The story of a story
Sunday, 12 June 2016 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carose59It's One Thing To Drive People Crazy. It's Another To Make Them Feel Ashamed Of It."*
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[This is the story of how I wrote my most disturbing story, A View to a Kill.. I'll be referencing details from both Starsky & Hutch and Wiseguy, and I'm not going to try to annotate so this makes sense to those of you who don't watch the shows; it would be cost-prohibitive in terms of time. Annotations are easy; gracefully written annotations are hard.]
One March morning in 2004—the year Pat died—I was IMing with a Starsky & Hutch fan named Giovanna. (At the time I thought she was a friend, but that turned out not to be true, and I'm now unwilling to write that she was.)
I don't know how the subject of Starsky dying of his gunshot wounds in Sweet Revenge (the final S&H episode) came up, but it did, and that led to the question What would Hutch do? The answer we came up with was, he'd hire someone to kill Gunther. He'd want to do it himself, but if a first attempt failed, it would be impossible to get close to Gunther again. And who better to hire than Sonny Steelgrave?
The set-up was, Hutch was in New York for Starsky's funeral. He gets lost on the way to the airport and ends up in Atlantic City. It's right at the beginning of the first episode, Sonny's name is in all the headlines. Sonny's found out Vinnie's a fed, but he can't get rid of him because if anybody finds out he hired a fed, he's dead. But we postulated that there had been territorial wars between the mob and Gunther. If Sonny took out Gunther, he could take over his territory, and the number one priority of the mob is making money. You earn, you can get by with an awful lot. So Hutch and Sonny agree to exchange murders.
I was so jazzed by this idea, I immediately went on break with a pad of paper and a pen and wrote the first two thousand words.
It was so much fun to write this crazy, improbable story.
I'm not sure how much I wrote to begin with, beyond that initial two thousand words. Giovanna told me about scenes she was going to write and I wrote other stuff. I stopped writing because Giovanna didn't send me any of what she said she was writing and I became hopelessly confused about pretty much everything, particularly the storyline and who was supposed to be writing what.
And pretty soon it didn't matter because Pat died and I had other things to think about.
Late that summer, I was casting around for something to write and I thought of this story. My mood was dark and angry and dangerous, and this story fit it perfectly. I contacted Giovanna, and this time she actually sent me stuff. We talked and we wrote, and then it came down to what it always seemed to whenever I collaborated with anyone: me finishing the story. That's not a complaint; it's just how things have worked out. It might just be that I get so excited by story ideas, I get greedy and want to do the whole thing.
I vividly remember the day I finished it. It was a gorgeous autumn day. I emailed the document to Giovanna and she called me while I was out for a walk. I was giddy and scared—this story was incendiary. We had killed Starsky, then we'd had Hutch kill Frank as well as Vinnie, and in the end we killed Hutch. I do remember how delirious and sick the idea made me. It was a scary, awful, perfect idea, the kind of thing that could get a writer lynched in SH fandom. I had a couple of friends I bored with my worry over the possible repercussions.
We came up with a pseudonym and I created a hotmail account to use to Flamingo for one of her Dangerous zines. I didn't want anybody to know I'd written it, at least until the shockwaves had passed.
I don't remember what happened after that, except for two things: Flamingo accepted the story and Giovanna started doing something odd: from the moment I finished the story disowned it. She invariably referred to it not as our story, but as my story. I thought she was being modest—I was really stupid and very isolated. I kept correcting her, saying that she'd done as much writing on it as I had, and that was true. But it got wearing, what felt like giving constant reassurance, so I started treating it like a verbal tick and politely ignored it.
I’m 99.9% sure that Flamingo didn’t know we’d written it, not when she accepted it. In October, I went to SHareCon, and while I was there, she asked me to read over this story she’d gotten. She said this story wasn’t dark, it was ultraviolet. She was really crazy about it, but she wasn't that familiar with Wiseguy and she needed a Wiseguy fan to read it over. She asked if I would do it. I said yes. She never sent it to me.
I found out later Giovanna had given the story in an incomplete form to a mutual acquaintance, and she had showed it to Flamingo.
But before that, there was the edit.
The zine was coming out in April, and by March I hadn’t gotten the story back for editting. So I wrote Flamingo asked about it, and was sent an edit. Most of it was no problem, but one question was about the ending—the original ending—which Giovanna had written. I couldn't answer the question. I couldn't get a hold of Giovanna to get an answer from her. She hadn’t spoken to me since Christmas, for reasons I still don’t know. I finally left her a message saying that I was going to make the suggested change because I didn't know what else to do.
From practically the moment it was finished, she had been talking about the story as my story rather than our story, & it felt very weird, that she suddenly wasn’t taking any responsibility for it. It would have been one thing if it was a normal story, but this is an incendiary device. I was really scared about publishing it, even under the pseud.
We had a weird conversation during which she kept insisting it was my story, mine and mine alone, she had not written any of it. (Though, oddly, she refused to say in so many words that she hadn't written any of it. I felt like I was being set up for something.)
So I said I’d be editting it.
Before I did that, I wrote to Flamingo, to let her know what was going on. I came out as the writer, which was no surprise to her, but her reaction shocked me. This was how I found out that Giovanna had given the story to someone else—Flamingo said she’d been told I sent the story to the mutual acquaintance, but that wasn't true. As far as I knew, only five people knew about this story: Giovanna, me, Pat (who was dead), and the two friends I'd been whining to, and neither of them even know the person who showed the story to Flamingo. I was expected not to remember who I'd shown the story to, but when you're that afraid, you're very careful.
Flamingo didn’t seem to want me to rewrite it, but I refused to publish something I hadn’t written, and by the way, fuck Giovanna. If she wanted her writing published, she shouldn't have disowned it.
I spend the next two days rewriting. I removed practically everything I was sure was hers and rewrote it.
It was a relief on a couple of levels. It was cathartic to rid myself of those vestiges of Giovanna, to trash her work. And it was lovely to get rid of her ugly, horrible words.
I kept the title because I didn't have one.
I came up with a new pseud, one that reflected how I felt about the whole thing.
And in lieu of a writer's credit for whatever residue of Giovanna might be left on the story, I put in a dedication: for that lovely March day.
And that was it.
Later, I asked Flamingo to tell me what had happened. I'd been screwed over by at least two people who had called themselves my friends and I wanted—I guess I wanted to know how stupid I'd been. She told me that it was so long ago, she didn't remember. She further told me that it wasn't important. My experience has been that other people's violations are never important, and I wasn't important to Flamingo anyway.
*(Citation Lost)
-:- -:- -:- -:-
[This is the story of how I wrote my most disturbing story, A View to a Kill.. I'll be referencing details from both Starsky & Hutch and Wiseguy, and I'm not going to try to annotate so this makes sense to those of you who don't watch the shows; it would be cost-prohibitive in terms of time. Annotations are easy; gracefully written annotations are hard.]
One March morning in 2004—the year Pat died—I was IMing with a Starsky & Hutch fan named Giovanna. (At the time I thought she was a friend, but that turned out not to be true, and I'm now unwilling to write that she was.)
I don't know how the subject of Starsky dying of his gunshot wounds in Sweet Revenge (the final S&H episode) came up, but it did, and that led to the question What would Hutch do? The answer we came up with was, he'd hire someone to kill Gunther. He'd want to do it himself, but if a first attempt failed, it would be impossible to get close to Gunther again. And who better to hire than Sonny Steelgrave?
The set-up was, Hutch was in New York for Starsky's funeral. He gets lost on the way to the airport and ends up in Atlantic City. It's right at the beginning of the first episode, Sonny's name is in all the headlines. Sonny's found out Vinnie's a fed, but he can't get rid of him because if anybody finds out he hired a fed, he's dead. But we postulated that there had been territorial wars between the mob and Gunther. If Sonny took out Gunther, he could take over his territory, and the number one priority of the mob is making money. You earn, you can get by with an awful lot. So Hutch and Sonny agree to exchange murders.
I was so jazzed by this idea, I immediately went on break with a pad of paper and a pen and wrote the first two thousand words.
It was so much fun to write this crazy, improbable story.
I'm not sure how much I wrote to begin with, beyond that initial two thousand words. Giovanna told me about scenes she was going to write and I wrote other stuff. I stopped writing because Giovanna didn't send me any of what she said she was writing and I became hopelessly confused about pretty much everything, particularly the storyline and who was supposed to be writing what.
And pretty soon it didn't matter because Pat died and I had other things to think about.
Late that summer, I was casting around for something to write and I thought of this story. My mood was dark and angry and dangerous, and this story fit it perfectly. I contacted Giovanna, and this time she actually sent me stuff. We talked and we wrote, and then it came down to what it always seemed to whenever I collaborated with anyone: me finishing the story. That's not a complaint; it's just how things have worked out. It might just be that I get so excited by story ideas, I get greedy and want to do the whole thing.
I vividly remember the day I finished it. It was a gorgeous autumn day. I emailed the document to Giovanna and she called me while I was out for a walk. I was giddy and scared—this story was incendiary. We had killed Starsky, then we'd had Hutch kill Frank as well as Vinnie, and in the end we killed Hutch. I do remember how delirious and sick the idea made me. It was a scary, awful, perfect idea, the kind of thing that could get a writer lynched in SH fandom. I had a couple of friends I bored with my worry over the possible repercussions.
We came up with a pseudonym and I created a hotmail account to use to Flamingo for one of her Dangerous zines. I didn't want anybody to know I'd written it, at least until the shockwaves had passed.
I don't remember what happened after that, except for two things: Flamingo accepted the story and Giovanna started doing something odd: from the moment I finished the story disowned it. She invariably referred to it not as our story, but as my story. I thought she was being modest—I was really stupid and very isolated. I kept correcting her, saying that she'd done as much writing on it as I had, and that was true. But it got wearing, what felt like giving constant reassurance, so I started treating it like a verbal tick and politely ignored it.
I’m 99.9% sure that Flamingo didn’t know we’d written it, not when she accepted it. In October, I went to SHareCon, and while I was there, she asked me to read over this story she’d gotten. She said this story wasn’t dark, it was ultraviolet. She was really crazy about it, but she wasn't that familiar with Wiseguy and she needed a Wiseguy fan to read it over. She asked if I would do it. I said yes. She never sent it to me.
I found out later Giovanna had given the story in an incomplete form to a mutual acquaintance, and she had showed it to Flamingo.
But before that, there was the edit.
The zine was coming out in April, and by March I hadn’t gotten the story back for editting. So I wrote Flamingo asked about it, and was sent an edit. Most of it was no problem, but one question was about the ending—the original ending—which Giovanna had written. I couldn't answer the question. I couldn't get a hold of Giovanna to get an answer from her. She hadn’t spoken to me since Christmas, for reasons I still don’t know. I finally left her a message saying that I was going to make the suggested change because I didn't know what else to do.
From practically the moment it was finished, she had been talking about the story as my story rather than our story, & it felt very weird, that she suddenly wasn’t taking any responsibility for it. It would have been one thing if it was a normal story, but this is an incendiary device. I was really scared about publishing it, even under the pseud.
We had a weird conversation during which she kept insisting it was my story, mine and mine alone, she had not written any of it. (Though, oddly, she refused to say in so many words that she hadn't written any of it. I felt like I was being set up for something.)
So I said I’d be editting it.
Before I did that, I wrote to Flamingo, to let her know what was going on. I came out as the writer, which was no surprise to her, but her reaction shocked me. This was how I found out that Giovanna had given the story to someone else—Flamingo said she’d been told I sent the story to the mutual acquaintance, but that wasn't true. As far as I knew, only five people knew about this story: Giovanna, me, Pat (who was dead), and the two friends I'd been whining to, and neither of them even know the person who showed the story to Flamingo. I was expected not to remember who I'd shown the story to, but when you're that afraid, you're very careful.
Flamingo didn’t seem to want me to rewrite it, but I refused to publish something I hadn’t written, and by the way, fuck Giovanna. If she wanted her writing published, she shouldn't have disowned it.
I spend the next two days rewriting. I removed practically everything I was sure was hers and rewrote it.
It was a relief on a couple of levels. It was cathartic to rid myself of those vestiges of Giovanna, to trash her work. And it was lovely to get rid of her ugly, horrible words.
I kept the title because I didn't have one.
I came up with a new pseud, one that reflected how I felt about the whole thing.
And in lieu of a writer's credit for whatever residue of Giovanna might be left on the story, I put in a dedication: for that lovely March day.
And that was it.
Later, I asked Flamingo to tell me what had happened. I'd been screwed over by at least two people who had called themselves my friends and I wanted—I guess I wanted to know how stupid I'd been. She told me that it was so long ago, she didn't remember. She further told me that it wasn't important. My experience has been that other people's violations are never important, and I wasn't important to Flamingo anyway.
*(Citation Lost)