This year’s October fiction project is a short middle-grade horror novel. The working title is “Turning Leaves,” but that will probably change.
Here are the rules (which I am making up as I go along!):
- Write every day.
- Write about a thousand words every day.
- Write words the same day the characters would be writing them, for the most part (that is, Oct 1 words in the story = Oct 1 words in real life).
- Don’t plan ahead.
- Don’t quit.
I don’t have an outline or even a plan.
It’s been a while since I wrote middle-grade fiction. This should be fun.
…
October Fiction Projects to Date:
2017 – October Nights – General flash fiction short horror-ish stories.
Website – Ebook
2018 – Tales of the Normal – Twilight Zone-style surreal stories.
2019 – Crime du Jour – Short crime stories.
2023 – Turning Leaves – Middle-grade horror.
Website – And sign up for the newsletter to get updates about the final ebook!
Turning Leaves (Working Title): October 17 - How to Lie
October 17 – Jayla’s Journal (Fake), First Entry
I turned in my assignment about the importance of education already this morning and Mr. Henderson didn’t even look at it, except to see how long it was. He said it was fine. Maybe he’ll look at it later.
Yesterday’s classes were interesting less boring than usual I enjoyed the Halloween themes that teachers are starting to us on classes
October 17 – Note on loose leaf lined paper
how do you write a fake journal
hahahahaha
please help me I am bad at lying
hahahahahahha
this is not helping
ok ok be mad
what?
you have to be like yourself or nobody will believe it and you are always scowling
nobody would believe you are not angry about something
just be angry about something else
don’t lie
you have lots to be angry about
thank you I think
October 17 – Jayla’s Journal (Fake), Second Entry
I don’t understand Stepdad Dave. At all. I don’t understand why he married my mom and I don’t understand why he’s so mean to her and to me and to everyone.
My dad died last year in September.
I am supposed to feel sad that he is dead.
I feel angry at him all the time.
Why didn’t he tell me or mom that he was sick?
Why wouldn’t he go to the doctor?
I looked up the type of cancer he had, pancreatic cancer, and it’s very dangerous but you can survive it if you fight hard and fight fast and my dad didn’t fight at all.
He was gone a lot on travel for his work.
It was mostly me and mom at home most of the time. And my mom was always saying that he had an important job working with the government as a plant inspector, which was why he wasn’t home very much. But when he was home he wasn’t a very good dad, in my opinion.
I wish I had a dad like Lola’s. I don’t know him but he seems nice, he shows Lola that he cares about her.
My dad is older than Lola’s dad by a lot. Mom said once that I had to understand that Dad wasn’t raised to show how much he cared for me. Why should I understand that? Why shouldn’t I be disappointed?
When he was still alive, I tried to understand. But now he’s dead and I don’t have to try anymore, except in front of Mom. I can’t hurt Dad’s feelings. He has no feelings anymore.
Stepdad Dave is worse than my real dad. He is angry all the time. He says mean things to my mother.
They were fighting on Sunday night and they came into the dining room where I was working on my journal, and Mom was holding a cup of coffee and Stepdad Dave pushed her and coffee went everywhere and I left while they were still shouting at each other. By the time I got back my journal was full of coffee and cream and sugar and the pages were stained and stuck together.
Mom wants Stepdad Dave to quit his job.
He says he won’t.
Mom says she has money from Dad dying, nobody is going to starve.
Stepdad Dave says he doesn’t do the job because of money. He does it because of blah blah blah.
I don’t care.
They are fighting and I hated Dad’s job and Stepdad Dave works the same job so I hate his job too. But I also don’t like Stepdad Dave, so I don’t care if he still works on that job. I feel like he doesn’t like my mom. I feel like he married her because it’s like a story where he promised my father he would take care of Mom and me, and this was the only way to protect us.
Real life, it’s probably for a stupid reason like health insurance.
Mom got a bunch of money because of Dad dying. She didn’t have to marry Stepdad Dave. Now that she’s feeling better they should get divorced.
That’s all I have to say about that.
October 17 – Jayla’s Journal (Real)
On Sunday night I was in the back kitchen at the breakfast nook table when
I have to write this
On Sunday night I was in the back kitchen at the breakfast nook table when I heard Stepdad Dave and Mom come into the house. They were already arguing with each other.
Then the room filled up with darkness.
I don’t know how to describe it except like that. My eyes started to itch. My feet felt numb. The food I was eating tasted like ashes. I was dizzy.
Then I was falling downward through the table.
I reached up and tried to grab something but I couldn’t touch anything.
The table and chair were gone, far above me. I could see through the floor. I could see the back kitchen above me. The room and the lights were getting smaller and smaller. I could see Mom’s hair and the scarf she was wearing and her elbow moving as she pointed angrily at Stepdad Dave.
I shouted for help.
She didn’t hear me.
Then the darkness caught me and started carrying me, very softly. I went limp and pretended I was asleep. It got colder and colder. After a while light shone on my eyelids and I sneaked a peek.
Everything around me was in squares, boxes and boxes and boxes. Stacks of them, rows of them, mountains of them. I was being carried in the air through the middle of the boxes, mostly in a straight line over a bare spot on the floor but not always.
All of the boxes were shut. They had writing on them, in English. THIS SIDE UP.
The darkness surrounded me, around the sides. It was dark and gray and smoky and huge.
Then there was a door. We went inside the door. It was wood and kind of stained on the outside.
The darkness had to crush itself into a tiny space in order to fit. I could feel it pushing around me.
It put me down inside the door.
It was a basement room with a tiny window at the top, black from looking out into the night time. It was a basement. I could smell dust and laundry soap, the lavender kind that’s on Lola’s clothes in the morning.
In front of the washer and drier were three cardboard boxes, marked with arrows and THIS SIDE UP. Two of them were empty.
One of them was still taped shut.
Inside the empty boxes there was this stuff that was like dry styrofoam, only it was very light, almost like old spiderwebs. It fell apart when I tried to touch it. Then it was dust sticking to my hand.
I tried picking the tape off the third box but my fingernails are all gone. I looked around and found a metal thing that looked like a paintbrush but with a piece of metal on the end in stead of a brush, with scrapes of paint all over it.
I used that to open the box.
Inside was more of the dry styrofoam stuff, only it was heavy, like foamy dry glue. I used the corner of the scrapey metal thing metal scraper to chip at the foam. I didn’t know what else to do.
I whacked it a few times. The top of the foam broke like it was candy. I pulled the pieces away.
Underneath was Lola.
She wasn’t breathing.
I don’t think she is the real Lola.
I don’t know what happened to the real Lola.
I screamed and ran out of the basement when I saw her. I ran through the house, calling for her.
She didn’t answer.
I was scared to leave the house. I didn’t want to walk back to Stepdad Dave’s house in the dark. I didn’t have shoes on or a jacket. And I couldn’t get inside without walking in the front door, right where they were fighting.
They might have stopped fighting but I knew they probably hadn’t.
I went back downstairs and tiptoed around the boxes and went to the door. It was still open. Outside the door was still the long place full of boxes.
Something moved behind me and I screamed again.
It was Lola, the copy from the box.
She said, “Help me.”
Her voice sounded wrong, like a robot doll’s. She held out her arms. She was wearing a pink t-shirt that said SELF-RESCUING PRINCESS.
“Help me.”
It wasn’t Lola.
I started crying.
She climbed out of the box and walked toward me like her feet were hurting her. She gave me a hug. Her arms felt wrong. She said, “Help me.”
I said “Okay.”
I waited a little while for the darkness to come back and carry us but it didn’t. It had disappeared. After a while I told Lola to climb on my back and I would carry her as far as I could.
She did.
As soon as we went through the door, it started snowing, but it wasn’t snow. It was cold but it wasn’t snow. It was the stuff that was in the empty boxes, like what was leftover from Lola’s parents.
I walked a long time.
But that was okay.
Lola wasn’t heavy until we came out into the basement under the back kitchen in Stepdad Dave’s house. Then she was too heavy and I had to put her down.
She crouched down on the floor in front of the door with her shoes in the cold not-snow and cried.
“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
The door is still there in the wall. There shouldn’t be a door.
The handle is old-fashioned, flat and metal with a flower and vine design on it.
The handle is so cold it hurts to hold it.
