Day 13- Let There Be Light

I had no idea that I was going to go dark for a week. I'm sorry! Between travelling to Quebec City for the NASSS conference, moderating, co-organizing and presenting in a session that went really well, networking with new people and seeing some old conference friends, and taking a trip back to Indiana to see some people I love, I haven't had time to blog or read everyone's blogs. I hope to catch up soon! I find it very comforting that you are all feeling as lost as I am. We are almost in week three! We're doing this!

In case you were all wondering, I kept up with novelling despite the radio silence. I couldn't novel while I was at the conference, but I have written 22,000 words and am on pace to write 50,000 words this month.

So, I'm announcing it here first: I'm going for it. I'm going to write 50,000 words this month.

I basically have to, since so little has happened so far. But as my friend said to me this weekend, "You just said nothing with a lot of words." Why thank you, it's a skill that I have honed as both a NaNoWriMo-er and a grad student.

This excerpt is from the chapter "When in doubt, introduce a love interest." Chloe is depressed and sitting at the bar at Jackie's Place, scared about Juliet and unsure of what to do next. The man beside her is reading The Big Sleep.

They looked into each other’s eyes, and Chloe knew that she wanted to keep talking to him. Back when she was allowed to talk about trivial things she might have told her friends about the way that his mouth crinkled in the corner when he smiled, making her want to smile along with him. She would have tried to describe to them how strong his forearms looked with his sleeves rolled up, without making him look too muscular and bulky. She definitely would have said that he had an ass like two scoops of butter pecan ice cream, and joked—but not really—that someone needed to get her a bowl and spoon immediately. If she had the time, she would have told him about how she had read The Big Sleep when she was in high school, and how Raymond Chandler had literally—not just figuratively—cut and pasted sections of stories that he had previously published to make The Big Sleep which led to him famously not solving the crime of the murder of the chauffeur, and how this question had plagued her ever since. Maybe they would have shared theories about who the murderer was. Maybe they would have agreed that it’s actually more interesting to not know who killed the chauffeur because it feels more like real life. Maybe she would have said that novels should depart from real life because we all have real lives and we read novels to escape them. Maybe he would have asked for her number, and maybe she would have said yes. Maybe they would have moved to Eglinton West just like she always thought that she would do with the man that she met at her favourite bar in the Annex who was reading a book and looking dreamy.

But at that moment, the days when she would have talked about how cute he was seemed so far away. She wasn’t in high school anymore, and there wasn’t really good reason to have a sleepover with her friends to tell them about her latest crush. She didn’t have time to speculate on who had killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep when what really mattered was making sure that no one killed Juliet in the novel of her life that she would never get around to writing because how do you know when it’s the ending?

“I wouldn’t put that book down if I were you,” Chloe said sadly, watching the world where she could talk about the noir genre over beers at Jackie’s Place slipping away and she couldn’t even reach out to try to keep it because she knew that it was for the best. “It gets better each time that you read it.”

He smiled his lopsided smile, making her wish more and more that she could just stay in the world where she could sit with him at Jackie’s Place and talk until there was nothing left to talk about.

“My name is Cole, in case you think of something,” said the man she now knew was Cole, offering her his hand.

“Chloe,” she said, accepting it. “It was very nice to meet you,” she said, hoping that he could tell how sincere she was. “I hope to see you again.”

“I hope to see you again,” he said as they withdrew their hands.

If she wasn’t on a case, she might have mused about how their names were almost the same if you did some rearranging and added or subtracted an H. Not that it might mean anything, but what if it did? No, it didn’t. It very clearly didn’t.

Cole watched Chloe walk away, also noting how nice their names sounded beside each other. When he would meet up with the friends that he was waiting on Jackie’s Place, he would tell them that he had just met a woman named Chloe who had long brown hair and a nice but slightly sad smile. He would say that she dressed like a pretty librarian in a cream coloured blouse, a green cardigan, and a black skirt, and his friends would ask him if it made him want to go and check out more than books from the library. He would sigh in an annoyed way that said that said that he thought that their joke was dumb, but he would appreciate it a little on the inside. When his friend who always seems to get the girl would ask him why he didn’t ask her out he would say that she looked preoccupied, which was true, but he would also think to himself that he still might have if he could have come up with a charming way to do it. They would leave Jackie’s Place to do other things and meet other people, but he couldn’t quite forget her, the girl who looked like a librarian and loved Raymond Chandler.

Finally, an excerpt that exemplifies what EsNoWriMo is all about. Here, Chloe is looking through Juliet's address book:

As she flipped through the pages, she noticed a strange magazine cutting that had been placed as a bookmark of sorts on one of the pages. Why had it been placed there? Couldn’t Juliet have just folded down the corner like a normal person might in order to mark the entry? When she looked at it more closely, it did not become clearer why it had been stashed there. It was a small cutting of a boyishly attractive brunette from what stylistically appeared to be a teen magazine from the late nineties. There was a “YM” logo in the corner of the photo, indicating that the clipping came from the now defunct “Young and Modern” teen magazine. Upon closer inspection, Chloe was able to identify the young man as James van der Beek, the star of the inimitable classic late nineties drama Dawson’s Creek, and more recently, a series of advertisements for DILF brand khakis that had led to a resurgence of the previously passé pant style. The caption on the photo was even more mysterious: “While filming Varsity Blues, James van der Beek was kicking around the browns with his darker hair colour.” The clipping had many folds and a few small tears, indicating that it had been handled many times. It was slightly faded, indicating that it had seen the light of day during the last decade or so. She wasn’t sure what to make of it, but under her “clues” heading in her stolen detective notebook, she wrote “James van der Beek was ‘kicking around the browns.’ Meaning unclear.” The last part was quite the understatement.

The magazine clipping may have been small, but it forced Chloe to ask a large number of questions. What, exactly, is kicking around the browns? Was that supposed to be a football reference? A characterization of hair colour? Has anyone else ever used that term to describe a brunette? If it had made sense to the readers of the teen magazine in the late nineties, that meaning was apparently lost in the mists of time. The reason that the clipping existed at all was perplexing enough, but even further, why had Juliet kept it for all of those years? Why did she ever have it at all? Chloe estimated that Juliet would have been thirty or so when Varsity Blues was released; why was she reading teen magazines? Was she obsessed with James van der Beek? Fair enough, Chloe thought, but why keep the clipping for over a decade? Does the phrase “kicking around the browns” have any special significance, aside from being something that Chloe wanted to say often in the future? Did it mean anything that it had been placed on that page? Was it a sign that a very important person’s contact information was listed there? Was placing a picture of a man that she loved symbolic of the fact that she loved someone on the page too?