Miserable ways I existed inside homes

what's behind my shoulders

Can we skip to the part where I’m dead and you’re quoting me. Updates on my debut novel.

I want to write about a complex thing using simple words.

That’s the decision I made after I dragged my novel into a folder named archive.

43k words. 30 chapters. None of it was right.

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I do worry that I prefer starting over rather than fixing what I’ve got but also art is different than relationship.

Or is it.

Regardless.

What I’ve been doing is sitting on a new outline. The first chapter is a river and the rest is open land.

A couple paragraphs sit at the bottom of the doc; they’re good and I love them for now. They’ll go somewhere or they won’t.

It’s a completely new project. Because I realized that what I was doing was hiding behind characters that I wish I’d known and a narrator that I wish I’d been.

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You might think I wear jean shorts in the summer but actually I hide inside pants year-round.

I’ve had stretch marks on my inner thighs since fifteen when God grew my hips. But I cover all that up; throw layers.

I’m bottom heavy but I write out thin characters.

I’m a recovering binge eater who didn’t purge. But I craft anorexics.

I have to remember that my eyes are green now like my mother’s and not blue anymore like my father’s and that’s the story.

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I’m not going to say everything in this new novel.

Because I realized that I don’t believe in hurting people that don’t deserve to be hurt, just for the sake of creating art.

But what I can do is create this novel like a painting where the hard things are a landscape.

I’ll include my sorry-words and my weak-knees.

I’ll say that I saw the phone calls but ignored them.

I’ll say that I waited for everyone to go to sleep so I could stare at the ceiling; eat again.

And how all of that lasted many years.

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I want to talk about the momentum of dark decision making, the killer that is heavy love, and about all of the miserable ways I existed inside homes.

I didn’t give up on my last novel. Rather, I looked behind it’s shoulders and I saw all the lies lounging in comfortable chairs and I said, get up.

To say a complex thing using simple words, my thighs are heavy and my eyes are green.

That novel was a thin woman with blue eyes and she was running. And I didn’t want to spend anymore time with that.