Good Evening !!
I made it through the day! For a while there I wasn't sure I was! I thought that perhaps I'd drown somewhere in paper or go deaf from phone calls or get sucked into the computer screen never to return. Its been a long day and very busy. And yet poor Xenia still has about 12-13 people to check in at some stage over the course of the night.
Speaking of checking people in, Sally tells me I have about a 2am check in on Saturday night. Yay! Well, no, not really but I'll deal with it.
Okay, so I printed off your e-mails and I am going to work through them and see how we go. Perhaps I'll answer questions as I go and maybe I'll create more! Who knows! He! I like this, I like having to think this through a lot more and explain it. Real time to flesh things out.
I don't know what this next meeting with Doreen is about. Its on the 25th and I am just assuming its the supervisory meeting that is supposed to happen every month but hasn't been. I can't think of too many reasons why she'd want to talk to me. I mean, maybe this whole HAC thing but aside from that I think everything is okay. So while I am a little nervous about it, I'm also not that worried. Its just routine.
Right. Writing. Description is the key to writing, but there is also a balance. I find that everything I look at in the world, I see slightly differently to most people. Like an Artist or a Photographer. You look for the things you can use, the material, the perspective. I try to soak up as much realness as possible. I pay attention to the way leaves move, the shade they turn, the sound they make. How far the moon seems in comparison to buildings and the depth of silver it has. Common day occurrences are those most forgotten in a story. For an environment to be real, you have to pull from real life. You have to feel it. Be able to close your eyes and see it, but should you see it without closing them, then that's even better. To be able to be taken to that very moment, that slip in time. I've spent dark nights in bus shelters in the rain. Its not fun. But its always interesting to watch how things move, how lights reflect. How the rain falls and flows. The way lightening flashes around the sky.
When I initially started to write Day and Night, I didn't want to take it anywhere. More than anything it was a particular situation I wanted to write down and turn away like an old journal. Out of mind, thus out of sight. Didn't quite go as planned. As things went along, I realised that Rachel Manchester in some regards played out morals I had. Beliefs I had. And yet there was always a distinct difference between she and I. Most people in the real world who knew of her existence, knew this. I realised that by writing about a situation I was in a sense prohibited from, I could in some regard still experience it through my alter ego.
Quite surprisingly, the very first words appeared one sunny afternoon as I sat in my tent in the middle of a green field in the Midlands of England. July of 2002 was a great summer. But it was also the beginning of the decomposition of a good friendship. I was just 18, I was facing the prospect of leaving high school, moving out of my aunt and uncles and trying to work out just why I seemed un-datable. I had a strong friendship with a good friend and without giving it much thought, I realised what I was feeling was beyond friendship. I can even remember the split moment the thought occurred to me. It was one of the first few days of camp in England, Penny had been disputing something with Kathy. I later walked into our tent to find Penny curled up in a ball and in tears. She always struck me as a very strong person, so much stronger than I. In that moment I felt my heart break and I couldn't figure out why. As I knelt down and gave her a hug to comfort (something we often did for each other) I found myself thinking I didn't want to find someone like her to be with, I wanted to be with her. Yes, that scared the hell out of me!!
I spent the next few days distancing myself. Somewhere in there I began to play with the idea, yet knowing I would disappoint so many people. Thus Day and Night was born of my own aspects of myself, how I could be one person during the day, yet at night I found myself with my thoughts and the person I actually was.
So quite obviously as you figured out, there are strong parallels between Myself and Manchester and indeed Penny and Jane. Yet that's about as far as it really goes. Scott was indeed based on a real person, indeed he lived in London and indeed was a friend of Veronica's. See, there is a history with Scott and Veronica which is pretty much something that happened in real life. Scott quite liked Veronica. She wasn't interested but decided to string him along to see how far it would go. It reached a point where I found what she was doing awful. And I ended up telling him what was going on. He was really hurt, as you can imagine, but still remained friends with her. He thanked me endlessly for telling me the truth and we too became good friends. If anything I envied veronica because she had someone who wanted her. This was reflected in the fictional friendship between Rachel Manchester and her work partner Veronica Noonie. And thus those aspects of the reality of the friendship arose in the fictional one. The only difference was, Scott actually took a liking to Rachel. And they ended up marrying. In that regard, this was long before Matt even entered on the scene in reality.
I found there were moments when I was with Matt that I thought about Penny. In the sense that the bond I had with her as a friend was something I was missing in my relationship with Matt. Don't get me wrong, he was a wonderful friend. But not Penny. By the time I met Matt, Penny and I had stopped talking and the friendship was just about gone. It had reached a point where we could only associate on a professional level. When I broke up with Matt, I wondered if somehow I had used him as a tool to make me believe I had no inclination to females. Its not something I consciously did. And yet felt really bad about it. The point I am trying to make here is that the character of Scott was around long before Matt had even appeared. The only correlation between Scott and Matt is that both Rachel and I had been with someone who cared a lot about us. It just didn't work out.
Michael Stone also appeared long before Ben entered on the scene. In fact Michael Stone was a character Carly created back in 2000 when she started to write her own stories. We decided to partner them up and try explore a relationship similar to that between Mulder and Scully from The X-Files. So Michael wasn't even from my own mind. The thing with he and Rachel is that they became Mulder and Scully too quickly. Rachel was beginning to understand the complicated factors in Mulder and Scullys friendship. Michael Stone to her was a representation (in my mind even though he was Carly's creation) of Penny/Jane. But much like the real Rachael, she wasn't allowed to have him. She was by this stage married to Scott whom she did actually love. It was my decision to have Michael die. I made that choice not long after I started Day and Night. I needed a reason for Rachel to come back to Australia and face up to things she had ran away from. For me in reality, this meant facing what it was I was feeling.
You have to keep in mind I haven't written anything in Day and Night since perhaps this time last year. Long before Ben came into things, so that rules out the correlation to Michael Stone. Alexandra Barlaston was never actually meant to hook up with Rachel. At least not in my mind. She was born that sunny afternoon in the tent in the middle of a field back in 2002. Ideally I just wanted her to be a representation of someone who made Rachel realise she no longer had to worry about peoples expectations, that she had to do what she felt was right regardless of what people thought. In that sense, she could be a combination of a lot of people. Subconsciously back then I had made the decision to create a relationship between the two and use it as a way for me to explore perhaps what might happen should I eventually venture into a same sex relationship.
Hence a lot of Rachel Manchester's insecurities, are indeed my own. The fear she has is real. Although unlike Rachel held onto Jane, I let go of Penny. I eventually did realise it was maybe just a phase I was going through. But was a little more open to the idea should it arise again. My only concern with that was my friendship with Veronica and in some ways I had to deal with peoples knowledge of me in a same sex relationship when the rumours about Vee and I started. This was all after high school and not long after I'd started to work for Vic Pol. Vee and I laughed it off because we knew it wasn't true and would never be true. But somewhere in the back of my mind I realised that the looks people gave us were indeed a reality I would face should I end up dating a female. I didn't know if I could deal with that kind of scrutiny.
Since then I've gotten wiser. A few of the women in the Crime Department were known to be gay and in reality, most people didn't have a problem with it. Through other peoples acceptance, I too began to warm to the idea that the adult world was far less brutal than the high school one I had known. You've heard me talk about Nat on several occasions, my old boss, the young one I used to sing Elvis with. She was one of those people with the brightest bubbliest personality. I remember the first time I met her. See, Veronica used to teach me what she looked for in a chick. I told her she was too fussy. So out of habit I found myself being Veronica and seizing females up. But in a purely innocent way. That very first day Nat walked in, I was stunned. She really was unlike anyone I'd ever met. But I didn't fancy her. I never have done. What it did was made me realise that perhaps it was nothing to do with the gender of a person, rather the actual person. Then Ben came along and I just got all hormonal or something, I still don't even know what was up with me!!
The point I was trying to get at is that Day and Night formed long before the seemingly parallels with reality even occurred. Like I had imagined a certain path in life, had a premonition, and hey presto some two or three years later here I am, actually in a relationship with another female which is strikingly like the one I had created. By no means was that a conscious thing. Like most things I write, they appear in the shape of words but are saved on disk and put away on the shelf. Even I found the parallels between Rachel and myself quite amazing as I read over my own words a day or two ago.
Alex in some regards is the stereotype of how guys see lesbians. Perhaps even in my mind I was being ignorant. When I created Alex, like I said, she was never initially meant to become a lover. I just pulled together an image and went from there. I looked at a trust element as well as a friendship element. There was care but also concern. The key there was trust. In order for Rachel to finally accept the fact she may indeed be attracted to females, she had to find someone she could trust.
What I want to make clear is that Alex isn't anyone in specific. And by no means should you feel that you're not my Alex, that you don't fit the bill. This is where Rachel and I different. You have to remember, most things in Day and Night are not purposefully real. You are everything and more I could even dream of having in my life. I am so very happy with you. You have a trust no one else has ever gotten from me.
I think that maybe I've gone right off track here and lost the direction I was going in! There is so much explanation to go with your questions! Its easy to look at the characters I have. But you have to remember, the characters have evolved over a period of about six or seven years. They have all been lying dormant for at least the past year. There is a whole world and life to each and every one of them Its like the complex lives of real people. What I've told you about how they all connect is only very basic. A few other stories I started ended up being character building too. They deal with the complex relations people have. That's what I love most about writing, how much you can explore and how much you can make real. Hmm...yet again I think I've gotten off track.
I should probably take a break from this! I've been typing for quite some time. Actually, I think maybe you should ask more questions to get me back in the right direction. I don't know, maybe some of what I wrote did answer your questions. Perhaps it only created more. Either way, shoot more questions at me if you want to. I really don't mind.
For now I say catch you later, I actually really have to pee and am still sitting here in my work uniform, it's now like 20 to 8!! Okay. Am off upstairs.
I hope your day is going well and I hope this hasn't gotten really long and confusing. Well long I know, I just hope it's not too confusing, although I do know that too is possible!
Later,
Rachael
