Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Confessions: First Secret

I have a whole journal/memory box/Native American medicine bag filled with scraps of paper dedicated to my secrets and my confessions.

As I read through them and touch the items again for the first time in years, it brings up many emotions and tears. But as I begin to finally make the push of accepting these secrets, these faults, I will confess them here. Some will take more time than others, naturally, but some are small enough for me to finally say,

"It's me. This is me, this is my fear, this is my soul. And without it, I would not be where I am today."

So, here's my first confession. It seems to change shape, growing and shrinking, every few months, but I doubt this is something that will never truly escape my critical eyes.

I fear that having homosexual or bisexual characters in my stories and my novel will ultimately bring its downfall and also have my family look down on me or have no desire to read my (eventually, I hope) published work.

Yes, my novel has homosexual characters. Two are clearly defined as such, and one is what I would call a bisexual character. They are what I consider to be my favorite and most complex characters, though I tend to hide them so often from any curious eyes that you would never know it.

They are all mentioned occasionally in my clusterfuck of an "organization blog", A Series of Memories , though everything there is first draft only and meant to really just help me keep the area straight as I'm writing my novel.

I thoroughly enjoy creating scenes with these characters, and, being as they are all pretty big players on the stage I've set, are in the spotlight pretty often. And yet, I have kept their existance a secret from the people that I most want to read my work. My biggest fan, for instance, is my mother. She always has and always will be. I suppose mothers always are. She has read everything I have ever thrown onto paper, both in the draft/experimental stages and all the way through to the edits and final result, except for any portion of my novel. As of now, I'm guesstimating that my novel is about 40,000 words long, and I have more to go. I plan to split the final result into two books, if after editing and re-editing I still feel like it should be split. I think this is the most I have written without her eyes seeing it at least once.

It's not that I think it's bad. It's still in process, and still being edited so I know that it will be wonderful once I finish everything. It's just that my mother tends to be a little closed minded about such topics. She doesn't see love the same way I do. For me, it's not about gender, or height, or color, or background. Love happens, and most of the time, you can't stop it. If it's an honest love, an honest emotion, then it is worth it in the end, despite what may happen. It's something you can still look back and smile on, even if it didn't work out. But my mother has a harsher view of the world. Things are black and white, with each person and relationship having an "ideal option". To her, love means a man and a woman are married, for several years, and then have a few children, no more than three, and then that continues with them both remaining together until life is complete. A lovely ideal, I think, but how often does that happen?

But anyway, I am worried that her outlook on life will make her immediately doubt my novel, and therefore, doubt me in turn. But, hell, I suppose I'm this far into it now, so turning back isn't an option.