My First Book

I wrote my first book in ’94, starting it the summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college. It was done by the spring of ’95.

It was an awful book. It took on various names between ’94 and ‘01: Stalemate, The Last Goodbye, The Long Eulogy, and Gothic Killing.

The main character, Julia, was unlikeable. She was a killer who committed her first killing when she was a four-year-old, killing her baby sister by placing her in a fridge. She almost killed a classmate when she was in first grade, and her final killing was in high school when she pushed someone off a cliff. In fact, all the characters were unlikeable. With the exception of the baby sister, all the characters were putrid in their voice and action.

The plot was implausible. The whole book came off as unrealistic. The writing rambled on. I was trying too hard.

The style was all wrong. I heavily used the thesaurus (and today I don’t use it as much). The writing was artificial, whereas nowadays my writing flows naturally.

The underlying themes and symbolism were crazy. I just got out of AP English, so I wanted to be deep—I wanted to be an artiste. I tied the idea of human death to animal death (Julia was big on vegetarianism). I threw in all this symbolism to liken humans and their circumstances to what animals go through at factory farms. Looking back on this I’m thinking, “Um, okay.”

The main character died at the end. She was buried alive by the father of the last girl she killed. He was her therapist, befriending her mother on purpose (and suggesting that he become her therapist) to get closer to her. And the mother in the book wasn't Julia’s real mother, but her aunt. Her real mother was a deaf-mute who suffered brain damage in a car wreck. Before killing Julia, her therapist killed her real mother after breaking into her apartment, mistaking her for Julia. Oh, and there was this whole jealousy thing between Julia and her little sister (who was really her cousin) since her aunt/mother treated her so much better (duh, since Julia killed one of her daughters).

The whole book was a flashback of Julia’s mind going back in time as she was breathing her last breaths in a makeshift coffin that her therapist built. I believe the coffin was in the basement of his house. I can’t remember. The book went away when I started using flash drives and threw my old floppies away. The book died the same way that Julia did, being buried and forgotten.

I’m glad the book went away. It was an experiment, nothing more. I rewrote it a few more times, and it never came out right. No literary agent wanted to sign me up in ’95. I was confused and heartbroken about this since I was a sensitive teenager. Now that I’m older, I’m glad I went through this experimental writing and the rejection. I learned a lot along the way.