Wincing at Light

We’re getting toward the end of Agnosis, so I’ve started thinking seriously about the next work I’m going to serialize.  My initial plan had been to go ahead and post From the Hands of Hostile Gods, but I think I’m going to go off queue for a bit and post an older, non-science fiction work called 12 Steps.

A couple of things going on here:  I’m pretty nervous about 12 Steps as a piece of writing.  Honestly, I’ve never been completely happy with it.  It’s a great deal more autobiographical than most of my work, and I feel like there are too many places where I hewed too closely to “what was real” rather than “what makes the best story”, and the narrative suffers as a result.  The problem with pseudo-autobiography is that it’s difficult to tell when you’re explaining for the sake of storytelling and when you’re over-explaining because you’re trying to nail actual details in a significant manner…and so too often, you end up under-explaining and flattening out the narrative universe.

It’s complicated.  And in some ways, I feel like I settled for verbalizing a psychological state rather than telling a compelling story.  I guess that means I wrote it primarily for myself as a cathartic exercise rather than writing for an audience, and the results, as expected, are mixed.  At least, that’s the way I feel about it.  Somewhat surprisingly, it’s also the story that many of my readers have found to be the most compelling.  I can’t tell if that’s because my perspective on it is so different that I can’t see its merits clearly, or because most of my readers are not science fiction junkies like I am, so my SF work just leaves them cold.

Anyway, here’s what you should know going in:  when I was in college, I spent five years working the night shift at a drug rehab facility.  For most of that time, it was just me, working alone and twiddling my thumbs through the long hours of the night.  I dealt with lots of interesting people.  Lots of drunk people.  Lots of suicidal people.  Lots of seriously mentally ill people.  The experience took a significant toll on my compassion reserves.  I think it’s fair to say in retrospect that I burned out about three years into that job, but kept at it because I was a poor college student trying to support a family while I was in school, and because I’m naturally stubborn.

I’m not sure that I ultimately am very happy with the impact this had on my personality, even ten years later.  I wrote 12 Steps in the last month on the job, as I was getting ready to start my first adult career.  It was my way of wrapping up a chapter in my life.

I recently learned that one of the off-stage characters, who was largely responsible for some of the core anecdotes around which the narrative is built, passed away.  He died drunk and seriously mentally ill, just as he had lived, and in some way, this lessens me.  It reminds me unpleasantly of my own mortality.

Make no mistake:  12 Steps is an unpleasant story.  I’m not particularly fond of the protagonist, even though I know he is/was me.  I don’t approve of the way he thinks, of some of the things he does, of his cynical worldview…though all of those things are true.  Or at least true for me.  They’re the truth of my experience.

And as with most pseudo-autobiography, some bits are factually correct.  Some are complete fictions.  Some are the experiences of co-workers that I’ve stolen because their stories were interesting or resonated with me or simply got at the kernal of truth I was looking to portray better than my own stories.

In all cases, names have been changed to protect the innocent.  If, you know, you can call any of us innocent.

Filed under: Miscellany Tagged: | 12 Steps