When I was about seven-years-old, I read Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt. This is a story about a group of siblings whose mother abandons them in a mall parking lot and they have to make their way to their grandmother's in hopes of sticking together. After this I read the sequel, Dicey's Song, then the spin off, A Solitary Blue.
There's a moment in A Solitary Blue where Jeff is staying at his mother's house for the first time. She shows him his room, says good night, shuts the door, and goes to bed. He wakes up in the night needing to use the bathroom, but he doesn't know where it is because his mom didn't tell him. He's consumed by anxiety that he'll open the wrong door. Maybe it'll be his mom's bedroom and that would be awkward. It's traumatic and I related to it on a fundamental level, which is super sad now that I think about it.
So I was inspired to write my own story. As far as I can recall, this is the first story I'd ever written. It was a self insert and stupidly derivative in that my baby sitter up and disappeared, leaving me and my two close family friends to fend for our selves.
"Carolyn," my mom said, "Dicey didn't go to the police because they would have put her in foster care. If the baby sitter disappeared, the police would just call me."
I thought on this. "Well, what if you disappeared?"
Instead of being offended at the ease with which I would kill her off, she rolled her eyes and said, "They'd call your dad."
Well, shit. No fixing it then. Not only was my story derivative, but the central conflict made no sense and I had no concept of how child custody worked.
The big nail in the coffin though was that I spelled "hungry" as "hogray," an error my mom makes fun of to this day.
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