Keith and I have been having a lot of "Remember when...?" conversations.
Maybe it's the slow approach of fall, heralded by the gold and yellow leaves I have to fish out of the pool in increasing numbers and the darker mornings that require me to turn on a light.
At one point, we sat and reminisced about all three years of marriage- which is, admittedly, a small amount of time, but they still held so many events and experiences.
We remembered the long drive to Minnesota to see my brother get married, and the snow, and the tiny town just outside of Denver where we ate a late dinner, and returning home just in time to get ready to move.
And we remembered about our house searching in Kentucky, and how confusing and stressful that was, and how grateful we were that we didn't end up buying a house.
We agreed we were incredibly lucky to find the house that we did, even if it was covered with leaves and overhung by the forest.
We remembered how depressed we'd been in that house, with the tiny garage and the hot, humid summers. That first winter I started therapy was pretty rough.
But still, we had good memories too, like having large, messy family gatherings, and the chaos of renting the pontoon boat, and playing nocturnal games of corn hole in the front yard by the light of the street lamp.
And then just as things were getting better, we moved here, where things have been awesome.
By the time we'd finished charting out our life together, we were both a little bit in awe at how much stuff changes. I had forgotten all of those twists and turns.
A couple nights ago, when we were all curled up in bed, I called him "Keith" by accident, which made him laugh.
"You never call me Keith," he reminded me. "Jenny," he added, with emphasis.
And it was strange; I got a little thrill, hearing him call my name. I hadn't realized it, but we never do use each other's names; there are so many other tempting, tender and amusing names to use. So then we had to go back and forth, using our names and just cracking each other up.
I am in the process of growing Gilly up. This is a very confusing task. Which episodes in her childhood do I draw out in detail, which do I gloss over at high speeds? There is just no right or wrong answer; everything works, but not to the same degree.
At this moment, I have decided to stop the speeding at age ten. I think ten is significant. I think it's the beginning of the end of childhood; at eleven, puberty begins. In fact, from everything I've read, eleven is one of the most miserable years ever.
Which is funny, because I do remember that year being just all kinds of aweful. And I don't want the story to speed through the easier phases of childhood and then crash right into the aweful. If the reader is drawn along in such a way that they live through the transition, the reader gets more satisfaction from the story.
So I figured, starting at ten is like standing at the shore. You can look behind you at the landscape, and even go back into it. But also, you are looking out at the vast and choatic ocean and knowing that you are going to have to cross it. Somewhere on the far side of the ocean, so far awayyou can't even see it, is adulthood.
Speaking of crashing the reader right into things, holy crap. I was reading a story that has been compressed into a Reader's Digest Selections (poor author). I don't know if it's a result of the editing, or of the story in the first place, but my lord. I can't finish it.
Prime example: "Tom rarely left her side, doting on her in the nicest, most subtle of ways."
If the author used that to begin with, and then went on to illustrate what the heck that looks like, all fine and good.
But that's not what the author did. She just wrote that sentence and carried on to the next thing. And the next thing. And the next thing. Almost the entire book is nothing but summation.
It's so frustrating because, somehow or other, she'd gotten me to like her characters. I would really enjoy spending some quality time with them, you know?
I would really like to know in what ways Tom doted on her. What does subtle and nice doting look like? The author piques my curiosity and then never satisfies it.
What else can I expect from a condensed story, right?
I could write a sentence like this: "Tenshio and Gilly's relationship grew day by day, as he walked her home from school, listening to her childish chatter."
Voila. I save like, two entire pages of dialogue.
In fact, if I wanted this to span several years, I could just tack on, "....and he continued to do this as the years went by." Or something similar.
Anyway, enough theory. Yesterday I spent all day helping Keith by arranging the lump of raw material he had accumulated into a logical and illustrated slide show on Turkey. I now know more than I ever needed to know about the country of Turkey.
I thrilled him to no end, when he came home to see the finished product. But I got no creative writing done until after dinner.
