Happy August. How are you this Friday? I walked part of the way home from my summer camp job today, and had a very nice time eating blackberries off bushes and looking at trees. I think the berries came up later than last year, though the summer is hotter.
I finished a book called The Goldfinch a little bit ago and liked it very much. I hear there is a movie, but I haven’t seen it yet. I have also been listening to a book about Ancient Greek history at camp, and though I’m a little too overwhelmed to remember everything, I like it very much. There is something very poetic in the aftermath of the Bronze Age collapse that applies to The Goldfinch’s central conflict, that the things in the past linger very heavily upon the present. You’ve been hiding a painting for years, your entire world is gone, and that fact informs everything. I’m rambling now.
Not very much else interesting is going on. I am writing a new story, exactly like the other ones, and I desperately need to find a new story once I’m finished. A dead or kidnapped sister isn’t the only thing to write about, but it always returns to that. It seems to be the only conflict I can come up with. We cannot all have kidnapped sisters. It becomes impractical. The stories aren’t good enough to warrant this. Perhaps I ought to write something from the sister’s perspective, and find a new plot trying to know you through the character, but perhaps I need to find something else entirely. It feels egotistical to only write about my own problems (which is exactly what I’m doing right now. Curses).
Maybe you’d find some comfort in one of these stories, while they exist. I don’t have much else to share with you today. I’ll give you my favorite: The Death of Jane O’Flaherty. It still needs editing, but I think it is my best work. It is the only story I’ve ever written not dedicated to you, as I wrote it for a friend who invented the original concept with me. It is fairly short, and has some description of dead bodies, suicidal ideation, depression, and grief. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LjhDQB-w6yW1ZvczL0dl5NgarAho3-SyhinBZpbi5RQ/edit . You may find it fairly boring, since I wrote imitating a 19th century writer.
Enough on myself. Tell me about you sometime. You were a better writer than I ever was. You probably still are. You can sense talent; I have only effort, which isn’t always enough. I’ll paraphrase something you wrote a long time ago, and leave you now: “As the moon rises, I still love you.”
With love,
Alice