"You Wrote a Book?"

My family recently had the pleasure of some together-time, courtesy of a few airline tickets and a few beautiful spring days.  I got to spend an afternoon with my brother, had the older niece over for a night, did a lot of family things, and they were busy the whole time they were visiting.  It was really lovely, and a lot of friends and family got to see them, which was fun.

Younger niece, let's call her "Snaps" (she is a Ginger, and she poses for the "occasional" imaginary photograph), has been a writer since before she was functionally literate.  She and I were talking one day, and I said something about my novel.  Though my work is part of the family furniture, its not having been published, a few thousand miles between us, and my having a job - and two eminently adorable PETS - means that my being a writer is not the prominent identity nor face of Aunt Diane among us.  It's that table in the foyer, not the couch we all sit on every day.

So when Snaps learned that someone old had done her thing before she got to it, I got a certain suspicious face.  "You wrote a book?" she asked, her face doing this ... thing.  It wasn't emotionally deep, but to an experienced broad such as myself the implications of her expression were amazingly clear.  Writing is hers.  I'd taken something, I was stepping on her lines.  And I am too much a given to go around surprising her like that.

Of course, Aunt Diane writes about incredibly boring old stuff Snaps need never read in her life if she doesn't want to.  I can't imagine much of anyone related to me getting excited about "The Ax and the Vase" though I did indeed share the MSS with my brother, Snaps' dad.  He is himself a writer who sometimes makes me ache with envy, but makes me no less happy with my own work, if that's possible.

Still, I felt a little bad, invading something so unique to Snaps.  I think I told her I wrote about the first king of France - enough to indicate to her I wasn't really an interloper; maybe that this is something in our ancestral soup.  She forgot about it pretty much instantly, anyway.

I didn't, though.  That's the way a writer's head works.  That's another shred in the giant garbage dump of my mind from which I scavenge components to build characters.  I wonder what flotsam in her family has begun her own little store of detritus, which may become her own maginficent dump over the years ...