Checking in (July 2024)

Hey everyone,

Regrettably, I don't have much in the way of progress for you. I've had some frustrating health issues (that I hope are maybe getting better now), and have been pretty firmly stuck on TDB. I figured I might talk a bit about that though, maybe sort out my thoughts.

(CW for discussion of depiction of acute transphobia below)

As you're probably aware, my rewriting and editing caught up to the point of the presentation itself, and the next chapter starts with Mr. Clark's response to that. This is a pretty tricky (and unpleasant) part of the story, and I keep being uncertain about how best to handle it. There's two competing aims I have here: on one hand, I need to establish Clark demonstrating that he's an outright bigot in stark enough terms that it makes sense that plenty of normal people would be repulsed by it--I'm trying to elide the worst of the ambient transphobia of the era, but want to get to it being reasonable that there's plenty of classmates who might initially be weirded out by Josie, but upon seeing that, they go 'what the hell dude, she's not hurting anyone.' On the other hand, I don't really enjoy having to write that directly, and I know many of my readers don't necessarily want to read it straight up either.

So in my initial draft, I tried to cut around that in terms of where this chapter ended, and with the next chapter picking up shortly afterwards and focusing more on Josie's reaction. But I still don't feel like I can leave it entirely unstated, and some indication needs to be given as to this really being over the line, and thus I have Josie internally reveal that... well, that he says something along the lines of 'you'll never be a woman, you should kill yourself, because that'd be better for your family than dying of aids' Like I said, yikes. don't love writing that. makes me uncomfortable to figure out what to do with it. But also I think it sort of needs to be that direct and bad for him to work as a villain and for that to feel real and not just Josie overreacting or something. (Plus, I kind of feel like if you're a trans person on the internet, regrettably you're going to run across something that bad or worse at least at some point). But I'm not certain whether I am straddling this line in a way that's not really working in either direction - if I want it to be clear how bad it is, should I state it more directly? or should I back off on that as not being worth the severity of what I'm dropping in, and just leave it more ambiguous? Regardless, you can see why I've been a little stuck and not exactly super excited to get right back to that exact moment. :\

The other piece of the bigger puzzle that I'm uncertain about is how well my plans for the end will come together. In some ways, the presentation feels like the climax of the story, but there's still quite a bit after that, as you can already see in terms of the chapters written. They flow from one to the next pretty directly, but I'm a bit worried that they're stepping on each other in terms of whether they're resolving things or building tension for the next thing or... etc. In a very vague sense, I feel pretty good about the next major moment that I've yet to write (the meeting in the principal's office with everyone and parents) and feel like that's going to be fairly satisfying, but then there's one more twist that I've been setting up where one more problem comes up and gets resolved and... Well, it's not exactly deus ex machina, because I've laid the groundwork, but it's also sort of orthogonal to the rest of the arc of the story. Sort of... winding up being more of someone else's thing where the story so far has been Josie's. I don't know if that's going to feel weird or unsatisfying. I do have an ending moment/chapter that I think will be good to close the story on though. But all of that together is like... I have the events all in my head, but I'm worried enough that they're going to be messy when getting them down that it makes it hard to get it on paper. And yeah, I'm just venting I guess (& apologies for the length of this stream-of-consciousness post), and I really should just do it all and then see what I have. But maybe this is also me trying to psyche myself up to do so, lol.

So yeah, thanks for your support as always, and I appreciate your patience as I work through this. In some ways, it'd be easier if this story didn't feel important to me, because I'd worry less about wanting everything to be good and coherent. But, for better or worse, it does feel important, and... well, yeah I do wish I had just finished it a year ago, but I also do feel like the edits have allowed me to add some really fun stuff that I like a lot.

Regardless, if any of you have any thoughts on how the story's going and how to handle some of these sticking points, feel free to leave a comment. In terms of my actual schedule, I'm going to be away for next week on a bit of vacation, and I hope that in August I can sit down and dedicate some real energy to getting this going. Best wishes! <3