You all remember Alli, right?

The bestselling author I almost murdered on a lazy Sunday afternoon?

Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t kill her, because her awesome novel Call It Consequences released today!

I’ll give you a moment to clap.

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Ok, that’s enough applause. Don’t want her getting a big head or anything.

“But…what is Call It Consequences?” I hear you ask. “What’s it about?”

Great question…stick to the end to find out!

Revisionist history

I love the past. I love memories. Sometimes, perhaps, to a fault.

I have over 11,000 photos on my phone. Mostly that’s because I’m too lazy to offload them, and my iCloud storage is full. But I also like to scroll through them when I have a free moment.

You know those videos you take and think “I don’t know why I’m filming, I’m never going to go back and watch this”? Well, I do go back and watch them. (Not your videos. My videos. I promise I’m not hacking your phones.) I cherish every scrap of nostalgia I can get my hands on.

And that’s okay. Except for when it distracts me from the real world. (Insert crash of thunder here).

“Escapism” is a big thing nowadays. Reality, on the other hand, is not in society’s good graces.

And that’s true on a big scale, but let’s narrow things down to a personal level, shall we?

I may not have gone to college, but I have a major in revisionist history.

I’m a master at convincing myself that my struggles “back then” are nothing compared to my struggles now. “When I was twelve,” I’ll tell myself, “everything was perfect. Everything was fine. No complaints. I want it to be that way again.”

And I suppose, in some little details, that might be sort of true. I didn’t have bills when I was twelve. Didn’t have rent. Didn’t have to think about cars or insurance or gas prices. But on the other hand, I was twelve. I couldn’t drive wherever I wanted. I didn’t have the community I have now. I. was. Twelve.

I remember when I wasn’t cast as the lead in Once Upon A Mattress in middle school musical theatre. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, right? Wrong. When the cast list was posted, I cried in my closet the whole day.

Now, I got a different role. Not the lead, but still a great role. And I ended up having fun. And that’s great! But slowly, as the years went on, it’s like I convinced myself that I hadn’t really wanted to be the lead in the first place. Not necessarily that I hadn’t wanted it at all, but that I just didn’t want it so badly. It was fine. No big deal “in the grand scheme of things.”

But that’s not true. I really wanted the part. To the point that I’d assumed I’d get it. Then I didn’t and it’s like my whole world fell apart for a week.

Time is funny like that. Sometimes it washes everything into a blur. And usually, for the small things like middle-school drama, it’s not a big problem.

But it can get really important to see things as they were, for better or for worse.

Am I saying you should only see the bad things in the past? Never smile about the good things? Never realize that things weren’t as bad as you thought?

No! I’m absolutely not saying that.

I’m just saying that we need to be cautious sometimes that we don’t cross the line in either direction.

If the past becomes this sacred, rose-colored thing…how will we ever move into the future?

The green light

Sometimes we can create a memory that isn’t real. It feels real. It looks real. It’s based on reality. But it’s not. It’s counterfeit. Like Professor Slughorn in The Half-Blood Prince.

Or perhaps, like Jay Gatsby, we’re so in love with a moment in time that we live out of a place of delusion. We’re living out of somewhere that no longer exists.

Or we’re like Lorraine, the protagonist from Call It Consequences. We thought we knew ourselves. We thought we had things handled. But then you look back–really look–and you realize there was so much that you’d simply forgotten.

Maybe that’s why I related to Lorraine so much.

She’s thinks she’s trying to move on, completely blind to the fact that ignoring past pain does not mean moving forward.

She’s constantly looking back at the proverbial green light–but instead of a lost love like Daisy Buchanan, that green light belongs to her mother and what life was like before she lost her.

Now, I don’t have something that dramatic in my past. And my twelve-year-old self didn’t pop into my bedroom and demand that we go back in time to save our mother. That’s certainly what I’d call an extreme case.

But I definitely have little things that keep me from keeping on.

Good, honest, harmless memories that I get a little too comfortable chasing.

I had a lot of friends growing up. I was homeschooled, in California, which means by default you were forced to find people like you. There was a group of us at co-op. We’d play at the park every Tuesday. We were tight knit. We had fun. We shared all our secrets, all our laughter, all our adventures. I can’t count how many hours we spend playing make-believe (and very silly rounds of Mafia).

And we don’t talk any more. With one exception (you know who you are–love you!), we all split up into our own lives.

There was no fight.

There was no discussion.

There was no failed time-travel experiment.

Suddenly, we just weren’t in each others lives.

And just like a time-travel experiment gone wrong, it really did feel like it all happened in a flash. In one small moment–one blip–life as I knew it was just…changed forever.

And I think about those days a lot. I think about all the fun we had. And that’s not bad at all, but here’s what I tend to do…

I sit and think about how, back then, I could just spend hours playing in the park with my friends, not a care in the world–and I mope. I mope about how I can’t anymore. And then I try to chase that high of “not a care in the world” and it results in me sitting around doing nothing, and not in a fun way.

Instead of inspiring me to make new memories with my newfound friends, it shuts me down and bums me out until I’m some kind of nostalgia-huffing hermit.

All this to say, it’s good to have happy memories to look back on. It’s so good to be thankful!

But here’s your reminder that you don’t have to be Jay Gatsby. You don’t have to keep chasing a green light. Because that green light doesn’t mean go. It means stay, retreat, repress.

You can take those memories--the happy, the sad, the in-between–and run with them. You can equip them to help move forward, instead of letting them drag you down.

In the words of definitely real Teddy Roosevelt,

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Call It Consequences

Since you’re already charging forward, why don’t you swing by Amazon and grab a copy of Call It Consequences? You know you want to. I wasn’t expecting a book about time travel and teenage angst to make me cry, but man, the final line gets me every time. Not only did I relate so deeply with the protagonist, but the story is filled with 2010s nostalgia and delightful pop culture references. I couldn’t put it down. I doubt you’ll be able to either.