.Most if not all of the information on what was once called "Maximum Security Showcase" is woefully outdated since the last time I talked about it. I'll also confess that I never referred to it by that moniker in the drafts. I was paranoid about calling it "Incarceration Troupe" because admittedly, if or when I decide to market this, I wanted that title for the final product. I worried that I wouldn't be able to if I referred to it online as such.
I was full of myself in thinking that. It also may have been silly in hindsight.
The whole hauntology angle never really panned out. The main reason being that it would've merely combined the recent works of Hossein Derakhshan, Jaques Derrida, M.T. Anderson, and Jon Ronson into some fictional narrative. In part, I have to thank an Internet friend for pointing out that this whole thing has been done before* when he joked that the projects he was working on were his projects.
(OtherMichael, if you're reading this, hello, and thanks for keeping me on the straight and narrow.)
The other reason dealt with the additional characters who would be the major players in that argument. I liked writing them, but the more I focused on fleshing them out, the less I focused on the main characters. Simply put, it became a hot mess.
Around NaNoWriMo 2015, I started reading Specters of Marx and if Capital broke me out of Marxism, Specters prompted me to say, "Well, screw it," and give up on the story as it was. That book was frustratingly dense, even for an academic book. I got the gist about what deconstruction theory is (in part) and how it works upon finishing it, so it wasn't that bad.
Still, I let that story collect dust for months. I tried again in the following summer to bring new life to it, but ultimately failed.
It had been over a year before I decided to take a look at the project again, or rather the short story that it branched from in the first place.
The circumstances in which I wrote that, well, sucked. This was two months into the new year after I realized that my hiking partner used me as a third wheel to start a relationship with someone who took my writing and ran. They did tell me, after our last hike, that they liked him and I relayed the message when we crossed paths at school. Either way, it hurt.
There was also an internship that did not turn out as it was originally planned. I ended up doing mostly secretarial work when I was supposed to be learning about web development. By proxy, I would've fulfilled my job over at the student-run newspaper if the internship was successful since, it goes without saying, that's what they hired me for in the first place. What's even worse was the fact that I didn't question it, that I just let the guy who ran the internship use me to write up some bits of content, change a club's constitution, and scan the back archives of their magazine which ironically never found their way onto the actual website. In short, I felt slighted and going into the final semester, asking myself if that internship was actually worth anything, is not a pleasant thought to say the least.
I also wasn't happy in the groups I associated with in general. I was physically tired due to both the workload and roommates who turned the commons into a pigsty in the course of a semester--it didn't help that I lacked the confidence to say something about it, and the fact that they were noisy past quiet hours--and mentally tired for the same reasons and then some. The some being pretty much the above...
...and what ultimately lead to me writing out that very story.
The draft itself had an ending far different than what I ended up with in the "final". Instead of this realization that he (the main character) was "free" from his ex-colleagues, he finds himself chastised by his girlfriend who leaves him the next day. Instead of just realizing that he's no longer obligated to maintain a relationship with some co-workers, he finds himself free. This, after he finds some slip of paper stuck in a book with some motivational passage comparing people to planets and how gravity, metaphysically speaking, can attract friends based on one's attitude or, well, "orbit".
Either way, it was the ending I preferred. The one in the final was a result of even more sleep deprivation, and delusions of grandeur in which I started to picture it as more of a sitcom in a series of short stories than a stand-alone novel, finals week notwithstanding. In short, it was a cop-out. It was crap...
...and I'm glad I veered away from that direction.
In early February, I decided to look at the workshop critiques from that first draft to try and figure out what the story was about it the first place. Many of them pointed out that the conflict between the main characters and his former co-workers is left unresolved and that the issues between them are unclear aside from the obvious political differences. There were also some questions about the main character's anxiety towards them, mostly due to said non-resolution but also in scenes where it's just him and his girlfriend. One of them noted that he doesn't seem to be comfortable with anyone, let alone relate to them.
It's sort of a dead giveaway as to where this is going and yet, four years on, I've finally figured out where this story's going and more importantly, what's it about.
Instead of focusing on making it some literary magnum opus, I'm going to focus on it. Whatever happens, I'll be glad once I finish writing it just for that fact alone. We'll see what happens after that...
