A longer story about the peacetime Army, circa 1995. This one’s still got a whole host of problems — huge clich
Victory Week
Preterition
mercenary interpellations
mercenary interpellations
A longer story about the peacetime Army, circa 1995. This one’s still got a whole host of problems — huge clich
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I read this story yesterday and have been thinking about it for the past day. My first reaction is that you have a terrific sense of twinning emotional and sensory detail. You’re able to dive down to the base of what’s hurting someone and then come back up and blend it into the narrative.
What I’m sensing, after one read, is that there needs to be more back story–or maybe the story begins at the ending? I felt that I needed to know more about Ginny to feel something for her and to understand why the story ended where it did–though yes, I did get the point about turning his bed to face the festival.
I think I’d want to know more about Scaipe–to help me figure out what was up with him. Have you ever written the story from his perspective?
What do you think about your story, Mike? How long ago did you write it? How has it changed as you drafted it?
Hmmm. Don’t know what to say about that one. Kinda hits home. Almost like an inside joke, but without the joke. I have to admit that my military experience has become a blur almost. I don’t remember too much and I wish that I would have spent more time outside of those damned barracks. So much around that area and I experienced so little.
The story was good. It seemed to get much better as it progressed. The emotions Scaipe relays are very painful to read. Very touching at times as well. Admittedly I cannot be the most objective person given my military history (shared and unshared).
I truly felt the humidity again as you described it. That Georgia air was borderline unbearable at times.
I’m ready for the next installment, though.
Well, Rob, I’m afraid you know the next installment, or at least how Scaipe’s story ends: court martial, conviction on multiple counts of assault and wilfully disobeying, two years in Leavenworth making big rocks into little rocks. I love your characterization, though, of an “inside joke, but without the joke.” Yeah, I guess it’s a pretty grim — but I tried, at least, to make it more hopeful than the real-life back-story.
Which I’m sure will tell you a little more about how the story came to be, Joanna. In a way, Ginny is a cipher, but she spends so much of the story playing it so close emotionally speaking that I felt like she had to be that way — but you’re right, in that as demonstrative as Scaipe may be, I still haven’t worked all the way through his emotional logic, and I think your suggestion of re-imagining it from his perspective is an immensely helpful one. To answer your questions: it was one of the last of the Army stories I wrote for my MFA fiction manuscript (the train/radio story and the dog tag story were the first), probably around early 1999, and the most significant change has been that Ginny, in each successive revision, has become far more ambivalent (although still, I think, insufficiently so) in her attitude towards Scaipe.