Page 23 of A Storybook Wedding

“Are you on social media?”

“Nope. That’s a time suck,” she says as the crowd inches forward.

“True,” I agree. “Well, I can have my publicist add you to my mailing list if you want. I have your email from workshop.”

She shrugs. “Sure.”

“So then maybe I’ll see you before the next residency.”

CJ grins, and her nose wriggles, showcasing a sprinkle of freckles. “Perhaps. But if not, I wish you a happy Halloween, happy Thanksgiving, happy Hanukkah, merry Christmas, and happy Kwanzaa. And anything else you might celebrate.”

“Thanks. And yes, all of those things to you as well.”

She reaches out to shake my hand, like she did when we first met. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you,” she offers.

I slide my hand around hers, noticing its dry warmth. “It was great meeting you this week,” I say, meaning it.

“You too,” she replies. “Have a great semester.”

Then she whacks me in the stomach with her backpack as she turns to leave the boat, and all I can do is laugh.

CHAPTER 5

Cecily

As the summer drips away and the brisk air of fall settles in, I experience my own kind of quiet rebirth. Energized by the time away at Block Island, I come back to my basement apartment in Little Neck with renewed purpose. I will write a novel this semester, I decide. I will be the hardest-working student that Dillon Norway has ever had the pleasure of mentoring, and I will take every suggestion and critique and shape it into something acquirable by a Big Five publisher. I will learn everything I can about the industry, and I will find an agent by the time I graduate. I will read all the craft books, subscribe to all the magazines, comb through all the databases.

This program is a gift, and I will squander none of it.

In residency, there was a lot of talk about the “writer’s life.” People are always quick to ask authors how they write—like, the mechanics. I took a lot of notes so that I could compare what worked for the faculty members who mentioned it. One teacher, a screenwriter from California, said that she writes in the middle of the night from about 2 a.m. until 5 a.m. She called it “the witching hour.” Another one said she wrote in a home office with headphones on and music blaring. I do not have a writing practice, so I decide that developing one will be a fun challenge.

I start by taking a trip to Bay Terrace Shopping Center, where I visit Bath & Body Works and discover a scent simply called Leaves; I buy a three-wick candle to satisfy my olfactory needs. At Staples, I purchase a wrist-protecting mouse pad, since many of my professors complained of carpal tunnel, and I buy a few new spiral notebooks and good clicky pens. I clear off my kitchen table and conclude that it will work better than my little computer desk. I feel like I need open space around me. And who are we kidding? I always eat dinner on the couch anyway, so the table doesn’t get much use, outside of being a landing zone for bills and assorted papers that I’m too lazy to file.

In late August, after devouring several craft books, I begin to write. I carve out three-hour time increments for this. I try doing it after work, but I find that I’m exhausted by about an hour in and am in no way producing anything readable, much less sellable. So I try the whole 5 a.m. thing. This is not without its issues. First of all, I typically wake up at 6 a.m. and exercise for an hour before getting ready for work. Second, I’m not vain, but I have a lot of hair, and I usually take time to blow-dry and style it in the morning. Third, I enjoy breakfast—so I tend to sit down (yes, on the couch) and have a cup of coffee and some prepared meal: oatmeal, bacon and eggs, a toasted bagel with cream cheese, an acai bowl. But when I get up at 5 a.m. to write and commit three hours to it, that leaves me with a single remaining hour to shower, do something to my wet hair (forget makeup, no time for that), pour the coffee in a Yeti, and grab a muffin and eat it in the car on the twenty-minute drive to the library. There’s no time to work out, and I arrive at my place of business looking frazzled and praying there are no blueberry stains on my shirt. But this is a small trade-off for all the progress I’m experiencing.

Yes, this is my life now. I’ve switched the workouts to after work (which is its own kind of challenge), and I’m asleep by 8:30 every night.

It’s a good thing I’m not trying to date anymore, because my whole vibe screams future crazy cat lady.

You know what though? I’m happy, and the pages are coming. By the end of September, I’ve got fifty pages of a new novel written. I tell Dillon Norway that I wrote fifty pages, but since we are only supposed to send in twenty-five pages per month, I ask him if he would rather I submit the first twenty-five pages or the later ones as well. He surprises me by asking for the whole thing, which makes me equal parts nervous, excited, and grateful.

The story is about a young woman whose sister marries her ex-boyfriend.

Yes, I realize it’s kind of an obvious move, but hey, Write what you know, right? And Dillon Norway himself said he thought it would make a great story!

Plus, the words come so naturally, since I already know the characters pretty intimately. Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking. Of course I changed the names of all the real-life characters, and it’s not exactly the story of what happened. It’s fiction. Lots of space for creative license.

So he reads the fifty pages, and we get on our very first Zoom call the first week of October. He tells me the opening is pitch-perfect: I drop the reader right into the wedding and work backward from there; he believes this is the right move. He says the work is laced with humor, which makes the narrative voice a pleasure to experience. These are his actual words. I scribble them down so they are preserved forever in my notes. He asks me what the plan is for this piece—will I be attempting to extend it into a novel? I say yes, and he seems pleased. He offers suggestions, but they are minimal, because he wants to see how the story unfolds. There might be some pacing issues with the flashbacks, but it’s too soon to tell.

It’s not all roses and sunshine. Dillon Norway is honest. There are moments where my dialogue needs work; there are occasional inconsistencies in my timeline. Still, he treats me like someone whose writing is worth something, which is more than I can say for Tim, Harry Potter, and Maleficent. I email him craft essays, which prompt dialogue unlike any I’ve ever had before. We discuss elements of storytelling using my current manuscript, comparing it to similar texts in the same genre, using other stories and books to identify what works and what doesn’t. Dillon Norway recommends that I read specific, wedding-themed books by Emily Giffin, Helen Hoang, Jojo Moyes, and Jasmine Guillory. He explains that he’s asked his wife’s book club to help him identify these—which means that he’s talking about me to his wife, to people in his circle. I am a real person with writing potential—not just some item on the to-do list of a low-paying adjunct faculty member’s job. This—this being treated like an artist worthy of respect—this is a high that I cannot get enough of.

My hair is always curly now, left wet in the morning and held up by a giant claw clip. I’ve lost five pounds because I’m skipping breakfast, as I’ve found that by doing so, I can squeeze in an extra fifteen minutes of writing time. I’m brainstorming during my lunch break. One time, over lunch, Ramona says I talk about my characters as if they’re real people. Another time, she comments that I am starting to look like someone an anthropologist might study. I’m not sure if she means it as a compliment, but she still eats with me, so it can’t be that bad.

By the time I submit my second packet at the end of October, I’ve written a total of 125 pages. Dillon Norway is impressed. He says I’ve caught the bug, and best not to let go of it. He allows me to submit the new seventy pages, even though the university expectation still remains that he only has to read a third of that per month. A week after submitting, we Zoom again, and this time he says he thinks we’ve got a novel on our hands. It’s not perfect, of course, and he recommends more craft books, including Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, in which she talks about “shitty first drafts” and many other anti-perfectionism ideas that encourage me to give myself grace without enabling me to be lazy. It is the exact book I need to read at this moment in my young writing life, and I eagerly write my craft essay on it via a voice note on my phone while on a power walk one evening.

I learn that November is something called NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month, and that writers across the globe come together to try and pen fifty thousand words in just one month. There’s a huge community for this online, but I am not interested in social media, so I participate from the fringes, keeping an old-school log of my daily word count on a magnetized pad on my fridge that is supposed to be for my grocery list. Fifty thousand words seems achievable, seeing as how I’ve already written thirty-five thousand in such a short time. In order to accomplish this new goal, I begin writing on the weekends for eight hours a day. It’s a lot, but I take the writing with me to the laundromat on Saturdays and make sure I still show up for Sunday dinner at my parents’ house. Jamie and Bryce are almost always there during the offseason months of October through January, since they come down to long-term visit in my parents’ basement. Just looking at them gives me new ideas and fuel for the week to come.

The story ends on November 20, all by itself. It’s shorter than I thought it would be at 278 pages and seventy-six thousand words. But it’s done.

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