Writer's Diary: Wrestling with Pigs
Thoughts and commentary on the fourth chapter of Rainbow Station
You can think of this as a commentary track for the fourth chapter of Rainbow Station (Wrestling with Pigs), so you should definitely read that first before reading this.
These were my thoughts as I was writing the piece, facets I’m considering as I move forward, things I was worrying about, and so on. Feel free to ask any questions about the piece below in the comments and I’ll try to answer as best I can.
I'd had to write a lot of the first scene in this chapter twice. This was my first real step back in the saddle after the holidays, and as a result, the chapter is both much longer and required a lot more work than I was expecting. I kept wanting to skip this first scene and get to the second scene with the cops, but I eventually embraced patience and went back to the conversation with Leah and V to establish a trust between them, which was necessary for both this chapter and the follow-up.
I've established a habit as of this chapter (and the chapter that came after it) of trying to write a little bit in the thread of the story every day. It feels a bit like burping a fermentation jar sitting on your counter or scraping the bottom of a sauce pot to keep it from sticking. It keeps my skin in the game more or less, allowing me to remember why I'm excited about this story. After I finished this first one, I wrote the next three hundred words in the follow-up chapter, which I then finished a day or two later. This project is incredibly fun for me to write, but it is only a joy once I'm in it and doing it, like exercise. If I take a break, it feels like just another chore which becomes harder to get into.
While writing this chapter, I found I'm more of a creature of habit than I had previously thought. For example, I found that I had to have my word processor (LibreOffice) set up just so on a new laptop before I could "deign" to settle down and actually write words in it. When it had a dark background, I just couldn't do it, similar to my attempts to write in Obsidian. Almost everything else that I write is in Obsidian. Why can't I put my stories there? I'm not sure, but I can't. I have to keep putting them in LibreOffice for the time being and then copy-pasting them into Substack for productization.
I ended up falling back on an old technique from when I wrote my first book during COVID and I was reminded of by T K Hall's post both on his own Substack and on Fictionistas as well as his livestream with JE Peterson and Meg Oolders. I was having trouble getting going to Rainbow Station, so one day I took a break, sat down with a pen and paper and just rewrote the chapter from memory. This allowed me to get out of my own head and get the story on the page. Highly recommend for other writers who get stuck while trying to get into the story.
I worried again about making this story cozy (probably a recurring theme in these Writer’s Diaries). On the one hand, I didn't want to wade into racial conflicts, but I didn't want to ignore them either. The reality of people of color (especially in the United States) is that they are nervous around police and quite justifiably so, in my opinion. To ignore that reality felt a little bit like I'm ignoring the world.
But I struggle with the balance between complete escapism and commentary on the world at large. I wrote a particular exchange in the first draft of the next chapter that I don't know if I want to cut or not where Leah tells V that she is from the "Musk Apartheid State".1
I expect that similarly certain people will be offended by the way I continually refer to police officers.
It is common among my generation (and in leftist circles in general) to refer to cops as pigs. I don't have a particularly high opinion of police officers, especially in the US, but I know that this view is probably not shared by all. I have tried in this piece to not portray them as monsters and to be even-handed, but I don't know if this will be enough to appease certain readers when balanced out with the very name of this chapter ("Wrestling with Pigs").
I don't know if I will lose some subscribers as a result of this post and, in turn, I'm curious about the demographics of Substack as a whole. Does it skew more towards the older generation and, therefore, more likely to unsubscribe when they get a reference to cops being pigs? Or is it young and more leftist/activist and therefore this won't be an issue at all? I'm not sure, although I am sure this chapter will help me find out.
Leah's re-examination of her feelings and discovery as to how and why she feels the way she does was interesting to me. It's something I do frequently and that I suspect she inherited in part from me, as her creator. As my therapist as said, I think about my own cognition more than most people.
I find when I'm angry or sad (as I was when further allegations surrounding Neil Gaiman broke during the drafting of this piece) that I don't really know why and have to go back through my reactions to things to discover why I acted the way I did. In the case of Leah, it allowed her to discover the incongruous nature of V's speech2.
I was fairly happy with how the language ended up working in this chapter and I have begun to reveal little pockets of information that I'm sure some of my readers have been wondering about. For example, I mentioned corpos for the first time and the fact that creating a space station in this world is illegal3.
I've started writing a bit in a world-building journal every day which, similar to writing in the chapter every day, keeps me enmeshed in the world and continually creating, which is good. I've been using these world-building prompts to do it and a randomized iOS shortcut to select one each day. It isn't perfect, as most of these prompts are focused on fantasy worlds, but I'm able to engage creatively and modify the prompt to work well enough for my purposes.
The cops in this chapter I was also fairly happy with. I based them on the cops from one of my favorite TV shows (Gravity Falls) although slightly less silly and bumbling.
I think I have an idea of how to fold them into the larger story that is being told and the corpo sub-plot that I think will inevitably come out for Leah. It may be a bit of a spoiler, but it is similar to the way the villains are revealed within the movie Baby Driver a couple years ago by Edgar Wright.
The pacing on this is still going slow, but I'm hopeful that in about two chapters we'll start to introduce some more permanent characters beyond V, and I'm hopeful that we'll get another peak at Ralph soon, a deeper exploration of Leah's backstory, as well as a return of those cops, but hopefully in a less...menacing air.
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I was advised to cut it by my fiancée, editor, and producer, Emily Westland, so if I don't, and it goes poorly, you were right honey!
I hinted at this at the end of the last chapter. Did anyone notice that?
Although even I do not yet know why it is illegal.