Greetings, WYMOP fans!
Just a quick little story today, because I spent the weekend at the Granite State Comicon. I meant to write something while I was there, and I was supposed to sell books while I was there, but, strangely, I spent all my time watching people walk by who were visible proof that I wasn’t the strangest one in the room for a change. I found the whole thing thoroughly entertaining (and sometimes disturbing) and never found the time to actually sit down to work. So this week: short.
I was speaking with a friend of mine recently—another writer of things dark and scary—and she mentioned that her mother hadn’t read her book. No, not that she hadn’t, but that she wouldn’t. I replied that my own mother reads just about everything I write, and has only missed things if I’ve forgotten to tell her about them. That’s the truth—I’m actually pretty poor at keeping track of what I’ve given her. Having read some of the more horrific things I’ve written (and no, they’re not all bad), my friend replied “Wow, your mother must really love you.”
Well, I thought about that for a while. I mean, of course my mommy loves me; it’s in the contract! But just the fact that she’s okay with most, and possibly all of what I write doesn’t mean she loves me any more than my friend’s mother loves her, whether she reads the book or not. People have different tolerance levels for things, and even like different things, and I do know of one or two people out there who I know love me who aren’t reading my stuff because they find it too disturbing. These are the kinds of people who hide their eyes for whole movie scenes if there’s the possibility of something icky happening on the screen. They’re a little sensitive, that’s all. We still love them.
My friend, however, had sounded a little bummed out by the fact that my mommy was reading my stuff, while hers was not. I tried for a while to think of a way to explain the difference between our two loving mommies, but since I don’t know her mommy, I couldn’t really make a comparison . . . so I decided not to. Instead, I’d tell her something about my own mommy that would help her understand where my mommy was coming from—and, by obvious extension, where I’ve come from as well.
“When I was younger—which leaves a pretty big range, I know, but I think this was when I was around eighteen or twenty—my parents got one of those big freezer chests for the basement. You know, the kind of thing you see in movies featuring bomb shelters. Someplace to store a couple of years’ worth of hamburgers, with room left over for a matching number of weenies, that kind of thing. But that’s not how my mommy described it. What she said to me, this sweet woman whom my own son refers to as ‘Grandmamá,’ was this:
“‘We got that freezer today. It’s down in the basement now. It’s pretty big. I think you could fit, oh, three bodies in there, maybe four if you fold ‘em right. Probably six, if they were women. Eight or nine if they were kids, maybe ten, depending on how old they were. And pets . . .’”
That was as far as I got in the story before my friend said “Your mom’s cool.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes she is. She’s also, I think, a little to blame for the stranger side of my sense of humor. You can thank my father for the puns, though.”
“I don’t think I want to.”
“Never said you had to. Just said you could.”
Yup. Mom is cool. Sometimes creepy, but cool.
Talk to you later!
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