Author Archives for Anna

Following Mistakes

Being a writer is like being a photographer. We can provide a snapshot of a life, a moment, one perspective — but however long or short that moment lasts, there will always be other stories left untold, whispering at the edges, like the blurred out faces of tourists in the background of your holiday snaps. You look at the photograph and you wonder what happened next to the people inside, what roads they took after the story stopped. Where are they now?

I recently finished reading The Postmistress by Sarah Blake, easily one of the best books I’ve read in quite a while. Near the end, one of the characters recounts the tale of Theseus, the Greek hero who sails off to war, promising his father that should he return alive, his boat will have white sails.

For years, the father climbs up to the mountain cliff and scans the horizon, desperate for a hint of movement, the return of his son. Every day he walks up there, and sees nothing but the taunting white froth of the sea. And then, one day, sails on the horizon. Sails, after so long. But the sails are black and the father jumps off the cliffs to his death while Theseus is returning home victorious, his promise forgotten.

It would have been so easy to fix that mistake and create a happily ever after. But without the mistake, the story wouldn’t have mattered, wouldn’t have endured. The mistake makes the story, is the story. It is why in the photograph, the author focused in on Theseus as opposed to anyone else in the frame.

Out of the countless stories out there, it is the ones with the most mistakes in them that stick with me longer, both as a reader and a writer. That is how I pick which photographs to take, which photographs to share. But then I can’t help but look at all the untold mistakes blurred in the background, and want to bring them into focus too, hear their voices, find a way out of the mess.

I always pictured writing as a way of making sense of things, a way of setting things right. You push your characters through every imaginable hell but somehow, somehow, things make sense at the end, the mistakes unravel into orderly lines. And they lived happily ever after. But now I’m wondering whether I’m not fixing or tidying, I am simply following a mistake for as far as it lets me.

PAGE 247

I remember once one of my colleagues asked me how it felt to be a hired assassin, shortly after I was promoted for the fourth time. I replied, “It’s just like any other job; you need a cool head, fast reflexes, and the determination to get the job done.” Maybe I even believed the words at the time. But I never would’ve guessed that those words would be flung back in my face several years later by someone I loved.

I met Alex shortly after my 26th birthday. He was the manager of a telecommunications company, and I told him I was a vet, an alias I often used since I had a soft spot for animals.

“A vet? Really?” He ran a hand through his baby-white hair, grinned lopsidedly. “You don’t look like you could handle blood.”

“I’ve got a good stomach,” I said. I thought of the banker I’d shot in the back of the head just that morning, and smiled. “A really good stomach.”

We hit it off then and there, at my best friend’s Cuban-themed house warming. He was everything I wished I was: intense, imaginative, yet simultaneously down to earth. The kind of person whose life burns unapologetically bright, like a shooting star streaking across the sky.

It’s tough to find a knight in shining armour when you know how to kill a man thirty-six different ways just using your bare hands. Somehow, Alex made me forget it all, made me feel ladylike. On holiday in Prague, when a teenager stole my purse, it was Alex who ran after him and rugby-tackled him to the floor.

He brought the kid out in me, too. I remember our first Christmas together, living in the same house. We had planned a quiet dinner on Christmas Eve, and were impatient for the juicy turkey in the oven to finish cooking. Neither of us could sit still, so we decided to go out for a short walk. As I was taking a photo of the snow-capped trees, Alex snuck up behind me and smeared a snowball into my face. I returned the favour, with interest.

We returned home several hours later to a frantic fire alarm. All that was left of our meal was black unrecognizable lumps and enough smoke to get high off of. We ordered pizza, and it was perfect. Our hips brushed as we washed up together, and I remember thinking: this is love.

What I’d pushed to the back of my mind was my mentor John’s favourite saying. He’d rub the swirl of white hair on the side of his head, chewing on a toothpick, and say, “There’s no room for humanity in a job like ours, kiddo,” except each time he’d say it he’d replace ‘humanity’ with a different word: love, hate, distractions, error…. The list went on.

John’s lesson only really sank in after my first victim. Nevermind that it was a mercy killing, that the woman on the hospital bed was begging to die. In the end, when her body lay limp and still on the tangled sheets, she looked so damn vulnerable that I was sick in the plant pot. All the honor and adventure that had so interested me in the job disappeared. There was nothing else left for me to do. I kept working.

The second killing was easier. By the time I killed my fifth victim, I didn’t even dream about it. I’d learnt not to let them get to me. I’d learnt not to ever, ever let anyone in. Everyone except Alex. He wasn’t the most good-looking man I’d ever met, but I felt comfortable with him. I felt safe and human and alive.

We’d been together two years when Alex came home one evening, pulled out a gun, and levelled it at my head. “Sorry, love,” he said, not looking sorry at all. “It’s just a job.” The words were a smack in the face, made all the more bitter by the fact that I had said them myself years earlier. I remember looking at his face, so calm and serious as he held the gun pointed towards my heart, and realizing he was ready to kill me.

No room for distractions. I pushed aside the pain, leant against the kitchen counter, feeling behind me for the bread knife. “So much for working in telecomm.”

He shrugged with one shoulder. “So much for being a vet.”

That shrug saved my life. I threw myself to the side, heard the roar of the gun and the shattering of glass.

I rolled under the kitchen table, leapt to my feet and launched the bread knife. The heavy metal blade was sharp enough to tear right into his head. He dropped down to the ground — dead, dying, it didn’t matter — and I called in a few favours to get the body removed.

Being an assassin was just a job like any other, but Alex ruined it, made it personal. I’ll never forgive him for that.

******

The prompt was: write page 247 of an autobiography.

A SIMPLE PRAYER

My first #fridayflash piece, inspired by the ABC Challenge. The rules are this: write a story that is 26 sentences long. This first sentence must start with the letter ‘A’, and every following sentence begins with the subsequent letter of the alphabet, ending with ‘Z’.

******

An entire hour passed without Evan Pyre moving so much as an inch from his perch amidst the gothic spires of the Duomo. Beneath him, just as immobile, was one of the cathedral’s gargoyles, a duck-like creature with a serpent’s tail and teeth worthy of a predator. Chance — or perhaps destiny? — had made fools out of them both, and Evan could not help but feel kinship towards a creature so outwardly hideous and inwardly harmless as himself.

Dawn was fast-approaching; the horizon was a line of pale pink light amidst the darkness. Evan could already feel his skin prickling in warning, every hair on his arm standing on end, and he had to swallow back the urge to retreat into the crypts, back to his coffin.

Fido—the gargoyle—sniffed the air, then began getting into position, his neck outstretched, his tail curled around his lower half.  “Good weather coming today,” he grunted.  “Hot.”

“I hope so,” Evan said, for the stronger and brighter the sun, the faster his death, and the end of years of torment. Just then, the thought struck him that he should have done this years earlier, and saved himself a lot of trouble. Killed himself with daylight, and consequences be damned. Let the consequences take care of themselves.

Minutes crawled by, the light on the horizon stretching upwards, pale and weak at first but with increasing vigour, until the edge of the sun made its appearance. Night, all of a sudden, had been passed over for day, and Evan stood dumbstruck as he saw the sun for the first time in three hundred years. Ominous crackling filled the air; he thought it was his skin burning at first, but no — his skin was unmarked — it was Fido solidifying into granite. Perplexed, Evan examined his hand, awash in the morning light.

Quietly at first, and then with increasing urgency, Evan began to mumble one word: no, repeated over and over again.  Rays of light struck his skin without leaving the faintest mark, without burning or igniting or anything they were supposed to do.  Supposed to do, he thought numbly, almost choking on the irony of it all.

Throughout the years, Evan had come to learn that nothing else worked: not stakes nor crosses nor garlic.  Unless struck by light or flame, he and his kind were immortal, so he had placed all his hopes for peace on the morning sun. Vampires were only unmourned souls, and not sinners; surely they deserved to rest in peace eventually?

Why some were cursed and not others remained a mystery.  Xero the Elder claimed it was the work of God, but only destiny could be cruel enough to make Evan a vampire when he had committed no crimes. Yet there was Fido, a truly cursed soul, and even he was allowed the luxury of sleep that Evan was denied.

 Zealously, awash in the growing morning light, Evan bowed his head and prayed for another way to die.

Starting Afresh

It got worse

You may have heard of all the drama I went through with my last flat, starting with literal puddles on the floor from condensation (my fault, apparently, for breathing) and ending with the water pipe above my bed bursting and causing the mess you can see here (and it looked even worse by the end!). Fun times, eh?

After traipsing across half of London (my brother did most of that) we managed to find a shiny new flat sans condensation and burst pipes. Victory! I’d show you pictures of my new, non-destroyed room, but it is still an embarrassing mess of half-open boxes and naked walls.

I keep looking around and wondering when I accumulated so much stuff, and how to go about getting rid of all the things I never use: clothes that don’t fit, useless but pretty gadgets, old Christmas and birthday cards, not to mention a plethora of posters that have sat in an envelope for several years now. I’m a pack rat; I like collecting things. But it seems to me that a new place deserves a tabula rasa (or as much as I can make one, anyway). How to go about getting rid of the unnecessary?

Since I am entirely one-track-minded, this whole debacle got me thinking about writing, and more specifically, editing.

I write the way I acquire new things: impulsively, with a half-idea of where I want to go and a lot of willingness to splash out on an unexpected find. The end result is a thrown-together look that may work with my wardrobe, but is a little lacking when it comes to my writing. But how to streamline it all?

Ah, editing. Of course. But then the problem becomes figuring out what to get rid of, and what to keep. And when I get to that point, I do exactly what I have just done: I pack up and move house.

I open a new word document, I change the font from Times New Roman to Garamond, and, bit by bit, I move sentences over, sometimes one word at a time, sometimes in great lumps. From the first document to the second, all those spare words that I cannot be bothered to retype get dropped, and all those awkwardly shaped sentences get ironed out.

Yes, some of the bad stuff creeps through — I am a packrat, after all. But eventually, if my story moves houses enough times, I can be sure a good amount of the crap is lost.

How do you edit?

On Character Deaths

A thread on weblit.us got me thinking about character deaths.

There is something intensely satisfying for me in the death of a character. But then, I have always been a glutton for punishment. I love books that make me cry, and killing off someone I like is bound to upset me (duh!).

I’m not talking about killing off minor sidekicks, those characters you put in the story knowing they’re going to die, like how the new recruits in Star Trek were doomed to bite the dust before the episode’s end. I’m talking about real blows, about characters you’ve grown to love that unexpectedly leave, about Sirus’ death (sob! I think I took his death harder than Harry did.).

From a reader’s perspective, a death like that pulls me into the story on a deeply emotional level. Perhaps because it is a safe way to mourn for the little deaths in my own life — the stresses and worries and losses — as it provides a catharsis of sorts. Or because it feels real, far more than any happily-ever-after.

But as an author, killing off your own character is a whole different ballgame. The perks are that you can really dig down into the other characters, because it is their story that matters, their coping with loss that we need to read. The problem is, by killing off a character, you’ve cut off his story. Was it his time?

It’s so tempting to kill someone at the end of a story, where you know it couldn’t have gone further. But, during some recent outlining, I realized that one character needed to go, that maybe their story wasn’t yet told, but life and time waited for no one. So, in my outline, I wrote down that scary four-letter word. (No, not that one. I’m talking about ‘dies’.)

I am steeling myself for when I eventually have to write that scene, because I know it’s going to be a tear-jerking ride. But when I’m done writing, I know it’s going to leave me with that strange satisfaction of the beautifully tragic.

What do you think of character deaths? And when you’re writing, how do you decide when it’s time for someone to die?