Until The Sun Explodes

They left her home with heavy hearts, boxes and boxes of notebooks scribbled full and so many questions that will never be answered. The literary community is devastated they never got her hint to ask, that they found her in death rather than in life.

What began as a routine call to the suburbs of Denver on July 28, 2091 ended in tragedy when 101 year old Julia E — locally-known, small-circle renowned author jl wood — was found deceased, her once vivid, imaginative but deeply troubled brain splattered on the wall behind her beloved couch and coffee table writing set up, a half smoked joint in her glass ashtray, melted iced coffee set in a ring of water stood next to it. It’s unclear whether the gun shot wound was self-inflicted or inflicted by someone scorned by the loss of her presence.

While a sad discovery, the story could have ended with the death of an elderly woman, but it continued due to what was found in her home. Brilliant manuscripts, half-finished novels, as well as a few finished ones, hand-written poems and 85 years worth of diaries, detailing a life and mindset so extraordinary that they have skyrocketed jl from obscurity in life to fame since her relatively timely, though unnatural and tragic death.

Born somewhere suburban between Boston and Salem, much of jl’s early life is unknown. Earlier acquaintances suggest she was a teenage outcast who dyed her hair neon colors, cut her clothes up just to resew them tighter and struggled heavily with anxiety and depression. They say she moved to Europe at age 18. From there she disappeared off the radar of anyone willing to talk to us.

Despite a lack of character witnesses from this period, we did have journals from this time that detail a life of extreme merrymaking, traveling, language learning — some pages, sensitive topics especially, even being found to be written in German, one of many languages jl is thought to have been fluent in— exploring, philosophizing and mixing optimism with bouts of depression. This is where her fiction writing and poetry really began to take shape in the form of marbled notebooks full of ideas, thoughts, quotes, half-stories that often starred herself as a kind of vagabond, noir-esque protagonist as well as full poems about sadness and drug use.

At some point she returned to the US, where she continued to work menial serving jobs and take small copywriting gigs while writing her works personally, in private, only switching from handwriting to Microsoft Word sometime in her thirties.

With detectives actively investigating the manner of death, all 87 handwritten journals chronicling her long, sometimes inspiring, sometimes depressing life, have been seized before we could get past 2015 — the year she returned to the US— leaving us to deduce what we can from her writings, which also range from inspiring to depressing.

Her poetry appears to have been an outlet for her strong emotions, as well as a form of communication to someone who wanted to translate for themselves, who didn’t want to ask directly, or face her, even, which seems a deep quelle of her pain; the lack of accountability in love with someone who was “always there, but never there.” They also suggest a connection to another artist, the heartache of being their muse, a relationship from which nothing would ever stem despite her intense desires for their touch or simply, presence.

While her poetry centers around these common themes for the most part, her fiction writing is much more varied, vivid, colorful and hard to deduce from. Following her personal protagonist period in Europe, her characters began to vary widely in age and gender as time went on, from a middle-aged male scientist in her now most famous novel, to quirky women, brilliant little girls, mustached Italian bakers and ego-driven pretty boy boxers in her short stories. Commonly, her characters, no matter the age, profession or gender, struggled with mental health, paranoia, anxiety, depression, even schizophrenia and bipolar, all of which she seems to understand too well to be an outsider looking in.

It’s also clear through extensive spell casting and Tarot reading journals, as well as an often-used themes of magick, fate and Universal energy in her writings that jl dwelled on many esoteric topics, possibly practicing some form of witchcraft.

It appears that she never sought fame, but actively avoid it, obscuring her face in the profile pictures of her writing profiles, or excluding it altogether, despite being considered conventionally attractive by all accounts, eventually changing her pen name to jl wood, her true initials with the last name given to her children by their father, a last name she never legally took, which is said to have saved her a lot of paperwork after the divorce.

She is survived by a son and a daughter, F. Wood, scientist and Robot Wars champion and Dr. D. Wood, rollie pollie doctor and visual artist. It is speculated that the gap-tooth girl in her story The Ring is based on her real daughter, and that her son often inspired clever comments and thoughts throughout her fiction collection, including the use of his scientific ideas in many stories.

The literary community is mourning this great loss we didn’t even know to expect. We are grateful that, though not physically, her mind is still with us, whole and on paper, to examine, enjoy, reflect on and relate to, forever and always.

Until the sun explodes.

rip jl