Writing Contest Entry

I entered this into a writing contest earlier this month. The prompt was a twisted fairy tale.

The Pea

The car pulls up to a house much larger than I had expected. Its iron gates look glam and intimidating.
“You vastly under sold your house.” I tell Kent. He grins and runs his hands through his hair.
“I guess. I didn’t want you to feel like you had to dress up or act weird or anything.”
I look down at myself. My dress is cute but now I’m wondering if it’s stylish enough for his mom. “Act weird? Like how?”
“My mom, she has this weird habit of testing my girlfriends. I don’t want you to feel like you have to play along.”
We get out of the car and are ushered into the house by, I kid you not, a butler. The house looks much more like a castle than any home I’d ever seen.
“Kent? Honey is that you?”
“Yeah mom, in the living room.”
His mom walks in and I can tell you now that my dress is in fact not stylish enough. Her gray hair is bobbed around her face and a simple pearl necklace rests against her collarbone. She is wearing shoes in her own house and those shoes look very expensive. I may be a broke college student but I still know what the red sole means. Her dress is dark purple and fits her like I have never seen a mother’s dress fit.
“You must be Piper.” She says with a smile. “Kent has told me all about you.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. He is quite infatuated with you.” That’s when I notice that her eyes aren’t smiling, just her mouth. Maybe she is showing me her teeth like the monkeys at the zoo I work at do when they want to intimidate other monkeys. “Should we go in the dinning room?”
I sit across from Kent and watch as more of “the help” comes out to fill our glasses with wine and bring us salad.
“Kent tells me that you actually have a very unusual name. More unusual, in fact, than Piper.”
I shoot Kent a glare. “Yeah, um my parents named me Peach. I go by Piper though, it’s my grandma’s name.”
His mom sips the wine and looks at me over the rim of the glass.
“Your home is beautiful.” I say.
“Thank you. Where do you live?”
“In an off campus apartment.” I leave out my four roommates and the smell of curry from the Indian restaurant downstairs.
Who knows how many dishes this meal will have but now someone is setting little wonton looking things down in front of me. I cut into one and the most amazing smell comes out. Like flowers and deeper spices. I take a bite and have to close my eyes. It is the most delicious thing I have ever eaten.
“Can you place the spices in that?” She asks. I open my eyes and find that she is watching me.
“Um” I think back to the spices I have had. “Cardamom, ginger, and “
She is watching me in a really creepy way.
“Hibiscus?”
Her eyes narrow. “How in the world did you guess Hibiscus?”
“I saw it at a store one day and bought some before I knew how to cook with it. I found a recipe online though.”
I take a really big drink of wine. Kent is unusually quiet. I try to kick him under the table but the table is too wide.
As soon as we are finished with out main course the lights go out. With everything so quiet we can finally hear that it is raining very hard.
“You can’t possibly drive home in this.” Kent’s mom says. “You two had better stay the night.”
“No.” He says with a bit more force than I would have expected.
“Kent, dear, it’s fine. I have already made up a room for Piper just in case.”
After desert I am led up to my room. A separate room from Kent.
“I hope you sleep well.” His mom tells me, handing me a candle and closing the door.
I drop my purse and head over to the bed. It is giant. There are at least two mattresses and six mattress pads.
“What the hell?” I ask under my breath. I crawl into the bed and pull the sheets over myself. In two seconds I am asleep.
I am woken up by Kent’s mom barging into my room. “How did you sleep?” She asks quickly and with no warmth or genuine concern in her voice.
“Great. I was really tired.”
“Mother?” I hear Kent say. He steps into my room and glares at her. “Are you kidding me? Again?”
“Kent, I just want to make sure that you get the girl that you deserve.”
“Piper, you slept fine, didn’t you?”
“Yeah…”
“See Kent, she didn’t even feel the pea under the mattresses. Her skin is too hard and rough.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask, sliding off of the mattresses.
“She puts a frozen pea under my girlfriends beds.” He tells me, coming to stand next to me.
“You can’t marry her Kent. She isn’t good enough for you.”
I laugh. I’m snorting in front of some lady who just put me through a princess test.
“Well mother, we actually came here to tell you something.”
“No” she says, taking a step back.
“Piper and I eloped.”
His mother looks horrified and runs from the room. Kent kisses me and swings me around in his arms.
We get in the car and head back to campus.
“So she wouldn’t have wanted us to get married unless I passed some stupid princess test?”
“Right. You failed hers but you passed all of mine.” He smiles. “You’re funny and kind. You’re smart and beautiful.”
“So I guess we will be going to my house for holidays?”
“As long as your dad wont make me pull a sword from a stone.” He jokes.

Just a Quickie

So I am running on limited time as I invited the boy over for homemade nachos and Supernatural watching before I have to leave for work. I clearly over estimated my "wake up and go" drive.

This week I am querying my favorite lit agent, Barry Goldblatt. I haven't been this nervous since High School. What if he doesn't like me? What if he turns me down? What if he laughs about my silly little plot with his friends in the Literary locker room later?
I stumbled upon a term, "Exclusive" and perhaps. like with boyfriends, this is the term one uses to snag a literary agent. An exclusive basically means I am giving him first dibs. He will know that I picked his agency to be the first agency to ever see my book. (lesson from HS: guys LOVE knowing they are the first to see what you're showing them).

So please, wish me luck. I am off to go shop for some nacho supplies.

Morning in Michigan

I seriously think that I am finally getting back into this writing game. Even though I haven't edited too much recently I think about my story a lot and the direction that I want it to go in. I have also found a part time job for Patch.com where I would review different businesses in the area. It is meant to become a hyper-local publication that has a listing and review for every business in an area. The best part is that I can do it for as long as I want. There aren't any reviewer's in Ohio or Louisiana at all yet. I spoke with one of the head people for my phone interview and we talked about my desire to be a travel writer. He said that after a few towns under my belt I should talk to my local editor about having my own travel column. So not only does it pay remarkably well for freelance but it is also an awesome stepping stone for me.

At work today Branden was telling me about how his aunt drives cars to different states for dealerships and such. He said that he was going with her while she retrieved a car from Michigan tomorrow morning. My first thought was that I have never been to Michigan. I checked and after I realized that I don't work until five tomorrow I asked if I could ride along, offering up my eclectic iPod and conversation skills. So, now I am leaving for Michigan at five in the morning.

A lot of people are starting to take a Gap Year. Canada, along with many European countries, are encouraging students to take a year off between graduating High School and starting College. The Gap Year is supposed to give students a taste of "the real world", or time for travel and prioritizing. After becoming more and more frustrated with my education the longer I was in school the more I started to seriously consider the Gap Year. If I had taken one before starting school I think that my whole experience would have been different. I think that I would have applied to more places and I would not have went to the college I chose. I never wanted to go there but listened to too many people tell me that my High School grades were too poor to get in where I wanted. In all honestly, they were but my SAT score was pretty damn good. I would have at least stood a chance. I also probably would not have majored in Writing. I don't think that writing is something that can be taught in class. I don't think that taking three creative writing classes and ten thousand literature classes is going to help me in the long run.

Taking all of this into consideration I think (think being the operative word) that my "new" plan is to graduate from UNO and take graduate classes at Loyola. I always wanted the "college experience" and let other people talk me out of it. I don't know if I will ever forgive myself for that but if it encourages me into grad school...maybe it was for the best.