Preview: Emily

Emily

Around 2009 I started a new story that had very little sex in it (except, of course, that pretty much everything has a little sex in it, if you know what to look for, and I'm not trying to be funny).

The story is about a middle-aged English professor at (again) a school in Pennsylvania.  Again, this is not me; but it does draw on some of my experiences.  I don't teach English, but I do find myself teaching a certain amount of writing.

What happens is that when Emily's ex, an older guy, dies, he leaves her their automobile (which he had taken when they split up).  Unexpectedly, she gets a phone call saying that the car belongs to a collection agency, and she gets so mad that she locks up her house, gets in the car, and drives off.  Her teaching has been going downhill for a few months, and the Dean had granted her a semester off to try and bounce back.  Now it looks as if she's going to spend the semester evading a collection agency.

It happens that Emily stumbles upon a very expectant mother and her 12-or-so-year-old daughter, totally indigent, whose ancient car had broken down on the highway.  Emily helps the women get to the closest hospital, at which the woman delivers, but the baby dies within minutes.  Emily appears to the mother and daughter as an angel, and they cling to her desperately, and beg to be taken with her on her open-ended run from the collection agency.

I have written up the story as far as California, where the trio spends Christmas at a campsite.  After that, I don't know what to do.  I'm a little tired of writing stories that only have women in them, and I think I'm ready to try and introduce a male character.  This is going to be very hard!

First off, I don't want to write a male character who is a typical guy, just a dick with legs, as most guys I know are.  On the other hand, I don't want to write a man who is sensitive an sweet, because those sorts of guys are so atypical.  To put it mildly, it is very difficult for me to get inside the head of the kind of guy inside whose head I would enjoy getting, if you know what I mean.  What we need here is a seriously flawed sweet guy.  Ideally, he should be someone outside Academia, because academic guys are both strange and somehow clichetic.  (I know some really nice guys who are college professors, but now we're cutting a little too close to the bone.)

I want Emily to be a woman who is essentially straight, but who is drawn to women very strongly.  Attraction between women is a complex thing, and sex is only a small part of it.  In Jane, for instance, I have her going to bed with women without agonizing over it very much; after all, pregnancy is not an issue.  If a child is involved, it makes sense that some restraint in indulging your sexual needs has to be used.  (That's something that's totally ignored in Helen.  Or rather, not ignored, but not taken into consideration by Helen.  I wrote Helen as very much a hedonist, but a hedonist with a conscience!  Ha ha.)

The idea for Emily, a woman who is not brilliantly beautiful, but middle-aged and sort of average, came from a friend (a fellow-author, if I dare consider myself an author of any kind), who was just sick to death of all my protagonists being drop-dead gorgeous women.  But in my head, Emily is beautiful in her own, way, and I have to try and get away from the image of her.  I sort of imagine her as being Emma Watson, of Harry Potter fame, aged twenty years!  But with a little more personality, and better diction, for heaven's sake.

More on this later.

K. B.