She is Risen

Actually, this post could more accurately be titled, “The Perils of Hyping a Project That Is Still A Work In Progress.” 

Were I rigid planner, the structure and trajectory of “Baby Girl” and “She Is Risen” would have been set in stone months ago and my day to day task would merely involved cushioning the bones of a story with the type of warm meat that would make it a living thing.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way I do things.  I’m an inexperienced writer with an intuitive sense of structure and rhythm (which is a fancy way of saying that I have no idea what I’m doing) and in the interest of making things interesting for myself (and prospective audiences), I tend to come up with ideas that are perhaps a little bit beyond my skill range to write.

Oh, and I’m a male.  If you’re simply reading this blog on WordPress, that’s never been made explicit and if you’re approaching this through MySpace then it’s flat out misleading since I have the project’s gender as “female” which means that most people will assume that the writer is female.  To be fair, my obvious alter ego in the story (my “Mary Sue” if you will) is a female character so I figured that my attempt to write in literary drag would be enough of a rationalization to lead folks to believe that I am a woman.  All I’m really doing is asking the world to enable my gender fluid delusion without actually having to physically dress as a woman and pretend that I was born as anything other than what I clearly am.

So, there.

The fact of my gender is one of the reasons that I want for there to be an all-female anthology volume as part of this story.  In my initial pitch (and quite frankly, the concept that seems to have fully engaged the support of the good friend and lovely Appalachian woman who is producing and acting as editor on this project), “Baby Girl” would develop into a story in which mankind evolves into a matriarchal species and women suddenly find themselves as the dominant gender in this world.   Quite frankly, I don’t feel qualified to write this concept and if I do, I’m sure it will be interpreted as an expression of my dysfunctional (and possibly misogynistic) relationship with women.

So, there.

Back at the ranch, you would expect to find my hard at work building a house from which this project will emanate, but the reality is that I just keep staring and the cornerstone and occasionally heft it.

So, what’s happening?  What the hell is this thing anyway?

Well, the original inspiration was discussed in the very first blog so I won’t go overboard reiterating it.  It started out as an idea for a kind of adult themed Supergirl story based on a dream that I had eight years ago.  I dropped the idea because I knew that DC comics and their titanic multinational corporate overlords would never allow me to do a story in which Supergirl swears, has sex and gets high.  Since I was (and continue to be) a lazy writer, I ignored the obvious path of writing this as an original story with no overt connection to the world of Superman and Supergirl.

Last spring, I had a renewed interest in trying to do this story again as a way of writing something quick, fun, shallow and sexy.  I could take all of the basic themes that I enjoy and steamroll them through a quick, hopefully fun pulp story as a way of recharging my batteries and actually getting something written since all of my oh-so-personal epic works of art just flat out defy my attempts to wrap my head around them.  Even the title “Baby Girl” was intended to be a way of liberating myself from being so damned serious all of the time.

(Un?)fortunately, the drive to dive into “Baby Girl” was immediately followed by the end of a romantic relationship (and the immediate beginning of another one, but we’ll get to that another time) so the story quickly became a way of dealing with that break-up hence my shallow sex, drug and superheroine story suddenly became another personal epic that is both intoxicating to sit down to and, for the longest time, more emotionally exhausting than fun to write.  I’ve been able to partially dilute this by convoluting the story into the type of shifting identity puzzle that I seem to love in the work of others.  Instead of a relatively simple revolving door of three (or more) first person accounts, I’ve decided to blur all three (or more) perspectives together into the same narrative and essentially giving myself license to change the rules based on who the dominant character is at any given moment.  A simple graph would clarify the shifts in the story and which character’s have the most influence on what you’re reading, but there won’t be a graph within the text.  I’m going to have to hope that I’m a good enough writer (or a disciplined enough self editor) to make it work.

Am I skilled enough to pull this off?  I have no idea, but I suspect that the answer is probably no.  As an underachieving reader and an undisciplined writer, I’m trying to change the rules in a medium that I have no educated grasp or mastery of.   To further complicate things, I keep changing my mind about what the tone and nature of the story actually is.

Last summer, this story was clearly intended to act as my own dreamlike, surreal speculation on the new relationship that my ex’ is enjoying with her new significant other, through her testimony, is too good to be true in a bigger than life way.  That element still exists, but for as unconventional as my handling of that romantic relationship is, I’ve worked so hard to canonize it that I’ve rendered it as shallow.  It’s a romance that I’ve tried to imagine as literally living up to the type of ecstasy that occurs in the minds of two people who are very much enfatuated with one another.  It’s a nice idea in theory, but I find myself choking the spontaneity out of it.  For all of the quirkiness that exists between those characters, they come off as cartoonishly wise and perfect which makes them less interesting and sympathetic than I want them to be.

The most complicated character in the story is the one I’ve always envisioned as being the antagonist.  Of course, she’s my alter ego in the story so she has unsurprisingly come to dominate the project.  Were I a stronger writer, I could probably flip the dynamic between her role and the role of our mythological lovers but that would also be dishonest.  As it stands, Anna dominates “Baby Girl” and that’s probably as it should be.  She sort of wandered into this story from a story idea that I literally dreamt up 13 years ago and then abandoned.  Now, she’s essentially a kind of Salieri figure, narrating the story of two heroes from the position of jealousy and an awareness of her own relative mediocrity.

But even her story has changed and taken a kind of salacious turn.  Several years ago, I decided that I could probably break out of my writer’s block by indulging in the one thing that never failed to hold my attention:  sex.  So, the plan was to break my writing fast by cranking out an erotic story (which is a nice way of saying that I was going to write pornographic fiction).  I had a basic idea that was kind of a twist on EYES WIDE SHUT that would find two co-ed roommates dealing with their unconsummated frustration by going out and essentially wandering through a series of increasingly unlikely sexual scenarios.

I started writing this thing while waiting around at the Motor Vehicles Administration (MVA in Maryland and the Department of Motor Vehicles or DMV everywhere else).  That seemed like the perfect situation in which to write some porn so I whipped out my composition book and got started.  True to form (and acting as an unintentional parallel to EYES WIDE SHUT), I never quite got around to writing anything overtly sexual.  The story fragment that I wrote ended up being more about the psychology of frustration and self repression.  Draw your own conclusions.

So, that didn’t quite turn out like I expected and yet that template has slowly crept into “Baby Girl.”  This raises the question of what kind of story I’m actually writing here.  Needless to say, if my story is brazenly pornographic, this will limit its appeal in a big way.  Should I even care?  Well, I do care seeing as I think I may have a story concept that would appeal to a wide range of people varying in age, gender and taste.  It was always going to be a strange story with an unconventional sexuality to it, but there was actually a time when I’d planned to tone down the overt sexuality in the interest of delivering a relatively accessible character story.

And I still may.  For the moment, the plan is to remain as true to my muse as I can so I will probably explore this decision to thoroughly eroticize “Baby Girl.”  And even if I do go through with this, keep in mind that it is only one draft and should I stick to this course, I’m not opposed to offering the story in two different forms, with a “clean version” (oh, how I hate implications of that phrase) offering a distinct enough alternative that fans of one version would be able to find something rewarding and different in the other.  In fact, I foresee having a lot of fun writing a less graphic version of the story which acknowledges the sexuality of the story without overtly addressing it.

And as far as the screenplay version that I keep sitting down to every time my imagination skews cinematic over literary, I suspect that it will ultimately be a mash-up of both versions (with the option of skewing closer to the “clean version” if I find myself trying to reach a wider audience).

Do I have the ability to pull this off?  Hell, the only thing that’s really holding me back is my lazy work ethic.  If I plowed on through, I may wind up with an unholy mess but at least it will be mine.

And yours should you choose to accept it.