Story I Still Shouldn't Be Writing: Part Two

Jonas is always watching me. The camera follows me as I fold the map into precise quarters and step out onto the street. My target is one hundred feet in front of me. My target is middle aged and grey haired. My target must not be thought of in these terms: two children, loving wife, alive. My target is already dead. I'm just assisting in the granting of peace.

The streets here are only for foot traffic. I slip through them like a ghost girl, like the hands of others could pass right through me. I watch my target's grey hair, keep an eye out for threats. I don't think he has security, but it's always good to be careful don't think don't think.

I take a breath, slide the pistol into my hand. I want to cause a commotion. I want to cause a commotion and get away. Jonas isn't sure I'll get away, but I will. 

I am better than Jonas. I still belong to Jonas. Don't think, don't think.

Two hundred feet. I am almost ready. An arm brushes mine. A boy slides into my sight. A boy with wicked eyes and clever smiles. A boy I killed two months ago.

He stands in front of me, the crowd of people breaking and combining around us. He can't be standing in front of me. He leans in. I can taste his breath. His cheek brushes against mine. "I have a secret," he whispers. 

"No." I shake my head. The boy is gone. The boy is melted into the crowd. No. The boy never existed. Couldn't have existed. The heat has gotten to me. I've gone too long without water. Dead boys don't talk. Dead boys aren't warm.

I need to focus, focus. The target is too far. I take a step forward. My knee gives out. 

I kill people and they stay dead. I kill people and they stay dead. What do I do if they don't stay dead?

Someone screams. Dirts coats my mouth.

"Collapsed," someone babbles in my ear, "she just collapsed!"

Is Jonas watching this? Jonas will not be happy. Boys with their throats torn out don't get back up. I can't find my gun.

***

Beeping drums insisistantly against my ear. I swat at it. Hit only air. 

"You're awake."

Jonas. 

I bolt up. Wires and tubes spiderwebbing my body pull me back down. "Where am I?"

"The hospital." Jonas' footsteps circle me. "You've made quite the mess."

"I can fix it." I gather my convinction into my voice. "I can fix it."

"It's too late for that." Jonas leans over me. I try not to look at his empty pale eyes, his high cheekbones, his endless lack of expression. The top button of his blue suit glints duly in the fluorescents  "Perhaps I moved you up too quickly."

"No." Tears threaten blur my sight. I blink them away. "I'm better than all of them. You know I'm better."

"I know you botched a job an amatuer could've managed."

I twist sterile sheets around my fingers. "I didn't account for the heat." I think I might be lying. Is it lying if you don't know?

"No second chances, Lila."

I cling irrationally to the name. Lila. Today I am Lila. Lila could be a girl with flowers in her hair and mischief in her eyes. I could be Lila.

"Your flight leaves tomorrow," Jonas says. "You're going back to Cleveland. Wait for me there."

I nod. He thinks he can punish me with waiting, but I am better than that. He'll see. 

Jonas walks away. I fiddle with the buttons near my fingers until I find one that pushes me farther up. The narrow doorway of my room hides the Jonas-containing world from me. For a moment I almost think I catch a glimpse of someone walking by. He smiles as he nods at me, but he's dead and therefore doesn't exist. I shake my head to toss the fantasies out. 

I don't have time to go mad. I have to get back to Cleveland. I have to make Jonas love me again.

In Which I Fail To Stick To One Story Again

Jonas won't be happy. I focus on the crunch of gravel under my feet crunch crunch crunch and let my mind fade out of existance. Twenty more miles until Cleveland. Miles to go before I sleep. I smile. 

Headlights flare in the dark. I turn my face before they blind me completely. For a moment no stop I wonder what they think of me don't don't a girl dressed in black on the side of the road at three in the morning. I wonder what they would do if I waved. 

I don't want to know what they'd do if I waved. I don't want to think anything at all. The car drives away. There's no one left to wonder at a lost girl on a dark night.

I fade out again. Crunch crunch crunch. I could almost dance to my own footsteps. The screeching of tires splits my darkness. I tilt my head to watch a pickup truck going the same direction as me jerk to a stop. A passenger door is flung open. A boy leans over from the driver's seat, blond hair illuminated by a light on his rearview mirror.

"Need a lift?" he says, as if this is the most natural thing in the world. 

He has wicked eyes. Dark eyes. Eyes a girl could lose herself in. I consider the way he smiles, like he has a secret, like his other hand is holding a gun. A nice girl would not get into this boy's passenger seat. A nice girl might even run.

I am not a nice girl. I am a girl who sews knives into her sleeves. I am a girl who is not afraid of guns. I am a girl who needs a lift.  I get in.

"What's your name?" he asks as I buckle my seatbelt.

I savor the way he says your name as if a name could be mine. "Sarah," I say. It's a name I might like to be mine. A steady name. A sure name. The kind of name you might write on notebooks and locker assignments. That's Sarah, someone might say, everyone likes Sarah.

"Trevor," he says.

I almost tell him that he's picked the wrong name. I would've picked something more sly for him, something with a wink, maybe Tyler or Jake. Trevor lacks subtelty. Trevor is a truck driver's name.

"Do you pick up stray girls often?" I ask. I try out twisting a strand of strawberry hair around my finger. I am trying to flirt, but not sure it's working. Flirting is something girls in movies do. Flirting is not for girls no stop who spend their Friday nights washing blood out of their best jeans.

"Depends," Trevor of the badly picked name says. "How often do you walk on the side of the road?"

I think he is flirting back. I try out a smile. "Only on nights when you're driving by." Only on nights when I get made and have to ditch my ride in Sarintino.

"If we go in any more circles they'll have to name a racetrack after us." 

Was that a joke? What if I laugh and it wasn't? I try out a low chuckle. Trevor smiles at me. My heart does something inexplicable. 

"Where you headed?" he asks.

This should have been the first question, the most important question, the question a boy would ask if he intended on taking a girl to her actual destination.

"Akron."

"Boring place for a pretty girl."

I shrug. 

We are stranded in silence. I curl my palm around the hilt of my knife. I'll need to steal the truck. I'll need to pick a place where I can easily dispose of the body. 

"Do you know what I think?" he says.

I forgot he's still alive.

"I think you have a secret." His face does something that might be described as beaming, if one was inclined to light metaphors.

I press my side against the door, judge our velocity and acceleration. I'll need to grab the steering wheel fast. The roads are lined with ditches, not an ideal set up for accidental swerving. But I am quick enough.

"And what would the secret be?" In point five seconds I'm going to drive this knife through your throat.

His eyes reflect the starlight. "I'm faster than you."

No. My arm is up, is swinging in a downward arch. I need force for the impact to be clean. He lets go of the steering wheel, or maybe he never held it. He is fast, too fast. His hand is around my wrist, his knees are steering us forward. My weight is too far into the swing, I'm sliding off the seat.

I think, for an instant, that he might be better than me.

I'm expecting the Glock in his other hand. I take back control of my fall. My wrist yanks back on his hand. I slam sideways into the seat. The bullet whispers past my midriff. Glass explodes behind me.

Better, I'm better.

My knee connects with his gun hand. He lets out a hiss. He holds onto the gun. He still has my wrist. He twists and pain shoots up my arm. Don't think about it, don't think. I lunge forward and bury my teeth in his throat. Finally, he screams. Finally, he drops the gun, primitive instincts kicking in as he pushes against me get it off get it off. 

The car is swerving, no time to think about the car.

I twist a fist in his hair. He falls back against the door. My knife is at his throat. His eyes flash starlight. With his foot off the gas the car slows to a roll.

"Got my secret wrong," I say.

He laughs. As if death could ever be funny. "That wasn't the secret."

I push my knife down. A little part of me that would badly like to be a girl named Sarah wants to let the wrongly named Trevor walk off into the night. And that is why I know I can't. Don't think, don't think. Girls like me don't have any use for starlight.

Because the Light

I’ll be honest. I just read this article and it’s left me full of feels. I’m not nearly as eloquent as Kameron Hurley, but I want to write it out and this is my space, anyway.

I am a small person who has spent a lot of time trying to become smaller. I learned early on that lashing out gets me nowhere, so I crumple inward instead. I’m a trick of folded paper, working my way down with the ambition of being microscopic.

I shove myself into corners, lockers, pockets. Some people are devastated because others make them small, but I made myself a point charge with no mass, hovering hopelessly in the empty space I left behind me.

I don’t know why. Maybe I was afraid. Maybe I didn’t deserve all that space others seemed to so easily occupy. Maybe I just give in, like it’s my super power. Some super heroes are stone walls standing against the tidal wave, but I am cotton and snow and sand. I am packed down, packed away, forgotten at the bottoms of shoes.

I am contrary and unpleasant and I duck before you even raise a fist. Because I am afraid. Because I don’t understand the space I occupy in the world and how I’m supposed to decorate it with sparkly pink stars and scrub it clean with suds. Because I forget which part is me and which part is dirt and kick over the wrong bucket.

I’m not even sure what this has to do with that article anymore. I meant to write something about the nature of reality, about how I approach the world as a writer and fight against the cliché. About how when I feel things I don’t accept the easy description. How does this fear make you feel? And don’t say your heart is in your throat because it isn’t, that’s a thing you read, that’s a lie, how do you really feel?

And I know that fear makes me feel like glass, not the sturdy plastic kind, but the kind that ipod screens are made of, the kind that shatters from a three-inch fall. Fear is light and too much air. Fear is tectonic plates moving, ripping me apart.

Fear is wanting to delete this entire thing instead of posting it.

We are told, endlessly, to write what we are most afraid of. And we are not told what to do when we are just too afraid.

I don’t want anyone reading my words. I want to keep them small and in my head. I don't want anyone trying to pull me out and stretch my taffy flesh. And I know I need to, but it's painful and I'm none too fond of pain.

So I wrote this because I needed to explain it to myself, and maybe I'll delete it and maybe I won't. I've deleted about five different endings because none of them seemed to work, and now if I don't get to sleep I'll never get up in time for work tomorrow, so here's my last go at it.

Be what you are. And never let anyone tell you you're actually a cannibalistic llama.

Indie Life: New Adult

I've been eyeing those pretty New Adult covers for a while. You know those black and white ones with the colored text on top? Gorgeous. I wanted one, but I had too many other projects and no good ideas for a New Adult book.

And then, umm, I was wandering around a stock photo site searching for the perfect model for the King of Forgotten Clubs cover to send to my cover designer, the fantastic Stephanie Mooney, when I saw a picture and thought, that would be epic as a new adult cover.

So, yeah. I made it into one. Oops?

I've decided to write the book in June once I've got these three novellas I need done by the end of May into edits (I don't know how I get myself into these messes... oh, wait, yes I do). Which means I've begun the research for it!

The first part of my research is learning about the New Adult genre. Shockingly, I haven't really read much in it. So I picked up a pile of New Adult books and am currently reading my way through them to learn genre conventions (I know, best research ever, right?). So far I've come up with some conclusions.

1. Typical word count seems to be around 80k, so that's what I'll be shooting for. It's longer than I'm used to writing, but I'm looking forward to the challenge.
2. First person present tense dual point of view seems to be perfectly acceptable, which is good because that's what I was going to write anyway. :)
3. I'm stupid excited to be writing about college years. (Hey, did Greek count as New Adult?) College is a lot of learning who you are without your parents and what it really takes to be an adult. Of course, there's still plenty of cushions in place for you in college, but it's a lot less than high school.
4. I'm not actually sure if I should be capitalizing the genre, but it looked good that way, so I did.

Anyway, I'm still learning the genre. The conventions seem to be a sort of mix of romance and YA, which is good, because those are two genres I'm comfortable in.

The second thing I'm researching is boxing. Somehow this book is about it, despite the fact that I know absolutely nothing about boxing. Or, oh, sports of any kind. No worries. I'm getting some books from the library. I'll figure it out. Probably.

Oh yeah, and I should probably show you the cover I've spent the entire post talking about. And the blurb that will probably change five more times as I figure out what the plot of this book is actually going to be.

Five matches. Ten million dollars. No turning back.



Juliette lives in a world where the fighter is king and the bookie is god. Still, she thought she had her gambling under control until the note showed up. Three million or her sister pays the price. She knows where to get the money. Her dad's boxing tournament. Only problem is, she can't enter. She needs a dupe to risk his life to win it for her.



She needs crazy, reckless, desperate. She needs Jeremy.



Jeremy lives in a world where family steals the shirt off your back and friends take what’s left over. With money he made from some less-than-legal fighting, he bought himself a one way ticket out, to a business school in Georgia. Except the money’s run out and he’s still a year away from graduating.



He doesn't want to entertain the scheme of the mysterious blonde who strolls into his life one day with swinging hips and batting eyelashes, but he needs money, fast. She offers to train him and enter him into The Underground, an illegal boxing championship worth millions, in exchange for splitting the winnings.



It's crazy, reckless, a risk to his entire life, but there's something irresistible in her blue eyes.



The only thing they have in common is the one rule they'll need to survive this.



Love is Weakness.

---

So that's all I've got to say! Anyone have any tips on writing New Adult, or books to recommend? But mostly the books. Because I clearly don't have enough. *stuffs pile under bed*