoy it are me and my mother.  But isn’t that enough?  Don’t I write for me?  Sometimes I think that’s the reason.  That, because I already know how the story goes and I’m the only person who’ll read it, I see no point in actually writing it down.  But when I write, the story surprises me, it never goes exactly the way I think it will.  Don’t I write because I love the thrill of being surprised by something I’ve created?  Sometimes I think that’s the reason.  That the story changes so drastically in so few words that I lose the ability to proceed purely because the destination changed and the GPS in my brain keeps telling my words to take a left turn down a freshly dead dead end.  Then I realize that the real reason is that I became such an accomplished procrastinator in high school that it’s subconscious now and I can’t control it anymore.  Which is why I’m sitting here putting pen to paper rather than finger to keyboard.  [4:04 AM]

This is still so true.

Hmm.  I need to write. Actually, what I really need to do is learn how to not get distracted while I’m writing because, in all honesty, I was writing five minutes ago and I’m not entirely sure how I even ended up on Tumblr.

I was all wrapped up in Princess Ceci wandering through the Fameen marketplace and trying not to bump into any men by accident, which would cause a riot and give the castle guard an excuse to slaughter half the town, when I blinked and realized I was staring at Tumblr.

This is me, smacking myself and going back to Ceci so she can get back to the random man she’s going to bump into in an abandoned area of the city and get rescued from her would be rapist by a man named Zane who appears to be entirely unaffected by the curse of the le Coufre bloodline.

Not that makes any sense whatsoever to you.  Whoever you are.

Farewell.