Another 10K

I started the book over again because the tone and character weren't what I wanted, plus as if that wasn't already enough to bail on the draft, all kinds of current events got into it and it went off the rails.

So now I have a new 10K and it's flipping awesome. Things are going the way they should have when it was happening to me, except they really super didn't. It still won't work out but it's fantastic to have these people rally around the two girls getting absolutely railroaded by some terrible stupid old men. Petty, miserable, angry, frustrated, hateful, narrow-minded, defensive, badly behaved ugly old motherfuckers who take it out on the young people around them. 

The characters make me so happy. There's a cohort of freshman composers, each of which has a different area of expertise. Our girl is an alien among them (as I was not) because she's kind of a rock and roller, not a classical musician. I was a regular old play all the instruments classical cellist and band instrument musician. The problem was their problem. 

I keep running into things in my memory that make me wildly, overwhelmingly furious, like absolutely enraged. It wasn't as clear to me then that they were so incredibly far out of line in what they did. I didn't know because I came from an abusive background, which also took me a long time to understand fully, because the water you swim in is the water you swim in. 

I've had some rage attacks on behalf of young me that would have leveled some stupid edifices if I'd been allowed to get angry back in the day. A lot of young people don't know they're allowed to get angry, especially girls. Girls almost never let themselves get angry the way they should. And if they do, boy, the hammer comes down hard. You're immediately discounted and squashed and thrown out of there so fast. There is no such thing as legitimate anger from girls, it turns out. Everyone will tone police you out of existence, never dealing with the actual issues, which is one reason nobody expresses that anger.

Ridiculously stupid system. Good thing our girl can go wild with her electric guitar and scream songs about it.

I learned one rock song on guitar. It's the one I sing in the bathtub top volume, with the sound bar turned way up. It's the one I played on repeat while writing the three Thrushcross novels--one song over and over and over. What on earth is the appeal? Eddie Vedder. Chris Cornell. Singing both their parts. And that smashy kind of strumming that I have no idea how to do and probably can't reach the chords.

I repeatedly come up against this limitation and it makes me wild. I have small hands. Guitar gods have large hands or long fingers. I simply can't reach to do what they do. Look at our man Hozier, whose hands are easily twice as long as mine. It's physically impossible for me to play these chords. The end of Unknown/Nth is killing me. I can hear it (speaking of songs I play infinitely on loop) but I can't do it.

Anyway Althea is a fantastic heroine, and I love her. Her older sister is Cassidy, because they were named after Grateful Dead songs. Their parents are sad old gone broke failed idealist former Deadheads who aren't good at being the hippies they wish they were and are kind of miserable AND really super prioritize the older sister to a degree that again is the water Althea swims in and so doesn't question it. I think her sister got really super sick with cancer and Althea got sent to live with her rocker grandfather and his wife for years. 

She has that neglected child thing of not thinking she has any rights or worth to other people, except her grandfather and Esther, his wife, who also gets super sick and that's when Althea gets sent home. Imagine the person you become when that's your life. Do you...stand up for yourself? I think not.

Also she has a fantastic boyfriend with a similar background, who lives on his brother's couch. 

All hell will break loose. And she will end up back in Esker, working in the bakery and running a generator in her parents' house, because they're gone and nobody knows where. She and the boyfriend fix up all the neglected broken house stuff. I love that part. 

There's something in Sarah Dessen's brilliant novel Lock and Key that is on my mind here. She wrote such a good book about a girl whose parent puts much too much on her and lets her down over and over. That mom just disappears also. That girl ends up carrying everything, until she can't, and has a very successful older sister she's not in touch with at all. I'm not sure how Cassidy will play into things here, but she's going to be very important for how things play out.

I picture a girl with long red hair as Cassidy but I think that's because I knew a girl named Cassidy with long red hair. Must check with college friend on that one. What's this character doing? Why aren't they in touch? When does that buried resentment come to light? 

As always I have to make sure NOBODY RESCUES HER because I always want people to rescue my heroines, who always have some variety of learned helplessness and low self-esteem. 

I don't actually suffer from low self-esteem. Quite the opposite. But these characters tend to have some variety of wanting to be invisible and disappear. I generally do want to disappear, but only because of awfulness. Give that girl parents who fight about money all the time or something equally terrible, right? 

Her obsession with Stijn (from Summerlands and The Third Daughter) is going to lead to all sorts of good things, but like me I think if she finally meets her hero, she'll kind of lose her mind. 

My imaginary mentor shows up in dreams with excellent advice. He sits on the piano bench next to me and tells me things like: You have to play guitar and write music every day. The real person probably wouldn't recommend that, I don't know. But it was good advice for me. I already tackled a song that hadn't been finished since like November and finished it up. Now I can sing ten tracks of vocals on it in different parts of the house so they sound different and be a crowd of one. Plus I played guitar sitting up in bed and the kitty came and laid on my chest between my arms while I played Wasteland Baby beautifully from memory. It was the loveliest moment. 

It's so good to get better and better at something. It does wonderful things to your brain. Sometimes you roll over onto a capo in your bed, but that's manageable, isn't it.  

A+++, getting obsessed with a certain person's music! Highly recommended. So many good things have come from it. It's going to work out great for my character, too, even while it causes other things to blow up. 

Hang in there, Althea. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

One of my favorite Hozier photos for obvious reasons. Or maybe not obvious. I identify with Mavis if anyone in the scheme of things is all I'm saying, not that I remotely could live up to her life and legacy. The other similar photos I relate to are him and his mom, but that's because she looks so much like me, heh. (Like, a lot.)