Tall Dark and Bad By Crystal Evans

by Crystal E. Business Consultant

I was introduced to watching interviews by bestselling authors by a rookie novelist like myself and after I watched their (celebrity authors) bio-stories, I conceded that their lives very much mirrored mine.

Novelist- A person who creates a fictional world, the voiceless in a world filled with loud, obnoxious and cruel people found comfort and power in prose and words.

I have no formal education in writing, I’ve had people denigrate and downplay the efficiency of my writing since it’s fraught with ‘grammatical errors.

English is the language of trade for my nationality but very few Jamaicans speak the formal or archaic English and as such my writing is in broken or pidgin English.

I do make errors, I won’t deny that, because my brain goes faster than my fingers, I guess that’s where the editor should come in.

I am not trying to win any Pulitzer, I am trying to tell a story, i call my novels. Book Therapy.

As a human being, I find people interesting whether it’s watching my grandmother make sense of a modern world while I wonder with repugnance(much to my own distaste) at the leathery nature of her senescent skin.

I wonder if she notices that her body has changed, the way I am aware that I’ve gained weight. If she remembers what her youthful carriage was like and if she worries about the looming, inexorable death.

I listen to my father make plans to start a new business, one he hopes will take off and give him the financial freedom he seeks, and I am afraid to tell my father that his ideas are exhausted and generic, I fear his time in business has passed. If he didn’t have small children, I would have told him to retire and I would try my best to at least get him food money every week.

I frown at my children, they are rambunctious, inquisitive and engender periods of elevated blood pressure. I wasn’t like that as a child or maybe I don’t remember.

I am told by folks that they are being children, normal children but why is it that what they are interferes with my thought process and wreaks havoc on my nerves.

Why does the nature of my children conflict with the serenity I seek?

Believe me, having children has made me understand my mother in ways I never would have or maybe that is my new excuse for my bouts of hatred of motherhood.

To be a mother is the eternal struggle between genes and my developed personal values.

I have created a town, Glambas, fictional but representing a town I grew up in, with people like my older relatives hanging on to an expired post colonial past and the emerging millennials with debauch lifestyles rippled with flashy cars, seedy gangs and burgeoning badmind.

I have sought to make sense of this chaos, I do it a lot, writing this piece I drown out the shouts of my tyrannical grandmother trying to prevent my intransigent four year old from eating out the Lasco.

I ignore it, for many times, the people in my life, big or small are overbearing and my otherwise quiet and reserved nature makes me resentful of their loud, despotic and intrusive ways.

My grandmother ask me questions about people I don’t know or should know, my granny isn’t the brightest, in our small immediate (not extended) family, I am possibly the first with any real, tangible formal education.

My granny frequently pesters me with questions about things I have no time to explain, her enquiries are at best innocent and at worse frivolous.

I met someone I like a lot, I like him mainly because of how he is physically, the shape of his mouth, the precision cut of his beard, his eyes, dark brown, soft like the soil type loam.

He is a good soul, but rough around the edges, he has made it clear to me that if it’s perfection I seek, he is not the one for me.

Even he isn’t all he professes to be, his current posturing to be that of a Christian yet he is such a villain in many stories about his past interactions.

Because of who and what I am, because of what I have been through, I cannot love him and I am force to, not by choice, mostly bolstered by his own engineering, to ponder if the wise thing to do would be to let him go.

He remains flawed yet still the man of my dreams.

Crystal A Evans

Tall Dark and Bad III

Introduction