Yesterday, my girlfriend Rochelle and I were discussing the nature of writing blogs, and how self-focused they tended to be, a conversation sparked by my brother Duncan and sister-in-law Marissa. I've been reflecting upon this since, because it's an interesting dilemma. Because of this conversation, I am very intentionally choosing to include names of people who are stories in my life.
Being that my books are fiction books, they are about other people. Yes, I am in each and every character that I write, but I am not the sum of those characters, and nor are they the sum of me. In many ways, they are a sum of every person that I have loved, even in the small ways. In my upcoming novel, This Dissonant Princess (out 4/4/24), the main character's father appears in one sentence having read a book about traffic. My own father once read a book about traffic, and shared everything he found interesting about it. Also in this book, her older brother mentions osrs, or old school Runescape. This happens because old school Runescape is my brother Duncan's favorite game.
I can relay countless instances of these stories being funneled into what I write. My best friend Hannah, at the time that I met her, had beads crushed into the carpet of her floor, which meant Evergreen Cutler of Train Track Princes does too. In one of my WIPs, both a former student and old friend contributed the knowledge I needed to build a fictional ranch. I borrowed my friend Cain's surname and gave it to Charlie Chee.
I collect pieces of people I love like a crow collecting shiny things, and I bake them into a place where I can show them off. My readers may not know that Callum Thomas Chessman and Nicholas Michael Pereira are named for one Thomas Michael Smith, my late stepfather, but he is there in those pages.
I prefer this to using people I dislike to write. If you're a writer, I'm sure you've heard the joke about being careful to be kind to writers, otherwise they may show up in their books. I never liked this idea. Why should they show up in my books? My books are sacred. The two (two!) times that I decided to name villains after people who were mean to me, those villains ended up with a redemption arc. So, yeah, I think I'll stick with the stories about people that I love.
Let me tell you some, just for fun. Some of these stories don't make it into my books, and some of them have. Regardless, they are very fun to tell.
I struggle to settle on a story about my dad, because there are a lot of them. I could talk about doing donuts in the snow outside of my elementary school. I could talk about how he was known as the "cool dad" in my teenage years at a Unitarian/Universalist church, because he treated all of us teenagers like we had brains in our heads. I could tell stories that he told me, such as jumping out of a car while high so that he didn't miss gym class, or stories my mom told, like that one love poem a girl wrote about him called Safari Dave.
I think I'm actually going to tell this one, though.
In 2002, at the mall, there once lived a pet store. It is no longer there, and hasn't been for a long time, but I saw a little black pug puppy inside and wanted to hold it. My dad decided to let me, for some reason. Then, we gave the puppy back, and I decided not to shut up about it for a second. I recall not thinking that this would actually work. I recall jumping up and down.
My dad let me hold the pug puppy a second time and announced he would be going downstairs to where my mom worked at the Gap (also now gone).
According to my mother, he came to her and said, "Your daughter is holding a pug puppy. You can say no."
So we brought Scout home. I remember that night fairly well considering it happened nearly twenty-two years ago.
Though I don't talk about it as much as I used to, I don't have a high school diploma. I have a GED. This is due to a failure of the education system, not of myself. One of those failures happened when I was called into the dean's office in the first month of my junior year of high school. I had been skipping my math classes. Instead of asking why, the dean put me on speakerphone, called my mom, and told her that I was the worst child she had ever met.
No, I'm not kidding.
When she dismissed me, I called my mother in tears in the atrium of my high school, the only place that got service at the time -- on my flip phone. My mom reassured me that she didn't believe a word that woman said, and that she would take care of it.
At the end of the day, instead of pulling up to the curb, my mom parked and came inside. She marched (if you know my mom, you know that she's very good at marching with purpose) to the first adult she saw, which, by some trick of the universe, ended up being the exact dean who told me I was the worst child she'd ever met.
"I need to talk to someone about changing my child's dean," my mom said.
The dean replied, "I don't think you can do that."
And my mom, never one to back down, said, "Watch me."
She did change my dean, which helped, but I ended up dropping out anyway. Nonetheless, I never felt my parents failed me. I felt the system had.
I have a number of stories about my sister Abby, but a broad stroke across many is that she has always been one of the biggest supports in my life. She reads damn near everything I write, including fanfiction. She tells me she doesn't understand why I never got a traditional book deal, because she's read some books she can't believe managed to be published. I know she is not lying about this, because she doesn't sugarcoat things that way.
When Abby went off to college, I was miserable. The very first time she flew back, I ran headlong at her in the Denver airport and body-slammed her to the ground. The crowd around us gave a sympathetic 'ooo.' The thing about Abby is that she's just fun. She likes going to concerts together, making good food for people, and exploring new places. I could tell you so many things about my sister. She took me to an Apashe concert. Her legume salads make me feel like I have superpowers when I eat them. She taught my girlfriend how to crochet.
I owe the shape of my stories to my sister.
Then, I ask myself, what stories don't I have about my brother Duncan?
I imagine there are quite a few he would rather I not tell, because he doesn't like remembering he was sentient before his marriage, which I am pretty sure he will tell you himself. I like telling the story of how he knocked a guy to the ground in middle school, but I'm sure he already knows what I'm actually going to tell you, because it gave me some much-needed perspective.
I was in my early twenties and he was in high school when we attended a convention together. Duncan and I used to attend conventions together all the time, and those pictures (despite the fact that he doesn't like them) are precious to me. At this particular convention, he decided to cosplay Sonic the Hedgehog, slicking his hair back and coloring it blue, wearing custom sneakers he ordered for the occasion.
My best friend of nearly twenty-one years, Keane, was also with us, and introduced me to somebody they'd met at a smaller con, dressed as Crowley from Supernatural. This kid, as we talked, noticed Duncan and his friend Austin and said in what can only be described as a rattled voice, "Oh no, there are boys from my school here."
I turned around to see that they were talking about Duncan.
"Duncan?" I managed.
To me, Duncan was my dorky little brother. To this kid, Duncan was the MVP cross country star. Both were true, but it showed me something about how different the same person can look depending upon where you're standing.
Either way, he charmed his way into marrying my sister-in-law Marissa, who's truly a dark horse. She is blonde, all about pastels, and softspoken -- until she says the most cursed things that you can imagine. I say this with so much love, because it's for this reason that we realized, oh, yeah, she's totally gonna fit in with our family.
I tell this one somewhat often, because it's the perfect illustration of what I mean. A few months into dating Marissa, Duncan added her to the siblings chat. She read the messages but never said anything, a quiet presence in a noisy group chat.
One day, at the grocery store, I took a picture of a Scrub Daddy sponge and sent it to the chat with "Duncan, this you?" I was calling him a scrub, thank you very much.
Marissa sent her first message:
"Only I can call him daddy."
With a gif of a winking corgi.
They are very welcome for me not telling this story at their wedding.
Of my brother Finn, I can say that he is a steady and reassuring presence. As with the others, I could choose from many stories, but I've decided to share an extremely recent one. He turned 24 on January 25, and for his birthday, he decided that he wanted to do a PowerPoint party. We could present something we were passionate about, anything at all. I chose to make on about facts I learned because I was researching for a book.
His PowerPoint was the entire reason he wanted to have the party. He gave us a lecture on why the Dark Souls trilogy is, in fact, the same as the Cars trilogy. To say it was well-researched isn't doing it justice. Finn is funny like that. He's dry as a bone, and one of the funniest among our family. I wonder how much laughter I'd miss out on if I didn't have him.
Fortunately, he's very appreciated in the form of his wife Kayleigh, which has been true for quite some time. They have the cute high school sweetheart story, and are coming up on a decade-long relationship.
One of my favorite Kayleigh stories does directly involve my brother. At time, she worked at Starbucks. She asked for the day of Finn's high school graduation party off (a Saturday) and her manager told her no. Kayleigh, determined to get there anyway, girlbossed her way all the way out of that shift.
Kayleigh is allergic to beef. Not so seriously as to be hospitalized, but enough that it makes her physically ill. So, my sister-in-law decided to eat a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, vomit onto her manager's shoes, and get sent "home."
Needless to say, she was at that graduation party.
I've written this far, and I have realized quite suddenly how many people I love. This post is going to be a lot longer than I initially planned for, but I think it's important to tell these stories, stories about other people. So if you don't mind...I'll keep going.
Keane is another force in my life who informs damn near everything that I have written. We met on the first day of sixth grade, seated next to each other by virtue of our last names. I told them that I liked their shirt, and the rest was history. They've been a supporter of my writing from the very beginning. They've drawn illustrations of my writing since the very beginning, and they never stopped. You can find their work in the Illustrations tab of this website, in the fanart section.
This is an oldie but a goodie, and I think it's representative of something larger than itself. In eighth grade, we were sitting in the chairs along a stretch of windows. I don't recall what we were doing, but when we looked at the sky, we saw a rainbow cloud. Yes, a rainbow cloud. It was gone almost as soon as we'd seen it, and nobody believed us when we told them, including adults.
Fast forward to my tumblr days, and I see a post: clouds can be rainbow! The term for this rarely-sighted cloud is nacreous clouds. There's a word what what Keane and I saw that day, something we were told didn't exist.
I say this is representative of something larger because I think that the idea of experiencing something rare or seldom seen, only to find that no one believes you, can be applied to just about everything, from mental health to everyday phenomena. This has often been the case for Keane and me. We've experienced a lot of weird, random shit together that's hard to explain on the outside.
(Note: you can find them on IG as @peachie_keane_art)
For about two years, I lived with my best friend Hannah just outside of Los Angeles. I had a mental health crisis, called her, and she bought me a plane ticket to come to California then and there. She single-handedly pulled me out of a turbulent time in my life in Colorado, and living with her always felt like one big inside joke. We spoke in a code known only to us that centered around fandom and goofy voices, and sometimes when I run through yellow lights, I still hear her voice calling, "DEATH DEFY!"
Hannah and I met, of all the places, in the South Park fandom. We have now been friends for nearly thirteen years. We began to write together almost immediately, kicking back words upon words of content over and over again and cheering each other on. When I adopted my late pug Stanley (the little publisher on the spines of my books), we referred to her as his stepmama.
When I make my most creative characters, I model them after her. She's the kind of creator given the gift/curse of ADHD, and she knows how to do...a lot. She makes a lot. I don't think she could exist without throwing up scarves and jewelry and mischievous queer characters.
I used to make fun of her for being into astrology, but now I'm into it too. I grasped onto it because I left behind the wizard books and the woman who wrote them, and I wanted another arbitrary way to sort my characters. I always consult her with questions, but I've gotten better about knowing it myself. She's a Virgo. For some this will mean something. I am a Gemini. For some this will also mean something.
My brother Soren --
How many siblings do you have, Scarlett?
Eight, next question.
My brother Soren has the same charisma that my stepdad Mike did. He also looks like Mike, now. It's a little eerie, to be honest. What always gets me about Soren is how willing to help he is. When somebody needs him, he's going to show up, no question. He's also a shit-stirrer, and he knows that.
Soren was a big influence on Callum Chessman in Common Strange Behavior in many ways, troublemaking and big heart alike.
Recently, he helped me move some furniture, including a very heavy bed frame, part of which he heaved up under one arm, because, as far as I can tell, he could. He seems more than happy to be paid for labor with food, and he's always ready to tell a story about how he [redacted] and also [redacted]. I'm not getting you in trouble, man.
Here's the trouble and big heart combined: Several years ago, Soren spotted the kid that had been bullying our sister Sariah relentlessly for two years. He decided to take it upon himself to hurl a rock at the kid's bike as he pedaled on. The rock struck the bully's wheel, and he went ass over teakettle onto the sidewalk.
"That's what you get for fucking with my sister!" Soren shouted.
As with many Soren stories, I think, technically speaking, should he have done it? Noooo, maybe not. Was it awesome, though? Yeah, it was.
And a lot like his dad.
I think it's probably a lot to feel that you have to live up to the mountain of a man my stepdad was. Mike's personality was bigger than -- well, something really damn big.
When I moved back to Colorado, I ferried Mike back and forth from his chemo appointments. Up until that point, he and I had a somewhat rocky relationship. We had a lot of differences that were difficult to reconcile, but slowly, in the time we spent together at the VA, we began to get to know each other. I would have liked more time to learn even more, and I thought I would have it.
I didn't, but that's not the story I'm going to tell you.
At his funeral, I told this story. He let me play my music on the drives to the VA and back. Once, we argued about Lady Gaga's age (we were both wrong). On another drive, I played Red Right Hand by Nick Cave. After a little while of listening, he remarked, "This song sure is long, huh?" instead of asking me to change it.
Now my girlfriend does this to me when she wants me to skip a song.
The time that matters, however, is when Highwayman by the Highwaymen came on.
Mike said, "You like this song?"
And I replied, "I love this song."
We sang it together.
Every time I hear this song, I think of him.
In one of my unpublished pieces, one of the main characters is an ex-marine like him. In This Dissonant Princess, there is a dog named Felony because of him. Of course, the original Felony was a German Shepherd, not a corgi.
Mike bestowed his audacity on all his kids, in my opinion. None of them are afraid to tell you exactly what they're thinking, which I feel is an underrated quality in a person. My brother Isaac is as straightforward as they come, perhaps to a point he doesn't realize, but hey, at least we all know where he's coming from.
The year I moved back to Colorado, I didn't have money to buy presents, so I made them. For Isaac, I made a blood-covered bottle, and I'm pretty sure that's the only present I've gotten him that he liked. Well, maybe the Kylo Ren mask was a hit too, but I'm not going to forget him telling me on the landing in my mom's house, "Thank you for the bloody bottle," because he's a blood and guts guy.
My sister Sariah shares this straightforward nature. She's always excited to tell you what she's currently playing or reading or watching. She's a big fan of interactive novel apps, and likes to relay the plotlines to people.
I still get a good chuckle out of a middle school incident she had, not long after the death of my stepdad. This pre-dated me doubling down on my original work, but it's an incident that made it into a fanfic I wrote.
Frustrated with her teacher, Sariah left the classroom to walk it off elsewhere. She didn't return for an extended amount of time, and when she returned, her teacher asked exactly where she had gone.
Her response?
"A woman's journey to Nunya."
Nunya business.
Come on. Admit it. It's funny.
What a mammoth of a blog post this has become, and yet there are still so many stories to tell. I think I may have already proven my point about the importance of stories about other people, but I can't wrap it up without telling the rest of them, continuing onto my stepmom, Jess.
Jess is another wonderfully straightforward loved one, while simultaneously being extra in the best ways. It's Jess who instated my favorite Christmas tradition ever, the yearly Christmas List PowerPoint Party, typically given around Thanksgiving. The original rule was that it must be ten slides minimum, with three serious slides, while the rest can be jokes. This event is the stem of dozens of my stories, because it makes way for everyone to be as silly or sincere as they want.
The other great thing about this tradition is how hard Jess goes for the gift-giving part of the affair. Often, the joke slides are given equal weight to the serious ones, which is how I have ended up with three raccoon plushies, two propeller hats, an 80s style arcade carpet, a Slip-N-Slide, and probably a bunch of other things I'm forgetting. One of these raccoons will be present at my first-ever author event, coming June 8th at Englewood Public Library.
One of her other greatest structures comes from the year that Duncan asked for both fencing equipment and a Sinclair dinosaur. Jess built a Sinclair dinosaur out of cardboard and fabric and hid fencing equipment inside of it. I'm still impressed.
Being that I work in a library and have worked in a book-oriented environment for years and years, my sister Amelia often becomes a topic of conversation by virtue of her religious dedication to Brandon Sanderson. Every time somebody checks out a Brandon Sanderson book, I have to mention that my sister is an impassioned devotee, attending cons and dripping in merch.
Our family often says Brandy Sandy or Brando Sando in lieu of the man's actual name.
The love of Brandy Sandy has appeared in a lot of my writing here and there. Most notably, in the book that fills the gap between Train Track Princes and This Dissonant Princess, Grayson Spelling bought audiobooks and read books aloud to his dyslexic older brother so that they could talk about Brandon Sanderson.
That font of enthusiasm also translates to our youngest sibling, Gabe. From the moment that I met Gabe, I was struck by their bombastic personality and grasp on knowing exactly what they wanted. That has never seemed to change, in my opinion. They are overflowing with, like, zest? And they are incredibly creative.
They are the sibling who owns all of my books way ahead of everyone else, and part of that is because of how much connection we made over reading. On the back porch at my dad's house, they mentioned the fanfic they'd been reading. I bounced the idea to them that they should read Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, because it was a lot like the fanfic that they'd been consuming.
After that, I kept kicking titles at them, including my own.
I clip the lesbian flag-themed keychain they made me to my purse, even when I change the bag. The love of bead projects is another common theme in my characters and books, both due to Hannah and Gabe.
I am certain that if you made it this far, you have gleaned how many stories of other people influence the stories that I create as well. I could go on to tell you many things, like how the aunt of one character is a mortician because my aunt is a mortician, or how I've included my cousin's art in the back of This Dissonant Princess.
I will leave you with a final story. This is of the origin of my relationship with Rochelle, and how, in this instance, rather than influencing my stories, my stories influenced us. For my twenty-ninth birthday. I wanted to drive up into the mountains to Georgetown for a little research trip for one of my completed but unpublished projects. On a whim, I decided to invite the girl I liked, and she accepted.
We toured a museum, walked the streets of Georgetown, wandered around the mountains into mining ruins, until we eventually drove to Central City Cemetery, one of the greatest places I have ever been or will ever go. It's a historical cemetery scattered throughout the forest, and unlike many cemeteries, nobody plows through and removes the offerings. Rocks and coins build up, and toys surround every child's grave.
Rochelle and I walked through, visiting the graves of people we never met, and as the sun went down, Rochelle shared one of her favorite poems: Do Not Stand at my Grave and Weep. She read it out loud to me, and it goes like this:
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.
The light becoming dim, I realized that I could fall in love with her. (I did)
My story pushed us to that place, and now she lives in all my stories.
I will forever tell stories about other people, of my people. With telling stories of other people, I can ensure that even if they die, even if they are dead already, they will live on in some way. My siblings and parents and friends live on in the pages of all my books. It's a little bit immortal, isn't it?
My name is on the covers of those books, but the people I love are in the pages.
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