What is the date you began writing this Lucky Girl and the date when you completely finished the Lucky Girl? I worked on this short story for about five years starting in 2015 (Bottom Left) and finishing it with the rest of the collection in 2020 (Bottom Right). My style is to begin a story and let it sit until it calls me back. It’s a slow process but one that seems to work for me.
Where did you do most of your writing for Lucky Girl? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? There’s a co-working space in downtown St. Petersburg (Below) where I do most of my writing. It has huge windows that face north and south. It’s a very peaceful place and very conducive to writing.
What were your writing habits while writing Lucky Girl- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I started writing by hand but then transfer to a laptop. (Below) Usually, I write in the morning. My favorite music to listen to when I’m working in hand drumming. There are three and four hour videos on YouTube that I plug into. The music is very repetitive and non-vocal. I find it keeps the critic in my head silent while I work.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer.
Lucky Girl
By Gale Massey
On that last morning I headed toward the deserted, bright beach south of my shack. The sun was high overhead, sitting alone in a vacant sky. I hated to think of its isolation, how lonely it must be as it trudged overhead day after day, cursed with a timeless existence. A small breeze licked at the sweat beads popping up along my upper lip as I walked. The summer had been hot and relentless.
Every night I dreamed of him, as though the dreams would keep him alive. But the dreams were always just more goodbyes, though they always felt as real as that last day. His hand letting go of mine, the skin on his fingers transparent and wasted, the bones so shrunken they could no longer hold his wedding band. But it wasn’t really a dream. It was a memory I fell prey to whenever I fell asleep. Every morning when the dream ended, I woke with grief sitting like a heat wave behind my eyes.
The roped bridge connecting the mainland to the island swayed beneath my feet when I passed over the water. The horizon tilted one way and then another. I kept walking toward the stinging saltwater that I would dive into, hoping to cleanse myself of the memory. Dreams restored the dead, but never fully. One minute they are gone, the next they are back. Sleep was nothing more than a Groundhog’s Day for the living. A nightly boomerang. In the morning, when grief returned – and it always did – it slammed like the wind.
At the tip of the peninsula, I turned and followed the path to the beach, passed hammocks of pine scrub set against the white beaches and restless water. A flock of gulls screeched their petty battles, picking over the beach’s debris: fish bones, seaweed, stranded conchs, and skittish fiddler crabs. The stench of low tide. A few porpoises breached out in the deeper water, chasing a school of mackerel.
I passed the Spanish ruins, so old they seemed like ancient boulders hidden in the landscape. The upper deck sat facing South with a view of the sunrise and sunset and any passing boat. The top level had a view of the gulf, the endless glare of sunlight bouncing off the surf. The pain it caused behind my eyes made me look away.
One time, Dad took me down below the upper deck to the rooms that had been dug out of the ground. Damp rooms filled with shadows. Chains bolted to walls. Local folk claimed these rooms were dungeons to hold pirates or slaves. They said those rooms were haunted by the ghosts of slaves and prisoners. Dad laughed at those stories and said that was rubbish. Ghosts don’t exist. They were just empty storerooms where they kept their provisions.
When I got to the north end of the park, the beach was desolate. White sand stretched out for miles with no one else in sight. Pelicans flew in formation overhead, then dropped low to let their wings skim the water. A school of fish and a stingray swam past. The air was still, and the water flat and calm, a place so barren it might’ve been the surface of the moon.
As I waded out to a sandbar a hundred yards off shore, the water got deep. It came up to my knees, then got deeper still. The current was swift as I swam across.
On the sandbar, dozens of sand dollars and starfish had been stranded by low tide. They lay dead and bleaching in the sun. I skipped them like river rocks across the surface.
The sun beat down on my head. I dove underwater. Sunlight filtered prisms of yellow and green columns. Pieces of seaweed floated into view. As the specks came closer, they began to take shape. Seahorses. Just like the one Dad and I had found last year washed up on the beach. He had spotted it first, partially sticking out of a pile of seaweed. Dead and dried, a brown-ridged spine in the shape of an S. That day, we had counted ourselves lucky. We had tied a red ribbon around its neck, and hung it on the door of our small shack.
But the ones floating in the water before me were alive.
Another one floated into view and then another, each one no bigger than my thumb. Then there were dozens of them floating all around me, an entire school. If Dad had been there, he would have said it was pure luck. That I was a lucky girl.
They drifted into the current toward the end of the sandbar where the water turned cold. I followed them out there, but they stayed just beyond my reach.
The current was strong and the water was colder than a spring. I shivered. I gasped for air and water splashed into my mouth. The sandbar and the beach were out of sight but I could see tall pine trees in the distance. Green against a pale sky. I caught a breath, and dove toward land, but I got nowhere. I surfaced and tried to dog-paddle. The sun was high overhead but it did not warm me. My legs were chilled, the muscles stiffening. I fought to keep my eyes open. I couldn’t stop shaking. My brain went dark. The tide pushed me farther out. Dad always said to not fight the current, to let it take you. It took me toward the mouth of the bay. I drifted, shivering and tilting in and out of this world. The pines were gone from view.
A dark shape appeared below me. Then another. They came close, disappeared and reappeared, rising and sinking in turns. The water darkened as the shapes congregated and offered an indifferent welcoming.
At the entrance to the bay the bridge stretched over the water, linking the peninsula back to the mainland. The water out there, deep as night. I had already forgotten my last breath.
The current took me beneath the bridge, but I could see from high above the water. The shore there was thick with wiregrass. Swampland. Greens and blues swirled below me as I lifted into the air. The world was no longer a tangible thing. Its smells and textures no longer mine. All of it a memory, no more real than the day my father and I found that dried-up seahorse on the beach. No more real than his hand slipping from my own.
Dad claimed there were no ghosts, only empty rooms full of rusted chains and broken doors. But he was wrong. In these deep waters, the dead are everywhere.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/rising-and-other-stories-gale-massey/1138769900?ean=9781952427190
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? This excerpt is based on tying a memory to my father and giving him a piece of dialogue. When I was very little, I saw a school of seahorses off the shore of a beach my family used to visit. That part is true. The rest is fiction. I never found a seahorse with my father. To me this passage represents a girl missing her deceased father which is a profound element of my life as my own father died when I was seven. The irony that he would have ever said I was a lucky girl breaks my heart. We were not a lucky family.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. I struggled with the giving the father in this story a voice. For so much of the story his character was silent, as silent as his absence. Just before the deadline arrived it began to make sense to give him these few words, to emphasize the loss of the father to the girl in the story.
Sorry, I’m not so organized that I keep mark-ups. Once a book is done or a story is placed, I keep a digital version and shred everything else.
All of the Inside The Emotion of Fiction LIVE LINKS can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/03/stephenson-holts-arranged-marriage-is.html
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