Writing where your heroes have written…who is mine?
Huh.
I’m not sure how to express this. I wrote the scene I’d been dreading in the big WIP. It went well.–First I had to do some massive journal-y pre-writing, cried a bit, laughed a bunch, exhaled. Wrote the Goob’s scene. He came to a place I hadn’t expected, where many of my heroes have written. I have been here before, or rather been led here. I never really expected to get here on my own. Lifetime bucket list stuff. It doesn’t look like I expected, from the inside.
The Goob is dancing around madly in my head as I type. He’s useless. Mr. Assassin is clearing his throat.
Mr. Assassin: I need you to answer a question for me.
Me: What?
Mr. Assassin: [Whispers]
–It’s a simple question. Anyone could answer it, but I’m the only one who can answer it at the level he needs to know the answer.
Me: You’re not planning to sacrifice yourself, are you? I would rather end this story unfinished and just fucking fail.
Mr. Assassin: Oh, I know how stubborn you are. And you know just how clever I can be. But if you can’t answer this question, if you can’t answer it so far down in your guts that you can help but exhale it every time you breathe, I *will.*
Me: …Fuck.
Mr. Assassin: If you get stuck, just use the Goob as a cheat sheet. He’ll calm down eventually.
Me: Goth Girl?
Goth Girl: Yes?
Me: [Whimpers]
Goth Girl: You don’t have to do it ALL overnight. Just sleep at it, work it out little by little. You’re stubborn. You’ll push through.
Me: Everyone says that.
Goth Girl: Yes, but what *I* mean isn’t that you’ll figure it out by trying hard. I mean that you’ll fucking take the universe apart so that there will always have been an answer, even if you can’t see it from here.
Me: [Rolls eyes] Dramatic much?
Goth Girl: Honestly, I really just want to see the universe taken apart sometimes.
Me: Me too.
…
Notes from later (4/19-4/20). Hopefully this helps make things make more sense. I was NOT in a place where I could articulate this without writing a book, or rather several books, about it. Sometimes writing fiction will do that to you.
I talked to someone about this yesterday and worked out that I’d written about love again, specifically, the “thou art god” type of love that Heinlein was writing, but without the woo. Without woo, it doesn’t look like “thou art god” at all.
This is in the middle of a fight scene, because it’s the Goob and of course it is. His mind can wander anytime.
Part of Logan’s mind considered the moment. He wasn’t sure how to describe what was going on, even to himself.
I am this. This is me.
The words felt like they didn’t come from him, exactly, not from the conscious part of him and not from the animal, either.
Was this what it felt like, to be—he didn’t know what to call it. Whole? Without doubt? Feeling like the animal inside him wasn’t some horrific fucking thing that needed to be purged and controlled, but maybe trusted?
Like all his pieces were held together, working together? Instead of fighting amongst themselves?
Logan smashed the brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide across Lacey’s nose. The bottle burst open, throwing strong liquid across Lacey’s bloody nose and into his mouth.
Gotta keep wounds clean, right?
Lacey choked on foaming peroxide as he tried to shout from the pain. His hands moved thoughtlessly out of animal panic, trying to clear his airway. A reflex against choking. On autopilot.
He dropped the handgun.
Logan kicked it away, down between the row of washers and dryers, and swept Lacey’s feet out from under him, holding his sleeve to help guide him down as gently as possible.
For once Logan had come to a place of violence without being terrified of losing control of himself.
—Holy shit. That was it. Logan didn’t feel broken or scared of himself.
He felt loved.
And the question that Mr. Assassin asks is “who is mine?”
This is one of those dangerous questions where it seems simple: “Who am I responsible for?” “Myself, my under-18 kids, if any.”–But that’s not the question, is it? Not who you’re responsible for, but who is yours and what that means.
Here’s about where Mr. Assassin is so far:
Dan didn’t really have a family left, not in the blood-relative sense. He and his mother meant nothing to each other. They couldn’t even resent each other any more. His mom didn’t have enough brain cells left to hate or be hated anymore. Nothing upstairs but pickle.
Again with the wandering mind in the middle of a fight scene, although mostly what Mr. Assassin’s doing is avoiding one dude and getting ready to pull the Goob out when things go the way he thinks they will.
I don’t know what the answer is, at least not consciously and fully enough to get Mr. Assassin through the book without him throwing himself in as a sacrifice. I will, eventually, because I won’t let him throw himself away; I promised that to myself when I realized that this project was longer than a short story.
At any rate, it’s an interesting question:
Who is mine?
A bee from the University of Southern Florida botanic gardens. <3
A Midjourney roll for “Who is mine?” I ran /imagine prompt: who is mine, and it came up all cats, so I ran with it.