Wow, it’s been a minute. Between plans to do Twitter/Mastodon threads or spamming the group chat, I decided it would be best to just utilize my blog space again. After all, that’s what it’s here for.
Anyway, not a whole lot has happened since I last posted, whenever that was. But I have managed to keep writing and was on a good run of submitting my work even though I’ve had nothing but rejections for the past two-plus years. Otherwise, I’m simply surviving the pandemic as best I can in my mostly solitude.
Well, there was one major life change. After an extended period of abnormal symptoms, I got myself to a doctor and discovered I had fibroids. Although I had options in the matter, my chosen treatment was a total hysterectomy. Even before the actual surgery, I knew I wanted to create something with this experience. So months after, I managed to draft a story and eventually complete a script focusing on a hysterectomy among other things. And after a couple of draft, I submitted it to The Writer’s Lab, a workshop for women and nonbinary folx over 40. I won’t hear about the results until September, but in the meantime, I have my fingers crossed.
However, two things made me pull out the script again this past weekend and re-read, re-consider what it all meant. First, I attended a virtual con for screenwriters. Not a lot of new advice but still a chance to hear from industry professionals and peek into their processes and experiences. Second, I finally watched the mini-series From Scratch. And yes I enjoyed it overall. I swooned, cried, and got hungry, but when that was done, I thought about what I was doing with my own work.
I didn’t remember going into it that the show was based on an actual memoir of Tembi Locke’s marriage and subsequent loss of her husband (not a spoiler, we know from the promos he doesn’t make it, hence the memoir). However, when I did remember, I found myself studying the execution of plot, character development, pacing, and such. I especially found myself guessing at what might have actually happened and what was probably given poetic license for dramatic effect. Not in a critical way. I think there were some good narrative choices here, but it did remind me that it did indeed need to be a narrative.
Which helped reassure me of my own work and completely making up a story around having a hysterectomy. From Scratch made me realize something I had missed as I worked on my own script: I was indeed creating a type of biomythography just as this mini-series did with Locke’s experience. But fortunately for me, my story did not have to wrestle with the agony of terminal illness and eventually loss. Instead, my real-life story was one of new beginnings and some hope of living a quality of life that had alluded me for some time.
A couple of years ago, I did biomythography sessions with Sofia Quintera and thought I’d apply those lessons to fiction not as close to my own life story. But one thing I had to consider is that biomythography doesn’t have to look just one way. While Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is indeed the prototype, I still feel my script falls into this category of history, myth, and biography although the narrative itself might be less than Gilgamesh epic and also attempts some humor in what could have been a drastically different experience with medical care. In fact, part of the writing challenge I issued to myself was to tell a story in a lighter tone that I usually do, see my world through a different lens. (Interestingly, another Sofia, Samatar, also broke the boundaries of biomythography with Monster Portraits, but that’s another subject.)
And hopefully I succeeded. I hope I did the damn thing with the script and have high hopes it gets accepted into this workshop. If anything, I have to keep in mind that sometimes when I set out to do a thing in my writing, I find I’ve already done it in another form. I’d already taken lessons I’d learned from Sofia and subconsciously applied them to a work that means the world to me right now, so I’m extending a thank you to her for that work and the copy of Redbone that I need to re-read. And in the meantime, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for my baby, hoping it gets a chance to evolve into that film that extends our representations even further.
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