Literary credits:
"Oh Cool is the Valley Now" by James Joyce
"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte
Sonnets 29 and 116 by William Shakespeare
"Brightest and Best" by Reginald Heber
"I Am Stretched on Your Grave," Irish traditional, translation by Frank
O'Connor
"The Convert" by G.K. Chesterton
and, of course, the Bible- Revised Standard Version (Protestant and
Catholic versions)
Presbyterian wedding vows found
here.
Music:
The following are recordings that inspired me through various points of
writing this story:
"Mal Bhán Ni Chuilionáin" by Aine Minogue- Just to get
into the Irish spirit.
"Spirit Of The Living God" and "Be Thou My Vision" by Eden's Bridge-
For the wedding.
"Brightest and Best" by Kathy Mattea- One of my favorite Christmas
carols, too. And this is my favorite version. It helped me
write Christmas in May!
"I Am Stretched On Your Grave" by Kate Rusby- Heartbreaking.
"This Woman's Work" by Kate Bush- I had this running through my head
during the birth scene. Thank you,
She's Having a Baby.
"Hear Me" by Shaun Davey- Cora enters Heaven.
"I'm Yours" by the Script- End credits song if one were to exist.
My mom played this to me the week I was writing this and I was struck
by how much it reminded me of Cora and Lor.
Afterword
In some ways this story has been in
the works since 1996. In others, it was a spur of the moment
project I began in late May 2009 after some mental flashes.
Either way, it only took me a week to write which is impressive for
me. Granted, a lot of late, caffeine-fueled nights were
involved. But it was worth it.
Though I'm told I saw bits of Ron Koslow's Beauty and the Beast as a small
child, I fell in love with it in 1996 while watching reruns on the Sci
Fi Channel. Strangely, it was the very end of Season 2 and Season
3 that won me over. I was graduating from the only school and
community I'd known all my life. I suppose my elegiac mode was
complimented by a mourning Vincent. Thankfully, Sci Fi restarted
the series and I got to learn about Catherine and Vincent and their
amazing relationship. I loved them as a couple but Vincent was
the show for me. He was just so unique and somehow more relatable
to me than Catherine. Maybe because he faced the questions that,
really, we all do: Who am I? What am I? Who created
me? What is my purpose? Of course, for Vincent these were
more than the usual existential questions. And I wanted him to
have his answers!
So began my journey into the limited medical resources I had access to
(this was pre-Internet for me!). I had a fine list going: cleft
palette, the werewolf gene, maybe a touch of acromegaly, pronounced
canines, and so on. But nothing explained everything. So I
opted for a made-up genetic condition that the writers just never got
around to telling us. During one phase I'm now hugely embarrassed
to admit... I thought he might be Nephilim. And then I decided
that was all just terribly boring (and the Nephilim sooo weird) and
since BatB was named for a fairy tale, there really ought to be some
magic or at least something supernatural about Vincent. So in
later years Vincent morphed into... wait for it... a half-human, half
Irish fairy changeling. See, apparently Irish fairies aren't
necessarily lovely and delicate and the types to fly about and alight
on flowers. According to some documentary long since forgotten by
me, they're kinda more troll-like. They live in tunnels under the
earth... Sound familiar?
Well, that worked for a bit and then there was this theory: don't have
an all-encompassing theory. I mean wouldn't it have been a let
down to have done all this theorizing and then just have an answer
given? Where's the fun in that?
And with that mindset, I began this story. Watching the last few
episodes of BatB's 2nd season, I so wanted Vincent to know who his
parents were. I wanted him to know he wasn't the product of
something evil. But I still didn't want to know exactly who he
was genetically. So... enter Cora and Lor. Bonus: I got to
keep the Irish aspect.
So there was my new, vague theory: there was a boy, there was a
girl. They fell in love. And at some point they made a
baby: Vincent. It didn't have the super-exciting ring of genetics
gone wild or even those troll-like fairies. I haven't
read too much BatB fanfiction about Vincent's origins but what I had
read involved scientific experiments, aliens, and (most difficult of
all IMO) rape. What I haven't seen explored was this:
what if Vincent was actually the product of a real, pretty normal
couple who had their own emotional issues but loved each other very
much? In other words, what if Vincent wasn't that much different
from many of us?
Cora and Lor popped into my mind in just brief images. A lovelorn
man scaling a convent, a girl waking up from a terrible nightmare about
him, and others. So many came to me that I couldn't have drifted
from the Cora and Lor hypothesis even if I'd wanted to. It seemed
almost as if I had dreamed these people and their story up long ago and
was merely typing it up now. There wasn't any of my usual
grasping for ideas.
So I had my characters, then I had to flesh them out and give them
histories. Siobhan and Declan didn't require much more reaching
than Cora and Lor did. I never had any other thought but that
Declan would be a minister. Looking back, maybe this was my
response to some criticisms, stemming from an interpretation of
Judeo-Christian texts, of BatB for promoting bestiality. I didn't
even want to write that because to me it's just so wrong. Yet
there it was in my mind so I felt I had to respond to it even if not
directly. There came the flash of Cora and Lor fighting by the
pond. Spirituality wasn't going to keep them apart nor was
it going to be ignored. It was going to keep them together.
From there on out, I was tracing two different parentages: Vincent's
biological one and his divine one. And if others' were going to
turn to the Bible to derail Vincent, then by golly I was going to turn
to it to give him his much-desired history. And it proved to be
really moving for me. (Not to mention a nostalgic throwback to my
days as a Theology student in college.) I know I've read Jeremiah
but never had
these words jumped out to me: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew
you, and before you were born I consecrated you." My eyes well up
each time I read them. I wanted to call them out to
Vincent. And to everyone. I wanted that to be the main
theme of this story: you were planned, you were wanted, and you're
loved.
I hope I accomplished it.
And now to a different subject... I think now I know why I’ve
never drifted from writing Dyeland stuff much. It’s safe… or
safer, I guess. I mean as much as I love Andrew (possibly beyond
reason) and Vincent (who taught me to be unreasonable) and the others,
they aren’t mine. I may add bits to them as we all do but it’s
not as if we saw them through from the start. Maybe that’s true
of our originals but even LJA I feel like was sorta a composite
character thrown together in the early days that now I just try to
mold. And where I just wasn’t interested, I based her off my
history. I don’t particularly care how or where she was born but
if I for some reason needed it for a story, I’d just plug in my own
stats. Why not? And I certainly didn’t arrange my own birth
so, in a manner, I haven’t really created her, either.
And, yeah, there have been Andrew’s assignments in stories that I’ve
made up. But that’s mostly been a glimpse into their lives in one
particular frame of time. They may have a little back story but
not much. Here I’ve written people from scratch and this time it
wasn't just “here’s who they are in this week of 2008/2009.” Lor
was literally "from the cradle to the grave" for me. I imagined a
scared mother and this child, a couple embracing him as a miracle, I
saw Lor as a little boy with his flowers, I wrote him falling in love,
and getting married. I loved him but I knew all along he would
have to die. Since 1996, I've always imagined a lone, desperate
girl leaving Vincent in that alley. It was too ingrained in my
mind that way for me to throw in a boy. One way or another, Lor
had to be gone by the time Vincent was born. And I did hate
that. The dread of it followed me to work and back, all day
long. I had nightmares that woke me up during the night. It
was not good!
There are scenes in this story that probly don't need to be
there. I kept putting "No Greater Love" off. Eventually I
wrote it, sure I would cry. I teared up a little but no
more. From there I thought it would be easier. And then
came the mental flash of Cora and the knife... That wasn't fun,
either. But I felt it was important. With the whole story I
wanted to show that God had planned this. God had brought this
couple together. How else did they keep getting through
stuff? I mean, crikey, I practically turned Lor into St. Joseph
up in that cave. (Although he didn't need to go as far as Egypt,
yay for him.) Further, God wanted Vincent to be born. So I
wanted to show His intervention saving this child, even if it meant
temporarily lifting the veil between Heaven and Earth so Cora could
hear Lor's directive: live.
Then once that was over, I definitely thought I could relax.
Apparently I was suffering from amnesia as I forgot I would then have
to separate Cora and Vincent. And so... finally... I bawled
during the birth scene. Not so much the writing of it as just the
flash of this girl trying so hard to save her child while being
inundated with all these memories of her deceased husband. And
knowing that soon she'd lose the baby, too. So mark it: over 10
years after I first started writing for JABB, I actually cried (not
just teared up but cried) over a plot for the first time. And
Andrew wasn't even involved. Go figure.
Moral of this story? I won't be creating my own characters from
scratch and devoting this much time to them unless I'm on
vacation.
I think that's it. As always, thanks to the JABB YG for letting
me borrow your characters. None of this would have worked without
the creative powers behind Touched
by an Angel and Beauty and
the Beast. And thanks to whatever cultural, mythical,
creative, and/or other forces that gave me the Cleary family. I
loved them and I miss them already.
Finally, BIG thanks to Nicole for pre-reading this for me. It
gave me a lotta confidence. :-)
God bless,
Jenni
Afterafterword
I lied. I forgot that I
wanted to list off some of the homages to the plot of Beauty and the Beast here.
Lately I've been really draw to this idea of history repeating itself
and how we might actually reflect our ancestors without knowing
it. So I wrote Lor's and Cora's relationship wanting to show
connections to Vincent's and Catherine's.
First, the way Lor and Cora met is very similar to how Vincent and
Catherine did. Cora was hurt badly, Lor rescued her, and took her
to his parents'. Catherine was hurt badly, Vincent rescued her,
and took her to Father. My innovation was that Cora wasn't
completely unconscious and caught a glimpse of Lor before passing out
whereas Catherine didn't see Vincent until days after he rescued
her. So I completely bypassed the screaming bit. My theory
was that if you saw someone like Vincent, then had some time to ponder
his features, were already indebted to him for saving you from a
devastating attack, and really wanted to be loved and have someone to
love... maybe you wouldn't freak out when getting to really see
him. And, as with Catherine's recuperation, I wanted books to
figure into Cora's also.
Second, I wanted to reflect some of Vincent's psychology in that of his
parents'. Neither has the best self-esteem which I think applies
to Vincent. They both have self-destructive tendencies when kept
from the one they love. Lor thrashes around the cave, Cora
contemplates and then actually does risk her health first in wanting to
go after runaway Lor and then in sneaking to his grave. The whole
going to the grave thing was an actual Vincent thing in Season 3.
I also wanted to show that Vincent's violent side might not come
completely from the unknown aspect of himself. Yes, Lor does kill
one man and fight another (both in defense of others). But Cora
also wants Lor's killer to suffer. Then she contemplates
suicide. So Lor isn't the only one capable of violence. I
always wondered if Vincent really did have a stronger tendency towards
violence than most or if he was merely more able to show it than most
of us given his strength. I dunno but I don't think it's a
settled issue.
Third, I liked the idea of Vincent's gift being something passed
down. The emotional telepathy with Catherine was inherited from
Lor. But as for Vincent's occasional psychic dreams, I liked the
idea of those being a legacy from both Lor (who knew Cora was going out
into the storm) and Cora (who foresaw Lor's death). I didn't want
Vincent to seem like a carbon copy of Lor. He had traits of both
parents: physical, emotional, and spiritual.
I also built in a complete contrast to Vincent's story in Lor,
though. Lor's life seems much, much easier by comparison.
Lor never had a breakdown that lasted for days. Lor also, after
an initial and intense struggle, is a lot quicker to accept entering
into a relationship with Cora. I decided that maybe a lot of
Vincent's issues stemmed from simply not knowing from whence he
came. And, to make matters worse, there was Paracelsus'
declaration that he tore his way out of his mother's womb. How
messed up would that make a person? A lot! How reluctant
would that person be to develop a physical relationship, thus
potentially setting the woman they love up for a similar, gory
death? A lot! Those were never considerations for
Lor. He knew his mother lived through his birth. He also
knew that, while she couldn't/wouldn't keep him, she had some love for
him. I would imagine that would make a huge difference. In
addition, Lor was a lot more sheltered and had 10-15 less years than
Vincent to develop hang-ups. And maybe simply being younger and
more naive helped. Also, Lor had a lot less reason to get
violent. Generally speaking, I do think Father did an awesome job
raising Vincent. However, my biggest complaint would be allowing
Vincent to be the main defense of the Tunnels when it's obvious
killing/maiming people really messes him up. Other than with
Cora's attacker and the little boy's, Lor just didn't have that
responsibility. And that's bound to make a person a lot less
conflicted, I would think.
Well... now I do think that's it. Feels kinda weird to be letting
this all go now.
Be well,
Jenni
