“Pretend Time”

You know, there are some cases in which being a drama queen isn’t a bad thing. If it’s actual drama, it’s perfectly appropriate. In school, I never got the lead in any of the Easter or Christmas plays, though Heaven knows I auditioned. They always went to the same person. Though if I ever got a part where I had to interact with the lead, I did so to steal the show, I will happily admit. Perhaps that was part of the reason why I enjoyed my Oral Interpretation class in college so much; there you learned to read so that it didn’t sound like you were reading. When I acted, I didn’t play a character, I became it. I suppose that’s what you would call method acting.

In college, I was introduced to the wonder that was Masked Bandtiz: a series of ad libbed movies that my friends shot on campus. A good vs. evil story, the Banditz kept the campus of the University of Evansville safe from the machinations of The Affiliation, who sought to take over campus and use it to influence the students to their own means. On my 18^th birthday, towards the end of my first semester at UofE, I participated in my first Masked Banditz filming, as a minion sent out to destroy EKO, the main female Bandit. EKO was played by the woman who would become my mentor and “duani” (bosslady) in college. Needless to say, it was an honor to get my butt beaten by her, and the movie turned out great. However, I was not content with remaining a “minion”. That night I made the goal of becoming the head of the Affiliation, the main villain, someday throughout the course of our movies. And what can I say? I did. An entire movie revolved around me as the main antagonist and instigator of the Affiliation on the campus of USI across town. It also came along with the best fight scene I have ever had in my life; I still have some of the scars to prove it. I was larping before I even knew what larping was. I even larped “Castle Wolfenstein” for a friend’s birthday; I was a medic.

I adore what my mother-in-law calls “pretend time”. I kept myself gorgeously occupied as a child with long chain stories that could last for days and required no one else to narrate and play them but myself, speaking for my toys. I would compose huge verbalized stories based on picture that I was drawing when I was 4 or 5. I sat on the arm of the couch and pretended to ride a horse into the TV when I watched “Young Riders”; I was one of the cowboys (thankful that one of them was actually a girl).

So I was prime material for larping when I met Ben. It took a few months of him explaining the game to me and helping me build a character, but, finally, in January 2005, he took me to my first Vampire: The Requiem larp. I recognized the book, actually; I had seen a boy with it during my senior year of college and I remember calling it the “creepy red book”. I trembled all night as a terrified thrall (a human controlled by a vampire, a servant) on her first foray into the night-world of vampires. In fact, I don’t think anyone had played a ghoul in the troupe game before I did, so I unwittingly began to set precedent. By the time I left the troupe game, there were rules in place that every new player had to begin as a ghoul and work their way up, ghouls’ heads were never higher than their regnants’ (ie, kneeling on the floor when your regnant sat), and all ghouls wore some sort of binding or “collar” around their neck to signify their position (girls normally wore ribbons, men wore a necklace or something of the like). It amuses me to see some of those things still in practice in game 5 years later. The ribbon came about, honestly, because I had a length of ribbon with me that I couldn’t decide what to do with so I tied it around my throat. STs and other players liked it and thus it was. Fun times!

I enjoy letting myself fall away and occupying the life of someone else for a while, someone who may be similar or vastly different from me. There is a sense of freedom to it, to inhabit the mind of another person, however made-up they may be, let their confidences or fears wrap around you and act accordingly. I once played a ghoul character that had been in an accident and the fear center of her brain destroyed because of it. Now THAT was amusing. I think like my characters, move like they do, speak like they do. Oh, Mel is still here, of course, but she is sitting back and enjoying “pretend time”. And pretend time is lots of fun when you can do it with other people. Ben’s mother laughs at us and teases that we didn’t get enough pretend time as children. We assure her that we most certainly did but we enjoy it so why give it up? I spent my sunny lunch hour as a child playing pretend with the other children. Sometimes it was house but, especially in kindergarten, it was Peter Pan. I was either Wendy or Tiger Lily and, of course, I was in trouble, captured by Captain Hook. And I didn’t want to be rescued. Never. Even at the age of 5, the drama of it all was too intoxicating and I was just too much of a drama queen to let it go without a fight.

“The Joy of Writing”

I have often wondered why I write. Why do I feel compelled to put pen to paper or open up Word and start typing? Yesterday, we were in Lowe’s and I had my notebook with me. While Ben looked for stuff in electrical, I promptly opened up the book and started writing as we walked. I’ve always been able to read/write and walk at the same time. My mother, from whom I get my talent, lovingly called it “playing Jo”, as my favorite character of all time is Jo March from Alcott’s Little Women. My father once asked, as he came upon me writing, “What obsession are you trying to write your way out of now?” I was a teenager at the time but that has always stuck with me.

He’s right. I have no many ideas, stories loves, hates, characters…obsessions rattling around in my head, what else can I do to exorcise them? I have to give them voice, let them play, love, hate, succeed, fail, mourn, rejoice, scheme. Sometimes they get out of hand and I have to rein them in for their own good, or else they would destroy everything and set the story completely off-course. Other times, they get out of hand and I let them have their head like a horse that wants to run, to see where they take me. I fully buy into John Fowles’ notion that characters (and stories) make decisions of their own about where they want to go. I cannot always tell them where to go and why; they have their own notions of their lives, no matter how I chalk things out.

I become obsessed with characters that intrigue me, which is why I think I am so good  at fan-fiction. Once I get an idea into my head, I have to make it happen somehow. Once upon a time, I spent three to four weeks researching Etruscan history, society, burial rituals, and art in order to add maybe a page of information to a story I was writing based on the television series “Highlander”. Something that I cannot even publish! But I wanted to add it and thus, it had to be so. It’s the only way I can think of to give voice and understanding to these dearly loved demons of mine. I am rather one myself, I’m sure my characters would say. I enjoy torturing them, giving them difficult, even heartbreaking situations deal with. I even had one very self-aware character, in a chain story written with friends, comment on why she has to have the self-torturing writer.

Yes, my writing allows me to work through my obsessions. When I was a teenager, I would fill notebooks with stories about myself and my friends. One year, that was my Christmas gift to my closest friends: a story for each of them involving them and their favorite boy-band boy at the time. I write about music (if you have ever seen the beginnings of my story “Thais”, it is indeed inspired by Mannesset’s classical piece). I write about movies, comics, television shows. I write poems and stream-of-consciousness pieces to vent my emotions. I write about the books that I read, the histories I adore.

I have yet to write a full-length novella/novel work of my own that is wholly mine and publishable. My father keeps asking when I will put out my first novel and the truth is, I don’t know if I ever will. Maybe a collection of stories or nonfiction is more likely. We shall see. For now, I am content to write whatever I can whenever I can.

Summer used to be my binge-writing-and-reading time because it was the time that I got to write for myself. One year, I counted it up. I wrote 9 stories, 6 poems, and 13 haiku in a summer. I loved that summer. I think those stories were part of my “in-between stories” project. I took the parts of Tolkien’s world that he didn’t show us and sought to write stories to fill in the blanks, i.e., when Gandalf and Aragorn met for the first time or how Gimli and Legolas came to decide to sail from Middle Earth at last. I enjoyed those so and they became somewhat of the last hurrah for my all-encompassing Tolkien obsession during my college years. Don’t get me wrong, I still adore the man and would sit on his lap and listen to him tell stories if the chance were ever presented to me. But those last stories were my exorcism and then I could move on.

Writing is cathartic, it’s cleansing, it’s joyful, it’s saddening. My writing is my dreams, my hopes, my loves, my hates, my talent. I never want to lose it, thus why you get to read this. And I’m always open for suggestions, too. As Jo March would say, “Give me a task to do!”

“Morning’s Quiet Rain”

Indiana rain is strange and soothing. I woke up early, of course. It is only the second day of summer vacation so my body is still telling me that I need to wake up early to deal with simultaneously hyper and sleepy 8^th graders. Instead, I wake to a silent house, having left the hubby burrowed beneath the covers in our bed in his hibernation. The only other thing awake is our cat Oz, who greets me at the bedroom door and follows me into the bathroom to keep an eye on me. When I finally clothe myself and make it to the couch, Oz is there to instantly claim my lap as his own, stretching his regal head up for scratching beneath his chin.

I let the cat settle himself upon my lap, which, of course, takes several trials and error, kneading, and rearrangements. Finally, he decides that he is content and nudges my hand with his head expectantly. I am happy to oblige, running my fingers over the dark, Egyptian-like lines on his cheeks, the lines that influenced our decision to name him after Ozymandias, King of kings. I also scritch under his chin and behind his ears just like he likes and his loud purr confirms that I am serving him aptly.

As we sit there in a rare silence, it begins to rain, large drops pat-spattering our lattice-frame windows. The rain drums softly upon the glass, massaging my mind and soothing my soul. Even Oz begins to look sleepy once again as my head starts to loll back onto the couch cushions. It has been a solid 10 minutes and he we haven’t moved. That is rare, like the silence. Usually our house is bustling with something: my husband on his Xbox yelling at the rustlers who just stole his seven-hundred-and-fifty dollar horse, the tv chattering away, the husband and Oz playing in the living room, Oz trying to climbs the walls, or one of us on the phone.

I let the quiet wrap itself around with the rain patters. It brushes away the stress of the past few weeks, of students clamoring like babies for their bottles. It calms the many worries about family. It reminds me that, no matter what, peace can be found. Then, like someone turning off a faucet, the rain stops, the bedroom door opens, admitting the husband into the waking world, Oz leaps from my lap, and the day has begun. Wet weather aside, it has been fifteen minutes of silent bliss and it is a beautiful morning.