Authorpreneur Dashboard – Kasie Whitener
After December
Literature & Fiction
Tony is dead. He killed himself Monday night. Three thousand miles away. Brian Listo is going home. Five days. Four best friends who don’t forgive him. Three women who can’t stand him. Two parents who don’t trust him. One unforgivable sin he can’t hide from anymore. Brian is back in Virginia despite the craters he left at New Year’s. Back to eat crow. To beg forgiveness. To explain himself to anyone who will listen. Except for the one person who can no longer hear him.
Book Bubbles from After December
Chris, race, and Brian
I've written Before Pittsburgh and there are quite a few mentions of race in it. You can preorder it on Amazon now. In any case, this passage is one of the only mentions of race in After December. Some readers didn't even know Chris was Black until this conversation. That's on purpose. Chris is just Chris. I wanted him to be authentic and that meant not trying to make him Black, just realizing that he is. More important in this passage is the lack of Brian's awareness of Chris's circumstances and Joel's business. He's so disconnected from his friends that despite their time together, he hasn't really absorbed what they've said to him. That will change in Before Pittsburgh. But it starts to change here.
No More Birthdays
Monday is my birthday and so I went to After December looking to see what Brian says about them. He's got a few he recognizes, but this one is my favorite. The dog. One of my early readers commented that two pages ago he hadn't even known Tony had a dog and suddenly he was weeping over Butterscotch. Our earliest experience with celebrating life is birthday parties. Cake, presents, your "special day" and other rituals designed to be grateful we're walking the earth. And our earliest experiences with death, often, are pets. So I love Butterscotch's birthday party as the kind of thing kids would do. An innocent, life-affirming example of love in its earliest and purest form.
She Said She Loved Me
In revision, one of my trusted readers asked me, "Why would Brian answer the phone if he's in bed with Meli?" Presumably that midday bed togetherness is sexual, so they're busy, right? Why does he answer the ringing phone? Remember this is 1999 and caller ID isn't exactly a thing. It could be anyone. I needed a rift between Meli and Brian. Something that would make him think it was time to sabotage -- to bail -- so I decided she must have asked, "Do you love me?" When he knows she loves him but he doesn't feel the same; when he knows he's still hung up on Kacie; when he knows he doesn't deserve Meli; she says, "Do you love me?" and he answers the phone so he doesn't have to answer her.
I'm Not Supposed to Be Here in February
The at-school at-home rhythm of college life is worked a good deal in After December. It's a unique experience in that age when we first detach from home and try to make our way elsewhere. The nostalgia can be like a drug when we return. It can also burn, chafe, or suffocate. Brian's geographic markers are meant to demonstrate the kind of distanced-but-strained connection we have with those places we once knew. I liked the recitation of where he'd been and how he associated those places with the people still in his life. It shows his unwillingness to see them as who they are now, a reluctance to let go of who they were then.
Christmas Returns
There's a kind of ritual to going home for the holidays. It's about gifts and anticipation and family and memories. Some of those things are good and some bad. When Brian returns to NoVa in February, it's awkward partly because he's there off-cycle. There's no holiday. Instead, it's the most tragic circumstances he's ever faced. Remembering the holidays, trying to understand why this trip doesn't feel like those, complicates Brian's efforts to make sense of this visit. Compounding the myriad of pain and anguish is the way he left after Christmas. It was not exactly a joyful holiday.
Thanksgiving Break
In college in the 90s, Thanksgiving Break was the first time you really got to see your hometown/high school friends. It was a ritual to travel back, spend Thursday with the family, but the rest of the weekend swapping stories of life "away" at college. These days, my students stay in near constant-contact with everyone they've ever met through social media. But back then, face-to-face was how you reconnected with the people who mattered to you. For Brian to skip Thanksgiving in Herndon is evidence of his further distancing from The Crew ahead of the New Year's Eve debacle. It sets up the intentionality of Brian separating himself from Kacie and the others while they maintain the rituals of friendship together. It's also Brian choosing Melissa over Kacie, and that he thinks she doesn't know creates even more tension for New Year's Eve.
College Kids and Classical Music
Mozart for Your Morning Workout, Bach for Breakfast, and Debussy for Daydreaming are just three titles of classical music CDs I owned in the 90s. I loved the idea of these twenty-somethings "adulting" with more sophisticated activities (like a formal sit-down meal) and what they perceive as grown-up tastes (like classical music). Classical music is visceral for me and I wanted to introduce it here because it's a surprising dichotomy that these young people would know classical composers and that they would try to make them familiar with titles like "Haydn for Hangovers." I love this device but my readers often forget about it. When I mention it, later, they say, "Wait, Brian listens to classical music?" Rachmaninoff for Remembering.
Flashback Junky
I love flashbacks. I love when they're worked seamlessly into the present story. I'm a past-perfect-tense junky. In early drafts, there were about six flashbacks in the Wednesday chapter. Obviously, my beta readers talked me out of that. Instead, we only get flashbacks of Tony. We see Tony moving, talking, being but only in Brian's memory. The flashbacks are singularly-focused on the relationship between Brian and Tony, how Tony held him responsible, how Tony challenged him to be better.
Parents Just Don't Understand
I'm often told people dislike Brian and I think part of the reason is his self-righteous indignation over his parents. Young people think their parents don't understand what they're struggling with. They think parents are enemy combatants to be overcome and outsmarted. It sometimes takes becoming parents ourselves to understand the depth of love that motivates parents to protect their children. When Brian questions his parents' motives, they lack the vocabulary to express the fear and anguish of being glad it was Tony, and not Brian, who died. That guilt fills Joan and Alan with remorse and that remorse is misunderstood by Brian -- he thinks they're disappointed in him. It's complex. It's meant to be.
Bar Napkin Poetry
In the late 90s / early 2000s we were living a wannabe rock band lifestyle. At each gig, while my husband was behind the drum set, I sat at the bar and put pen-to-napkin. I pulled a bunch of them out to fill Tony's green velvet notebook for the second-to-last chapter of After December. These scraps of paper -- song lyrics, poems, stories, insights -- were the evidence of our attempt at being artists. This passage, from page 21 of the GVN, is one of the final recordings of Charlie's band, Backyard Green, "Invincible." It is one of my all-time favorite lyrics of any song anywhere. It perfectly captured what it was like to be that young and have that much life ahead of you. I guess now the equivalent of bar napkin poetry would be thumb-typed text on the notes app. There's something magical about those creased and folded slips of paper, softened from years of waiting to be read again.
A Complicated Relationship with the Truth
Brian lies. It was hard for me to write Brian lying because I very rarely lie. I don't have "a complicated relationship with the truth" as some people I know put it. Something is what it is. Call it what it is and let's deal with it. But don't lie about it. But drug addicts lie. Cheaters lie. They lie because they don't want people to think badly of them even though they are making bad decisions and doing wrong things. And Brian is 22 and he seems prone to bad decision making and wrong behavior. I love him for it and I don't want him to lie. While writing the book, I once sat on the couch and said, out loud, "Okay, man, tell me what happened on New Year's. The TRUTH." It's hard to write a liar, especially when they won't even tell YOU the truth.
Suicide is Painless
In the 90s, we side-stepped around mental illness. We didn't have the vocabulary to describe the anguish and suffering of depression. We didn't have empathy for it. We didn't have compassion for it. The thing about suicide is choice. Choosing to end it. Choosing the next life over this one. The unknown over the known. Hurting so, so much that there seems to be no other way out. The people left behind are often taken by surprise. So I wrote Brian reeling, guilty, angry, and disbelieving. I'm not sure that's how I'd feel. But I think it's how Brian felt. Lost. Lonely. Regretting the moments he'd wasted and longing for the ones he'd never get back.
Hometown Ghosts
I love the idea of returning to one's hometown under the weight of so much regret and so many memories. I took a trip to Herndon when the book came out and filmed myself going to the landmarks in the book. Brian's relationship with Northern Virginia is just another complication of the book. In some ways, Herndon is home and, as such, comfortable, familiar, and secure. But it's also the past and something that fits too snug, suffocates him, and expects him to be something he's not. I used real landmarks, real street names, and the travel-through-town montage effect to create a momentum to the story. As Brian works his way through hard conversations, he is traveling past familiar - and changing - landscape. My favorite parts of the book are his car rides from place-to-place.
Stupid Dog Tags
The dog tags printed by the Smithsonian were real. I had a pair myself back in the 80s. I thought about the Top Gun scenes wherein Maverick clings to Goose's dog tags and liked the 80s vibe of this keepsake for Tony, specifically if Brian had no right to owning them because he had mocked them when Tony was alive. Brian's relationship with Tony was a complicated one. He doesn't really know what to make of the history they have together or the fact that they will not have a future. I like the childishness of Brian's jealousy over the dog tags and also his regret for having not been a very good friend to Tony. We don't always get keepsakes of the ones we love. And the ones we do get are often poor substitutes for the people themselves.
The Burning Valley
When I was in high school, I drove my Toyota Corolla out west of Leesburg, Virginia, and into the foothills of the Appalachians. I found an abandoned church and across the gravel road from it, a deep and wide valley. It was June and the trees were vivid shades of green with the glinted gold of summer sunlight. I promised myself I would come back in the fall and see the rich blanket of auburn and maize that the season would have painted over that valley. I never found the church again. In this scene, we get Tony's connection to nature, to beauty, and the story behind the burning valley painting that appears on New Year's Eve and again on Sunday, before ending up in Oro Valley, Arizona.
A W K - ward
Brian is an only child and his friends are his family. The divisions between them are not superficial. In this scene, Jason gets Brian one-on-one for the first time since the New Year's Eve debacle. At this point, we still don't know what happened on NYE, but we do know Jason slept with Kacie, Brian's ex-girlfriend with whom he has a very complicated relationship. Brian's not comfortable with the tension in his friendships. He doesn't know what to do about it and he's not really convinced it's his fault that they are at odds. There are some good Easter eggs here, including the fact Jason barely smokes the cigarette, that come back again later. I like the tension and the awkwardness in this scene. It's super cringey.
Page 1 is EVERYTHING
I spent a lot of time re-working page 1. Any writer who has ever done a slushfest knows agents and publishers can be wicked cruel about the first page. The final time I took this one to slush, an editor pointed out the dialogue (which has since been removed) was "procedural." It's a term that has stuck with me. Procedural dialogue is the kind of "I'm going out, do you need anything?" mundane conversation that exists in real life but does nothing for a story. It certainly doesn't belong on the first page. I wanted only dialogue that would tell us something about Brian, about his dad, about the story's set-up and, really, about Tony in a way that the reader would care that he was dead. I think I got it right. What do you think?
