Love, Dad | ONC 2024 ✔️

Authoress' Note

Hi guys! ☺️💜

As I tend to write each year around these dates: come in, grab a comfy seat 🛋, some yummy biscuits 🍪 and be very welcome to Love, Dad.

I bet the title and the letter-shaped cover are already allowing you to guess that this is going to be mostly a family-theme-oriented coming of age litfic novella.

But what you don't know is that it shall also have a sprinkle of romance 💜

Its creation owes its existence to ONC 2024 prompt number 4:

4. When life gives you balloons, you fly up into the sky.

And, and: also a conversation from some days before the prompts came out, that I had with an incredible writer and a friend, Lisa London, who inspired me so much! She is participating in this year's Open Novella Contest as well, so check out her novella "Where Is Araminta Green?" that has the both of Only Murders in the Building and Wednesday worlds, and add it to your reading lists!

The biggest comp for this novella is "Crossroads," (2002) movie with Britney Spears, which I discovered thanks to my wonderful friend and authoress, WinterSleep85 . Her ONC entry "Lost in Shadows" deals with alluring, powerful and terrifying vampires. It's different from anything she's done before, so make sure you have it in your library!

The romantic moments in the story come from my love for the following two movies I saw with my mom. They are: "It Happened One Night" (1934) with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, and "Leap Year" (2010) with Matthew Goode and Amy Adams.

Ooh ooh, as well as my very recently discovered love for the TV show "A Murder at the End of the World" (2023) with Harris Dickinson and Emma Corrin.

There is this a-mazing scene where Harris and Emma (Bill and Darby in the show) are on the road in the car, and they are a bit angry with each other. She plays a song on her iPod, it's a random shuffle, and it turns out to be "No More I Love Yous," by Annie Lennox.

You can just see how they slowly get in the groove and forgive each other, and everything is alright again, while they don't even say a word. They just sing together and their mood brightens by a second. Tremendous acting by Harris and Emma both 💜 They don't speak at all to each other, but their eyes and their gestures say everything.

Here's a YouTube videocito so that ye can see I ain't lyin':

I hope that you like it and that you perhaps get inspired to see the show!

To me, there is something poetic about the notion of the road trip: that duality between the blend of the present and the past, what the roadsters perceive now versus what they already lived, the people they meet on the road...

All those destinies and life stories that intertwine in a huge human yarn, transcending time and space. Not to mention the quantity of life lessons one learns on such a trip.

And as it usually happens, the journey might turn out to be even more important than the destination.

The fourth source of inspiration for the novel is: surprise surprise: my own life.

At one point I had a similar altercation with my mom as the one April Lewis, my she-tagonist has, and I also left home on a train, determined to get to my dad's place; but I didn't get as far as April did 🤣

I did meet someone very similar to Dave, so that part is also based on a true story!

To tell you the truth, this is my very first attempt to write anything remotely lit-fiction-y. In 2019, I wrote an ONC titled "GG." While it had some minor elements of literary fiction, mostly isolated quotes, it was actually more of a phantasmagorical Alice in Wonderland-ish piece with sci- fi foundation.