The Blue Trunk

I'm doing things in reverse order this morning. Usually I sit first, then write, but the children are home this morning, and I don't want them to know about my blog. It's all right--they'll sleep late. They sleep like rocks.
Both my children want to be writers. Nick has written a 400+ page sci-fi novel. He's been writing since he was five. When he was in third grade, he wrote a 128 page novel called Kid Wars. The premise was that there were these two rival gangs of kids in our neighborhood, and they mainly fought each other with high powered water guns. There were also evil paper boy ninjas--which I thought was sort of a masterstroke. He made all his friends characters in the books. He followed it up with a sequel: Band Wars. I'll let you guess the plot. His third grade teacher (who quit teaching the very next year) was a little burned out let him read his book out loud to the class an hour each day, it was terrific encouragement. He's up most nights, pounding til 2 or 3 am. Then he's exhausted the next morning, then he throws up on the way to school. His grades aren't what they should be, of course. I took away tv and video games during the week on advice of my analyst, and they went up a little bit--no more D's at least--but then my analyst suggested forbidding writing, or curtailing it, and I didn't do it. Never get in the way of a passion, I think.
Lilly writes more realistic stories, thoughtful stuff, good character development. She notices things, details, and gets them down. She doesn't like to read them out loud. Her reading choices are better, too. For example, I realized this summer that she'd plowed her way through all the victorians--George Eliot, Thomas Hardy (he was a victorian, wasn't he?)--and she loves Jane Austen. Then she whacked her way through Gilgamesh and Aeschylus. Pretty good for someone who didn't read til 3rd grade. I was really worried about her.
I wrote a book when I was 19. Someone actually gave me money to do it. It was a children's fantasy novel. Lilly finally got me to show it to her.
She came back from Florida at the end of the summer and said at dinner that night, "Dad says that the blue trunk in your room is filled with short stories and that you even have a book in there and that I'm supposed to ask you to let me read it."
So that night I opened the trunk and dug out the manuscript for Lilly. "Oh my god, I can't believe he was right! This has been in your room this whole time!" I didn't hear anything for a few days, then a few weeks. I was really nervous. Finally, I asked her, "what did you think of the book?" She was eating breakfast. She looked up at me with a careful expression. She's usually terrible about hurting people's feelings--just blurts things out--but when she's careful, it's almost worse, because she hasn't learned yet to cover well.
"You're a better writer, now, aren't you?" she asked.
Ouch.
Back in the trunk!

That's my 1/2 hour.