One of the key themes in the trilogy was the idea of growing up, which is something I've been going through in my own life. Better late than never, I suppose. Hours of therapy and head-shrinkage have gotten me to the point where I am finally, perhaps 20 years too late, emerging as the adult I am supposed to be. Part of that process is learning to deal with life and discovering how life has influenced you in ways that you were never quite aware of before.
If that sounds a little arcane, I'll explain more concretely.
That's me about 15 years or so ago (I'm on the right) at one of the anime cons I used to staff (Neko-con, from the look of the badges). In the photo with me are two of my good friends.
The dark haired guy in the middle is James, Ernie's player and the "inspiration" for Mitch in VbN/PbN. I have to confess I spend much of my 20s in great envy of James. During our college years, he was quite the bon vivant libertine that Mitch is portrayed in the story. I envied him his smooth confidence and his good fortune with the ladies, things I've never been able to master even now.
James and I are now largely estranged from one another, mostly due to the fourth person in this picture: his wife, one of the most miserable and unpleasant people the universe has ever spawned.
How do you live when one of your best friends isn't there for you anymore? We all have those people who drop off the radar. What does it mean?
The fellow on the left is Dan and he was much like James, a man with a massive lust for life. I didn't know him as well as James, but we worked con staff together and had a good time of things. He was one of those rare folks that you just couldn't help but like. A great guy, a lot of fun, a good heart.
I learned yesterday that Dan passed away in his sleep on Halloween. There's something fitting about that, given his fondness for cosplay and burlesque. But I'm still in shock from the news. He was my age, far too young to go.
What does it mean to lose the people we care about? That happens to all of us too.
In many ways, these two guys were two of my heroes, two people that I aspired to be like and never achieved. I admired them. I wanted to be them. I don't know what all this means, but I'm asking the question where I didn't before. Maybe that's part of this whole growing up thing.
But it also has a pragmatic element to what I do here on this site. They say the best way to become a good writer is two-fold. 1) Read a lot of good writing. 2) Have a lot of good experiences to write about. At this point in my life, on the cusp of my 42nd birthday, I suppose I've done both. I've read a lot of books, good and bad. And I've struggled in life. Lost friends. Waged the war between who I really am and who the world wants me to be. Come to terms with my family's expectations and failures. Made mistakes and learned from them (or not, in some cases.)
Whether that makes me a good writer at this point, I'll leave to the judgment of my readers, but I can say that I am far better than I used to be.
Good enough to not be satisfied with where the plot for Act Three of Philly by Night was going to go. Largely because of Grossman's trilogy and a few other books I've been reading lately, Act Two very much so lived out the old saying "tales grow in the telling." I vastly expanded the roles of the mages and werewolves in the story, added a lot more background and characters to those sub-plots.
Not surprisingly, those new characters are all aspects of who I am as a person. There's no secret that Michael is a different interpretation of me and always has been, one far more confident and ambitious (and less moral) than I am in real life. But so too are Sarah and Boar and Quentin and Cortez and Rebecca and pretty much everyone else that has more than a single scene in the story. They are all mechanisms by which I continue to explore the craziness in my own head.
That being true, I have to see this through to the end. If loss and letting-go are part of life and my story is a dark reflection of my life, then these things need to be a greater element of the story. How that'll play out I'm not quite sure just yet. But it does mean I'm back to the drawing board with Act Three.
The last few chapters of Act Two will be posted shortly. Realistically, I expect there to be another long hiatus after that, as I figure out where I want Act Three to go and how I want to speak to both the needs of the plot and of my own literary therapy. In the end, I hope the final product will be worth the wait.
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