The Crime of Ideas: When Stories Touch A Nerve

In my last post, I talked about having stories that served as embarrassing dandelions, material that can embarrass the author. This post will be about the opposite-- stories that offend readers.

I believe that authors should not be censored, on a local, national or international basis. Each year I participate in Banned Books Week, and read about the books never purchased or bought. When you suppress words, you are smothering a sprout of story that demands a patch of sunlight and adequate watering.

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Despite this logic, governments continue to oppress those words, especially those with religious freedom laws. This year, for example, the Iranian government has imprisoned a cartoonist named Atena Farghadani for drawing the Iranian parliament as animals, and there's an online campaign to remit her sentence of twelve years imprisonment. 20-year old English major Tara Schultz in California wants four graphic novels eradicated from her university's curriculum, and Neil Gaiman has posted about the situation.

Despite my disgust for people that cannot handle stories or art that challenge them, I have found my open mind challenged by one online genre: creepypastas. Creepypasta are the Internet's form of spooky campfire tales, posted on the main website. As Matt Anderson explained it to me, "the Creepypasta wiki is just a hub of tales . . . [Creepypasta] started in imageboard sites, and forums. The idea was, you could write something, then post it somewhere. If it was good, someone would Copy it, and Paste it. Hence copying it and moving it all around the board. It's related to copypasta. But it's the scary-themed version. Hence, creepypasta."

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 There's an entire web collection of these horror tales online, and they rarely get taken down. Often the tales rely on digging up a grain of truth and expanding on the grain to create willing suspension of belief. The hits are the stories that manage the blend of truth and fiction almost seamlessly, like "Candle Cove" by Kris Straub. The misses have a blog on their own, with snarky commentary in the comments.

Some of the myths involving media are quite laughable when they involve copyrighted work; I laughed when I read "Abandoned by Disney," for example, because while Disney has abandoned its fair share of resorts and parks (RIP, River Country Safari), they would never design a theme park centered around the animated adaptation of The Jungle Book with the cast members dressed in loincloths. Also, cast members are not called "mascots" and generally people from India do not wear loincloths if they can help it. Although the writer had done some research, the leaps of credibility he made were quite astounding.

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Before I came across "Abandoned by Disney," I came across "Suicide Mouse," which also made me look at the story with a rather dubious expression. "Suicide Mouse" is a description of a "lost" Mickey Mouse cartoon that features black and white animation, creepy music, and the backgrounds going nuts. Although the video recreation is creepy (no it's NOT a real cartoon), this legend actually insulted me because Disney is rather open about their earlier dark cartoons, like "The Mad Doctor" and "Pluto's Judgment Day" and the animators were very concerned with creating quality animation. In addition, there were a series of comic strips where Mickey Mouse was suicidal, and it's easily found online. It goes to follow that if "Suicide Mouse" were real that Disney fans would've found it ages ago, long before the twenty-first century. 

A few months later, piqued by curiosity, I read some other Lost Episodes, to see if they were as inaccurate as “Suicide Mouse.” Most of them were; the only one that could be plausible was a dark take on a “Tom and Jerry” cartoon. The writers seemed to use copyrighted works as a mean of evoking cheap thrills by using established characters that people knew and loved. This was explained as "corrupting innocence," and the scares lay in messing up nostalgia for older generations. I found this logic stupid because, as mentioned, a LOT of kids' shows have dark elements to them that the Lost Episodes don't address.

This is a real cartoon.
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Then I found one for Arthur, the PBS kid’s show. that was beyond violent and depressing, and way beyond the original spirit of the show. I got even angrier when I saw one that postulated that The Magic School Bus, another PBS show that is about teaching kids science, would have originally been an animated horror anthology and talked about a pilot episode set in Soviet Russia.

My kneejerk reaction was, "Seriously? How dare you! How dare you write such a story? Did you even watch the show?"

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Why did I get angry? Because I watched a lot of PBS episodes as a kid. Magic School Bus was one of the shows that got me into science, as a matter of fact, and taught me how the world worked; its scary bits, mainly in the space episodes, created lasting phobias about asteroids and supernova. Before Arthur’s episodes lost quality over time, they captured an optimism about the world and stark reality about how no person is likable all the time, even if they’re the main character.

Obviously, I didn’t raise a public fuss about my taking offense. I didn’t write to the authors and ask how could they write such a thing, if they knew the first thing about how scary the shows could be. That sort of behavior isn’t nice, and the stories had already been written. I make it a point to not discourage young or anonymous writers from their work, since we all have a learning curve to work with, and just utter nothing when I cannot say a nice word.

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Then I discouraged Matt Anderson when he suggested hypothetically doing a Lost Episode for Winnie the Pooh. I didn’t even let him finish his idea when he pitched it to me; I just said, “No. NO. Pooh Bear is off limits!” I felt bad afterward, but the feelings remain.

That has been the only time I have ever told someone I liked to not write a story, and that was because the idea touched a nerve. It’s the same problem with the other Lost Episodes: the Pooh Bear franchise has its share of horrors that a Lost Episode would never touch upon, like the Heffalumps and Woozles sequence or the monster Crud from the 1990s show. Any corruption of Christopher Robin, who did have  a rather interesting life in the real world, would feel wrong, worse than the 2010 movie.

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This exchange has made me wonder if I’m any different from the moral guardians that would arrest a cartoonist for making fun of them, or if censorship always starts with a spark of anger at the offender. Do we merely have to realize that our knee-jerk reactions are personal  to stop enabling censorship to happen? Could such a solution be that simple?

Perhaps anger fuels all violent oppression of ideas, which is why the European governments put books like Ulysses on trial, why school districts fire librarians for purchasing “immoral” books and why a 20-year old English major protested about books in a course she could have dropped if she had checked the syllabus. The trick is that we have to realize when our reactions are emotional rather than logical, and behave maturely. That is, that instead of oppressing the authors for putting terrible phrases and ideas in the world, that we let the ideas wash over us, and allow them to make waves on the beach. Then we pick up where we left off and turn our anger into creative storytelling.

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I’m not going to discourage any more Lost Episode stories, but I hope that by contributing to the genre and writing a better original story than what’s on the Creepypasta Wiki, that I’ll add material that compensates for the disgust and outrage. Instead of smothering an idea and letting it die, I’m going to nurture it another way, with actual knowledge of how an original show works and what the original spirit is , and see where it goes from there.

Also, don’t forget to support Atena Farghadani. Keep ideas alive, and ignore the extremists like the Revolutionary Guard and shameless young ingenues like Tara Schultz. Obviously writers and artists do not deserve jail time for writing a terrible or offensive work. At the most they deserve thinking time, to improve on their tales and to learn from their mistakes. I know that I’m going to be thinking a lot on how to write a better story than a twisted take on genuinely terrifying children’s shows, and to leave readers with a satisfied taste in their mouths.

Old Shame

On Monday before last, while searching for a hard copy of a science fiction novel I plan to revise, I found a hard copy of another long story, a dystopia with intended moral ambiguity and a boarding school of horrors. Immediately I put it away and hid it in the drawer, along with the poems and short stories that had earned me A's in middle and high school. The shame colored me all evening, to think that I had written something so laughably terrible and dark.

Last Tuesday, coincidentally, AvannaK on Tumblr posted a few old Naruto fanfics that she had written when she was younger, with apologies for characterization and shipping. I thought they were well written and had less obsessive shipping than a few young adult novels I had read over the weekend, and told her so. So did a few followers, but she still responded with modesty:

Jumping7Salon:Awwwwwww I want to give 20 year old Avanna a hug!!
AvannaK: or a smack in the face with a dictionary

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Writers always have that interesting contradiction: the egotistic ones, like me, know that we can write well, and we submit works when we feel they are ready to be published, but we also have some works that can never reach the proper light of day, and when they do, they are like the rogue dandelions that the gardeners could not pull out. I don't think I can ever read the bad fanfiction that I wrote when I was a teenager, but a few of them are still floating around online; half a dozen more disappeared when I switched computer hard drives. No, I will not tell you that pseudonym I used.


We writers have one thing in common when we have success, big or small: self-deprecation. Our old works embarrass us because we know what we did wrong then, and that we can do better now. AvannaK's concern involved her not knowing how to characterize Sakura in Naruto fanfiction, since it seems that when we fanfiction writers started out we tended to make our girl characters obsessed with the guys or vice versa, giving no thoughts to canon. With that said, she still finds the right words and phrasing to paint vivid scenes.  

For context, Sakura takes a bit to warm up to Naruto in canon.

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When submitting I try to hold onto my ego and belief that "THIS story is good!" and I ride on a high that it's going well, that "THIS story" will be the one to earn professional rates. The few times that I get an acceptance on the first try, like with "The Opera Singer," it brings a great sense of vindication especially when those stories come from a dark place. The times when a story that I work hard on gets nothing? I feel like a wave has flipped me over, and that the story isn't good enough. That it has lost my edge.

Some of these stories, I have retired because I run out of places to send them. I don't delete them like I used to, but I feel ready to move on to other stories, that feel right, and get back to the troubled ones when I know how to fix them. Probably when I have more energy I'll deal with them properly, and understand what to change. My endings are still fairly weak, but I'm getting better at them. 

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In the meantime? I'll watch the embarrassing dandelions bloom in my garden of stories. They deserve a small place, for having helped me start.  And I'll keep praising Avanna's works, old and new,  because her dandelions are undiluted power.

Harriet The Spy Was My Nancy Drew

Last week, the 85th anniversary of Nancy Drew happened. The article details how Nancy became a role model to girls living in the Great Depression, driving around in a car and wielding a gun to deal with potentially dangerous criminals. Later editions turned Nancy into a damsel in distress, needing a college boyfriend to save her, but she inspired a generation of female readers.

I felt a sense of disconnect. The Nancy Drew that I knew was not the girl detective of my childhood. Sammy Keyes eventually became that,but another fictional lady came in between. She was a little older than me, wore fake glasses and ratty jeans to go out spying, and she wrote in a notebook. This was Harriet the Spy, from her titular novel by Louise Fitzhugh.

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 I shied from reading Harriet the Spy at first because of the title. The thought of reading about a girl that spied on others, including her friends, and wrote about it in her journal, did not appeal to me. I like reading about characters who are fundamentally good and who didn't get into trouble. My siblings kept checking out the book from the library, and I kept returning it.

Then one day, I cracked it open and started. I became captivated, and started reading. The book paints a picture of the 1960s, when children could wander the New York City streets without their parents worrying, and slip into dumbwaiters. Kid bullies could spill bottles of ink on their victims because ink bottles were part of the curriculum. Authors still use heavy typewriters, and can crinkle up their paper with poor handling. People could order egg creams -- a type of cream soda that I had never heard about before-- and sip them slowly. I had always pictured them as a drink to slurp from a bowl, but they apparently came from tall glasses.

This is what kids drank in the 1960s

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More importantly, the story itself featured an imperfect yet likable protagonist that doesn't want to change when the world imposes changes upon her. Harriet loses a lot of valuable things, and people, and the path to winning them back or letting them go does not always have a straight answer. She represents brutal honesty in a world that does not appreciate hostile words, and thus suffers persecution. Even readers, like my brother who recommended the book, have little sympathy for Harriet and for the honest notes she writes in her notebook. The film adaptation makes Harriet's thoughts worse, so that her former friends have a more valid reason to bully her, though there never is a valid reason for bullying a child in my opinion.

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird mentions how writers as children are told to ignore their instinct and accept little lies as opposed to swallowing and registering proper truths. One cannot create believable fiction without knowing how real life works, and how people behave, why they act the way that they think. People do and think horrible things, sometimes with good intentions.  Sometimes their motivations are complex, but they do not behave in a vacuum. A writer, too involved in the art of crafting as I am, can miss all those actions and motivations and real life, perhaps because we cannot face the horrifying truth.

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Harriet taught me that a character with stubbornness and brutal honesty can be likable, and she demonstrated a skill that all writers need: the ability to observe. This eleven-year old girl spies so that she can learn more about people, to put them in the books that she will write later. She faces the daily mundane horrors that plague humanity on a regular basis, whether they concern heiresses with too much money or birdcage makers with too many cats. Her problem lies in having no filter for her thoughts when they end up in her notebook, and when her notebook ends up in her friends' hands.

I had an epiphany after reading Harriet the Spy: I wanted to write, and to become a writer. My desire to create stories hadn't notified me; the fiction prompts in preparation for the FCAT hadn't notified me either. Yet I wanted to write, and to create worlds that would absorb readers the way older books had absorbed me.

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Unlike my sudden desire to learn figure skating after reading the Boxcar Children, writing was a skill that I could hone on my own time, with just a piece of paper, or a blank notebook, and a pen. The computer could also help, with various writing programs and access to the Internet. I learned later how to connect with fellow writers using the web and to find soundtracks,  but at the time computers only made me feel official, that I could write something that could be printed and look official.
 There was a bit of a problem: I had the ideas, thanks to Harry Potter fanfiction and inspiration from fantasy authors,  but I didn't have any idea how to structure a story, or what elements were involved. I didn't know how to use words to develop character. Worst of all, I didn't know how to write honestly, or how to observe people.

 I withdraw from the real world, finding a structured fiction more appealing than the harsh realities of our time. "Write what you know" seemed to be a facetious piece of advice, since what a person knew was not necessarily what interested them. I didn't start incorporating personal experience into fiction until high school, and even then it took about four more years to learn that it was okay to do so, in fact encouraged.

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Harriet knew better than I did about how to write, and how to record life without a filter. It gets her in trouble,  but the book argues that writers need to be honest with themselves while lying to the people they know to avoid hurting people's feelings when you use real details. One can use filters, but only after the rough drafts are written.

Paranormal Romance: What Works and What Doesn't

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 During the first weekend of January, I was going through my bookshelf to finish library books before the start of school, and to read one hundred books this year. I noticed that I had two paranormal romances that I had not picked up, Starcrossed and Beautiful Creatures. Beautiful Creatures is a novel that my friend Cory likes, and it was popular enough to become a feature film.

Starcrossed is about the descendants of ancient Greek families finding out that they’re mortal enemies, and that they cannot get together for fear of starting a war. The book went on an emotional roller coaster of “I want to be together, we can’t stay together, if we stay together it’s going to cause a war, wait suddenly new characters arrive and want to be dangerous, no we actually have bigger problems” for about two hundred pages. The suspense kept riding up and down, and at the end of it the sequel hook made me feel a little dizzy.

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Beautiful Creatures involves even more “opposites attract but can possibly lead to death” love, this time in the Deep South. I might have tolerated the snarky tones, the bullying towards the female love interest, if it weren’t for one teensy fact: the narrator, who dreamed about escaping his home town and the ignorance there, puts all his dreams of college aside and never talks about it for the rest of the series. My biases towards the Deep South and to people who believe in the Civil war’s glory didn’t assist with my enjoyment, and neither did the absence of people of color in the story that would suffer from such an environment. I admit that I am biased about places I’ve never been which have a profile of people not treating minorities well, but my biases are based on general American history and proven facts. A twenty-first century book about such a place that ignores the facts, especially in the light of Mike Brown and Tamir Rice and other victims of violent racism, does not earn my good graces.

I don't have grudges or prejudices against the paranormal romance genre, since it's merely a construct of "magic and romance dominating the plot" for the most part, and some of my favorite YA novels like the Abandon trilogy and Sunshine handle both elements with finesse. After reading both novels, however, and especially knowing that Twilight started the trend towards paranormal romance, a prejudice against paranormal romance is threatening to rise. This is a problem because if I ever want to write the genre, I’d want to write it with sincere effort.

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Starcrossed and Beautiful Creatures suffer the fundamental problem that I’m finding in most paranormal romance: previously established “smart” characters make stupid decisions over an obsession for another person, guy or girl. Even worse, the stories justify these decisions as “right” despite the illogical approach that the narrators take. I actually applaud novels like Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld where when the narrator makes a stupid decision, like paying $3500 a month in rent for a year, it haunts her in the end.

The problem is that in romance stories, the conflict involves getting the leads together, and what keeps them apart. Poorly written paranormal romance makes the conflict highly exaggerated or blown beyond proportion in the face of greater evils, and with obsessions. People can be rational about love, thus when you show rational characters behaving irrationally for pages on end it frustrates the intellectual reader and promises only a world where obsession is the norm. The same applies not just to boy meets girl relationships, but also to non-hetero-normative ones. 

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Which paranormal romances handle these conflicts well and plausibly then? Quite a number, to be honest. The first one that comes to mind is, as mentioned before, the Abandon trilogy by Meg Cabot: that features a relationship between seventeen-year old Pierce Oliviera and Underworld ruler John Hayden. Due to a near-death experience Pierce has encountered John in the Underworld and at fifteen thought she was too young to die and settle down with a guy forever; this is a plausible road block, as is an older Pierce finding herself in dangerous situations due to the necklace that John gives her. She spends half the trilogy trying to figure out how to get rid of the Furies that are plaguing her, her friends and John, and the other half deciding if such a relationship could work. In other words, she never lets her growing feelings for him get in the way of taking practical measures to handle an ongoing conflict, though at times she does admit that she cares for him a lot. Meg has also written satirical paranormal novels about mediators falling for ghosts and soap opera writers expressing strong dislike for vampires, so she knows what types of conflict to avoid.

Team Human by Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan also makes the paranormal material work by satirizing the Twilight mythos with vampires and showing a believable world involving such creations. In that novel the protagonist Mel tries to stop her friend Cathy from turning into a vampire to stay with the new exchange student Francis. Mel in the meantime develops feelings for Kit, a human raised by a vampire family, who lacks certain social skills and is matter-of-fact about how terrible normal people can be. Both sides bring up points about whether or not becoming a vampire is a bad thing, and eventually Mel and Kit resolve their differences by working together and learning to see the other's perspective, before they engage in any sort of relationship. In other words, they behave rationally and communicate about their desires and needs.

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As for myself, I haven't written a paranormal romance yet, but I wrote about romance and fantasy. In my webcomic A La Mode before it went on hiatus, I had a relationship develop between two characters over time, based on their interactions. Lamode, the nineteen-year old main character, takes her time to express feelings for a local medical student, and before the hiatus they became an official couple. Their obstacles mainly stem from having two different backgrounds and going on a disastrous first date as a result: the boy B.B. is a twenty-one year old rebellious medical student that takes her out to a horror film, and Lamode is a reluctant witch from a conservative atmosphere, unused to jump scares and suspense. When I was writing the comic I was letting their personalities bounce off each other as they communicated their needs and worked through that disaster; their different backgrounds will still be an obstacle when I resume, but they’re working through it without the high-stakes drama in typical paranormal romance. In addition they're both too busy with their jobs-- medicine and baking-- to become obsessed with each other.

Here is what works in paranormal romance: legitimate road blocks that are not necessarily dramatic, three-dimensional characters, and communication between said characters. Don't go for the star-crossed love that predated every novel ages ago with Romeo and Juliet and every mythos in the Western Hemisphere. See what a little bit of mundane conflict can do in a fantastic world.

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A Tale of Two Artists

Before I begin: Acidic Fiction has published my short story "Coming Home"! It's available for perusing and reading, and I am grateful to Stephen x Davis for accepting it.

I meant to post this the moment I came back from India, but the start of school and the inability to articulate my feelings staggered the post for a month. With that said, I think that I have the words now to express the numbness and grief at losing two great people. 

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 While I was away, my friend Corissa messaged me grave new: Sir Terry Pratchett died. Sir Terry had written dozens of fantasy novels, some tongue in cheek, some somber, and some falling in between humor and tragedy. He had also been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and had planned to use physician-assisted suicide when he felt the time was right. On March 12, however, he died of natural causes at home, surrounded by family and his cat. At least three thousand people have since petitioned Death to “reinstate” Sir Terry and have offered Death basketfuls of kittens in exchange for the beloved author. They have left comments on said petition explaining how Sir Terry impacted their lives, and what it meant to have a friendly personification of Death or a character like Sam Vimes.

Two weeks ago, right before we left the States, Dave, a tennis teacher who has been giving lessons to my younger brother, delivered more grave news: songwriter Frank Smith died. He had spent several weeks in the hospital due to pneumonia, while living with paranoid schizophrenia. Frank was a prolific songwriter that detailed science fiction adventures  with bluegrass riffs. Frank lived in Cleveland Georgia, channeling his inner demons into song and creating analogies for paranoia with alien abduction and robotic women far from reach. He would leave song demos on Dave’s answering machine and cheerily refuse to move from his Cleveland home, even though he could get better care in Miami.

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Unlike Sir Terry, Frank didn’t have an international following or a petition written up to bring him back to life, but he had friends in the Southeast and family that appreciated him and his talent. Last Thursday these people came together to honor Frank at the Luna Star Cafe in North Miami. His friends played dozens of songs, some that Dave hadn’t heard, and they remembered Frank’s good nature and stubbornness.  

Death at times becomes incomprehensible to me; that someone I either know personally or whose art I know personally is gone, suddenly vanished from the world. I hope that by writing down my thoughts that I could pay homage to both of these geniuses.

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I first encountered Sir Terry by reading The Tale of Maurice and his Educated Rodents, which was a parody of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”. Intrigued by the balance of humor, wit, and suspense within the story, I started reading. Afterward I looked for more Pratchett novels and found a standard Discworld novel, Night Watch. I started reading the Discworld books out of order, while requesting the ones that were in order. The library didn’t have all of the books, but I read as many as I could and gobbled up the ones that were released the fastest.

Terry Pratchett's humorous tone relied at first on mocking typical fantasy tropes, like the orphan who’s a king in disguise or Fate choosing the unluckiest wizard to be her tool in defeating evil. He often turned the tropes on their head, so that the orphan would remain an actor or a police officer, and mock the idea of playing them straight in an age where many writers took inspiration from Tolkien. Within all the humor, however, was a respect for the established tropes, and knowing the reader’s need for a story to have logic and completion. Sir Terry also commented on social justice and current affairs through his work, explaining to the reader about arbitrage in Making Money and why gold standards do not work; he trusted us to follow along even when the issues were complex. 

Before, I had previously encountered humorous fantasy through Harry Potter and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For the latter, I was too young to appreciate Douglas Adams's caustic humor, and often I couldn't finish his books out of disgust and confusion. Sir Terry rekindled my belief that a fantasy story could have humor and logic. Wintersmith both made me laugh hard and cry for the titular character, and Hogfather showed compassion for "The Little Matchgirl" that few people would show, to challenge acceptance of tragedy.

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I'm not exactly sure the details about meeting Frank, except that it started with talking with Dave. Dave teaches tennis to my younger brother, encouraging him to run on the court and to put "more spin" into his hits. At some point Dave lent me a CD he had burned, from when he had belonged to a science fiction bluegrass fan. I enjoyed the last song, "Hunting Aliens," for its matter-of-fact tone approach towards the titular activity and tongue-in-cheek lyrics. 

Dave told me that his friend Frank Smith had written it and all the songs on the album, and Frank often wrote songs to express his feelings about the world and about living with paranoid schizophrenia. I mentioned wanting to draw cover art for a CD, and I did draw a watercolor for "Robot Woman". Frank and I talked on the phone once, and he even sang one of his songs on the phone. He had his talent, and he had supporters that wanted to share his music, but he didn't have the widespread success that his contemporaries did. He didn't need it, though he deserved it.

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Before I learned about Frank, I had no idea fantasy was possible in general music. No popular song I know talks about aliens, or about the possibilities of exploring other worlds; our generation mainly has romance, breakup songs, and righteous fury in the mainstream. I didn't think it was possible to combine two worlds, except perhaps as a musical. What's more, I didn't think that people accepted that sort of music. But people did, the ones who understood.

I never met Frank in person, but his music touched me. Like with Sir Terry he taught me that something previously thought impossible was highly possible. He also taught me that people respond to the fantastic woven into bluegrass, and that genius can be hidden right under your nose. 

May these two great men rest in peace, and find further adventures in far-off places beyond our reach. And may people care about them and remember them for an eternity. RIP Sir Terry and Frank.

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Vacation Blog: Traveling With a Hiccup Doll

(This was originally posted to my Tumblr account. May add more photos later on.)

Two Mondays ago, on March 9th,  my family flew to Chennai, India with a stopover in London. The stopover, which was supposed to be only two hours, ended up becoming four, and I had stayed up on the first leg watching The Book of Life and reading Neil Gaiman.That was awesome.

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I packed an extra companion for myself, to deal with the stresses of traveling and the surprises that accompany international journeys, along with my laptop for writing and reading ebooks like Neil Gaiman’s Trigger Warning. He was quite happy to come, although he got dropped a few times.

This is my Hiccup doll, smiling  at the Heathrow airport. He enjoyed the trip, though he had to spend a good portion of it in my purse or in my grandparents’ place, and he missed my Toothless plushie. I would have brought the latter if my family hadn’t laughed at Hiccup so much and implied that I was too old for dolls. With that said, we both enjoyed quite a bit, like this image of Ganesha the elephant god.

The city of Chennai is different in that everyone drives crazy on the roads and yet we see few accidents despite the smaller amount of signals. People park where they can find space and there are billboards everywhere. Chennai has definitely become more industrialized, displaying more shops and corporations than I remember seeing in 2011. 

There are still a lot of stray dogs, though, including a friendly one that napped outside my grandparents’ apartment. Often he would sleep on the pavements, to wake up when the cars threatened to run over him. He didn’t even snarl or snap.

My grandparents took us to the Mamallapuram monuments, as well as a beach resort where one can find elusive white people hiding from the Indian populaces. We had lunch there, strolled the beach and watched fisherman work from tiny boats, using large nets. I even found a garden construction that resembled a Shel Silverstein creature, and he probably has his story. I just haven’t found it yet.

Hiccup didn’t get to see any of that, however; I was worried about losing him. He spent most of his time napping with me, and I napped because of the jet lag and the heat. It was comfy to sleep with him.

On the last day, my family had to eat lunch with relatives I hadn’t seen in a while, including several cousins and aunts. My mom was sick, as was my younger brother, so my two older siblings stayed behind to take care of them and I represented the five of us over a lunch of spicy Indian and Western food, talking about business school and the book I had published. As recompense, I got a sizzling hot fudge sundae on a Korean barbecue plate. It was worth it.

The trip back was quite eventful; my younger brother misplaced his passport in the Chennai airport, and we frantically searched for it. Security helped, and a lady found it lying on the floor. After that we made our flight; I wrote a short story about imperialism and butterflies while listening to Jhumpa Lahiri. Hiccup remained in my arms, though we didn’t take any selfies because it was too dark and my legs kept cramping. I do NOT recommend listening to audiobooks when trying to sleep because they will keep you awake.

It was quite a trip, quite memorable and inspirational. Hiccup is back with Toothless and they are happier together; I’m catching up on fanfiction that I missed and starting the second semester. And I am going to figure out how to write outside of an airplane, to channel the creative energies that got stimulated.

As a last picture, here is a notebook display that I saw at a shop. It was quite tempting, but I thought against it. After all, it would’ve barely fit into my overstuffed suitcase. Maybe next time, if my purse is lighter.