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Writing Notes: Blue and Gray - Ch. 7 (spoiler warning)
6 years ago
SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
As I mentioned in the last chapter’s writing notes I had a kind of mini-arc in mind for the character Jonathan. The beginning of the chapter is mostly the pivot-point for that arc, with Jonathan falling overboard after recoiling from Calvin due to his homophobia, then being rescued by Flynn. I don’t think there’s too much to say about it other than that, perhaps that it’s also called back to later in the book in chapter 9.
I think I also mentioned that I had to make a couple choices as far as anachronisms in this book; I tried to keep them to a minimum as much as possible but I felt it was okay to let some things slide here and there if it was in service of the story. That was the decision I made when I presented the battle of Gettysburg as occurring over only 1 day rather than 3, and it’s something I decided was all right here when Flynn saves Jonathan with CPR. CPR wasn’t known back in 1863, but I figured I could maybe get around that if it was presented as a kind of Appalachian folk remedy type thing that Flynn learned from his dad? CPR wasn’t known back then, but it would still work if people had known about it, and I don’t think it’s too far-fetched that someone would have. Anyway, I thought the image of Flynn saving him with the kiss of life kind of served as a good (though unsubtle) snapshot of the story within the story I was trying to tell with the character of Jonathan.
Calvin’s PTSD flashback in the face of the tumult is the 2nd of 3 in the book. It kind of leads to their relationship being exposed to Cletus and also reinforces that Calvin is still dealing with his own trauma, just as real as Flynn’s healing leg but not apparent from the outside.
Originally the conversation that Flynn and Calvin have that night with Emily was more tense, but I really didn’t feel like that was the right way to go after she had tried to defuse that kind of tenseness with Jonathan in the last chapter. I think it works better this way and fits her personality better, both in terms of trying to protect herself and Jonathan and also that she is the smart, level-headed one in their relationship. Taking a step back, I also made her the more overtly religious one of the two of them because I thought that would make for a more interesting dynamic and a character that wasn’t so cliched. She’s in the midst of change as much as any of them, caught between an old life and a new one. She’ll be able to process and think through all this in time, but right now she’s just trying to survive with her husband. That’s how I viewed her character, anyway.
The scene after that I felt might have been a little sappy but I wanted to include it. An undercurrent I was trying to go for in this book as a whole was that no matter what they did, they’d never be accepted by society at large because they’re gay, and that the best they can ever really hope for is to just have each other. That’s not an especially happy thing to think about, but that was reality in 1863 and it was reality for most of history until like, ten minutes ago. I wanted to treat it kind of like the Civil War itself in this book – it’s this big, ugly, horrible thing, but it’s reality and we’re stuck in it, and the first thing we have to think about is survival. Calvin and Flynn aren’t going to change their society’s perceptions of gay people any more than they can end the Civil War on their own. They can run from the war, but the war is still there. They can change the minds of maybe a handful of people at best, but they can’t change the world. It’s just not that kind of a story.
That said, I didn’t want that reality to make the whole book dour, and I didn’t want to make them being gay the entire focus of the book. It’s about them and their relationship and their journey and their path to a new life – all that other stuff is there but the focus is always narrow on Flynn and Calvin.
Anyway, since coming out wasn’t really a thing someone could do in 1863 I thought it would be interesting to have a scene where Flynn tells Calvin about when he was first really honest with himself about who he was. They can’t come out the way we think of it, not ever, but they can be honest and truthful with themselves and accept that part about themselves - ‘stop pretending’ as I said throughout the book. And going back to what I was just saying, that has to be enough for them, and they have to make peace with that. Not the happiest thing in the world, but reality.
If I remember correctly I only use the word ‘gay’ twice in the entire book, and no character ever says it since that word didn’t mean what it does now in 1863. Instead Flynn uses the same word that the preacher used when he was growing up, the blunt ‘homosexual.’ Anyway, the story with Flynn ‘coming out’ to his reflection in the mirror and getting Calvin to do the same in the reflection of the water was one of those scenes I had in my mind for this story before I filled in all the other details and I thought it was important to include. I also personally liked Calvin’s monologue about space sailors and their place on the river; I feel like it’s almost a kind of thesis statement for what I was trying to do with this portion of the story. It also neatly ties together the two biggest motifs I had running through this novel: the importance of rivers and the ubiquity of the moon. Plus the line “I think real-life space sailors will float across the Ocean of Storms up there, walk on the Sea of Tranquility before that happens” is a direct reference to the Apollo 11 landing on the moon in the Sea of Tranquility, which happened just weeks after the Stonewall riot. Anyway, I liked the writing in this scene and I’m happy with it!
Sex scene next. I feel like that’s the weakest part of my writing, to be honest. Probably because I don’t have much experience writing porn and I do have a good bit of experience writing… pretty much everything else. But that’s why we practice, to get better!
Scene after that is Calvin confronting Cletus about what he saw when Calvin kissed Flynn. I mentioned in the last chapter’s writing notes that I knew Cletus’s name was a bit silly but that there was a reason for it, and this is pretty much it. The chapter’s title, “Panta Rhei,” is referring to one of the themes I wanted to run through the book: constant change. It means “everything flows” and is probably the best known aphorism of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. He is also known for the phrase “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” I felt that worked pretty well with what I was going for in this book with the motif of the river and I wanted to include it in a way.
I have a bad habit of inserting meaning into character names in some of my writing, and I avoided it for the most part in this book but I kind of went wild with Cletus, ha. As you may have guessed since Cletus says the above phrase pretty much verbatim to Calvin, the heron Cletus is referencing Heraclitus. As a bonus, his name could also be written “C. Heron” since “Heron” is his actual last name, and that looks a lot like “Charon,” the ferryman in Greek mythology who carries the souls of the dead across the River Styx, but only if they pay him for passage. Anyway, once I started putting all the pieces together I was like ‘yeah, this is happening, the flatboat driver is gonna be a heron named Cletus, it fits too well,’ lol. It also worked out pretty good because, as I mentioned before, there are no actual supernatural events in this book, but with his wildly different physiology from other characters as the only avian in the book, his ability to go without sleep for days at a time, and his general aloof and duplicitous demeanor I felt he was a character whose true nature and intent would always be kind of mysterious for the reader, and that’s what I wanted.
After that we skip ahead several weeks to their arrival in Cairo. The start is a reference to the Book of Job 40:15-24 in the Bible that describes the river monster Behemoth, which I felt was appropriate in describing the ironclads at anchor in the river. I spent some time tying up the events from the past weeks and making it clear that the foxes and Calvin and Flynn were on good terms now to put a period on Jonathan’s character arc.
The very end of the chapter sets up the next few chapters, of course. The steamboat Sultana disaster has always intrigued me; such an enormous disaster, yet so few people today are aware of it. I wanted to include the last line of Flynn reading the name ‘Sultana’ and just leave it there in case any readers were aware of it so that it would be kind of an ‘oh shit’ moment. If not that was fine too because I explain all of that stuff in the next few chapters, but still.
And I’ll talk about that more when I dive into the writing notes for the next chapter, I reckon!
As I mentioned in the last chapter’s writing notes I had a kind of mini-arc in mind for the character Jonathan. The beginning of the chapter is mostly the pivot-point for that arc, with Jonathan falling overboard after recoiling from Calvin due to his homophobia, then being rescued by Flynn. I don’t think there’s too much to say about it other than that, perhaps that it’s also called back to later in the book in chapter 9.
I think I also mentioned that I had to make a couple choices as far as anachronisms in this book; I tried to keep them to a minimum as much as possible but I felt it was okay to let some things slide here and there if it was in service of the story. That was the decision I made when I presented the battle of Gettysburg as occurring over only 1 day rather than 3, and it’s something I decided was all right here when Flynn saves Jonathan with CPR. CPR wasn’t known back in 1863, but I figured I could maybe get around that if it was presented as a kind of Appalachian folk remedy type thing that Flynn learned from his dad? CPR wasn’t known back then, but it would still work if people had known about it, and I don’t think it’s too far-fetched that someone would have. Anyway, I thought the image of Flynn saving him with the kiss of life kind of served as a good (though unsubtle) snapshot of the story within the story I was trying to tell with the character of Jonathan.
Calvin’s PTSD flashback in the face of the tumult is the 2nd of 3 in the book. It kind of leads to their relationship being exposed to Cletus and also reinforces that Calvin is still dealing with his own trauma, just as real as Flynn’s healing leg but not apparent from the outside.
Originally the conversation that Flynn and Calvin have that night with Emily was more tense, but I really didn’t feel like that was the right way to go after she had tried to defuse that kind of tenseness with Jonathan in the last chapter. I think it works better this way and fits her personality better, both in terms of trying to protect herself and Jonathan and also that she is the smart, level-headed one in their relationship. Taking a step back, I also made her the more overtly religious one of the two of them because I thought that would make for a more interesting dynamic and a character that wasn’t so cliched. She’s in the midst of change as much as any of them, caught between an old life and a new one. She’ll be able to process and think through all this in time, but right now she’s just trying to survive with her husband. That’s how I viewed her character, anyway.
The scene after that I felt might have been a little sappy but I wanted to include it. An undercurrent I was trying to go for in this book as a whole was that no matter what they did, they’d never be accepted by society at large because they’re gay, and that the best they can ever really hope for is to just have each other. That’s not an especially happy thing to think about, but that was reality in 1863 and it was reality for most of history until like, ten minutes ago. I wanted to treat it kind of like the Civil War itself in this book – it’s this big, ugly, horrible thing, but it’s reality and we’re stuck in it, and the first thing we have to think about is survival. Calvin and Flynn aren’t going to change their society’s perceptions of gay people any more than they can end the Civil War on their own. They can run from the war, but the war is still there. They can change the minds of maybe a handful of people at best, but they can’t change the world. It’s just not that kind of a story.
That said, I didn’t want that reality to make the whole book dour, and I didn’t want to make them being gay the entire focus of the book. It’s about them and their relationship and their journey and their path to a new life – all that other stuff is there but the focus is always narrow on Flynn and Calvin.
Anyway, since coming out wasn’t really a thing someone could do in 1863 I thought it would be interesting to have a scene where Flynn tells Calvin about when he was first really honest with himself about who he was. They can’t come out the way we think of it, not ever, but they can be honest and truthful with themselves and accept that part about themselves - ‘stop pretending’ as I said throughout the book. And going back to what I was just saying, that has to be enough for them, and they have to make peace with that. Not the happiest thing in the world, but reality.
If I remember correctly I only use the word ‘gay’ twice in the entire book, and no character ever says it since that word didn’t mean what it does now in 1863. Instead Flynn uses the same word that the preacher used when he was growing up, the blunt ‘homosexual.’ Anyway, the story with Flynn ‘coming out’ to his reflection in the mirror and getting Calvin to do the same in the reflection of the water was one of those scenes I had in my mind for this story before I filled in all the other details and I thought it was important to include. I also personally liked Calvin’s monologue about space sailors and their place on the river; I feel like it’s almost a kind of thesis statement for what I was trying to do with this portion of the story. It also neatly ties together the two biggest motifs I had running through this novel: the importance of rivers and the ubiquity of the moon. Plus the line “I think real-life space sailors will float across the Ocean of Storms up there, walk on the Sea of Tranquility before that happens” is a direct reference to the Apollo 11 landing on the moon in the Sea of Tranquility, which happened just weeks after the Stonewall riot. Anyway, I liked the writing in this scene and I’m happy with it!
Sex scene next. I feel like that’s the weakest part of my writing, to be honest. Probably because I don’t have much experience writing porn and I do have a good bit of experience writing… pretty much everything else. But that’s why we practice, to get better!
Scene after that is Calvin confronting Cletus about what he saw when Calvin kissed Flynn. I mentioned in the last chapter’s writing notes that I knew Cletus’s name was a bit silly but that there was a reason for it, and this is pretty much it. The chapter’s title, “Panta Rhei,” is referring to one of the themes I wanted to run through the book: constant change. It means “everything flows” and is probably the best known aphorism of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. He is also known for the phrase “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” I felt that worked pretty well with what I was going for in this book with the motif of the river and I wanted to include it in a way.
I have a bad habit of inserting meaning into character names in some of my writing, and I avoided it for the most part in this book but I kind of went wild with Cletus, ha. As you may have guessed since Cletus says the above phrase pretty much verbatim to Calvin, the heron Cletus is referencing Heraclitus. As a bonus, his name could also be written “C. Heron” since “Heron” is his actual last name, and that looks a lot like “Charon,” the ferryman in Greek mythology who carries the souls of the dead across the River Styx, but only if they pay him for passage. Anyway, once I started putting all the pieces together I was like ‘yeah, this is happening, the flatboat driver is gonna be a heron named Cletus, it fits too well,’ lol. It also worked out pretty good because, as I mentioned before, there are no actual supernatural events in this book, but with his wildly different physiology from other characters as the only avian in the book, his ability to go without sleep for days at a time, and his general aloof and duplicitous demeanor I felt he was a character whose true nature and intent would always be kind of mysterious for the reader, and that’s what I wanted.
After that we skip ahead several weeks to their arrival in Cairo. The start is a reference to the Book of Job 40:15-24 in the Bible that describes the river monster Behemoth, which I felt was appropriate in describing the ironclads at anchor in the river. I spent some time tying up the events from the past weeks and making it clear that the foxes and Calvin and Flynn were on good terms now to put a period on Jonathan’s character arc.
The very end of the chapter sets up the next few chapters, of course. The steamboat Sultana disaster has always intrigued me; such an enormous disaster, yet so few people today are aware of it. I wanted to include the last line of Flynn reading the name ‘Sultana’ and just leave it there in case any readers were aware of it so that it would be kind of an ‘oh shit’ moment. If not that was fine too because I explain all of that stuff in the next few chapters, but still.
And I’ll talk about that more when I dive into the writing notes for the next chapter, I reckon!
The writing notes for the next chapter will probably be pretty long actually, because there's a couple tangents I'm going to go on most likely, one in particular about the role of music in the book that will probably be kinda in depth. It may be a few days though, because things are gonna be kind of crazy for me at work this week, ha.