Chapter 17: Tania

Oh, my beloved Tania
How I long to see your face photographed in fifteen second intervals
In a bank in San Leandro
A Polaroid of you, Cinque
With a seven-headed dragon
In a house in Daly City
Don’t be sad my beloved Tania
They say your father never liked Stephen Weed anyway
Hired a detective to follow him around
Oh, my beloved revolutionary sweetheart
I can see your newsprint face turn yellow in the gutter
It makes me sad
How I long for the days when you came to liberate us from boredom
From driving around
From the hours between five to seven in the evening
My beloved Tania
We carry your gun deep within our hearts
For no better reason than our lives have no meaning
And we want to be on television

Having reached the midpoint of Gray Rock, Damron has reached another false peak. His team is a top performer, confident, and he enjoys his work in spite of The MP’s occasional slights. Time to knock it all down!

I procrastinated for two months before I began writing the manuscript that became BPTW!, but I remained determined to finish the draft to send to editing by mid-October. By late May, 2019, I had to sit down and think through exactly why I procrastinated. After a period of contemplation, I made the decision to fictionalize the memoir and, importantly, make the story as “ruthlessly first-person” as I could. I also decided to start with the scenes I most feared writing, and so began with Tania. I kept referring to my notes taken at the time, which made the going entirely to slow and tedious. I decided to junk the notes and write from memory only, and after that decision, I wrote 2/3 of the manuscript in five weeks.

My notes were helpful in keeping straight the timeline of events, and occasionally my notes would contradict something I wrote on the stream-of-consciousness level. Often my subconscious mind was in denial or suppressing how emotionally wrecked I became, or humiliated I was, or angry, or my terror at the thought of Harriet or Penelope feeling uncomfortable around me. In this way, the writing was the best therapy, forcing me to be honest with myself about all things.

After I finished writing the Tania in HR scenes of Gray Rock, the most difficult scenes, I moved on to the next most-difficult scenes, which are in The Strange Remain, writing the last half of the book in reverse chronological order for the most part. Then I wrote the rest of the second half of Gray Rock, and the second half of Destination Unknown. In late July, I had an operational pause to assess where I was and what was left.

I had 55,000 defensible words, but my objective was 70,000. All of my notes were in, but I still had a ways to go, and lacked that ‘linkage’ between the end of Destination Unknown and Tania. Unsure of what to do next, I began revising what I had, which reminded me of many additional details and stories. One month later, I had 85,000 words, which I felt comfortable showing to Melissa.

Melissa read Destination Unknown and thought it was dreck! And she was right. I began deleting extraneous material and re-arranging scenes and chapters to sharpen the story line (with a big assist from my friend and fellow traveler Alyssa Richards). I probably deleted 15,000 words and wrote another 10,000 before sending off to Sandy for editing at the end of October.

Because I had already beaten every chapter of the manuscript to a bloody pulp, editing was almost a non-event. But I made a few key changes and additions thanks to Sandy’s feedback. I’m proud of the end-product, and it meets my criteria for the project and as a writer: I’m comfortable defending every sentence of the story. And nowhere in the story am I more confident defending the facts and the writing than Tania through the end of Gray Rock.