Alice Thomsen

on the wrong side of sunrise

Tag: novels (Page 1 of 2)

In Which I Date Myself ;)

December 8, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I’ve always been prone to inertia, for better and worse—often worse, especially this past month. This afternoon, I lay down, prone, on my bedroom floor with the intent of stretching my back … and then I stayed there. After some amount of time, I broke through enough to prop myself up on my elbows and—what else—scroll social media in hopes of finding a bit of, well, hope.

I’ve come across this one before—especially this past month: Queer kids need stories about happy queer adults.

A post from Midwestern Lesbian reads, "Queer kids need stories about happy queer adults." It is in observations of national honor our LGBTQ+ elders day.

(I should note here that I am incredibly lucky to have come from an extended family that included queer adults being happy and embraced, and of all the things I questioned, the love and acceptance of my parents was never one of them.)

By high school, I knew I wasn’t straight. I’d claimed a few middle school crushes in the form of naming boys I liked hanging out with, tried to stoke that into something that felt special, but it didn’t happen. Okay, I figured; if I don’t like boys any better than girls, I must be bi—duh. I joined GLOW—Gay-Lesbian-Or-Whatever—after school. (The only GLOW initiative I recall was a post-Katrina clothing drive. “But,” more than one person said, “that was months ago. Isn’t it over?”) I had pins on my backpack, “Marriage=<3+<3” and “These colors don’t run … the world” and that sort of thing. My best friend and I skipped school on election day to volunteer at the polls. I fooled around with a boy at writer camp and a girl in the back of a car, and I reassured myself that I was only 14/15/16—it would be statistically ridiculous to think I’d meet the love of my life so early. I was too busy worrying about bird flu anyway.

(“It feels like you’re not attracted to me,” a partner would later comment, and I guess they were on to something.)

I was 17, I think, when I started to accept that well, maybe there was more going on. My writing should have been a red flag; after a number of indulgent friends read drafts and commented on the seeming setup of romantic tension that never paid off, I found myself needing more clarification than a hormone-addled adolescent ought to.

“But,” I said more than once, “aren’t they friends?”

Eyebrows were raised; acknowledgments were made that I was the writer and they weren’t going to tell me how to write my story. It was just feedback, take it or leave it.

I left a note in my best friend’s locker asking what she thought, and she passed me a doodle of the “friends” in question.

“Wanna bone?” one (though I don’t remember which) asked.

“Let’s go,” the other replied.

It didn’t really feel like an orientation, or an identity, or, if I’m being honest, anything except a shortcoming. A supposedly beautiful, life-changing, mind-blowing part of the human experience was off-limits to me. Instead, I romanticized settling down in a small cottage on a rocky coast, just me and a big grey dog and a pair of horses and a vintage typewriter for when I wanted to feel fancy. If I was destined for spinsterhood, I would spin the hell out of it.

I accustomed myself to the idea that I would never be a significant other—a friend, sure, and maybe even a good friend, but my transition into adulthood had been shaped by watching my closest friends partner off and become less close. I understood the eventual progression of everyone around me as they moved onward and outward into Normal Grownup Relationships.

(I know this is sounding like the story of a queer adult being unhappy; just bear with me.)

I made a friend at work; we’ll call them Alex. After a relationship ended, Alex moved in with me, because that’s how I got most of my roommates—they were in a bad place without a better option. That’s the same reason Alex’s younger brother came to stay with us, first for the summer to get a break from their alcoholic mother, and then for longer. I didn’t consider myself the parental type, but I also don’t have a word for what I became: an adult who cared deeply for him and enjoyed the person he was becoming and felt genuinely privileged to be a part of that becoming.

Alex started dating a woman who lived several states away; let’s call her Linda. I thought I would be prepared for the inevitable, that when they moved in together, those several states away, I would be sad in the usual way. Instead it felt like I was losing a family I had never considered I might have.

(I know, I know. I promise, we’re almost to the good part.)

Here’s the thing: Linda never wanted kids. Alex’s brother was non-negotiable. Not wanting kids, or else already having one, is often still viewed by society at large as a deficit, a shortcoming, or whatever—a burden for a partner to bear or a reason to end the relationship. This could be a story of three queer adults realizing that what they bring isn’t, by some measure, “enough,” and going through the stages of grief that become so familiar it’s almost a habit.

Instead, last year, we pooled our resources and bought a nice house in a nice neighborhood in the queer-friendly state of New Jersey.

Our wifi network is called “NotAThrouple,” because that’s the obvious non-traditional model for people to latch onto, but it’s not accurate. We fill different roles in the home, and the same way it’s overly simplistic to ask a gay couple, “So which of you is the guy in the relationship?” it’s not easy to give names to who we are to each other. Alex and Linda are each other’s “significant other” in the most traditional sense—but I’m also significant, in a way I never thought I would be, not as an afterthought or a third wheel or a tag-along but as a weird-shaped piece of a weird-shaped family.

I won’t be so bold as to say, unequivocally, that it gets better, because sometimes it doesn’t. Some queer adults aren’t happy. Some adults are queer kids who got cut off or beaten down or smothered. Some queer kids never make it to adulthood.

But sometimes—even when a lot of things really, really suck—we’re happy.

Sanctuary

April 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments

awproom
It’s that time of year. AWP 2015 has arrived; I’m writing this now from my third-floor hotel room, looking out over Washington Ave., in Minneapolis.

Emphasis not on Minneapolis, although it’s nice to be out of Indiana for a bit, or AWP, although that’s certainly the reason I’m here, or third-floor, even though it gives a bit of a view. No, emphasis on my.

When I was sixteen, my ever-indulgent parents got me a retreat for Christmas. Nothing extravagant, because I didn’t need extravagance; it was just five days at the Super 8 maybe twenty minutes from our house, but for me, with a brand new draft of a novel sitting in front of me, begging to be torn apart and reworked, it was a perfect writerly sanctuary. I stayed in my room with DO NOT DISTURB on the door, blinds drawn, music playing, and manuscript pages and maps and note cards splayed out all around me.

I drank alcohol-free merlot, ate tortillas with pesto, kept my own hours, and hermitted it up (although I think I reached out by text a few times for advice).

I’m not going to hermit in Minneapolis; I’m going to the conference, and to the book fair, and around the city. Still, I have a room, and it’s mine. Not in a permanent way—just in an exclusive one. My little hotel sanctuary.

This evening I took myself and a book to dinner at a restaurant across the street, Sanctuary. I’d read the menu online, and it looked exciting—and it was, but it was also much classier than I anticipated. (Seriously, look at the website. I feel like it was not an unreasonable assumption on my part.) I walked in and was seated by the very well-dressed host … and then looked around and realized that it wasn’t just the host—everyone was very well-dressed.

My first impulse was to apologize profusely—my jeans and Payless shoes and shirt with hops on it had tripped and fallen in here by accident, and I would get out of the way right now. Instead, though, I stayed; I lingered for two hours, over …

garlic, spinach, and parmesan artichoke tartlets, provincal olives, cornichons and a shot of white verjus

liquor 43 bread pudding with salted caramel ice cream and ristretto espresso crème anglaise

a quasi mojo—and absinthe mojito

and a cup of coffee

Not surprisingly, especially to anyone who looked at the menu, it was an expensive linger. Still, it was mine, whether or not I fit in.

Plus, part way through my meal, more conference types started to come in, and writers are a notoriously shabby lot. Suddenly I was not so out of place after all.

Sanctuary takes different forms, see?

What Big Teeth You Have

September 4, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I’ve mentioned before the fiction workshop I’m taking this semester, specializing in linked stories. (If you want to follow along with the course, check out our class blog.) The basic idea of linked stories is that they’re too connected to be wholly separate stories and still have the same impact (that is, they function as stories alone but become more powerful in combination) but too distinct to be a novel(/novella). If this sounds like a slippery definition, that’s because it is. There’s a whole messy space between collections of unrelated stories and novels that’s inhabited by linked stories, story cycles, novels in stories, composite novels, etc.

I took something of a hiatus from writing anything complete from 2003–2005 (during which time I considered, among other things, becoming a high school band director) and picked it back up on a whim when a friend of mine instructed me to do NaNoWriMo. (I do mean instructed. There was no, “Hey, I’m going to do this thing. Want to do it with me?” There was only, “Do NaNoWriMo.”) It was a messy month—I came up with my concept at the last minute, realized when my planned plot concluded that I only had half of the 50,000 words, and only finished because Thanksgiving Break afforded me the opportunity to lock myself in the bathroom, away from distractions, and pound out 7,000 a day. But I finished a project that I lovingly called the SVN, because titles have never been my strong suit.

The SVN involved five different viewpoint characters, and although that messy first draft didn’t make the best use of them, by the time I’d been through several revisions (for three years, although I had other side projects, it was my focus) each of those characters had an arc, all of which converged in the penultimate scene.

In other words, the SVN could, in a way, be considered a collection of linked stories, interwoven with one another.

I wrote another NaNoWriMo novel in 2008 (my next serious project) that had two viewpoint characters who spent the majority of the plot not knowing of each other, much less their connection. Again, their arcs joined up as the story neared its end; again, I could rephrase that as, their stories joined up as the piece neared its end.

My current project is a single viewpoint chronological narrative—free of murkiness—but it occurred to me that it’s the exception. Of the novels/sort-of-novels I’ve written, almost three-quarters have been, to some extent, separate but linked stories.

That said, they’ve all be much closer to the novel end of the spectrum. There are separate character arcs, but they’re all structured around the central conflict, whatever that is, and even when the characters don’t yet know each other, it’s clear to the reader that they’re all directly tied to that conflict, so they’re only ever as distant as a friend of a friend(/enemy of an enemy, etc.). I consider those pieces to be novels … but I suppose it’s rarely quite so simple.

I’ve adamantly defended my novelist identity; the idea that I might be dipping so much as a toe into that murky in-between water seemed, until about 3:15 this afternoon, impossible. It’s disconcerting. Because Continue reading

Pulpy Marshmallows (or, how I became an embittered novelist)

August 19, 2013 / / 1 Comment

I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again. Cathy Day is the reason I applied to the graduate program I started today, and although she isn’t the sole reason I picked it over the others that accepted me, she is a big one. This semester, I’m taking a fiction workshop with her, and in preparation, I read this.

I was going to quote some passages, but then I realized I wanted to quote the whole thing, so instead, just go read it. Seriously. I’ll wait.

Back? Okay. Still here, because you didn’t actually go read it? I’m not kidding. GO.

Now that you’ve read it, let’s talk. My writer friends will back me up on this: I hate short stories with a passion that borders on pathological. (Okay, they might not say borders.) If pushed, I will grudgingly admit that now and then, I do come across a short story I enjoy, and I have written a few that I found tolerable, but those are the exceptions. I hate short stories.

So when Day writes, as you recall, “I know without a doubt that when I was growing up, I absolutely loved to read novels and rarely read short stories unless they were assigned in a class,” I’m with her. It’s #9, though, Writing Right-handed vs. Left-handed, that really got me.

Sometimes a left-handed novelist is wise or stubborn enough to realize that he is not a right-handed story writer with horrible penmanship, but more accurately a beautiful left-handed novelist with perfectly fine penmanship. When he is alone, away from school, he brandishes the pencil in his left hand and sighs. Ahhhhhh. Then in college, he takes a workshop, which is full of nothing but right-handed desks. He puts the pencil in his right hand. Out of necessity, he’s become ambidextrous. And so, he goes through the motions of writing right-handed short stories for class. Assignments that must be completed. Hoops to jump through so that he can be in this class, read books for credit, and get a degree in the writing of fiction. At night, he goes home and puts the pencil in his left hand and works some more on his novel, the pages of which he never submits to his teacher, whose syllabus clearly states that they are to submit short stories that are 8-15 pages long.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve called short stories a hoop to jump through, I could buy so many more cereal marshmallows than one person needs. And then I could eat homemade Lucky Charms, gnashing my teeth and enjoying the bitter fantasy that the marshmallows were made of the pulped pages of short stories (which, let’s be honest, is plausible).

That’s the key: bitter fantasies.

When I was eleven, I wrote my first novel-of-sorts. It was a hundred-something pages, and I entered it in our local 4-H fair. The rule book didn’t have a page limit for creative writing submissions. I checked.

Come show day, I plopped my binder on the table in front of the judge. She looked the size of it, read the first paragraph, and gave me an honors ribbon that I knew had nothing to do with the quality of my work.

The next year, the rule book specified a ten-page limit. I brought in the first chapter of my new novel-in-progress. Suffice it to say that the year after that, they also instituted formatting requirements.

It’s always been that way. When I want to have the work I care about read, the Powers That Be won’t read it, so instead I put forth work that, to be honest, I don’t really care about. I get grades (which are what count) and feedback (which I file away, in case at some point I need, say, application material) and go back to what I do care about.

There are things fiction writers can learn from poetry. It’s the same line I hear when I say I want to be a novelist, and it’s true—there are things a novelist can learn from short stories. Still, my poetry-focused undergraduate program left me feeling adrift, alone, and embittered, and my short-story-focused education has left me the same way.

I’ve been lucky to have friends and family who have been supportive and interested in my real work. But am I really just spending thousands of dollars and years of my life in the hopes of jumping through enough hoops that one day I can get a couple letters after my name to identify me as a Real Writer, then go be a novelist in peace?

I think not. I hope not. My graduate program is not well-suited to novel writing, and I knew it wouldn’t be, just as I know my professors don’t have the resources to work with me on a novel. Wednesday, though, I start that fiction workshop. We’re focusing on linked stories. It’s not novels, no, but you read the article—I don’t have to tell you that it’s a sign that somewhere out there, there exists something bigger than the standalone 8–15 pages.

The Gobi Desert (or, by the end of this post, you’ll be glad I chose the camel image)

August 6, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Edith Wharton, late in her writing career, wrote:

What is writing a novel like?
1. The beginning: A ride through a spring wood.
2. The middle: The Gobi Desert.
3. The end: A night with a lover.
I am now in the Gobi Desert.

I’ve been working on my novel-in-progress for just over a month, and just over 31,000 words. It’s hard to predict exactly how long it will turn out to be, but I can safely say that I am out of the spring wood … and I think I would know if I’d reached the night with an unidentified lover.

So this must be the Gobi Desert.

I don’t often watch survival-type shows—you know, Man Vs. Wild, Survivorman—because I am easily squigged out by survival. I can’t even think about 127 Hours (which I never saw) without having the impulse to curl up in the nearest corner and watch YouTube cats until the bad thoughts go away. But on the occasion I do end up watching something survival-related, a common theme shows up: keep moving. It makes sense. Unless you have the resources to set up long-term sustainable camp where you are, the longer you take, the more you expend.

This, I’ve found, holds for the novelist’s Gobi Desert, too.

It’s all about momentum, about keeping the story and the characters fresh and alive. Stagnation—true stagnation—has never helped anything. That’s not to say I subscribe to the write every day, without fail philosophy, because I don’t; I think stepping away to contemplate can be, at times, just as productive as actually putting words on the page. Sometimes we need to pause and think things through, because if we don’t, we might well end up with days, weeks of wasted work we could’ve avoided if we’d taken that time for thought.

I don’t need to write every day to make my way through the Gobi Desert, but I do need to have the writing on my mind every day. Even a few minutes, just to keep it present.

Of course, three hours of thought rarely gives the same satisfaction as three hours of writing, because there’s something wonderful about seeing that quantifiable progress. It often feels more valid, too. I can post on Facebook, I wrote two thousand words on my novel today! and my internet friends will understand at least to a point what that means, maybe even leave me little Yay! comments. But if I said, I spent two hours drinking tea and talking to my cats about my novel, I’d be lucky to get a lol.

It’s hard to measure the worth of contemplation, and I think that makes it easy to brush aside as a form of procrastination (which, don’t get me wrong, it sometimes is). But when you’re making your way through that Gobi Desert, you don’t do yourself any favors by charging boldly onward without stopping now and then to make sure you still have a sense of where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.

After all, what good is a night with a lover if you retire to the bedroom, begin to undress, and discover that your toes are purple with frostbite?

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