The Nightmare Dolls' Imperfect Reunion

I can't write this novel

I love novels, especially the big sagas that take months to read, such as Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, which took me three months to read and I adored it. When I read Robertson Davies’ The Depford Trilogy in my twenties, I knew I wanted to spin tales, write novels. The man was exceptionally witty. The only book of his that I couldn’t get into was the Papers of Samuel Marchbanks. Heather O’Neill’s novels also make me want to write: stories of quirky broken people. I love Shawna LeMay’s Everything Affects Everyone and Rumi’s Red Handbag. Shawna packs a lot of literature and art references into her work, which is delightful and rabbit-holey, just the way I like it.

As I kid, I adored Little Women and I was so glad that there were numerous books. I identified so much with Jo March. I loved Alice from Alice in Wonderland and Adventures Through the Looking Glass so much that she appears in much of my writing As an adult I did love the Chronicles of Narnia, and loved the possibilities for the imagination. In university I studied the 19th century novel, both in French and in English. I loved Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la Mer and Notre Dame de Paris. I adored the Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy and some Dickens novels. We did not study women much when I was in university. I read Anne of Green Gables as a woman in my thirties. I adored Anne and wished we had been friends. I have always found reading novels to be a way to feel comforted that I am not the only weirdo out there, the only lonely little misfit girl who doesn’t fit in with the crowd.

I think if I were growing up in this era, I would have turned to graphic novels, or read more fantasy and science fiction. A few years ago I read Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is A Thousand and was totally captivated by it. I love Helen Oyeyemi’s fairy tale novels. I like romance but dislike happy endings, heteronomativity and the end goal always being love. I love a good erotic novel, but haven’t read anything as good as the books by Remittance Girl, a friend and erotica writer back when I was writing smut, in years.

So I keep wanting to write a big novel, one about friendship between women. I wrote a shorter erotic novel that I self published, and had fun writing. I did it for National Novel Writing Month, writing 50, 000 words in November 2004. I dreamed of the main character. It was an intense and immersive experience. I could easily write 3000 to 5000 words in a morning but it had to be a priority.

I find the blocks of time required to write a novel difficult to make brain space and time for.

I came up with a good idea back in 2017. A group of girls in junior high school form a band in the 70s. They sing covers of misogynistic songs. Years later the daughter of one of the girls, the main character, Betty, learns that her mother was in this band, but never heard of it before. She sets out to orchestrate a reunion and all kinds of secrets are revealed.

I did a bunch of research. I went to Toronto Island and took a tour of Ward’s Island with a bunch of other women, who could easily have been characters in my novel. I paid a tarot reader, a friend to read my tarot and read the tarot of my main character. I read a lot about the start of punk rock in UK and its evolution in North America. I read about girl bands. I think I wrote about 50,000 words. I did a plot outline.

But writing it became complicated. It turned into a story of family, trauma and abuse and I couldn’t continue it. Maybe I will some day. I feel as if I’m letting Betty down by not telling her story.

For the Anvil Press three-day novel writing contest labour day weekend in 2022, I wrote 25000 words in 3 days, a novella about empty nesters who rediscover intimacy. I did a plot outline and even made a playlist ahead of time. I wrote about 8000 words a day and it was a laborious process, both physically and mentally.

For those of you who write novels, i admire your stamina and strength. I dearly want to join you. I want to help fellow musfits know they are not alone.