What happened is, Maggie Stiefvater recently wrote a wonderful and highly detailed post dissecting the intricacies of revision, and the response was tremendous. The resulting discussion involved a lot of people saying they wished more authors would share their process with this same level of detail, and since Maggie is by nature a helpful and motivated person (also, she is organized), she asked a bunch of us if we’d be willing to participate in what has essentially become a series!

When I signed up for this, I thought for sure that I’d be making an absolute fool of myself— possibly even revealing the depths of my crazy-looking writing process. But I’ve surprised myself.

It turns out that while my early attempts at story-telling are always plagued by rogue commas and brackets, full of strange gaps and cryptic notes, by the time I reach a completed draft, it actually looks pretty … normal.

The post that follows is really long.

Really.

Long.

Also, there is one F-bomb, just so you know. I try to keep this place at least marginally compliant with school and parental internet filters because I don’t want people being FORBIDDEN from my blog. However, since the F-bomb is contained in a screenshot of my manuscript, I think we’ll be okay. To put it another way: I don’t actually write very clean books.

I know—you are not surprised. But I felt I should probably say it anyway.

Here are two pages of The Space Between, documenting Daphne’s first moments on Earth. (Click to embiggen.)

ROUGH DRAFT

1. Setting the scene—but it’s really just a post-it note to myself. Later, I’ll decide to give this opening a little more context. Not a lot, not too much, but a little.
2. This is pertinent because Daphne comes from a place where the whole environment is pretty much grayscale-plus-red. A blue sky is something she would most certainly have expectations about.
3. An attempt to describe the experience of temperature, while cursing myself for naively deciding to write from the perspective of someone who has no prior experience with any kind of physical sensation.
4. Again, trying to show Daphne working to make sense of things she’s never had to think about before—in this instance, the concept of time—but it’s hitting the page in a very abstract way.
5. Presenting the world as a series of units, not only in an attempt to convey sheer size, but because Daphne has a tendency to break any large idea into manageable pieces.
6. She’s conscious that her appearance/presence could be interpreted as unusual, but in true Daphne-form, the understanding is very dispassionate. This is really another instance of me working to pin down her voice
7. Daphne’s entire notion of Earth has always come from a purely visual representation, and now it’s expanding to encompass other senses.
8. Reiterating the separation between what she’s experienced before and then, what the world is actually like.
9. Daphne’s voice developing, inventing her own vocabulary to describe all these concepts she doesn’t have any practical knowledge of.



10. An action that shows how naturally compliant Daphne is, how ready to be obliging.
11. This is Daphne focusing on small details because they seem fascinating, rather than big ones that might tell her something pertinent about the situation.
12. Again, a sense of pure curiosity, taking an interest in every piece of new information.
13. Misinterpreting what ought to be a recognizable threat. Throughout the book, Daphne typically attributes good intentions to people, and particularly to human people.
14. Responding to the object rather than the gesture, inability/disinclination to read intention.
15. Not a taunt or a challenge, but a purely honest question.
16. The first indication that Daphne has some exciting new abilities she doesn’t have at home.
17. Still trying to find Daphne’s voice when it comes to sensory details, while also demonstrating that she’s totally unshocked by the fact that she just burned a man with her hands.
18. Reiterating that Daphne is a pragmatist above all things. Even post-mugging, she’s still focused on the knife, which happens to be the most beautiful thing on hand.
19. An interesting realization. Daphne is voicing a concern that will deepen and come up for her again and again—all these troubling ideas about being bad and how she got that way
20. Even in this completely new environment, she’s carrying a lot of the person she was at home in Pandemonium—easily distracted by anything pretty or interesting. Her radio dial is still tuned almost exclusively to novelty.

FINAL VERSION

1. In the interim, I have added … chapter titles!
2. This is deceptive, because in the rough draft, this chapter is designated number five, so it would be totally reasonable to assume the beginning of the book got longer in revision. But no, is actually shorter. I just broke up some of the earlier chapters.
3. It’s actually been a little while since we were in Daphne’s POV, so I needed a sentence to remind us where she was when we left her, in order to set the new scene.
4. Daphne’s voice has solidified over the course of revisions, and she’s definitively become an “expected” sort of person, rather than an “imagined” one.
5. In keeping with that, she’s consistently more factual, more direct.
6. As Daphne’s character began to develop, there’s a new layer—this idea of otherness and what it means to be a demon on earth, what makes it different from home. It hasn’t really come to light yet, but I’ve added some small exploration throughout so that when we get to it, the big issues don’t come as a surprise.
7. I’m working to crystallize the way Daphne expresses the idea of time. The revision process has made her much more concrete in the way she assesses situations. It’s a pretty dreamy book in terms of tone, and I ultimately felt like Daphne needed to offset that, rather than exacerbate it. Urgency seemed way more abstract than simply getting down to business and trying to quantify the amount of time she has at her disposal.
8. While early Daphne was quite comfortable referring to a map, this Daphne feels a definite sense of ownership over everything she’s brought with her.
9. The character has evolved enough to know what Cicero is, but not necessarily the geographical location.
10. This is a rare example of revising to be less specific.
11. To that end, I decided I didn’t need to describe the map, but rather Daphne’s very casual reaction to the size of the world.
12. Adding some context to the interaction. Even though the extra dialogue doesn’t tell us a lot about the speaker, it gives us a little bit more than the previous generic disembodied voice.
13. This gives the reader a clearer idea of where the man is standing in relation to Daphne and how that reflects the geography under the bridge. Also, I felt like in the original version, it was unrealistic that he would be able to come so close without her noticing, so here I’ve moved him a little farther away.
14. Changed the description to something more physically specific, less impressionistic.
15. Ditto above.
16. I rephrased this to make the paragraph flow better and also to further downplay the ease with which she follows him.
17. I took out the reference to thorns because I wanted to knife to seem totally harmless in all aspects, even little tiny superficial ones.
18. Added Then to give the action a greater sense of force/aggression. This is when she finally interprets the situation, and I feel like the then gives it a little sprinkle of shock—why is he being so unreasonable?!

As you can see (you can, right—I’m not making this up?), my rough draft is all about the character. I almost always use my early versions of stories to find character and voice, get a sense of what they notice, what they sound like, what they think about. And then by the later drafts, it’s mostly a matter of kind of shaping that character, defining them, sanding off the edges, and turning my attention to the surroundings.

Also, I want to just take a second to address the fact that apart from bunches of little nitpicky stuff, not a lot about this scene has changed from rough to final, even though the book actually went through a lot of drafts (so, so many*).

The reason for this is that most of my revised scenes wouldn’t be remotely helpful on a line by line level because I routinely throw so much stuff out. And the line level is what this exercise is all about. Anyway, I wanted to at least explain that this tidiness is not typical of me, because otherwise I’d feel like I was lying to you.

(Also, if I’d had my pick of a billion other scenes that involved only line-changes, I would have picked one one with no F-bombs.)

*So. Many.

But.

The thing is, it’s about to get very disorganized around here and I wanted to announce ahead of time that the next couple weeks are due to be pretty quiet.

The reason for this is twofold—first, I’m going out of town to work on the Merry Fates not-an-anthology with Tess and Maggie in an undisclosed location.* Secondly, the trip will immediately be followed by knee surgery.

Which, it’s cool. I’ve had knee surgery before and while I wouldn’t class it as fun, exactly, it’s eminently doable. However, based on my previous experience with the recovery process (specifically Vicodin), even typing out a series of four or five coherent sentences can take about twenty minutes. So, not only will blogging most likely not happen, it absolutely should not happen! I have one more fun thing that I’ll be posting on Monday, and then blog silence for the next two weeks.**

Okay, now I feel like I’ve just spent this whole post talking AT you, declaring things loudly and telling you how it’s going to be.

So hey. Hey, you. What’s up with you guys?

*Otherwise known as Tess’s living room, but it sounds way more glamorous if you imagine us working diligently in a dilapidated fortress. Or a rustic cabin above a fjord. Or anyplace else suitably isolated and weird.

**This might not work. I might disregard my own advice. I might subject you to incoherent post-surgery ramblings. Please, I hope not.

Kristina Y. Zavala
brookea_2006
Andrea
Meagan L
Meghan (@meghan805)
Aik
Marisa
Leigh Smith

After which, they will receive mailings of my choice. (I assure you, whatever I send will be tidy, well-packaged, and tasteful. But of questionable usefulness.)

And now to everyone, thank you so much for sharing your goals with me! It’s really wonderful to see what you all have in store this year—so go forth and accomplish! ♥

I mean cynical in the sense of Whatever. This is stupid.

It’s not a good look. It’s not a good feeling. But more than that, it doesn’t make any inherent sense.

The thing is, nothing bad has happened to me. Nothing much has actually changed, and yet I suddenly feel like the whole world is a giant lump of pointlessness. It is completely unprecedented that a non-traumatic breakup with a perfectly nice, perfectly decent boy could turn a girl into such an unrelenting pessimist.

It starts with my ill-tempered crisis about dating and relationships and beauty, but quickly grows to encompass All the Everything. And while initially it still seems recoverable, the situation is then worsened by a variety of factors. By the fact that Jane hasn’t been at school for four days.

At first, I wait by her locker, trying to look casual and like I belong there when Rooster and #4 come to get their books.

It doesn’t work.

Rooster and Dweezil laugh and elbow each other and tease #4 loudly about his inability to get a girlfriend. #4 just shakes his head and looks someplace else. Despite my newfound reluctance to take the world seriously, I feel excruciatingly out of place, and Jane does not show up.

After awhile, I don’t even bother with her locker anymore. She is never waiting for me outside my writing class now. I know that when I pass the speech and debate room after second hour, she won’t be there, and I don’t know what to do about it. It’s like she’s disappeared.

“What do you mean you don’t know her phone number?” Catherine says. “We’ve only been hanging out with her every day for the entire semester.”

I shrug. “I don’t know, I just hate calling people.”

This piece of intelligence is absolutely true. At this point in my life, I have never asked a single person for their number, due to my intense dislike of making calls. As far as I’m concerned, the telephone should die in a fire.

Catherine sighs and shakes her head, but by now, she’s very accustomed to my lax social skills. “Well, Dill used to go out with her, right? He’ll know.”

So I wait for Dill after lunch, leaning against his locker until the warning bell rings and he’s pretty much forced to come over and get his books or else be late. I smile and start to speak, but he just reaches around me to turn the lock like I’m not even there.

“Hey,” I say, waving my hand in front of him, but stopping short of actually touching him. “Jane’s been gone and I don’t know her number. Could you give it to me?”

It’s the first time I’ve said anything to him since the night we broke up, and I keep being distracted by the fact that I suddenly think my voice sounds weird. I know I’m saying all the wrong things, and being totally inconsiderate and invasive when I should be giving him space, but I don’t know what else to do.

He just maintains a frighteningly neutral expression, looking off over my head. “I don’t have it with me.”

“Well, can you get it for me?”

He shrugs. “Yeah. Yeah, I have it written down. I’ll see if I can find it.”

He leaves me there, arms at my sides, watching him all the way down the hall. In that moment, every single thing about the world feels shaky and out of balance. Off-kilter.

Because I have no idea what else to do, I walk down to the cafeteria, half-hoping that Wit will have skipped English again and we can split a cup of coffee or go for a walk and talk about relationships and the appalling lack of meaning in the world and the Jane Situation, and how someone goes about calling someone else on the phone.

But Wit isn’t there.

In fact, the common area is mostly empty except for a tall, skinny boy sitting at one of the round tables, hunched over a pile of office forms. A tall, skinny boy with orange hair and a billion freckles.

For a second, I just clasp my hands in front of me and consider him. I stand there, trying to get used to the idea of him, to make it seem right and reasonable that he would be there.

“ Irish?”

He glances up. “Hey—oh, hey!” Then he reaches for me, grabbing my hands, swinging them back and forth. “Buckaroo, what’s up?”

We both laugh when he calls me that, but it sounds empty and sort of false. We look at each other for a long time, and then he drops my hands.

“So,” I said finally. “How are things? I mean, where’ve you been living?”
     He met my gaze, looking embarrassed and sort of shy. He shrugged. “Oh, you know. I been at an apartment, friends’ houses, my mom’s. I just been living, I guess.”
     I smiled a little, “Another step towards becoming that bum you always aspired to be.”*
     He laughed softly and I was sorry. “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “Yeah, it is.”
     We looked at each other a long time, smiling, just staring uncomfortably into each other’s faces. Still red-haired, still freckled, still green-eyed, still Irish.
     But older now too, hadn’t shaved in awhile. Not really my friend. Maybe never my friend, but it has always mattered so much that he was nice to me when no one else was.
     He took a deep breath suddenly and blurted out, “Oh God, I don’t even know what to say!”
     And I just looked down, hands held childishly behind my back, thinking of all the things he could tell me that I would love him for later. “I miss you.” “I’m sorry.” “I screwed things up.” (“I plan to stop selling meth.”)
     What he did say though was about as good as any of those. “Buckaroo,” he said, “I’m thinking about getting myself registered for school next year.”
     And who cares if it’s just thinking? Who cares if it’s all bullshit and it will never really happen? He said it out loud. And when he says things, it’s always just so $%&@ing easy to believe him.

Our conversation is short and uncomfortable, but also kind of transformative. I don’t really think Irish will get his act together, but then, I never believed he was coming back in the first place, and in this regard at least, I’ve been proven wrong. I start to wonder what other things I’m wrong about.

The next morning, I catch Dill in the west hall, before first hour. “Do you have Jane’s number”

“I forgot.”

And because she’s been gone for a week by now and because I already want to put my head down on the linoleum and go to sleep, or collect fifty-seven empty bottles and throw them against a wall, or scream into a pillow because I don’t want Irish to be a drug-dealer anymore, everything else suddenly seems very, very easy.

(This sudden easiness? This right here is the beauty of acute nihilism.)

“Dill,” I say, folding my arms across my chest and looking up at him. “Just give me her number.”

We stand facing each other in the hall, toes almost touching. He’s looking down at me in this very monolithic way, like he’s tremendous, taking up space, and I am very, very small. Which is true, but suddenly doesn’t feel true.

Instead, the whole interaction feels totally contrived, like a social studies skit or one of those practical exams where you play-act the parts,** and all the time I spent last year thinking that I was insubstantial or see-through? I am not that girl anymore.

Last night I dreamed that Jane came back to school. I walked into the building this morning feeling hopeful for the first time in what seems like centuries. Guess who wasn’t there.
     And every time I ask Dill for her phone number, he says he doesn’t have it on him, or says that he doesn’t remember it, or says he lost it. So today I didn’t ask, I just looked up into his face and said, “Dill, just give me her phone number.”
     He sighed and recited it like a poem.

The way I say, unequivocally, what I want from Dill is magical and kind of amazing. The idea that you can just declare your objective and people have to give it to you? Amazing! The whole encounter is eye-opening. It is so small and so commonplace, and also a complete revelation.

And no, it doesn’t solve the problem of Jane, and how she is missing. It doesn’t mean that Irish will come back to school and do his homework and not sell meth and not wind up in a whole lot of trouble. It doesn’t solve the fact that graphing parabolas is really boring, or cure me of my global cynicism or my fear of making eye contact with #4, but it reminds me that every single moment is a tiny little bridge to the next one.

Nothing is foregone, nothing is certain, and maybe meaning isn’t inherent, but even if it isn’t, that doesn’t mean you can’t still make your own.

*****

Discussion topics are getting really hard because I feel like I’ve used up all the straightforward questions and nothing that I’m talking about is very straightforward at all anymore. Because a lot of times that’s what happens when you start thinking about the world—there are all these little divots and incongruities and sticky-out parts, and your brain can just get very noisy.

And now, at the end of junior year, Brenna’s easy, self-explanatory lessons have mostly been learned, and for the rest of high school, things are just very, very noisy.

*This is actually intended to be a joke, although a very ill-timed one. The year before, we were pretty constantly discussing how he wanted to be a professional hobo, to heat up cans of baked beans on a flat rock in a campfire and ride the rails and have a dog with a piece of rope for a collar. So I’m making an inside reference that’s supposed to allude to our shared history, but which is shockingly not-right for the moment. I am very bad at identifying appropriate circumstances.

**Later, I’ll start to realize that these are always the moments where something significant changes for me—when things become detached and kind of artificial, like I’m standing outside it and can see all the pulleys and the wires, but someone else is in charge of the words coming out of my mouth.

Today,* I really like this:

(P.S. My contest to win books/stickers/miscellany is still going on, so be sure to enter if you’re interested in receiving something ill-defined/unpredictable. It goes for the rest of the week!)

*Also, I like it on other days besides today.

There are a billion things that seventeen-year-old Brenna doesn’t understand. And some of them—okay, most even—have to do with feelings. This makes her (me) feel pretty shockingly stupid, because theories and facts are what you’re supposed to work hard to master, and feelings are the things you’re supposed to be born knowing about. Instead, I eat up books with a vengeance, while struggling to grasp even the simplest emotional concepts. I kind of feel like a cartoon character.

Here is the story of how I break up with Dill, or else, he breaks up with me.

I’ve mentioned before that as a couple, we have a tendency to bring out the worst in each other. I wasn’t lying, and the interaction that follows is one I’m distinctly not proud of. While lacking in drama and vaguely surreal, it’s exactly the kind of break-up one might expect from teenage Brenna. Basically, I’m saying you’ve been warned.

*****

First, he picked me fifty violets. Wove them into my hair and around my wrists. The leftovers, I stuffed into the pockets of my hoodie.

Later, we stopped to get coffee. It was a warm night and I asked for ice in mine. I knew the boy behind the counter, a little. He was older and I’d had Spanish with him the year before. Here’s most of what I knew about him: Buddy Holly glasses, nerdy in an ironic, contrived way—and nice, always nice to me, even when the basketball players and the wrestling boys would sometimes take my things and tease me just for fun.

“I like your flowers,” he said. “Hey, you think you could spare one?” He gestured to his lapel.

So I handed him one and he slipped it through his buttonhole, while Dill stood against the counter and squeezed my hand more tightly than was comfortable.

“I picked those for you,” he said, as soon as we were outside.

“Yes.” (Factual, remember—so, so factual.)

“So, I didn’t pick them for you to give to someone else.”

“If you picked them for me, they’re mine now. Anyway, a flower is not the same thing as affection. I wasn’t giving your affection to someone else.”

We were at Dill’s truck by then. He was shaking his head as he unlocked the driver’s side. “You’re unbelievable.”

I climbed in, tucking my hair behind my ears. The violets were tickling me. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, I can’t be like you. You analyze everything.”

“Well, it’s a very good way to make decisions,” I said, but I understood suddenly that we were almost to that point where you can’t go back—not ever. “It’s the best way I know of.”

He turned and looked at me, and it wasn’t angry or possessive or aggravated. It was so, so sad. “Are you even into me at all? Because I can’t go through life putting two dollars in and getting a dollar back out. I just need to know if you love me.”

I stared at my feet, my ragged green shoes. The rubber soles were gray with dirt. The tiny dollhouse clock I’d glued to the toe was long gone. “Not like you want me to.”

“And you won’t feel different later?”

“No,” I said, and I knew that it was absolutely true.

The whole time, I kept thinking about Jane, how he said he broke up with her because she was strange, but that I’m just unique. Wit, flopping and jerking when he talks, swearing like a tourettes patient, always calling me out on things, asking actual questions about what I think and feel. Making me explain myself again and again until he understands.
     My best friends are the weird ones, which is how I know that I’m weird too. Dill is perfectly normal. Like J. Alfred Prufrock in the poem, I can never make him see what I really mean.
     He told me all the things he wished were different about me. How I don’t hold hands with him at school and I can be quiet for hours. How sometimes he gives me the silent treatment when he’s mad and I don’t even notice. He admitted that the time he stood me up last month and then told me later that he forgot, he’d really done it on purpose.
     “Why would you do something like that?” I asked.
     “I wanted to see what you’d do.”
     It’s funny, because when it happened, I wasn’t upset. People forget things, or get distracted. My evening wasn’t ruined. Little Sister Yovanoff and I watched the hockey game with our dad and screamed at the TV and ate ice cream. I didn’t mind that Dill hadn’t shown up to take me to play pool with him and Greg, but the fact that he would do it on purpose, to punish or test me?

“Don’t you ever care about anything?” he asked, and the way he sounded made me sorry and angry at the same time.

“Yes,” I said, because it was true. I didn’t know how the whole thing had gotten so nasty so fast, but I couldn’t seem to stop. “Pandas. African elephants and the national deficit and the ozone layer.”

I don’t know why I’m so bad at telling the truth. I care about lots of things. But I care about them in ways that I wouldn’t be able to make anyone else understand.
     “Well, I care about you.” Dill tapped his palm on the steering wheel. “I love you.”
     “We’re seventeen,” I said in a hard, level voice when I would have rather screamed it.
     He took me home. In my driveway, I got out of the truck. I stood there for minute, looking in through the passenger window, dripping with flowers.
     “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to talk to you anymore,” he said, looking away from me.
     So now, I’ve had the big break-up. Not a splitting-off or a fading-away, but the real thing. It had everything to do with how we are disastrous.*

*****

Dill is true to his word. He avoids me to a degree that I didn’t even know was possible. In addition to finding all-new routes through the building, he doesn’t come to our writing class for a week.

When I actually discuss the break-up with someone else, Wit is the one I talk to. Mostly because he brings it up, but also because he doesn’t seem to expect me to be distraught or emotionally fragile.

We’re sitting on the curb, out by the back parking lot. He’s smoking and ditching English—two things that he does habitually. I’m staring out across the track and the practice fields, pulling up handfuls of grass and stacking them in an untidy mound.

“What’s wrong with you?” he says abruptly. “Are you all tragic and sad because you dumped your $%&@ing jock-boy? You didn’t have to. You could’ve just kept going on dates and making out with him casually. He wouldn’t have minded.”

“No, he minded. Anyway, I think he dumped me. Look, do you know how many boys have asked me out since we broke up? Three.”

“Brody doesn’t count.”

“Okay, then two. But I didn’t even know one of them. Why would someone ask out a girl they didn’t know?”

Wit mashes his cigarette out on the curb with the kind of ferocious dignity that only belongs to sixteen-year-old goth-boys with impressive eyebrows. “God, sometimes you piss me off so much.”

“What are you talking about?”

He sighs, knocking his shoulder into mine. “Okay, so you’re like this really decent-looking girl, right? You’re pretty, and it’s like you—I don’t think it’s that you don’t notice—I think you just don’t care.”

The thing is, I can’t quite bring myself to admit it, but he’s right. I’m pretty, and I don’t care. Later, I will. I’ll care a big-fat-alarming lot. I’ll obsess about it to a degree that I’ve never obsessed over anything in my life. But right at that particular moment, I’ve hit the sweet spot of my high school career. My stock has never been higher, and all I can think is that I’m kind of terrified by it.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, and something in my chest feels hollow, but I can’t tell if it’s because I’m lying, or because I’m starting to panic.

Wit sighs again, shaking his head. “You’re only saying that because you’re not ugly. If you were ugly, then you’d care.”

Later, I’ll grow up to be self-aware. Or, if not that, then at least be more articulate. I’ll be able to explain some of the things that bother me—the things that have always bothered me, but I never really had the words for. For now, though, I just feel helpless and kind of frantic. Scared of everything.

“Please, what is so great about being pretty? Everyone’s always acting like it matters, and it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Wit rakes a hand through his hair. “God damn it,” he says, but he sounds exhausted. “It’s not supposed to mean anything. It just makes things better for you. Don’t you get that? I mean, these guys like you. Brody, your $%&@ing jock-boy, they’re crazy about you.”

The way he says it is utterly final, and all at once, I can feel the panic ratcheting up again. These are the big, shuddering ideas I’ve never talked about with Jane or Catherine or anyone, because if you’re not even supposed to admit you could possibly maybe be pretty, how can you ever talk about it?

“No,” I say, and I almost whisper it. “They just don’t know me very well.”

“Well, whose fault is that?”

“What I mean is, if they did, I don’t think they’d even like me that much. I’m weird, Wit. I think about weird things. When I talk, it’s about weird things.”

I don’t know how to make him see what’s really bothering me (scaring the hell out of me)—that I’m so afraid I’ll never figure out how to have a relationship where someone actually knows me. That it was easy before, when no one ever noticed me, because as long as they weren’t noticing, there was nothing for them to misjudge or make assumptions about. That there’s nothing wrong with people thinking you’re attractive, except that after awhile, it starts to define you (becomes the realest part of you) and when boys I don’t know come up and trap me against the wall and say cheesy, appalling things like Hey good-looking, I don’t feel happy or proud, but sort of claustrophobic.

When I equate being pretty with being grossly misunderstood, what I’m really struggling with is the idea of inside versus outside, which is a huge, tricky concept and one that will dog me for the rest of high school.**

Right in this moment though, all I know is that I’ve spent pretty much my whole life staring at the world through a magnifying glass, and now, just when I should be starting to compile my data, drawing some well-reasoned conclusions, everything is suddenly very confusing.

I haven’t quite reached the point where I’ll stop understanding myself completely, but we’re not that far off now.

We’re getting there.

*****

Now, the discussion topic.

Basically, before all this, I never thought I was the sort of person who was remotely defined by their relationships, but my break-up with Dill sends me into the kind of identity crisis I didn’t know was even possible. (And remember, existential crises are one of teenage-Brenna’s main hobbies.)

So how do these things work for you? Do relationships come naturally, or do you have to struggle to figure them out? Does the process tell you anything new about yourself?

Interestingly, when Little Sister Yovanoff starts dating during my senior year, she does it with such absolute ease and self-assurance that it’s shocking. So, I know that kind of natural facility exists, but even observing her closely, I’m totally unable to isolate the components.

*Which, wow. YES.

**Also, beyond.

However, what I didn’t really understand until it was brought to my attention by D (who is far, far more organized than I am) is that I have a lot of MY books.

And I have to say, it feels amazing to have all these books—these physical reminders of what I’ve worked really hard on, what I’ve accomplished.

But the thing is … I don’t actually need this many.

So, in honor of my outrageous stockpile of books, I am going to implement what will henceforth be known as The Easiest Contest Ever.

I mean it. Easy-peasy.

Comment below, telling me a personal goal for the year 2012, be able to provide me with a US shipping address, and I will draw some names.

That’s it, the whole thing.

The contest will go for two weeks—now until Sunday the 15th at midnight Eastern—at which point I will draw something like six names, and each of those approximately six will get something in the mail. Probably a book.

(Really, a book)

What you need to understand: I’m not necessarily sticking to English-language versions. When I say I have a lot of books, I mean some that are in a language I can read, and some that aren’t.

Which means that you might receive one that isn’t.

You might receive additional prizes, such as buttons or stickers.

You might receive a book I didn’t write.

Honestly, this is a very freeform contest …

SO. That being said, good luck!

EDITED FOR CLARITY: No need to leave me a postal address here (I’ll get them later, if applicable), but if you could leave an email address, that would be fantastic!

Um, carry on.

The thing is, if someone were to attempt to assemble a clear picture of teenage-me using only my journal, they’d most likely assume that I never did anything but go to school, be at school, and think about school.

This is remarkably not true.

In actuality, I pretty much only ever bother with the journal when I’m at school, because at school, I’m very, very bored.

Because of this desperate need to entertain myself when I’m in class, the entries are often recorded in real-time and capture the at-school portion of my life fairly accurately, but they don’t really reflect my home life at all, since when I’m at home, I’m busy doing stuff.

*Except in this shot, where I am doing nothing

Home is eclectic, full of interesting things like baskets of miscellaneous bones, and animal skulls and vintage chemistry sets and forty-year-old dissection specimens in jars of formaldehyde.

Really, as far as bedrooms go, my bedroom is a very morbid one, and when I’m not watching hyper-violent crime movies, staying up all night, sewing beads and sequins on my clothes, or making buttermilk waffles, I spend a lot of time there.

To be perfectly clear, it’s not actually my room, because it’s also my sister’s room. And the animal room. And the craft room.

*You can’t really see, but the wall behind me is absolutely covered in homemade masks. Some are for Halloween. Most are Just Because.

The room is huge and drafty, with insanely high ceilings and terrible carpet, furnished with assorted bookshelves, a homemade work table, a store-bought tool bench, and a record player from the 1940’s. Also, two ladders, three aquariums, several hamsters, toads, salamanders, ferrets, and one rope swing.

It is basically the perfect environment—part cozy playhouse, part menagerie, part freefall.

The loft where my bed lives is really just a narrow shelf, high up along one wall and running the width of the room. You reach it by climbing a ladder and crawling through a trapdoor.

On the ground floor, there is one closet for clothes, to be shared between myself and Little Sister Yovanoff, and one closet for art supplies, full of tiny drawers filled with pens and paint brushes, and big drawers filled with bags of plaster and bolts of fabric.

My mother is not only a treasure trove of art-room knowhow and professional-grade adhesives, but also has very good craftsmanship. And since we have the conveniently open schedule of being homeschooled, she teaches us a good portion of what she knows. (Except for me and the craftsmanship. I don’t have that. But other things.)

Before I’m ten, she teaches me to stretch watercolor paper, cut stencils, and use paraffin wax to resistance-dye batik patterns onto pieces of muslin by soaking them in a five-gallon bucket full of Rit.

She teaches me how to use the very cranky sewing machine and how to tack in a hem, and unsuccessfully attempts to instill in me a love of embroidery. It’s a good effort, but ultimately fruitless. By the time high school rolls around, I’m still terrible, and she’s still stuck darning little hearts onto my winter tights every time I accidentally stick a finger through the heel trying to pull them on.

What I’m saying is, ours is a House of Activities.

When Little Sister Yovanoff and I aren’t pushing each other on the rope swing or leaping perilously back and forth between our lofts, we spend a lot of time in the downstairs part of the room, painting and drawing, making dolls out of polymer clay and homemade paper mache, drawing giant cityscapes on butcher paper, and building tiny wooden houses. But the idyllic state of things can’t last. Like most stages in life, it has to end eventually.

*The barefoot photos are all part of a series that Little Sister Yovanoff concocted by dragging the armchair into the middle of the bedroom and covering it with a big piece of satin. My job is to take direction, and pose with various pieces of my ceramics homework. (Facial features.) Also, it is cold, so I’m wearing a hat. But no socks.

This isn’t really a post about school. It’s kind of about all the other things that aren’t school, and how once I start tenth grade, I have to catch my balance and scramble around trying to hold onto the little pieces that used to be my whole life.

A big part of problem is simply that my house is fun, and school is not, and there’s really no graceful way to transition from one to the other. To that end, I spend most of tenth grade wishing the bell would ring so I could just go home.

*Here I am, posing by the TV and wearing one of my dad’s old sweaters, to which I have sewn a pink plastic heart, made for me by my cousin. Also, this is for one of Little Sister Yovanoff’s art assignments. Also, later she will cut me out and give me dragonfly wings. Which I like.

And a big part of why my junior year turns out to be kind of cool is that somewhere in the summer between 10th and 11th, I start to figure out all the ways I can bring parts of home with me everywhere I go. Mostly by decorating my clothes. (Also, the winter of junior year is ridiculously cold, and the heat at school is not only central, but full-blast. While the heat at home is one temperamental wood stove—occasionally full of birds.)

For this post, I really wish I had more pictures of my room, and specifically more (or any) pictures of my sister and me in the room working on stuff. But we kept the door closed a lot and our mom was really polite about it and mostly stayed out, so there is a notable lack of documentation of the Sisters Yovanoff in their natural habitat.

Instead, I’ve decorated the blog with various shots that Little Sister Yovanoff took of me at various times, usually for school projects, often when my tongue is blue from popsicles or I’m not wearing socks.

*****

Do you have at-home hobbies? Things you love, but that don’t really bleed over into school? Do you ever wish they did? Are hobbies best left at home, or do you find ways to incorporate them in your school life?

D gave me these. For writing. Which is awesome.

Because as much as I like writing in coffee shops, sometimes the noise of them is … too noisy.

And also, if you’re wearing earbuds, sometimes people think that your small, non-confrontational headphones are an invitation to start talking to you right in the middle of a very crucial scene.

These babies, though? These are like a fortress to protect crucial scenes!

What about you? Do you write to music? To noise? In silence?

(And if in silence, HOW?)

*Okay, you got me. I’m actually getting caught up on email, but whatever. Lounge! Eat leftovers!

This is the story of how I eventually decided that whatever was happening between me and Dill had to end, and how it still took two more weeks for me to actually do anything about it.

This is the story of how I knew once and for all that I was a bad girlfriend.

Right now, I’m just going to go straight into the excerpt, because personal realizations aside, the excerpt is pretty much the whole story. It’s the part that matters.

Dill got a PA system for his truck. Now, he yells at people when he doesn’t like their driving. It’s kind of embarrassing, but kind of funny, too.
     On Saturday, we were coming down from my house, and we were at that T-intersection by the Jif Store when we saw a big white Blazer come bouncing through the field and careen onto the road. Dweezil was by himself, blank-faced in the driver’s seat, vacant as always.
     Dill grabbed the PA speaker. “Dweezil, you punk-ass!”
     Dweezil didn’t turn though, or act like he’d heard. He never hears. In Fishwoman’s class, I drew his portrait during the figure drawing unit, skinny and smooth like a weasel. I spent two whole days just concentrating on his hands, his narrow, squinting eyes. Fishwoman put the picture in the art show at the mall.
     She said, “You’ve made him look so . . . pensive.” Like Dweezil in real life is incapable of thought.
     He drew his self-portrait using the reflection in the back of a spoon, blurry around the edges. It was kind of amazing. She always just treated him like he was stupid.
     Dill yelled again, holding the speaker close to his mouth. “Dweezil! Look at me, m*****f*****!”
     We were stopped behind him at the light, but Dweezil didn’t glance around.
     And yeah, Dill and I had Drawing with him last quarter, but it’s not like we actually know him. So, he used to sit with me sometimes on the bus, so what? He wasn’t even really sitting with me. Just next to me. What is that? Stoned before class and drunk on the weekends. Not an actual friend of ours.
     We were just beginning to gain on him when he turned off the main road and onto a side street down by the Lutheran church. Dill followed, screaming to a stop by the side-yard of a low, dingy house. Dweezil’s Blazer was parked out front. Dweezil was standing in the yard, smoking a cigarette with Holden and #4.
     Dill pulled right up to the fence, so close that I wouldn’t have been able to open my door if I’d wanted to get out, and reached for the PA again.
     “Dweezil, you crack-fiend! I been chasing your ass down since the light at JJ’s Lounge, buddy!”
     His voice boomed out over the neighborhood, amplified, alarming, and the boys in the yard all flinched.
     #4 came to the fence and leaned on his elbows, smiling wide and nervous.
     Behind him, Dweezil was giggling in that slow, stoned way he always does. “Holy shit, m*****f*****! Just, holy shit.”
     #4 cleared his throat. “So, what are you doing here?”
     He was looking at me steadily over the chest-high chainlink. I’d never really seen him in the sunlight before. Back in M’s Foundations [of English] class, there were windows and so there was always light shining in. But one stray beam is not the same as the whole outside dropping down all at once. This was not tenth-grade #4 smoking in the rain, not last August, blood-smeared in the bus circle. Now he was clean, clean, clean, leaning on the fence. He was still looking at me, a cautious, complicated look, and it occurred to me that he really did expect an answer.
     I grinned a little, awkward. “We’re not really doing that much, just saw Dweezil driving. We were trying to get his attention for like two miles. Since the Jiffy Store.”
     #4 took a deep breath, cigarette burning down in his hand. “Oh. Hey, look, we’re going camping* later on and . . .”
     He ducked his head down, not finishing.
     Dill threw the truck into gear. “Well, you guys have a good time. See you around.”
     #4 lifted his head, looking at me, only at me, nowhere but me. “Yeah. Bye.”
     He waved gently over the fence, then turned and walked away, back to where Dweezil and Holden stood. Smoking.
     We peeled out on the gravel, light and vicious like nothing else. And then we got in a fight. It was so stupid.

I write this down carefully, avoiding the part about how unutterably amazing #4’s voice sounds and how I don’t even glance away, because in that moment, I don’t want to.

When he looks at me over the fence, it’s like being seen on some new and uncomfortable level, and I don’t even care if he doesn’t feel the same way. The damage is done, the stage is set.

The whole encounter basically ensures that I will not be able to look him in the face for the rest of the school year.

Dill’s a bright guy. He understands that something just happened, but because #4 is…well, #4, and because I have a history of being wildly indifferent to pretty much all boys ever, he makes the somewhat logical assumption that none of it was happening to me.

And because I’m a relentlessly logical girl and know beyond all reasonable doubt that when you’re sitting in your pseudo-boyfriend’s truck, holding hands with him across the gearbox, you are not supposed to be thinking about some boy you hardly know and wondering whether he just almost invited you somewhere because he wants to kiss you, I refrain from thinking about the implications too much, even when we get into the kind of argument that drags them right out into the open.

This is the beginning, to the best of my recollection. What I mostly remember is that we are both aggressively at fault. But me more. At this point in our relationship, it is pretty much the worst and only fight we’ve ever been in.

Dill, awkwardly: Why do you always do that?
Me, deadpan: Do what?
Dill: You encourage him. I mean, why would he ask you to go camping if he didn’t think he had a chance at—
I’m waiting for him to say something suggestive or possibly even offensive, but he stops before he gets there.
Me, still deadpan: He didn’t ask me to do anything. Anyway, he was talking to both of us.
Dill, emphatically: He was looking at you. And I mean, come on—he’s just so…

I sit perfectly still. My skin feels atomic, and all I can think is that if he says the words white trash, I am going to level this entire city block before I can stop myself.

But Dill doesn’t say it. Instead, he abandons the first sentence and tries a different one. “I just feel sorry for him. I mean, he’s stoned, what, pretty much all the time? And his house?”

“It’s like mine,” I say. Which is not even remotely true.

My house is a tremendous, sprawling Alice-in-Wonderland affair, chopped up into three pretty arbitrary apartments. The whole thing is full of spiders. (I mean, like a billion.) Our apartment is the biggest of the three, all weird asymmetrical closets and shotgun hallways and windows that don’t open.

The only heat comes from a wood-burning stove out in the living room. It only radiates warmth if you are closer than six feet away, which my room is most definitely not, and more than once, birds have flown down the chimney and gotten trapped. When that happens, I catch them in a pillowcase and take them outside. There are giant red centipedes living in the crawlspace and if the wind blows the wrong direction when it’s raining, the roof buckets water like it’s hemorrhaging.

Just to be clear, I love my house. I love everything about it, down to the exposed beams and the long, windowless halls and the hideous silver-green carpet. (I love everything except how my room is forty degrees in the winter,** and a hundred and ten in the summer.) But no, my house is not a small, compact single-family unit with central heating and a clearly-defined yard and good weatherstripping. Whatever is the opposite of that? That’s what my house is.

Dill and I patch it up. Sort of. We go for ice cream, not talking much. I order a double scoop, blueberry and cotton candy on a sugar cone. Afterwards, he picks handfuls of flowers and put them in my hair.

I smile and eat my ice cream. By my own estimation, I act perfectly normal, but in the back of my mind, I’m still thinking about #4. Wondering if he’s thinking about me.

Now? Is he now? Now? What about…now?

Wondering if what he said or the way he looked at me means anything—if it had any significance whatsoever. If I’ve disappeared from his head now that I’m not right there on the other side of his fence.

Not wanting to acknowledge how easily Dill has disappeared from mine, and he’s still standing right next to me.

*****

For today: okay, yes. This is another of those highly-specific stories that doesn’t readily invite a topic, so today can be an all-in day—whatever you’ve got to say, hit me!

*Full disclosure: I was raised in a tent. Literally. As in, when I was little, we did not have a house, we had a tent. I can build a fire in like two seconds. I am excellent at camping.

However, at my high school, “camping” did not mean camping, it actually just meant driving to someplace where there were no adults, getting drunk, and passing out in the back of your truck.

It is indicative of my level of fascination with #4 that I fully understand this and am sorely tempted anyway. If there were any way to go someplace with him and not be a terrible human being. Which there isn’t. There just isn’t.

**In theory, this has made me tremendously resilient. In reality, I am a giant weenie who hates being cold.