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Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Why I Write

I've always wanted to write since I was young and since I'm procrastinating working on my story because I've gotten to a hard spot I thought I'd share some of my early (as in crazy) ideas when I was in junior high. Oh, yeah, girly girl day dreams. So, I was in band. Stop laughing. I liked playing the trumpet and I didn't go to the same band camp as Allison Hanigan. So as I was saying, we had an intern working with our band instructor. Let me draw you a picture, so we're perfectly clear. I had braces. Shoulder length brown hair with bangs and could not for the life of me get them to do that bush thing that everyone else could do with their bangs. It was the 80s. And I was constantly cutting the inside of my mouth with my braces everytime I played the trumpet. No blood, but raw flesh. I was in the "intelligent" group in classes, but didn't fit into the popular crowd. At all. So back to our intern. I'd been reading Harlequin's for a while at that time and had read all the Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children series (Clan of the Cave Bear, for those who don't know). I thought a wonderful idea for a story would be this intern, who I think his name is Jeff, but I don't remember. So, Jeff would leave town and then come back and find that the geeky braces girl he taught in band had grown up to a beautiful woman and fall in love with her of course.

I mean that stuff happened in Harlequin's quite a bit back then. It seemed like a viable premise and probably would do a lot better than the Clan of the Cave Bear ripoff with panthers I had thought of before that. I was 12 or 13 years old. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. I don't think I'll be resurrecting those story ideas or the one from that time my friend Nick and I went to Dairy Queen and saw this business man and you guessed it. He returns years later to find that freakish girl grown up into a lovely woman and tries to woo her.

I've matured and I hope my ideas have matured with me, but it's fun to remember the types of ideas I had back then. Somewhere there is a bunch of notecards with ideas written on them. My guess is it's somewhere in my basement, but [shrug] I'll laugh when I run across them someday. I'll just make sure that I run across them with the lawn mower.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

All right, so I'll confess now that I played clarinet in the marching band. I was more of a Goth clarinet player (if there is such a thing), so the black and silver of the instrument matched my clothes and lipstick and such, but it was still uber geeky LOL And I still have my clarinet. Now my kids think I rock because Squidward from SpongeBob plays the clarinet, so go figure. Your trumpet experience sounds nothing short of excruciating! Ouch!

And isn't the whole Harlequin revenge fantasy awesome? Even though I'm very happily married, I still think of all the weird/geeky things I did in high school and I want to demand a do-over! Or at least redeem myself in a way now that shows how effing cool I turned out (OK well I can fantasize anyway; we're doing that here, right???).

Best wishes for tackling the hard spot and thanks for sharing the craziness :)