Content Warnings: Terminal illness, parent-child role reversal, suicidal ideation, self-harm, medical trauma, cancer, chemotherapy, grief, family trauma, loss of bodily autonomy.
I wake up.
I just… opened my eyes. I didn’t even think to sit up, at first. After a minute or so, I just said, “Wow.”
That was a doozy. I tried to hold the memory of it in my head, but it was already fraying into impressions, like dreams do. There had to be some meaning in it.
And there had to be something I could use.
Something about a sculptor… love-lost sculptor, that maybe. With a sick daughter… wait no. That was something else. But the sculptor, that might work. There was passion there. Passion and tragedy. Could be, anyway.
Had I done that already? No, there’d been the violinist in Heartstrings. The painter in Colors of the Heart. I didn’t think I’d done a sculptor. Wait, there’d been a sculptor in Heart of Stone… but he’d been the love interest. Could I double dip with an MC sculptor without anyone noticing?
Ah! No! “Sculptress”!
I’d have to look that word up to see if it was kosher.
Then I huffed a little laugh (the only kind I did anymore… what I’d have given for a belly laugh) and closed my eyes. Like any of it mattered. Back to sleep.
No more dreams came. No that I remembered anyway. I woke to sunlight, checked my phone, and it was 9. But I wasn’t checking for the time. I wasn’t checking for the two messages from Beth, either, and I didn’t read them.
I opened the romance forum and went to /danayoung. My fan reddit. First post was a from user DanaOlds. The first lines were, “I can’t believe you Muppets are really reading the same stuff I am. I’d swear these are paid reviews, but there’s no way a hack like Dana Young makes enough to pay this many people. I’m…”
This wasn’t her first post on the subreddit; they went back over a year, if you did a search, all of them trashing me and my stories. But this was the first time one had made it to the top; the first one that had gotten more upvotes than down. Which was fair; after all, DanaOlds was a better writer than Dana Young. At least she was passionate about something.
It was inspiring. So I switched browser profiles and signed in again, this time as DanaOlds.
It was amazing how much better I felt writing as her. And why not? I was writing what I knew, for a change. As Dana Young I wrote about about love and romance, and what the hell did I know about that? But as DanaOlds, I was writing about that hack Dana Young, and I knew every miserable detail about her.
I savored one post from someone gushing over The Sainted Heart. That absolute dog of a book, from back when I was playing with working in religion. I replied with “God will probably forgive you for enjoying that, but you should never forgive yourself. But hey, at least you’re not talking about Zen and Heart of Archery. I don’t think Jesus or Buddha could forgive that.”
A lot of Dana Young’s stalwart fans were giving me grief, a few even resorting to very unromantic language to make their point. A number were asking why the moderators never did anything posts trashing the author the reddit was about.
Because I’m the moderator, you fucking goofs. Why would I kick out the only one of you with any taste?
But now DanaOlds had a squad of her own that was defending her. They weren’t all in, they still called themselves Dana Young fans, but they were priding themselves on being “realistic” about it.
“I’ve probably read more than most of you,” HeartofDana78 wrote, “probably 24 books already, and you’d have to be crazy to expect all 24 weren’t winners. Olds has some issues, but a broken click is still right twice a day.”
HeartofDana86 (oh god) wasn’t happy with that: “I’m embarrassed to share a screenname with you!” Well how do you think I feel, sister?
I snarked back at a few of them, but my focus started to fade after awhile and, as always, it started to feel pointless. Oh, well, that was enough catharsis for one morning.
Time to pay the bills. The sculptor idea was the best I had to work with, so I put it through the process. First I checked off all 34 of my novels to make sure I hadn’t done it before… and, yes, there was only Heart of Stone. That left the question of what I was going to call this one, but Beth would probably come up with something.
Then I took out the worksheet and started dropping in elements: MC, sculptor, call her, I don’t know, Dania for now. Love interest is… her model? That could work. A little cliche but what wasn’t? A reverse-Pygmalion thing, maybe; he starts to fall in love with her as she carves his likeness. Or maybe she does. Both? No, both was no good, there’d be no conflict, no tease.
MC: Dania Michaels
LI: Her model (Mike? No she can’t be Michaels and he’s a Mike. Figure it out later.)
Conflict: She… can’t love because she’s married to her art? Why not, I’d done sillier.
Rival/nemesis: The LI’s: … I circled “Ex” then crossed it out, wrote in “Art Teacher”. A painter, maybe?
I got an idea. Maybe I could use the painter from Colors of the Heart, years later, an older woman…
I deleted it. Don’t complicate the process. Ah! The name of the painter MC’s from Colors: Tanya. Call it an Easter egg, those romantic twits will eat it up. I was already writing DanaOlds’ mocking response in my head. “I thought for a second she was actually going to do something interesting and it turned out she’s churned out so many of these she’s had to start recycling names.”
“Shut the fuck up, Olds,” I said out loud.
I stopped typing. Woah. Maybe I was finally cracking. That had definitely been a mentally-cracking thing to do.
I should have a glass of wine. I looked at the clock. Only 10:30. Still, I was having a moment. No. I might be a hack but I was absolutely not a washed up romance writer getting wine-drunk alone at mid-morning. I’d wait for noon. For now, back to the plot chart.
Location 1: Um. New York? She could start in the glitzy art scene of New York and travel to Paris to learn romance, YES!
Meet-cute: Indie coffee shop near her studio. She needs a coffee, he’s the barista? Why not?
Passions rise: She’s started a new commission but her model can’t make it; on honeymoon with his boyfriend? Yes, shows that even her model’s got a love life and she doesn’t. She asks around, someone sets her up with a new model, and it’s barista boy! For the first time she doesn’t see a body as just a body.
Notes: She doesn’t usually do portrait sculpture. She’s like a Sarah Peters, functional interactive, focus is on the materials, but she took the commission to do something different. (Also, needed the money? Maybe.)
I stared at the page. That was… specific of me. Sarah Peters. That was a real name. A real sculptor. I knew about her. Where did I know her from? Maybe from my research from Hearts of Stone.
Location 2: Paris. She has to fly out there with the piece. It’ll cost a fortune to ship it, unrealistic, who cares? Some emergency, she has to finish it there, she brings baristo. (Crap, I’d have to stop calling him that or I’d start thinking of him as Barry, and you can’t have a romance hero named Barry.
First kiss: A moment of excitement at the gala unveiling of the sculpture.
The Separation: He falls for her, she gets scared, scoffs at him, he leaves, insulted and heartbroken.
The Regret: She regrets it. What the hell is this field even for?
Belly of the Beast: She’s lost her muse, her artistic vision.
- She cancels her next commission bc she can’t think of an angle
- Starts to teach sculpture but doesn’t take any joy from it., starts to see her students as suckers and posers wasting their time.
- She learns Barry’s (FUCK!) become a top art model in Paris, because of her last piece. Bitter, she becomes a critic under a false name, writing hit pieces on artists who use him as a model; her article becomes wildly popular.
- People start to wonder who the critic is, so to throw them off the trail she trashes her own piece. As she writes it, she starts to agree with it.
- This is way too much going on in the Belly of the Beast. It’ll have to be like a montage.
The Reunion: It’s a year later, and she’s gone full-blown impostor syndrome. By day she’s doing corporate commissions where nobody cares what it looks like by day, and by night she’s drinking cognac and writing her hit pieces, but now people have gotten tired of it; she’s a has-been as both a critic and a sculptor. Then one day Barry walks in, now he’s a big, mainstream male model. He’s tracked her down, worked out that she’s the critic – of some tell in her writing, something he noticed the first time he modeled for her and always remembered. He wants to know why.
Alright. That was enough to send to Beth. She’d be over the moon. And 11 was close enough to noon.
And by noon Beth was ecstatic. I had to threaten to hang up just to bring her down to human hearing range.
She squeed “I love it! I love it! I love it! This is going to be Heart of Louvre only times, like…. five!!!”
“Wasn’t that a terrible seller?” I asked.
“Not if it’s times five! That’s still more than your biggest! Which was Hearts on a Plane, by the way.”
I mused, “Yeah, writing a money grab to play into that movie was brilliant.”
“People underappreciate how romantic Sam Jackson is,” Beth nodded. We were on the phone but I knew her so well I could hear her nod.
“Alright, what kind of advance can you get me for this?”
“Dana, babe, you know I need more than this before I go to the table. We need an ending, first off.”
I was irritated. “We know how it ends. Happily ever after. Glint of a baby in Daddy’s eye. Drive off in whatever the guy drives. The end.”
Why was I so irritated?
“Are you okay?” Beth sounded concerned. Beth was always concerned. “You sound…. irritated.”
“What did you call me?” I asked.
“Irritated? I wasn’t calling you that, I was–”
“Before that!”
“Dana,” she repeated. “Then I asked if you’re okay because–”
“Before the ‘okay’ !” I snapped. “Did you call me ‘babe’?”
There was silence for a second and she said, “Yeah. I call everyone ‘babe’, you know that. It’s my one concession to the glitz and glamor of the media-industrial complex.”
“It’s irritating!” I said. Snapped.
“O-kay…” The pause was exaggerated. Which I found irritating. “Has it always been?”
I sighed. “Look, I’m having a bad day, okay? I got this whole idea from a dream and it was a fucked up dream.”
“Why don’t you have a drink?” Beth suggested. “It’s past noon, right?” I looked at the just-empty wine glass on my desk. “I’ll try to hold off a little longer,” I said. “I need to be able to figure out the ending.”
“That’s my girl!” Beth said, then she stopped. “Is that okay?” she asked. “‘My girl’?”
“Yes, Beth,” I said with my eyes closed like a headache was coming on, but the headache was metaphorical. “It’s great. My girl. Babe. It’s all fine. You just be you, okay? Don’t mind me, I’m just going through the Change or something.”
“Oh, that’ll do it,” she said from experience. “But once you’re on the other side it’s all roses and buttercups. That’s not right, it’s roses and something. Or maybe it’s shits and giggles, I’m not sure. You’re the writer, you do the expressions. I’ll sell them.”
“You do that, Beth. I’ll call you when I have this ironed out.”
It ironed like winter linen. Three days later, I’d progressed from the bottle of rosé to a box of red, and that was all. And on the third day, Beth called again.
She started right in with dreadful enthusiasm. “Talk to me, Dana!”
My metaphor started to flare up again. “I can’t get it to work,” I said. “I let her go too far into the dark.”
“The darker the meat the sweeter the juice, ba– Dana,” she said.
I rubbed my eyes. “Beth, you realize that’s a racist thing, not a cooking thing, right?”
“What?” She sounded really taken aback. “I’ve been saying that for years. Nobody’s ever said anything.”
I handwaved. “Maybe they didn’t know.” She got quiet and I knew she was counting back on her conversations over the years. Beth was the only person I’d ever met who talks louder when she’s thinking than when she’s talking. Then she seemed to table it for later and went on. “What’s the problem? He left, she got sad, he’s back, she has her second chance at happiness. Are you not using your worksheet?”
“She’s not sad,” I said, “she’s broken.”
“Right, that’s what makes it so powerful. This is the best story you’ve ever had. It’s going win you a RNA for Contemporary. Love heals all wounds.”
“It doesn’t,” I insisted. “She fell, and she broke. That’s what sculpting a stone is all about; once you break a piece off, it stays broken and you have to work with whatever you have left.”
I started typing to give my hands something to do, before they did something stupid like pouring more wine. “what you still have.” Just random words I was saying to Beth.
She got quiet for just a second. “Yes, Dana, it does. That’s one of the core principles of the genre.”
“Then I don’t think I’m writing that anymore.”
“Dana, you can’t write a romance novel for 300 pages and then turn into Flannery O’Connor at the end. I don’t think Flannery O’Connor could have done that, and you’re–” She broke off, too late for me to not finish the thought for her.
“Not Flannery O’Connor. I know. But I can’t write this story and write an ending that I know makes no sense, either.”
Not Flannery O’Connor. Makes no sense.
“So what makes sense, then?” Beth asked, shifting back into sounding board mode.
“If anything made sense, I’d have written it by now. Therapy? Do you think anyone would keep reading while she talks to her therapist for ten or twelve years?”
“Is the therapist hot?” Always pragmatic, Beth.
“I can’t start a slow burn 300 pages in, either.”
“slow burn”
“So what will her therapist tell her after twelve years?” Beth asked. “What makes her happy again? Shortcut to her realizing it on her own. An epiphany when she sees the barista’s face again.”
“Cuts don’t work,” I said before I heard the words in my head (but not before I’d typed them: Cuts don’t work). “Shortcuts, I mean. And. She was never happy.” (never happy) “She was just… looking forward to being happy. Someday. And now she’s not anymore. But now she knows that Barry was never going to make her happy. No sculpting awards were ever going to make her happy.” (ever going to make her happy.)
“Happy endings are what we do, Dana. Happy, sexy endings, preferably after dramatic, sexy middles. You’ve got 25 pages to get her there. Maybe you can start with her happy and work backward to see how she got there.”
“Sure,” I said. “How about I just have her sculpt a hot guy and he comes to life?” (comes to life)
“You could start it out that way, romantasy is big now. Maybe you should. You haven’t written that 300 pages yet, remember? It’s just an outline; go back and change what you have to change to make it work out. And if it’s not going to, now’s when you should stop and we can pitch something new.”
“I–” I got stuck for words. I what? What?! “I… think it’s too late. Too late to stop. I’m… committed.”
“You’re committed to a story you don’t know how to end?” Beth suddenly sounded curious but not angry. “Dana, are you passionate about a book again? I haven’t gotten that from you since Pair of Hearts, and, I’m not trying to give too much weight to this, but that was your biggest seller after Plane.”
“The book?” I think I actually snorted. “Not the book. But I… I need to figure out the ending.”
“Well,” Beth finally said (I could hear her squared shoulders), “when you figure it out, let me know. Then we can either start this one or do your Pygmalion romantasy, either way.”
“Bye–” I started, and she hung up before I was through.
Fuck it. I logged into my fan forum. What were the Muppets saying today?
It was quiet. Only 5 posts. Nothing of note in any of them; what page they were on of what book, the Main Character of this book reminds them of the Best Friend from that. DanaOlds would be bored. I was bored. I’d have been ecstatic years ago, to have people even interested in them. When did I get so far away from that? Years ago, of course. No matter. DanaOlds didn’t need anyone to start the party for her. I logged in as her.
Everything was starting to get fuzzy. I was supposed to wear my glasses for writing.
I reached for my glasses without looking and knocked them off the desk. Shit. It had gotten dark and the only glow was the computer monitor, but it had sounded like they’d landed on the table below. I felt around on the table and knocked over the wine glass. “Shit!“ I snatched blindly at the stem to try to grab it and sent it flying, heard it shatter.
I turned on the desk lamp. There were shards glinting here and there on the parquet, but a big piece was still intact. I picked it up, carefully, by the stem. The rim was gone, and about half the bowl. A few drops of wine ran down from the sides to gather in the bottom. I looked at the jagged edges for a moment and felt something familiar start to move. I heard myself mutter, “I should do something with this.” Then my focus shifted and I saw the words on my screen, sharp as anything though the glass:
Cuts don’t work
I’d said that. It was true. But.. maybe it’s not the cutting that’s the problem. Aren’t we always cutting? What’s editing but cutting? Maybe it’s where we cut that matters. Less smashing, more sculpting. If the edges get hardened, you cut off what needs to be smoothed away, and start whole limbs over.
I took a deep breath. Then another. I clicked my forum account, then Settings.
Delete Account.
Are your sure? This cannot be undone.
My pointer hovered over it, and I realized I wasn’t breathing. I inhaled. On the exhale, I clicked Yes.
And just like that, DanaOlds was gone. And I was staring at the forum, being asking to log in. I had my moderator account “RomQueen1978”, but I didn’t want to moderate. I was sick of moderation.
I hovered a minute or two. Then I clicked, Log In. Then, Sign Up
email: dana@danayoung.com
I verified. Finished up the login info. Then I was looking at a blank profile, needing a user name.
DanaYoung
That username is already taken.
Well crap.
DanaYoung1979
That username is already taken.
Oh, God, please let that not be one of the followers on my forum.
DanaYoungRomance
I stared at it for a few seconds and backspaced.
DanaYoungAuthor
I hesitated.
I stared at it for a few seconds and backspaced.
DanaYoungWritesThings
I hit submit, and that one cleared. Go figure. Then the blank bio stared into my soul. Tell people about yourself. God, I don’t even know. I did the only things that ever worked with writers block: just let my fingers start typing.
I’m Dana. I’ve been writing all my life, and that’s been a long time, and so I’ve written a lot of things. Some of it people have liked. Some of it not so much.
And I don’t have a beat sheet for what happens next.
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