Clean Freak, the Beginning

            It all started while I was cleaning my bathroom. Cleaning is a rather meditative activity for me. Not to say I enjoy it. Contrary to what one reviewer postulated about me, I am not really a clean freak myself. However, I do like the chance to let my mind wander and the repetitive motion of cleaning allows that.

            So there I am, running the shower after scrubbing the tub. As the water ran down the drain, it gurgled and I found myself staring into the darkness of it, imagining the glugging sounds as someone trying to speak to me.

            The initial story idea exploded in my head. I mean, it really walloped me. I sat back on my heels, awash in the ecstasy of inspiration as I just let the story idea flow through me. I turned off the shower and grabbed my phone and immediately started texting my partner. It started with this sentence:

An obsessive compulsive is cleaning his bathtub after a shower (he has to clean things after he uses them), he hears a voice coming from the drain, the voice of a little girl who “escaped” down the drain from her “mean mommy.”

and continued over several more messages.

            I immediately went to my collection of blank journals (every writer I know has at least half a dozen that are waiting for projects; or are too handsome for projects, so they just use spiral bound notebooks) and transcribed the summary from the series of text messages, filling a page and a half. It wasn’t much, but it was the whole idea. Looking back at it now, I’m still amazed by how complete that initial summary was. Things fleshed out and changed in the course of writing the story, as they always do, but the whole story was there from that first inspiration storm. I wrote a stupid title on the cover page of the journal, noting that it was a stupid title and a placeholder only. I went through two more stupid titles before my partner gave me the title Clean Freak.

            It was really Clarence’s character that called to me. It was the first time that I’d written about a character with a specific mental health issue. Previous “crazy” characters I’d written about were just that, crazy in quotation marks, meaning I didn’t really understand what made them crazy; I just needed them to be crazy for the sake of the story. I steered clear of the phrase Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder because I didn’t want Clarence to be misunderstood or mischaracterized by people and the media. By exploring Clarence’s character and motivations, without labeling him, I felt that I’d created a character that felt like a real person, rather than a caricature that existed in quotation marks for the sake of the story.

            I knew that I had something special almost from the moment I started working on the story. I’d written two stories that were novel length prior to Clean Freak: a novella about religious guilt written shortly after graduating high school that was set in a high school which reads exactly like what you’d expect from someone who just graduated; and a strangely long, meandering story that consists of three parts which almost reads like three different stories because of tone and style. But when that voice whispered to me from the shower drain, I knew that I had a story that would become my first published novel.

            I’m excited for you to reahttps://bookshop.org/books/clean-freak/9798676694845d it, now that it’s available from Siren’s Call, but don’t forget to wash your hands!