Devil Sun - My Work in Progress

February 19, 2023 filed in Writing

It started as a character sketch — a character sketch of my kid's great-grandmother, Mary Rose. I really didn't know that much about her life. All I had were a couple quotes from mosôm (that's grandfather in Cree): "she couldn't look after me because she wanted to party" and "she left Anzac reserve when she was 15". Of course, I also knew she was Cree which comes with a whole lot of possible histories and questions like was she in a residential school? (doesn't look like it, but her mom probably was) and did she live on or off reserve? (the reserve doesn't have any record of her). But after not too long I decided that I really couldn't write the story of Mary Rose's indigenous heritage. It didn't feel like a story I had the right to tell. But the story of a mother dealing with the repercussions of intergenerational family trauma — that was my story — and one I wanted to write.

I started that character sketch in April 2017 a couple months shy of five years ago. The original sketch turned into an online project called Mary Rose, which won a new media prize from Bournemouth University and is now archived on the UK Web Archive. Since then I have written 100,000 words (actually much more since I've deleted almost as many words as I've kept). To be exact, this morning my manuscript is sitting at 100,683 words. Mary Rose is still in the story, but she is a secondary character and isn't indigenous.

The main character is Autumn and when I first started writing her she was very loosely based on me, but this has also shifted as I've written and rewritten the novel. I had to completely separate Autumn from myself to understand her character. The novel opens with Autumn leaving her abusive husband. Autumn desperately wants to find autonomy. She feels that she has been controlled by her father and then controlled by her husband and she wants to find a different way of living where she can discover who she really is and what she really wants. But she is also a mother and her desire for self-actualization has to take the back-seat as she tries to deal with her traumatized children who miss their father.

Autumn is also a computer programmer and the novel has a strong work element to it. Autumn gets a new job with a wellness / new age group who are trying to start an online school. Autumn becomes an integral part of the group. They not only fulfill her desire for meaningful work, but also her need for larger meaning and community. But things are not exactly what they seem. The shadowy benefactor of the group, Emmett, appears to have a dark past. And the way that Autumn's kids start to integrate into the group is concerning.

Anyway, I'm not going lay out the entire plot in this blog post, but suffice to say some things go wrong and Autumn has to rescue her kids and find a way out of the mess she's got herself into. I'm really interested in how people delude themselves in abusive situations, the way that we try so hard to make what we have work.

This novel has been a labour of love for a long, long time and I think about it many times a day. Sometimes it feels like a weight around my neck dragging me under water and other times it feel like the best thing in my life. I'm not sure I would have started it if I'd known how difficult it would be (just like having kids).

I'm about a third of the way through this draft (I think I'd call it draft #5) and I'm really happy with the changes I've made. I am hopeful that when I'm done this draft I will be able to send it out to some beta-readers (I have a few waiting in the wings) and then I'll only be one more draft away from having a completed manuscript.