Some Fiction in Progress

I have a story that is wiggling around in my head about these twins who don't look alike, and deja vu, and??? I woke up the other day with it in my head, and I think I know where it might go. But with fiction writing, often I find that where I start to go at the beginning is NOT where I end up.

Twice, when I was in high school, I sat down to write a story about that nice, thoughtful, calm feeling you get in a fancy, old-fashioned church when no one else is there-- with the dust motes in the sun, and the lemon-oil polished pews, and dusty smell of old, thin paper (bibles, song-books). As I wrote, with lots of description (show, don't tell!) the stories both morphed into something about Satanism. I showed the first one to my boyfriend of the time, EVIL EX, who was a self-righteous holier than thou guy and he mocked me. So I tried to write the second, and it turned out sort of the same. Revealed issues about how I felt about religion at the time, and, now that I think of it, how I felt about the boyfriend, too. The first one was published, eventually, in a little local magazine at Halloween. I still have several copies of the magazine in a box in my closet.

I also have this sci-fi story about global warming, and one of the things that I have happen is related to New Orleans being 30 feet under sea level, and what would happen if a big storm surge (rain, or a hurricane) were to occur. When Hurricane Ivan seemed like it might hit New Orleans, aside from the normal fears & anxieties about all the loss of life that would really occur, I thought "Jeez, that'll make it so that I can't write my story about it! It would seem morbid and disgusting if it really happened and then I wrote about it." (I hope that doesn't sound callous...you know what I mean!)

So fiction writing is something that I don't get a chance to do much of right now. Trying hard to work on the dissertation, and getting a lot of good stuff done, means that I can't spend hours musing over fictional characters. But now and then they insist on "talking".

Anyway. I am going to give you a "taste" of the story-- the first full paragraph I wrote the other morning. It's still not very developed, but this the stuff that insisted I write it down.:)

Every day, for the last two weeks, I’ve woken up with the strongest feeling of déjà vu. Everything seems loaded with importance– the red striped old fashioned running shoes of the guy in the Waffle House. The little bugs struggling in a spider web on the outside of the window. The way the raisin-toast is buttered. The forty-something man who looks young, but comes in and heaves himself onto the closest booth like he’s a man twice his age, wheezing and holding onto the table as he labors into a sitting position. All of these things seem so familiar and yet alien, and it seems like they should be significant. Sally says it’s because I long to feel important and mysterious, like Mulder on the X-Files with his “I Want to Believe” poster. I think that someone who uses words like “I long to feel” in regular conversation doesn’t have much room to talk about someone wanting to feel important.

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