?@#&%!

Since I first told my dad to eff off when I was in fifth grade, I have enjoyed the thrill of a good curse word.  We were in the backyard, playing two v two basketball.  Playing that day were my dad (6'2"), my uncle (5'10"), and my other uncle (6'5"), all in their thirties, and me.  At 5'3", I was tall for my age, but I was nine and had only ever played soccer.  In other words, I thought I was nice for evening out the teams.  I can't remember exactly what happened, but my dad, my teammate, was getting on my case about posting up or something and I snapped "You know what, Dad?!  You can f--k off!"

Everyone stopped.  My uncles' mouths hung open and my dad's lips pressed together, his nostrils flared--the deadly combination I knew as his angriest face.  I didn't wait for a response.  I just turned and went inside, sending myself to my room.

Here's the thing though.  From my room, where I peeked down onto the half court he'd put in, all I could hear was laughter.  My dad was laughing, my uncles were still laughing, my mom and aunts had come over and they were laughing.  And I felt better, having expressed my roiling emotions with just a short pithy phrase.   I probably could have gone down and started playing again, no harm, no foul.  Instead I chose to stay inside reading the Babysitters Club book where Stacy tries to ignore her diabetes problem, wanting to eat chocolate like Claudia and the girls, for probably the 105th time.  

I've told that story to my students before and most are horrified or shocked.  They try to imagine what their mom would do, but can't find the words and just shake their heads wide-eyed.  I figure that's just the South for you.  My family, California born and bred, is more informal.  With the exception of my Grandfather--ironically the former Marine--everyone curses at some level.  My immediate family is probably the worst.  While I try not to curse at people, there's hardly anything I wouldn't say in front of my parents and brothers.  My husband's the same way.  No one bats an eye at even the most colorful language.

Therefore, when I consider the issue of whether or not I should include profanity in my book, I'm stuck.  My characters are the kind of people that would never use the "f" word, especially at another family member, but they are normal teenagers.  How do I convey a sense of realism without the occasional four letter word? It drives me nuts on Breaking Bad that amid all the mayhem, the worst they say is the occasional shit. I know, I know...it's on basic cable.  But still--they're dealing meth!

Now you might agree with those whom forswear swearing.  Class acts like Bill Cosby and George Washington have maligned it. Even Chloe Grace Moretz has weighed in, saying "I was raised to think cursing makes you look unintelligent."  There is probably a lot to be said for that.  However, I think I'm going to have to respectfully disagree and come down on the side of Mark Twain, someone I am much more likely to have ever hung out with.  He asserts that: "There ought to be a room in every house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that." Say what you want about gratuitous cursing, but as an intensifier or an expletive, dropping some Anglo-Saxon words can really take the edge off.

Chloe Moretz:  a true lady

So, here's how I plan to approach it:  there will be metaphorical rooms in my book, spaces where I let the profane creep in.  However, I will pledge to try and make sure it's purposeful.  I hope to find the right balance of authenticity and decorum.  Maybe that will help me be a little less gratuitous with the vulgarisms in my own speech.  Because eventually that shit's going to wind up biting me in the ass. 

Why Am I Here?

No.  I'm not having an existential crisis (at this moment).  In fact, I feel like I have renewed purpose.  What, you ask?  Writing.  I haven't written a non-work related text since my creative writing seminars in college, and I hated those.  They were mostly filled with self-important, melodramatic jerks, myself included.  Don't believe me?  You obviously don't know me; as evidence, I provide Exhibit A, an unaltered poem I wrote in English 4800, in December of 1999:

"Every Four Years"

When everyone grew tired
of complaining about the wetbacks and jews
who were ruining their lives,
my family would make fun of Benji.

Uncle Dave was especially adept
at imitating the garbled whir of Benji's voice,
meanwhile beating his chest with curled up fingers.

The whole room would laugh,
even Aunt Eloise who had a mustache
that would put Hitler to shame.

I sat in the corner
and watched as Benji laughed
with the rest of the room.

If only I had known
that he would be dead before the next family reunion,
I might have laughed, too.

Wow.  I mean, I think there is something there, but Hitler mustache?  That's a little heavy-handed. Not to mention that clearly, although this poem was fictional, I liked to see myself as the person in the corner too good to laugh, even though I love politically incorrect shows like Workaholics, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.  And don't forget the overly dramatic ending.  The sad thing?  This was my best work of the year.  In Advanced Creative Writing.  It's no wonder that, disgusted with myself, I wrote the following in my "Writer's Manifesto":  "I have realized this semester, [sic] that I have made a mistake...I am not a writer."  Of course!  Look at the comma before the 'that.' Thus, I gave up.

Yet here I am again.  So back to the original question.  Why am I here?  Simply put, it's because I need something new in my life.  I'm pretty happy teaching AP Language to the (generally) smart, hard-working students who will inevitably go on to become more successful than I.  I can't lie and say I love everything about the job, and any student I've ever taught will tell you that I am constantly threatening to quit.  Yet I haven't, and I don't want to.  I think I'm a much better teacher than I ever was a writer, and I need to support my book buying habit, my subscriptions to Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Spotify, and the occasional vacation.  I've recently started doing SAT and ACT tutoring (let me know if you're interested!) but that isn't exactly good for the soul.

The idea came to me from a friend.  I was jogging on the Greenway one day with my good friend Michelle Y.A.--discussing Twilight or some other insanely popular book-- and we were talking some serious junk.  Something along the lines of, "we could definitely do that."  (See! I'm still a self-important jerk). We were talking about the genre, you know paranormal teen romance, and brainstormed what territory remained undiscovered.  We came up with ghosts.  There are plenty of ghost stories, but we couldn't think of anything since the 1990 classic film Ghost (RIP Patrick Swayze) that went there.  We talked about co-writing it, but she had a baby, life happened, and we dropped the idea.

Until I picked it back up a couple of weeks ago.  At the beginning of every summer, as Michelle Y.A. perfectly put it, "I become unmoored."  In contrast to the hectic school year, I'm suddenly faced with more time than I know what to do with. (Yes!  I did just end a sentence with a preposition! I'm writing in English, not Latin, and it's functionally grammatical!).  I spent the beginning of June catching up on Game of Thrones, watching another season of Dr. Who, and then four straight days of True Blood.  I'm not even sure I like that show.  At my brother's suggestion, I was about to start in on Breaking Bad when I realized that if I died the next day I would feel like I might have wasted those last couple weeks.  (I had a similar sentiment about the 50 Shades of Gray trilogy.  When my sister-and-law tried to get me to read them, all I could think was "What if this is the last thing I ever read?"  I couldn't have that).

I decided to get down to business.  I went to my friend Amy's lake house to dog-sit the illustrious Hank! while she was out-of-town and did some research on ghosts (you know, by reading the Wikipedia page), pick the brains of resident lake psychologist, Marquis, and his lovely wife Suzanne, and started writing.  I ran my ideas by another friend Chau, an awesomely critical doctor (most people won't tell it like it is, but she will!), and after lying awake at night trying to resolve the central story, I had it.

I started in earnest writing a couple days ago and got going.  I realized that I didn't really know how to proceed, so I hopped onto Amazon and got a book titled The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published and realized I probably wasn't going to be able to just ship it off and become a millionaire, so here I am taking a break from writing, to write about writing (don't you just love all things meta?).  This blog is meant to help me reflect on writing, to get ideas from the people I know, and to make me follow through on writing this book.  I've said it out loud.  Now it's time to back it up.