folksy rural fantasy novel, apparently

I grew up in this small town in the Midwest where each generation has a secret coven of witches. Up until my generation, it was always just boys, and my dad had high hopes for my older brother. My dad was actually the head witch in his generation. The position came with a lot of power. All of the witches were really smart and popular. They could turn into dogs (collies, generally) and fly little personal spaceships, but mainly they were excellent authors. Every witch in my dad's generation was an accomplished novelist. My dad represented all the writer-witches from our town. He also somehow got to approve or reject every single novel their publisher published.

People generally found out if they were witches about halfway through high school, when it was the hardest to keep it a secret from the rest of the town. Most of the witches were pretty unpopular right up until the point where they weren't anymore, and it was all they could do to keep from lording it over the other kids who used to beat them up or turn them down for dates. My brother was already a senior in high school, and nothing had happened to him yet as far as I could tell. Then it turned out that I was the witch in the family, the first girl witch the town had ever seen.

Things got really tough for my brother then. I kind of blamed my dad. He was this really judgmental, controlling guy. He liked being in charge of all the other witches and telling them what to do all the time, and it drove him nuts not being able to get my brother to do all the magic stuff, and be a dog and fly around in the little ships and all that. The worst of it was that he was a terrible writer. My brother stopped hanging out with people. Mostly he just moped around the backyard. I would fly down in my personal spaceship and offer to take him for rides, but he just ignored me. The other witches didn't make matters any better. I think they were annoyed with my dad telling them what to do all the time, and they took it out on my brother, ganging up on him in the general store where he worked and making him drop groceries all over the place all the time. He sort of shut down. By the time I left for college he had pretty much stopped talking. I didn't come home for a long time after that.

When I left home, I tried to give up the magic. I got a job as a book editor, and I was pretty good at it. Sometimes I'd get annoyed with agents who would fight me over tiny little things---it was hard not to pull out the old magic tricks to get my way. I worked for a different publisher than the one my dad wrote for, but even so he tried to get his fingers into everything we did and tell me how to do my job. The thing was, inside the industry, the house my dad published with was getting to be kind of a joke. My dad would only let them publish old-fashioned western novels about cowboys. He was convinced these were the only books worth writing, and the only ones anyone who was worth anything really wanted to read. One time I tried to explain to my dad that times were changing, that the world wasn't the way he remembered it being, but my dad never listened to anybody.

secret show

I had made plans months ago to see this show with some friends. It was somewhere in the Midwest, and I was staying with this girl I'd met a few times but whose name I had forgotten on the trip over. Luckily, she had no idea who I was, either. After dumping my stuff at this mystery girl's house, I headed down to the river, where one of my friends was supposed to arrive by submarine. The sub let people out inside a top-secret government compound and then bussed them out to the entrance. Several people threatened me with machine guns when I tried to walk in. So I waited for my friend and then we walked back to the house along the river. The trees on the banks had petrified animals hanging from the branches---frozen white frogs and squirrels. We knew the monster from The Host was swimming alongside us in the river, but we tried to act natural.

Back at the house, the parents of the girl I was staying with were throwing a raging party in the backyard. There were bonfires among the cornstalks. Maybe this was not a safe thing to do. I don't know, I didn't see a lot of corn growing up. I overheard someone saying, "Oh my god, Winona Ryder is here!" But I never saw her. It turned out this was the show we were all in town to see, which was convenient for me because I didn't need to find a ride home afterward.

At some point during the night, I wandered into the basement. It was the same as the basement at my parents' house, minus all the piles of Christmas ornaments and old ski equipment. Instead, there was a girl sitting alone at a desk under an exposed lightbulb. I knew she was the sister of the girl who let me stay there, but I didn't know her name, either. She talked to me but she didn't make any sense, so I went back upstairs and rejoined the party.