#BehindTheScenes 72 - The Unloved After All
It's not just the autumn season that left me drifting with plenty of colors. It's also the time when I discovered the truth, harvested the results and applied myself to a new life as the spring unfolded. My writing had come to a new season, and it was not letting up anytime soon. If you need an update on what I am talking about, don't read this yet. You can check out parts one, two and three first.
Scribe Jeeves and I entered 2015 exhausted. We had been on our own for three years. We had a small community and jobs at a call center, working for Comcast Movers Edge. Our son, Calvin was nearly four years old. He had some developmental problems and we thought he was autistic. On top of that, for the past two years, we had driving back and forth between Maine and Connecticut, all for funerals.
It was time to talk about our futures...and my writing.
In early spring 2015, I was still writing fan fiction. But my world was changing. Many elderly relations had passed and family members who were caretakers needed help. Suddenly, I saw myself in a sandwich situation. I was in my mid-twenties at that point. I had a young son with developmental delays and aging parents, one of them disabled.
And that was what my writing so bittersweet - the ache of having your own life and the obligation to your family and both are tugging at you. There was also the hatred I still carried from 2012. Almost everyone in my family despised Scribe Jeeves. They never thought he was good enough and was lazy and using me. My parents were the most vocal about it.
And it was true in some ways. But we both used each other at that point, each of us balancing that fine line between sanity and complete breakdown. There was no break and no advice from another. It was just us.
The biggest thing Scribe Jeeves and I agreed to was being better than our parents and to give our son a better world than what we lived through, being children of the late Cold War. And in my fan fiction, that translated to relationships with a man with emotional instability, protection of children and the coming-of-age of women who endured trauma early on and constantly. It also translated to settings that were dystopian and dangerous.
There was another idea I came up with: peace of mind. It's not just a Boston song. It was a state of being. It was retirement in a way, raising children or maybe choosing different adventures, such as improving myself in some career choice or art.
In my heart, that was what I wanted. On my second year of school online and working for the call center, I tried to focus on what was important. And sometimes, talking to my father helped me to realign everything. Despite not agreeing to everything he said and paying him lip service, I was devoted to Scribe Jeeves. Through the ups and downs (mostly the arguments), Scribe Jeeves had guided me away from addiction and total dysfunction and we had the same goals for our son. To me, that was love.
Or, was it?
As we began to pack our things to return to Connecticut, Scribe Jeeves and I made plans. We had reached the point in our relationship where we were beginning to wonder if we were meant to be married. I was still on the fence in 2015, but I leaned towards it because I truly loved him. It did not matter how much money we had because we had dealt with him being homeless. We had each other and Calvin, and that was what mattered the most.
I never questioned this loyalty. What I felt like was an imposter. I was a mother and a girlfriend. Yet, I felt like I was still the daughter under my parents' roof. I wanted them so badly to see the good I did in my life, all without them. I wanted them so badly to see us as a family and to stop excluding Scribe Jeeves.
And that was when the concept of imperfect parents came from.
It was the yearning for what was supposed to be - no parentified children through trauma. Yet, fan fiction stories of mine told about the irresponsible wistfully aching to be part of that peace of mind colored my life. I did not know how to get there. I just knew that I had to do better.
From May-August 2015, we lived with my grandmother, helping her out. Then, we moved into an apartment downstairs from one of my mother's cousins, who needed desperate help. For the next three
years, the stress was blinding and it was all we saw. From nonstop drama upstairs (because that cousin was a dry drunk) to endless fights with Scribe Jeeves about my workload, my writing had turned into an outlet limited and often shut off.
In October 2015, I picked up the job at the bank call center. While Scribe Jeeves was being blackballed by a former employer, he was still actively trying to find work. But I was also organizing everything else in my life - chores, school, our son, mental work loads and the cousin upstairs. Writing was a distant dream and I picked at my fan fiction, unsure of what to do and where to go next.
In 2017, after finishing what I called a fan fiction "magnum opus" to my friend of fan fiction, my thoughts drifted back to the publishing world. For the moment, no agents were interested in ideas and wanted full manuscripts. There were what I learned was hybrid publishing, where you pay for company to market and the sales make up the difference.
Life picked up and writing again became a distant dream. Between 2017-2019, I scarely wrote much. Scribe Jeeves and I married and I bought a house (where we live now). I graduated from college in 2019 finally, but without the degree I wanted. Calvin needed more help because of his autism and I stepped up my efforts to help him.
And there, waiting for me, was the self-publishing world.
As I skimmed through life, I saw many options were open to me. As I eeked my way through fan fiction writing, I peeked into the world of independent authors. Without much support in any department (especially financial), I took the plunge and decided on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. Many people I know order from Amazon, and I had the chance to get copies for myself to sell at shows.
From there, my publishing career began.
A World So Bright and Dark was mostly written and had been since I was in high school. That was to be my first book. It had some corrections and the names and places I wanted to change. From those scraps, I started a new document, split it into five parts, and published in October 2019.
But those imposter feelings never faded. It was especially bad when I knew nothing about the industry and was equally frustrated with the people I thought would help. In between calls at work, I was browsing for ideas. I wrote down names of bookstores looking for authors for events. Tried publishing with Barnes & Noble (with disastrous results). Made email and phone call inquiries for consignment.
It all felt useless. The book flopped. There were no reviews and my husband was tired of telling people about it. He said to try another genre maybe. At the time, I thought a switch to historical fiction was in order. But then, another story tugged at me.
It was the story I wrote while working at the call center in Maine.
It had kings and queens and sad backstories that always ended with happily-ever-after. It might also be in the market. I knew many loved fantasy and adventure novels, and this tale seemed to tick all the boxes I needed. By the end of 2019, I abandoned all projects for the new novel, which I titled Casting Shadows.
I was very familiar with historical European royalty and could capture the relationship between the classes well enough. But underneath all the glitter and power laid the truth behind the masks: fighting sisters, loyalty to family and the simple urge to find love, no matter where. It was hope and fearlessness, wrapped with some experience. It was also the idea of the unloved being in charge of their destinies.
I hammered away at it between calls. I emailed it back and forth between home and work. By the early spring of 2020, I knew that I had a different world developing...and it would need a sequel. The story was becoming too long, and the characters became close to me.
But then, the news of the COVID-19 pandemic came to Connecticut...
Next time on #BehindTheScenes (in two weeks), I will talk about the pandemic and how it shaped my writing. I also began to see similarities in my writing to real life, and the truth about how the unconscious became the conscious. Next week, I'll feature #TriviaTuesday where I present three persons, places, things, ideas, etc., and connect it back to my books.
Namaste!
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