#cleaned up/more cohesive version of my older post which is still up both edited and in a chain with the order of discovery | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

waywardoakdown · 6 years

Text

stream of consciousness ramble about a story I’m writing below

To set the stage, I am fourteen years old and watching The Lost Boys for what is probably the fourth or fifth time within the month of June. I latch on to movies sometimes, for a while it was Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I remember watching How to Train your Dragon on close to repeat, sitting in front of Practical Magic for hours at a time.

In the summer of 2011 it was The Lost Boys. You see I had come out of my twilight phase before this point, I was buried in The Tale of the Body Thief, in Daniel’s unwilling surrender, in Vampire Academy because the struggle of Rose Hathaway was so endlessly interesting to me. In Shattered Mirror and In the Forests of Night, because Amelia Atwater-Rhodes was barely older than me when she published her first books.

I had written vampire stories before.

Christa Morgan was still the sharp tongued huntress she had always been, fighting for her life and trying not to let her best friend die like the rest of her family had. But I had hit a rock with her story long before this point, a mountain pass I could not find my way through.

Aria and Melody were on hold while I thought over the consequences of a world where eye color could denote whether or not you’d killed someone you were related to.

Then I was buried in fanfiction to extend this universe that there seemed to be so little of. My obsessions grew far and I was hungry for whatever was written well, though my standards at the time were admittedly low. I’ve revisited some of those stories lately, to find them holding up surprisingly well.

So I sat down to extend the universe myself.

Alexandra Blackwood was born of that endeavor, and like me at this start, she was fourteen. Turning 15 on September 9th. She wasn’t a self insertion, how Christa started out, she was brash and scared and all around a pretty broken kid. I’d settled on her upbringing being shit from the start and I pulled from relatives and friends lives to give life to how these things had affected her. There wasn’t a lot to go off of at first, it was generic as they come when fanfiction sprung from this movie. Another kid goes off to Santa Carla and falls in step with the boys.

In this case the only original Lost Boy I kept was David, since in the novelization of the movie there was a post-end scene of him having turned a handful of surf nazis, one being Shane who would move up to Luna Bay with his own crew of exceptionally violet buddies. I liked the idea of having a new group of people, especially since while I felt comfortable in David in the way I always feel comfortable writing those of questionable morals and exceptional cruelty: I didn’t feel comfortable in my abilities to capture Marko, Paul, and Dwayne.

Making people scream over my lack of ability to do so was not something I wanted.

And thus Eric, Kyle, and Jesse were born.

Only two of them survived into this edition of the rewritten mess, only one of them stayed in his semi-original state (Jesse, my green haired ball of energy). I wrote the story very fast for my pace at the time, I flew through chapters like it was nothing until about 14 or 15 in.

That’s when things started getting weird.

See by this point I was working simultaneously on this mess of a fanfiction, and writing a companion that had the copyrighted materials removed, hence David becoming Daniel, and Santa Carla becoming Twin Lakes (a little town barely a mile across just below Santa Cruz, in case anyone wondered). I changed the story very little in the first rewrite, which I have since trashed and can no longer see the light of day, though it may still exist on a flash drive somewhere labeled ‘Safe - 23036’ which was the word count at the time. Pretty impressive for a 14 year old who had never written more than 10k before and that being over the course of years rather than a handful of months.

I had a cheerleader though. There was this woman in Australia who got very attached to both versions of my story, and needed something to read after putting her kids to bed. So whenever I hit a rut I reminded myself I had someone waiting for this, waiting and excited, and forward I plowed.

Back to things getting, weird. The longer Alex waited to feed the less cohesive her mind became, she had dreams that lasted days and hallucinations about real people that she hadn’t even met. Things that, if I remember correctly, still got cut from the last-most-recent rewrite, the one before this one, the one with a little over 2 dozen chapters and a handful of alternate endings and off shoots because gods know I can’t make up my mind.

Well, scratch that, looks like I did include that weird bullshit in the last rewrite. Go me, those chapters are absolutely a confusing pile of shit. But apparently I wanted to keep them. That rewrite happened in, oh I dunno, 2014 or so? Maybe it was 2013, I think it might have been. I don’t know for sure, but I do know it got a huge overhaul and moved further away from The Lost Boys so that it could stand better on its own.

By this time I think I had changed Alex’s age to match mine again? 16 or 17 or something around there, just because I remember going back and reading and thinking ‘What dumb fuck 14 year old lets herself join a bunch of fuckin vampires, and what vampires allow that???’ So I upped her age a bit, which I’ve done again in the current version, to match my own age, again, making her 20 going on 21.

I remember the first time I finished these stories, it was maybe halfway through January of 2012 when I started the sequel, having set up for it at the end back in December. Kayla Raes was born of probably the least thought out romance of all time, rest assured I’ve built up Alex and Isaac’s relationship much more this time. But at this time they were just, together, because reasons? I guess?

Now more than half that characters in this damn book are queer, so whatever.

Anyways.

Kayla Raes, who inexplicably has David/Daniel’s eyes and doesn’t think to question it when these fuckers show up and offer her immortality.

Which she takes and then after realizing that she’s still being controlled, kills the FUCK out of David/Daniel and unfortunately Isaac dies in the process and there’s some bullshit going on there but we don’t need to go into “Free” I really don’t follow that ending anymore.

Originally Alex either killed Isaac or escaped with him in the end.

Because I didn’t even touch on the fact that her parents were worthy targets.

It didn’t even really come up until I did I one shot AU of my own damn story called “Feral” where the boys would just feed people vampire blood, drop them back in the streets, give them a week to kill someone and if they didn’t, kill them. Alex attacked a woman in the streets, demanded answers from Daniel, originally she turned here, like she killed the woman and that was the end of it. I wasn’t sure where I was bringing the story from that point. But it did spawn the beginnings of this rewrite.

Of Alex becoming a vampire without killing Isaac.

Now, shoot forward to what is the very beginnings of 2017, I haven’t so much as touched this story in years, I do occasionally re-read it for the parts I enjoy. The scene in San Francisco for the sake of cementing Alex’s fear of trying to run away from Daniel, the image of his hair soaked red and the bones of that last girl cracking under his hands. The opening of Alex discovering the whole vampire thing, of almost killing Isaac in the shop, shaking and calling 911 and not quite knowing what else to do or what she’s done. Jesse leaving to go find his sister Sarah after years of her being a missing persons case, finding her dead just outside Chicago with a broken arm and two bullets in her head. Things I still loved the descriptions of, things that still flowed the way I felt they did the first time I’d written them.

But oh gods the mess that was most of the story.

I opened with a clean slate.

With one single chapter written.

Alex discussing the possibility of killing her parents with Daniel. She’s been fighting for months now, and the pain is so bad most of the time she can barely leave bed. Daniel is emphasizing her lack of time, and how worried they are getting about her. By this time the ‘they’ is different, still Jesse, but Eric and Kyle are gone and there is now a girl named Moira, who is small and fiery and slow to like people.

They talk about her parents, about how nobody could blame her for wanting to see them dead and gone. She’s afraid to go back and Daniel offers to kill them for her if it turns out she can’t bring herself to do it.

They go, she kills them, everything is fine.

That was how this rewrite started.

That was the only thing I had cemented in my mind. The vision of her obliterating everything that had caused her pain in the past and using it to move forward. To start a new life.

I also moved this shit to the east coast so that I was more familiar with the setting. Since I’m a Vermonter and I know Maine and New Hampshire pretty damn well, especially the coastal parts of Maine. She did still spend time in Santa Cruz, but I left that to memory.

Daniel’s story changed heavily as well, as it had to in order to move away from The Lost Boys, I’ve read the prequel script, I know all that mess. But Daniel softened somewhere in between rewrites. He wasn’t the so called ‘big bad’ anymore. So he was a PTSD kid who had gone to war when he was too young and seen things he couldn’t forget. In that respect he was molded after my Uncle, though without the denial of his PTSD and massive drinking problem.

From that story was born Amalthea, Carter, Lia, and reborn Eric. Carter fit more closely to what Daniel had been originally, but he was more childish about it. Amalthea was a placeholder I never replaced because she just faded out of importance so she kept the Last Unicorn’s human name.

Daniel grew on me fast once he had a background in place, wanting to please his grandfather, wanting enough money to finally propose to Emily Dawr. The moment when he realizes he’s killed her brother. When he tells her goodbye, and then following being ready to kill Carter when it’s implied Carter killed her. Going to check on his sister’s family every few years. Getting so lonely when Carter and Lia are killed. Not having the energy to go after Eric and Amalthea afterwards.

When he comes across Jesse the kid is so bright he’s annoying. But that fades away fast even though it’s obvious Jesse wants more from him than he’s willing to give. Not that he’s got a preference either way when it comes to sex but Jesse it just very energetic and not really his type. Regardless, they do become very good friends throughout the months where Jesse is trying to get everything in order so that Daniel can kill him.

I’d go into why Jesse wants to die but the story does that for me, in his own words, the 80s were a bad time to be gay.

By the time I’ve gotten all the backstory for the pair of them, Isaac’s story is changing and his decisions are slowly becoming the turning point for every possibility in this book. He helps Alex get more time by giving her his blood every couple of weeks, courtesy of Carrie who would very much like to know why he keeps asking such questions about how often you can remove certain amounts of blood and what the effects might or might not be. When Alex does turn, they remain friends, sort of. Carrie, not knowing who Alex is, has Isaac invite her to their occasional dinner-and-stake nights. I need better wording for that, they have food and then Isaac trains them to fight vampires.

Isaac is, understandably apprehensive about this, especially considering everything Alex did/almost did to him. But she assures him that it’s all much easier to control now and things go smoothly for some time. One night things, get a little heated while Isaac and Alex are fighting, she feels almost like she’s out of control for a second, and then it stops. Later on they end up kissing, and there’s a blood exchange, and this leads to Isaac craving it. Every time it happens, he calls it something akin to an addiction, though after a close call of thinking she might have turned him, they stop.

They do continue sort-of being a couple.

Fast forward a bit, some bad things happen, Alex almost dies, and Isaac tells her he loves her. To which she responds that loving him is terrifying and she doesn’t want to face the choices that leaves them with. Jesse reinforces this when he tells her she has to be prepared to watch him die, or turn him into a vampire. Neither of which Alex likes, not having wanted to be a vampire herself, though she’s gotten used to it by now, and doesn’t think any the worse for it.

So she runs, and Isaac, having already decided that he’s okay with the likely outcome of their relationship being an eternity of murder, goes to Daniel.

Rewind a bit, remember that scene I mentioned in San Francisco? That scene doesn’t happen anymore, it didn’t fit with Daniel’s personality and I knew if he had stayed the way he was originally, Alex would never had trusted him, never have agreed to kill someone, and never have stuck around in the first place.

Here’s where Eric comes back in. Taking on all the traits of Daniel and his old self combined with a little touch of carnage soaked madness I attribute to my ever present muse for The Master from Doctor Who. Sometime somewhere I haven’t figured out when exactly to shove it in, he shows up and decides a little wake up call is in order.

So like the asshole he is, a side that didn’t really come out originally until ‘Free’ but fuck that story and fuck Kayla and fuck Ally and everything else that happened there- He kidnaps Alex.

And of course things take a quick turn for the worst.

But the others show up and whisk her the fuck out of there and I’m like 90% sure Moira straight up shoots Eric until he’s so full of holes it doesn’t matter that he’s immortal. Because she’s seen this kind of bullshit before and there is no way she’s dealing with it again.

Alex kills her mother two or three days later, I ended up changing it because she couldn’t kill Jack, every time I sat down to write the scene she’d fly into a panic and so I had Daniel do it. Well, she had Daniel do it. These characters talk to me, they appear like ghosts, just visible in the corner of my vision, people fully formed but incorporeal.

Onward we move.

This story has been near and dear to me for a long time.

Alex is probably the most pissed at me of all the characters in my head, and I’ve killed off Emmreth Took more times than The Master would ever allow (like he’d allow it at all, but jfc).

She is a permanent resident of my mind, like the Master is. She doesn’t flit in and out like the rest, she’s just there. Which is equal parts a help and a hindrance. With the Master it’s an odd sort of tolerance, because we share certain similarities, and are polar opposites in other areas. We find destruction highly cathartic, and he’s helpful when I’m drowning in my emotions because he is the kind of person to shut them away and move forward anyways.

I can’t do that, but his irritation is usually enough to pick me up out of bed.

Alex is different.

Alex is all on her, she doesn’t bleed into my normal life, she comes up to talk in regards to her own and little else. But she’s still there, just outside the edge of my vision, and depending on where she appears from, her questions range from pure curiosity, to fear, to outright pissed off demands.

Of course, I don’t always have the answers she’s looking for, either because they are out of my control, or I haven’t gotten far enough to decide yet. Or I’m stuck and can’t decide in either of two or more directions.

#beware it's fuckin huge #but if you've ever wanted to know what it looks like when i talk about a thing i'm writing for about 3000 words there you go #girlbehindthedrums #( still tapping. less murder ) ooc #( still tapping. less murder. ) ooc

0 notes

daggerdove · 6 years