I love how this book came together. Taking a secondary character from Rape in Holding Cell 6 and making him a badass investigating the disappearance of his gay uncle. What's even more fun to me about it is...I got the name, Owen Taylor, from The Big Sleep. Because he vanished from the story.
This scene is the closest we get to seeing or knowing Owen, in the movie. He kills a man who's misusing a girl he's got a crush on, and this is his way of protecting her...but it gets him killed immediately after. We never see his body; just his feet running down some stairs.
I felt that was a disservice to him. Just a crazy kid in love with the wrong woman. So when I started thinking about my book and making it into a murder mystery, his name fit it so perfectly it's like he was calling to me. And it made the title almost evocative.
I did not know what the story was going to be when I began writing, aside from Jake having to travel to Palm Springs to find his missing uncle. It just...it fell together in ways I'm still very proud of. And what's even better, the politics and legal aspects of the book...where a shadowy anti-gay group called PSALMS is undermining the gay community...still fit today.
I use this to remind me that if I trust the story it will come together. I'm fighting to keep from falling into my old habit of thinking what I'm doing is stupid and makes no sense, with MQM. But VoT is a very complicated mystery that does everything right and I had not planned it out the way it went.
I threw out lots of pages that went nowhere...and just need to remember that's going to happen, again, with MQM until it all falls into place. Just trust the process...
Even as you whine.,
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