It’s 5:00 AM. As The Boss once sang, “Monday morning, when the foreman calls time/I’ve already got Friday on my mind.” I’m pretty much the same way this morning. Back at The Undisclosed Location, and I’ve a full week of work ahead, and I’m already thinking of the drive home on Friday afternoon.
The drive down was a bit frustrating, as I had to deal with someone who seemed to not like my trying to pass him. So for about thirty miles, every time he’d see me coming, he’d pull his dumb, white truck right in front of me, and actually slow up a little. See? Another candidate for allowing one to mount guns on their car and help idiots to shuck this mortal coil as quickly as possible.
Oh, and he almost caused a wreck–right in front of me, I might add–when he forced his way into a line of cars. Which, believe it or not, was the point when I was able to get around him, and never have to deal with him the rest of the time.
When I wasn’t gripping the wheel, filled with an urge to snap it off in my hands, I played with a story. Of course, what else am I going to do? I ran Dinners at the Memory’s End through my head, thinking about what I had wrote all those years ago, and it was pretty easy to completely disregard nearly everything I’d written before–save the basic outline of the story–and redo it the way it would need to be written today.
So when I wasn’t screaming, “You son of a bitch!” at a driver just beyond my windscreen, I took what would be nearly the last half of the story, and worked it out. And in doing so, I created some completely different motivations for at least two of my characters.
The way this story was originally written, it was pretty much about one person who was sort of on a mission to . . . well, to pull another main character into her orbit and make him her little snugly prize. And he didn’t really think about what was going on, nor feel too bad about what eventually happened, when Character A finally made a very serious play for Character B.
The problem was, there is a Character C in the mix. In the original story, she didn’t much give a shit about what happened between A and B. Her motivations were–lets just say, she was more interested in maintaining a front for B and her, C, than she was worried about B hooking up with A.
But that wasn’t going to work. Nope, no way. Because, in other stories, I’ve already established a precedence for characters B and C, and how they interact with each other. So, I did a little head canon on Character C, and thought about her relationship with Character B . . .
Head Canon: An idea or opinion about a fictional series (Book, TV, Comic, or otherwise) that is true in one’s head, but has not become a canon fact. You can believe things about character that haven’t happened, or been talked about, or even seen. The thing about head canon is that until the author actually writes that someone acts in a particular way, then it’s not canon, it’s just everyone’s head canon.
In Dinners, there’s a lot of head canon for me. There had to be, because at this point, I’m actually making up a new relationship for Characters B and C as I was driving along. That relationship became completely refocused for me in one particular scene, one that wasn’t in the original story, one that ended up actually occurring, for the most part, because Character B and C were meeting with Another Character D and discussing the matter that occurred between Characters A and B, and in this new scene a statement is uttered by Character C that puts her emotions about Character B right out on the table for all to see.
Needless to say, she’s not a happy person.
The thing I really need to do is timeline this sucker out, because there’s an event that happens to Character B that changes things for Character A in a big way . . . but we won’t get into that right now, will we?
Sounds like it’s time to turn head canon into canon, doesn’t it?
