That's Just Life

This will be a short post, but I needed to write down.

First, a little background.  Our youngest daughter, Adelaide Bleu, recently discovered her undying love of toothbrushes.  It's weird, I know, but she loves to carry them around--all the toothbrushes in our house--clutched in her chubby little hands.  Hopefully the stage will pass, but for now, this toothbrush fetish is super cute.  (And only annoying on some occasions, like when you have to brush your teeth, and your toothbrush is gone...)

So a few mornings ago, the family was up and getting ready for the day.  I was brushing my teeth with all three kids in the bathroom doing their routine.  Liam was playing with a spaceship, Zoe brushing her hair, and Adelaide doing her best to get a hold of all the toothbrushes.  I wasn't paying attention, and was startled when my oldest daughter started wailing.  Adelaide had apparently seized Zoe's toothbrush, and in her effort to escape the bathroom, dropped the toothbrush into the toilet.

Zoe was upset because this was her new 'princess' toothbrush from the dentist.  Adelaide, bewildered at the strange reaction of her older sister, proceeded to fish the toothbrush from the toilet (which, thankfully, had clean water.)  I quickly pulled Adelaide from the bowl's edge and started washing her hands.  I told Zoe that we would get her a new toothbrush, but that didn't seem to help her despair.  Liam (who is just turning four), put his hand on Zoe's shoulder and said, with the utmost wisdom of a little kid, "Zoe, sometimes things happen, and that's just life."

"What did you say?" I asked Liam.

"That's just life." He said in all seriousness, and zoomed his spaceship out of the bathroom.

Inspirations (1)

“Where do you get your ideas?”  Is probably the question that I get asked most often, when it comes to writing.  (If it’s not about writing, the question is usually, “why are you so weird?”  And my answer to that is always: dill pickles.)

I’ve read other author blogs and been to author events where this question comes up time and time again.  Authors can’t answer the question because there is no real answer.  Mostly, ideas just come.   Stephen King once said that he gets his ideas from “everything,” and as vague as that is, he nailed it.  Ideas are floating around us all and every once in awhile, these “floating ideas” light the creative fires in your mind. 

In my novel, Impish, the ball got rolling with one of the most bizarre true stories that I’ve heard in my life.  I heard the story while I was clerking at a law firm during law school.  One of my fellow clerks, a smart and funny girl with a dicey track record for recognizing social dos and don’ts, recounted her experience in taking the LSAT.

She had to take the test twice.  The first time she sat down to take the test, she was excited and nervous.  She started answering the questions. About an hour or so into the test, she suddenly got that old, familiar signal from her bladder that she would soon have to leave the room.

Now, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of familiarizing yourself with the LSAT, the trickiest part about that test is the time limit.  Most of the questions can be figured out, if given enough time.  But the test is designed to force you to come up with answers very quickly, and even if you are very quick with your responses, it can still be difficult to answer all the questions in time. 

A couple minutes passed for my friend, who tried her best to ignore the calls of nature, when she realized that this feeling that her bladder was going to explode is not going away.  She knew that if she got up to go to the bathroom, she might not be able to finish the test in time, but she also knew that if she stayed, she would soon be sitting in a puddle.  The decision was a difficult one, and in the end, rather than take a quick bathroom break and do her best to finish the test, she calmly stood up, turned in her test, and signed the form that indicated her forfeiture of her score.

A few months later, she was back in the testing center for round two.  Not wanting to face a similar predicament, she emptied her bladder several times before the test even started, and wore an adult diaper, just in case.

Yep, you read that right.  She wore an adult diaper so that she wouldn’t have to miss any of those precious minutes using the restroom.  Now, I know that people sometimes have to do extraordinary things—like that guy in the fantastic 127 Hours— to survive, and I know that there are people who genuinely need assistance with adult diapers (and I’m not poking fun at that), rather, the situation was so awkward that I could hardly come up with a response.

When I asked her, as discreetly as possible, if she actually had to use the diaper, she just smiled, and wouldn’t say.  From then on, she became known in my mind as the girl who didn’t play with fire or go around kicking hornet’s nests, but instead, chose to wear a diaper. 

The summer ended and we went our separate ways, keeping in touch occasionally, but that story stuck with me.  It became one of the seeds that eventually evolved into my new novel, Impish.

The girl who wore the diaper became a central character in Impish—a friend to the guy who accidently sells his soul to hell.  I wanted to capture the academic passion someone could have, and all the eccentricities that would come along with it.

So, usually dill pickles, but in this case, a crazy story about refusing to take a bathroom break during a test.  Check out Impish: A Comedy of Horrors.