Back on top in June: Carolyn & Dorothy

The circumstances that led to the writing of Come this here July were as follows:

1) A friend suggested we do a prompt writing challenge. This may not sound too strange from someone who was both in fandom and wrote fanfiction, but I remind you that when I was writing in fandom, I never did anything like that. I was not a “participator” in “community events”. I took prompts back in my Wangxian days like… once. On Twitter. I never did challenges or charity writing or was even good at engaging with anyone else’s writing. I just wrote what I wanted in my little corner and never got any better at the community aspect of fandom. Are alignment charts still a meme? It was very true neutral of me. I think. I never fully understand those.

Also, the prompt that we (the prompt generator) generated was sci-fi. A genre I am both familiar with and also not familiar with at all. Of my own volition, I’ve seen some Star Trek and, not of my own volition, Star Wars. I’ve seen a handful of sci-fi shows like The X-Files and Fringe and a lot of Doctor Who, all in another life when I still watched TV. Supernatural always got classified under sci-fi/fantasy, too, which was hilarious. I haven’t read a lot of sci-fi, though. I’ve lightly dipped my toe in writing it. Technically, I did a treatment for a sci-fi show years ago that I dubbed “Firefly with lesbians”, and even wrote the first two episodes. Haven’t looked at them since then. They’re probably not very good. But the dream was there.

I also didn’t really follow the rest of the prompt at all. We included three words to help shape it, none of which I used, or even remember. I think “copyright” was one, which is immediately great fodder for a sci-fi story, but my bullish sense of Actually I’m Going To Do It My Way kicked in and I didn’t do any of that. Calling Come this here July sci-fi is pretty bold of me. I mean, it is sci-fi. But barely. Little itty bitty squeaky mouse-voice kind of just-slides-in-right-at-the-back type sci-fi.

2) Back in the fall, I read Frog Music by Emma Donoghue and got my feelings hurt.

If you’ve read Frog Music, you will see its DNA in the much less good, polished, and professional Come this here July.

If you haven’t read Frog Music, that’s fine. It’s not Frog Music fanfiction. Just inspired by it. Distant, distant cousins who aren’t blood related, and could legally get married, if Frog Music would ever be willing to lower its standards.

3) I am a big fan of the Fallout (video game) universe. Similar to Fallout, July was originally intended to contain more ray guns and Jetsons-style nuclear-powered cars and Jell-o molds. I listened to a lot of Dean Martin (and, per the title, Frank Sinatra) to keep the mood appropriate. However, because I’m me and I like to write about lesbians homesteading in the woods, that made it a little more difficult to incorporate the incongruously cheerful midcentury Americana (Canadiana) retro-futurism that makes Fallout so unique. I think there’s still a bit of a love letter to Fallout in there, somewhere. You just have to dig a little.

4) My unfortunate brain chemistry. July is about suicide! Probably best to keep the intricacies of my personal connection to that point to a minimum, so I’ll leave it at this: Come this here July ended up being much more than the “Here’s a lark, let’s do a writing prompt challenge together” that I expected. All on my own terms, by the way. I brought this all on myself, ignored the majority of the prompts, and the max word count was supposed to be 15k. Foiled once again by my Actually-I’m-Going-To-Do-It-My-Way-itis.

So, those are my extenuating circumstances that lead to what I think is a very strange, interesting, and endearing (to me) novella. It was a challenging writing exercise, but ultimately rewarding. Some further points of potential interest:

July gave me the opportunity to give into one of my worst instincts as a writer: getting too big for my britches and fucking around with prose in stupid, stupid ways. However, I will defend myself on this point. The schmaltzy, hokey prose only started stupid. The deeper I got into the story and realized it was about something as mawkish and overzealous as being near comically suicidal, the more I realized the prose needed to meet it where it was at. A deep, sad, morose, somber meditation on a character who desperately wants to kill herself, tonally, does not work for me. It’s boring and sad for no reason other than to be boring and sad. Or to stoically romanticize it. I decided my deeply suicidal character was going to have some pep in her step, and by God, I think Carolyn did. Does! She’s definitely probably most likely for sure still alive. Totally. If nothing else, Dorothy is very good at making honey-do and honey-do-me lists.

When you’re someone who has been on the internet for a long time, it feels like formless, arbitrary mental illness is a lifelong condition. However, in the real world, it’s the opposite. Depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and the like are seen as bumps in the road, not just roads. They are temporary afflictions, often brought on by external circumstances. Maybe the literature is changing now to reflect the tidal wave of formless, arbitrary sadness that appears to plague us all. Or maybe I’m right on the money, and in the offline world, depression is solved with a few months of pills, and then you’re back to business as usual. Leave that to the so-called experts, I suppose.

That being said, I have written a lot of characters who struggle with formless, arbitrary mental illness. It’s an incredibly difficult and interesting topic to write about, because from a clinical, writerly toolkit standpoint, it’s not a very good topic to write about at all. Losing the depression coin toss is not an actionable item. It’s not something that can be resolved— not the way I write it, anyway. Sad, depressed characters are not particularly motivated, which makes moving plots forward challenging. Many of the ways I’ve written around this have been in the form of characters who try very hard to mask their feelings, and as such, overcompensate for their empty insides.

I’ve written before about my complex relationship to high-emotion writing and how eventually, it becomes a bit of a cry wolf situation. I thought of the goofy prose in July acting as sugar would in a pasta sauce— cut the acidity a little, bring balance to the dish. Obviously, I’m biased, but I think it worked. Otherwise, it would have been a miserable reading and writing experience if I had approached it with all due solemnity (think papal conclave), despite the fact that suicide/being suicidal is, y’know, quite a serious problem that should be taken seriously.

I also think Dorothy being so deeply flawed in her response to Carolyn’s miserable guts really helped keep things grounded. A lot of the time, the person on the receiving end of their partner’s mental illness in fanfiction ends up being entirely self-sacrificing, perfect feelings-receptacles who huggle the sadness out of the protagonist with the power of love. Dorothy resenting and maybe even hating Carolyn a little for being suicidal is such a nasty and tantalizing character trait to engage with. I was especially enamored with that, paired with the pulling-teeth nature of how Dorothy looked after Carolyn when she was recovering from her suicide attempt. Dorothy is extremely in love with Carolyn, and the fact that her bad personality fights her on it every step of the way is just a bit delightful, unfortunately.

I am pleased with how complex Carolyn and Dorothy’s relationship ended up being, especially for something novella-length. Also, writing their dialogue was very fun. I had quite an enjoyable time crafting Dorothy’s insults. Something I feel I’ve held onto since I first started writing not only novel-length works, but novel-length works I think aren’t half-bad, is that the characters have to be on somewhat equal footing. It’s not so much that they have to be the same amount of nice to each other, but that they have to be the same amount of cruel, which sounds a bit absurd, but I think it holds water. Hear me out: at the beginning, your sympathies lie almost fully with Carolyn, right? Here’s a fun-loving dyke, flirting, joking, and clowning around a bit to try to soften Dorothy up and help her let loose a little, and in return, Dorothy’s a big old jerk. Yes, it’s part of their courting ritual, but still, a jerk is a jerk. More than that, she occasionally ups her jerkery to real asshole territory and says some pretty nasty things to Carolyn. Or just straight up slaps her. However, once Carolyn’s suicidal inclinations become clearer, and starts putting the screws to Dorothy, and also, oh yeah, Dorothy helps her run away after committing a murder, Carolyn’s high ground starts getting a little shaky. In the end, as far as the narrative is concerned, Dorothy’s coldness and cruelty is balanced out by Carolyn’s realization that her being suicidal is, in its own way, deeply cruel. It’s kind of cathartic. In an uncomfortable way. Balance equals stability. Sugar in the pasta sauce.

The first time I really caught myself on the balance aspect was when I was writing Dean Winchester Beat Sheet six years ago now (yikes!), and I needed a way to “even out” Castiel’s big betrayal at the climax (if you can believe it, the love interest was working with the bad guys the whole time!). And the thing was, Dean didn’t need to do a big climactic betrayal right back to return them to equal footing. Despite being the “better person” of the two of them, there were small moments of unintentional cruelty from Dean dotted throughout the story up to that point by refusing to acknowledge his feelings for Cas and his struggles with his sexual orientation. It’s not the same type of cruelty as Cas’ Act 3 Betrayal, and it doesn’t have to be, as far as I’m concerned. Cruelty looks different person-to-person, story-to-story. Distilled down, my argument is simply that one character cannot be 100% wronged and the other character cannot be 100% the wrongdoer. You can see it in my Wangxian fanfiction as well, and Wangxian are actually a great case study in this principle, as the cruelties they visit upon each other, both in the source material and my derivatives, were quite specific to their characters and dynamic. It was there in Don’t Worry About It, too. Wren could be quite a cruel person, but Ashley, similar to Dean in Beat Sheet, actually, had her cruel (sometimes on purpose, sometimes not) and closeted moments as well.

I hate the structure of July. I hate the NOW - THEN - NOW - THEN - NOW story structure. Hate it in movies, TV, novels, all mediums. However, I understand why it’s so ubiquitous. It allows for expedient storytelling, and also feels a lot less abrupt than it would have had I written this chronologically, my preferred way to construct timelines. The first original work I posted on ao3, baby, give me it, also follows that structure, also because it is short and I needed to get readers on board quickly. A few of my lesbian Wagnxian fics are guilty of this for the same reason. It’s just a bit lazy. My meager defense in July’s case is that it helped frame the murder of William May in such a way that it wasn’t a huge deal to the current narrative, while also still being an incredibly significant plot point/event. I will also say, chronological vs NOW/THEN gets sticky when you consider a chronological timeline with a lot of flashbacks, and I don’t necessarily mean the overbearing italics, but even a paragraph every few pages reminiscing on past events. When does that line start to blur? Either way, it is very likely that were I constructing July as a full length novel, the timeline would have been almost strictly chronological (which is a bit of a headspin, because at first blush, I have NO idea where I would start the story, but the good news is I’m NOT writing it as a full length novel, so, crisis averted).

When I was younger, I wanted to be one of those people who was into old-timey movies and that artsy-grungy-hipster black-and-white-is-better schtick, but it just never schtuck. The problem with old movies is that they’re like, pretty boring. But what I did love about them and wanted to carry over into Come this here July was that electrifying rat-a-tat-tat banter, both in the prose and dialogue, that we don’t see much today. Basically, I wanted to cannibalize the Transatlantic accent and its associated patter, run it through the meat grinder of gritty humanity-is-fucked sci-fi, and spit it out in the laps of two very difficult women who had the misfortune of falling in love with each other. Or fortune. Maybe just for one of them. Maybe depends on the day.

I’ve been victim to my own tiresomely cheeky prose before (there are a few serious offenders from my Supernatural days, and hey, just look at pretty much any post on this blog), but at least in July’s case, it’s semi-warranted. I’ve also grown a lot as a writer since then (no excuses for my current blog), and have expanded my repertoire beyond “look at how many pop culture references I can jam into one story”. Bit of a sidebar: an easy but still quite successful swap for external pop culture references in your work is just… internal references. Doesn’t matter if it’s a real world or fantasy setting, keep your references contained within the borders of your fictional world, and it will feel tighter, more cohesive, and less like the author is constantly elbowing you in the ribs, wiggling her eyebrows, and saying, “Get it? You get it? Funny, right?”

I love Carolyn and I love Dorothy and I love their story. However, I am not sure I could have spent any more time than I already had in their world. In a way, this was a completely boilerplate entry in my bibliography; difficult women in the woods making it work with no one else to cling to but each other, pastoral-leaning (this time with chamber pots), feminist talking points that everyone hates, and “Canadiana” that no one outside of this country’s borders would ever care about, and most people within them would look at me like I had two heads for thinking #bellletstalk is kind of fucked. Though I do think “New Trono” is very funny, thank you so very much to that one commenter who wanted me to write something set in Ontario. Somehow, I don’t think this is what you had in mind. I guess it’s more like Ontario 2.

On the other hand, less boilerplate was spending that much time with a character who can’t wait to kill herself. Lots of my characters are suicidal, and some have even attempted to kill themselves, but Carolyn’s mouthwatering anticipation of her own demise was new to me, and a little… emotionally taxing, to put it lightly. Despite the goofiness! Despite the bastardized Transatlantic accents! If you can believe such a thing!

If you have been following my yellow void exploits at all over the past few months, you may be wondering, hey, weren’t you (me, I) in the middle of editing your (mine, my) second novel? Yes. I created my document for Come this here July on January 21st and finished it on February 13th. That might sound impressive, but I would actually consider it a bit alarming, considering I also work full time. Anyway, I was intrigued by the prompt idea, and a (second) clean palate never hurt anyone during the editing process, and boy, howdy, did Carolyn and Dorothy give me something to momentarily sink my teeth into.

And now, I am admittedly pretty glad to be unsinking my teeth from them. Between them, they have plenty of teeth. My interference is no longer necessary.

Notes:

• Come this here July is available on my ko-fi as a PDF ebook, with the same pay-what-you-want-for-the-sick-cover structure as Don’t Worry About It.

• Also, Rat on a Horse PDF ebook coming soon because I absolutely refuse to give up my chance to use a line of little digital rats in place of the usual three asterisk section break.

• I’m working on epubs. No promises. They’re finicky.