Exchange of Realities

Some of you may go back far enough to remember the story of how the idea for this blog got started, with a debate with a classmate who couldn’t figure out how a character could write herself. This is the story that started it all, originally written for a first-semester creative writing course. Enjoy!

Missing Shula

Six pm. The lamp on my desk and the flaming sky of my computer’s desktop light the corners of the room with amber halos, streaked with lamplight through the Venetian blinds. Flute and violin pipe from the speakers of my laptop. Several notebooks, a bottle of sparkling cider, an artistically filled bowl of rice crackers from Trader Joe’s, and a spiraling centipede of Thin Mints coiled around a hand-painted dish wait on my desk. It’s the perfect setup for a date with Shula.

I’ve been looking forward to this all week. Last week I took her out to the butte at night, and we hunted for the chips of rainbow obsidian that shone like the sea in the moonlight. Two weeks ago she chose the venue, and we and a creature with scarlet fur stalked each other in a forest where spiders wove dew-spangled dreamcatchers and even the trees seemed to breathe. Three weeks ago we went out to the desert and watched a flock of bats and a meteor shower play tag over a sea of wildflowers.

And through it all, two things stayed constant. One was that every step we took, every sight we saw, I could almost convince myself that I was there, with Adrien. The other—never once did we leave my room.

Unfaithful? Not exactly. Shula is Adrien—or at least something Adrien could be, under the right circumstances. Both of them are highly exploration prone, clever, pretty, and fiercely independent… and both are, in a sense, in a place and situation where I cannot touch them. Yes, they’re vastly different. Shula stands out in a crowd, carries live steel even when she probably shouldn’t and doesn’t take impossible for an answer even when she should. Adrien is a bit more hesitant, and far more prone to sedentary, detail-prone activities. And most importantly, Adrien is real, while Shula is a shared figment of our combined imaginations.

Shula was born on the night the Perseids peaked, one week before Adrien left for graduate school on the other side of the country. Since then, she’s worked her way through nine social intrigues, at least fifteen exotic landscapes, solved two mysteries, acquired a pet crow, learned a long-lost language (Adrien’s creation; I seem to use it more fluently when writing Shula than on my own), fought a few monsters, destroyed things I expected her to negotiate with, negotiated with things I expected her to destroy, gone through three different companions, and most of all gotten into more trouble than I could ever imagine.

Every week, on Tuesday at six pm, I sit down with the cider, the rice crackers and the computer, give Shula a situation, and just let my fingers flow as she tells me what she did with it. Sometimes we have it completed in one night, sometimes it takes us the rest of the week. Through these stories, we’ve gone on adventures together, destroyed problems like biased professors and Byzantine financial aid applications in effigy, and surrounded ourselves with beauty. And by the morning there’s always something I can send Adrien, along with a sweet little note, to tide her over until the whole story arrives on Friday and she can read it, live it for a little while, then send me her own note and a few sketches or plot suggestions dashed off on the hour-long commute to work.

Except for tonight. I’ve gone through all the motions—everything that seems to help me call Shula to the active parts of my mind so I can write her—but she’s not here. And at the worst possible time. Adrien’s last email implied a stressful week, and I’m about to write a confrontation we’ve been looking forward to for the last three months. Either of them alone would be enough to make me want to have this story finished in one night and be writing a second for Friday. The fact that I’m almost as worried as Adrien about how this one’s going to end only adds to the need to write.

But Shula’s not here to be written.

Why?

It can’t be homework-stress; I’m in the clear assignment-wise. It can’t be pure lack of inspiration. All the other characters are ready. Zared is waiting amid the shadows. Roshika, Adrien’s mantis-demon, crouches on the ceiling. All the pieces are in play, and it’s almost unnervingly hard to say whether our heroine will be able to make her way out of this one.

But despite the fact that she’s supposed to be standing outside the temple, getting ready to walk into what she fully expects to be a trap, she’s not here.

Come on, Shula, I whisper into the darkness outside of the scene I’ve written. We need you. Get out here. While I wait for her to arrive, I fidget slightly and absently nibble on one of my rice crackers. I planned this situation to be completely within Shula’s abilities. But there’s always that chance that she’ll do something unexpected and throw it all off, and I need to be ready with a solution—one that Adrien will believe—in case that character-unpredictability gets her in more trouble than she can get out of.

Or at least I would, if she were here. Why can’t I write her tonight?

I want to make sure she’s all right. If I can’t keep Adrien’s demons off of her, I can at least ward off Shula’s.

Wait….

The last time this happened was the same thing. High tension situation, and I was feeling rather deus ex machina prone. And not only would Shula not come, but Adrien told me I was being silly when I wrote her a note about it. “Let it flow,” she wrote back. “We’ll take care of ourselves.”

They’ll take care of themselves. It… does make a more interesting story anyway.

About time, a stronger voice, Adrien-but not, says.

And the inspiration comes, and I begin to write.