Loving In A World Of Desire

Argh, I've been sucked into this again. All 300 pages of it. Of course it's way too long, it was a serialised internet soap opera that I tried to hack into a novel. I sat up until midnight last night, gulping it down by the bucketful, and even though I KNEW what was going to happen (because, well, I wrote the bloody thing) I found myself caught up in it, and even disappointed by the abruptness of the ending.

Oh, and the bit that I was actually looking for, it seems, never made the final edit. (In the web version, it split into two divergent threads, based on the quantum symmetry breaking of a single decision, though it came back together for the last chapter. A few years ago, I decided to sew it back together into one reality, though I'm not sure I now like the path it took.) KG, alone in a big, haunted house near Oxford, trapped with the ghosts of Thom's failed relationships.

It's weird re-reading your own work. How much you forget. And I think it's a good sign when your characters still have the capacity to surprise you. There were so many points where I just wanted to slap KG and shout "You stupid bint!" at her, but I know she had to do the things she did, even when they were stupid and self destructive. Her decisions make sense, when you look back at the things she'd been through in the previous episodes. Why she is afraid of getting too close to Damien because things with Alex went so disasterously wrong. Why she actually marries "the lazy-eyed pscyho" (god, Damien had such a turn of phrase) during a two day pills and booze binge in Las Vegas* because she still feels guilty over Jeremy's suicide.

The plot turns are so ridiculous and over the top, I can remember how much fun it was to write something so absurdly soapy. (Though I had a few twinges at moments that were overlaps with other stories written by people I'm no longer in contact with.) It's still fun to read it. And god, yeah, I find myself falling in love with Damien again and again. Earthy, blunt, pragmatic, slightly Machiavellan, yet unbelievably intelligent and boundlessly creative and energetic. He wouldn't put up with KG's bullshit, he saw through her, and met her on equal terms. A modern rewrite of "The Taming Of The Shrew" though it kind of backfired on him.



Why don't men like Damien exist in real life? Or maybe they do, but I don't see them, because like KG, I'm chasing after the pretty boys with the red hair and arty neuroses. I suppose I spent so long with the Hypocritical Sound Artist because I projected so much of the fictional character of Damien onto him, with dangerous results.

I'm sorry, I know this makes no sense to anyone who hasn't read it. But sometimes it's good to revisit your old work, and pat yourself on the back.

*Yes, this was *before* Britney did the same thing IRL.