Writing Woes

99

While I foresaw the end of the local science fiction club's Quarterly 'zine coming, as the writer's group had disbanded by the end of Nineteen Ninety, I was disheartened that The Doctor Who Report was also not going to be sustainable. At the end of Nineteen Eigthy-Nine I was waiting on the artist to finish the drawings of the next comic serial installment. The issue was otherwise complete and after a few days past due I gave him a call and left a message on his answering machine. Five weeks later of wondering what to do and leaving more messages, he finally called me back. He told me that, when he had gone to the east coast to visit family for the Thanksgiving holiday, his sister in-law was in a terrible car accident. She was in the hospital for a while and then died. As a result his trip to see his family was extended indefinitely until they could finish dealing with the heartbreak and he could attend the funeral. But he was now back and would have the sheets finished by the following week. My own heart sank for him given the story he told me.

As TDWR subscriptions were based on issue count, not calendar time frame, I decided it wouldn't be a long term problem to worry about. But as I supplied some issues to be sold at a friend's comic book shop, I went there to see him and let him know the next issue, while late, would be ready soon. With a smile on his face he said he knew, he had heard how the artist had found himself an all consuming new girl friend and spent the holiday season entangled with her, but the brief relationship had come to an end and he was getting his act back together. Oh really? I thought to myself, not sure what to make of it as the artist's story to me had been so detailed and solemn. Either way the comic book shop owner was looking forward to having the next issue on his shelf...

While the issue ended-up being published six weeks late, I assumed it was a one time delay only to discover for the rest of Nineteen Ninety that the artist's work was now routinely several weeks late and as a result we only got out four issues that year, instead of the intended six. Clearly I had to notify the subscribers of the problems and give them an idea of when they'd get the rest of their issues. While I had originally seen TDWR as being a short term project, once the artist had chosen a long story arc for the comic serial, I decided I could keep cranking out the report for a few extra years until the serial reached its conclusion. But now I wasn't sure if the serial was even going to get there and requested a meeting with the artist to discuss the matter and make a long term plan. He acknowledged the problem and said that, in part, it was due to the seemingly never ending story itself and he needed to see the end of the tunnel so he'd know what he was aiming for. With my restored health and reinvigorated writing skills at the start of Nineteen Ninety-One I offered to write the rest of the serial's scripts in the coming month so he could see where it all lead to. He agreed that would be a big help and I cranked out the next installment as an acceptable, though with loose ends, conclusion to the comic serial just in case the artist lost interest and didn't wish to continue to the true end.

As I handed him the scripts I noted that, while the ending might be sensitive territory for him to cover as the serial ended in a family funeral, I thought he'd have the chance to use some of his own experiences to enhance that section. Referring to the story he had told me of losing his sister in-law the year earlier, I instead got a blank look back as he didn't have a clue what I was talking about. Apparently the comic book store owner had been right!

Despite that being the case, seeing the whole story come together with the final scripts, the artist was reinvigorated and rather than continue to parcel out the comic serial in four or five page installments he wanted to complete it in just a few more, large page count efforts. As a result, we determined where to combine the smaller segments into larger installments and figured the last two issues of TDWR would feature the giant sized climactic conclusion of the story arc. With this plan in mind I worked out how many issues would be left after each current reader's subscription ended, and then sent each a letter informing them of the remaining issues that would be printed and how much it would cost for that partial count if they wished to complete their subscription with the full run. The vast majority of them renewed, which was a great sign that they were liking the content, even if the issues themselves had become routinely delayed.

Still, by Nineteen Ninety-Two it had become clear that the final push of drawing the comic serial was still going to take longer than hoped for and I had to send out another batch of letters to the subscribers to apologize, but assure them they would get those final issues once they were done. For my part, I had finished the last of my content for the issues except for the news pages which I updated from time to time with fresh facts as the weeks and months went on. There were only two issues of TDWR left to publish and I hoped to have them both out by the end of the year. As it turned out, we only got one out for Nineteen Ninety-Two and thus the final issue ended up being for Nineteen Ninety-Three.

Still, with my part finished by Nineteen Ninety-two, I focused on what I was going to do about my most recent speculative script for 'The Other Show' I liked. While designed to sell as there was nothing in it that 'pushed the envelope' and would potentially make the show's intake readers nervous, my agent had refused to send it in given its plot focus. She had sarcastically said 'I could always send it in on my own if I wanted', but made it clear it had no hope of being accepted. At the time this came to light I was in the middle of finding myself a new place to live and concluded I should wait until I had. Once situated in my new apartment with my new address and phone number now known, I decided I should go ahead and mail in the script myself, despite my agent's comments. After all, what was the worse that could happen as a result?

When I had put together my first script intended for the show three years earlier, I had toyed with an idea to get attention for it amongst the pile of other unrepresented scripts that they received. But then, as I had found my first agent, I put that idea aside and let her handle the submissions as she felt appropriate. Yet now, once again facing the prospect of mailing in my script alone, I decided to go ahead and use my 'attention getting idea'.

For those who wanted to submit scripts to the show, they had produced a quick 'script writing guide' which included a one quarter sized example page. My idea was to play dumb and provide the script in two sizes: Normal script size and then a size matching the example page with a humorous note stating I wasn't sure what size they had wanted. The reduced size being too small for the traditional script binding brads, I found some polished brass tack nails that looked just like them in miniature and pounded them through the edge of the tiny script from both sides to secure the pages in place and make it look just like a little duplicate of the full sized script. Satisfied that it would work, I sealed these into an envelope with a brief cover page including my contact information and mailed it off...

After several months passed I concluded I wouldn't hear back from them.

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Background Story

98

Just before noon the following day, Daina had finished with morning church and called me at my apartment wanting to talk more and wondering if she could stop by my place in the afternoon. I was thrilled, simply because she had called me back. I had spent the afternoon and evening after I told her of my 'situation' expecting she'd call back to ask questions or something. Instead I had a long evening of waiting by the phone for nothing. But now she had finally called back and it wasn't to let me know that I'd never see her again, but that she wanted to talk more...

When Daina arrived she was very quiet and sat at the end of the couch and uncharacteristically, rather than placing her purse on the floor next to her feet, she placed it next to her hip as if she were sitting in the corner of the couch for safety and using the purse as a shield to protect her. She explained to me ''how unfair it had been'' for me to talk about my secret issues to her. She herself had secret issues that she'd been hiding for many years since her childhood as well. While she had tried to talk about them to a coworker of hers during her college years, she soon learned that people didn't want to hear about others' troubled childhoods and Daina had kept her issues to herself ever since. Now I had foisted news of my issue on her.

I apologized and, as I had grown up deciding to do unto others as I would have them do unto me, I asked her what her issues were as I was open and willing to listen to them.

She seemed to poise herself for a moment realizing she was going to break past a wall she'd been living behind for multiple decades whereas in my case it had only been a mere thirteen years. I recognized her building up the courage from my own experience and simply let her have the time to begin when she was ready. And then she did, first introducing the topic of the ideal American family home and how hers had not lived up to the myth. As my own family was shy of the mark, too, I understood what she was talking about. Then she explained the environment she had grown up in.

She told me of a family where her father practiced, in my words, 'marital rape'. Coming from an orthodox religious family he knew any form of contraceptive was a terrible sin against God and, while he didn't worry much about being a true believer in other areas, refusing the use of contraceptives was his way of keeping the faith. Her mother, already having had many kids and many miscarriages, tried to at least practice the rhythm method to reduce the chances of getting pregnant, but Daina's father had needs that called upon him on days other than the ideal ones for her cycle. Her mother refused his advances and, given advice from his religious counselor, knew that she was to cleave unto his needs. He forced himself on her and it soon became a normal part of their family life. Daina told me of night after night hearing her mother screaming from the master bedroom below as her father first tried yelling their mother into submission, then used other methods. Daina told of the next mornings seeing the fresh bruises her mother tried to cover up and the bottles of alcohol she would begin to drink to take herself away from the pain and realization of 'her place in life'. This drinking would start her mother's day at the kitchen table as the children scrabbled to figure out breakfast for themselves.

Sometimes Daina would try to console her mother as she was crying and drinking while her one year older sister moved onto getting the other kids ready for school. Her mother said that she didn't mind having sex so much, it was just that she couldn't face having another kid each time and she damned the church and their father for not allowing contraceptives. Being in the nineteen fifties, she didn't have the pill as an option. Of the eleven pregnancies her mother had, four were miscarried, and Daina ended up with three surviving sisters and three brothers as well. Daina noted the time when her mother found she was pregnant with the last of the kids and how she intentionally threw herself down the home's flight of stairs in the hopes of inducing another miscarriage so she wouldn't have to go through yet another pregnancy, but she hadn't succeeded.

As a result of the frequent pregnancies, all of Daina's siblings where closely spaced together. Her earliest memories were of the job of her and her sister raising the remaining kids just a few years younger than themselves. Daina's sister took 'the authoritative father role' for the siblings while Daina took 'the caretaking mother role' in the family. They would make sure the other children were taken care of as best they could but, as they didn't have any examples in their family life to draw from, they just did what seemed best to their child minds. Physical violence among the siblings had been very common though Daina, as the caretaker of the rest of the kids, avoided this fate instead serving as the one trying to break up the frequent fights of the other siblings. Once the end of each day came, the siblings would retire to their bedrooms and once again spend the early hours of the night listening to their mother screaming, their father yelling, and occasional sounds of punches and objects being broken until he got his way. In her adulthood, Daina wasn't able to listen to dynamic female vocalists singing songs because the high pitched vibrato brought back too many bad memories of those nights as her mother tried to fend off their father.

Daina then talked of a shadowy figure that would stand at the foot of her bed many nights and seemed to just stare at her. She wasn't sure if it was a ghost or something else and steeled herself to be as still as possible and not even breathe in the hopes that this ghost-like figure would conclude there was nobody there and leave her alone. As a result, not only was going to sleep a seeming impossibility in her home, but then staying asleep was as well and she began to stay awake for fear of the figure at the foot of her bed returning, and she didn't want to be asleep when it came. On the times she finally did fall asleep, she would have nightmares of this looming figure standing next to her bed and she'd wake up in terror. These nightmares continued into her adult life and even twenty years after getting out of her family home she was still having them and had accepted them as just a normal part of sleeping.

As a child in this environment, Daina one day decided to kill herself and did as she had seen on a television show and locked herself in the bathroom and took a bottle of pills out of the medicine cabinet and contemplated taking them all. But after about an hour of internal debate, she put the bottle of aspirin back into the cabinet and returned to her childhood life, accepting it for what it was.

If it was a case of her mother becoming sterile, or her father loosing his 'interest', or finding a way to satisfy himself outside of the home, the worst of these times were over by Daina's teenaged years just leaving her with a frequently drunk mother and a threatening, though less violent, father. Daina did note that there had been some good times with her father. They were typically on the weekend when he would take some of the kids out of the home and to a museum or other places of interest. Daina credited him with her life long enjoyment of going to museums of various types.

Daina talked of the isolation she felt in this childhood. Despite living in a home filled with siblings, her older sister was the task master and all the younger kids were 'a responsibility', not simply her brothers and sisters. Any friends she might start to make in school she would fear bringing home, given they would see the environment she lived in and that would taint those budding friendships. Daina kept mostly to herself and buried her mind in books as the only respite from the life around her and escape into the lives of other people, some fictional and some historical. By her teens she was a member of the Junior Great Books Foundation and, also using her studies as an escape, became the Valedictorian of her Senior year of High School.

She saw College and an education as her only way to avoid the life her mother had lived and took a job in her teens to save money as she knew she would have no financial support from her parents. Having to choose a College based on closeness rather than preference, as she would have to continue living in the home to save on her expenses, she found one a bus ride away associated with her family's church. It was during this time that she had tried to talk about her childhood with a coworker, but then that coworker kept her distance from that point forward and Daina decided she would never tell anyone. Four years later College was done and she finally, physically, escaped her childhood environment though emotionally it had continued to haunt her for the rest of her life.

The story told, I wanted to give Daina a consoling hug, but with her pinched in the corner of the couch and her purse as a defending wall next to her, the best I could do was sit on the floor at her feet and give her calf a hug.

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Display

97

Just about six months since I had started seeing my new psychologist, 'Samuel', we had discussed at length my mixed-sex 'situation', what it meant to me personally and what it meant to the world socially and we both agreed that I was emotionally prepared to look into the medical part of my 'situation' and find what my options were for addressing it. One area of concern was outside support. While it was all good to have him on my side, I really should have someone in my social life aware of the 'situation' and be supportive as well. As my family members weren't an option, all of them living hundreds if not thousands of miles away except for my mother, and she had been the one who insisted I keep my 'situation' a secret and not tell anyone, I guessed I'd have to find someone else.

With March Nineteen Ninety-Two it was starting to get warm enough for Daina and I to once again go hiking in the nearby mountains and parks. Given how well our friendship had developed over the years, I decided I would tell her on one of our hikes. When we arrived at the foothills of the nearest mountain I realized, with the effort of hiking up and down the paths, that it wouldn't be conducive to a good discussion and also lack privacy given the occasional other hikers we would pass by on the trail. So I waited until we were getting back to the car and then let Daina know I wanted to talk to her about something. Apparently Daina had noticed my contemplative quietness during the hike and concluded that something was up and I had now confirmed it -- To her fears. Back in the car, Daina decided to start it and begin driving though that hadn't been my plan. Sure enough, with Daina paying attention to the twists & turns of the mountain side road, it didn't feel like the right atmosphere for the discussion and I asked her to find somewhere to pull aside so we could talk. She decided this meant she needed to drive faster, but I finally insisted she stop at the next overlook pull-off and she reluctantly did.

''What!'' was her prompt to me once we stopped and she shut off the car. While not an ideal beginning to the topic, I felt it was the best I was going to get to talk to her about my 'situation'. Let's face it, when is a good time to bring up something like that? And so I decided to start from the beginning with puberty where boys begin to become men and girls begin to become women and in my case it was 'pretty much a mixed bag'. This attempt to ease into the subject only brought a confused look so I decided to be more explicit that I had been a boy but when I turned thirteen, parts of me developed as a woman while the male parts of me withered a bit and I had only developed a few speckles of beard but nothing else. ''So you're saying you wanted to be a woman?'' she guessed, still not grasping the situation. No, not necessarily, I returned, it was a case of my body, physically, not knowing what it should be and I was seeing a doctor to figure it out.

She was clearly perplexed and asked a few questions which lead me to believe she still wasn't understanding what I was trying to explain to her. This was before the time when I had come up with that succinct line I thought I was a boy but when puberty came I got a big surprise. Perhaps I came up with this line after my much more wordier attempt to explain it to Daina hadn't been very effective. She didn't seem to want to talk about it any further and I couldn't figure out what else to say on my end of the conversation. So she restarted the car and we continued driving to her place. Once we were there, she brought up the topic again but it was still clear that she was thinking this was an emotional 'feeling' I was talking about not a physical occurrence. So I decided just to lift up my tee shirt, unclip the ACE bandage strapping me down and pull it free, letting my boobs drop out. She stood there mute for a moment then turned away. ''Never do that, ever again,'' she said in a solemn voice and I left for her bathroom to cinch myself back up.

When I came back into the condo's combination dining room/living area, Daina decided she should just take me back to my apartment for the rest of the day as she needed to think. I felt this was bad news, but didn't want to stir up any more resentments by trying to force the topic on her any further. It was a quiet drive back and I told her to give me a call later when she wanted to talk more. I got out of the car and she just as quietly left. I watched her drive away uncertain if I'd ever hear from her again.

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Intolerable

96

I was at first surprised when the manager said they weren't going to worry about fixing the car sized hole in my old apartment's wall until the Summer at the soonest. At first I thought it was because they needed the warmer temperatures for the repair. Instead it turned out they were losing the apartment complex to the bank and had been in the foreclosure process for a while. The old management was out of the way by January and the complex sold to a new owner at the start of February. The new owner accepted anyone who applied for an apartment without any background review as he had to make his own mortgage payments on the property and the manager's apartment directly below me was promptly rented to a new tenant. She liked having the radio on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week... and so she could hear it anywhere else in her apartment from her bedroom, she had it at the highest volume possible.

At first I couldn't believe it and assumed she must have been away to work and hadn't realized she had left the radio alarm on, but I soon discovered that she was home all day. Even on the rare occasions when she'd leave the apartment, she left the radio on to keep the empty apartment company. I finally mustered up the courage to knock on her door and introduced myself and asked if she could turn down the volume. When I reached the word ''radio'', she slammed the door shut in my face mid-sentence. With little other clue what to do, I wrote a letter to the new owners as they didn't have any on-site management nor had we been given a phone number, just an address to send our rent checks. They didn't respond to my letter. As I had been without sleep due to the never ending noise from below I asked Daina if I could once again move into her guest bedroom for a while until the issue was resolved.

The following week all tenants received a notice from the new owners that they were going to raise the rent by two hundred dollars a month starting in April. As I didn't have two hundred dollars a month in spare money, that clinched it for me and I started looking for a new apartment while staying at Daina's. I had actually started a new apartment hunting spreadsheet after the car accident had ruined my old apartment, but had put it aside when I was offered the apartment two floors above my old one. Now that spreadsheet was back out and being updated. I identified a few in my price range but as the nearest bus stop to Daina's condo was quite a walk away, and then a longer ride to even reach the bus hub before being able to get on the right bus to any prospective apartment, I decided to wait until the weekend when Daina would be able to play chauffeur and give me her opinion on the apartment choices as well.

At such short notice, the selection was very slim and one place we looked at didn't fit my 'needs' criteria. It was not between multiple bus lines, so I would now have to pay double for my round trips to the downtown area as I wouldn't be able to take an alternate route home for the same initial fare cost. Also the apartment wasn't anywhere near a grocery store and, having witnessed the problems people had grocery shopping and trying to get their grocery bags home on the bus, I didn't want to get into that trap. On the plus side the apartment was pretty good, though a bit smaller than my current one, and the rent was actually seventy-five dollars less a month than my original rent. Looking at the few other choices, all were worse than this one, but I couldn't see taking it given the transportation issues I saw with it.

But Daina very much wanted me to get the place as it was half the distance to her condo than my current apartment and as she had been driving to my place more and more as our friendship grew, she wanted a break on the driving time and gas costs. I pointed out my core problem being the lack of any grocery store, but she assured me she could start making regular trips taking me to a grocery store without any complaint. I asked her if she was sure about it as, if for some reason she couldn't provide me rides, I would be in a world of hurt. But she was certain it wouldn't be an issue and, given that I was getting free monthly bus passes from VocRehab at the time deferring the bus ride cost issue, I applied for the apartment and was accepted.

I wouldn't be able to move into my new apartment until the first of March, so I couldn't leave my current one until a few days into the next month. I wrote a letter to the new owners and let them know I was leaving the complex and detailed the reasons why, such as the ceaseless loud radio playing in the apartment below me that they hadn't resolved, the problems with the heating controls, and the coming profound rate hike in the rent. I told them I would be out of the apartment by March fourth. I continued to sleep at Daina's but would take her to work and then borrow her car during the day to be at my apartment packing in preparation for the move. Each day I was there, the neighbor's radio was still at full volume at all times. As I put my stuff into boxes and collected my mail, nothing had changed. I filed a change of address card with the post office as well as notified the phone company of the move date and new location I needed for service. I actually moved my electronics into Daina's condo myself a few days before the move as they would have been the most sensitive to unintended damage from my move helpers.

While my friend Jeff had helped me move into my first apartment shy of three years earlier, he felt it was someone else's turn this time and I called one of the former writer's group members who I knew had a truck. He was willing and we agreed on Sunday March first as the day. Daina would be helping and even her youngest sister offered to come from Denver and help out on the day. As I had upgraded to a second generation PC clone computer, I had my original clone computer at loose ends. Not sure what to do with it, Daina's youngest sister needed a computer and I offered it to her for free a month earlier so I guess she felt she needed to pay me back with the help. The day before the move, I drained the water bed and disassembled it into its various pieces and all was set. When the day came, Daina refused to help load the concrete blocks of my shelving into the truck, but as the writer's group friend was pretty strong, he didn't mind. I think it was around three truck loads worth until all of the furniture and boxes were out, just leaving behind some assorted cleaning supplies.

The writer's group friend congratulated me on the move and I thanked him for his help and he was gone. I would only see him one more time that summer before I'd lose contact with him. Daina's sister returned with us to my now empty apartment and helped clean it and then we left for dinner, leaving it as pristine as possible so I wouldn't get dinged on my security deposit. I checked the apartment again myself the next day just to make sure I hadn't missed anything and then mailed the key to the new owner.

Rather than bill me for the partial month, he simply deducted five days rent from my security deposit, sending the rest back to me. This time he gave a phone number and I called it as I had told him I would be out by the fourth, and was actually done with the place by the second, so I should have only been charged four days partial rent at the most, not five. My guess was he had forgotten that February had twenty-nine days that year. But he assured me he had gotten it right and the additional amount he kept wasn't for a fifth day of rent, but for the repairs he had done to my apartment that month.

What repairs were those? I asked. He said he had fixed the heating valve in my apartment during the last week. I asked him which day it was as I knew I had been there most of the time that week packing. He couldn't remember. As I already knew the heating valves of the complex were in the bedrooms, I asked him if he had to move the bed to get to it. While my bed hadn't been in the way, I wanted to test his story. He said that, ''Yes,'' he did but thought he had moved it back to exactly where it had been. I didn't bother congratulate him on the strength needed to move a sixteen hundred pound water bed by hand, I just decided to drop it rather than try to take him to court for an amount under twenty dollars...

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