#WIPpet Wednesday - Goth of Christmas Past - The Goth Thing #amwriting #lgbtqia

WIPpet numbers for 10th January, 2018:10 sentences from Goth of Christmas Past

Sorry…again…to my fellow WIPpeteers for my tardiness. I had a spider-related mishap last Wednesday, so I’ve been, well, dopey, mostly. Antihistamines…ugh.

WIPpet Context:
I’m still snipping Goth of Christmas Past—this is another snippet of Jay. It falls a little after last week’s snippet, and I realised, while trying to select a suitable excerpt, that this story will need content warnings.

I think people who have read my work before know I don’t write about mental health and illness for shock value. I write about what I know from personal and professional experience, but I try to tell the stories that aren’t usually told.

There’s a kind of amusing anecdote that follows on from that. When I was working as a high school teacher, the headteacher at that time called me to her office and asked if I would be willing to mentor a group of Year Eleven pupils (age 15–16). I agreed without hesitation, even before she said, “They’ve excluded themselves, really, and I thought—” she glanced over my attire of black blazer, t-shirt, bootcut black pants and Doc Martens “—if anyone can connect with them, you can.”

Yep. She wanted me to build bridges with the ‘goths’—not because I was an awesomely cool teacher (which I was ;) ), but because…I was a ‘goth’.

Or a 'goff' as the pupils would have it.
“Miss, are you a goff or an emo?”

Except my gothness began here:


And their gothness leaned more towards emo (but what do the powers-that-be know?) and was somewhere around here:


Anyway, that was the best part of being a teacher—supporting/guiding students who’d already been labelled as trouble or misfits or…emos. *sigh* Whatever the label, the system had no idea what to do with them beyond acknowledging that many of them were facing some major emotional challenges.

The content warning, then, is for reference to self-harm. There are no graphic details. I’ll issue the full set of warnings in the blurb when I release the book.

Here’s the blurb for further context:

Black hair and band hoodies had a lot to answer for.

That day, eleven years ago, when Gothboy mooched into their business studies class for the very first time, Krissi had taken one look at him and thought, What a freak. He’s so cool!

Now in their mid-twenties, Krissi Johansson and Jay Meyer are successful businesspeople and still best friends. But while one of them is moving forward with their life, the other is sliding ever backwards…revisiting the past and wallowing in regret.

Worse still, it’s Christmas—happy joy joy everywhere! Yay. >.<

* * * * *And here’s the snippet:

It was better than it used to be. He was better. Not fixed—he didn’t think he ever would be—but since he’d opened Black Hole, he’d felt less at odds with the world. His dad, eventually, when they started speaking again, told him he was proud of how Jay had coped, although he hadn’t coped at first, because it was a sh*tload of money. But becoming a millionaire overnight didn’t make him feel any more of a freak than he was already.

‘The goth thing’ wasn’t just a fashion statement for him; it was a state of mind, a way of life, his identity. Like Krissi, a lot of those people who’d mocked him at school had gone through a ‘goth’ phase, which was hilarious and ironic—trendy kids kicking off when their school banned military drummer jackets—the establishment is crushing our right to self-expression. Yeah, not really. They were trying to stop kids cutting themselves because it was ‘cool’. They had no idea.

* * * * *
What is WIPpet Wednesday?
WIPpet Wednesday is a blog hop where authors share from their current works in progress - expertly organised/hosted by Emily Wrayburn - and the excerpt has to relate to the date in some way. For links to other fabulous authors' WIPpets, visit: http://www.inlinkz.com/wpview.php?id=355404


Thanks for reading
Deb x