Hi there! I’m trying to get better at casual posting on my sites. I’m trying to relearn that passionate and casual can coincide. Because I’m definitely not going to stop being passionate. One of the top traits on my character sheet is that I care about things intensely, lol. So I’m trying to figure out how to mix that with throwing flower petals along my way, letting things get the reactions they get. If you’re passionate about everything, you can’t very well be perfectionist about all the things you’re passionate about. To quote a favorite character of mine, “One might go mad.”
So here, with all the cazzz (there is no good way to spell the shortened version of “casual” in English!), is a prequel scene to my beloved flagship story, set when my protagonist is five, from his mother’s point of view.
My writing focus is always the characters, 100% (an EP writer’s first step), and one of my favorite things, since I was a lil tiny writer, has always been jumping to different points in a character’s life and seeing who they are at different check-in points in their lifetime character arc. Over the years since Barry’s inception, I’ve done that with him more than any of my other characters, with three different main novel plot arcs set at three crucial points in his life—16, 22, and 40—and tons of flashbacks to all the times in between.
For anyone who may not have read my fiction before, this is a silly, seemingly mundane lead-in to the way I write, that is actually critically targeted at the themes of Barry’s story. There is humorously no mention of the magical elements of the story in this scene at all. But poignancy happens within the mundane moments of life. Psyches are shaped in the quiet moments like these, where conversations happen, questions are asked, and childhood worldviews are developed into grown-up ones.
This scene, while on the surface just about a mom of two young boys having the kinds of crazy interactions that little boys have, shows a seemingly simple conversation that shaped who Barry Anderson is, and his relationship with his selfness. It’s technically foreshadowing… but in a way, aren’t all our childhood experiences foreshadowing for who we become? Children are such fascinating summations of their grown-up selves, even with all the choices in the world open before them to choose who they ultimately want to be. It’s always my soapbox that people are both always their forever-selves, and who they chose to be with every ever-changing day.
Barry, in all the ¾-of-a-million words I’ve written of him, is always as portrayed here–passionate, dramatic, a little whiny sometimes, but deeply invested in the questions of the Universe and what defines self, and gender, and what makes people matter. He grows with every one of the hundreds of thousands of words I put him through (often kicking and screaming), but it’s in the quiet and the silly that the images of the world take shape for him. This is the seeds of Barry’s relationship with Barry, starting from being very smol.
So, without further adieu, or somethin’, please enjoy five-year-old Barry Anderson… and three-year-old Nick Anderson 😱 !
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