Soli Deo gloria

DISCLAIMER: I do NOT own Gilmore Girls.

I'm hitting a little slump in this story, which is actually kind of normal 20,000+ words into NaNoWriMo. Makes me empathize with Rory, LOL.

Rory's attention slipped from her laptop screen to the list her mom pressed into her hand. The list was composed of an entire wardrobe's contents. Rory didn't believe that her mom really expected her to pack a raincoat, hiking boots, lace-hemmed stockings, and a hazmat suit. (The last hazmat suit they bought for fifty cents at a yard sale was lost somewhere in their closets. Or maybe their attic. They'd misplaced it two years ago and hadn't seen it since.)

It was a weird list, but still a welcome distraction from her laptop. While happy that Grandpa had used his charm, his Yale story, and his rich prestige to win her a free weekday off from school, Rory wasn't looking altogether forward to the day ahead: finally catching up on NaNoWriMo before buckling up for a road trip in her grandparents' car with her troublesome mother all the way to New Haven.

She set aside the weird list (she didn't really need to pack up stuff for it, she was sure—Mom was just joking, because she liked to joke about Grandma—that was all) and turned her attention back to her laptop. While she and Jess had gotten a well-earned chunk of work done yesterday, she still had an extra thousand words to add on to her usual workload of one-thousand-six-hundred-sixty-seven words. After today, she thought brightly, she'd be caught up. Just a regular daily dose every day for the next sixteen days. Yay.

Rory groaned. Sixteen more days of this? School gave out to weekends and Friday nights had a week buffer between each one but this had no relief. She brushed her teeth every day, ate breakfast, showered, habitually, no thought. She'd have to write every day just like she did those things every day. No break. Relentless.

These were such the annoyed morbid thoughts that haunt every writer. For despite the great love of writing and the great passion for words and stories that drive them to write at all, there is a certain point in every writing project where they groan from the relentless daily work of it. Not all writing can be running away on muses. You can't just write whenever you darn well feel like it. Sometimes you gotta force yourself to write. Especially when you're coming to a boring part of your story. An important part of the story, a filler-joiner-transitioning scene. Still, it was boring but necessary and Rory groaned as she applied her fingers to the keys. Thalia had to make her way from the Philippines to Vietnam. Rory had to write of getting to the airport, onto the plane, her thoughts on passing passengers, her realizing feelings for her sneezing companion, her little cold constantly making her harp on things about life to complain, etc, etc.

Rory felt like writing about realizing feelings for a sneezing companion should be more fun. But there was only so much Rory could find in Josef for Thalia to like. He was relatively boring, the regular friend-zoned dude who'd been in love with Thalia forever but was always shunted to the side while her attention was solely absorbed by her obsession with her grandma's stories. Now, to bring him and his boring constancy into a romantic life was proving a more boring task than Rory could deal with.

Maybe it was because Josef was just an ordinary guy Rory couldn't find a way to spin him into a romantic light. He wasn't the kind of guy she'd go for. He had no ambitions, no great passion in his life. He was nice to everyone, constantly sacrificing himself for the girl he loved. He was a lovable friend-zoned dude that everyone liked. Somehow Rory had to make him into the surprising Prince Charming Thalia had never seen in that light until now, but now she had to. But how? How could Rory make him romantic?

Rory had a touch of inspiration. She'd instead make Thalia meet a dashing young man in Vietnam, a streetwise guy full of wits and knowledge of his little port hometown. He'd be snazzy, at ease, bantering, quick, lithe, dashing, and sneakily handsome. He'd bring light and thought to Thalia's life; he'd be adventurous, daring, fun, and spontaneous, all the things Thalia loved best from her grandma's stories. He'd make Prince Charming jealous but resign to his spot as the forever best friend of Thalia Hillard.

Rory stopped writing, sat back in her chair, and thought. Her eyes widened in alarm. Was this one of every writer's nightmares? Was she unwittingly writing a self-insert story?

No, she couldn't be. She wouldn't write a self-insert story. Self-insert stories were for thirteen-year-old girls who wanted to steal the love interest of a story they loved from the main character because they thought she didn't deserve him while they did. They were petty and stupid and nobody wanted to read them. Rory knew she'd delete her entire novel if she found herself delving into such juvenile writing tendencies.

Then she stood back and tried to look at her story objectively, trying the entire time to not panic. She wasn't writing a self-insert novel, was she? She wasn't imagining herself as Thalia Hillard, getting to travel the world and explore the cultures and satisfy her curiosity to see the world that'd been growing in her since childhood. Dean wasn't the sneezing companion; invariable, boring, dependable, always in love with Thalia even when she didn't notice it, or noticed it and didn't care. Jess wasn't this new dashing arrival, all smart and self-assured and, while a nuisance to the rest of his town, lovable in his own way. No, no, no, no!

Rory's grandmother wasn't a traveling woman. Emily Gilmore had gone to Europe a couple of times and been all over America, but she'd gone with her husband on visiting-friends trips, not on visiting-places trips. She never had adventures. She went to museums and charity balls and raised champagne glasses and shook senators' hands. She didn't make odd friends of complete strangers and get into car chases by accidentally offending some local gang or stealing some revered local antique. Emily Gilmore was elegant, high-class, and boring. If she had any fun stories of her travels, she never held Rory spell-bound by them. All she ever did was harp on all the rich high-class people she met. Rory didn't hold against her grandmother her lack of adventures or fun tales; as a matter of fact, in this comparing of her story to her real life, Rory was grateful that her grandmother was nothing like Thalia's grandmother.

Her grandfather was nothing like Thalia's grandfather, and hey, her parents weren't dead. There! There were plenty of differences between Thalia and Rory! Thalia enjoyed sports while Rory really didn't; Rory loved small town quirks while Thalia grated against them. Rory loved coffee and Thalia hated coffee and loved tea (Rory realized now that she might've made it a direct point to tell the reader this from the get-go, just so the reader would never be able to draw a correlation between Thalia and Rory, even as Rory was doing now).

Rory sat back up her chair and resumed a cool head. There was nothing but circumstantial evidence backing up the case of her NaNoWriMo novel being a self-insert fantasy story. It was sparse, subjective evidence. It was nothing. There was no correlation. None whatsoever.

Rory wrote another hundred or so words with this conviction in her mind. Then she stopped and let her irrationality take over as she, panicked, spent the next fifteen minutes making little text messages on her tiny flip phone to Jess, the only other person who'd read this story, asking him if he thought anyone or any of the events in the story reminded him of anyone—did any little thing remind him of anything or strike him with a moment of déjà vu or something? Her laptop screen went black from disuse and her chances of finally catching up today fell by the wayside as the minutes ticked by until Lorelai came barging in, announcing that the Gilmore Train was pulling into the station in less than ten minutes.

Rory didn't care too much about not catching up today as they drove up to New Haven. Her mind was still unsettled regarding the Great Self-Insert Question. Then she forgot about her novel when they reached Yale. And she had an interview to get into Yale?! And she and her mom grabbed good tacos from Hector's and caught a cab home and crashed on Luke's metaphorical couch.

She and Jess had their first real kiss then, out on under the streetlights of a Stars Hollow November night. It'd been a long day and Rory's head reeled. Somehow everything came into focus when he kissed her. He dispelled all the awkwardness and uncertainty surrounding them for the past three days. Monday's awkwardness, Tuesday's Invasion of the Mom from Outer Space, and Wednesday's neutral territory disappeared as they clearly defined them to each other. Suddenly Rory didn't care if her novel was a self-insert story or not. She didn't care about Yale or her grandparents. She only saw him.

Walking back to the Diner together, hand-in-hand, after they'd said everything they'd been waiting to say for forever but couldn't until the ice was broken, Jess said, "Oh, by the way, I got your texts from earlier. You're not clingy in the slightest, are you?"

Rory smiled. "I was in a moment of weakness, full of anxiety and urgency. I'm fine now."

"Well, just to settle the question in your mind," Jess said, looking at her, "I didn't think your story sounded familiar at all."

Rory beamed and squeezed his hand. Now she felt completely relieved.

Thanks for reading! Review?