Vaccinated!

Now that I've finished The Madonna Of The Future, I finally feel free. It's the last of what I considered my backlog from 2008.

The Madonna Of The Future was supposed to immediately follow What Maisie Knew. I was already working on it before What Maisie Knew ended in May 2008. It was all there: characters, calendar, plot, first chapter... But then Marcie And The Amazons appeared and became irresistible to me, so I put The Madonna Of The Future aside.

Unfortunately, by the time I finished Marcie And The Amazons in October 2008, I didn't have the heart to go back to The Madonna Of The Future. Some of the people who didn't like Marcie And The Amazons were so thorough and insistent in their criticism, that they really got me down. I'm still touchy about that story. I consider it one of the best things I've written, and yet when someone recently left a supercilious comment on it (demanding a rewrite), I got pretty angry.

I'm not fishing for compliments or looking to rehash what's been said. Of course I can't expect people to like everything I write, and yes I should have a much thicker skin. Still, even the strongest egos aren't bulletproof.

In any case, at that time I had two unfinished stories: Short Chapters and Wish I'd Stayed In Bed. Even though I loved them both, it was a struggle to finish them. They used to be fun; now they felt more like incomplete jobs. It only took six chapters to finish both, but those six chapters took me three years to write. Once they were done, I went back to The Madonna Of The Future. It was next on the list.

Anyone who's written for more than a few years has had the experience of rediscovering their own past work. Specifically, I mean when you pick up something that's old enough to be unfamiliar. It's a strange experience, almost as if someone else wrote it. It's even stranger if it's something you barely started, because instead of a finished work, you only have the unassembled pieces. No matter how good your notes are, some of the most important connectors are missing... exactly because they were so obvious, at least, they were obvious back then.

And so, you have to look for clues to what you were thinking, as you pick up the puzzle you left for yourself. You look at your own handwriting and ask, "What on earth did I mean by this?"

Still, in the end, I think the story came out pretty much the way I meant it to, except for four things.

The first was that Mallory was going to play more practical jokes, much like the ones Alicia plays in Enid Blyton's Malory Towers. And yes, Mallory's last name *was* going to be Towers, as stupid as that would have been. And that's exactly why I ended up with another character whose name starts with M (Mallory, Maisie, Marcie), which I wish I hadn't done, but oh well.

The second thing is that Blair wasn't supposed to be a troubled girl. She was supposed to be comically absent-minded, like Irene in Malory Towers. That was the only change that came into to story as I was writing, and it *is* too abrupt, as one commenter observed. I need to go back and fix that.

The third was the shortness of the story. There was going to be more about the beauty pageant. I expected to do more with the artist searching for a model. I meant to have more conflict with the boy who hit Marcie; I wanted to play up the double standard: that the bully found it natural to beat up a boy, but was horrified that he hit a girl. And there was going to be more going on in and around the tea shop; in fact, my first title for the story was The Real Tea Girl. Mr Fisby was supposed to be a friend of Ida (Maisie's mother), and *that* connection was supposed to get Marcie the job in the first place, AND involve Ida and both Marcie's parents in discussions of the Ponzi scheme. But when I was dividing the plot into chapters, it was kind of like sorting bones. The story got very concentrated, and characters ended up appearing only when they were strictly needed. I didn't mean to do that. But I was committed to finishing it, and it wasn't easy, because it all tasted of 2008 to me.

The last thing that troubled me, even back when I was planning the story, was that it didn't seem funny at all. I mean, Marcie complaining about her mother's pregnancy; her getting hit in the nose; everyone thinking it was a nose job... when those ideas first occurred to me I thought they were funny, but on second thought, they just seemed sad.

And *that* scared me. I was afraid that I used up my supply of laughs, and when it came time to write the story, I was still somewhat deflated by the bad reviews of Marcie And The Amazons.

But then I remembered a friend who wrote screenplays... *he* wanted to write comedies, too, and when he was searching for a new idea, he tried to build a comedy around the black market in human organs.

The two of us used to commute together. He'd be driving, describing this poor man... "The guy's only got a month to live, so he travels to this third-world country. Haw! Haw! Haw! He's running out of time, because he will die if he doesn't get a new liver!" I'd sigh and look out the window. He'd poke me and say, "Aw, come on! Come on! It's FUNNY! Haw, haw, haw!"

The lesson I took from that is: If you're desperate to be funny, maybe you should wait and be something else for a while. You can be funny tomorrow.

So I tried to not force any laughs, and just wrote the story.

And now, as I said at the start, I feel free. I feel like I just paid off a debt. I've got another Marcie story in the works, and a few short projects, but I'm going to do them in my own time and try to not make much of comments, either positive or negative.
 

There was one thing that happened while I was working on The Madonna Of The Future that brought me out of my funk and made me happy about my writing: I was looking through what I'd written, and laughing at the chapter titles. I hadn't gone back to Marcie And The Amazons since I finished it, and one of the chapter titles was completely unfamiliar to me: First Prize Is An Old Nightgown. Puzzled, I clicked on it and started reading.

Honestly, considering the scene that begins when Marcie wakes up on the couch, I don't know that I've ever done better. Marcie is confused, and so are the other characters, and the reader feels what Marcie feels. And it's FUNNY! Haw, haw, haw!

After reading it, I felt good. I even went so far as to feel triumphant, and thought, Ha! Beat that, if you can! Rewrites? Rewrite your grandmother, if you want a rewrite! Marcie And The Amazons stands as is. Long may it wave.

Now I think I can write with more confidence in myself, with a bit more steel in my heart. I think I've been vaccinated, although I've still got a little weak spot where Marcie And The Amazons is concerned.
 

The next Marcie story will take place in the summer and is set in Europe, which Marcie visits with her Aunt Jane. I'm aiming for scary as well as funny, but we'll see how it turns out. You never know! At least this story isn't planned down to the atoms, or grown old on the shelf. It's still new and fuzzy. I don't know how it ends yet and a lot of the middle is implausible even to me. In other words, it's showing a lot of promise. While I work it out, I'm aiming to do some shorter, unrelated stories. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks for reading!