I haven't written plays in a really long time. Part of me feels like I need to change the name of the blog or maybe what it's about or something, but I still feel like what I do here is the same thing right? Like this is still how I build my work, which is dramatic, either for the stage or because it's not a comedy. I've always written drama, either fiction or on the stage, so there you go. Not changing the blog name, but I might update what it's about. Not that you asked. I am more telling myself this.
Anyway, that's not what this post is about. I have been feeling SUPER overwhelmed lately. Part of this is just because I have anxiety and depression and they really like to fight for control, which sounds completely insane, but hello? I have anxiety and depression, i have been on medication for it for over 10 years and have gone to therapy for about half of those, so yeah. It sounds crazy because I am crazy. And I know I didn't talk about that a lot before, but guess what? Times change.
Also, I have been writing mostly fiction since the twins were born. I did NaNoWriMo the last four years. The last two years I have done work on my current novel, DUSK. The year before that I wrote a draft of my novel about the Holocaust, IN THE BUNKER, and the year before that I wrote a draft of my first work of fiction in a couple of decades, INSIGHT. That first work I didn't finish the draft, mostly because it was a work of horror and it was totally frightening me. But IN THE BUNKER was a breakthrough that I had been waiting for for 15 years. And finishing that draft felt like I got the novel that I knew what inside me out, after working so long and so hard to do it.
And after working my entire writing life to get IN THE BUNKER out, I wasn't sure where I was going to go next. Or how I would get there. Or if I would get there. Or if I would write again.
I had planned on working on a second draft of IN THE BUNKER the year after I finished that draft, but the idea for DUSK was planted inside me by a dear friend, Minda, who was working on a project about the future basically according to Trump.
She and I sat down at a coffee shop about three years ago maybe close to right now, and as she outlined her work, my brain started turning.
I had been very sad and lost and angry since Trump became president. I didn't sleep that night. The next day I was a zombie and I just kept thinking that I would wake up. I hugged my kids and cried and said that I was sorry and I tried and we have to keep trying. Fast forward to now, and I was clearly right to be upset and angry about it. I could not have imagined what has happened during 45's presidency.
Or, at least I guessed that I couldn't have imagined worse.
And then DUSK snuck up on me. I started doing research on a ton of things--all the terrible things 45 says and does, the environment and what its destruction means for all of us, war, genocide, The Holocaust and Nazi Germany.....among many other things. I found myself creating a world where I took everything that i was learning and took it to the worst most terrible extreme. I found myself building a horrifying and disgusting future for the United States, which started with 45 and ends with the tag line: 'A Girl Finds Her Long Lost Twin Sister and Together They Defeat the Patriarchy'.
It's more than that. I had to create two whole new religions, a new world ravaged by the changes of war, genocide, genetic altering and climate change.
The really weird part? I finished a draft on 2017. I continued doing research and writing through all of 2018, and kept going on the draft in NaNoWriMo in 2018 (I didn't finish because I really hated where the writing was going, but in retrospect, it wasn't that bad, i think my anxiety and depression were basically being terrible assholes). But I didn't stop. I kept on going.
And I am still working on it. And I haven't stopped, except for when life gets in the way (which is often with twins who are turning 5 next month, a part time job, a full time life as a wife and mother, political stuff, etc.).
But here's the thing. Okay, two things.
First, I keep thinking that I am pushing the story far enough into insane horror and then 45 does something even crazier. And then I wonder why I am still working on this novel, when I keep having to butt heads with all this horror, from the past, from my fictional world, and the present.
In some ways, I started writing DUSK because I had nothing else I could do with my anger and sadness. I did it to cope with the horrors. I tried to create worse only to be faced with even worse in my fictional world. I am slightly scared to see where the hell this thing is going to go, mostly because I feel that no matter how bad things get, the present and reality will be as bad.
Second, I would give all of this--the last three years of working on this novel, creating these characters, working on this world of horrors, and some hope in there too--so this would all stop. It feel like we are just on a shitty timeline filled with racism, genocide, concentration camps, migrant children dying....not that we didn't have these things or similar before, but, I don't know. Maybe it's because I am a cis white woman who lives in the middle of Iowa, maybe I am kind of removed enough to be shocked by things still. Or maybe just human enough still to hope that things couldn't be this bad, or that I could still see good in the world...I don't know how to explain it exactly.
I just needed to get this down because this work has been a wonderful journey of trusting myself as a writer and trusting the characters and the story to know where to go with the research and how to craft the story, but at the same time, it isn't worth everything terrible that has happened, not worth the lives lost and families destroyed.
So what will I do?
I guess I will keep writing, because there's nothing else I can really do to help.
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