My Brother, the Writer

I have longed to be a professional writer since I was 10. For over 50 years I have been scribbling, writing, reading, revising, attending conferences, getting rejections and the occasional acceptance, which feels like rain in the middle of a drought.

I have journaled daily for the last 28 years. I have carried notebooks for spontaneous ideas. I have read books on writing. I have maintained blogs (this little blog is the seventh blog I’ve had!). I was part of a writing group in Humboldt. I hosted a poetry reading at Borders in the early 2000s.

I’ve been published in a few magazines and journals. I even won an award in the mystery field, something I mention as often as I can because, frankly, I still can’t believe I won, and that was 2 years ago.

My older brother, whom I idolized as a child, spent these last 40 years working for CalTrans. He married and had two children. He’s still married to the same woman, God love them both. He watches a lot of TV. He rarely sits down with a book to read.

Though he does love Sherlock Holmes. He’s read a lot of the Arthur Conan Doyle canon. Modern mysteries bore him.

We talk on the phone frequently even though he’s only about 40 minutes drive from my desert home in Hesperia, California. One day he told me he had an idea for a mystery detective. The great-granddaughter of Arthur Conan Doyle would solve mysteries with the help of her ghostly famous great-grandfather and Harry Houdini (the two were friends in real life). He described it in detail to me, then said ‘what do you think?”

“I think you should write it,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “I thought you might write it.”

“I have far too many books unfinished to start another one,” I said truthfully. I was in the middle of the first draft for the Minerva novel, a novel I am now rewriting from scratch.

“I can’t write,” he said.

“You just described the story for me,” I said. “All you gotta do is include the details.”

So my brother wrote a 6000 word short story with his character.

Now, when a person who never wrote a piece of fiction in their life tries to write a mystery story, the effect is much like what would happen if I decided to write a scholarly essay on thermonuclear dynamics. I know nothing about thermonuclear dynamics.

But my brother–did I mention I idolized him when I was a child?–wrote a very good story. It’s charming. It has a good puzzle. It moves well. And its very readable.

He’s started on his second story. He’s now retired from CalTrans, so he has time (I am not retired; I write this in my law office before dashing off to the Law Library to research the opposition on a motion).

See, now I’m worried. My personal relationship with fate is so absurd that I have this peculiar idea that my brother’s character will become famous before Minerva and that everyone will say I copied him, not that he was inspired by me. (Both Minerva and my brother’s character are middle-aged women with highly logical minds who are well known in their communities for solving knotty problems.) Then I’ll be watching the Netflix series on my brother’s stories while Minerva stands in my mind, impatiently tapping her toe, wondering when I’m going to get the damned novel finished.

But…well, if that happened, I’d be more irked at myself than my brother. And I’d watch the Netflix series. Oh, yes I would.