Novella wrap-up!

Just last week, I finished posting the four-chapter novella Youth Conference:
* Let the Manhunt Begin!,
* Doomed Unrequited Love,
* Sexual Purity, and
* Another Great Year at Youth Conference.

This has been a lot of fun, and I agree wholeheartedly with what William Morris said about why Mormons should embrace the novella. My project -- posting this story on the web -- proves some of William's publishing-related points right:

* "I think the novella would work well on the Web (serialized or not), especially if it was presented in a creative format — with accompanying images, music, discussion, glosses/hperlinks, sidebars, etc.": A novella serialized on the Web? With images? And discussion? Is it narcissistic of me to imagine he was thinking of me when he wrote that and now he's helping others to my brilliant idea? ;^)

* "novellas are a quick, yet often satisfying, read — even a one-sitting read": My logs show he's right about the "one-sitting" part. It looks like more people have been following the story as a serial than reading it in one shot, but quite a lot of people have read Young Women's and/or Youth Conference in one sitting -- a few people per day. (Yes I do read my logs very carefully -- because I'm curious about what works and what doesn't -- and I can tell if someone is actually reading the story or just paging through it.)

Some of his more literary points about framing and the connection with drama are also interesting, and I'd be curious if anyone here has any comments about them.

Now, as you probably already know, my novel Exmormon is composed of a series of (interrelated) novellas, and I'm planning on posting the whole damn thing!!! Slowly but surely...

The next section/novella on the agenda is Part III:Saturday's Warrior. I've scheduled that one to begin on September 18. Why such a long wait? Because I don't want to skimp on the high-quality cartoons that you've come to expect from this novel. ;^)

Unfortunately, I've only got one new one done so far for the next section:


(I know they don't look like much, but they take forever, and Saturday's Warrior is a long segment that will need a lot of them...)

Anyway, that gives you plenty of time to get caught up on parts one and two before part three begins. Not that you need to read the earlier parts to follow the later parts (the beauty of writing a novel as a series of novellas!) but you can if you want to. :D

Another great year! -- the conclusion of Youth Conference

For that night's dance, the last dance of the conference, Amy and I were more resolved than ever to talk to Y and Z and dance with them. This would be our last chance of the conference to get together with our true loves, and besides that our other prospects hadn't really panned out.

The beginning of the dance didn't offer us any more obvious openings than the previous two dances had. We realized that we didn't really have much choice in the matter: if we wanted to talk to them, we were just going to have to get up the nerve and walk over to them and start talking. It shouldn't be so hard! People just walk up to other people they know and start conversations every day. Why couldn't we bring ourselves to do it? Read more ->

The scripture-chase!!!

Our lunch group this time was down to me, Amy, and Tammy. Annette and Jenny were sitting with Tony and some boys from his ward, and April, Cookie, and Alexandra were all sitting with Andrew and Dan. Since it appeared to be 'eat lunch with the boys day' I looked around for Bill, but I couldn't find him. I saw Y and Z off at a table by themselves, but we weren't exactly invited to go sit by them. Then I looked for Tom and Greg, and saw that they were sitting with Kimberly and Lara.

"Well it looks like we've been abandoned," I said.

"Yeah, and I'm absolutely furious about it!" Amy said. "If that Greg thinks that he can be with Kimberly whenever she's free and then come running to me whenever she's not, then he's got another thing coming! He's not so cute to be worth putting up with treatment like that!"

"Yeah, you're better off without him," I said. "We probably were never going to see him again after Youth Conference is over anyway."

"How come today all of the sudden they're having lunch together?" Amy asked, still clearly annoyed. Read more ->

The church gains a convert, or Mormons: 1, atheists: 0...

At breakfast Annette was ecstatically telling everyone about Tony, her new boyfriend. She recounted how she met him and how she'd asked him to dance and all that. It turned out that he was in the Crystal second ward, so he wasn't too far away even if he wasn't right next door. And they'd already exchanged phone numbers so that they could keep in contact after the end of Youth Conference. We all congratulated her and gushed about how very cute he was. At this point I had no reason to be jealous since I had met someone too.

Not to be outdone, as soon as her story started to wind down a bit I launched into my narrative about Bill. I skipped the parts about not hearing him and about computer networking and went straight to telling them about how cute he was and how much he seemed to like me. All the girls who had seen him agreed that he was very cute. Read more ->

Desperation...

After dinner, while getting ready for the second dance of Youth Conference, I resolved that I was going to seriously make an effort to meet someone good this time. Otherwise I would be down to my last chance on Saturday night. I looked at my dress closely in the mirror and couldn't help but feel that it just wasn't right. I wasn't unattractive, and there wasn't anything specifically wrong with my look, but I felt that I somehow lacked a certain je ne sais quoi which would attract the boys to me like they came to Lara for example.

In the background, I could hear Amy talking on the phone to her mom. I wasn't really listening as they were discussing which dress she should wear to that night's dance and which one she should save for Saturday night. But then a shift in the topic caught my attention.

"No, we haven't heard any news," Amy said and then paused. "Well, we were thinking that it was probably just that they liked them so much that they didn't tell anyone anything so that they wouldn't have to share them with the other boys."

She didn't! I couldn't believe she had told her mom about the cookies! I was never going to hear the end of this! As soon as she got off the phone I confronted her about it. Read the rest of the story ->

Sexual Purity

In my next class, "Sexual Purity," they were bound to take attendance, so I couldn't very well just not show up. I thought a bit about what the consequences might be if I were to skip one of my classes, but in the end, since I knew that some of my friends would in there with me, I decided to just bite the bullet and attend.

When I arrived at the classroom, sure enough April, Alexandra, and Jenny were already there saving me a seat. The classroom was a bit bigger than the others had been. Undoubtedly they were more concerned about giving this lesson to as many kids as possible than they were about getting us to read the Pearl of Great Price. Each of the desks had a Mini Reese's Peanut Butter Cup sitting on it, but it was written on the board in big letters that we were not to eat them. Read more ->

A Very Special Hieroglyph

When I arrived, Annette was already there saving me a seat, and Cookie joined us shortly after I came in.

"I don't know why they're giving us a Pearl of Great Price lecture," Cookie said taking her seat. "That's one of the books we covered this past year in seminary." Read the rest of the story ->

Doomed unrequited love was something we could definitely relate to in the Mia Maids class

The next morning over breakfast we compared notes on the dance. This didn't take too long since no one had really met any serious prospects. The ones that were closest to finding a romance were Amy with Greg and her sister Alexandra with this guy Matt who was from Ely. But neither one of these was particularly promising since Greg was a non-member and Matt lived way on the other side of creation where Alexandra could hardly hope to see much of him. Plus he seemed like a bit of a hayseed. So when they had finished their stories, I recounted to them the whole situation with Tom and how Lara was leading him on just to get him to join the church. The other girls agreed that it was pretty pathetic of him to fall for such a thing, but that on the other hand if it got him to convert to Mormonism, his soul would be saved, so at least some good would come of it. Then, since no one else had had more than one or two dances with any one guy, we moved on to comparing our class schedules to see if we had any classes together.

We each had received a schedule of classes in our registration packets, just like a real college class schedule supposedly. Read the rest of the story ->

Heart-shaped Cookies...

We stepped out of the building and found a low brick wall that we could sit on with no one around.

"Well?" I asked.

"I've brought a little present that I was thinking we could give to Y and Z. I baked them a batch of delicious heart-shaped cookies."

"What?!? Are you crazy?! Can you imagine the embarrassment of giving them something like that?!?! We'll look like the biggest geeks on the planet! Don't you think that we should stick to more subtle tactics?"

"We'll give them anonymously," Amy explained. "They'll find the cookies and eat them and all the while they'll be wondering romantically about the girls who thought to give them this little gift. It'll be perfect! Anyway, my mom always says that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach."

"And how to you propose to give them anonymously?" I asked.

read more ->

Let the Manhunt Begin!

The very first thing I heard upon arriving at Youth Conference was a dirty joke.

Somewhere behind me in the long line of kids walking from the buses to the registration tables a boy's voice said "Why did the condom fly across the room? -- because it was pissed-off!" Not very funny, really, but it made me smile to myself. It seemed like a good omen for how the conference would go -- hopefully not one hundred percent goodie-goodie. Not that I objected to religious education in principle -- heaven knows I had a lot of work ahead of me if I wanted to make it to the Celestial Kingdom one day. It was just that for this event the prospect of spiritual growth was hardly my real reason for attending.

I was sure most of the other kids felt the same way. We came for the fun of spending the weekend in a college dormitory with five stakes worth of Mormon kids -- practically all of the Mormon teenagers in all of Minnesota. read the rest ->

Youth Conference Begins!!!

I've been burning the midnight oil so that Youth Conference can begin tomorrow as scheduled, and I just finished the illustrations just now!!! I'm thrilled because -- if I do say so myself -- they're fabulous!!! (Hey, I spent a lot of work on this, so I'm going to pay myself a compliment... ;-) )

Plus, I've made a character chart just like the one I did for Young Women's -- so if you're reading along and forget who somebody is, the answer is right there for you!!! :D

I meant to get out and do some publicity for this, but I got sidetracked by about a million other projects (like Main Street Plaza -- time consuming, but worth the effort!!), so as usual, please feel free to tell your friends about this novella, especially if you like it. :D

Now, if you haven't finished reading Young Women's yet, you've got a little more than twenty-four hours left to get caught up... :-) (But don't worry -- they're independent so you can read Youth Conference even if you haven't read Young Women's.)

(Sorry, I kind of O.D.'ed on smileys for this post -- blame it on the sleep-deprivation...)

Youth Conference 1986

Some may have noticed that I've been serializing my Youth Conference novella over on RfM. The novella is part II of my novel Exmormon.

It's fiction (though the Youth Conference part is strongly based on actual events), so for non-fiction lovers, I thought I'd post my real-life Youth Conference journal entries for you here.

Let's set the way-back machine for August 4, 1986...

I recently went to Camp Many Point and then to Youth Conference. I will tell about Youth Conference first.

I knew I would hate it there. I told my mother I didn't want to go and not to sign me up for it, but of course she did anyway. I convinced my friend Jennie H- to go too so that I wouldn't be miserable. (She didn't want to go either.)

...here I'm skipping two pages of description of how very awful it was. It just keeps going and going... ;-)

We girls got dorms that were intended for boys. There were urinals and dirty drawings on the walls and everything. The dorms were incredibly ugly and the closets stank.

The activities were over-planned and boring. Most of them took place in a huge hot auditorium. It was stuffy and uncomfortable. In contrast I practically froze to death during the seminars.

We had testimony meeting on Saturday only to have one the very next day in our own wards the very next day.

Everyone was playing frisbee, and although I love the game, no one threw any to me.

Once Chris O- and Scott R- were playing frisbee. I walked by with Jennie as it was coming to Scott. I lined up the angle and stood in line with where the frisbee would come. Scott, being a polite kid, wasn't about to knock me over for a frisbee. He just stood there.

When it came to me I put my hand up and let it fly in. It was a perfectly effortless catch.

Scott then turned to me, and by the expression on his face I could tell he was in a state of shock. "Nice catch," he said surprisedly.

I was a little surprised myself and since I was quite embarrassed, I just tossed it back to him saying, "Here, want this?" turned and kept walking.

I think I know why he was so amazed. I've known Scott for several years and during that time in various groups and organizations we've played water balloon war, dunk people in the pool, canoe races, softball, kickball, volleyball, three-team keep-away, pie races, foozball, frisbee, tackle frisbee, sledding, swat the animal, hacky-sack, various relays, etc. I hadn't shown any promising talent in ay of these.

I might as well tell you right here and now that for years I've had the biggest crush on Scott. We've talked and had fun (our families are friends) and done a lot of things together. We were always at least friends although he nevver showed any specifically romantic interest in me.

At the dance that night my plan was to join in the group dances with Scott, Lynn, Karen, and Lynn's many male friends. I figured that during all this dancing I could look at him and imagine how wonderful it would be to be his girlfriend.

Unfortunately Jennie, being new, was shy because she didn't know anyone, and walked over to the tables. I figured I'd better go with her because I was her best friend at Youth Conference, and besides, I had nothing to lose because Scott seeemed to be ignoring me. I went over and talked with Jennie.

A few minutes later I looked at a table a few tables down, and there was Scott, talking to two of the girls he had met earlier that day.

I then said to myself, "Carrie, this has been coming for quite some time now. He doesn't like you at all, so just quit bugging the poor guy."

I turned to Jennie, who wasn't having a great deal of fun either, and suggested that we go back to the dorm. Surprisingly, she didn't want to. I asked her how long we'd been there and she replied "About 20 minutes."

"I guess I can stay for an hour, but after that I'm going back to the dorm."

For a half an hour I sat and wallowed in self-pity. I again asked Jennie the time. When she said there was only about 10 minutes left, I figured I could wait another ten minutes.

After a few minutes, Scott came hesitantly to our table and sat down. We had a wonderful conversation and he brought some other boys over to the table for Jennie.

We all had wonderful fun stacking cups, playing with the live-goldfish centerpiece and scratching words into the disposable plastic centerpiece.

Ah, how we danced. I was clearly the center of his attention. It was wonderful beyond description, especially holding him in my arms for the first time during the slow dances. We danced the last dance together.

The boys of our ward had escorted us to the dance, all except Scott. They had done a hopelessly lousy job of it. The boys walked ahead in a glob and the girls walked in a glob behind.

My mother, being a chaperone there, was determined that the girls should escort the boys to the next one, to show them how it's done, and to be polite and return the favor.

I, of course, escorted Scott. I took his elbow in the usual escort way as we walked to the dance. As we were walking he took my hand as we walked close together. I have to admit that I let out a few giggles, but it was so wonderful to be with the person I loved and know I was the object of his affections.

Actually, I should be really embarrassed to post something so ridiculous -- but what can I say? I think it's kind of funny, and apparently I have no shame... ;-)

Personal Progress '89

Here's a little blast from my past as a Mormon teen. The boys got the "fun" of earning merit badges, so the girls needed some sort of award objects as well.

I remember getting a metal bracelet with oval-shaped indentations that I could earn gemstones for by setting goals in different areas. The gemstones were just colored plastic ovals that we got to stick to the bracelet's indentations with double-sided stickers. Later, the awards for setting and keeping goals were golden medallions with (relief) images of idealized young women on them to be worn as necklace pendants.

This little "improvement" I made to one of the pictures in my "Personal Progress" workbook as a teen illustrates a bit about what I thought of these lovely rewards:



Here's a picture of one of the awards that the teen me was mocking:



Thanks La for the above picture!!!