So, last night, I realized that Julie, the best friend of my main character, has her birthday on July 16. Don't ask me how this happened. I'm just letting my characters talk to me again and it so happened that Ella started talking to me about a memory of Julie's birthday party on July 16. So, out of curiosity, I went to a website to find out about her astrology. If you're curious, it's astrology-online.com.
So, here's what I found out about Cancers:
Emotional and loving
Intuitive and imaginative
Shrewd and cautious
Protective and sympathetic
Changeable and moody
Overemotional and touchy
Clinging and unable to let go
Much to my surprise, this is very Julie. Julie is very intuitive, shrewd, cautious, protective, sympathetic, but very overemotional at times and changeable. So I went to see the traits of some other characters.
Ella was born on September 2 and is therefore a Virgo. This means...
Modest and shy
Meticulous and reliable
Practical and diligent
Intelligent and analytical
Fussy and a worrier
Overcritical and harsh
Perfectionist and conservative
It's fun to see a description and be able to remember specific scenes that make her fit this description. Especially, the practical and diligent, intelligent and analytical and conservative.
So, next we come to Michael, the February 9 Aquarius:
Friendly and humanitarian
Honest and loyal
Original and inventive
Independent and intellectual
Intractable and contrary
Perverse and unpredictable
Unemotional and detached
Well, I don't know about perverse or unemotional, but loyal, original and inventive, independent and DEFINITELY contrary.
And finally, of the tetrarchy of main characters, we have Alex, May 17, the Taurus:
Patient and reliable
Warmhearted and loving
Persistent and determined
Placid and security loving
Jealous and possessive
Resentful and inflexible
Self-indulgent and greedy
Jealous/possessive/inflexible/patient/persistent? Not him at all! :P
So, all of these dates were picked without considering the astrology. I like them!
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Method to the madness
So, back in high school, my Ancient History teacher said that all brilliance had something to do with madness--the gods would give someone great talent and a little craziness to go along with it. I think I agree with this.
See, I'm a musician and a writer. Both require a kind of masochism. See, I ws listening to Murry Peraiha's recording of the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 21 and I was reflecting on all of the fantastic things about music and making music. There's this one part right before the cadenza that's the pianist doing passagework in parallel 10ths leading to scales, and then this beautiful, insane trill. I call that part of the piece my pipe dream. But really, the whole appeal for me in music is making something that's never been heard before. Really, musicianship is deeply personal because it reflects so much of your own personality. It's why I never get tired of hearing things played in concerts.
Writing is the same way. No matter the familiarity of a plotline or a type of character, it is something that has never been read before, experienced before. And, like music, the difficulty is in making it WORTH experiencing. That's where the craziness comes in.
I remember vividly my seating audition for my last year at the NEC orchestras. I walked in with my viola and Melba Sandberg, my conductor, turned to the other conductor holding the audition and said "This is Kathryn Olsen, one of our violists. You'll never know if you can expect something wonderful or ridiculous from her." Twice I've auditioned for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and gotten rejected. I've flubbed orchestra auditions. In my sophomore recital, I was 90% of the way through the Bach Double Concerto when I lost my place and almost botched the ending of the third movement. I've had great peer reviews, but I also have broken down in tears when told how bad my writing used to be.
So many things in life are only rewarding after a lot of humiliation. I'm sure that some time, I will have a reader or a friend or an agent or whatever tell someone else, "This is Kathryn Olsen, one of our writers. You'll never know if you can expect something wonderful or ridiculous from her." In music and in writing, my two greatest passions, a lot of humility and vulnerability is required. And you never know if it'll be personally worth it.
Like I said, genius requires a little bit of madness, so I must be Einstein.
See, I'm a musician and a writer. Both require a kind of masochism. See, I ws listening to Murry Peraiha's recording of the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 21 and I was reflecting on all of the fantastic things about music and making music. There's this one part right before the cadenza that's the pianist doing passagework in parallel 10ths leading to scales, and then this beautiful, insane trill. I call that part of the piece my pipe dream. But really, the whole appeal for me in music is making something that's never been heard before. Really, musicianship is deeply personal because it reflects so much of your own personality. It's why I never get tired of hearing things played in concerts.
Writing is the same way. No matter the familiarity of a plotline or a type of character, it is something that has never been read before, experienced before. And, like music, the difficulty is in making it WORTH experiencing. That's where the craziness comes in.
I remember vividly my seating audition for my last year at the NEC orchestras. I walked in with my viola and Melba Sandberg, my conductor, turned to the other conductor holding the audition and said "This is Kathryn Olsen, one of our violists. You'll never know if you can expect something wonderful or ridiculous from her." Twice I've auditioned for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and gotten rejected. I've flubbed orchestra auditions. In my sophomore recital, I was 90% of the way through the Bach Double Concerto when I lost my place and almost botched the ending of the third movement. I've had great peer reviews, but I also have broken down in tears when told how bad my writing used to be.
So many things in life are only rewarding after a lot of humiliation. I'm sure that some time, I will have a reader or a friend or an agent or whatever tell someone else, "This is Kathryn Olsen, one of our writers. You'll never know if you can expect something wonderful or ridiculous from her." In music and in writing, my two greatest passions, a lot of humility and vulnerability is required. And you never know if it'll be personally worth it.
Like I said, genius requires a little bit of madness, so I must be Einstein.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Me and my babies
I'm something of a Renaissance Woman. I have a lot of hobbies, a lot of skills. I play musical instruments, have a flair for foreign languages. I can steal a base and ballroom dance passably. My parents raised me in a suburb of culture-rich Boston and I say that I'm from Boston because when even when I wasn't at school, I was in rehearsals at New England Conservatory's youth orchestras. I have traveled the world and can both admire myself for being the unofficial tour guide when we visited places I'd only read about in Greece and laugh at myself for not having learned how to use chopsticks until four years after I went to Taiwan with VIP Strings. I draw well and appreciate fine fashion. I'd like to think that Jane Austen wouldn't always turn her nose up at me.
In spite of all this, I am a complete disaster when it comes to communication devices, yea, even normal electronics. No matter that I type 75 wpm and handwrite 15 wpm. I invariably kill everything from my cell phone to my laptop. The only exceptions are the following: the typewriter that I used for the last half of my time as a missionary because my handwriting was too small for President Bennett to read and my iPods.
Case in point. This morning, I saved the latest version of my novel onto the 4 GB flash drive that my friend gave me for Christmas. I have made this a habit because of my propensity for wrecking things. I then put my flash drive in the adorable little carrying case and put it in my backpack for safe keeping. I later packed up my laptop to bring to a friend's house. I never got around to using it while there, but left it out of the way on the couch where neither her mixed-lab nor her children nor her husband nor my friends could trample it underfoot.
So then I got home, ran choir practice, did the dishes and then decided to do some more writing. I pulled out the carrying case for my flash drive and promptly discovered that somehow, while out of the way of harm, it had been snapped. It is in a couple of pieces because part of the motherboard so to speak snapped off and then it broke in two as well.
Then I went to my computer and decided to turn it on. It would not respond to the power button. At all. It was clearly charging according to indicator lights, but I could not get it to work. I nearly cried because usually I'm not THIS disastrous! Yes, I have had a VCR that only worked when a fork was stuck into it and a laptop that turned off in protest every time the Indians scored in the 2007 ALCS vs. the Red Sox.
So, I left it to its own devices, but came back to nurse it (the laptop) back to health. It took a pencil eraser, removing the battery and re-placing it and several repositionings of the screen, but then the CD drive started clicking and flashing a happy little green light and then it just turned on.
So I am back in command of my semi-faithful laptop. Thank goodness!
In other notes, I thought I was done learning about dysfunctional boyfriends, but just found a new variety. I've decided that I've got a knack for dating Darwinian men--who are, as William Schwenk Gilbert put it, "though well-behaved...at best [are] only a monkey shaved."
In spite of all this, I am a complete disaster when it comes to communication devices, yea, even normal electronics. No matter that I type 75 wpm and handwrite 15 wpm. I invariably kill everything from my cell phone to my laptop. The only exceptions are the following: the typewriter that I used for the last half of my time as a missionary because my handwriting was too small for President Bennett to read and my iPods.
Case in point. This morning, I saved the latest version of my novel onto the 4 GB flash drive that my friend gave me for Christmas. I have made this a habit because of my propensity for wrecking things. I then put my flash drive in the adorable little carrying case and put it in my backpack for safe keeping. I later packed up my laptop to bring to a friend's house. I never got around to using it while there, but left it out of the way on the couch where neither her mixed-lab nor her children nor her husband nor my friends could trample it underfoot.
So then I got home, ran choir practice, did the dishes and then decided to do some more writing. I pulled out the carrying case for my flash drive and promptly discovered that somehow, while out of the way of harm, it had been snapped. It is in a couple of pieces because part of the motherboard so to speak snapped off and then it broke in two as well.
Then I went to my computer and decided to turn it on. It would not respond to the power button. At all. It was clearly charging according to indicator lights, but I could not get it to work. I nearly cried because usually I'm not THIS disastrous! Yes, I have had a VCR that only worked when a fork was stuck into it and a laptop that turned off in protest every time the Indians scored in the 2007 ALCS vs. the Red Sox.
So, I left it to its own devices, but came back to nurse it (the laptop) back to health. It took a pencil eraser, removing the battery and re-placing it and several repositionings of the screen, but then the CD drive started clicking and flashing a happy little green light and then it just turned on.
So I am back in command of my semi-faithful laptop. Thank goodness!
In other notes, I thought I was done learning about dysfunctional boyfriends, but just found a new variety. I've decided that I've got a knack for dating Darwinian men--who are, as William Schwenk Gilbert put it, "though well-behaved...at best [are] only a monkey shaved."
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
An unwatched parade
One of the greatest rewards of being a writer is the transfer of your best thoughts onto paper. I have a folder of papers from high school that I have kept to remind me of how far I've come as well as what I have accomplished in the past. Sometimes, I just kept the original draft of an essay and the final product. Occasionally, I kept just the last page of the essay, where the teacher left comments and a grade. It was from pages like this that I learned words like "astute" and "poignant" and it lifts my spirits for me to remember that I've been called that.
On the other hand, it is an immensely difficult thing to be unsung. As I believe I've mentioned in the past, I am not a novice writer. I was first published at the age of 19, ten years ago. I have been writing fiction and non-fiction fairly consistently since the age of twelve.
I'm lucky to have one brother and he married a great girl who is now aspiring to be a novelist. Hers is the kind of story people will remember far down the road. While her husband did an internship and she was expecting my nephew, she wrote a chapter a week for her younger sister. She blogged about it, facebooked about it...
I'm not that kind of writer. Yes, I tell people about what I'm doing, but I don't make it a public spectacle. I have a good friend who is involved in a relationship and she is much more enthusiastic about the guy on Facebook than she ever is in real life because it's an attention-grabber and some people really need that. Me, I need attention, but have been treated for so long as someone not worth admiring that I just can't pull it off.
Not only that, but who will really care that this one author typed out her mediocre novel on a laptop with a couple of keys missing after putting in 8-hour work days while she was a nearly-30 spinster? After all, there are people out there writing bestsellers while bored and pregnant, on welfare and a single mom, whatever the latest story of the day is.
But it grates on me. I have been a published writer for 10 years and still overheard my mother say that it was exciting to "finally have a writer in the family." I went to my sister's baby shower and while all of my mutual friends with this in-law grilled her on when she'd be looking for an agent and how her latest chapter was coming, I couldn't get a single one of them to say hello to me, much less ask how my book was coming. When my siblings and I went to lunch with my favorite cousin, I attention-whored in desperation by making some critiques about the latest draft that I'd read of this in-law's book. Immediately, everyone admired how I was supporting the writer in the family. Ironically, this in-law is the only one of the family who even calls me anymore and it's generally to ask when we can have another word war.
In 7th grade, my best friend ditched me and took all of my friends at the time with her. I didn't realize this had happened until the day that I won 3rd place in the Boston Globe Art Awards and couldn't find a single person to be happy for me other than my art teacher. I spent the rest of 7th grade eating my lunch against the wall because I couldn't find a place to sit.
I feel exactly like that right now. I am doing something monumental and one person in my family seems to care. It's petty to whine that my siblings and cousins and friends care too much about someone else, but it would be nice if any of them cared at all about me.
In short, I am an unwatched parade. Plenty of pomp, circumstance, flash, excitement, but no one along the route to cheer me on.
In short (again), it blows.
On the other hand, it is an immensely difficult thing to be unsung. As I believe I've mentioned in the past, I am not a novice writer. I was first published at the age of 19, ten years ago. I have been writing fiction and non-fiction fairly consistently since the age of twelve.
I'm lucky to have one brother and he married a great girl who is now aspiring to be a novelist. Hers is the kind of story people will remember far down the road. While her husband did an internship and she was expecting my nephew, she wrote a chapter a week for her younger sister. She blogged about it, facebooked about it...
I'm not that kind of writer. Yes, I tell people about what I'm doing, but I don't make it a public spectacle. I have a good friend who is involved in a relationship and she is much more enthusiastic about the guy on Facebook than she ever is in real life because it's an attention-grabber and some people really need that. Me, I need attention, but have been treated for so long as someone not worth admiring that I just can't pull it off.
Not only that, but who will really care that this one author typed out her mediocre novel on a laptop with a couple of keys missing after putting in 8-hour work days while she was a nearly-30 spinster? After all, there are people out there writing bestsellers while bored and pregnant, on welfare and a single mom, whatever the latest story of the day is.
But it grates on me. I have been a published writer for 10 years and still overheard my mother say that it was exciting to "finally have a writer in the family." I went to my sister's baby shower and while all of my mutual friends with this in-law grilled her on when she'd be looking for an agent and how her latest chapter was coming, I couldn't get a single one of them to say hello to me, much less ask how my book was coming. When my siblings and I went to lunch with my favorite cousin, I attention-whored in desperation by making some critiques about the latest draft that I'd read of this in-law's book. Immediately, everyone admired how I was supporting the writer in the family. Ironically, this in-law is the only one of the family who even calls me anymore and it's generally to ask when we can have another word war.
In 7th grade, my best friend ditched me and took all of my friends at the time with her. I didn't realize this had happened until the day that I won 3rd place in the Boston Globe Art Awards and couldn't find a single person to be happy for me other than my art teacher. I spent the rest of 7th grade eating my lunch against the wall because I couldn't find a place to sit.
I feel exactly like that right now. I am doing something monumental and one person in my family seems to care. It's petty to whine that my siblings and cousins and friends care too much about someone else, but it would be nice if any of them cared at all about me.
In short, I am an unwatched parade. Plenty of pomp, circumstance, flash, excitement, but no one along the route to cheer me on.
In short (again), it blows.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
In Memory Of...
So, if you're not familiar with my fanfic tendencies, let me clue you in to a major one. I am good at writing character deaths. When writing a long story, that's one of the first things that I plan out and, strangely/sadly, I look forward to it. Not to the same degree as one reader who said quite memorably about one character, "Yay! They're married. Can he kill her now?" But I almost always start a story with a bit of wistfulness for those who will not make it to my closing word of every epic: "Finis."
Well, not so with this book. After writing Alex for a while, I wanted to kill him off, but wasn't about to be that petty. As soon as I worked out one part of the plot, I knew two characters were going to die as a result of that crucial part.
But, as I said, the book is being written non-linearly. I first wrote the scene that is in the aftermath of that crucial part and a huge emotional impact comes from the death of this one character. Then I went back and wrote the scene preceding the event and realized that I could choose whether or not to kill that person off.
And so I reached my first actual crisis of character when it came to a death. I can't claim that I shed any tears over the idea, but I really like this character. "Good old JK" says that Harry Potter came fully-fledged into her imagination and this relatively minor character is like that. I don't remember coming up with her, but in one of the first scenes I wrote, there was a lovable bisexual redhead who eschewed cars and rode her bicycle everywhere. She and that bicycle kept turning up and I'm not sure where the bisexual part of her came from (we've never seen it manifest yet), but once I started getting to know her, I realized she was. She was another person that cracks me up in this story and I needed a character like her. Sadly, for the interest of making the villains as cunning as they're supposed to be and for the purpose of driving a permanent wedge between two characters, she's going to die after all.
One other character that is like that but who is NOT going to die is Julie. In my very first draft of Chapter 1, I was introduced to Ella's best friend, a wisecracking person whose bag looks like AC/DC and Jackson Pollock got into a fight. She was based on a friend of mine, but her artistic sense is based on one of my three best friends in high school, who decorated everything from her bag to her Converse with Wite-Out. When I went to mywebface.com to discover her appearance, I found out that she looked something like my very good friend and ex-roommate. I didn't realize it until I got to her glasses and went "Wow, wait...That's just weird."
I love being introduced to my characters.
I'm getting to 100 pages of text this week! Wish me luck!
Well, not so with this book. After writing Alex for a while, I wanted to kill him off, but wasn't about to be that petty. As soon as I worked out one part of the plot, I knew two characters were going to die as a result of that crucial part.
But, as I said, the book is being written non-linearly. I first wrote the scene that is in the aftermath of that crucial part and a huge emotional impact comes from the death of this one character. Then I went back and wrote the scene preceding the event and realized that I could choose whether or not to kill that person off.
And so I reached my first actual crisis of character when it came to a death. I can't claim that I shed any tears over the idea, but I really like this character. "Good old JK" says that Harry Potter came fully-fledged into her imagination and this relatively minor character is like that. I don't remember coming up with her, but in one of the first scenes I wrote, there was a lovable bisexual redhead who eschewed cars and rode her bicycle everywhere. She and that bicycle kept turning up and I'm not sure where the bisexual part of her came from (we've never seen it manifest yet), but once I started getting to know her, I realized she was. She was another person that cracks me up in this story and I needed a character like her. Sadly, for the interest of making the villains as cunning as they're supposed to be and for the purpose of driving a permanent wedge between two characters, she's going to die after all.
One other character that is like that but who is NOT going to die is Julie. In my very first draft of Chapter 1, I was introduced to Ella's best friend, a wisecracking person whose bag looks like AC/DC and Jackson Pollock got into a fight. She was based on a friend of mine, but her artistic sense is based on one of my three best friends in high school, who decorated everything from her bag to her Converse with Wite-Out. When I went to mywebface.com to discover her appearance, I found out that she looked something like my very good friend and ex-roommate. I didn't realize it until I got to her glasses and went "Wow, wait...That's just weird."
I love being introduced to my characters.
I'm getting to 100 pages of text this week! Wish me luck!
Saturday, February 13, 2010
LTUE
If you've never gone to this symposium (Life, the Universe and Everything), you are missing out. First of all, it's a weekend of scholarly geekdom where they have everything from "World-building a religion" to "Interesting Facts about Killers," costuming workshops to "Saturday's Werewolf: Vestiges of Pre-Mortal Romance in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight." You can walk around and see people dressed in the occasional costume, but regular people as well.
One of my favorite things about the symposium is the laid-back kind of atmosphere that comes out because it is a small symposium. Two years ago, I was on the organizing committee and got to take Gail Carson Levine out for a leisurely lunch where we discussed writing. Today, I was standing in the registration room, started talking to someone who wanted me to read the new Brandon Sanderson book and then Brandon Sanderson turned around from his place nearby and started debating his comedic style in his various series with us.
Whether or not I ever have hordes of readers and fans, I want to be that kind of writer. Someone who will hang out with the fans at signings or be willing to talk about what I meant by certain things in my books.
One of my favorite things about the symposium is the laid-back kind of atmosphere that comes out because it is a small symposium. Two years ago, I was on the organizing committee and got to take Gail Carson Levine out for a leisurely lunch where we discussed writing. Today, I was standing in the registration room, started talking to someone who wanted me to read the new Brandon Sanderson book and then Brandon Sanderson turned around from his place nearby and started debating his comedic style in his various series with us.
Whether or not I ever have hordes of readers and fans, I want to be that kind of writer. Someone who will hang out with the fans at signings or be willing to talk about what I meant by certain things in my books.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Confessions of a Survivor
So, it's now after midnight on February 8 and I feel more comfortable writing on this topic than I do on February 7.
I've talked about the inspiration for the plotline, some of the fundamental philosophies that I'm working with, etc. but I'd like to address some of the characterization and plot issues based on my own life.
So, as I mentioned before, I'm a Bostonian Mormon. No, that's not like a Roman Catholic, more like a New York Jew. Regional attitude+religion.
Anyway, so some 10.5 years ago, I met this really nice guy named John who was from the Detroit area. He made me laugh, had little fear and was a good friend to me. A year later, he left to be a missionary in Nevada. By the time he finished his two years as a missionary, I'd left to be a missionary for 18 months in California. On my first day back at our mutual alma mater of Brigham Young University, I ran into him again and spent 5 hours of the next two days talking to him. Three days after we ran into each other again, he called to ask me on a date for Sunday, but ended up taking me to a Star Wars marathon that same night.
I fell hard in love with him. We were history nuts with a lot of things in common, were supportive of each other and he made me profoundly happy. On June 12, 2004, we got married in Salt Lake City so both sets of grandparents could make it.
On February 7, 2005, my friend Amy picked me up from my apartment. Dad had offered to let me have a small vacation by giving me a plane ticket to Virginia, where my sister lived. I kissed John, promised I'd try to be back in time for Valentine's Day and that I'd call as soon as I could. Amy drove me to the Mt. Timpanogos Transit Center a few miles away and put me and two suitcases on a bus to Salt Lake City.
That was the end of a very long week. Two weeks before then, John had tried to choke me to death for wanting to go to choir rehearsal because they didn't want "lying b****es" like me there.
A few days later, Dad had a fight with John and offered the plane ticket because John seemed to be emotionally abusive. I got that voicemail just before singing a concert with BYU Women's Chorus and when I couldn't stop crying between the rehearsal and the concert, I told the conductor that it was because of my broken tailbone.
The following Monday, I was on my way to apartment-hunt with John when my sister called to convince me that I should take the plane ticket and get away for a little while before John got physically abusive. I blurted out the truth and only convinced her not to tell my mother by saying I was going to talk to my aunt who's a family therapist the next day.
On February 1, I met my aunt for a concert and asked to talk to her outside for a few minutes. She convinced me of the same thing that my sister and father had suggested. As we were leaving the concert, John became worked up over the traffic that was caused by the concert and attacked me again. The police were called, but I didn't press charges. The people who kept him away from me until the police arrived were two missionaries assigned to work with the Church's Family Services and they offered to provide therapy to me if I should ever need it. By the end of the night, I had asked Dad to arrange my flights. The missionaries would later become my therapists and good friends.
On February 3, I wrote my mother-in-law to tell her that John had become physically, emotionally and sexually abusive and that I was going to take a few days away to let things cool down. I warned her that I might have to simply leave before that date and she responded to say that she supported that and was willing to lend me any money I would need to leave.
Money was tight because of our status as starving students as well as my medical bills from a recent surgery. The next day, I went to my usual Women's Chorus rehearsal without having had food to eat all day and needing to walk home because I didn't have bus fare. One of John's friends who was a fellow Alto II gave me a granola bar and bus fare because of my rotten day. On the bus, I ran into Amy, a friend I hadn't seen in months who knew both John and myself from our honors program. She was the first mutual friend that I told about the abuse and she called in 'sick' to work, bought me dinner and then kidnapped me for a night. By the time she gave me a ride home, we had set a date and time for me to get out.
I took the bus on February 7 to my parents' place in Salt Lake City. My Mom had been on tour with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir when my sister blabbed the news that I might be leaving an abusive marriage. She immediately asked about any current bruises or injuries, but my major complaints were a sore wrist that had been bothering me since August and a pain in my ribs. Neither was serious and there was no bruising in the rib area, so we gave no thought to it. I learned 4 months later that the sore wrist had actually been broken when he beat me on Christmas afternoon. It was not until February of 2009 that a chest x-ray looking for pneumonia showed a growth on one of my ribs that was thought to be cancerous and turned out to be an improperly-healed fracture from my days as Mrs. Lambert.
I spoke to John several times over the next week, but when he threw a telephone through our wall when I said I wasn't able to come home for Valentine's Day, I decided to take further action. My parents helped me find a divorce lawyer who suggested that I seek an annullment and I went into hiding until the papers could be signed. I tried to make arrangements to return to BYU while my parents worked out possible ways that John and I could attend the same university without coming to blows. I was on-campus for a meeting with an advisor and Dad one day when John spotted me across the street. He ran over, ecstatic that I had come back to him when he thought I was still in Virginia and Dad physically kept me away from him until we got into the car and left. John followed us to my parents' apartment and tried to get into the apartment while I hid in the master bathroom and hyperventilated. Dad convinced him to go outside to talk and with the doors closed and thirteen floors of apartment building between us and the sidewalk, we could still hear John's screaming fight. He fled to his grandparents' house, where they took him to the hospital to be sedated and had him restrained by police. A few days later, he had been ejected from the university and his parents removed him to Michigan where he spent some time in a mental facility and was unable to hold down a job because of his mental instability. We know now that his diagnosed ADHD was actually Aspberger's Syndrome and he has been treated accordingly, but on May 19, 2005, a judge ruled that our marriage had never existed.
Five years later, I'm still single and still have times when this affects me as profoundly as it did then. I have had clinical depression since I was 14. Last year, when I found out that all my fear over having cancer were due to the fact that I never got that pain in my ribs diagnosed as a broken rib, I plunged into an abyss of anger and profound depression that affected me until several months later.
Sometimes, I wonder how much of my writing is influenced by all of this. I wrote a draft of a novel in 2005 and one of the major themes was the destruction of a friendship by abuse and unrighteous dominion. I still haven't gone back to revise that novel because I'm not sure of how I would write it now.
As I've said before, a central theme in this book is the question of who you are really able to trust and the unreliability of traditional mentors. I have to wonder if some of those philosophies stem not from my original interpretation of The Matrix Reloaded but from my anger at having been denied traditional happiness that's supposed to result from marriage to your soulmate. Mormons believe that marriage can be eternal; my marriage lasted 11 months and 7 days and is now annulled.
Sometimes, I look at the writing that I've done so far and castigate myself for seeing Alex too much as John and trying to turn Ella into what I think I should have been back then. I certainly have more empathy for her because like me, she is forced to turn her back on someone she trusted implicitly for her own sake.
I've talked about the inspiration for the plotline, some of the fundamental philosophies that I'm working with, etc. but I'd like to address some of the characterization and plot issues based on my own life.
So, as I mentioned before, I'm a Bostonian Mormon. No, that's not like a Roman Catholic, more like a New York Jew. Regional attitude+religion.
Anyway, so some 10.5 years ago, I met this really nice guy named John who was from the Detroit area. He made me laugh, had little fear and was a good friend to me. A year later, he left to be a missionary in Nevada. By the time he finished his two years as a missionary, I'd left to be a missionary for 18 months in California. On my first day back at our mutual alma mater of Brigham Young University, I ran into him again and spent 5 hours of the next two days talking to him. Three days after we ran into each other again, he called to ask me on a date for Sunday, but ended up taking me to a Star Wars marathon that same night.
I fell hard in love with him. We were history nuts with a lot of things in common, were supportive of each other and he made me profoundly happy. On June 12, 2004, we got married in Salt Lake City so both sets of grandparents could make it.
On February 7, 2005, my friend Amy picked me up from my apartment. Dad had offered to let me have a small vacation by giving me a plane ticket to Virginia, where my sister lived. I kissed John, promised I'd try to be back in time for Valentine's Day and that I'd call as soon as I could. Amy drove me to the Mt. Timpanogos Transit Center a few miles away and put me and two suitcases on a bus to Salt Lake City.
That was the end of a very long week. Two weeks before then, John had tried to choke me to death for wanting to go to choir rehearsal because they didn't want "lying b****es" like me there.
A few days later, Dad had a fight with John and offered the plane ticket because John seemed to be emotionally abusive. I got that voicemail just before singing a concert with BYU Women's Chorus and when I couldn't stop crying between the rehearsal and the concert, I told the conductor that it was because of my broken tailbone.
The following Monday, I was on my way to apartment-hunt with John when my sister called to convince me that I should take the plane ticket and get away for a little while before John got physically abusive. I blurted out the truth and only convinced her not to tell my mother by saying I was going to talk to my aunt who's a family therapist the next day.
On February 1, I met my aunt for a concert and asked to talk to her outside for a few minutes. She convinced me of the same thing that my sister and father had suggested. As we were leaving the concert, John became worked up over the traffic that was caused by the concert and attacked me again. The police were called, but I didn't press charges. The people who kept him away from me until the police arrived were two missionaries assigned to work with the Church's Family Services and they offered to provide therapy to me if I should ever need it. By the end of the night, I had asked Dad to arrange my flights. The missionaries would later become my therapists and good friends.
On February 3, I wrote my mother-in-law to tell her that John had become physically, emotionally and sexually abusive and that I was going to take a few days away to let things cool down. I warned her that I might have to simply leave before that date and she responded to say that she supported that and was willing to lend me any money I would need to leave.
Money was tight because of our status as starving students as well as my medical bills from a recent surgery. The next day, I went to my usual Women's Chorus rehearsal without having had food to eat all day and needing to walk home because I didn't have bus fare. One of John's friends who was a fellow Alto II gave me a granola bar and bus fare because of my rotten day. On the bus, I ran into Amy, a friend I hadn't seen in months who knew both John and myself from our honors program. She was the first mutual friend that I told about the abuse and she called in 'sick' to work, bought me dinner and then kidnapped me for a night. By the time she gave me a ride home, we had set a date and time for me to get out.
I took the bus on February 7 to my parents' place in Salt Lake City. My Mom had been on tour with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir when my sister blabbed the news that I might be leaving an abusive marriage. She immediately asked about any current bruises or injuries, but my major complaints were a sore wrist that had been bothering me since August and a pain in my ribs. Neither was serious and there was no bruising in the rib area, so we gave no thought to it. I learned 4 months later that the sore wrist had actually been broken when he beat me on Christmas afternoon. It was not until February of 2009 that a chest x-ray looking for pneumonia showed a growth on one of my ribs that was thought to be cancerous and turned out to be an improperly-healed fracture from my days as Mrs. Lambert.
I spoke to John several times over the next week, but when he threw a telephone through our wall when I said I wasn't able to come home for Valentine's Day, I decided to take further action. My parents helped me find a divorce lawyer who suggested that I seek an annullment and I went into hiding until the papers could be signed. I tried to make arrangements to return to BYU while my parents worked out possible ways that John and I could attend the same university without coming to blows. I was on-campus for a meeting with an advisor and Dad one day when John spotted me across the street. He ran over, ecstatic that I had come back to him when he thought I was still in Virginia and Dad physically kept me away from him until we got into the car and left. John followed us to my parents' apartment and tried to get into the apartment while I hid in the master bathroom and hyperventilated. Dad convinced him to go outside to talk and with the doors closed and thirteen floors of apartment building between us and the sidewalk, we could still hear John's screaming fight. He fled to his grandparents' house, where they took him to the hospital to be sedated and had him restrained by police. A few days later, he had been ejected from the university and his parents removed him to Michigan where he spent some time in a mental facility and was unable to hold down a job because of his mental instability. We know now that his diagnosed ADHD was actually Aspberger's Syndrome and he has been treated accordingly, but on May 19, 2005, a judge ruled that our marriage had never existed.
Five years later, I'm still single and still have times when this affects me as profoundly as it did then. I have had clinical depression since I was 14. Last year, when I found out that all my fear over having cancer were due to the fact that I never got that pain in my ribs diagnosed as a broken rib, I plunged into an abyss of anger and profound depression that affected me until several months later.
Sometimes, I wonder how much of my writing is influenced by all of this. I wrote a draft of a novel in 2005 and one of the major themes was the destruction of a friendship by abuse and unrighteous dominion. I still haven't gone back to revise that novel because I'm not sure of how I would write it now.
As I've said before, a central theme in this book is the question of who you are really able to trust and the unreliability of traditional mentors. I have to wonder if some of those philosophies stem not from my original interpretation of The Matrix Reloaded but from my anger at having been denied traditional happiness that's supposed to result from marriage to your soulmate. Mormons believe that marriage can be eternal; my marriage lasted 11 months and 7 days and is now annulled.
Sometimes, I look at the writing that I've done so far and castigate myself for seeing Alex too much as John and trying to turn Ella into what I think I should have been back then. I certainly have more empathy for her because like me, she is forced to turn her back on someone she trusted implicitly for her own sake.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)