Yesterday I shared my review of the new novel The Lemoncholy Life of Annie Aster
. If you missed it, you can read it here. Long story short: I really enjoyed it. Today author Scott Wilbanks was kind enough to share a great post with all of us! In it he talks about how a bad first date led to him writing this novel. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
A BOTCHED FIRST DATE
I wonder how many writers can claim a
botched first date as the inspiration for their debut novel? And if they could,
how many would actually have the cheek to admit it? As Stephen King said,
“Fiction is a lie, but good fiction is the truth inside the lie.” So here goes…
It had all begun so charmingly, really.
I’d lived in the Castro district of San
Francisco for a good ten years up until that fateful moment, and can say with a
good degree of certainty that our paths had never crossed until that peculiar
weekend when I’d spied him at my regular neighborhood haunts five times.
The first of our encounters was so vivid
that it even found its way into LEMONCHOLY’s pages.
The cars crawled. A hummingbird inched
forward like a slow-motion sequence in a National Geographic special, its wings
undulating in the exquisite fashion of a Japanese fan dancer. A dog floated
upward in the park across the street, a look of pure joy frozen on its face,
eyes focused on a Frisbee hovering inches from eager jaws and spinning so
slowly that you could read the word Wham-O on it. Then, whoosh… time repaired
itself and Christian was walking all too quickly past the face with the secret
smile.
Okay, so I just gave away two secrets right
there. Christian—Annie’s best friend, a young man burdened with a debilitating
stutter—is based on me. And, as the excerpt reveals, I do love my melodrama.
But getting back to those mysterious
encounters. As the narrative indicates, I quickly dubbed the object of my
fascination “the face,” and by the fifth encounter (at the gym), one that
involved my tank top and a joke about “third cousins, twice removed” that
earned me a laugh, I had his phone number.
We met for coffee—a calculated decision on
my part—what with dinner showing too much commitment, and drinks at the local
pub showing too little class. In my
opinion, coffee for a first date is the equivalent of the third bear’s
porridge. It’s not too hot, it’s not too cold, it puts everybody at ease, and
is j-u-s-t right.
Truth be told, I’d thought everything was
going swimmingly, that is until my date made it clear that it wasn’t by rocking
back in his chair to declare, “I think we are destined to be great friends.”
Great… friends.
Not the comment you’d expect when you’re
picking colors for a picket fence.—I might have been jumping the gun a wee bit,
but who hasn’t? I’d even come up with a name for the dog the two of us would
surely be adopting. Sneeze. I’d already
decided that we’d name him Sneeze.
Thirty minutes and a cataclysmic decline
into tragically boring conversation later, I found myself driving home—fenceless,
dogless (sad face emoji)—and with my tail tucked firmly between my legs when it
occurred to me that things are only inevitable when you accept them as such. By
the time I’d pulled into my drive, I’d concocted a pair of characters in my
head—Annabelle Aster, a modern day San Francisco eccentric with a penchant for
Victorian clothes, and Elsbeth Grundy, a cantankerous, old schoolmarm living in
turn-of-the-century wheat field —pen pals who write one another between
contemporary San Francisco and Victorian Kansas, depositing their
correspondences in a brass letterbox that stands in some common magical ground
between the two.
I ran upstairs, whipped up a letter from
Annie to Elsbeth in which she asked for advice regarding her love-struck
friend—me—and promptly emailed it to my date. I know, right?
The following day, I received a call. Amidst
the laughter in the background, I was slowly beginning to grasp that my email
had made the rounds at my failed date’s office and was a bit of a hit. More
were demanded.
“Sadly, I cannot,” I said.
“Why’s that?”
Wait for it now… (This part is positively diabolical.) “Elsbeth hasn’t written back,” I responded,
as if nothing could be more obvious.
Within the hour, there was an email in my
inbox with Elsbeth’s name in the subject line. And while he’d certainly gotten
into the spirit of things, I must admit that Elsbeth’s grammar was shockingly
poor for a schoolmarm.
These letters became a regular thing, and
ultimately formed the core around which I built the plot of my book.
And what my date’s prognostication, you
might ask? We did become the best of friends. After all, how could we not? He’d
inspired Edmond, the character in Lemoncholy who coaxes Christian’s secret to
the surface, curing him of his stutter.
