Stargazing in Solitude by Barbara Lockwood

Author:Barbara Lockwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Wild Press
Published: 2021-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

boone, north carolina

My book needs some work.

I spend way too much time complaining about Chole and other exes.

I am not sure of some people’s preferred pronouns, so I refer to everyone as them. I soon realize I am not Jesus, Buddha, or Gaia, and I can’t make every single person in my life gender neutral. There is sort of an issue, though. JC still signs her/their emails with the preferred pronouns (they/them/theirs or she/her/hers). I do not ask JC, which would have been the best route, but I don’t want anyone to know I am writing about them.

Everyone wants to be written about until they see what you have to say.

I do not want to freak anyone out, so I go with she/her/hers for JC and constantly doubt this was the right thing to do. I want to get this correct, but I am embarrassed to ask. I know better now.

The title is still fucking awful and long and laborious.

But now I have people in charge of helping me, like a savvy editor named Barbara, who gives it to me straight while still believing in me, and a publisher Lisa, who thinks others need to hear my story.

And this is actually happening.

I kind of assume that like this terrible novel I self-published (okay, I was proud of it at the time), no one will read this memoir. It’s not that I don’t believe in myself or my writing because I always have; it’s just most people don’t read anything but social media posts and web articles, and the people who were there for me during surgery and the aftermath probably have no desire to relive the hell we all went through.

Then there is this other nagging thought.

I had to start dying to make my dream come true, to achieve my biggest goal in life.

I am incredibly thankful, but I also despise this irony. My main Goal Before Death (because what the hell is a bucket list?) was to have someone other than myself publish a novel I had written. I did not care if it was an agent signing me and then selling my book to The Big Five (the main publishers in the United States) or a small press; when I thought about it intensely, which I often did, I would have preferred having a small press publish a novel. I loved reading books from small presses because most novels published by The Big Five are typically not as cool or experimental as the small press shelves. I purchased plenty of small press poetry and fiction and thought my writing would fit in nicely with comparable titles. I was not going to write a coming-of-age story from the perspective of a middle-class white boy, and I also was not going to write a fantasy series or mystery thriller that would piss conservative Christians off until the next election.

Although Christians love cancer, my constant usage of the word fuck would be more than enough to infuriate them.

Before everything happened, I had begun compiling a chapbook of flash fiction I could submit.

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