Alternate Title: A Sue By Any Other Name Would Destruction Wreak
Flagrant narcissism was the answer, isn't it always? My main character would be an obsessive devotee of the Phantom, trying desperately to create the one "true" film version of the story that would essentially launch all the other tacked-together versions into the sun. Not bad. It was a starting point, but where to go from there?
I fidgeted through the rest of the bus ride, and when I finally got home, hardly said hi to my mother as I made a beeline (meaning I ran quickly but crookedly and unsteadily...pretty much my norm) for my computer.
That thing I said about no research? Okay, so it was a bit of a lie. But it wasn't much, really. I think I still held to my new "lazy" resolution quite nicely. I needed a catalyst though. So, armed with the Complete Phantom of the Opera and Google, I began to feel my way along Phantom's cinematic history. I didn't have to probe long before the perfect setting landed in my lap, and Telly began to take on more detail in my head, along with a cast of utter idiots. I was jitterbugging all over my room, except not really because it was the size of a horse's stall and the open floor space in it measured exactly one foot by three. So instead of jitterbugging, I sat on my bed and began to write.
I wrote two pens into Bic Heaven. Around seven o'clock in the morning, brain feeling like cotton, eyeballs on fire, and shivering like you do when you haven't slept a wink, Stage 28 was done. Rough to be sure, but done. I went for a much needed cup of tea, then came back and read the story.
I started to feel sick.
It started off well. It was funny, and clipped along well, then about a third of the way in, it became a mess. Not even a salvageable mess, just an absolute disaster. I suppose this shouldn't have been a surprise, given the circumstances, but for all of you who went to college or university and procrastinated like most students do, well...you get used to pulling off miracles. The panic doesn't hit until you've failed to pull off the standard miracle. Once the standard miracle has failed, then you're in the realm of the unknown. THEN you panic.
I panicked, and the first thing I did in my panic, was make another cup of tea. It was the same as the cup of tea I'd just drank, except my hand shook a lot more when lifting the cup. I re-read "Stage 28", and thought of what I should do with it, all the while, a nagging discomfort grew in my mind. There was something else wrong here, besides the story just being a pile of crap.
Wincing, I read the story again, tried to pinpoint what was bothering me, and couldn't do it. I forced myself to try again, this time doing the critical thinking and sniffing out of symbols and themes that I'd supposedly learned to do in four years of university. Then it hit me.
Dear God, sweet God, I had accidentally written a piece of homoerotic slash fanfiction.
Seriously...no seriously...was I an even bigger hack than I thought? Apparently so.
There's not much left to this sweeping, epic tale, then I'll actually start talking about current writing events, rather than a year old farce.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
Stage 28: the story of the story Part 2
Yes, Phantom of the Opera.
One of my first memories is of being in our basement when I was four-years-old, eating dinner with my parents and watching TV, when suddenly I heard the most beautiful music.
And this was high praise from me: I HATED music. Hated the songs we sang in Sunday school, hated the silly rock and roll my parents listened to, hated the ragtime my mother played on the piano. What I did like was classical music, but I considered it such a separate entity from the normal garbage I heard referred to as "music" that I didn't even classify it as such. It was a pretty sound, but not music, to my young mind. Music was crap*.
But this, this was something I'd never heard before, and that deep, spooky voiceover (anyone else remember it?) was calling it music. The images on the screen were also like nothing I'd ever seen before: hundreds of candles on elaborate iron stands in a black room, swirling red velvet drapes, a beautiful woman in a fragile-looking white dress, and then there was the man.
It was his profile, and his hands, he had beautiful hands. I was in love, though I didn't know that. I wanted to sit next to him and listen to him play his organ** and sing forever.
So sprouted the seeds of obsession.
Phantom was all consuming from that point onward, and I didn't even get to see the musical until I was seven, three years after seeing that first commercial. Every film version of the Phantom I could find, I had my parents rent ad nauseum (bear in mind that these were the days before home Internet access, so it wasn't like I was looking these up on IMDB. I just scoured every video store I could find). My father taped a few versions off television, and I watched the tapes so much that today, they're just about broken. I started piano lessons when I was seven, and hated playing (except for classical music, which I had by then learned was also music), but when I got the Phantom piano book for Christmas, I knew them all after a day or two. I started singing by reading the libretto at the back of the Complete Phantom of the Opera. I bloody well talked to Erik. That is not an exaggeration, I constantly spoke aloud to a fictional character. I was a very lonely only child. That, and there's a lot of syphillis on my father's side***.
Phantom as a focused obsession faded into the background eventually, though I still watched the movies often, but the aesthetics, musically and artistically, never did. I loved darkness.
So that night as I sat on the bus and found myself besieged by several of my younger selves to go back to Phantom for inspiration, that commercial, and the montage of images that started it all beckoned first.
I am proud to say that I never even considered the idea of a straight-up fanfic.
I retrieved that body of knowledge from where it had been collecting dust in my memory, and began to turn it over, and look at it from different angles. I kept coming back to the movies. So many movies. All of them had one thing in common: the title. All of them had one thing in common with the original novel: the title. Aside from the first silent film and a very short, cheaply made children's animation in the 80s, all the Phantom movies had pretty much junked the original novel, and just used the basic concept of a crazy man who may or may not be deformed being obsessed with a beautiful young girl who may or may not be a very talented singer. I tried to picture what a truly faithful Phantom movie would look like. It would be tough to do without looking like a prat. There were so many clichés intertwined with Phantom by now that had served a purpose in the original work, but had been relentlessly abused by filmmakers since. The depth of the characters had been stripped away layer by layer, until they could have been convincingly played by cardboard cutouts (I refer you once again to the animated version of the 80s. And the Dario Argento version of the 90s, ba-zing). If someone who truly loved the story, the original story, were to take the reins of yet another remake, what would the result be?
And that's when I first met Telly.
* I should point out that I've since developed a tolerance for rock and roll, a cautious affection for ragtime, and like a whole bunch of other music as well. Classical still kicks your ass though.
** Who's the pervert now, pervert?
*** Just kidding, or am I****?
**** I am.
One of my first memories is of being in our basement when I was four-years-old, eating dinner with my parents and watching TV, when suddenly I heard the most beautiful music.
And this was high praise from me: I HATED music. Hated the songs we sang in Sunday school, hated the silly rock and roll my parents listened to, hated the ragtime my mother played on the piano. What I did like was classical music, but I considered it such a separate entity from the normal garbage I heard referred to as "music" that I didn't even classify it as such. It was a pretty sound, but not music, to my young mind. Music was crap*.
But this, this was something I'd never heard before, and that deep, spooky voiceover (anyone else remember it?) was calling it music. The images on the screen were also like nothing I'd ever seen before: hundreds of candles on elaborate iron stands in a black room, swirling red velvet drapes, a beautiful woman in a fragile-looking white dress, and then there was the man.
It was his profile, and his hands, he had beautiful hands. I was in love, though I didn't know that. I wanted to sit next to him and listen to him play his organ** and sing forever.
So sprouted the seeds of obsession.
Phantom was all consuming from that point onward, and I didn't even get to see the musical until I was seven, three years after seeing that first commercial. Every film version of the Phantom I could find, I had my parents rent ad nauseum (bear in mind that these were the days before home Internet access, so it wasn't like I was looking these up on IMDB. I just scoured every video store I could find). My father taped a few versions off television, and I watched the tapes so much that today, they're just about broken. I started piano lessons when I was seven, and hated playing (except for classical music, which I had by then learned was also music), but when I got the Phantom piano book for Christmas, I knew them all after a day or two. I started singing by reading the libretto at the back of the Complete Phantom of the Opera. I bloody well talked to Erik. That is not an exaggeration, I constantly spoke aloud to a fictional character. I was a very lonely only child. That, and there's a lot of syphillis on my father's side***.
Phantom as a focused obsession faded into the background eventually, though I still watched the movies often, but the aesthetics, musically and artistically, never did. I loved darkness.
So that night as I sat on the bus and found myself besieged by several of my younger selves to go back to Phantom for inspiration, that commercial, and the montage of images that started it all beckoned first.
I am proud to say that I never even considered the idea of a straight-up fanfic.
I retrieved that body of knowledge from where it had been collecting dust in my memory, and began to turn it over, and look at it from different angles. I kept coming back to the movies. So many movies. All of them had one thing in common: the title. All of them had one thing in common with the original novel: the title. Aside from the first silent film and a very short, cheaply made children's animation in the 80s, all the Phantom movies had pretty much junked the original novel, and just used the basic concept of a crazy man who may or may not be deformed being obsessed with a beautiful young girl who may or may not be a very talented singer. I tried to picture what a truly faithful Phantom movie would look like. It would be tough to do without looking like a prat. There were so many clichés intertwined with Phantom by now that had served a purpose in the original work, but had been relentlessly abused by filmmakers since. The depth of the characters had been stripped away layer by layer, until they could have been convincingly played by cardboard cutouts (I refer you once again to the animated version of the 80s. And the Dario Argento version of the 90s, ba-zing). If someone who truly loved the story, the original story, were to take the reins of yet another remake, what would the result be?
And that's when I first met Telly.
* I should point out that I've since developed a tolerance for rock and roll, a cautious affection for ragtime, and like a whole bunch of other music as well. Classical still kicks your ass though.
** Who's the pervert now, pervert?
*** Just kidding, or am I****?
**** I am.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Stage 28: the story of the story, Part 1
It started off with laziness.
You see, normally I make writing very, very difficult on myself. This is probably why I never finish anything. I think of stories that are related to obscure mythologies, or set in a country I've never been to, or in a culture I've never experienced, therefore to sound plausible, I need to research my ass off. Since typically I'm not writing against deadlines, this was no problem. I just never finished the damn things.
Then, I took a creative writing course in my last semester of university. Suddenly, there were deadlines.
Suddenly, there were problems.
I had a short story due in class the next day. The professor didn't care if it was just a fragment, but it had to be about eight pages.
In my last year of university, I was working like crazy on top of school. I taught music four days a week, volunteered, and did a bit of tutoring on the side. Unfortunately, the creative writing class fell on Wednesday, which, for those of you who are unaware, is the day after Tuesday, which happened to be my longest work day of the week. So, on the two hour bus ride home at the end of the day (9:00 PM), my tired little brain mulled over story ideas, tacitly resigned to another all-nighter. My usual material...the obscure mythologies, countries, and cultures...floated in circles, occasionally colliding with each other in a brief creative formation, only to pull apart when I would shrink from the idea of the research I'd have to do, and the speed at which I'd have to do it.
It was at that moment, on a stinking, filthy TTC bus creeping through one of the worst ghettos the GTA has to offer, that I had an epiphany.
Why the hell was I making this so complicated? Where was the shame in writing from what I knew?
There was no shame, came the answer loud and clear, except for what I was creating in my head.
Fuck mythology, and fuck worldliness, I was going to use this short story to embrace my admittedly narrow and uncultured world view. I was a white girl from the middle class suburbs, and for once I was going to take that sheltered identity and run with it. I always have and likely always will make things difficult for myself because I feel a lot of guilt about my life being too easy, but this time, the hell with it. I was going to take the easy way out like normal people.
So I changed the direction of my thoughts, and started thinking about things that I knew, inside and out, that I could somehow string out into a story.
From an old and long neglected corridor of my memory, my four, five, six, seven, eight and nine-year-old selves came charging out in all their frizzy-haired glory, and screamed to make themselves heard.
Phantom of the Opera...
You see, normally I make writing very, very difficult on myself. This is probably why I never finish anything. I think of stories that are related to obscure mythologies, or set in a country I've never been to, or in a culture I've never experienced, therefore to sound plausible, I need to research my ass off. Since typically I'm not writing against deadlines, this was no problem. I just never finished the damn things.
Then, I took a creative writing course in my last semester of university. Suddenly, there were deadlines.
Suddenly, there were problems.
I had a short story due in class the next day. The professor didn't care if it was just a fragment, but it had to be about eight pages.
In my last year of university, I was working like crazy on top of school. I taught music four days a week, volunteered, and did a bit of tutoring on the side. Unfortunately, the creative writing class fell on Wednesday, which, for those of you who are unaware, is the day after Tuesday, which happened to be my longest work day of the week. So, on the two hour bus ride home at the end of the day (9:00 PM), my tired little brain mulled over story ideas, tacitly resigned to another all-nighter. My usual material...the obscure mythologies, countries, and cultures...floated in circles, occasionally colliding with each other in a brief creative formation, only to pull apart when I would shrink from the idea of the research I'd have to do, and the speed at which I'd have to do it.
It was at that moment, on a stinking, filthy TTC bus creeping through one of the worst ghettos the GTA has to offer, that I had an epiphany.
Why the hell was I making this so complicated? Where was the shame in writing from what I knew?
There was no shame, came the answer loud and clear, except for what I was creating in my head.
Fuck mythology, and fuck worldliness, I was going to use this short story to embrace my admittedly narrow and uncultured world view. I was a white girl from the middle class suburbs, and for once I was going to take that sheltered identity and run with it. I always have and likely always will make things difficult for myself because I feel a lot of guilt about my life being too easy, but this time, the hell with it. I was going to take the easy way out like normal people.
So I changed the direction of my thoughts, and started thinking about things that I knew, inside and out, that I could somehow string out into a story.
From an old and long neglected corridor of my memory, my four, five, six, seven, eight and nine-year-old selves came charging out in all their frizzy-haired glory, and screamed to make themselves heard.
Phantom of the Opera...
Friday, February 22, 2008
OMG
Oh my god, it's a blog. A writer's blog no less, does the world really need another one? The answer is no, of course not, but my vanity and "artiste" affectations demand one, I'm afraid.
I be T. Max.
I am currently working on "Stage 28", a story very close to my heart that I've been struggling with for nearly a year. Details will follow once my baby's done, but until then, you may know my shame in that it's the closest to fanfiction I've ever written. And I mean fanfiction like whoa. Self-insertion, sex with my favourite character, and everything I've ever hated. Luckily, I'm a writer, and therefore hypocritical and pretentious enough to think that I can pull it off when no one else can.
Welcome to Rosebush Maze, everybody.
Edit: Holy craparino that text was bright. Hopefully this is better.
2nd Edit: It occurs to me that the phrase "self-insertion" placed right before "sex with _______" (fill in the blank) results in a much dirtier sentence than I intended.
3rd Edit: By the way, I'm a pervert. I even own a trenchcoat. You'll get used to it.
I be T. Max.
I am currently working on "Stage 28", a story very close to my heart that I've been struggling with for nearly a year. Details will follow once my baby's done, but until then, you may know my shame in that it's the closest to fanfiction I've ever written. And I mean fanfiction like whoa. Self-insertion, sex with my favourite character, and everything I've ever hated. Luckily, I'm a writer, and therefore hypocritical and pretentious enough to think that I can pull it off when no one else can.
Welcome to Rosebush Maze, everybody.
Edit: Holy craparino that text was bright. Hopefully this is better.
2nd Edit: It occurs to me that the phrase "self-insertion" placed right before "sex with _______" (fill in the blank) results in a much dirtier sentence than I intended.
3rd Edit: By the way, I'm a pervert. I even own a trenchcoat. You'll get used to it.
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