Dear Reader,
Today's guest author, Jilly Gagnon, is the author of All Dressed Up and the young adult novel #famous. Her new book, Scenes of the Crime is a locked-room mystery told in a mix of first-person narration and screenplay excerpts. Set at a luxurious (but remote) Oregon winery, it features toxic friendship, long-buried secrets, and a missing queen bee who still has a hold on her friends, fifteen years after her disappearance.
Jilly is giving away five copies of Scenes of the Crime. To enter, email Emma at [email protected] and make sure to include your preferred mailing address!
Welcome Jilly…
Sometime when I wasn't looking, geekiness became mainstream. By the time it happened, I'd stopped caring about "cool," a privilege I count as a rare, undisputed benefit of adulthood. I'm sure as hell not here for the bills and making my own dentist appointments.
Growing up in the Midwest in the nineties, however, the borders of cool were more strictly patrolled. Sports: obviously. Disaffected artsiness: potentially, especially if you're hot. Math Olympiads and mock trial, my chosen middle school activities? Yeah, no.
And video games...that depends. Are they hyper-violent? Are you male? Are you already cool? Then sure, enjoy your Golden Eye marathon.
But I was a girl clawing her way up from the social basement. When "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" appeared under the Christmas tree, I knew it wasn't my path to greater social acceptance. By then I desperately wanted to shed the parts of me that now, in my late thirties, I'm actually pretty into. If I couldn't (I couldn't, my gold-star-kidness is both generational and personally hardwired), I wanted people to think I had with brilliant tactics like occasionally smoking a cigarette to prove that--though I would never threaten my GPA by trying weed--I definitely wasn't some goody-goody.
The problem was I was obsessed with this game. The entire winter break, my sister and I lived in the basement, exploring an open world that felt infinite. The internet was still proto, so we couldn't just look up puzzle solutions. We had to earn it. Finishing that game felt like a major achievement.
...And a major letdown. I still needed that world, and while I started a replay immediately, the wonder had faded, like a lover's scent on sheets.
I needed more, so I dove into the online fandom. Soon, lurking on websites wasn't enough. I taught myself HTML, built my own. Still not enough.
I started drawing fan art, posting fanfic, anything to keep me connected to this thing that felt more essentially 'me' than most of my social life.
But I knew to hide it. Which is why I was genuinely surprised when, years later, my little sister's friends uncovered a cache of my colored pencil drawings in a basement cabinet. These were my dirty secret. Proof that I had never--could never--be cool.
I wish I had them now. These days, I wear my geek badge with pride. When my daughter is older, I'll tell her: Mom was never cool. Don't worry about it. Do whatever brings you joy proudly.
-- Jilly Gagnon
Jilly is giving away five copies of Scenes of the Crime. To enter, email Emma at [email protected] and make sure to include your preferred mailing address!
* I hope you enjoyed reading today's guest column. If you're one of the winners, or your entry is an Honorable Mention in this year's Write a DearReader contest, it will be featured as a guest column. Cash prizes, rules and deadlines, along with last year's winning entries, read all about them at: http://www.dearreader.com/contest2023/index.html
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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