So, NaNoWriMo has come upon us again. I resolved earlier in the year that I would work on the sequel to The Deserter during every month but November and work instead on Wingspan. Wingspan is the briefly aforementioned retelling of Swan Lake.
Now, there are many different issues in this kind of story, most of them involving the practicalities of raising a teenage girl as a bird. I had a quite hilarious moment earlier in the week involving my imagination and rehearsing the ways in which you could tell the SPVM (Montreal Police) that you were accidentally in their country naked without any foul play going on.
But something I am now very aware of is the reason I don't really write romance. I skirted over it before because no matter how hard I tried, Michael and Ella didn't think of each other that way. Ella and Alex were adorable, but doomed to failure. In fact, I was thinking of something to write for a Halloween challenge in which we had to explore a type of scene that we'd never done before. I realized that I've never done a proper breakup. People usually get killed off or just go into hiding or, memorably, set fireballs on each other in a crowded subway.
I mostly steer around conventional (or unconventional) romance. It's not that I don't feel qualified. It has a lot to do with the fact that for me, romance is supposed to be a very personal and often very private thing. The reasons people fall in love aren't something you can really explain to others, no matter how much they have emerald orbs, heaving bosoms, rock-hard pecs, marble lips and all that crap. Romance doesn't consist of just those things.
So here I am writing a story in which it is required for the main character to fall in love. I was running through scenes in which she and her love interest converse and I started falling in like with him, but that didn't take me all the way to breaking a curse with this neverending love.
Last time I fell in love, it was a combination of finding someone to be my best friend, the way he held me in his arms even when we were standing in line for milkshakes, the wall map of Middle Earth that he got me to ask me to Homecoming, the conversations we had at this picnic bench south of campus.... You see where I'm going. It's too complicated to invent for fictional people!
