Mark David Adam’s story “Hold This Star for Me” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 16 February 2018.
“Hold This Star For Me” started as an exploration of the idea of lost memory. My first draft began with a page and a half of the main character obsessed with the idea of repressed memory, feeling he’d had experiences in childhood he couldn’t recall. After the story was finished, I realized this musing about the possibility of repressed memory had been my way into the story but the reader just needed the story, so I cut it all out.
I believe Stephen King in “On Writing” (though I’ve been scanning his book all morning and haven’t found it) relates how Raymond Carver once knew he had a story though he only had the first sentence, something banal like: “She went to the closet and got out the vacuum cleaner.” Carver didn’t know what the story was about, only that it was there, and that following that first line would lead him to it.
“Hold This Star” was very much like this. I knew the protagonist was on a quest to uncover childhood memories but I had no idea what he was going to find. This makes “Hold This Star For Me” one of my personal favorites. Writing it was an act of discovery, and I was especially excited by how David uncovers two important strands of memories: contact with aliens and the very real human memories of his mother.
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