December 19, 2009
A new novella, Backyard Princess, is up on the website. Unlike most of my stories, there's not even a hint of incest anywhere in it. I've been working on this one for a while now; in fact, I believe I started it before most of my earlier ones, including Allison and the Primdales. I just never got around to finishing it until now. In that sense, it's a perfect example of how I write. I get an idea in my head, I start to work on it, I get bored with it, I come back to it, I get bored with it again, I come back to it, then I finish it.
That's not to say that the story is boring; in fact, it's one that's very personal to me.
In a way it's a pretty typical coming-of-age story with a thirteen-year-old boy and a seventeen-year-old girl, not unlike Not a Baby Anymore. In fact, it follows the age-old plot of Boy Meets Girl, Boy Falls in Love With Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl Back.
Like most of my stories, however, the characters are what make it interesting. The viewpoint character, Kenny Grant, is one of the more interesting characters in all of my stories, on par with Lance Lyons from Island For Three and Allison from Allison and the Primdales. Kenny is a lot like me when I was his age. I looked at the world and saw not houses and yards, but castles and forests and space ships and skies full of moons and galaxies. I imagined hundreds of different worlds, and when I saw an interesting bit of architecture or an unusual tree or any one of a thousand sights, I had plenty of places to fit it into my worlds. I grew out of that stage, which really is a shame. Sometimes I wish I could go back to that, or at the very least that I had some kind of device back then that would record not what I saw, but what I imagined I saw. Then I would have pictures of that strange and surreal universe in which I lived.
Unfortunately, there was no Sarah Laurent in my neighborhood, so the events of this story are completely fictional. That's all right; I write fiction because then I'm not limited to the truth. I can embellish the tale however I want, which is absolutely essential for this story in particular. I jump in and out of Kenny's imagination seamlessly, though hopefully it comes across as charming and amusing rather than confusing or jarring.
It's also a kind of modern-day fairy tale, and in fact one of the characters in the story points that out. It's a love story wrapped up in fate and destiny, in forces out of their control, and perhaps just a little magic. The "Once Upon a Time" and "Happily Ever After" are just implied, but they are there all the same.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.