Tag Archives: memory lane

A Breath

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Not a lot of people read this blog. Transparently speaking, it more or less exists to prove to any publishing professionals who might go looking someday that I’m a real person who thinks seriously about this whole storytelling thing. It’s also often fun to blather about whatever’s on my mind that month to the handful of friends and family who do check in. Every few months, I get an email notification that a stranger liked a post, which is neat. But for the most part, I’m writing into a sparsely populated void.

Sometimes this frustrates me. I have a lot of opinions and ideas that I want to share more widely. I think about what I could do for the causes I care about if more people followed my Twitter or whatever. Unfortunately, I both am bad at and generally dislike using social media most of the time, so I don’t feel a whole lot of incentive to invest my time in getting better at it, aside from the vague guilt that tells me I should be Doing More. But I think my efforts are probably a bit better spent on my creative and academic work, which hopefully one day will help some people in some small way. Meanwhile, I just continue to support organizations that have a much larger reach than I do.

All of this is to say that I’m resisting the urge to talk about the Week this country has had (in a long string of Weeks), because I don’t have anyone but a choir to preach to. I haven’t really been in the mood to talk about my writing or write a review or do other standard blog fare, though. So instead, for my over-a-week-late July post, I’m going to make a list of little anecdotes or things I like about my family. I’m just going to write them as they come to me. For the few people who read this, I hope they make you happy and make you think about the things you appreciate about your own loved ones. If you want to share any of your own favorite things about people with me, I’d love that.

This can just be a breath, shared among a small handful of people. I kind of need to take a breath.

  • My mother’s mother always sounds startled when she laughs, like even at nearly 92, each moment of amusement is still a delightful surprise.
  • When I was maybe around eight-ish, I was at my paternal grandparents’ house with my sister while my parents were at a wedding. We played Go Fish with this large children’s deck of cards with actual cartoon fish on them instead of suits and numbers. I can perfectly picture the goldfish in particular, but I can’t remember anything about the conversation the four of us had. All I remember is the feeling that I was starting to experience my grandparents not just as beloved relatives to a little kid, but as their own people to whom I could be a friend as well as a granddaughter. I can recall a shared sly sense of humor even though I don’t remember any of the comments or jokes that were made. I don’t think you always notice when relationships begin to evolve, but I did that day. My grandpa died when I was nine, and my grandma when I was ten. Both times I remembered the game of Go Fish and was so grateful for it.
  • Three years ago, my great-aunt left me a birthday voicemail that begins with, in a very high pitch and a very strong Staten Island accent, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KATHALEENIE. If you keep having birthdays, you’re going to be as old as me! ….This is Aunt Cathy.” AS THOUGH THERE WERE ANY DOUBT. I had to turn my face to the wall at work so no one would notice I was laughing.
  • My uncle has a pigeon coop. One year, I was at their house when a bunch of eggs had just hatched over the previous week. He carefully carried out each hideously ugly chick to show us how to pinpoint newborn pigeon age to the day.
  • When I was a hermit in the woods for six months, my mom came to visit me and took me to the movies. There was nothing that I wanted to see except for Jupiter Ascending, which I warned her she wouldn’t like. She saw it with me anyway, and my (completely unironic) delight at lines like “BEES NATURALLY RECOGNIZE ROYALTY” was increased tenfold at the utter bafflement on my mom’s face.
  • My sister and I used to divvy up parts of songs from musicals to sing together in the car or just upstairs in the guest room. I generally sang the dude parts because her voice is a thousand times better than mine. I can’t hear a song from Aida or Rent without automatically assuming the parts I used to take as a kid.
  • Not a dissimilar memory: my sister and I used to lip sync dramatically at each other in the backseat of the car to see who would laugh first. (I generally lost.) I once cried laughing at her pitch-perfect emo face journey at the lines, “I miss your purple haaaair, I miss the way you taaaaaaste” from “Somewhere Out There” by Our Lady Peace. (I just had to Google I miss your purple hair lyrics for that title and band.) Our parents were annoyed because we wouldn’t tell them why we were laughing.
  • My parents also let us listen to NSYNC for an entire car ride to and from New Hampshire, so now I’m thinking I owe them an apology for all the music they endured during our adolescence.
  • I know I owe my dad an apology for taking us to see the Pokemon movie, because he never misses an opportunity to remind us that he did that.
  • My dad was a really good middle school softball coach. Parents always joke about the amusement inherent in embarrassing their kids, but I don’t actually ever remember being embarrassed when he was my coach, even though that’s everyone’s automatic assumption when they hear about a parent being involved in your activities in middle school. Everyone whose opinion I actually cared about (which was honestly too broad a category; see again: middle school) liked and respected him, and I knew that was no less than he deserved.
  • My aunt and uncle (the one with the pigeons) are excellent swing dancers.
  • Another aunt collects stuffed animals, which officially made her the coolest adult I knew as a little kid. We had a few parties at her house with all of them, and there’s a home video from one in which my sister and I still have baby New York accents. Also we watched The Sound of Music for the first time at that party, and I was utterly enthralled even though I hadn’t known that movies could actually be so long and I was pretty tired by the end.
  • Even though my sister and I lost our baby New York accents, we still catch each other’s eye every time we hear a Fun Accent Moment, which happens a lot when we’re at family functions, although it also happened when she came to visit me in the Midwest and a waitress offered us saaaalads with the flattest A I’ve ever heard in my life. Now as a speech language pathologist and the first of us to defect to South Jersey, she tutors me in the intricacies of the Philly area accent.
  • Before I moved to Boston to start my Master’s program when I was 22, my family had Chinese food and my fortune cookie said, “The current year will bring you much happiness.” My mom spirited it away, framed it, and presented it to me as a housewarming gift. I’ve lived in a variety of apartments and states since then, and it’s lived in every one.

I’m going to think of a million more, but various errands and responsibilities demand my attention, so I’ll end my post here. If you are one of the few who read this, please comment either here or on my Twitter or Facebook links with Fond Thoughts of your own! We can all use some, I think.

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Ode to a Home

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In two weeks, I’m moving down to South Jersey to begin working towards a PhD. Not long after, my parents are going to move to the mythical Central Jersey to downsize/be closer to their children/be closer to my grandmother. The Childhood Home (which has on occasion been an interim adulthood home, including right now) will soon be someone else’s, and I’m soon going to actually know where I’ll be living for far enough in the future to actually register to vote in someplace that isn’t my hometown.

I have not traditionally been known as someone who is, shall we say, good at change. I’m better than I used to be; it does help when you get frustrated enough with your life that you really, really want a change. I’m extremely excited about going back to school, and I’m not quite mourning the loss of the Childhood Home (yet). The whole moving situation has put me in a nostalgic mood, though, to the shock of precisely no one. (A conversation I once had with my mother revealed what an exhausting child I was to raise, as I began a sentence with, “As a kid, I would get preemptively nostalgic about …” and she interrupted me to say, “EVERYTHING.”) So this will be a preemptively nostalgic blog about a house that has not yet been vacated but knows that it’s about to be.

My mom has loved the house as a home, but does not love the house as a building. She never wanted to live in a split-level; she prefers Victorian houses, especially those with porches. I can never quite let her mention this without prompting her to admit that it’s been a good house, because I haven’t learned to accept that the people I love don’t always get 100% of what they want. I compulsively try to erase all trace of disappointment or regret, no matter how minor — especially if I somehow factored into the decision, as I obviously did when my parents moved here.

My sister and I were eight and had just finished second grade. I did not love the house as a home for a while. In our new elementary school, the friend groups were quite solidified; while I wasn’t friendless, I certainly wasn’t granted permanent membership within a group. A little over a year after we moved, my paternal grandfather died; a little over a year after that, my paternal grandmother followed. These losses contributed to a mythologization of “when we lived in Staten Island” in my mind. I saw those first eight years of my life as a time of wholeness and ease. Without entirely articulating it to myself, I felt that moving away had broken the unchanging spell of childhood, and now other, worse things were allowed to change, too.

(Goodness, but it’s obvious in hindsight that I was going to have OCD, isn’t it? Incidentally, after my grandma died, my parents made me go to therapy. They are Good Parents.)

I have the same impulse now that I do when I insist to my mom that we love this old split-level. I am afraid of making it seem like I had an Unhappy Childhood. I want to assure anyone reading this that I have plenty of happy memories from third through seventh grade, which I absolutely do. I don’t want anyone to feel sad thinking that I have disappointments or regrets (…which I absolutely do). But I can reassure you without lying: I did learn to love this house as a home. Even in those early days, I can see things that I loved in my memory. The exact configuration of my sister’s and my Barbie families on the guest room floor. The swing set in the backyard under the trees. The snow tunnel we built with our neighbor that entirely collapsed on all three of us. The books upon books upon books that I read late into the night, sprawled on a beanbag in my room.

And then, around eighth grade, I became friends with the people who are still my friends. Or I should say I became close friends with them; I’d known and liked them since I was eight, but hadn’t quite realized that they were my people. Throughout most of middle school, I’d floated around the outskirts of friend groups, wallowing in the common pubescent suspicion that I didn’t really have anything in common with anybody, only to figure out that yes, I did, and they were right across the cafeteria.

From that point on, The Kellett Basement became a hub of adolescent girl weirdness. If my life were a novel, critics would almost certainly call it a liminal space. I never felt in a hurry to grow up when my sister, my friends, and I congregated there; we allowed ourselves to be extravagantly strange without feeling like we were sacrificing our fragile teenage maturity. Or perhaps I’m projecting and should only speak for myself, so I’ll say instead that I felt that way, and I am grateful that my friends allowed me to. They completed the transformation of this house into home.

This house has absorbed so many good and bad memories. In the kitchen, women of several generations tended to their assembly line of vegetable chopping while the men cleaned and shucked an alarming number of clams in order to make enough clam chowder to feed a small army (a.k.a. my extended family). In the living room, my father played the piano; ragtime and jazz mostly, but also Christmas carols when seasonally appropriate, and my sister would sometimes wander in to sing. For ten years, a beloved and poorly behaved Portuguese water dog tore through the backyard and barked at the phone. Throughout the house, I experienced periodic cataclysms of anxiety and found safe places to weather them. I read and listened and made choices about the kind of person I wanted to be.

My new apartment is the second story of an old house that my mother will probably like as a building. It has patterned carpets and long windows. I hope that when my friends and family come to visit, they will feel at home. When that happens, then I will, too.

 

The (Sort of) Persistence of Memory

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My family knows me very well. I have always been quite open about both my emotions and opinions (I’m going with “open” as opposed to “an over-sharer”), and I feel like I’m relatively easy to figure out as a person anyway. However, there are some (very minor) misconceptions that have worked their way into the things people believe about me. I’m not talking about misjudgments of character or anything like that. I’m strictly speaking about the completely innocuous and at most mildly annoying assumptions that people make. I’m sure everyone knows someone who once expressed mild fondness for an animal/flower/band/etc. only for the world to decide that they are OBSESSED with that animal/flower/band/etc. and to make it the theme of every gift forever. That person then goes on to politely accumulate like 8,000 peacock figurines, which they now regard with an air of grim resignation.

For me, the strange mythologies that have sprung up around me are “Kathleen is never cold” and “Kathleen remembers everything about the books she reads.” As for the former, just because I like cool weather doesn’t mean I’m not cold in the dead of winter. (Also, the reason I wander around the house barefoot when it’s cold out, Mom, is that my feet are literally always cold and I just don’t notice it anymore. Also we’re inside.)

I realized recently that even I had fallen for the latter misconception, though. My memory is indeed very strong in some regards. For example, I have some memories from a weirdly early age. My earliest is from around 18 months, when my mom EXTREMELY ACCIDENTALLY hit me in the face with a seat belt. I don’t blame you if you’re skeptical, but I’ve corroborated specific details that were never part of a story about it, such as what side of the car I was sitting on and details about the car seat. (Also, can I just reiterate how much my mom did not mean to do this? She cried way harder than I did.) I have multiple memories from ages two and three, as well — bouncing in the stroller with my sister over a cobblestone road is a particularly fond one.

Then when I started to read, I was never content to only read one book at a time. Once I discovered The Baby-Sitters Club, I would have a stack six- or seven-deep beside my bed at all times, with a bookmark in each one. (I probably would have had more if I’d been allowed to take more out from the library.) My parents would marvel aloud that I could keep all of the stories straight, and lo, a personal legend was born.

I definitely cultivated this perception of me as a Reader Extraordinaire. I was deeply protective of and arrogant about this aspect of my identity, as I think many bookish kids are. I remember having “quote competitions” with my best friend circa eighth grade, in which we would quote the most impossibly obscure lines from Harry Potter at each other, trying to come up with one that the other person wouldn’t recognize. (I think we stumped each other once each.) Obnoxious performative bookishness aside, I genuinely could rattle off a great deal of detail from the books that I read and loved.

As I look at my bookshelf now, though, I find plenty of books that I know I enjoyed, but can barely remember anything about. I mentioned that I was rereading one of these forgotten books several months back, and my mom teased, “I didn’t think you ever forgot a book.” My arrogant child self experienced a brief moment of panic. I looked over the shelves and realized that details about characters and plots from books I had read only in the past few months now escaped me. What had become of my amazing book memory?

Well, my memory probably isn’t actually as good as it was when I was a kid. I definitely don’t read seven books at once anymore. But also, it was probably never actually that amazing, anyway. I’ve never been all that great with names, and even less so with dates. (Minoring in art history was a bit of a challenge.) The books I remember the best from childhood are either the ones that I read for school or the ones that became all-time favorites. The connection? Conversation. I never immediately stored the information I read in my long-term memory the way I’d proudly assumed that I did. I just talked about books literally all the time, and the repetition drove the details home. The books on my shelves that I don’t remember as well are the ones I’ve never had an in-depth discussion about.

I’ve always had a vague hypothesis that being a twin has a lot to do with my long memory. My sister also remembers our adventures in the stroller. I don’t know if she remembers the seat belt incident, but she does remember me falling down the stairs at my grandparents’ house when we were two. (I didn’t actually get injured all that often.) Our parents and other adult relatives obviously spoke to us all the time, but we also spoke to each other. These were conversations between cognitive equals, so we probably had to work harder to understand and be understood. I wonder if there was something about our communication skills growing in tandem that helped us to store our shared experiences in our memories. Of course, I know very little about the science of memory, so I could be entirely making this up. (It’s possible that my sister, who does know about the science of memory, will yell at me after I post this.) But I do have a good memory for conversations I have had, and it seems probable that my “good memory for books” had more to do with that aspect of my cognition than it ever had to do with actually reading.

This realization actually makes me really happy. I may not have been as ~remarkable as I once thought I was, but I did have a family who let me babble to my heart’s content about the books that I liked. Later on, I found friends who were eager to do the same. I still get to talk about books that I have in common with these friends, and I cherish and remember these conversations. The fact that I don’t remember all the books on my shelf just means that I need to make time for more of these conversations. I’ve been living alone since completing my Master’s, and though I was only literally a hermit for six months, I sometimes let myself get a bit isolated. I’m going to try to stop doing that. I want to have as many memories as possible.

Continuity

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When I was at my parents’ house for Easter a couple of weeks ago, my mother plunked a sheet of sketchbook paper in front of me. It was filled, front and back, with an elaborately loopy cursive scrawl that I recognized as my 10-year-old handwriting. I recognized it instantly: it was the first two (and maybe only two?) pages of a “novel” about vampires. I could remember the exact unit in Australia where I had scribbled it down. We were there with lots of family, visiting lots of family. Australia owns a lot of my heart and I really want to go back, but that is perhaps a different post for a different day. What I was delighted to discover/remember was that a) apparently my fondness for writing in hotel rooms started super early (the first thing I ever wrote down for story was on hotel stationary in Venice) and b) clearly so did my fondness for monsters.

I had not remembered this particular vampire idea in — well, probably about 18 years — but it immediately came back to me. It was written from the point of view of a kid named Dan, who has been best friends with Van (short for Vanessa, or “Vannessa” as I apparently thought it was spelled) for several years. They bonded over their rhyming nicknames. Van always came over to Dan’s house, though, because her parents were very “private.”

Of course, it turns out that the real reason is that they are VAMPIRES.

Van will be a vampire, too, but she isn’t one yet. You see, vampires can totally have kids, but they don’t start off as immortal creatures of the night, because then you’d just have a newborn with insatiable blood lust forever, and that’s not a good idea. So the process of becoming a vampire starts slowly around puberty (at age 10, I was morbidly fascinated with the concept of Puberty) and completes in early adulthood, at which point you stay like that forever. Van doesn’t want to become a vampire, or at least not the killing people variety, and so the story was going to involve figuring out how to remain partially human. I don’t know if I ever worked out those details, but I do know that substituting citrus fruits for blood was a major solution. For some reason. She did remain part-vampire, though, I know that; shades of Renesmee aside, I’m pleased that baby Kathleen knew that monsters had to stay monsters.

Also, I’m not sure if Dan’s “voice” is something that’s really detectable in two handwritten pages by a 10-year-old, but what little was there was pretty much straight up stolen from Marco in Animorphs.

All of this is to say that I was DELIGHTED by my mother’s discovery and also by my weirdo childhood self. If you had asked me before Easter when my love of monsters began, I probably would have placed it around age 13 (that was The Summer Of Thinking About Literally Nothing But Remus Lupin). Apparently, though, I was already predisposed to think about monsters — and to root for them.

I spent most of today working on an academic paper about monstrosity, and I couldn’t help but think about that 10-year-old in the hotel room. She wouldn’t like everything I had to tell her about age 28. She’d expected more to have happened by now. She’d thought that, at this point, everything would be settled and sure. Hadn’t she already done the heavy lifting of deciding what she wanted to be when she grew up?

(I wouldn’t tell her anything about the sociopolitical state of things in 2017, because I’m not a horrible person.)

But then I’d tell her that I still think about monsters every day of my life, and most days I write about them in some form or another. I’d tell her I haven’t stopped inventing girls with deadly bites who choose what kind of monster they want to be, and boys who are willing to do the dangerous thing and stand by their friends. I’d tell her that I have long and jubilant conversations about stories, like, all the time (because, oh yeah, I have way more friends now, and they all love to read). I’d tell her I still write in hotel rooms, and when I write longhand, it’s always in cursive (just a little less loopy now).

She wouldn’t be brave enough to ask if she really had to be as afraid of growing up as she was, and I wouldn’t be brave enough to attempt an answer. But I’d let her know that the things she loved are still the things I love, and that would make us both smile.

Story Origins, or How Athletic Failures Can Change Your Life

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Since last I saw you, dear blog, I have been working on my first ever set of Official Revisions (a.k.a. as per my agent’s request), so for once I have a good excuse for such a long time between posts. This was the first pass of revisions on story that wasn’t a total overhaul (I did, um, a lot of those), so I’m feeling a little bit of DID I DO ENOUGH second-guessing, but mostly I’m excited that blank page rewrites are apparently no longer a necessity. My work on these revisions was rather . . . concentrated. By which I mean my attitude essentially was CAN’T STOP WON’T STOP until I finished. In a related story, there actually IS an upward limit of how long you can stare at word processing programs before your entire brain tries to chisel its way free of your skull. (My paid job as a transcriptionist did not help in this regard.) Hermit life was definitely conducive to nonstop work, though, so I feel very lucky that the timing of recent Life Events have fit together well, since I feel like few 25-year-olds can actually say that.

When I was preparing my revised manuscript to be emailed and waging unholy battle with Scrivener and Word (FORMATTING *shakes fist*), I named a temporary document “story.” This was what the first ever Word document of The Children’s War was named, and consequently why I still refer to it simply as story whenever I’m speaking about it. (The document title was not capitalized, so it’s not actually a proper noun, even though I use it like one. Explaining that further will force me down a mysteries-of-cognition rabbit hole [“seeing” written words in my mind’s eye when speaking, etc.], and I’m too tired for that, so let’s just leave it there.) Having a new “story” document got me thinking about the history of story, and how important it has been in my life.

Story is my first novel, and therefore it has taught me very nearly everything I now know about writing. For a long time, though, I had no idea it was going to be my first novel. I just had a couple of characters who I would occasionally take down off the mental shelf, poke around a bit, and then set aside. For this, I have the Bernards High School girls’ fencing team of 2006-2007 to thank. Specifically, I have to thank them for being so good they were boring. 

Let’s back up. Not many high schools have a fencing team, so most people I know are only really familiar with college fencing clubs – not actual teams, but just a recreational group that meets like once a week. I can’t speak for all college fencing clubs, but of the ones I’ve heard about, I can only say that there is an EXTREMELY different vibe. College teams are obviously super competitive, but many clubs tend to be, shall we say, the athletic option for the super nerds. (This is not a derogatory comment, by the way. I make up fake societies for funsies, and therefore can never cast stones w/r/t nerdery.) People would gather casually, learn and practice the basics, and generally have a good time, if you like that particular brand of physical exertion. (I do not. More on that in a minute.) This, however, is not what high school fencing was like.

High school fencing was intense. 

If you were good at it, that is. Which many, many of the fencers at my high school were. However, my high school was also rather small – small enough that it had a no-cut policy for sports teams. Anyone could get on a team, they just wouldn’t start. This is how I wound up as a fencer my freshman and sophomore year.

My motives for joining fencing were not pure. Like all the “honors kids” in my school district, I felt the college pressure from an early age. I entered high school with the neurotic need to pad my application as much and as early as possible. One of the easiest ways of doing this was getting into our chapter of National Honor Society in the beginning of junior year. Once inducted, my work would be done, because our NHS did precisely nothing. However, to get in, I would need not only good grades and no enemies among the faculty, but also enough extracurricular points each year – five, to be exact. Clubs and community service carried one-point values. Sports carried three. In hindsight, I find this remarkably unfair, but since I had a choice between a sport and two other activities versus FIVE activities, I had to pick a sport. Since most of my friends (some of whom are legitimately good athletes, and some of whom had the same motives I did) were joining fencing, I did as well.

My friends, there has never been a worse fencer than your humble blogger.

Look, I’ve never been an athlete, really. However, in my elementary and middle school phases of life, I generally was able to start a sport, achieve mediocrity, and then plateau forever as neither actually talented nor an embarrassment. Fencing, though. Oh, fencing. I progressed about as far as “learn the rules” and then could go no further. This wouldn’t have really been a problem if the team’s starters weren’t as good as they were. You see, once we won enough bouts to win the whole meet, then the rest of the no-cut-policy-team-members would be subbed in. There were enough of us that I didn’t have to fence in every meet (and I mean, we weren’t the only good team in the whole state, so sometimes good fencers were required the whole time), but far too often for my liking, I’d find myself standing in front of a crowd of my peers and our parents, in a slightly rusty robot’s version of the en garde position, facing down a fencer who was a) almost certainly better than me and b) pissed that her team had already lost. My defeats were no less humiliating for how quickly they transpired.

Plus, every night we didn’t have a meet, we had TWO AND A HALF HOURS OF PRACTICE. These were dark times for me.

NHS doesn’t care if you’re actually good at your chosen sport, though. I got my three points, and fall of junior year, I got my college app fodder. Then the fencing season began to creep up again. Now, technically I was supposed to maintain my extracurricular points, but like I said, our NHS didn’t actually do anything. Once you were in, they kind of stopped paying attention to you. So as the fencing season approached, I had an epiphany. After weeks of thinking things like “maybe I’ll break my leg,” “maybe I’ll become deathly ill,” “maybe I’ll DIE,” I realized: maybe I could just quit.

So I did.

All my friends were still in fencing, though, so I made an offer to our coach: I could act as scorekeeper. Did we really need a designated scorekeeper, instead of just using a fencer who was not currently fencing? Not really. But the coach said yes, so I still got to hang out with my friends during meets without any of that pesky actual fencing getting in my way. Plus no more two and a half hour practices. It was a perfect solution.

One day my senior year, though, I was not having a good time as scorekeeper. We were at an away meet, and the team we were playing had a very tiny gym. So tiny, in fact, that there were no bleachers or even room for chairs to watch the bouts. I was propped uncomfortably on a pile of fencing bags against the wall. Also, I was freezing, because the door was open and it was January. (I don’t know why the door was open. Possibly because if it were closed, the tiny tiny gym would have become very hot. Or it was broken.) Meanwhile, this was one of the most boring meets of the year. Like I said, our team, for the most part, was good. This team was not. They weren’t as bad as me, because that’s physically impossible, but they were losing 0-5 almost every bout. This is not interesting when you are keeping score.

My mind began to wander to the mountains of homework I could have been doing instead of shivering on a throne of masks and breast protectors recording the world’s least exciting fencing meet. At this point, I was a second semester senior who’d already gotten into college, so my attitude towards almost all of my remaining responsibilities swung between apathy and seething resentment. I was fast approaching a Very Bad Mood.

Abruptly, I decided I was displeased with being in my own head, so I’d rather inhabit the mind of someone else. And just like that, the first character of story was born. Moments later, the second character followed. They didn’t have names then, and wouldn’t for about a year, but some of you now know them as Mat and Beidrica.

Though Mat’s inception predated Beidrica’s by only a matter of seconds, he was the one whose head I first leaped into, and he was the one who stood at the center of a world that slowly built itself around him, almost without me noticing. He is very different from who he was that cold, boring January evening, but then again, so am I. While I genuinely enjoy writing all four POVs equally (Tamma came later, and Dayvec came MUCH later), Mat holds a special place in my heart, because without him, none of this would have happened.

Without the Bernards fencing team, none of this would have happened either, so this is my seven-years-overdue thank you to them. I’m glad you won states that year.