Reay Jespersen

Cassandra sat at the end of the sofa closest to the window in the dark living room. The curtains were parted, and she looked up to the cloudless, starry night sky, a small smile on her face.
Her young son peered out from behind his bedroom door, looking at her for a long time. She’d been doing this a few times a week for the last month. Exactly a month, he slowly realized.
He finally pushed the door open and stepped into the short hallway. If she heard the light slap of his small bare feet on the parquet floor of the apartment, she didn’t show it. He stood half-hidden at the wide doorway to the living room, watching her.
“Mama?” He finally asked.
She turned to look at him, slight surprise crossing her face.
“Jason, honey… what are you doin out of bed?”
He looked down for a moment, bending one foot around the other, toes splaying on the floor, and gave a shrug. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Mmm,” she said mildly, turning back to the stars. “Me neither.”
He watched her for short time again.
“Whacha doin’?” He finally asked.
She turned back to him.
“Just… thinking.”
“About Jerome?”
She gave a sad smile. “About a lot of things,” she nodded slightly. “But yeah… mostly about Jerome.” The tears in her eyes were staved off by her warm smile.
“C’mere, baby,” she said, opening her arms to him. He went to her quickly, enveloped in her powerful but loving weight.
She eased up on her hug and turned to him.
“You wanna look at the stars with me?” She asked. Pressed against her, he smiled and nodded.
She shifted up the couch slightly, patting the place she’d just occupied. He hopped up and rolled onto his back, her thigh a makeshift cushion for him. They gazed skyward in silence for several long minutes before she began to hum quietly, a warm, heartfelt but sorrowful tune that Jason could recall since before any other memories. It was a song passed down from her mother, Cassandra had told him. And her mother before her.
He knew the words to better than anything else he could think of, going over them in his head even before she sang them, whispering but with heart and power to her voice.

Mama done tol me,
Said Baby, doan you cry,
We’ll leave here together,
To be home by an by.
She wipe my tears an hol me,
I never be alone.
We’ll leave here together,
And baby, we’ll be home.

There was silence for long moments, save for Cassandra’s relaxed breathing. It caught for a beat when, under the trees out in the courtyard, she spotted some dark figures moving. More hints of shadowed shapes than anything else.
Pushers. Gang members. Maybe even the ones who killed her son. Not that it mattered any more. Around here – the worst area of the city, and infamous country-wide, but all she could afford on her meager salary – no one would talk about the bad things that happened. A dozen people could witness a young man get killed one evening, caught in a crossfire between a rival pushers, and no one would say a thing. The police, when they were around, would only say they hadn’t found anyone yet. Not even any suspects. And a month after she held her boy’s head in her lap, crying out for someone to help her and finally, finally hearing the sirens in the distance as Jerome’s life bled out of him, the people responsible walked around freely.
A tear ran down her cheek. She wiped it away quickly, and stroked Jason’s head. He hadn’t picked up on her sudden discomfort, still looking at the stars.
“You always did love them,” she said, making herself look to the positive that was still in her life. Jason nodded. Before he started school, when he had a father, he went camping once with his daycare. Way out of the city to where there were only trees and rocks, and hardly any roads, just a few dirt ones. And he could see more stars than he ever thought possible. He’d never forgotten the awe he felt.
He was a bit disappointed when he looked at the stars back home, in the city, because you couldn’t see nearly as many. But he’d always loved them.
“Can I visit them one day? When I grow up?” He asked.
She smiled and looked down at him; his life ahead of him, eyes and heart wide open to whatever the future held.
“Honey, you can do anything you set your mind to.”
He breathed a few times.
“Will I ever forget him?”
Cassandra held her breath to hold back from crying openly, the question cutting her to the quick with its innocence and earnestness.
“No, baby,” she said, stroking his head and looking down at him, her tears coming freely now, running down her broad cheeks and soaking into her thin summer nightgown. “Not if you don’t want to.”
And he knew what she said was true. That as far as he may go some day – even to the stars – as far away from his mother’s hugs, and from the place where his big brother had taught him things and meant so much to him, he would always and forever be loved.

She wipe my tears an hol me,
I never be alone.
We’ll leave here together,
And baby, we’ll be home.

A philosophy isn’t an easy thing to change. We grow up being taught certain things (intentional or otherwise), believing certain things, and have opinions formed by interactions with the people in the world around us and our experiences - things that are right and wrong, things that should or shouldn’t be, and why.

It has long been my philosophy that while I’m a creative idea man - I have notebooks full of them, for everything from stories and characters to settings and isolated independent scenes, inspired at times by anything and everything I experience and hear - the fact that I see precious few of those ideas through to completion, always writing something only to be distracted, crow-like, by the sparkle of a new idea, means that I should protect what relatively little I do finish.

Protect it from what? In short, theft. Which sounds exceptionally egotistic put so bluntly, but truly isn’t so. My concern has never been that of course people will steal my material because it’s clearly so damn good, but rather that I’ve been writing stories of various kinds literally since I could put two sentences together, and so with a lifetime of writing to my credit and with a passion to make even a modest living writing my own material, that it would kill me if someone somewhere took any of my material and presented it as their own and had success with it when I hadn’t.

Then several years ago I came across the website of a friend of a friend (whose name I unfortunately no longer recall, with some embarrassment), who regularly posted new short story material on her site. It blew me away, in part that someone could crank out fresh material that quickly, but more because she was just laying it out there for anyone and everyone to see and for anyone and everyone to take. I contacted her in that regard: here’s my baggage, and aren’t you similarly concerned about people taking your ideas and using it for themselves? Her response was that she has more than enough ideas to go around, and that what she posted was the tip of the iceberg of her completed material arsenal. Intriguing!

Years later, part of my wanting a website of my own was to accomplish the same feat: to not only write stuff, but post it. This was around the same time I started pitching some of the feature-length scripts I’d been working on, so it was part and parcel with not just finishing material, but trying to start getting some attention for it and for myself. And you can’t do that by sitting on a (slowly growing) pile of finished material and not telling anyone who had the ability to do something with it; to make something of it and, over time and with some luck, of you.

That first point of the website failed when I found myself still unable (ok, unwilling) to post my material online. Same old reason. Despite the big steps toward going public with my stuff, I couldn’t quite step over the threshold and actually do it.

A few years later, cutting now to a scant month or two ago, I read an interesting, brief article which cited someone - I believe Cory Doctorow - who stated that writers shouldn’t fear pirates of their work, but should instead fear anonymity. An interesting outlook which truly struck a chord with me.

Then this last week, I followed a link from Bubble Cow on Twitter which hit even closer to home. Seth Godin’s point in his excellent article on how to protect your ideas in a digital age is to not protect them at all, but in fact get them out there as much as possible. You aren’t going to be successful keeping ideas all to yourself, but may find success in making a name for yourself as someone with a lot of ideas.

In that light, and inspired in part by Twitter followee Alan Baxter constantly posting and hyping new material, and by new followee Simon Later’s infectious love of writing and posting about it, my philosophy is at least in the process of changing, with a huge part of that being my taking that step over that threshold I spoke of.

My next post will be the first time I’ve let the public see a story I’ve entered in contests but have shown to precious few; my first #flashfriday entry; the first time I’ve posted something I was hoping to save for future print publication. And hopefully, far from my last.

So the winners for the first mifiction contest were announced today, and I was none of’em. Basically, they’re taking the classic Choose Your Own Adventure-style approach to stories and formatting them for use on mobile devices. Great idea, to be sure, and one that I think will do well. However, it would seem that my concept - having the reader be a superhero and take on various criminals en route to discovering what a supercriminal mastermind is up to at the climax - either wasn’t done well enough, or wasn’t their cup of tea (no UK pun intended). What makes it a little more disappointing is that I had thought that if it were a success, my story could very easily be spun off into other stories featuring the same character. Much like a comic series.

Having said all that, I’d already known for the last week or so that even if I were rejected, I’d plow through and finish the story, at least for myself. It’s not only proving an interesting challenge to offer the reader multiple choices for certain actions while trying to keep the main thrust of the story moving forward - a unique challenge to this kind of format - but at over twenty packed pages, it’s also easily the longest (prose) story I’ve written since high scool. Anyone who knows me knows that while I’m constantly struck, and smitten by, new ideas for stories, characters, and settings, following through with them to completion happens all too rarely - typically due to getting hit with other ideas which then lure me away from work on earlier ideas. So having pushed myself to get this far in the hopes of publishing through mifiction, I’m eager to finish the story, if only for myself. I at least want to finish the first draft, as I’m not sure how much polish I want to bother putting on it when it’s not going anywhere at the moment, and the often-advised putting it in the proverbial drawer and forgetting about it will let my fresh eyes in months or years to come take a more clear-headed approach to editing and re-writing, should I wish to fix it up in the future.

This also raises an item of note I’ve been considering the last couple of weeks:
It shall be my New Year’s Resolution to submit stories and/or screenplays to no fewer than twenty-five contests or publishers in 2010. A scant number for writers who’ve been pushing themselves on submissions as hard as I should’ve been for a long time, but a wholly achievable number for someone who’s done precious little submitting in the past. An average of two submissions per month (plus one for good measure) should by rights be something I could do in my sleep. And if I happen to blow that target out of the water early on in the year, then so much the better.

In light of that, if you’re a writer and submit your stuff to contests or publishers who are looking for short story/flash fiction or feature-length/short screenplay material, please mention them in the comments section or contact me directly with your (much appreciated) insight.

Thanks very much!