RE: Trailer Trash 7 pt ?? (Patreon)

/// Progress in rewriting the 'Mrs. Moore reacts to Goblin Princess' section. <s></s> are placeholders for strike-throughs, Patreon doesn't support the formatting. Probably still not final, I want to put a lot more thought into some bits that might help it synergize with the Lisa subplot that would occupy the third act of chapter 35.

   It’s a tremendous struggle to write someone who’s lost their own narrative. How do you even express someone so difficult to define? Depression in young adult fiction is often oversimplified, to such extent that nuance is lost and it becomes impossible to relate to. Bad happens; the protagonist is sad about it. The average reader will grow impatient rather than sympathetic.

   Depression isn’t just sadness. Depression is feeling nothing much at all about the things that once made you feel EVERYTHING. The pursuits you’d once so invested yourself in seem to lose all meaning, even victories feel hollow. You lose your own narrative and fall into this passive state, repeating what doesn’t work or becoming secondary to the drive of a more goal-oriented character.

   As one of the most prevalent mental illnesses, I find depression personally important to write about... but it’s also just so damned hard to address, because it really is the anathema of engaging, interesting fiction. Real <s>depresi</s> depression is not compelling, real depression is something anyone will do their best to avoid, deny, and escape from. The quick and messy route is to play up the angst angle, throw your protagonist into a moral gray to struggle with. They can persevere for high ground or they can get a little edgy, either is fine—anything but dare to linger on the unpleasant. The alternative seems to be couching everything in metaphor. Your protagonist becomes physically lost in a maze of choices, or an Atreyu and Artax mired in the swamps of sadness. The emotional weight is there (sometimes), and it can be cleverly done—but, some part of me is reluctant to be clever or dishonest about this at all.

   Sometimes, a big part of me just wants to write something terrible, some moments that just really, really fucking suck. Something that isn’t simplified until it’s meaningless, or wrapped in allegorical safety-padding, or skewed by survivorship bias. But who THE FUCK would ever want to read it? The only

   “—Whatcha reading?” Aiden interrupted.

   “Good heavens!” Mrs. Moore jumped, almost knocking the binder into the bare patch of dirt worn into the mulch by the feet of those who sat at this park bench.

   She caught it, just barely, slapping her hands down against the pages of Tabitha’s Goblin Princess outline before they could slip out of her lap. It was a thick binder, and it seemed to grow a little heavier with each page she read. Sometimes she could only read and helplessly reread her daughter’s words over and over again in consternation and disbelief.

   “Young man!” Mrs. Moore finally collected her wits about her with an exasperated laugh. “You were ‘bout liable to give me a heart attack!

   “Aiden!” Tabitha yelled from the other side of the playground. “Please don’t bother your Auntie Shannon when she’s reading. Say you’re sorry and come back over here with your brothers.”

   “Sorry,” Aiden complied, giving Mrs. Moore another glance before trotting back over to the others.

   Her heart in her throat, Shannon Moore spent a long moment watching her daughter play with the four cousins. Tabitha had them all lined up and was showing them some dance or another—Mrs. Moore didn’t have the faintest clue about modern dance and couldn’t tell whether this was supposed to be the electric slide or the macarena—but the girl teen still just looked so young that it was all but impossible to reconcile the dainty redheaded teen with the one who was writing about all of these dreadful things.

   I KNOW that Tabby’s sharp, Mrs. Moore watched on with a complicated expression. But this—? This is beyond her just being a smart kid, this is—I don’t know what to do with this. She’s putting words to things I’ve felt for—for a long time. Too long. More than just putting words to them, she UNDERSTANDS them. To her they’re these, these fully-fleshed-out ideas she can turn over and examine in her mind, ideas that she’s already figuring out how to fit into other things.

   Mrs. Moore drew Goblin Princess the rest of the way back up into her lap, cradling it carefully against herself.

   As a parent, it’s so EASY to underestimate how much she’s grown up. She’ll always be my little girl, but she’s a teenager now. And somehow, she understood. Really understood, that I had completely lost my own narrative. That I was going to be a star, I was going to be a model, a beautiful Hollywood actress, and that I was so set on it, so set on racing down that path, that once I WASN’T—there was nothing left of me. No spark, no drive, nothing but just complete bitterness.

   It was alarming that Tabitha understood so much, that Mrs. Moore could feel that same bitterness rising up from the girl’s written words to such an extent that they stung. She’d never in her life read something that could make her lose her composure so easily—this was the daughter she’d so thoroughly failed to connect with in the past summer months of this year. These were the feelings Tabitha was grappling with and struggling to jot down back then.

   “Is... everything okay?” Tabitha called over.

   “Oh! Yes, yes,” Mrs. Moore forced a smile, looking from Tabitha to the notebook and back to again with an incredulous shake of her head. “This is all—well, it’s incredible, honey.”

   “Okay. Keep on reading—if you want to, that is,” Even in the distance she could see Tabitha muster her own nervous smile. “I’ll try to keep the boys occupied.”

   Each page of the story manuscript itself was in white notebook paper, and then was followed by Tabitha’s meta commentary on the next in yellow legal paper—sometimes there were as many as three or four yellows for every white page. Mrs. Moore first read a single story page, then she delved into the yellow legal pages wherein Tabitha often explained how the ideas were connected and outlined the purpose they served in the larger narrative. Mrs. Moore read these pages over and over and over again, searching for and studying over every scrap and hint Tabitha was willing to reveal before finally returning to reread the story page with new appreciation.

   Tabby just has so many ideas she puts into these! Though she had of course read screenplays before, Shannon Moore didn’t regularly read for fun, and her daughter’s writing prowess was very honestly intimidating. Some details were easily gleaned from her first casual read-through—the book was intended for an audience of teen readers, after all—but reading the note pages always seemed to shock Mrs. Moore.

   A good deal of the process was Tabitha creating a methodology for herself as she wrote. She was attempting to use a regular rotation of sensory exposition—visuals, sounds, smells, tactile sensations, temperature and et cetera—while also utilizing her ‘economy of words’ stratagem, using increasingly brief references to past descriptors to omit the more lengthy and repetitive description. Tabitha worked to paint a scene upon reader’s memory, and then as the story progressed she would ease back and only allude to that imagery or slightly build upon it, using less words to greater effect each time because the ‘set pieces’ and ‘production value’ now already existed in reader’s imagination.

   Many of the more complete notes were almost too verbose to follow, but more than the technical difficulty of interpreting it all, there was just something sanitized and clinical about them that Mrs. Moore found honestly bewildering. It was the unorganized notes Mrs. Moore adored and kept poring over again and again, and most of them were meandering rambles, important thoughts that Tabitha hadn’t quite completely organized yet. Each of these seemed like a precious gem that might allow Mrs. Moore to glean better insights into her daughter’s actual feelings and thought processes.

   She eagerly flipped forward to the next yellow page, completely enthralled.

   Giant spiders, such a fantasy cliche! Though I’m loath to follow the common tropes (and yes oh yes I do personally hate spiders. Don’t most people? (<s>Arah</s> arachnophobia to some extent seems very common but then I can fuse that into the fear of heights here, too!)), but I’ve always been fascinated by their webs. Spiderwebs are just so beautiful and interesting and I never feel like a fiction I’ve read before has really done them proper justice. The web aspect itself, not just spiders. How the webs are constructed, how they work, the function and the why. Mooring lines that anchor points to the environment, bridging threads to create the frame, the geometry of the radial webbing itself, and finally the beautiful spiral of sticky trapping thread in a natural fractal pattern.

   But it’s not even just all that, either. There’s something always a little magical about them to me.

   When I was very very young (3rd grade? 4th?) I remember we went on this random fun trip to a flea market, and there was this one stand where the artist was selling those airbrushed ‘van art’ style paintings. There were fairies with butterfly wings and spiderwebs on flowers and tigers sitting on mushrooms and colored smoke that (in hindsight) probably represented marijuana clouds or something. Obv don’t want to go all in on THAT sort of thing but borrowing from aesthetics that leave a strong impression on people can be vital!

   ANYWAYS wanted to focus more on the web, on the scary tightrope-walk trial sort of thing, and have the spider itself be more of an unseen threat/tension that hangs over them. When a big spider is just a giant monster in a story, it seems like it’s lost the essence of what makes a spider scary, to me. Spiders should be written more like ambush predators! Just <s>ominiou</s> ominous tension. Hidden and unseen. If the characters can see it, then it’s already too late!

   Mrs. Moore rocked back in her seat at the memory of taking a very young little Tabitha to the flea market. It had been a fair drive away across Sandborough, over forty-five minutes, and she only remembered the whole place as being crowded and unpleasant. The rows of stalls had been beneath the roof of a long covered pavilion but it was still too sweaty and humid, their little Tabby had gotten hungry and started whining for one of the disgusting overpriced hot dogs some filthy vendor was selling, and personally Mrs. Moore been resolved to never allow their family another trip to the flea market. So, they’d never visited the place again after that.

   But, she wrote here that she remembered it was fun, Mrs. Moore seemed flabbergasted. Never even considered what it might have been like to her little eyes. To her it wasn’t awful, it was just this exciting new experience. Part of her fresh narrative. All these years, and we never ever even talked about the flea market again. Talked about going ANYWHERE. These notes of hers, they’re not a diary, but then somehow... they also are. She gets herself so intent on getting down her thoughts on something and not leaving anything out that may be important to her own story, her own narrative…

   Mrs. Moore couldn’t help but keep returning to the idea of narrative. The book of Shannon Delaine had obviously closed—it was long since over and done with. But after such a long— too long—period of suffering through self-loathing and drowning herself in what she now recognized was severe clinical depression, a new narrative had begun. One that had started with the unexpected clashes she had arguing with Tabitha over the summer, or maybe it really began that watershed late night epiphany after she’d cooked that godawful broccoli.

   Maybe I started into my new identity when I decided to start walking in the mornings, Mrs. Moore mused. That was a big change— feeling resolved about anything at all. Maybe it was the moment I made love to Alan again, after so long. SO damned long! Maybe this real Shannon Moore came about when we thought we’d lost our baby girl, and who knows? Maybe who I’ll be, what I’ll be all about is something still up in the air, something that’s still undecided, something that’s yet come to pass.

   She hadn’t actually started considering it all until the Moore family attended that church service—some of her fears about presenting herself socially again reared up and absolutely suffocated her, while other fears she’d thought would completely entrap in the strangle of an anxiety attack or nervous breakdown had instead seemed to fall away like they’d never existed at all. It was so strange feeling alive again, feeling purpose and drive again after so long, feeling herself transform.

   It was strange and a little terrifying, especially realizing how many years she’d wasted completely, but Mrs Moore needed this. She was going to be the mother to a new child, her family was both finally growing closer together and literally growing in number. Even these four brats Tabitha was playing with across the yard felt like family now, they had gone from little terrors she couldn’t stand to even think about to becoming her dear nephews.

   I just can’t even fathom what sort of dance that’s supposed to be, when she has the boys step and wave around their arms all together like that, Mrs. Moore thought, shaking her head in amusement. And they’re all LISTENING to her, instead of just running amuck!

/// This then would segue into Tabby running the boys through Taekwondo forms.