Friends

Help me out here. I'm trying to remember some song lyrics, but one word keeps slipping my mind. "When the moon hits your eye, like a big pizza pie, that's..."

So we workshopped Over the Rainbow last night. There were a number of positive responses (including what I consider the most important compliments, namely that people who know nothing about paganism are frequently expressing how "included" they feel in my stories, how they feel educated by them but not preached to) and a couple of negative ones (mostly the feeling that there wasn't enough conflict in the story.) Admittedly, that might be fair. Even Argen the Demon had a meditative tone throughout most of it, and that was a story about an ass-kicking vigilante. Now that I'm writing stories about "real" people, my conflicts have been even quieter, verging on unspoken in some cases.

When I presented Perfect Love and Perfect Trust, some writers thought that Andy was essentially without conflict and that Dottie should have been the point of view character; Over the Rainbow got the opposite response, with some saying that Dottie didn't have anything wrong with her* and that Andy was the dynamic, interesting one, and therefore the story should have been told through his eyes. I don't really agree with either of those opinions, and I wonder if that's just a divide between my opinions as a writer and those of my classmates and professors. Both of those stories seem to me to really be about the character I wrote from the perspective of; Over the Rainbow in particular, though it might seem like it's about Andy lashing out at Dottie over his mother's death, is, to me, really about Dottie finally making a connection and starting to find her way back from her alienation. That's why the most important line is the final one, where she finally takes Andy's hand. That gesture is much more about her than it is about Andy; while it's meant to comfort him, it expresses that she's realized how important he's been to her life, how important her pagan family has been.

Granted, all that probably makes a lot more sense to people who have read Surrender Dorothy and Perfect Love and Perfect Trust, which most of my class had not.

A couple other things people brought up:

-if these are pagans, why are they doing something Buddhist? (Probably resolvable by having Peter say something about their willingness to incorporate elements of many traditions. This might be a place where my pagan upbringing is coloring my expectations of the reader; it just isn't weird to me that Wiccans would steal something from any tradition that was useful to them.)

-what's with all the Wizard of Oz references? (Again, they make sense if you've read Surrender Dorothy. I'm not sure what to do to make them more obviously relevant in Over the Rainbow.)

-is Andy really trying to guilt Dottie into having ritualistic pity-sex? (No, seriously, this came up.)

-is it okay to have a happy ending? (To which I say, yes, it's okay to have one fucking happy ending in a collection of stories, and if you don't think so, fuck you. It wasn't like it was "happily ever after," dudes.)

But overall, the response was pretty good, and it identified some places where I'll need to address the story's ability to stand apart from Surrender Dorothy and Perfect Love and Perfect Trust. Having finished this, I know I need to go back and change both of those stories considerably to make the triptych stronger. (Andy's absence from Surrender Dorothy, in particular, now feels very strange.)

-E

*No, really, I did a double-take when I heard that. They whole idea of Dottie is that she's screwed up and lonely! *L* This is the character who, when one of the other writers read her in Surrender Dorothy, said, "She was so unpleasant that I didn't want to think about her afterwards."