In the last post, I wrote about diversity and how it’s not a dirty word. I also wrote about how it’s a part of me and not an affectation. I will say that it’s deliberate in that I choose to make the majority of my characters minorities. So, yes, in that case I’m doing it on purpose. I am not doing it at anyone in particular, but if I upset certain people in the meantime, well, that will please me greatly.
Some people are worth pissing off is what I’m saying. Yes, we need to be civil in general to work as a society, but when people break that social contract by being bigoted assholes, I am no longer beholden by that social contractor to those people.
There are going to be three main characters, and nary a cishetwhiteman among them. I will admit it amuses me to see how far I can go without having one as a main character. I have three or four other characters in mind (not fleshed out yet), and none of them are CHWM, either (figure it out).
I have a snapy beginning to my novel. The first few pages have been written–in my mind. This is how I write, by the way. I write in my brain before I write for real. That’s my way of planning/scheduling/outlining. I do a big brain dump as I’m musing things over in my mind. Then, I write in my mind for a few weeks. Then, I start the actual writing, and it’s like a brain dump agai, but in a more orderly fashion.
Before my medical crisis, my writing regime was pretty uniform. I wrote 2,000 words a day like clockwork in the fashion I outlined above. I edited as I wrote, though I tried not to do that. I rarely had a writer’s block, and I could finish a novel in a few months.
When I used to do NaNoWriMo, I had no problem meeting the word count. Why did I start doing it? Just to get back in the habit of writing again. I set my own goal of 2,000 words a day, and I was able to do that with ease. One year, I did 5,000 words a day–that was exponentially more difficult. In the later years of doing it, I started breaking the rules. I edited a novel one year. I wrote a novel and the the beginning of a sequel another year. I started on a day other than the first of November in yet another year. Before November, I mean.
See, after many years of doing NaNoWriMo, I stopped thinking it was helpful because it was too restrictive. Oh, and I wrote a screenplay one year. Well, part of one. It was called The Year of Seven Penii, and I got stuck on three or four (phrasing!). Why? Because that penis belonged to a character I was writing with Alan Rickman in mind (you can tell how long ago this was), and I realized that I really wanted to make the movie about him and the Jacqueline Kim character who was the protagonist of the novel.
Backstory: I loved Alan Rickman beyond all reason. I saw him as Professor Snape in the first HP movie, and I immediately fell for him. Yes, bad wig and all. He’s the only reason I watched the rest of the movies, even though he was barely in them.
Side note: I firmly believed if he were still with us, he would thoroughly denounce JKR for being so bigoted. I read up on him when he was alive, and he was very much a man of the people. He championed all his colleagues, and he was geneuinely interested in them. I heard so many good stories about him (because, as I said, I was a tad obsessed while he was alive), and I was truly sad when he died. Plus, I got so many condolences on my FB wall and in my Twitter feed. I jokingly said to Ian that I felt like I was his widow. (Not really, but I had declared over and over again that I wanted to make sure people thought of me when they heard/read his name.)
Side note to the side note: This was a time where full female frontal nudity was acceptable in movies, but full frontal male nudity was verboten. I thought that was bullshit (as I think many things are), so I wanted to write a script that featured seven penises in a year. I called them penii because it amused me. Hey, it was a working title, and I probably would have changed it if I actually did anything with it.
It wasn’t the first script I had written, but it was the first in a decade or so. The basic premise was that the main character (the one played by Jacqueline Kim, who, by the way, is as gorgeous as ever) had just gotten dumped in a very traumatic/humiliating way. I can’t remember how or why, but probably being cheated on. It’s always someone being cheated on.
She decides to move on by moving onto someone else. Someones plural, actually. I can’t remember if I actually had her say seven dudes, but it’s possible. I think I might have set that as her goal–seven dicks in a year.
Yes, I wrote the script with those two actors in mind for those specific roles. Or rather, I had Jacqueline Kim in mind for the main character, and I knew the main outline of the story. I also knew I had to have Alan Rickman in it, but I wasn’t sure who he would be. I knew he would get it out for the right role beacuse he did that in a really quirky, dark movie he did in his early career. It’s called Dark Harbor, and he dives into a lake/pond/river/ocean fully naked at one point in the movie.
When I first started writing his section of the movie, I had the idea that he would be in it for ten or maybe fifteen minutes. Twenty at the most. But then I just kept writing and writing, and it soon became a very twisted story about his character and Jacqueline Kim’s character. It was so good, I could not stop. NaNoWriMo was over before I finished his section, and I realized I should have made that a script in and of itself. It was so much better than the rest of what I wrote, it was a cut above.
I am tempted to find it and finish it, but there’s no point now. No one can hold a candle to Alan Rickman, may he rest in peace.