Trial, Trauma, Fantasy-- Find Your Themes

One of the things people never realized about me in my early life was that reality was always as much in my head as the world I share with everyone else. I was teased for being genuinely terrified in haunted houses, clamping my ears as fireworks exploded in light and sound around me, and not really believing that fairy tales weren't real (even if magic didn't exist now, perhaps it was more historical than fantasy). Over time, my head wrapped around these distinctions somewhat, but not from lack of people I thought I could trust forcing me to lay down clear lines between fantasy and reality, lest my own trauma be dismissed as overactive imagination. It hurt that no one saw how I cringed when my abuser hugged me, that no one questioned why I couldn't sleep without a light on. In time, I began to think that maybe they knew but I just wasn't important enough to defend. The illusion that children were protected was never one I got to enjoy. I was meant to feel sorry for a parent whom was a best friend at best, someone I parented or was used as entertainment by at worst. Yet no such forgiveness was available for the child that stumbled through life confused when mistakes were inevitable but unacceptable nonetheless. I reached a resolution with my childhood woes late into adulthood. The apology was made but the damage was done.

Fortunately, as a child, I already possessed an internal world that captivated me. It's possible that without that early trauma, I might not have retreated into myself as I did. I didn't write or draw as an outlet, at least not on any conscious level. I've said before that those places are ones I can't really access in my darkest moods. Drawing and writing became a playground, not just for what I wanted to see, but what I wasn't able to face at full force yet wouldn't allow to haunt me. Either way, I had to reflect on it when the full force of trauma was not new. Extremities are incoherent for me in their throes. It even took me decades to learn to explain how I was gaslighted by a psychopath. They can literally convince you you're crazy and that you don't remember what really happens in your own life.

lol I know-- that got dark fast. I won't apologize, but it gets less morbid. The fantasy genre, after all, was a natural start. I could face darker realities under the cover of fiction. But I could also play in places of whimsy and innocence. And innocence lost. Rather than go into anything too deeply, I'll start hopping around on the themes I care about.

I won't cover mythology/gods, sex, time travel or topics I've covered before. I'll aim for something unique to my usual ramblings (but again, as much as I blog, you'll have to forgive repetition).

Castles- not unique in terms of being loved but new to my topics. Castles and palaces, realistically, were not that cozy of luxuries. In fact, drafts are a problem you hear repeated when it comes to one of its many downsides. Not to mention, very few were of modest size. If the upkeep itself wasn't too expensive over time, then getting from one side to the next was tedious enough. It wasn't uncommon for even wealthy castle owners to huddle into a single wing during harsh winters or even only keep up outside appearances yet opt to only use a small portion of it. Let's call them what they are: displays of wealth and fortresses meant to intimidate. Architectural marvels but I'd need some serious downscaling and modern amenities to make it livable. As a child, there was no practical obsession, only the romanticism of spires, drawbridges, moats and knights on armored horses. While Scotland and Germany have ones I'd realistically love to see, the use of castles in my stories is never romanticized very long if at all. Building do receive sort of personalities in my work, often related to how people envision them. Rather than just a rich vs. poor perception, buildings do have the potential to subtly show the mentality of the observer.

Princesses- historically, we all realize there were really few realities more rotten than that of a princess. I get that, with present dreams of wealth at any cost, the why is lost on many people. Yet princesses were not only property but public figures. They were never given agency nor encouraged to love and privacy was almost impossible. They were groomed and sold for the greatest gain, some not even educated let alone allowed consent with their own bodies. Even more progressive times have never given princesses much choice and even then, it was a slim list rife with expectations. Movies like The Princess Diaries make light of 'choosing a prince' as if age and looks were ideal. It was just as likely a princess would have to marry an abusive old widower with five children older than her or even her own brother. But hey, as a kid, nothing was more romanticized than Disney Princesses, if only for their perfect demeanors and dresses. We were willing to forgive that Beast terrorized Belle and that Snow White was indebted to the prince who kissed her. But true love, amirite?

Seas- not all of my books go into my love of oceans, but when they are present, I am drawn to their potential. Starting at my childhood fascination, most people who know me would think that Myrtle Beach is the origin. Yet my true love started with the deepest unexplored places, namely learning about the Mariana Trench. If it has ever been explored, I admit I don't really want to know. The idea that there might be creatures or secrets where my imagination can run wild is reason enough to accept blissful ignorance. You could try to ruin that for me but in my head, there will always be mysteries worth exploring. Raising African cichlids could be part of it. Even though they are freshwater fish, all fish navigate through water in a way that never fails to fascinate. Seas are places where I might be limited in movement, but there are so many ecosystems and life that dominate it in a way we can only dream of (and I do in a future book, Piscine).

Martial Arts- this isn't something you'll see me get carried away with in writing but every bit of choreography does stem from inhaling Kung Fu movies as a kid. Like some chess players romanticize the sequential movement of pieces (Amy Tan does this a time or two in her books), the names of stances, kicks and styles are my cup of tea. While Jean Claude Van Damme made a stinker with Street Fighter, one of my all time favorite movies was the Quest, a campy movie with a solid plot that makes a real show of different fighting styles. Who can forget Bloodsport? And Jackie Chan's Drunken Fist! I could go on and on but one thing is certain, I'm not a stranger to the beauty of a well written action scene. I try to do better every time it's worth exploring. There a beauty to martial arts equivalent to dancing. Even in Drunken Fist, Jackie Chan managed to make stumbling look like calculated grace.

Magic- magic is easy to tear apart. Without limits or logic, it always seems to fall apart at the slightest nudge. In Harry Potter, Alohomora seemed like a snazzy trick and Avada Kedavra a fearsome one, but what really stops a wizard from opening any door, even if all wizard doors could enchant against it (sucks to be you, muggles)? The only thing stopping Avada Kedavra from being used is... Trust and morality? We're so fucked! The same goes for hiding everything from the muggles. This seems like a really easy rule to rebel against. Hell, even Harry fucked up on accident. I suppose Rowling probably amended this later, pretending she'd already thought it out to save for Pottermore. Or maybe because it was young adult, it was fine to gloss over it. Yet try telling a Star Wars fan that you don't need to explain everything because it's 'kid's stuff' and them's fighting words! Maybe it was just a lovely pothole to slam us out of imagination. Regardless, it makes me consider how I formulate my own magical worlds. Now, as far as childhood goes, what kid doesn't dream of magic in any and every form?  Magic is a tough sell for most adults who do pick apart the mechanics but I also don't find it necessary to explain everything. However, the mechanics shouldn't be big enough to crash Ron's dad's car into. (I can't fault Rowling for her imagination -- big stories can get away from anyone and few are as dedicated as she to reworking the details, even to the point of maddeningly fucking with her own canon.)

Women Who Aren't Born Strong- I feel like this is something that speaks to me most. I rarely have even seasoned or old characters that always seem to have the right tool for every situation. I absolutely do see a need for strong women in fiction, but not bulletproof. Smart women can make dumb decisions. Beauty can make them dull and dependent. The heroines I connect with are the ones that often have to make the most important decisions without experience or help, so I don't make them infinitely lucky nor does 'knowing better' automatically mean they are immune to it when it comes in a different box. In reality, kind women sometimes let people hurt them the same way many times because they try hard not to become bitter or judgemental and think all people are the same. My strong women doubt themselves, sometimes get their ass saved by a man, sometimes finding strength in the wisdom of what they are best and worst at. I can't lift a big TV like my dad can. I have CPS, for one, and even doing yoga, I learned my wrist strength and flexibility had peaked well below even some of my friends that didn't work out. A strong woman doesn't need to be good at everything. A strong woman is a well-rounded woman who makes the best of herself. And sometimes fucks up. Even if you give her the most wretched traumatic past, making it have only a superficial bearing on her perfection in your tale will assure I won't even bother to finish it.

The last point doesn't really have a category, just a personal preference. Just... fuck sadness. I avoid sad movies and entertainment period. I'll take violent, sexy, and sure, throw in some sad moments, but I don't do sad endings and if I spend too much time sinking, I'll jump ship. I can hang with dark to a point. Dark humor can be one of my favorites. I don't like endings that are too saccharine either, so it's not some weird demand that people keep me happy. Yet I've been fooled by enough movies and dramas labeled romance that were just fucking sad and telling me something is sad will guarantee I won't bother. Yes, I write sad here and there, but it's never been a place to leave a final ending. Sadness makes me feel like an abused masochist for pain. I've endured enough to know that I would never choose to feel it if I don't have to. I don't need sad to feel alive. In fact, it can take me to a place of not wanting to be alive.  If you love sad (and this tends to be one of those quirks that women most often embrace), good on you. However, I'll take a rousing, exciting, suspenseful tale.

Just a side note-- I'm not vague about my past because I'm avoiding it. I exercise privacy because I don't have some sick need to hurt other people who could be affected by it. I don't want to poke rabid dogs either. I don't have the means to run if my honesty turns my world inside out. They are a part of me that I do talk about with a very limited audience, but they inevitably bear some weight on who I am and how they feed into my work.

If you are someone who is still struggling with the pain of trauma, please know that there are many numbers to call for help. If you're a close friend, you already know I'm always available and your pain doesn't inconvenience me at all.

Let it be known that my pain does drive me and I have learned to manage it. It's not perfect, but it doesn't get to trigger me as it has become wisdom, caution and valuable for introspection once I've learned to twist damage into something useful. I am not grateful to those who hurt me or give them any credit for making me stronger. That part is in each of us from the start and only you get that fulfillment.

The Distance and the Intimacy: The Love Affair with Writing

We're all consumers before we are creators, no matter how much our parents/caregivers might have insisted the massive dumps in our diapers were a sight to behold. Learning faces through the blur of first sight, hearing every strange noise to prickle the ear-- assuming we're born with all senses intact, that is. (Perhaps this is why some deprivation of sense is fascinating to me, but I'll get to that.)

What do I mean by distance and intimacy? Well, not all of us really know that our 'passions' have longevity so there's a time issue involved. Sometimes, and for long periods of time, we may break up with our passions, cheat on them, all the while pining for them. Sometimes a particularly sensitive piece creates a different phenomenon of distance/intimacy. Sometimes we need to blubber and roll in the juices and sometimes we need to be the harsh logical judge of it. We get through the passion parts and then poke, edit, play, indulge, reject, accept-- it's 12 stages of grief and euphoria, but we each fill in the blanks. I've said before-- ebb and flow and some of the best writing I've seen uses the push and pull of development, to align with the very real state of many struggles. Something the characters move on their motivations, sometimes things have to happen to them. Do we take the omniscient look and hash it out in great detail or do we limit it to experience the spotty details alongside the character? Neither one is king when it comes to depth. From any perspective, we can get uncomfortably close or coldly analytical.

There are a lot of aspects to me, for one, that people try to explain. It's especially trendy these days to assume to speak for others, even when the subject is more than capable. I suppose you could narrow down my attitudes to trauma, whether it be my sexuality, my draw towards art and writing, my lifestyle. You could correlate things simply, but there's more to that history than I will ever feel comfortable writing or explaining, especially when it pertains to the 'stressors' outside of myself, the people that did and still can terrorize me if I step over the line. I will not give them that piece of fame, to ride on whatever failures or successes I have in my life with association. If you have bogeymen in your life, give them to your fictions. A memoir is the thing to write if you outlive them all.

That being said, there are 'other' things. Things I stopped trying to understand, things I use and learn to master as much as possible and I don't aim to be mysterious with those so I'll describe this the best I can without using labels that might give you false impressions.

I've struggled with neuropathic issues from a very early age. For no apparent reason or stressor, I've temporary lost my sight or hearing or sense of touch, or had them 'heightened' to unbearable and painful levels. No amount of searching ever gave me answers and in most cases, I was too afraid to tell. I had some wonderful teachers along the way that saw me melting down in my confusion and helped me, no questions, no words. Sometimes it was just a space to cry in their office, sometimes it was me interrupting to go to the bathroom. The counselor, for some reason, really liked me, even gave me her home phone number and told me to call if I needed it, made sure all my teachers knew that I could leave class any time I needed to (on days I bothered to show up, I didn't leave class at all-- kind of an all-or-nothing when it comes to showing up). It's not that these people thought I was suicidal, but looking back, I think they knew my 'other' better than books or doctors had any grasp of back then. They also saw my potential. Another thing I couldn't see without hindsight, but learned to trust some people when they said good things about me.

Because I don't see what's in front of me or, rather, rarely do. I see things more clearly looking back, sometimes beating myself up for how stupid or ineffective I was in the moment. I became adept at trying to recreate the person I wanted to be, to try to learn to be a person that can see the moment or even a little ahead, learn to anticipate the world around me. Somewhere in the invention of myself, I became a storyteller. I never saw a place for THAT (I never could get the taste for lying) in my life, but there was a pocket I'd stumbled on where worlds did wait. Despite all the characters and events happening over 'there', it could still be a lonely place, not a place of inside jokes and the things I could talk about with others who weren't familiar. So I wanted to find ways to show people. I was already building those places, learning to express through art and writing what I struggled to say.

An honest place, one I have trouble lying about too. It's not a place that can actually speak for my desires, doubts or fears, just a gathering ground from my journey in this world. And I don't have these fascinating stories of world travel, but I can simulate it through the means that I have. It's maddening, a bloom of chaos and beauty. It can be safe and warm or frigid and frightening. It affects moods that people can't see the reason for, and sometimes I don't even know why I feel or act the way I do. It can be a real bastard trying to recreate it for the sharing. Yeah, sometimes I thought about giving up because creation and using it to funnel what I don't really understand is never a safe place. It's erratic and it's not structured. Because of that, writing...

Writing holds structure or none at all. The only demand is what you intend for it. I wrote stories for school, but then I wrote stories in school when I was supposed to be doing something else. Just little stories. 'Born to Play Video Games' and 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Kitties'... (I loved the Turtles, but the idea of drawing humanoid cats was just so appealing.) I wrote poems when I fell in love with rhythm and rhyme. It was music and color in words alone. Alongside this passion, always came the impulse and whimsy of 'doodling'. I love that word too, doodling. So often it was said to me in an attempt to belittle it or guilt me for wasting time, but doodling and noodling about-- those things brought me closer to a feeling of rightness. Doodling has brought me closer to some of the most amazing people in my life-- my best friends, family, and my friend's children especially. No matter how much adulting pressures my drawing to be 'more', kids always give me this surreal sense of expertise I forget to see sometimes. They're not comparing me to 'masters' or ticking off all they've liked better; they're capable of just loving it for what it is. (Not unique to kids, by the way-- my best friends always seem to lift me up like this too. Also people who are terrible at lying, but are also likely to clam up if they don't want to hurt my feelings either.)

It's hard to say whether I can make my characters and worlds resonate the same way they do with me. I'm not someone who can see the hook, the blurb, the simplification of the big picture. My love affair with writing and creating is selfish but it wants to be generous. It can feel superficial, it can feel overly deep. Courageous and cowardly. I can't lie, but sometimes I can omit or gloss over, defense mechanisms for survival and a habit I try to break.

I write because... it's too big to contain. Because otherwise it can leak out where I don't want it to. Just like my neuropathic struggles, it's not about the cure, but working with the intuitive treatment of it. Writing is often a sensitive organism, sometimes needing compassion, sometimes needing tough love. Raising kids-- much the same. You treat every kid the same and they lose sight of what could motivate them to improve or change. I don't discipline my nephews the same, nor reward them the same and when they notice this, I explain the circumstances, let them see the logic (the punishment fits the crime and so on). Almost always, a punishment or a reward merits a discussion, but there is also a lot of time for play, contemplation, or things being what they will be. I never wanted to be a parent, but like most labels, it's not important. These little guys grew on me and the one thing I want to give them are tools to maneuver through an unfair, unsympathetic, confusing world.

I write because it's not an exaggeration to say they saved me. I call them my little heroes. I knew it would never be fair for a human being to inherit my issues, but I did need 'new life' to remind me of the one the world tried to beat out of me. I did find myself and it wasn't just through me. It was all the things they helped me see-- family/friends, writing, drawing, music. I didn't need to 'have kids' to learn to look ahead. I just needed to open myself to the 'other' things.