skeleton in a wedding dress
In my last newsletter, I mentioned I had a story about the photo below. Today is the day you get to hear the story.
As previously mentioned, while drafting a now-on-hold book back in 2021-2022, I made this image my laptop background. I’ve done something similar with a number of my books. I’ll find an image that encapsulates the mood of the book and set it as my background so that every morning, just before I start writing, I have a quick visual cue to transport me out of the real world and into my fictive one.
The book is about a recluse, a woman living in extreme isolation in a giant manor in the English countryside. She hasn’t left the house or spoken to another soul in three years. She sees things that aren’t there, talks to inanimate objects, and sabotages the relationships that come her way. Are you getting a feel for why this photo represents her and my story perfectly? I stumbled upon it on Pinterest one day, and it stopped me dead in my tracks.
Despite its tonal perfection, I am aware it’s a weird f*cking image to have on your laptop screen. For the most part, I write at home, so am unworried about peeping eyes from strangers in cafes, for example. If I work on planes, I’ll use a screen shield—mostly because I’m paranoid that people will read my first drafts over my shoulder and think I’m a terrible writer. In the rare case that I had my laptop out in public, I tried to remember to keep a browser window open so no one had to look at my skeletal Miss Havisham. For, oh, about a year and a half, I managed this concealment without issue.
Permit me a left turn in the story. My maternal grandpa died in June 2022. I was sad, of course, but he was ninety-two years old and lived a good long life, as I mentioned in my grief essay a few posts back. My mom was essentially in charge of organizing the wake and funeral. To lessen the load on her, my sisters and I took charge of putting together some collage boards, plus a slideshow with photos taken throughout his life. Since none of my grandparents’ photos were digitized at that point, this was a huge undertaking. But we got the job done. In the end, we had 3-4 collage boards, plus a forty-five minute slideshow that we would play on the funeral parlor TV at his wake.
(Can you see where this is going yet?)
The plan was to use my sister’s laptop to hook up to the TV. She has a PC, whereas I have a Mac, so we figured hers would be easier to connect. For whatever reason, we could not get hers working, so we had to make a last-minute switch to use my computer instead.
Now. For obvious reasons I was reluctant to project my computer screen onto a 42” TV monitor. Should I have changed my laptop background? Indeed. And I did, in a way. Mac users will know you can toggle between multiple desktop views. So I toggled over to Desktop 2, which was an innocuous, standard-issue Mac background. All good, I thought.
Fast forward twenty minutes, and now my entire extended family is in the funeral parlor room. My grandparents had six kids and even more grandchildren/great-grandchildren. Suffice it to say there were a lot of people in the room. Given the choice between focusing on my grandpa in his coffin and watching our slideshow, most opted for the latter. We all needed a distraction from our sadness.
You know what happened next.
I plugged the HDMI cable into my laptop. The innocuous Desktop 2 background appeared on the TV. As I went to pull up the slideshow, somehow, some way, MY SCREEN CHANGED TO DESKTOP 1. That’s right, folks. With my poor grandfather in his Sunday best ten feet away, his granddaughter projected an image of a SKELETON IN A DRESS at his memorial service. All I remember is one of my uncles saying, “What the—” before I looked up, saw with horror what was on the screen, and then literally threw my body in front of the TV.
That, my friends, is the life of a writer. (Or maybe just the life of me.) On the plus side, my mortification gave everyone a good laugh on a heavy day. However, this incident did little to persuade my family that writers are just like everyone else.
I’d like to close by apologizing to my grandpa, though I suspect he would’ve enjoyed the spectacle.
Cut yourself some slack today,