So the night before last, I had kind of a magical dream, a dream that was maybe supposed to remind me of something. It was a dream about two characters that I haven't paid any attention to since I was a teenager. (...) The dream I had was that they were waking up on the sidewalk under a blanket of snow, and Tilly was rising from it rubbing her eyes. She said that he could feel the fingerprints of someone else playing in the snow in the different place, like she could feel them drawing in the snow or making snow angels or something. Then she and Jo raced up and down the street, and they could run at super speed.

I had a story for them that I wrote maybe eight chapters for and only had one friend (Gianna) who cared to read it. But it bonded us for some reason. The two characters (Tilly and Jo) were 13 and 16, and orphans, and they sort of... travel the country by the kindness of strangers, or by sneaking onto planes/trains and the like. (Yes, when I was younger, I thought it was possible to sneak on a plane with today's security. I-I-I don't know.) Anyway, as implausible as they might be, they had very charming personalities that you could explore.

written some time earlier this month

Why am I writing about these two again? Here's what's been on my mind: I remember in 2010, I was sitting in a fucking hot car in a parking lot at the dock. I got a parking ticket from some douche cop who was trying to enforce that the whole lot be saved for boat trailers. The reason I was there is because during the twilight of my parents' marriage, things were too unbearable at home for me to properly focus on writing some heavy-duty emotional chapters of He's There (chapter 37 and 38, to be precise), I'd rather drip with sweat in my car as I carried out arguments between Mariam and Lily or "Erik" being particularly manipulative. At least, in there, I wouldn't be interrupted, I thought -- that stupid fucking cop...

Anyhoo, you can see now it's a habit of mine to expect myself to finish things long before I actually will, so naturally in 2010 I thought I might finish He's There. Because I was thinking ahead to a time when a new (er... "new") project might emerge, and because things like my Nosferatu obsession didn't exist yet, things were more up in the air. I was digging through old folders -- the same way I had been digging through them in 2007 and "rediscovered" He's There -- and I spent a small window of my time fixated on Tilly & Jo.

I wondered what to make of it, if anything. I could see that it needed not just improvement, but a full gutting out and reassembling. The only thing I ever really felt sure about was the title characters -  not even the main character, who was just a placeholder, just a "Bella Swan", if you will. But no, I just dropped it all over again. HT didn't wrap up. I started working on the AIW site. We dealt with the stress of selling a house before I went off to university.

* ~ * ~ *

I've still got a flame for T&J, though, as a much smaller literary project. It's not some psychological drama that must go day by day, built by the minutia of tense situations, dependent upon realism. It was supposed to be some simple message about how we can enjoy our life more if we don't live it inside of a box - the box of social expectations, of self-consciousness, of reservation, of fear, etc. etc. It was my nod to the 1997 animated film Pippi Longstocking, actually, except my own twist from that took a while to form.

Originally, the story was about Tilly & Jo positively influencing a girl named "Gina", whose entire being is still up for debate because she was so bland. They were best friends, she's a new friend of theirs, and they let her into their sphere. They were a less annoying and more benign version of a Hatter and Hare to her, as an Alice. But that seemed overdone and predictable very shortly. I'd done it before. Lily herself is a character with intrigue injected into her mundane life - I didn't even want to do it twice.

So I started working from a little seed I found inside the bond Tilly and Gina had, something she couldn't have with Jo, simply because he was a boy. Now, Tilly refers to him as her "Best Friend in the Universe #1", and because, as a thirteen-year-old, she is still afflicted with fantastical thinking, she sees him as her cosmic brother, a soul companion from many lives past. And although they get along like two carrots in a bunch, although no one will understand or appreciate their history but each other, there were things happening to her, new interests, new concerns that make life as, erm, "scamps" harder and more isolating for her than for him. She's more sensitive than him, more generous, more easily roped into giving more than she should, more gullible, and she realizes she needs more privacy than she thought.

I remember I was going to have Tilly divulge to Gina that she'd recently gotten her period and was quite upset about how she'd deal with it and how it might embarrass her in the future. Just simple things like "how will I carry tampons around?" "What if my clothes are dirty but I can't change them?" lol I know this sounds weird, but I still imagined it. So yes, Gina and Tilly had this "girl thing" going on, which Tilly has had with other girls, too, being that her and Jo have many friends around the country, and this need of hers to have different kinds of support seemed like a problem that would steadily grow from that point on.

Then we have Jo, a character who is hella smart and complex but doesn't advertise it. A character who just doesn't care whether anyone knows all the things he's capable of, or who he really is. He's secure enough with himself, but so introverted about it, that he seems aloof. He seems to be Tilly's sidekick, her muscle, her rock. Most people don't bother to try penetrating him, nor does he necessarily want to be penetrated.

She'll provide the sensational, magical version of the story, and he'll parrot it, but if he feels close enough to you, he'll tell the real one later.

And I wondered if I could go anywhere with that. I wondered if it could be a story that seems so light-hearted and jokey, but it's a little bit more about Jo recognizing that Tilly is a wonderful girl with an abundance of potential who can't flourish if she lives exactly this way with him much longer. That's all I've got, at the moment, though. I don't want some story about how he and (whoever else will be in this story/some evolution of Gina) convince her to search for a foster home. Maybe the smaller more ambiguous goal is to try to build her roots somewhere she'll be nurtured, if they could only figure out what she wants. This is the type of girl who hopes to be an actress, audition for American Idol, have a giant garden, become a fortune-teller, become a bee-keeper, own a Bed & Breakfast on the coast, design a fashion line, have a dramatic make-up/cooking/various anctics youtube vlog, AND become Jo's personal assistant because she insists he become a marine biologist, and her idea of marine biology in practice is doing a whole lotta scuba diving. ;)

Maybe I need to brainstorm what kind of third-party personality would work as a catalyst, here. What would work for her, what would work for Jo, to make something new happen.