Setting the Stakes 9/14-18/12

So where from here. I’ve started in on the rewrite of Chapter One but slow going. Thinking I need to instill more mystery, more suspense about what the stakes are for Jade. The stakes. This is the question. What’s in it for her? What’s in it for her is what's in it for me. Why am I writing Drum anyway, Why is it an obsession? I think I hit it on the head when I wrote that she had somehow associated herself with this thing and therefore is in need of letting git go--permanently. And yet is that possible? I guess it comes down to the reasons I feel a book like this may of use. I don’t know. It’s a meditation on loss, but also of allowing a full release, even though that may never actually happen. So many hurting in the world right now, so many seeking deliverance, and I sit in this comfortable house in this comfortable chair with the knowledge that life may go on like this indefinitely. And what the hell do I care? A moment ago I answered that question with my harmonica: a bluesy, angry bit that started to breathe for itself. This bluesy angry bit may in fact be my life and I need to tap into it if in fact I intend to make a difference. What difference? I dunno. Something. I won’t do religion anymore, no more alcohol, drugs. What do I have left to hurt myself with? Why do I need to? Because I’m afraid, that’s why. Afraid of telling the truth, afraid of exposing myself to the white light of my own despicable nature, afraid that if I turn over too many rocks, I will discover the darkest part of myself. Yes, this is middle age talking. The fear and angst of a man still unfulfilled and living as if he is. I play my harmonica when I need to get get this blackness out into the air where I can see, smell, taste and hear it. Where I can feel it. So why am I writing Drum? What’s the f’n point? So that I can feel it? I already feel it. Or do I? Why am I writing Drum? Because I need to get it out of the way? Possibly. Out of the way of what? The rest of my life? Possibly. Why am I writing Drum? So that I can feel it. Feel what? Feel the pain again, the center of that pain, what it feels like. But you know that pain. It is the pain of loss. You know that pain, the pain of losing Dad. But the M&C pain is a different thing. I was a child. Oh! Yes a child who looked up to these people almost as if they were gods. They left something indelible, indestructible. What? What was it? It was the feeling of sailing on Drum, the smell of sunbathing oil on Cordelia, Michael’s hand-rolled cigarettes. It was the Zippo, the anchor, the conch, the scent of marine paint and epoxy inside Drum’s cabin. But it was more. What? What THE HELL are the stakes? The stakes are Jade’s stakes. Jade’s stakes are my stakes. Why Jade? What the hell is this Jade business? Jade is a construct, an extension of myself who is able to live the experience vicariously, fictionally, and therefore able to put things together with more intelligence and more coherently than I can. I am a scatter brain. Jade is not. But isn’t Jade just another way to hide, another way to lie about my own fears? What can she do that I can’t--or won’t? Well again, Jade as a fictional persona allows me to push the truth of this experience out into the open without me getting in the way. Without getting in the way. Without getting in the way. I write this three times because this is the reason I am using Jade. She is me, to be certain, but she is more than me. She is the uber-me, the person who can get things done, who can show her fear and anger and distrust; who can reveal her grief. Oh, that is all well. But what is her grief? Certainly she is no longer in mourning; that would be a stretch indeed. No. Jade’s grief stems from her inability to move foreword as a person. She is stuck. I need to show that she is stuck. How are you going to show me that she is stuck? Are you stuck? Yes, I am stuck. I unstick myself through working with my hands, music, writing. But these all are momentary and distractive. No they are not, for when I use my hands, make music and write I recreate myself. So, writing Drum is a recreation? Yes. A recreation with a singular function: to be free. Free of what? Where are we going here? What are the stakes? What is this all about? The stakes. I was getting to that. the stakes are my stakes. Can Jade ever function socially? Will she learn to be someone? Trust someone? That’s it? That’s all the stakes are? The stakes are plain The stakes are weak! Jade needs something truly threatening. Her very identity needs to be challenged, her soul. Jade needs to protect herself from something more than a psychological broken down. She needs to create again. Ok but that’s not it. C’mon, what are the stakes? Depression. Ok that’s closer. Her ability to place trust in anyone. Meh. Her life. Go on... She is dying, she has five years, tops. So? She needs to uncover as much as she can to enable the truth to be revealed. Yeah? In her zeal, she stretches, she breaks stuff, she burns bridges, she get’s lost. She get’s lost--like I get lost. She get’s lost often. In fact, she is directionally challenged, a diagnosed condition. This will never leave her. She will always get lost without the aid of the GPS she carries everywhere. But this has nothing to do with stakes. No. Then why bring it up? Good character trait. Because she is often lost. Jades stakes are my stakes. What are my stakes?

9/16/12

My stakes are keeping the memory of M&C alive in a family  and social environment that would rather sweep it under and forget. I have always been one to treasure the past. The story of Drum has always struck me as slightly unnerving. First, the initial loss was a hit that was completely surprising. I was 13 and suddenly there was this vacuum in the family, a void sucking all of the air out of my youth. It shaped me, drove me further away. I had already idealized Michael, but his departure and eventual disappearance became a factor for considering him a sort of martyr for the footloose freedom he was after. I learned to appreciate that mentality, idealize it. Hitchhiking and traveling alone, keeping to my self and not becoming too involved in social life became my MO. I adopted the whole “Me generation” of the ‘60s and ‘70s as my own. And I now spend considerable time and energy trying to recover from it. Jade recognizes this idealization in herself and needs to let go. But it isn’t compelling enough simply for Jade to struggle with some amorphous idealization that has gripped her life. She needs a clear and present danger, that is forcing her into this search. It could be that the Sleuth has become very insistent, threatening her sense of “ownership” of the Drum story. The story is her own and she is not going to allow anyone to appropriate it to their own ends.

What’s at stake: Losing the story. she must write the story before anyone else gets their hands on it.

Drum is an insistent image. She has been haunted by it since the disappearance, and now, more than ever. I mentioned before that my own identity is wrapped up in this story, perhaps to an obsessive degree, and the Drum story is perhaps all of our story. How so? We are all lost, trying to find our way home, trying to define home--a theme in my own life.

What’s at stake: losing her own future. Jade is trying to find “home.” She feels psychically lost and associates this state of being with Drum, with Michael, Cordelia and to the entire disappearance. By idealizing this packaged past and in effect living in it, she unconsciously idealizes detachment, reclusion, disassociation: Jade has projected Drum on herself. She needs to come to this awareness, or at least hint at it, early in the story. Early early. This need to escape the hold of Drum is big. it is perhaps the most compelling factor for her journey in this book.

Jade’s stakes are my stakes, but this is also fiction. I can alter Jade’s stakes to be more universal, to appeal to the readers, to uncover something yearned, something previously rough and intangible. Of course we all lose. Of course we are all lost from time to time; some of us permanently. But what Jade is seeking is something we all seek: peace. Peace and the permission to move forward in life, past grief and mourning, past the ugliness of unknowing, past the self-destruction and denial. What Jade needs is what I need, but what we all need, which is to get on with it.

What’s at stake: What is the clear and present danger? This is where the fiction must come in. While Jade’s stakes are my my stakes, there is no real threat to my existence, or to my family. I live a relatively secure life. That said, the question of whether I can “move on” is real and shared: a universal. Without the break through, we have no story (which is what is lacking in Drum at present). Ryan Bodinot’s point about no real danger being presented to the protagonist has been riding alongside most of my thoughts as I begin to revise. The danger needs to be defined. What is the danger? The danger for Jade is the loss of her future, the loss of her own potential, the extinction of her own self due to this early and long-lasting grief, a wound that refuses to heal. The more I think about this, the more i think about all the vets from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who will not be returning alive, and specifically, those who will never be found. I’m thinking of them but more, I’m thinking of their families. The long road ahead for them. So what’s at stake? Human resilience, the ability to heal, to look to the future and smile at the good things to come. Hope. Hope is at stake?

A clear and present danger. We can be lost or we can know where we stand. Jade, like me has the dastardly predilection for disorientation, perhaps more so. Here’s a thought: Jade suffers from Developmental Topographical Disorder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_topographical_disorientation and http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/) which she has learned to deal with using certain mnemonic strategies. This could be just the quirk of personality that Jade needs, and may also present a clear and present danger. For example, she may be placed in certain situations that can at once disorient her and give her certain clues that she would not otherwise “see” by recognizing them and therefore categorizing them without proper analysis. Her disability then can be her way out.