SJ Driscoll

“IN VIVO”

Today Daily Science Fiction emailed my story, “In Vivo,” to subscribers. It’s due out on the DSF website next week.

Initial Twitter comments are “Great twist” from @AnneEJohnson in Brooklyn and “Amazing and somehow disgusting at the same time” from @kisalar in Turkey. =))

Brooklyn and Turkey. I love the Internet.

TWO SIDES TO MY HEAD

Last week, Daily Science Fiction accepted “In Vivo,” one of my speculative fiction stories.

That’s my third pro level spec fiction publication, since I had a story in Asimov’s and one in Interzone under my previous name.

I’ve spent the last few years learning to write novel-length contemporary romance and have garnered quite a few helpful editorial rejections that taught me to focus on strengthening my story conflicts.

Selling this little story in my “old” genre comes as a delightful surprise.

I was uneasy to return to the quicker pace of short story writing after the long, slow haul of writing at novel length, but my mind’s boiling over with spec fiction ideas and there’s now a sheaf of drafts/ideas on my writing desk.

I’m also about 9,000 words into the draft of my 5th(?) contemporary romance and have a pile of new plot notes to add to the story plan.

Which to concentrate on is the question, isn’t it?

All I can do is write both spec fiction and romance, and see where it all leads.

So these days I’m getting up much, much earlier. If the birds have started twittering, I’ve stayed in bed too long.

AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED?

Sometimes the real story starts after the story ends

I just reread Guy de Maupassant’s story, The Necklace.

Since I was eight years old, I’ve read that story many times, but only today did I question my original childhood reaction of open-mouthed delight. What a terrible ending! How ironic! How delicious!

Today, I saw that the story as written ends at the beginning of the real story.

Here’s how the story goes:

Mathilde Loisel and her husband destroy their youth and health in their effort to pay for the diamond necklace they bought to replace one that was loaned to her, but which she lost.

After the debt is paid, Mathilde meets the friend she borrowed it from, only to find out the borrowed necklace had been fake, not diamond at all.

The end.

Umm… ‘scuse me?

Then what happens?

Does Mathilde punch her friend in the nose? Is she arrested while screaming that she wasted her life?

Does the friend say, “Thanks, Mattie! I gave the necklace to my daughter. She can sell it and buy that little house on the lake”?

Does the friend offer to repay them?

This last is the most poignant possibility.

Mathilde and her husband got into this fix because she was poor and beautiful, and wanted to experience one night of luxury at a ball.

The gratification of this innocent desire cost them both ten years of drudgery and extreme poverty as they expended every effort to pay off the loans they needed to buy the diamonds.

If the friend repaid them, Mathilde could live an easier life with a few of the luxuries she’d once longed for.

But the last ten years turned her into a coarse, rough woman used to a coarse, rough life. All her youthful elegance was destroyed by their struggle.

The most vital story would be this:

How do Mathilde and her husband face the kind of life they could live, now that they’re no longer the kind of people who could live that life?

I understand that the reader is supposed to realize this dilemma, and the realization is supposed to effectively substitute for the writer’s exploration of the dilemma.

But why shouldn’t the writer explore it?

It’s pretty much taken for granted that stories should have a conventional ending, like marriage or death.

The girl/guy gets the guy/girl.

The criminals are caught.

The adventurers return home.

The youth reaches the epiphany that indicates the beginning of maturity.

But are these the best endings?

Aren’t most stories really just the setup for the more complex, difficult, fascinating story that starts after The End?

A thousand birds—they flew out of

your mouth at your dying,

                                       as you said

                                       they would

& bewildered me: 

                       They bewilder me still.

Poet Hilda Morley wrote that. It’s from her poem, “A Thousand Birds.”

When she gave a reading back in the 90’s for the journal I co-edited, Passager, at the University of Baltimore, she said the poem was about her husband, composer Stepan Wolpe, and the music that remained unwritten at his death.

She told us how they once lived in a tiny Italian town, where Stepan had no piano. He had to walk down the stony road to the local movie theatre to use the piano there.

I have her book, CLOUDLESS AT FIRST, in front of me now. After the reading I tried to buy one of her books but she had sold them all, so she sold me this one, the one she read from.

The book falls open at certain poems: “Animula Vagula,” “Out of Nothing,” the middle of the long “A Thread of Scarlet” and “For Margharita Rospigliosi.”  “Weight & Lightness” is marked with a rectangle of lined notebook paper.

In the front of the book, she wrote:

Warm greetings from Hilda Morley

I was thinking about Hilda tonight. Don’t know why. Often I’ve found myself remembering her words

a thousand birds

as she spoke them at the podium. So I looked her up on Wikipedia and found she died 13 years ago.

I hear her voice.