Author’s Insight — LIBBY CUDMORE

We asked the ever magnetic Libby Cudmore to elaborate on her writing process with “The Weather Girl”, featured in our debut Issue 01.

Author Insight—Libby Cudmore, The Weather Girl

The title of the story comes from the eponymous Shiny Toy Guns song—I woke up with it stuck in my head one morning, along with the remnants of a dream about a girl with red galoshes. I couldn’t shake the image, so I listened to the song on repeat, and the longing heart of the story formed there.

The story itself is a reoccurring theme in my work—that is, that one can never return to a lost love. We spend so much time on Facebook trying to reconnect with friends (or worse, people we hated) that we should have long ago let go of, and it rarely ends in the fulfilling relationship we all secretly hope it will be. This is why I’m not on Facebook and why I’m skipping my 10 year high-school reunion. The past needs to stay the past, and in that way, “The Weather Girl” shares a thread with “The Second Time I Lost My Virginity” (Xenith) and “Unplanned” (Thrillers, Killers ‘n’ Chillers).

Coming from a pulp tradition, I was used to drawing everything out in long metaphors, so it was kind of refreshing to be able to write simply and let the reader absorb the scene organically. I had originally planned to have The Weather Girl return to her lost boyfriend, only to find him married and with a daughter, learning the same lesson through an attempt to seduce him … but too many of my stories revolve around bored suburban girls being sad, so I decided to switch it up and make Jay the narrator, The Weather Girl unmarried and the kid Jay’s.

This was a tough story to write because it was a new style for me, and the end was written at about 3AM when I couldn’t sleep and therefore, couldn’t censor myself. There’s a certain loneliness to the hour, even though my boyfriend and my kitten were in the next room, and I think it was the last push I needed to finish the story.