All Eyes on Me

October Review Challenge, #4 - "What motif shows up frequently in your work?"

Motifs in writing, as I tend to define them, refer to the images, concepts, things that recur in your work because you find them interesting, or compelling, or find them useful to express your ideas.

Like any author, there’s just some stuff I really like writing about. Locked rooms, knife fights, fancy clothes. Ballet and ballerinas, particularly broken-down ones. Small, angry women who are tough to deal with but damn excellent at the thing they do. Hot sensitive guys who know how to defer and aren’t afraid to cry (and who probably get compared to a horse at some point). But I probably have to go with the one that people most like to make fun of me for, because of how weird and pervasive it is— if it’s a Phoebe project, you can start taking bets about when there’s going to be a dead baby.

I am a person who has both an inclination for children and a frank fear of having them, and that does a lot to shape how I tend to depict them. Usually I am exploring the notion of hope versus obligation. A baby, you see, is a blessing and a terrifying responsibility. So a dead baby is a brutal loss but an absence of that responsibility. The tension is always a vital part of the child’s presence, the push between the joy and longing and the grief and fear.



After the stillbirth of Gabriel Hawking, Mrs. Hawking is at once relieved to be excused from motherhood, and guilty to have wished away his life— particularly since the Colonel was so crushed by the loss. While she had an inability to connect with the idea that the baby was any part of her, she could never shake the feeling that she had taken something from Reginald and destroyed it. Again, we have tension, relief versus guilt, the death of hope versus the freedom from obligation.

In my western larp The Stand, the sheriff character Malcolm Royce has suffered a recent stillborn child that took his wife’s life as well. Not only is he grieving the enormous loss, the baby never living represents another common meaning I use these dead children for— the crushing of a hope, in this case, that he can have purpose and identity other than a wartime leader. There is an in-game cemetery where both the wife Amelia and the child are buried, with a stone marked only as Baby Girl Royce. This was inspired by the stillborn girl my grandmother had who was similarly buried without a name, except my grandparents could not afford a headstone to mark it.

In a recent piece, our new supernatural mystery thriller pilot From Dust, we have a dead baby in the back story of the murder victim, a brilliant AI scientist David Heller who named his Siri-like digital assistant invention after his stillborn son Adam. One of the themes of that story is identity and self-determination, and in that particular case the child was born with holoanencephaly, or without a fully developed brain, and that body with no mind or soul stayed with Dr. Heller in his work. Again we see lost potential, and the pain of lost hope.

Those are just a few. My thesis play from grad school, Mrs. Loring, has the main character haunted by how her depression made her neglect her baby to the point where she almost died, so there's a near miss. Both my tabletop games set in the larger Breaking History universe, are driven by baby loss in one way or another, but I will not be specific in how so as not to spoil. And of course no discussion of this would be completely without mention of the progenitor, my very first larp Alice. That game was an attempt to be creative during a very dark and difficult period in my life, and I poured a lot of negativity into it. That larp contains one of the purest examples of a lost child representing at one freedom from obligation, the death of hope, and a guilty pain.

I like to joke that some day, when people are writing graduate analyses of my work, what the fuck is up with the dead baby thing will be a perfect topic for all the doctoral theses. God knows I've done it enough. And I'll be real, I'm sure I'll be going back to that particular well for many stories to come.

Tone tends to be very important to me when it comes to whether or not I can become absorbed in a given piece of media. By tone, I mean the overall feeling and vibe a piece gives off, plus the attitude they take towards their story or subject matter. Embracing the right tone for the right story is something I care very deeply about, and can make the difference between obtaining my buy-in to the tale you're telling or shutting out my sympathy completely.

This can have an even more significant effect when I'm already invested in a property. For example, contributing to my notorious pickiness about fan fiction is that if I feel a fic has a tone that doesn't fit properly with the original, I usually cannot get into it at all. I guess it doesn't necessarily have to reproduce the same tone exactly, but unless it feels compatible, it just doesn't work for me. Similarly, in a series, if later installments go too far off the tone, or embrace a tone that doesn't gel with earlier ones, I get skeptical and put off.

Recently I experienced this most strongly (at least in the anticipation) of Guardians of the Galaxy. The Marvel movies have generally had a light tone that was not SO frivolous as to cut off drama, which I've always thought worked for them. When Guardians was announced, I was seriously doubting that it was going to work in context with the rest of the series. It pushed the boundaries of the silliness and weirdness allowed by the series, and I thought it was going to be really ATONAL, disrupting the vibe the world had established. I was surprised to find that Guardians worked, even with the tone shift, probably mostly because it wasn't quite as exaggerated as I thought it would be, and because it existed at such a remove from the other stories, a literal galaxy away.

I am still doubtful of when the Guardians stuff bleeds into the already-established-on-Earth stuff. I still don't quite buy the notion of Rocket Raccoon existing in the same universe as Jessica Jones torturing and executing the man who raped her. Though to be honest, Daredevil and Jessica Jones are a fair bit darker than the films ever got, which is a tone shift of another kind. I guess when I get dramatically invested, I'm more likely to buy things getting a bit darker than getting sillier. That may just be my personal bias.

But it's something to think about in my own work. It occurred me to that maybe my silly Woodhouse parody larp Woodplum House could be part of the Breaking History universe, except that it's REALLY out there tonally from the rest, and that gave me pause. Again, it was weird thinking of that and Mrs. Hawking existing in the same world and theoretically being able to meet. Okay, I think she's dead by the 1920s, but that's beside the point. Hell, I'm even slightly worried about how the Hawking stories are going to take a slightly darker turn with the second trilogy. I don't want to go all grimdark even so, and I don't want to alienated people who liked the tone of the first set. I have to tell the story I have to tell-- just as any writer does --but it's one more of the many things to take into consideration when you're taking on the challenge of serializing.

Took the plunge and started watching Orange Is the New Black, and I am fascinated. It is really well-written and multidimensional, and I love the vast array of characters and stories depicted. Sophia’s scenes are my favorite, and their writing combined with Laverne Cox’s acting make her my favorite character. I do struggle with a gross-out reaction to the body fluid stuff, but it’s worth it. I’m only like five episodes in, but I can’t wait to know what happens next.

From a technical standpoint, one of the things I find most fascinating about the way it’s put together is how it’s building up a huge cast of characters that move in and out of the spotlight as needed to tell different stories. Like, everybody is in the prison and therefore possibly available to be involved in the plot, and they do such a good job of making everybody interesting that it’s exciting to see what combinations of players will be explored at any given point. I really love the idea of writing in an environment like that. It’s almost larpy in its way, lots of protagonists with various plot threads all in a circumscribed setting, though the story exploration doesn’t have a set roster of who those protagonists always are. I’d love to try writing under circumstances like that. I guess my extended universes are sort of like that, but an entire world like that has less of an immediate feel. Also it provides less of an opportunity to make background characters truly interesting enough to be worthy of sometimes rotating into the forefront.