Suzie’s House 202: That’s My Story

Suzie's House

She said to keep a journal. Mrs. Audrey, that was. She said it would help him clear out stuff and keep words flowing and a bunch of other things. Ben liked it better than all the reading she had him doing, which wasn’t all that bad either, so maybe he should give it a try.

She also said he should try out places to writ, too. She said sometimes it help people keep writing if they always did it in the same place, but that sometimes it worked better to move around, and that you had to try different things to know which kind and where you did best.

So Ben sat in front of his mom’s computer and put his fingers on the keyboard the way they made everybody do in keyboarding class.

The first time he told Mom about keyboarding she laughed and said, “You mean typing?”

“No. I mean keyboarding.” He wasn’t entirely sure, but he got the feeling there wasn’t that much difference between keyboarding and typing, but he knew for sure it was called keyboarding, so that’s what he said.

Index fingers on the F and J keys where he could feel the little dips, he stared at the blank white Microsoft Word page on the screen. He was tempted to change the color, at least of the letters, but Mrs. Audrey called it pencil sharpening, and said it meant he was making himself scared of the page and he should just type random words instead. She said it was faster.

So he typed:

ran dumb junk today I said… So… Today, yeah, today. It was OK, I guess. Lisa’s coming over later to “help” me with my homework. Don’t tell Mom, but I already got all my homework done and don’t need any help. She just wants to hang out.

I never thought last year that she would ever hang out with just me. It’s so… so… yeah. I can live with that.

That’s the kind of thing Gene says. A year ago everything was different there, too. I thought Gene was all scary. You should have seen him the first day of school this year. Seriously. He rocked. I had no idea so many chicks were into him.

And me, too. Not just Lisa, other chicks were looking at me, too. Maybe not so many as Gene, but I can kind of understand that. Point is, there were some at all. And Lisa, of course.

It’s all just too good. Everything. It’s all just… yeah.

So… now that I’ve written my 100 warm up words, what should I write about?

Mrs. Audrey says it doesn’t have to be like a diary. She said I don’t have to write in it every day, just however often I can, and that it doesn’t have to be about me or anything. She said I could write poetry if I wanted.

Yeah, right. Me write poetry. Not.

But I like the idea of writing down any stories I think of – just what she calls the bones. Not even necessarily an outline. That’s good, because I’m not entirely sure what an outline is, let alone a fast draft or a synopsis.

She says poetry is a good idea because it’ll help me learn the “flavor” of words. She says there are things you can say without actually saying them, and that it’s easier with poetry.

Yeah.

So, anyway, I need to come up with a story idea. Seems like everything I come up with is stupid. I wrote a bunch of stories about a monkey, but they all have farting in them, and I know she isn’t going to like that. So I need something else. Something real.

Yeah. Well. Maybe tomorrow. Right now I gotta go “do my homework”, if you know what I mean. Good think Mom will never read this.

He saved the file to the flash drive he’d bought at Shopko a few days ago, and made sure there wasn’t a copy on Mom’s computer. Then he turned the computer off, just like she asked him to, and put the flash drive in his pocket.

His first time writing on a computer. It felt weird, but he couldn’t wait to do it again..

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