NO SECRETS - NaNoWriMo Idea # 6

 NO SCRETS

NaNoWriMo Idea # 6

Violet “Dee-Dee” Davenport is going to learn you can never go home.

 The public knows her as Delicious. Her stories and interviews appeared on Page Six of the New York Post. Famous for her celebrity interviews and her tell all books. Dee was the last women writer in a line that began with Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons.

According to her publicist, there are “No Secrets,” when Dee-licious pens a story. Ask a famous past president, the ex-want-a-be senator, and that famous cowboy who admitted to wearing a dress when he goes on his men-only hunting trips.

Violet “Dee-Dee” Davenport learned early that she was invisible. Growing up poor and lonely in Kalamazoo, Michigan, she discovered town folks said things around her that should have been secrets―were secrets, except for Dee-Dee.

      Dee never told these secrets, rather she recorded them. She wrote them in her diary. She crafted them into a story that was easily told. Then when the minister at the New Faith Babtist Church asked her about attending bible class, she’d mention how grown-up little Cleo Newburg seemed. Dee learned she didn’t have to say the crime, just mentioning the victim was enough to get what she wanted in school or church.

      While attending Kalamazoo College, Dee-Dee wrote a column for the school newspaper, called “Happenings.” Under the watchful eye of an Editor with far too many secrets, Dee-Dee became Dee-licious, and a career was born.

Now after ten years at the top, her book editor was pressing her for one more bestseller. A new tell all. The problem was her sources had run dry. She wasn’t invisible. No one with any smarts. No one with any secrets would talk to her. The only stories she had were those left in her diary. Stories from her past. Stories she never published. So, for reasons she couldn’t explain, she went home.

In interviews, she claimed she was going home because she needed a break. Her publisher said she was going home to write about her past. About her time in Kalamazoo. The first was true, the second, not so much. The stories in her diary were decades old. Most of the people are dead or gone.

As far as Violet Davenport was concerned, the only story left was about the invisible girl who grew into a cunning and ruthless gossip columnist with no friends, no lovers or spouses, and no family to tell her true story when she was gone. Violet was going home to change her life. To become visible. The question is will the people with secrets let her write her story?