WIWAW - Twelve Months

This short essay was inspired by the thread What I wrote and why: Fairytale of New York, which was posted in The Author's Hangout by StillStunned.

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WIWAW -- TWELVE MONTHS

by Emily Miller

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INTRODUCTION

This article focuses on how I wrote Twelve Months, and what the story is meant to be about; while recognizing that readers may of course bring their own interpretations. My intended audience is other authors, but there may be topics covered here which are also of interest to the general reader.

ADVISORY: The text contains mild spoilers for Twelve Months throughout. If you haven't read it, may I suggest that you do that first. However, I have tried to be at least somewhat vague about the actual story plot here.

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BACKGROUND

At nearly 19,000 words, Twelve Months (hereafter abbreviated to 12M) is a short novella, which was published, in the Lesbian Sex category, on January 10 2025, as part of the Valentine's Day Competition. At the time of writing this WIWAW, 12M is my most recent story on Literotica.

12M is not explicitly part of any of my collections of works, appearing as it does under the rather self-conciously titled Attempts at Serious Stories. However, without going too deeply into areas I'd rather keep private, it does have some connections to both My College Years, and one other stand-alone work. I'll touch on this again later.

The structure is somewhat simple, though this presented some writing challenges. The story covers the twelve months between Valentine's 2023 and Valentine's 2024, and explores the life and loves of the nameless narrator through this period. There is a section for each month, consisting of one or more brief vignettes. Each of the stand-alone scenes is meant to build into an overall narrative. But the text is intended to be somewhat fragmented, as if the reader is dipping in and out of the narrator's day-to-day experiences. The tone changes from section to section, just as - in real life - no month is a carbon copy of another.

As per the advisory and endnotes, the narrator is suffering from the after effects of a sexual assault. Only at the very end is her condition described as being PTSD; an overused term, but the correct one here. The narrator's trauma has become the dominant factor in her life, dictating how she sees both relationships and herself. It would be lovely to say that the story is about the narrator overcoming the shadows of her past, but trauma isn't like that. Maybe what happens is more around her learning to live with what has happened to her and to move on with her life.

In this essay, I wanted to do a few things: to dig into some of the story's themes, to touch on connections to reality, and - perhaps more cheerfully - to catalog the songs referenced, particularly those by my fellow Pennsylvanian, Taylor Swift. Taylor's music and lyrics seemed particularly apposite for this story.

But I am going to start with a few clarifications.

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REALITY AND WRITING

I'm fully aware that I'm going to be tying myself in knots in this section (which makes a change from someone else doing it, I guess 😬). Please bear with me and understand it's not just my privacy that is involved.

Some readers have suggested that the story is somewhat autobiographical. Well yes and no. For a start, a few have claimed that I am the narrator. I'd like to state categorically that I am not, and that it was never my intention to give this impression. While my heritage is European, encompassing Lithuanian, German / Polish (the specific town has been in both countries at different times), and Italian, I have no Czech antecedents as far as I am aware.

What I have done is to be a magpie. The story is mostly fabricated. A few scenes are based on real events - e.g. the flashback to San Francisco in April, the impromptu visit of the narrator's Ex and her boyfriend in July (though not the nude scene), elements of the New Year's Eve section (though none of the conversations). The narrator and some of the other characters are loosely based on real people, but each of Madison, Eliška, Brett, Clara, Mara, and Lejeda are entirely made up.

I'm not going to say who the narrator is based on. Anyone who has read enough of my work will be able to figure this out pretty easily, but I prefer not to be explicit; to be so just doesn't feel right. Like me, the person in question has sadly been the victim of sexual assault, and sought therapy to help with this. Again like me, she has suffered from anxiety and depression, but - unlike the narrator - she was never an alcoholic.

The narrator's alcoholism is entirely artistic license. I have at times in my life drunk too much, but I don't believe I ever crossed the line into alcoholism (I hope I'm not in denial here). However, one of my family members is a recovering addict, though their addiction is to chemicals other than ethanol. My vicarious experience of this is where some of the darker elements come from.

And any trace of my own autism that has leaked into the narrator's character is entirely unintentional. Of course I can't stop being me, but neurodivergence wasn't meant to be part of this story.

To go back to quasi-real events, perhaps an example will help. The real life version of the narrator did indeed spend last New Year's Eve (12/31/24 and not 12/31/23 as in the story) at her Ex's boyfriend's parents, but I wrote the text before the actual visit happened, and - aside from the dramatis personae and location - everything else in that scene is a figment of my imagination. The same entwining of fact and fiction permeates the story, though at least 80 - 90% of it never happened in reality.

What is real, is my own trauma response, anxiety, and depression. I hope I have treated these things realistically, even when many of the circumstances and events are fabricated. A little more on this later as well.

All authors borrow from their experience when writing, I just got into rather more debt with 12M than is often the case.

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TAYLOR SWIFT

Thanks to Actingup for suggesting this section.

I like Taylor Swift's music, but I'm not a true Swiftie. I actually like classic music more than rock or pop. Even within the latter genres, I'm more into The National, Wolf Alice, and Vampire Weekend. But Swift's lyrics fit the story I wanted to tell, and the person that the narrator is based on is closer to being a Swiftie than me; she's seen her live twice.

In the March section, the narrator is listening to Shake It Off, and reacting to the lines:

I go on too many dates
But I can't make 'em stay
At least that's what people say, mm-mm
That's what people say, mm-mm

I obviously couldn't let the August section go without reference to probably my favorite Swift song. At the beginning of this month's section, there is an explicit excerpt from the lyrics:

But I can see us lost in the memory
August slipped away into a moment in time
'Cause it was never mine
And I can see us twisted in bedsheets
August sipped away like a bottle of wine
'Cause you were never mine

Swift's protagonist, Augustine, reminiscing about lost Summer love seemed to work great. And there was even a call out to a bottle of wine!

In the October section, I make a much more oblique reference to the August line:

Back when I was livin' for the hope of it all

This was in a paragraph where the narrator uses "hoped" three times. That was intentional, not just unimaginative writing.

The October section also starts with an adapted quote from Lover's first verse:

We could leave the Christmas lights up 'til January
And this is our place, we make the rules
And there's a dazzling haze, a mysterious way about you, dear
Have I known you 20 seconds or 20 years?

I was trying to acknowledge the depths of feeling that the narrator was experiencing, even after a relatively short time with Madison.

Back To December is all about Swift apologizing to an ex-boyfriend for "dropping the ball" in their relationship (her words in an interview). In the December section, I included the lyrics:

Because the last time you saw me
Is still burned in the back of your mind
You gave me roses and I left them there to die

Then, in the denouement, I have the narrator attempt to sing the very next words:

So this is me swallowin' my pride
Standin' in front of you sayin' I'm sorry for that night
And I go back to December all the time
It turns out freedom ain't nothin' but missin' you
Wishin' I'd realized what I had when you were mine
I'd go back to December, turn around and make it alright
I go back to December all the time

She changes "December" to "October" for obvious reasons. The narrator is trying to tell Madison not to think of her as being perfect. This is mostly illustrated by the fact that she can't sing at all (a real-life reference again, but then neither can I). But Swift's emotions, once again, seamlessly fit the story. It seemed a suitably melodramatic ending to a melodrama.

I also mention the Miley Cyrus song. Party in the USA at the beginning.

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ANXIETY

Readers will probably be delighted that I'm not going to dwell on the source of the narrator's trauma (nor indeed my own). Suffice it to say that some people are evil. Trauma response can manifest in many ways, it can lead to hypersexuality, or to exposing yourself to high-risk activities or situations. It can obviously lead to depression, and - as in the story - addiction. But anxiety is central to 12M.

Anxiety is obviously different to depression, though related. If the latter can be over-simplified to the feeling that everything is wrong and nothing can change that, the former is more a persistent and visceral belief that things are about to go very, very wrong. I still suffer anxiety attacks all these years later, but they are more under control than at any earlier point. I wanted to try to convey what this feels like, and how much it can dominate your behavior, affect your relationships, and impact your whole life.

This is making significant demands of an erotic story in which a lot is already going on. But I did my best. I wanted to describe the fight or flight response, the escalating sense of dread, your body going into overdrive. But, I also didn't want to either overemphasize the area, or to write a self-help book. I tried to make anxiety a natural part of the narrator's psyche, without it swamping the story. Readers can judge how well I achieved this objective.

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FRIENDSHIP

Twelve Months is not just about romantic, or sexual, relationships, it has friendship at its heart. I've been lucky enough to have good friends in my life, people who have been there when I was at my lowest. I wanted to celebrate friendship in this story, and for friendship to be a pivotal factor in the ultimate destination of the narrator's journey.

I suppose there were a few paths. Friendship becoming romance, romance becoming friendship, and indeed friendship remaining as friendship. Some friendships featured were longstanding, some fleeting, just like in real life. It's wholly intentional that a range of different relationships are included in the story.

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BILDUNGSROMAN

It's rather presumptuous of me to claim my little novella, covering just a year in the narrator's life, is a contribution to this literary genre. However, she starts the story as a singleton, and ends it - at least potentially - embracing both relationship commitment and the idea of forming a family. It's a very accelerated path - at the end of the day, 12M is a story, not a documentary - but it does fit the general bildungsroman model of the protagonist's emotional growth.

I'm not sure that Charlotte Brontë would fully enjoy the comparison to Jane Eyre, but I do think of 12M as being a story about taking a more mature approach to life, and this being a part of the narrator trying to put her unhappy past in a better context.

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IN CLOSING

Yet again, I'm really stretching the concept of what erotica can be about here. I probably have ideas way above my station. More practically, there is a yawning gap between my aspirations for stories, and my, at most, emergent talent and experience as a writer. I am under no illusion that I achieved everything I set out to do with 12M, but I hope that it's been another milestone in my own maturation as an author.

Thanks to those of you who have accompanied and supported me on the journey so far 😊.

THE END