Death and Romance

Yes, I skipped last week. I'm sorry. I had a lot going on. It was all Halloween/beginning of NaNo/having to work on my day off, and I realized sometime on Sunday that I never wrote my post. But that's fine. I didn't have much to talk about then anyway.

So now I'm a few thousand words in, and this story is taking turns I never expected. My initial thought was that Steve was just some hapless oaf who got killed repeatedly in gruesome ways. But now all of a sudden he's a mentally ill grave robber with possible aspirations of being a superhero and I don't know what's happening anymore. Oh, and there's a love interest?

What started as some easy, jokey series of unfortunate events has turned into something else entirely. I find that I now actually care about poor Steve, which actually makes it easier to kill him repeatedly in gruesome ways. Because I'm a fucked up monster.

So, the whole love interest thing. It started because someone (sorry, I totally forgot who) said he should try to go on a date, and be interrupted by dying. Well, he managed to go on the date, but he is going to die before it ends. Anyway. You've probably heard me say that I don't write romance. I try not to even have romantic subplots. And do you know why?

It's because I'm weird.

I have a strange concept of… I don't want to say "intimacy" but I think that's the best word. I don't even mean Intimate intimacy, if you catch my drift. Fucking, is what I'm saying. To be quite honest, I don't really see the point in that. Rather, what I mean is that I ascribe a level of intimateness to things that probably aren’t. Like… basic physical contact.

Like:

She reached out and ghosted her fingers across the back of his hand, slowly wrapping them around his wrist.

Or:

Her thumb grazed along his shoulder blade.

The latter, by the way, is while he's puking and she's rubbing his back. Not exactly romantic.

I know that this is a Me thing. I'm weird when it comes to people and touching. But is it going to make anything I write unrelatable to any normal human? Are they going to wonder why these people never bone, but I keep describing these little moments like they're important?

This is why I don't write romance.

I decided I needed more deaths in this story about death. So instead of trying to work them all naturally into the plot, I literally just made a little section break and wrote: "There were many ways in which Steve might have died. Here are a few." Then I managed to write 1,772 words just on "Steve gets crushed by a boulder." It was pretty gruesome. He died three times in the course of that adventure.

By the way, if you're keeping score at home, as of Day 8, I have killed Steve 8 times. And I'm finally getting caught up on word count.

I'd better get back to it. I'll see you next week.