Ofelia Grand: Remember Us

Let’s welcome Ofelia Grand today! She’s talking about her re-release, Remember Us. It’s a story about older characters and memory loss and I love it, although Ofelia doesn’t like the first-person POV very much!

Hello, everyone! Thank you, Ally, for letting me drop by today. At the beginning of this month, one of my short stories, Remember Us, was re-released through JMS Books. I love that story.

I write under two names, Holly Day is my alter ego, and by now I’ve written a few stories. Most of them are short, so the backlist isn’t quite as impressive as it looks at a first glance, but by now I’m pretty secure in my writing style. I write third person, past tense, dual point of view unless it’s a really short story, then I might only do one character’s point of view.

What I don’t do is first person. I never buy a book where the blurb is written in first person. If I’ve bought a book, and you should know I never do my research – never read the entire blurb, never read excerpts etc. I might glance at a few reviews (and then I browse for the bad ones, so in my case, a two-star review often is what sells the book LOL). But if I’ve bought a book, and it turns out to be written in first person, I might read it if it doesn’t annoy me in the first pages. If the first thing I read under the chapter heading is a name, we’re done, though. First person, dual POV, not going there.

After having trashed first person, I feel I need to explain a little. They say you should write in first person because it brings the character closer to the reader, makes it easier for them to connect, to feel with the character. And I think I’m malfunctioning because for me it does the exact opposite. When a story is written in third person, I can forgive stupidness. I can chuckle at how foolish the character is. If it’s written in first person, and I read an ‘I threw myself at the snarling beast instead of staying safely hidden’ I just get annoyed because I *knocks on chest* never would. It’s even worse when we get to steamy or emotional parts. If it says I, the I damn better act like I would, and the Is never do LOL

Why do I ramble on about this, you wonder. Well… Remember Us is written in first person.

Yes, I’m as stunned as you are.

And I still like it. I don’t know why. I think it might be because it’s more of an emotional journey than a physical one. There are no snarling beasts, no awkward flirting or sweaty sex scenes where I lose connection with the character due to unfortunate reactions or actions LOL. It’s not even a romance story, it’s an established-couple-at-the-final-stretch-of-their-lives story.

Charles and William have been together for over forty years. All Charlie wants is to spend the rest of his time with William, but William’s memory is failing him, and Charlie is unable to look after him.

Excerpt from Remember Us

The door to the nursing home opened, and I almost ran into one of the nurses.

“Oh, there you are, Charlie.” Relief flooded her eyes as the heron woke in my chest.

“What happened?” If she was coming to get me, something must’ve happened to William.

“Nothing, everything is fine now. I just got a little worried when I couldn’t find you.” She smiled and held the door open for me.

I nodded. Was I late? I glanced at the clock—about the same time as always. Of course, she wouldn’t find me if I hadn’t arrived yet. “Is William all right?”

“Yes, he’s fine, just fine.” She smiled and started to walk back to the front desk. I hurried through the foyer towards the corridor leading to William’s room, wanting to make sure nothing had happened to him.

Sucking in a breath, I knocked on his door. The nurse had given me a scare, and my heart didn’t want to slow down.

“Who are you?” William glared at me when I opened the door, and I slowly let the air out of my lungs.

“I’m Charles.”

His eyes narrowed as he got out of the armchair. “Charles?”

“Yes, Charles.” I searched his eyes for recognition, but it wasn’t there. I should stop hoping, but now and then, there was a flicker of awareness, a few minutes of presence. It was those moments I lived for—the short seconds when we were ‘we’ again.

“Charles, huh?” He studied me. The ticks of the old wall clock that used to hang in our kitchen were far slower than my heartbeats, and the heron trapped in my chest tried to turn.

William’s lips narrowed; fear grew stronger and stronger in his eyes. “Charlie?” The whisper broke my heart.

“Yes.”

“Babe, what happened to you?” He reached out but stopped short of touching me. “There has to be something we can do. Is it an illness? Or…” He rubbed his forehead. “Were you exposed to radiation or something?” Panic took hold of him as the heron crushed my insides.

“No, no radiation or illness. I grew old.”

“But how? You were fine this morning.”

This morning? How I wished I could tell which morning he was in—I’d have given everything I had to be there with him. “What did we do this morning?”

“You don’t remember?” His eyes widened, and I feared I’d only made the situation worse by asking.

“We had coffee.”

“Of course, we had coffee! What else do you remember?”

Yes, of course, we had coffee. What else could we have done? I searched his face for a clue. He wasn’t giving much away. “We ate breakfast.”

“I did! You didn’t. You were too busy trying to get that freaking cat down from the tree. That’s it, isn’t it? It had some disease, and now you’re ill.”

Cat? I winced. There was only one cat I’d ever rescued from a tree, and it had been a long, long time ago—before we were married, before we had Ann, before we lived together. “No, it wasn’t the cat.”

I glanced at the clock. I needed him to start thinking about something else. “Want to go grab some coffee?”

“We just had coffee! I’m taking you to the hospital. Now.” He started towards the door, throwing a confused look around the room as he went. “I need to pee, real quick, and then we’ll go.”

I sank down on his bed as he slipped into the bathroom. My hands were shaking. I didn’t want him to get angry, but there was no way we could go anywhere. We could go to the cafeteria and David—no, Daniel was his name—had said we could sit on the balcony if we wanted. I hoped Daniel was here today. The few times William got angry enough to get violent I always feared for the young women trying to soothe him.

I startled as the door banged against the wall. William hurried out of the bathroom. “There’s an alien in the mirror.”

“What?” Oh, no…

“In the mirror. I always knew there was something strange with this place.”

“I don’t think there is an alien in the mirror.” I could see William getting ready to argue and took a deep breath. “It was probably only the light or something.”

“You’re in on it.” He poked a finger in my chest. “I knew it! You’re not my Charlie. Of course, you aren’t. My Charlie isn’t old, and he would never lie to me.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Yoda is living in the bathroom mirror, and you’re saying there aren’t aliens here.”

Yoda? I looked at William. He didn’t look anything like Yoda…or maybe a little, but didn’t we all these days? “How about that coffee?”

William curled his hands into fists. “You aren’t listening to me. We need to get out of here. They have us under surveillance. Yoda is living in my bathroom!”

My bathroom. The heron picked at my intestines. He had never named anything in this room his. It was silly how a little word could hurt more than him thinking I was a stranger.

“Okay, let’s get out of here.” I hoped he’d forget about the aliens before we got anywhere near the door.

“We need to be sneaky about it. I’ve tried to leave before, but they never let me.”

“Yes, sneaky.” I bit my cheek. “Maybe we should go to the cafeteria and have a cup of coffee.” William started to object, but I cut him off. “Then on the way back, we’ll slip out.” Fingers crossed he wouldn’t remember when we got there.

“Smart. My Charlie would have suggested the same thing.”

Buy Remember Us: JMS Books :: Amazon :: Everywhere else!