Or, the last bit of fussbudgeting before I cut this story loose.
The Aphanes started a couple of years ago, as a little image rolling around like a marble in a shoe box: people in the woods, looking for an invisible, intangible person who couldn't be found, and didn't want to be. Joel himself grew separately in two different stories -- some characters pester me through several different plots until I find the right one for them. I wanted to write about invisibility, which seemed tied to being forgotten, isolated, unloved. Writing about mental illness followed naturally from that, and I drew on my own experiences in the mental health system. (Even Joel's constrained, oddly polite suicide note is a reworking of one I wrote during a bad patch.) What emerged over time was a story about doctors and patients, and fathers and sons.
For me, this is what it was like trying to get over the last hump of adolescence with a mental illness. You're stuck in the past, you've got no friends, you do nothing and you depend entirely on your parents, who you almost hate even while you know they're keeping you alive. Your brain tries to kill you from the inside. And twice a week you sit in a room with someone and you talk. Or you don't. The world happens outside -- far outside. Even things that ought to be serious traumas just barely touch you, and in some cases (mine, and Joel's), they help.
On the other side of the fence, the therapist can't make you change and has to watch while you spiral downward. In this story, I wrote Xavier as somewhat lacking in clinical experience: over the last 30 years, he's been building telepathy machines with Magneto, running a school, coaching superheroes, and basically doing everything but treating patients with actual disorders. He's a telepath, yes, but what if the patient could resist even that level of contact? I played Xavier off of Father Gilles Visineau, another flawed therapist character who is also a childless father figure -- Xavier here is mildly distrustful of religion, but his job is ultimately the same as Visineau's, just with a different vocabulary and different rules.
It's set (partly) in Canada because that's where I'm from, and Marvel has never done Canada well. I wanted to do what comics and big-budget movies don't have time to do, and that's set a character within a context: a city, a political scene, a family, a religion, and a culture. This is why it's brimming with references to Canadian literature and music, street names and in-jokes, saints and Biblical passages.
I thought the religious aspects would be more problematic for readers than they were, especially Joel's conversation with Amanda in "And Those at Sea". Although perhaps I shouldn't point that out. In any case, here's a disclaimer: no preachiness was intended, Joel's background is not really typical of most Catholics (Paul's is far more ordinary, which we'll see in the sequel), I don't even agree with everything he and Father Gilles say, and no Jesuits were harmed in the making of this story.
One technical note: I planned it out as a novella, but it ended up being 65,000 words and change, which is morbidly obese for a novella. It's a claustrophobic little tale, but I'm not sure it really has the tightness of plot and style that the form requires. So maybe it's a short novel. Call it what you want, but don't come crying to me if it's not Old Man and the Sea enough for you.
Most of this was written without a beta; I'd write, put it aside for a few days, edit myself, and put it up. But some parts were beta'd (thanks to Phil R) and people have given me some truly superior feedback (thanks to Minisinoo, Moi, Phil W, and others via email). I first started this story almost a year ago, in mid-December 2004.
I never really expected much response to this story. It hasn't been a runaway freight train of success, but I've received a number of thoughtful comments and emails from people who said they could relate to Joel and his struggle for recovery. Something connected, and even if it was only for that handful of people, it was worth a year's work. Looking back on the early chapters, I see a lot of awkwardness in the writing and I can spot things I'd do differently today. But on the whole, I think it's a piece that accomplishes exactly what I wanted it to, and I'm very glad and very honoured that people have responded it.
As Sinéad O'Connor said, Thank you for hearing me.
F.A. MacNeil, November 2005.
0fac@qlink.queensu.ca
(Oh, and a second banner, made on completion of the story. This isn't Joel Plaskett; it's Tony Dekker of the Toronto band Great Lake Swimmers, whose music is a perfect soundtrack to this story -- acoustic, depressing with flashes of hope, and obsessed with boats. Dekker only looks like Joel from certain angles, but this is one of them.)
DVD extra: Joel's family tree, somewhat truncated but showing everyone named in the story.
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