Notes from a writer's notebook

January 20, 2020.
Monday

A post that proves that someone else's notebook is as boring as it gets until that someone else becomes a literary phenomenon.

First things first:

What a great date today would have been to send this blog out to the wide net! January 20, 2020! Can numbers alliterate? I still have February as an even better option.

Is it ok to post-censor myself? I wrote a full paragraph here about why this blog is still not live yet. It was about my frustration towards the technology behind the website. The reason why I chose Ghost as my blogging platform in the first place was that it advertises itself as a minimalist, easy to handle platform for technologically-challenged writers. Their sell was a love letter to me. Until it wasn't, because frankly there is no such thing as blogging without acquiring SOME knowledge of coding OR acquiring SOMEONE who has aforementioned knowledge.

People at Ghost (very nice people based on our correspondence) and clearly NO ONE with any coding knowledge have ANY idea what it is like to be someone who doesn't speak Code. I ask a question from Support and have to read the answer at least three times to have some understanding about what I am supposed to do and with which file, while googling CSS and API at the same speed a hungry wild boar unearths bulbs. It is a good challenge, but, as you might know, I already have a couple of challenges waiting to be achieved.

As for acquiring HELP to do the tech: my husband is a software engineer. One of our biggest marital fights to date was the fate of my future blog, this blog in question (a future blog... the things that can shake up a marriage...Fun!), namely: who designs the site and for what price. The price of having designed and maintained this site by the love of my life turned out to be something I couldn't afford. I'd have driven him crazy. He didn't believe me so I asked:

"Do you know how many edits I make on a single post? On one tiny paragraph?"

Well, as of today he still has no idea and it's better this way. (The number of edits equals three times the number of weight-lifting a body builder does per day. Imagine a poor body builder who needs to wait for his partner to bring her out the weights every time she needs to lift? Then imagine the poor partner...)

Trying my best here to fill in the cold place of that poor paragraph I've just deleted.

I've got onto the second step on Dan Brown's ladder that leads to a Story:

2. CREATING THE HERO?

I've been thinking about my heroine, Médi, during swimming.

I still don't see yet what makes her a heroine, someone we envy, someone we would like to be similar to, someone who is better than us in many ways. She is beautiful. No. She is just as beautiful as any human being. I don't want to make her the beauty of the Story. I have someone else in mind for that role. Médi is pretty nevertheless.

She is stubborn. Strong-willed. Warm-hearted. A loner. She makes decisions by herself that are not hers alone to make. Why do we care about her? That's my question for today.

Notes from my notebook:

Once upon a time there was a woman called Médi Montag born in a Hungarian village... She was someone good to look at. Extremely smart, sensitive, brave. Her childhood was about emotional survival: her mother worked as an ambulance driver, crazy about her job, saving lives for a living, didn't spend much time with her only child. Médi couldn't count on her mother. Médi's father was a surgeon in the same hospital where her mother worked: same story. They were the parents who shouldn't have had any kids. Médi had a roof above her head and food to put in her mouth. With everything else she has always been on her own. It has become the only way that she could operate: all by herself.

Why do I care about her?

Because she is the mother of my hero. That's the twist: The hero of the Story is not Médi. It's her son. Benjámin. Médi is my villain.

"You might want to write your villain first. Because your villain is the one who's going to define your hero." (Dan Brown)