just words

It was a gray day. I had spent most of the early afternoon trying to write something, but my head was full of clouds as dark as those outside, so I ended up deleting about two thousand words and playing Zelda until my son woke up from his nap. After an hour of play and Paw Patrol and lunch, my son grew restless and unhinged, so I decided to get us out of the house, go to the playground, so I buckled my son up in his overly complicated car seat, got in the driver’s seat of the Toyota, revved up the engine, played “Nice to Know You” because I was on an Incubus kick again and it's like one of the best songs ever recorded no joke, backed out of the driveway and avoided ducks wading in a pool of hours-old rainwater while doing so, and then floored it out of the neighborhood at a brisk five miles per hour, stopping at all neighborhood stop signs and causeway traffic lights like a law-abiding citizen, passing all sorts of barely drivable junkers and politically incorrect bumper stickers along the way because this town is southern as hell but that's OK because I'm just trying to stay in my lane here.

Singing along, “To obtain a bird’s eye is to turn a blizzard to a breeze,” I drove to the playground by the abandoned school, the one surrounded by two little league baseball fields that get used by the local church about twice a month, the one with the Coke-sponsored scoreboards quantifying every American boy’s dream of making it to the big leagues and getting out of this backwoods southern town, the one where homeless people take shelter in the dugouts overnight. It must have been about 4:30 p.m. Eastern time. The clouds were a dusty old quilt draped over the planet, everything damp, yellow, and pale. I unbuckled my son from his seat and let him run unfettered through the mostly empty parking lot. There were only two cars, mine and some purple van parked a few spots down. The playground was just a few feet away, one of those small kids’ playgrounds with low slides, protective railings, miniature rock-climbing walls, paths of colorful raised plastic, and safety swings that look kind of like those things they strap astronauts-in-training into, all enclosed by a tall wire fence, containing the boundless energy of youth. There were three other kids there, climbing all over everything. Girls, Hispanic, I think. As my son approached the playground gate, he veered off, like he always does, toward one of the empty baseball dugouts, determined to step on some used syringes or empty beer cans or whatever, which is when I caught up to him, placed a hand on his shoulder, and gently steered him toward the playground. And that’s when I saw her, standing there, right by the dugout nearest the playground.

She must have been around thirty years old. Hispanic. She was wearing a black dress, and her blue-black hair flowed waistward in purple highlights. She was holding her phone way out, pointing it at the empty parking lot for some reason, and she was standing behind one of those cheap folding tables you can buy at Walmart. She was totally alone. The table was decorated with black and orange paper tassels, pumpkins and bats made of papier-mache, Halloween-themed grab bags full of candy and snacks, a large basket tagged with the word RAFFLE stuffed with cheap pencils and a Nightmare Before Christmas thermos and some Keurig coffee pods for some reason, two books propped up on little wooden bookstands, and a sign that said BOOK SIGNING in edgy cursive font, hanging from the table with two pieces of clear tape.

And of course, I was instantly intrigued by this. I had so many questions. But, being kind of naturally standoffish and weird, and having to tend to my son, I tried my damnedest to seem disinterested, passed the BOOK SIGNING table, and made my way through the playground gate, closing it behind me. Then I proceeded to climb the playground equipment and chase my son around. We played for a good twenty minutes, but the whole time I was like compelled to look over my shoulder every few seconds at the book-signing table, where the woman in black was pacing back and forth, phone extended, presumably filming the parking lot, totally alone. The whole scene made me feel weird, sad almost, embarrassed in that sort of hyper-empathetic way you sometimes get when something is just so embarrassing that you yourself are embarrassed just by witnessing it. Vicarious embarrassment, cringe, fremdscham, whatever they call it. But I also felt a sort of kindred bond with this woman. After all, I also like to pretend that I’m a writer sometimes, so I sort of respect anyone who makes an effort to write, regardless of the contents of their writing. To me, the desire to write sort of elevates people, romanticizes them in my mind into a more thoughtful, interesting person. So there I was, contradictorily feeling both fremdscham and kinship with this woman, and this created a sort of dissonant pressure in my head, which eventually became so intense that I had to walk over and talk to the woman, so that’s what I did. I walked right up to her and said, in a blunt, almost dumbfounded tone, “What’s going on here?”

She lowered her phone and said, in a chipper tone, “Hello, thanks for asking, I’m having a book signing. I’m the author of two books. I write romance horror thrillers.”

I plucked one of the books off the stand and observed it closely.

SHADOWS BELOW. The glossy cover featured a cloaked young woman standing in a dark forest. She wore a solemn expression and held a dagger real close to her chest. It looked like something you’d see on a high school girl’s Pinterest feed or something, that sort of brooding, semi-realistic, Twilight-esque artwork that may or may not have been AI-generated because like who can even tell anymore, the line between reality and irreality blurring more and more each day.

Then, awkwardly, and already knowing the answer, I said, “You wrote this?”

And that's when the woman's wine-colored lips curled into a smile. “Yep, that’s the first one. I’m almost finished with the trilogy.”

The book itself was thin, papery, light in my hands. I turned it over. It had a barcode and an ISBN number on it and everything. I wondered to myself if maybe she just came up with the ISBN number herself, like was any of this even legit or what? Is she just out here pretending to be a serious author? With no audience? Has she even sold one book? Don’t you need to like ‘graduate’ to book signings? Gradually work your way up to it? Don’t you need to sell at least a couple hundred copies? Don’t you need to be like an established author for people to even want a signature? I started thinking to myself, wasn’t she skipping steps here? The balls on this woman. What was she thinking? What truly motivated her behavior here? I found the audacity of this woman somewhat offensive but also somehow admirable. But that feeling of fremdscham was not going away, because despite her vaguely admirable qualities, there was something pitiful about the whole thing, but it was a sort of pity I could relate with, like the shared burden of authors unknown. And for some reason, I started thinking maybe she was actually like some sort of well-respected local author, because who in their right mind would be out here at an abandoned playground on a gray day holding a book signing event? I started thinking maybe she was an established author just having an off day or whatever, so I read the synopsis on the back of the book, hoping it would support my hypothesis, but lo and behold, it was riddled with grammatical errors.


“Never Sleep-some Secrets stay buried. Others wake you screaming.

When Luica Ashbourne returns to her hometown after a decade away, she finds more than dust and old photographs waiting for her, she finds the door to her sister sabine's room stilled locked, and her name still whispered in hushed tones. Sabine disappeared without a trace. Everyone has moved on.

Expect the house.

Except mirrors.

Expect Luica.

As buried memories resurface and old friends turn into strangers, Lucia begins to uncover the truth: what happened to her sister wasn't an accident and someone is willing to kill to keep it hidden. In a town that's forgotten how to speak the truth, Lucia will have to tear through layers of lies, family secrets, and her own fractured past to survive.

Because the dead don't rest.

And secrets never sleep.”


This was not helping. My fremdscham was worse, much, much worse, and now also mixed with something like disgust. “Expect the house,” it says. “Expect Luica,” it reads. I mean, did she even proofread any of this? The blurb on the back of a novel is like the solitary draw of the novel, the hook to catch the reader, and she didn't even bother to proofread it? I mean, was the character's name “Luica” or “Lucia”? And “Expect the house”? Are you fucking kidding me right now? I mean, I get it, I'm dyslexic, I mix up “expect” and “except” all the time, among a whole slew of other words, but this is a printed novel, something for people to take seriously, so wouldn't you extensively proofread the thing before publishing it? I started getting kind of pretentious, like does this woman even care about the craft? Is this some sort of joke? I wanted to get in my Toyota and punch the gas, get the hell out of there, make it all go away before I accidentally said some real nasty shit to her, but I felt locked in at this point, unable to escape, and I could hear my son having a blast, screaming his head off with the three girls behind the locked gate of the playground, so I had no legitimate excuse to remove myself from the situation. And after a long period of silence, all I could think to say was, “How long have you been writing?” which was a sly question asked almost solely from a place of mean-spirited judgment.

“About three years. I love writing.”

Her tone diffused my annoyance somewhat. Despite her black dress, goth makeup, and combat boots, her tone was actually quite cheerful, and her aura was very pleasant. She spoke in a matter-of-fact way but had some sort of speech impediment with her S’s going on, which I found to be endearing. She watched me with big, brown, expectant eyes. She was very still but gave off a sort of nervous energy. She seemed to be out there, at the book signing, at the playground by the abandoned school, totally unaware that this was like objectively the worst possible place to have a book signing, because like what is the audience you’re trying to target here, toddlers? And yet there was nothing furtive or creepy about her. She seemed confident in herself and what she was doing.

At a loss for words at this point, I started flipping through pages of SHADOWS BELOW. “Sabine vanished on a warm July night with no shoes, no phone, and no goodbye.” The formatting was awful. There were no line breaks between paragraphs. It was almost all dialogue, no descriptive text or mood-setting or anything, and the dialogue was neither line-broken nor consistently housed within quotation marks, and not in a stylistic way, but in a careless, inept way. The text was filled with ellipses and cliches. It read like some sort of high school girl’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction. “Some monsters don’t knock. They bled through the walls.” Her tenses were all fucked up. There were several instances of repeated pronouns at the beginning of sentences. Words were consistently misspelled. Whole chapters were just walls of text. I felt my fremdscham growing, my eyes widening, as I flipped through those pitiful pages. There were like three or four spaces at the start of every sentence for some reason. Em dashes were often used in place of commas. She constantly misused “there,” “their,” and “they’re.” The book read like it was written by someone who barely knew English, frankly. She obviously didn’t know the difference between “its” and “it’s.” I felt my face turning red on her behalf. She called herself a horror author, but the real horror was having to read her awful prose.

I put the book back on its stand, stared down for a few terrible seconds, then looked up at her with a forced blank expression on my face, trying to think of something to say that wasn't just flat-out mean. The whole time she was blinking at me with those big expectant eyes of hers.

Not knowing what to say, I said, “Anyone show up, you know, other than me?”

Her smile died for a second but came right back. “Yeah,” she said, sort of fidgeting, “a few people.”

She was obviously lying, but I wasn’t going to get into it with her, so I just asked, “What were you doing earlier, with the phone?”

“Oh, I was livestreaming, to Facebook.”

She was livestreaming to Facebook? To what, an audience of zero people? She was showing an audience of zero people on Facebook an audience of zero people at the abandoned-playground book signing? Was this like some sort of Schrodinger's book signing event or something? Some tree-falls-in-the-woods-with-no-one-around-to-hear-it type thing? Like, if no one shows up to the book signing event, and no one knows about it, then maybe actually the book signing event was a smash hit, because no one would know otherwise? I guess me and her being there kind of screwed that up, but the point is, what the fuck? All these incredibly judgmental, mean-spirited quips were running through my head, all while she was standing there, expectant eyes and all that, in her weirdly confident way.

Then she said, “So, did you like what you read of Shadows Below?”

And this was like a mental blow to the head, because no, I absolutely did not like what I read, but I didn’t want to crush this woman’s dreams, at least not out here at the abandoned playground with my son nearby, but I couldn’t not say anything, so I figured maybe I would let her down gently, and that's when I started rambling off the first things that came to mind.

“The thing about writing these days is that your work is probably going to be read by like two or three people, tops, and you're never going to get the recognition you think you deserve. That's just the sad truth of it. I mean, like, I read that the latest Battlefield game sold more copies than all of the books sold in the United States in 2024. Isn't that crazy? People are reading less and less. They're turning to these like quick-hit entertainments, stuff they don't have to think about too hard, you know? You can fact-check me if you want, but I think the Battlefield thing is true. Writing is just not the enterprise it once was. So, like, if you're trying to get famous on like BookTok or whatever, it's probably not going to happen. Reading is like a dying form of entertainment, and writing is a dying craft.”

Her smile was quivering at this point, cracking, starting to break, but I just kept going for some reason.

“That’s just something I’ve had to come to grips with, you know? Do I want people to read my writing? Sure. Do I want them to say it’s amazing, the most genius thing they’ve ever read? Yes, deep down I do. But I know it’s not going to happen. It’s a stupid dream, is what it is. And it’s sort of discouraging to think about, it really is. I’m not going to sugarcoat it here. Your books, probably no one is going to read them. That’s just how it is. Maybe your best friend might read them, maybe, but more likely they’ll just tell you they read them when they really haven't, to like make you feel better or whatever. There are also a bunch of free tools out there for spell check and grammar check nowadays that people who do read expect a certain level of polish to the writing, you know? Your stuff has to be readable, is the thing. Not that your stuff isn’t readable, I’m just, like, saying, it has to be readable. You can’t like mix up the tenses and use past perfect incorrectly and screw up ‘their’ with an I E and ‘they’re’ with an apostrophe R E, or else the people online are going to eat you alive. I’ve learned this the hard way, believe me. It’s not pretty. That’s all I’m saying.”

Her smile was no longer a smile but a sort of seriously straight line. She seemed to be listening very carefully. Her big expectant eyes locked on my face. So I kept going.

“So there are, like, two things working against the aspiring writer these days. The first thing is, like, one, it might be easy to start writing, but writing is very, very hard, there are rules at play here that are both punishing and difficult to master, and then, once you know those rules, knowing when to break them takes a whole ‘nother level of skill. I’m talking years of practice. And the second thing is, like, two, you’re not going to get famous writing, no one is going to care, no one is going to read your shit, and by ‘no one’ I mean, like, ‘not many people,’ you know? You’re not going to get famous writing. It’s just not going to happen. I mean, like, the best you can probably hope for is someone significant discovers your stuff after you die and suddenly you’re like posthumously famous, but of course you’ll never know because you’ll be dead. And there’s always going to be people out there that tear your stuff down, laugh at you, call your work shit, and that hurts. It hurts a lot. You know? Taking criticism is really hard.” 

She had averted her eyes to the table at some point during my ramble, so I had no hint as to what she was thinking, but I kept going anyway.

“But the thing is, and this is the kicker, I think, the thing is, if you still choose to write, despite knowing that it’s hard as hell, despite knowing that you’ll likely never become famous doing it, despite knowing that people are going to tear you down, if you still choose to write, despite all this stuff, then maybe that’s what makes someone a real writer or whatever, you know? Maybe that’s the hallmark of a true writer. I don’t know.”

She was still looking down, at the table, nodding her head in a sort of contemplative way, like she had paid full attention and was internalizing everything I had said, even though I felt like I was being kind of a pretentious asshole, because I kind of was. Then, after a few seconds, she looked up at me with this sad, pensive look on her face. But she didn’t seem sad herself, more like she felt sad for me, like she actually felt sorry for me or something, and that caught me off guard. I was at a loss for words. And it was around this time that I heard my son shout, “DADDY, DADDY, COME LOOK,” so I waved my hand at the woman and said, “Anyway, sorry for rambling. Good luck with your books,” then started to turn toward the playground, but as I was walking away, she shouted, “HEY,” so I turned around and saw her holding a book out to me, and that’s when she said, “Please, read the back of this one.”

So I stepped up to the table, took the book from her hand, SECRETS NEVER REST, which featured the same semi-realistic, Twilight-esque, possibly AI-generated woman on the cover, flipped the book over in my hands, and started reading the description on the back.


“This story was born from late nights and quiet questions about memory, about home, about what it means to lose part of yourself and still fight to reclaim it. Vaela's journey is one of courage, but not the loud kind. It's about the bravery it takes to return to the places that hurt you, to face the shadows of your past, and to choose your own future.

Through Vaela and Sabryn, I explored the strength of sisterhood, the complexity of identity, and the danger of buried truths. Magic is real in this world but it often looks like love, grief, or memory. Writing this book helped me understand that stories are how we pass down our fire.

I hope this one lights a spark in you, too.”


And that’s when I bought signed copies of both of her books.