I have my prolific years, I have my stagnant ones. After just how much I wrote in 2016 I figured this year would be stagnant, and yeah, it was about what I was expecting. A look back at 2017 and notes on what I wrote.
Royal Pains: The idea of telling the events of Slayers Expecting from Zel and Amelia’s POV had been at the back of my mind for a while, and it grew more and more persistent until I finally started writing it. It gave me some avenues to explore some of the things I wanted to with the characters, such as Amelia’s rather black and white view of the world and how she makes sense of her mother’s murder with such a mindset. That said I did lose interest towards the end. Zel/Amelia just doesn’t do it for me.
While I did not set out to do this, somewhere along the way I realized my depiction of their marriage resembled the model laid out by Dr David Schnarch in Passionate Marriage. It’s been awhile since I read it, but basically issues arise in a marriage, fights emerge, and the marriage can either end, the fights continue, or one person can change something within their control that the other person has to adjust to. The example he used in the book was him and his wife fighting over whether to have a baby. His wife wanted one, he didn’t. Eventually she decided she was going to stop taking birth control. He could either wear a condom or go without sex. He says he was mad initially but it forced him to confront his anxieties and they agreed to have a baby. My own example would be telling my husband (then boyfriend) that I’m simply not a Catholic and would not be going to mass with him anymore. He was free to go without me, but I have better things to do with my time.
Therapeutically, I’m a Gottman and Gottman girl when working with couples. I found Schnarch’s concepts intriguing and accurate but not for much practical use, though, I guess they stuck in my mind because I do see so much truth in it with how relationships grow through the years. At anyrate, once I realized it was creeping in I built on it a bit.
Rosalinda Franks was a subtle illusion to Rosalyn Franklin, whose contributions to the discovery of DNA went unacknowledged until recently.
While doing my practicum I worked at a children’s hospital and saw too much about what happens to children who are adopted and seen the result of custody battles, which influenced how I handled the situation with Bennie.
The idea of Gourry having an infertile uncle was thanks to the musical, Hamilton. I started reading up more about the people surrounding the American Revolution, and learned that George Washington was likely infertile. Martha Washington had children from a previous marriage and was still young enough to have more, but never did with George Washington, and while he had a few “adopted” children, he never did have children of his own even though he wanted them. I was going to name Gourry’s great uncle George, but I have some weird associations with that name stemming from childhood and I just couldn’t do it (and not even in a someone named George was mean to me way, just ways that make the name a complete joke but people who weren’t there wouldn’t understand type way).
The Storm: I had the idea for the prologue shortly after I finished Beneath the Portrait, but I did not want to follow through and write it. For one thing I knew it would be long, for another Beneath the Portrait wasn’t terribly popular, and its prequel, Jealousy, even less so. So I was surprised by the amount of positive reaction I got from this one when, for lack of any better ideas, I went ahead and started to write it, and it goes to show I’m not as impervious to feedback as I like to think I am.
The other things that surprised me was that everyone who commented with the exception of one (who didn’t say anything either way) expressed support for Zel and Attie getting together. I was honestly going to have them go their separate ways, mainly because I didn’t want a pairing Zel with an OC trope. However, since most people commented in favor of it I went ahead and developed it. Not sure if it’s a sign of how the fandom has matured, just understanding that people who we are with when we are young aren’t necessarily who we are going to be with when we are old, or if the idea of Zel becoming involved with one of Lina and Gourry’s daughters and having Lina as an MIL amused people. But there you have it.
In the final Slayers novel, I was struck by how forcefully Lina drew a comparison between Luke and Rubia, with Luke being someone who gets stuck in his rage and is described as having a shard of hatred in him, and Rubia described as having a shard of sadness but that she moves on. In the novels, it is also worthy to note that Luke and Rubia are two of three characters described as having red hair. Of course, Rezo doesn’t, but something about the parallels being drawn made me wonder if Rubia also had a shard of Shabranigdu.
My own parents are one of those golden couples, very well suited to each other and still passionate about each other even though they have been married for decades and they set that marriage bar unnervingly high. Once someone I was working with had started dating someone who had children and she was nervous about meeting them, and she asked me what I would think if my dad brought her home after a date, and I just gawked at the thought of my dad with anyone other than my mom. Which informed the scene where Min and Orion learned that Syphiel had feelings for their father.
All Apologies Not much to say, other than writing this fic gave me an excuse to thumb through the novels. I also don’t do this often, the only other time I can remember doing this is Desolation, but it allowed me to play around with the surrealness of dreams and the weird things people say in dreams (and I love surrealism. Vincent Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo are my two favorite painters). I kept referencing the Buffy episode Restless, really the best depiction of the strangeness of dreams by a long shot, as well as paying attention to how scenes morph and change in my own dreams.
Unrequited? Luke was a difficult character for me to write. Milina is easier for me to get a read on, even though we know the least about her of all the characters. But I finally got a hand hold when I thought of working with a men’s substance use group during my internship and finding a bunch of little boys who were real vulnerable and desperate for affection behind the scary prison ink tattoos, piercings, and sheer ridiculousness of their behavior at times, not to mention their criminal history. From what little we know of Luke you get the sense he had a hard life and was engaged in some shady dealings, like a lot of the men I worked with. But beneath hardened exteriors are vulnerable people describe for love and validation.
Naga’s Story I’ve noticed that women in their mid-30s reach a disillusionment point where they realize that they are tired of their niceness being taken advantage of and then used to steamroller them, and then a period of rage starts. Well, I’m 2 years into that rage, and an incident that happened while on vacation where I was more aggressive (not violent, but yelling, and I’m not a yeller) in response than I ever would have been in the past sparked this. Originally I had a sort of nice girl turns bad thing in mind, but it never really worked out well when I started writing it.
Part of it is I am not like Naga at all. So my work with people with substance use disorders really informed this. I had some people note that Naga’s alcoholism started before her mother’s assassination, and from getting the life history of addicts, usually they start experimenting with drugs and alcohol rather young and it’s very recreational, but then a trauma happens and they start using it to cope (unless it’s one of those extremely tragic cases where they trauma starts as a young child).
So what started as something to quell social anxiety spiraled out of control in the aftermath of trauma.
The other thing was deciding on whether to refer to her as Naga or Gracia. I’d thought about having her as Gracia until she changed into her outfit to signal the transition, but it felt too much like writing an original character when I did that, so I went with Naga because it was more familiar.
And while I never went out and stated it, I decided to portray Naga as asexual. Considering how sexualized she is I thought it would be interesting if she wasn’t interested in having sex.
This is also one where the explanations for why Naga’s mother was assassinated gave me headaches, because it doesn’t make sense. Supposedly Naga’s mother was mistaken for Naga and Naga was targeted because she was in line for the thrown, but since women in Seyruun can’t inherit the throne…
So I eventually decided to use it to make it muddy as to who did kill her mother and why. If you read enough true crime stuff, especially stuff before modern forensic techniques, it can be hard to say for sure who committed a murder and there’s often an uncomfortable amount of room for doubt. Hence why we have the Innocence Project in the US.
Figuring out the type of relationship everyone had with each other was an interesting challenge because we never see Naga interact with anyone from Seyruun, aside from her time as Nama, which leads to the impression that she wasn’t as close to her father as Amelia. Considering that after trauma people tend to cling to surroundings and people that are familiar, the fact that Naga left, it would indicate that she did not trust her family or feel safe around them. In the novels you get the sense that Amelia is real paranoid and guarded in Seyruun, not something that translates over to the anime so much, but I took those traits and developed them in Naga.
Slayers, Neverending For this one I’m just experimenting with an on going day to day in the happily ever after life of our heroes type thing. So when it says “neverending” in the title…
While reading the Slayers novels, there’s one that features a pair of sisters, the younger one went off in the world while the older one stayed home and got married, and the parallels made me wonder if Luna did choose a domestic life, as opposed to the spinster I typically portray her as. So I decided to give Luna a family of her own in this work, though I keep finding I like her better as a spinster, lol.
Considering how often Lina has saved the world and how she seems to get so little credit for it, I wanted to see her get some acknowledgement, add to the fact that I am mad as hell at how women have to work three times as hard and still get so little credit…So yeah. Lina gets her day in the sun. I loved writing that.
I also decided to torment her with a MIL from hell, because so often while dealing with my own in-laws I think about how wonderful it would be to not have to deal with them. That idea was kicking around for a while and went through several false starts. The trick was to make Lina’s MIL a different kind of difficult than my MIL (so no, Guloisa is not like my MIL) and to not worry about a tidy resolution because life does not always hand those out.
Anyway, I have some ideas for where this is going to go, though it’s often when I finish with one chapter that the next materializes in my brain. At anyrate, Neverending is the only for sure thing on the menu for 2018.
Speaking of 2018…I don’t know ya’ll. I know I go through this from time to time but I really think I’m running out of ideas and ways to keep things fresh and new. Given I have said this before and wells of creativity suddenly spring forth, I could be wrong. But I also think I’ve done about as much with this as I can and right now it looks like some new people are entering into this who are fresh and have some new ideas so it would be good to step back. I plan to keep going with Neverending though I’m not terribly inspired. I have two other ideas I’ve talked about a little bit I may pursue if I become inspired. I may also try to work on some original stuff again.
It’s also hard to separate whether I’m tired of writing because I am a do it all mom and am tired of everything or tired of writing for Slayers specifically. And when I mean do it all, I mean I take care of my kids, I work at home and I have evening office hours, and I homeschool, so I do it all. On the one hand writing keeps me sane, on the other I have very little time now. The bright spot is I may have finally found a school I trust with my son (he’s autistic, and finding a place that doesn’t treat him as an inconvenience has been aggravatingly difficult, and I have been let down so often here I’m worried it will go wrong again), but if it works that will help a lot. Especially when my daughter gets old enough for school. So hopefully it will work and that will free up a lot of my time and hopefully I won’t feel so stretched thin and exhausted and will feel excited about something I am writing again.
I have not done anything interesting since 2017 and that's okay. I can write a letter to 2017 asking what I want out of this year and keep it until the end and tell myself what happened.
