Cancer's Legacy

I hated high school. High school hated me. Suffering from major depression that went undiagnosed for years and years, I lived in a gray cloud layer that insulated me from the rest of the world. Long way of saying that I wasn't a particularly pleasant person. I wasn't easy to know much less like. (By contrast, when I finally got diagnosed and treated appropriately, I looked around and realized the world is in color and no one had told me! Thus, I subject you from time to time to my 'treat the depression - get your life back' soapbox.)

Sullen, unhappy sophomores just can't be the highlight of anyone's day. And yet. There was Mr. Wiles.

Pete Wiles taught biology. He was one of those rare people who actually seemed to like teenagers. I've secretly wondered if that made him an alien. The man exuded charisma and the kind of easy enthusiasm for science that made what he taught matter to everyone in his classes. No one skipped his classes. He went to great lengths to make his students feel good about themselves and he did it without any discernible effort. He and his wife both worked in nuclear science for the Navy. As a result, they'd agreed to not have children. They suspected they'd taken a little too much radiation to the DNA. So they treated an entire high school full of angst-ridden teens like their kids.

I was lucky enough to wind up in Mr. Wiles's biology class in my sophomore year. Wasn't supposed to be there. Chemistry was a prerequisite, but through a series of miraculous, huge schedule screw ups, a few sophomores ended up in biology without the prereq.

And to my utter shock and surprise, Mr. Wiles liked me. Not just 'I'm your teacher, and I want you to learn' or 'I'm your teacher and I have a responsibility to you'. The man took a genuine interest. He made a concerted effort to reach through the prickly cotton wool depressive crap in order to get to me - as if he instinctually saw through the illness wrapped around me.

In his classroom, I got to feel alive in a way I didn't anywhere else. When I got whatever concept he tried to present, when he assigned homework, he upped mine - challenging me to do more. To be more. When we did well, he told us so. He liked to tell me that I was a quarter of a point behind his top scoring student - the kid who went on to become a Rhodes Scholar. Mr. Wiles's wife came into class one day. Mr. Wiles introduced us and said to his wife, "This is the one I told you about." In retrospect, that could be taken a lot of ways, but at the time, it was clear that it was high praise. I swelled way up with pride that lasted the rest of the week. He assigned us an experiment - write up the hypothesis, the experimental process, document, conclusions. Long drawn out (to us - in reality our experiment lasted a week) process of coming in everyday to mess with whatever it was we were doing and writing up our presentations. We turned it all in to be graded.

Mr. Wiles handed back tests and papers in order of score. Highest scores got handed back first down to the lowest. He'd spoiled me. I was accustomed to being one of the first three in the class to get my work back from him. When he handed back our experiment papers, he went to someone else's desk first. Second. Third. He still hadn't even looked at me. Had I screwed up? I couldn't think what I'd done or said in the paper. By the time he'd finished handing back all the papers but mine, I hovered on the edge of tears and I wasn't breathing. It wasn't so much my grade - it was the thought that after he'd been so careful to let me know that I had a future in science that I'd disappointed him so badly.

He finally came to stand beside my desk. I don't know what he saw when he looked down at me and I looked up to meet his eye. He grinned at me and shook my paper at me.

"Highest score out of every single class," he said. "Not because of the fancy cover. This is clear, concise, and to the point. It's perfect. If you don't become a writer, I will come back to haunt you."

Two weeks later, we had a substitute teacher and I knew why Mr. Wiles had used that 'come back to haunt you' turn of phrase. He came back long enough to tell us what most of us had already worked out. He had cancer. It wasn't until a year later, while I was sitting in the chemistry class I should have taken the year before, that I got word Mr. Wiles had slipped away.

It sounds so trite to say 'he had an impact on my life', but I'm sitting here in a teashop. Writing. Breathing around the crater of having lost a friend who thought I was worth the effort.

The Real McCoy or Whoever

I use people I know in stories all the time. If I knew you in junior high or high school, there are good odds you've appeared in one of my novels. There are even better odds, depending on whether or not you were a bully, that you've died a messy death or three in those novels. But I defy anyone to point to one of my characters and prove they can identify themselves.

I go to great lengths to make darned certain no one will ever recognize another human being in what I write. Names are changed. Race is changed, sometimes species is changed. Speech patterns won't be identifiable. Nor will body language or habits. And if you ask me who that alien was in the first SFR book? Remember that I have a degree in acting. I have the flat-dumb stare that says, "I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about," down pat. I'd really rather not find out that it's useable in court. The point is to have my infantile revenge on a few memories. No one in the great wide world needs to know who these people are or once were. Just me. Chances are, the bullies aren't bullies anymore. Chances are, some of them didn't make it into adulthood to care whether I'm offing them in novels or not. That's a sad, statistical fact of life. One I intend to go on respecting. So while I admit I model some characters on some people - there won't be names and everyone will go on being made 100% unrecognizable.

If you weren't a bully, I might have borrowed a single thing from you to put in a novel. Occasionally, I see someone who has a look or a feature that I find intriguing. I'll assign that to NPCs in a book (Non Player Character, for you non-gamer types). The NPCs in my books are characters who walk on, do one thing, and then walk back out. Nothing bad happens to them. In fact, they get no story of their own. They're color. Set dressing. Customers in a shop. Soldiers guarding doors. It is possible that someone could identify these characters in a "Hey! She totally stole that pink hair thing from me!" kind of way. That said, I seriously doubt that the people I am lifting wardrobe or dye jobs from actually read the sorts of things I write. Also? I keep it as general as possible - like pink hair. No one individual owns that hair color. So if I see it on someone and use it for an NPC in a story, it's pretty tough to say I took it from that guy over there in the skinny jeans with holes in the knees. (All of which I just made up. I'm sitting on the boat, staring at the unbelievable mess that's been made this week.)

Main characters are almost always products of imagination. I say 'almost' because there have been cases where I kept a personality type in mind when writing, but that's as far as that goes. The protagonists and antagonists need to be specific people in order to serve the story. Even if I'd wanted to model an MC on a real person, in order for the story to work, I'd likely have to change so many things that the real person would be lost. So I just don't.

What about you? Do you think it would be cool to be written into a book? Would you want to be a major player in the story? Cause you know some terrible things have to happen, then. What about being a bit player?

The Good, the Bad, and the High School

Full disclosure: If I'm writing -  actually getting story on virtual paper, there is no place, no matter how awful, that's totally bad. It's only when I'm trying and failing to write that I claim someplace is worst. I'm keeping a running list.

1. Onboard a moving boat while a cat is having a full blown panic attack and insists she'll only be okay if you hold her and never let her go. Though, to be honest, that can go much worse. Sometimes the cat gets seasick into the bargain.
2. Onboard a moving boat because getting lost in your own little fictional world and forgetting to look up at the horizon once in a while is a sure fire recipe for getting seasick yourself.
3. Family events of any kind  - they've put up with this writing shit for however many years old you are. When it's Mom's 70th birthday? No one understands the need to just get this awesome idea on paper.
4. In a moving car - again with the motion sickness thing. I'm fortunate that airplanes aren't usually a problem. Or maybe it's that I'm already drugged to the gills in order to fly in the first place.
5. Anyplace with an internet connection - seriously. The best and most progress I made on books ever has been when my internet connection was down. Easy to make fictional tracks when you're not being tempted away to glance at email. Or Twitter. Or Facebook.
6. In the company of my nearest and dearest. I love my family. I promise. But there's something about me wanting to sit down and make word count that turns my normally rational husband and standoffish cats into creatures who adore me and can't possibly live without me. And they must all off them tell me so the second my fingers make contact with my keyboard. Writing email? No one cares. Blog posts? Yawn. Open the WIP? It's like I opened a can of magical husband and cat luring scent - pizza for him, tuna for the felines.
   

This is why I'm going to say what I'm going to say: Public places are generally conducive to my getting a novel written. So long as I *like* the place, I have  my mp3 player, and a little bit of space. The trick is to carve a tiny bit of personal space out of that public place. Make your booth in the café into your own little world. My corner table at the tea shop I jokingly call my office allows me to spread out just enough to have a buffer between me and any potential neighbors. The headphones and soundtracks I've chosen close out the public to an even larger degree.

The place where I wrote that I hated the most? High school. Wasn't a happy kid, I grant you that. It's hard to claim it's the worst place I ever wrote, though, because writing in order to survive high school is what made it necessary for me to write to survive period. And as coping mechanisms go? This is a-okay. I make shit up and occasionally, someone pays me for it. What's not to like?