I like to write. Which is a pretty unremarkable statement except for the fact that it hadn't been true for a very long time. The best I could say until about a year ago was that I wanted to write. I liked to write when I was young (elementary school through college) but then there was this huge chunk in the middle--almost twenty years--of nothing.
Not nothing. There was wanting to write, thinking about writing, trying to write, beating myself up for not writing. And, you know, living my life. That constituted most of those twenty years and it was generally good. I'm not trying to say it was twenty years of misery. But certainly two decades of persistent frustration, like trying to put a fitted sheet on a mattress that's just a little too big for it, and so you're constantly going back and forth between opposite corners that slip off as soon as the other one's done.
So, what happened a year ago? None of your business.
But the point is this: liking to write again is something of a revelatory experience, which makes the statement I like to write a revelatory one. It means a lot to me that I enjoy the process, and I'm not past the honeymoon period of wanting to savor it as much as possible. I hope I never get past the honeymoon period. I don't want to bog myself down with how I should be writing or what I should I should be writing or how much I'm producing or what I should be doing with what I write. I just want to keep writing and keep liking it. I want to see where it goes.
An unsolicited and incomplete list of stories I wrote before my 20-year hiatus
Technically this entire website is unsolicited, but here we are. Think of this as my CV.
Elementary School
The time of the Publishing Room (a place run by volunteer moms who typed up and bound your stories for you so you could illustrate them) and, amazingly enough, speech and debate club where I performed monologues I wrote myself.
Aladdin's Second about Aladdin and Jasmine having a baby (written after having seen both Aladdin and Beethoven's Second but before Return of Jafar).
A monologue from the point of view of a four-year-old who has just become a big sister.
An unfinished play about divorce court for happily-ever-after couples.
Middle School
R.L.Stine inspired thrillers co-written with my sister and cousin. They are absolutely the best ideas I have ever or will ever have.
Revenge of the Killer Turtle, about siblings who flush their (presumed) dead pet snapping turtle down the toilet only to have it set out on a world-wide butt-biting rampage.
Bunk Bed of Doom, wherein a mad scientist's son is inadvertently doused in chemicals, turning him into a bunk bed and forcing the father into opening a bed & breakfast to feed his son's insatiable hunger for human flesh.
High School
Romances!
A romance about a bookstore employee and a film critic with the New York Times.
A romance about a legal secretary and a lawyer.
A romance (a theme is emerging) about a woman exiled from her village for remaining unmarried past the age of twenty-one, kidnapped by pirates (the nice kind!), and ending up with...some guy (the details are fuzzy).
College
The edgy phase--don't judge me.
Drain about an assassin who falls for the woman at the dry cleaner that gets the blood out of his clothes.
Up Down about a young girl obsessed with riding escalators to escape the growing tension of her feuding parents.
Writer vs Character about an author who's writer character outdoes him in every way--including in bed with his wife.
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