But on the BRIGHT SIDE

So I’m not having the greatest day. I’ve been alternating between homicidal and severely depressed, and those aren’t the healthiest of emotions to alternate between. One of the reasons really isn’t anyone’s business at this point (a girl’s gotta have SOME secrets), but the other reason is that David “F*** Your Childhood” Yates is going to be directing a Doctor Who movie. Let me repeat that. David “Takes A Crap on Everything Good and Pure” Yates IS DIRECTING A DOCTOR WHO MOVIE. I don’t know what I did to the universe for it to spite me so, but I would like to take a moment to SINCERELY APOLOGIZE.

Moving on, though, I took the day of classes because in addition to being severely depressed and homicidal, I’m not feeling particularly good. It may be a result of aforementioned emotions, but either way, I would not have been a constructive addition to any of my classes, so I’m spending the day writing. Right now, I’m in the middle of a week of edits for my antagonist, Zachary Bluff. In the first several drafts of Eugenia, he was just this insane, racist sexual predator, but I didn’t feel like that was believable. Besides, in every writing book I’ve ever read, the author always stresses the importance of recognizing that the antagonist is never ALL bad. There has to be something redeemable about them, otherwise they’re flat.

So I introduced this issue to my roommate, Colton, who came up with a brilliant idea. Instead of making Bluff just straight up crazy, I’m making him a kind of utilitarian whore. Utilitarianism basically is the philosophical way of saying “the most good for the most people.” Bluff believes that basically enslaving anyone less intelligent will be good for society as a whole, and any “reg” (“Regular”, the term for people who fail the IQ test) who is unhappy with his/her lot is selfish and hates society. It actually sort of makes sense in a really twisted way, and it’s actually an even better way for me to explore the problem of intellectual elitism that I wanted to when I started writing this book.

IN FACT, the girl (coughMiaHaneycough) that I’m basically dedicating this book to due to her own insane intellectual elitism would probably agree with a lot of the things I’m now having Bluff support, which makes it even MORE fun to write.

Anyways, I really am going to try to blog more. So today, I’ll leave you with some of the sections of Eugenia that I’m having the most fun with at the moment.

“When were you able to get proof? That’s right. Never.” Decklan told me when I voiced my guilt later that night. “Look, we all knew the risks. And on the bright side, Jon doesn’t have to call in sick whenever we need to do something for you guys.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better? Oh, good, now Jon has more time to cater to my needs!”

“I’m just saying, you shouldn’t feel guilty. Jon is a big boy.”

“What am I?” Jon emerged from the bathroom after a long -and judging from the steam that followed him out, hot- shower.

“A big boy.”

“Right. I’m even transitioning from pullups to boxers.”

“We’re all so proud of you, Jonny.”

Context: this next section is something I wrote to replace this weird story I had Meg tell her friend Zia on the bus to the sorting facility, where their fates were decided. You can read the original, weird story here. It was actually a story idea I had a while ago (two young people are doomed to arranged marriages, so they run away and meet accidentally on the road, fall in love, and by the end of the story they realize that they were actually betrothed to EACH OTHER, and everyone lives happily ever after). This time I decided to give Zia a little more air time before I kill her off, and so I actually took the plot to my fiction class story for Meg’s uses. I’m so clever sometimes.

Zia frowned, shattering the facade. “We won’t get to have picnics anymore, will we?” Her bottom lip protruded and shook. That wouldn’t have ended well, so I quickly changed the subject.

“I didn’t get to finish my book before the test.”

Even though she didn’t like to read much herself, my friend liked hearing me talk about books. Apparently, my storytelling methods were far better than the authors themselves. She sniffled a little, but looked up at me. “Wh-which book?”

“The one about the superheroes.” A boy behind me perked up at that, and leaned forward marginally.

“You’ve been waiting for that one to come in the mail for a while, right?” Zia was reinvested with the conversation now, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Yeah, I ordered it over a month ago, but it didn’t come in until yesterday. I told dad I was staying up doing math flashcards, but really I was reading.” Part of my mind reasoned that this act of rebellion could have possibly erased my future, but the other part of my mind was already lost in the story.

“But you didn’t finish it?”

“I don’t read that fast, geez!” We giggled at one another, a sound decidedly inappropriate for the surroundings. The two adult escorts up front turned slightly with disapproving frowns, but as soon as their backs were turned again, the rest of the kids on the bus moved a little closer. Anything to take their minds off of the ride.

“So what was the story about? Maybe we can finish it!” Zia’s voice raised artificially at the end of her exclamation.

“Well, it’s about this girl- a normal girl like me or you, in her twenties- who lives with three superheroes. One was super strong, one was super fast, and one… could fly.” The kids who hadn’t fully invested in eavesdropping buried all pretenses and leaned in at that point, and having read most of the book myself, I couldn’t blame them. But I wasn’t focused on anyone but Zia. My friend, fun and silly as she was, didn’t deal with bad news well.

“So the story starts out with her writing a novel about living with superheroes, and she’s really frustrated because she doesn’t have many friends past her roommates and she’s way smarter than all of them so she can never really have an intelligent conversation. And then she gets kidnapped by this supervillain called Captain Chaos-” There were several well-timed gasps from my enraptured audience “-and they hit it off, but he has to escape. Then they accidentally run into each other at a coffee shop where she likes to write. They decide that they really like each other, and go out on a date without her roommates, the superheroes, knowing.” I paused. That was the most I’d read.

“Then what?” The girl in front of of asked. Zia nodded excitedly, having been beaten to the punch.

“Well, that’s where I stopped reading.” I shrugged at my audience, who unanimously deflated. I hurried to speak again. “But so what? We can make our own ending!” A few faces perked up a little, Zia’s included. Sometimes, when I didn’t like the ending of a story, I’d just change it, and she often liked my version better. She trusted me, and I appreciated that. This story was probably the most important I’d ever told, if only for the setting in which it was being told.

“They start dating, the girl and Captain Chaos. His real name is Danny, and when he was a kid, he got picked on by another kid superhero, so that’s why he became a villain, even though he doesn’t actually have powers.”

“A supervillain who doesn’t have super powers?” The boy behind my scoffed. “what kind of a supervillain is that?”

“A tricky one.” I proclaimed, smirking at him. “The girl… let’s call our main character Zia.” I winked at my friend, who blushed. “Zia and Danny started dating in secret, because he was her roommates’s sworn enemy and that probably wouldn’t fly with them.” I paused, hoping someone would catch the pun. When there was no response, I continued.

“Sometimes, Zia would tag along with Captain Chaos when he’d kidnap people and dangle them over tanks of sharks, just for fun. All of their adventures together really helped her put together her novel, but she started growing further apart from her roommates. She justified it by saying that they weren’t smart enough to keep up with her anyways, but really she missed them. Eventually, she missed them so much that she told Danny that they needed to out themselves as a couple, because she just couldn’t keep it a secret any longer. At first, he resisted, but then he agreed. So they started plotting the most epic superhero obstacle course ever in order to get all of her roommates in one place an one time. There was a section of it that required each of her roommates’s powers; for flying, for strength, and for speed.”

“Like what?” The boy behind me demanded. The romance in the story was clearly boring him.

“Any suggestions?” My audience pondered this in silence for a moment. The adults in the front of the bus glanced back at us again, but decided to leave us be. They probably figured it was the least they could do.

“There could be a wall of old cars that the super strong hero has to rescue a woman from within.” A boy across the bus suggested. My most vocal commentator, the boy behind me, nodded excitedly at him.

“Alright. First, Rhys, Zia’s super strong roommate, had to pull down a solid wall, three rows thick, of old cars. Inside a car at the center of the wall was a young man, trapped, that they had to rescue. Once past that…” I looked expectedly at my audience.

“There was a woman tied to the roof of the building, over a busy intersection?” A girl who I recognized from my early school days piped up. I smiled at her.

“Once past the wall of cars, Elle, Zia’s flying roommate, had to soar up to the top of a nearby building to rescue a damsel in distress, hanging precariously over a busy intersection. Finally…”

“there was a bomb planted near a building that the super fast roommate has to get out of city limits!” Zia cried, in what I assumed was an attempt to beat other people to the punch. No one seemed too put out, and I grinned at my friend before continuing the story.

“Finally, after the dangling woman was rescued, they heard about a bomb being planted in the main city square. Rhys wasn’t strong enough to stop it, and Elle couldn’t fly far enough to get it out of the way, so Mike, the super fast roommate, grabbed it and took off running, faster than he ever had before, and dropped the bomb off in the middle of a huge desert where it couldn’t hurt anyone. Then they all met up together and searched for Zia, who they presumed was kidnapped as well, at Captain Chaos’ lair. But when they got there…”

“She wasn’t actually kidnapped! It was all a set up!” A girl finished for me excitedly. The rest of the kids shushed her.

“Yes. Zia took Captain Chaos’s hand and told her roommates that they’d been dating for several months. Instead of laughing or being happy for her, though, her roommates were angry. Maybe none of Captain Chaos’s ‘victims’ were ever seriously hurt, and maybe he only became a villain to make sure that superheroes didn’t let their egos run away with them, but he was still traumatizing the city. And Zia shouldn’t have abandoned her principles and her friends in order to date him.” The story was starting to sound less like a romance, and Zia looked concerned. I hurried along. “A year later, Zia has moved out of the apartment and has published her book, which is a best seller. At a local reading, her old superhero roommates approach her. It turns out that Zia has broken up with her supervillain boyfriend because, at the end of the day, he may have been smart and witty, but he could never amount to the friendship she shared with her roommates, thick as they were sometimes. She learned that intelligence wasn’t everything, and that everyone always has something to offer. Zia moved back in with her roommates and kept writing and lived happily ever after.”

“The end.” sighed Zia, even though she was more of a painter than a writer.

“Wait, that’s it? The moral of the story was that intelligence isn’t everything?” The boy behind us glared at me. “When was this book written?”

“I made up the ending.” I reminded him. “But it was more of an educated guess than a shot in the dark. It was written before the economic collapse. Early 2000s, I think.”

He continued frowning. “Well, that’s a dumb ending. She should have stayed with the supervillain and spent the rest of her life on the run, robbing banks and squaring off with superheroes.”

A couple of the other boys nodded their agreement, but I noticed that a lot of the girls seemed to like my ending, particularly because of its -unintentional- parallels to our current predicament. Satisfied with the distraction from life, Zia closed her eyes, smiling as she drifted off to sleep by the gentle rocking of the bus. I smiled too, glad I could be of help, but it didn’t reach my eyes. My stories could only distract; they couldn’t actually solve anything. In the next few days, both super Zia and I were off to a life of no return.