Week 8!
Welcome to Week 8 of CU This Tuesday Writing Group! Sigh, well, since the Oilers lost out of the Stanley Cup playoffs on Sunday, life has felt a bit purposeless but I suppose I need to carry on. Some GOOD news from last week: I did finish the first draft of the novel I’m working on!!! Woooo! I just need to create the graphic element that will go after that last chapter and I’ll have a draft. That is a good feeling! Now the editing, and finding an agent and a publisher and all that garbage (well, not the editing part) begins. As for this thing I’m dabbling in, I’m still liking the idea of an eating disorder clinic/home on an island. This is actually based on a real place - there’s a hotel on Galiano Island that was a beautiful hotel, then for a while in 2010, I believe, it became an eating disorder hospital for a few years, and it is now operating as a hotel again. Obviously, I’ll have to do some more research but this interests me. Today, I’m adding the idea of including ghosts - not of dead girls, but of who the girls were before their illness. We’ll see how this goes! So, today the prompt from Monday’s Wordle is: CANOE and my random number generator came up with 3 again, so we’ll write in third-person POV. Here are some ideas for you:
Your character is canoeing at summer camp. Someone stands up in the canoe, thus capsizing it. Everyone’s overboard and then … they notice some sort of creature in the water. Could it be … the infamous lake monster???
Write about a tense father-son relationship. Maybe the son is too effeminate for the father’s liking. Mom suggests they go on a canoe trip to bond. What happens?
Your character is on a first date with a guy they think they might like but then he offers them a ride home and they see he’s one of those dudes who always has a canoe strapped to the roof of his car for no particular reason. Gross.
Writing prompt: CANOE in third-person POV
The ghost of what Maisy once was does not drift around the manor like the other ghosts do. Maisy’s ghost is perpetually at summer camp, she wears a life jacket and bumps into the other ghosts with her padded chest like they were bumper cars.
She whispers at Maisy about canoeing. Remember when your arms could hold a paddle? Remember that feeling of slicing it through the water? The sparkle of the sun off the choppy surface of the lake? The cold spray on your arms? Remember fresh air?
Some of the other girls look longingly at their ghosts. They want to return but they don’t know how. They don’t trust Dr. Binet’s solutions. The process. They don’t like the way her chin folds when she takes notes. They don’t like her fat little sausage fingers. They know there must be another way.
But Maisy only wants to forget. Maisy’s ghost knows what happened at summer camp. She tries to show Maisy things—the life jacket, the scar on her right ankle—the memories of happy things to bring her back.
Maisy is slipping and her ghost knows it. She feels another ghost growing behind her shoulder. A ghost salivating, preparing to swallow her. Maisy’s ghost puffs her chest in the life jacket, strikes dominant, lunging poses—oh, her thighs, how full and strong and fleshy they were—to intimidate the other ghost. She hears a futile sounding chuckle.
Maisy opens an eye. She’s on her side, in bed, with one eye open, surveying the dusky room like a halibut. She sees her ghost, the ghost of what she once was, and the corner of her mouth twitches upward.
It’s hard to tell with Maisy, she barely moves, but her ghost feels this was a smile. Maisy has remembered! She has remembered canoeing on the lake and sunshine and water. Movement and feeling inside and outside her body. Her body! She’s remembered her body and now everything’s going to be okay.
Maisy’s ghost lies down beside her to wait for the amalgamation. She’s seen it happen with the other ghosts—the ghosts of the girls who’ve gone home.
Maisy’s ghost closes her eyes and smells Maisy’s sour skin, that sweet curdled smell of cottage cheese in the sun. Maisy suddenly smells like smoke. Campfire, her ghost thinks. This is part of the healing.
But she opens her eyes and Maisy is disappearing. Her skin turns to ash bit by bit and swirls above Maisy’s bed until it is sucked right into the other ghost, the ghost behind the ghost of what Maisy once was. The more powerful ghost, the one Maisy was attempting to smile at. And Maisy’s ghost feels that she is burning now, too. She smells that curling plastic smell of a burning life jacket as all the ashy pieces of her collect inside the other ghost. The ghost of Maisy, all of Maisy. The ghost of dead Maisy.
Afterthoughts
I’m happy with this addition to the idea. I’m reading A Grandmother Begins the Story, by Michelle Porter right now and maybe being inspired by what she’s done a bit. The book is told in a series of vignettes by different characters, some of which are bison and dogs, and I love it!! Maybe this is something I’ll actually go with for book #3? Anyway, let me know how your writing is going in the comments! CU Next Tuesday :)