Into the Wild: A Reflection on the Film

This article is about my emotional reaction to the movie Into the Wild. It is not intended to be a review. I will not be discussing the pacing of the story, the quality of the acting, or the accuracy of the information presented. If you're interested in reading about how well the movie lines up with the actual story, the following links may be of interest:

Into the Wild Debunked
A Note From Carine McCandless

What Is Into the Wild?

Into the Wild is the story of a man who died because of his own misguided ideals.

It is the story of a young man who thought he had it all figured out and didn't want to listen to the advice of those who could have helped him on his journey.

It is the story of a restless soul who never really found his place in the world.

It is the story of a man who tried to build a perfect life and failed in the worst possible way.

Into the Wild is probably the most disturbing movie I have ever seen.

Why Did I Find Into the Wild so disturbing?

You may think I'm exaggerating. You may think I meant to say "thought provoking" rather than disturbing. But I'm not exaggerating. I was profoundly disturbed by this film. I watched it for the first time about about a week ago. At first I referred to it as one of the most disturbing movies I have ever seen. Then I didn't sleep for four nights in a row because of the nightmares this story provoked. I don't think any film has ever done that to me before, so it's now officially the most disturbing movie I've ever seen.

I am a horror movie buff. I can watch things that would give the average person nightmares and barely be phased by them. I love stories that are creepy. I can usually tolerate the gory without too much emotional strife. But watching a young man starve to death all by himself in the middle of the woods was more than I was prepared to deal with. I literally have not been able to sleep at night for thinking of it.

I think I am disturbed by this story for the same reason many people are inspired by it. Because I see a little of myself in Chris McCandless. I think that while I watched the movie some part of me was subconsciously thinking, "that could have been me". Perhaps because a part of me identified strongly with Chris, that same part of me wanted to see him succeed. When he didn't, I simply couldn't cope.

The Universality of Into the Wild

It's odd to say that I identify with Chris McCandless, considering how different my lifestyle has been from the one he had. Looking back on my adult life, the first word that comes to mind is "traditional". And I mean very traditional. I was twenty when my husband and I got married. A year later we bought our first house. Three years after that we welcomed our first child. I've spent a huge amount of that time being a stay-at-home mom. Like I said...very traditional.

By saying that I identify with Chris McCandless I do not wish to imply that I feel tempted to run away from my husband and kids. Nor am I saying that I resent the choices that brought me to the place where I am today. I did the things I did because it was what I wanted, not because it was what society said I should want. In fact, growing up as I did in the aftermath of the Women's Lib movement, I always felt that society was telling me I should want to "have it all". My choice of the traditional, the old-fashioned, the simpler life was my own little rebellion against the society in which I was raised. So I suppose I was really identifying with Chris McCandless way back then; I was just following a different path. But my feelings about Chris and his story are a bit more complicated than that.

There are three categories of people: those who are content to the point of complacency, those who are restless to the point of misery, and those who are somewhere in between. Most of the time I fall into the middle camp, but when I do start to drift toward an extreme it is usually in the direction of restlessness. I've written about these feelings multiple times, so I won't say it all again here, but if you are interested you can read some of my previous posts:

The Angst: Embracing Our Discontent
The Odd World of the Introverted Artist
A Personal Meditation On Matthew 25: 14-30
The Inevitability of Regret
My Lenten Journey, Part 5

Because I have felt that restlessness, I sympathized with Chris and his search for meaning in his life. I desperately wanted him to find what he was looking for while at the same time recognizing the mistakes he made along the way.

Lessons Learned From Into the Wild

Perhaps it is because I am in my late thirties as opposed to my early twenties that I am more frightened than inspired by this story. For me it is a warning against trying to be too independent. Though we may become fed up with the people in our lives and disillusioned by society, the truth is we need people in order to survive. Chris McCandless followed the noble dream of getting back to nature and living as our ancient ancestors did. But our ancestors were not alone. They lived in groups. In tribes. If a man was injured, he had someone to carry him down the mountain. If he was overwhelmed by a seemingly impossible task, he had older, more experienced people to help him. Sometimes people died, because medical care as we know it today did not exist, but at least people did not have to die alone. Society has never been perfect and it never will be because people are not perfect, but we still need each other. Left alone, we perish.

Being an introvert, I never found the idea of dying alone to be all that disturbing. In fact I've had moments when I've thought that would be preferable to dying surrounded by people who want to invade my personal space, put their hands on me without permission, then proceed to slobber and cry all over me. But Into the Wild showed me how terrible dying alone can really be. The level of isolation Chris McCandless knew during his final months of life is something I can't even imagine. In one of the nightmares I've been having these past few nights I dream that I am Chris during his final days. I won't describe the dream. I'll just say that I don't want to be that alone when it is my time to die. It's just about the most horrible death I can imagine.

He did not deserve to die like that. I know his story is something of a controversial one. For every person who views him as a hero, there is a least one person who who feels he got what was coming to him because of his own impulsiveness and lack of preparation. There are also the people who would say he was a jerk for ditching his family and not keeping in touch with those who loved him most. But I'll say it again. He did not deserve to die like that. No one deserves to die like that. Maybe he made mistakes, and maybe he has only himself to blame for his own demise, but that doesn't diminish the tragic nature of what happened. He went into the wild in search of something profound and encountered instead a lonely and painful death. I can only hope that there was peace also. I hope that God was with him and that he wasn't truly alone.

 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

Why I Actually Liked the Ending of Mocking Jay

NOTE: This article contains spoilers.

An Unpopular Opinion

It seems the past few years have been rough ones for young adult dystopian novels. People seem universally disappointed with the clichéd "married with kids" happily ever after in Mocking Jay and with the death of Tris in Allegiant. I feel completely neutral about Allegiant. I didn't love that Tris died, but I wasn't overly upset by it either. Sometimes the hero dies at the end of a book. I've been known to like those books in the past, so I had no hard feelings about this one.

Mocking Jay, on the other hand, was a book whose ending thoroughly satisfied me, so I was surprised to find that so it left so many people disappointed. I would like to explain what, exactly, I liked about it. But first things first...

The One Thing I Didn't Like About Mocking Jay

I didn't like the fact that Prim dies. Not that I hate books where important characters die. I loved Henry's death in The Time Traveler's Wife. I wept, and yet felt strangely comforted, at the death of Father Karras in The Exorcist. But those deaths made sense to me. Prim's death made no sense at all.

From the beginning of the series, everything Katniss does is for Prim. Her feelings of responsibility to her mother and sister are the primary reasons she gives for not running away with Gale at the beginning of The Hunger Games. Saving Prim from certain death is Katniss's only thought when she volunteers to take her sister's place as tribute. Saving Prim seems to be one of the main themes of the books. And then she just dies? Um...huh? 

Let's talk a little more about The Exorcist. The book was written by a devout Catholic, so it contains many themes with regard to faith and morals that I don't plan to get into here. I'm just going to talk about the primary action of the book, which all revolves around Regan and her possession by an evil entity. Father Karras comes on the scene, not fully believing that Regan is possessed, but determined to help nonetheless. In addition to being a priest he is also a psychologist, and he treats Regan's case from a very scientific point of view. As the story unfolds, of course, he begins to realize there is a little more going on than merely a chemical imbalance in the brain. He agrees to perform an exorcism. Or at least assist in one. The exorcism fails, but Father Karras sacrifices himself in order to save Regan.

I love the scene where he dies. There has been so much about his emotional state and the loss of his faith in God earlier in the story that the reader truly wants him to have a happy ending. And he does. The movie sort of rushes through this scene, but in the book it is very strongly implied that in the final seconds of his life his faith is restored. We are then led to believe that he does indeed find joy in the hereafter. And of course Regan and her mother have a happy ending as well.

What if Regan had died instead? I don't know about other readers, but I personally would have wanted to grab William Peter Blatty by the lapels and scream, "Why would you make me spend 300-plus pages rooting for this kid to be saved and then kill her anyway?" Well, that's kind of how I felt about Prim's death in Mocking Jay. Maybe not quite that angry, but at the very least confused.

Now...on to what I did like about the book.

Katniss's Feelings About Children

In the first chapter of The Hunger Games, Katniss tells Gale that she never wants to have children. This is not motivated by her personal feelings about kids in general, but by her revulsion at the thought of bringing a new life into such a messed up world. These feelings become a recurring theme of the series, so the fact that she ends up having children in the end really says a lot about how far she's come emotionally. It is also a testament to the fact that they really did create a better world when they won their fight against the Capitol. Katniss is free to have a family and to love that family without the fear that one of her progeny will carried off to a horrible death. Yes, this ending may be clichéd and overused, but in this situation I found it fitting.

The Love Triangle

Gale is Katniss's best friend. There's an undeniable attraction between them that they both seem to want to act on, but for some reason have just never gone there. Then Peeta comes into the equation. If we are to believe that he is indeed telling the truth in his interview before going into the arena and not merely making a publicity stunt, then we know that he has loved Katniss practically from the first moment he saw her. At first Katniss does not return his feelings, but as time goes on their bond deepens and we see something forming in Katniss's heart that could very well be love. But of course it's complicated, because Gale is still a part of her life.

The question of who she would eventually choose plagued me from the beginning. At first I wasn't sure who I wanted to root for, but gradually I started to think I wanted her to end up with Peeta. My husband and I actually had some in-depth conversations about this. He was rooting for Gale. Neither of us had any idea who she would choose, if she even chose at all.

I was naturally delighted when I reached the end of Mocking Jay and discovered I'd bet on the winning horse. But my satisfaction with the end of the book went much deeper than that. I literally had tears in my eyes (something that doesn't happen to me often) when I read the final few pages. The passage that moved me so profoundly was this one:

What I need to survive is not Gale's fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring.

So in the end she chose the person who was good for her. She and Gale may have been kindred spirits of sorts, but their relationship would have been toxic. She chose the man who could keep her grounded. Who could provide a counter-balance for all of her passion and rage. She chose the one who was the missing part of herself.

Do People Grieve After a Job Loss?

How Some People Experience Job Loss

My husband went through the loss of a job about ten years ago. I remember that he was angry for a couple of days, but then he poured all of his energy into finding another job and the pain of the loss seemed almost forgotten. Throughout this time I watched him, confused.

"Why are you not more upset?" I asked him.

I don't remember his exact response, but it was something like, "I am upset, but there are other jobs out there, so why fret over this one?"

"But this is your job! Your life's work! A fundamental part of who you are! How can you be so blasé about having it taken away from you?"

Being a typical man, he simply shrugged and went on with his job search.

A year later, when I experienced my own job loss, it was quite a different story.

An Event That Many People Would Consider Traumatic

Twelve years ago--three years before my job loss experience--I suffered a miscarriage. I have known women who went through that and never fully recovered from it. I knew one woman who, twenty-five years later, still cried whenever she thought about it. I did cry over my miscarriage, but the tears only lasted a week. Then I moved on.

I think part of it was the circumstances under which it happened. We already had one child. We knew from the start that we wanted more, so we started trying again when our first turned a year old. We got pregnant right away. It wasn't until several days after that stick turned blue that I started to realize, "Holy crap! I'm going to have two children under two years old!" The thought made me nervous, but nevertheless, I wanted another child, so I was excited about the pregnancy. Then the miscarriage came, and because my first child was still so young, I think I just sort of accepted it as something that was meant to be. Then three months later I was pregnant again and all thoughts of that lost baby were banished in the flurry of preparing for the new one.

When I lost my job, however, it was quite a different story.

From the Start No One Understood

I found out I was going to lose my job months before it actually happened. Now, when I was hired the word "interim" was never used, so I naturally assumed this was a long-term decision I was making in accepting their offer. When they let me go, the word "fired" was never used. After all, they let me stay on until a replacement was found, so it wasn't really like being fired, right? I mean, I didn't have to collect my things immediately and be escorted from the building. I still had a job. For several months I still had a job. Basically, when they told me I was being replaced it became an interim position, but from the way they treated it I got the impression that they always thought of my assignment as a temporary one. They seemed to think that letting me go was no big deal. I should have been expecting it.

What I really felt was quite a different story.

The Worst Experience of My Life

I'll never forget the day I found out it was happening. I was at home. The job being part-time, quite often I received communication from the powers that be in the comfort of my home. It was not odd that this particular bit of news found me there.

It was about half an hour before a piano student was due at my house for a lesson, so I was tidying my living room and lighting scented candles and doing all the things I normally did to make the house presentable for my students. And then the news came. You've heard the phrase, "It felt like being punched in the gut"? Well, never was that description more accurate than it was for me in that moment. First there was a sick feeling that crawled up my spine as realization set in. Then I felt like all the air had been sucked from my lungs. Then the tears came. Then the sobbing. You've seen babies cry so hard they forget to breathe? That was me when I found out I was losing my job. I sat on the sofa, in my sweet-smelling, freshly tidied living room, and I struggled to regain control of myself. I literally thought I was going to throw up.

I watched the clock. I knew I had to let the tears come out, but I knew they had to be gone when my student arrived. So I timed myself. About ten minutes before the scheduled lesson time I ran to the bathroom, looked into the mirror, and took slow deep breaths until the tears finally subsided. I cleaned up my face with a tissue and continued staring at my reflection until I thought the redness around my eyes had lessened somewhat. Then I walked back to my living room just in time to welcome my piano student.

I honestly don't know how I made it through that lesson. Have you ever been in a situation where you refused to let yourself cry, but all the same you couldn't stop thinking about the thing you wanted to cry about? That was me. For that entire half hour I smiled and talked cheerily, and guided my student through his songs, but I was thinking about my job. When he finally left, I collapsed against the door and let myself cry again. I kept crying for a very long time.

I won't say that was the worst day of my life. In the coming months there were to be a lot of bad days, and I don't think I could pick one and say, "This one! This was the worst!" But it was bad. I can say that with absolute certainty.

For nine months I continued working that job while the powers that be looked for my replacement. I could have quit then and there, but I was holding on to this faint hope that if I just worked hard enough, if I could just prove my worth, they might change their minds. They didn't, of course, and nine years later I still can't think of that experience without bringing up all the pain I felt when I was going through it.

When You Think It Can't Get Any Worse

Have you ever been there? Have you ever felt so bad you didn't believe you could feel any worse? That was me during those nine months of waiting for my identity, my dreams, the foundation on which I was building my life to be snatched away. By the end I was so tired of waiting that I almost believed the end would bring relief. Then the end came. And it was worse than anything I ever could have imagined.

I live in a small town. My job was in that small town. My bosses and coworkers and the people with whom I interacted on a day to day basis were all my neighbors. I can't begin to describe what it felt like to walk through the streets of my town in the wake of my shameful dismissal. I looked at the windows of houses and, knowing who lived there, imagined the residents looking back at me and laughing. Thinking to themselves, "There goes Greta. She thought she could be somebody important, but we showed her!"

The Defining Moment of One's Life

Losing that job put my life on a different path than the one I had imagined for myself. I can't say for sure whether this new path has been better or worse than the one I would have followed had I kept that job. To quote Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia, "No one is ever told what would have happened." So I will never know. I'll never know who I would have been today if I had not endured that one hardship. I do know that part of my life since has been a feeble attempt to reclaim what I had then. I'm like Europe in the Middle Ages, futilely trying to rebuild The Roman Empire. But the Roman Empire was gone and so is the life I would have had. So I have to figure out how to make the most of this new life. The life I never planned on.

In the title of this post I asked if people grieve after a job loss. The answer? I guess it depends on the person. But I know firsthand that some people do grieve, and grieve deeply. This article is for those people, so they will know they are not alone.

The Bizarre Things That Happen When You're Becoming Fluent in a Second Language

Beginning to Learn the Language

Learning a second language is more than just acquiring new words. There's a whole new grammar structure to learn as well, and, depending on how closely the new language relates to your native tongue, these grammar rules can prove quite confusing. Nevertheless, a huge part of learning a language is building your vocabulary. After all, what good does knowing the rules do you if you don't actually have anything to say?

Learning new words in your second language is very similar to learning new words in your first. Some will immediately feel easy to use, others will be awkward. If you're just starting out on your journey into the world of the bilingual, you may be surprised to find that sometimes these new words you're studying become as familiar to you as your first language. In fact, some words don't even feel like foreign words anymore. They just feel like words. And you feel tempted to use them in conversation just as you would use your first language.

The first Spanish word, well really I guess it's a phrase, that became as familiar to me as anything I had ever heard, read, or spoken in English was "tal vez", which means "maybe". This happened before I had even been studying Spanish for a year. Someone would ask me a question to which my response would have been "maybe", and "tal vez" would be the first thing to pop into my head. "Maybe" would follow a fraction of a second later, so I never actually got the point where I accidentally said "tal vez" out loud, but I was sorely tempted at times. Why was "tal vez" the first Spanish phrase to find a cozy place in my brain to snuggle up and nestle in for the night? I have no idea, but it was there nonetheless.

When You're Becoming a Little More Comfortable With the Language

After I had been studying for a couple of years, I occasionally found my English speaking brain trying to operate like my Spanish speaking brain. Here's an example:

The verb "to try" in English has quite a few different Spanish translations, depending on what, exactly, you are "trying". One translation is "probar" which can also be translated "to test". It is also the verb you would use if you wanted to say "to taste something" in Spanish. For example:

I want to taste that cake = Quiero probar ese pastel.

This verb gave me a laugh one day. I was at a church supper and I had just finished my plate. There was a delicious-looking chocolate cake over on the dessert table that I was just itching to try. When I turned to tell my husband that I was going to get myself a piece, the sentence that popped into my mind was, "I'm going to go probe that chocolate cake." Um...probe the chocolate cake? No, I most certainly did not want to say that out loud. That would conjure up a terribly inaccurate image of what, precisely, I intended to do with that cake. Luckily I caught myself just in time and was able to say "try" instead of "probe". Whew! Really dodged a bullet on that one.

Occasionally Speaking Your Second Language Better Than Your First

I do not yet consider myself completely bilingual. That word implies equal comfort with both languages, and I do not yet have that sort of mastery of Spanish. But sometimes...well, here's a funny story:

I was walking my dog and carrying on a rather lively conversation in my own mind (I'm a writer, so that's okay). I don't remember what I was talking to myself about, but at some point I starting thinking about things that people are not allowed to do. I knew that there was one word that summed up that sentiment, but I was having a hard time thinking of it. Then a word popped into my head. "Probidden." I stopped mid-step, scratched my head, and thought to myself, "probidden?" Somehow that didn't sound right. I knew it wasn't a real word, but I couldn't think what the real word was.

I continued walking, all the while racking my brain to figure out this mystery word that was giving me so much trouble. Then I thought, "It has to be 'probidden'. After all, the Spanish word is 'prohibido'. How else would I translate that to English?" Suddenly I remembered that "prohibited" was an English word that meant the same thing as "prohibido", but still it didn't sound right. I distinctly remembered a word that ended in "bidden". What was it? I just didn't know.

I walked for a good ten minutes, puzzling over this mystery, when finally it hit me. "Forbidden!" Yes! That was the word I had been trying think of. That was the word that meant "prohibido" but was not "prohibited". Once I thought of it, it was so obvious I felt instantly foolish, but that's what happens when your brain tries to think in two languages at the same time.

The Surprising Benefit of Learning Ballet

Not Really a Surprise

Okay, the idea that engaging in one form of physical activity improves your performance in another is nothing new. It's called cross-training, and people have been doing it for years. I guess what surprised me is exactly how much my performance improved, especially considering that I've been pretty physically active for a long time now. I did not expect just adding ballet to my regimen to have such an impact, but it did.

I Love Exercise

I love exercise. I joined a gym for the first time ten years ago, and ever since then I haven't been able to stay away. I teach yoga and Pilates. I've been to zumba classes, step classes, boot camp classes, and kickboxing classes. I've spent huge amounts of time on the treadmill and the elliptical. I take my dog on long walks. I swim laps whenever I go to the pool. And I love riding my bike on the country roads that surround my hometown.

Heaven and Hell on Two Wheels

I would describe cycling as both the most pleasant and most grueling form of exercise I've ever done. I love getting out in the morning, when the sun is low in the sky and everything is bright and golden, and just exploring. My eyes love it and my soul loves it. My legs, on the other hand, do not always have such a great experience. Last year I really got into this cycling thing. I would go out a couple of times a week, in addition to all the other exercising that I was doing. I should have gotten into better shape after a while. I should have reached a point where getting out on the road and pedaling for half an hour or more became easier, but you know what? It never did. It was always difficult. My legs would get so tired I would wonder if I would be able to make it home. Often I would cut my ride short because I just didn't want to go any farther. And it never got better. Never.

Until...

Along Comes Ballet

I started taking ballet classes about a year ago. I knew I was getting a leg workout. I could feel the fatigue after just a few minutes at the barre. I knew I was building strength in those muscles, but I didn't know just how strong I was becoming until this morning. You see, I haven't been taking regular bike rides lately. Through the winter it was just too miserable to get outside and do it, and in the spring I didn't think about it. But now it's summer and I want to ride again, so I decided to start this morning.

I was nervous. After all, I haven't been on a long ride in quite a few months. A route that was difficult last year should be darn near impossible after so much time off. But do you know I found? It wasn't impossible. In fact it was almost easy. Yes, my legs were tired, but not to point that I wanted to toss my bicycle in a ditch and curl up on the side of the road for a nap. Hills that I hated a year ago were suddenly easy. Even fun.

I know that this improvement is due to my ballet class because that's literally the only thing I've added to my exercise routine since the last time I attempted a bike ride. In fact I've backed off on some of the other leg exercises, like squats and lunges, that I was doing last year. I thought my legs would be weaker because of that, but apparently the ballet more than makes up for it. My legs are stronger than they've ever been.

No, ballet is not the solution to all of your fitness problems. In fact, I know I lack upper body strength because I don't spend enough time working those muscles. But if we're just talking legs, ballet really can do some amazing things for your body.

When Your Dance Teacher Videos Your Class

You've spent hours in the studio, strengthening and lengthening your muscles, learning complex choreography, and perfecting your dance moves. What felt awkward and difficult just a few months ago now feels as natural as breathing. You're starting to get the hang of this dance thing.

You're practicing a particularly fun bit of choreography and enjoying every moment of it. You feel light on your feet and one with the beat. Moving your body in such a graceful and elegant way makes you feel more beautiful than you've ever felt in your life, and you're absolutely sure you've just nailed that dance step you spent so much time learning. You're convinced that you look like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

Yep, you're really feeling good about yourself right about now.

And then...

...your teacher decides to make a video...

...and she makes you watch it...

...and you realize...

...you don't look a thing like John Travolta.

In fact, you look more like Kelso from That Seventies Show.

At this point you realize you have a choice. You can either decide that you are not cut out to be a dancer, or you can decide to get back in the studio and practice until you do look like John Travolta.

When My Own Book Makes Me Cry

A Difficult Process

I have to admit that I've had something of a love-hate relationship with my current work in progress. I mentioned in a couple of previous posts that my first book, Amelia's Children, flowed out of me with relative ease. I completed the writing portion in just three months and had it published a couple of months after that. This new book, Primogénito, has been more of a challenge. There is so much backstory and the paranormal element required so much research on my part before I even started writing that in the beginning I kept getting bogged down in the details. Some days I didn't even want to write at all because I knew that before I did I'd have to do about a dozen Google searches and read passages from about a dozen different books just to makes sure I was getting everything correct. For a while this really slowed down the writing process.

In Love With My Characters

This is the driving force for all of my writing. I have to love the characters or I don't want to write about them. More specifically, I have to be head over heels in love with my primary male character. In Amelia's Children, that character was David, (though by the end I was also kind of digging Sarah's brother Will too). In the new book my favorite character is Damian Fuentes.

A Complicated History

The story revolves around Damian, his wife Jenn, their friend Ashley, and Ashley's husband Nick. There's an extensive back story that gradually comes out over the course of the book involving a traumatic event that the four of them lived through five years previously. Though Damian and Jenn were dating at the time, it was Ashley he turned to for comfort during the first few weeks after everything went down. Jenn never fully recovered from the pain of seeing the man she loved open up to another woman while simultaneously withdrawing from his own girlfriend.

A New Crisis

After moving to a new town and spending the past five years trying to put their lives back together, Damian and Jenn are pulled back into the darkness of their past when Ashley shows up on their doorstep, informing them of another crisis and begging for Damian's help. Jenn doesn't want him to get involved, but Damian feels responsible for what's happening and has to try and fix it. This causes the four of them to once again confront demons they thought were long dead. Along the way they also have to deal with feelings about their complex relationship with each other.

Something of a Love Triangle

A major factor in the story is the fact that Damian and Ashley were a couple before they married their respective spouses. Jenn's jealousy of Ashley and Nick's jealousy of Damian become recurring themes as the story unfolds. Though Damian no longer has romantic feelings for Ashley, still it hurts Jenn to see them together.

Because it is my mother's favorite movie, I saw Gone With the Wind about a hundred times over the course of my childhood. I practically have the whole thing memorized. So it's only natural that I think of Gone With the Wind as I write my own story about an Ashley who threatens the marriage of the two main characters. That's not why I named her Ashley, though. I already had her named before I came up with the love triangle dynamic. I didn't even know that Ashley and Damian had a past relationship until I finished writing chapter two. I certainly was not trying to write a tribute to Gone With the Wind.

Jenn's Greatest Fear

Jenn is afraid of much more than just losing her husband to an old flame. There are much darker forces at work in this story than marital strife. The things Damian is required to do in order to help Ashley with her new problem could prove extremely dangerous and Jenn wants no part of it. She wants Damian to walk away so they can live their lives in peace, but she knows he would not be the man she loves if he did that, so she has to let go and let him do what is in his nature to do, even though she knows it might mean losing him forever.

An Iconic Scene

Back to Gone With the Wind for a moment. Remember that scene at the end when Rhett has finally had enough and decides to leave Scarlett for good? Yeah, I'm talking about the "Frankly, my dear..." scene. It's impossible to watch that scene without feeling all the despair Scarlett feels as she watches her husband, a man she's only just realized she's madly in love with, walk away for the last time. Though you understand why he does it, still you want him to come back to her and tell her everything will be alright.

My Own Scarlett and Rhett Scene

Just this week I found myself writing a scene that kept reminding me of this final goodbye between Scarlett and Rhett. Again, I did not set out to write any kind of tribute. What is happening between Damian and Jenn is pretty much inevitable given where the story has taken them up to this point. I've made it to the scene where he finally understands what he has to do in order to solve Ashley's problem, and he's going off to do it. Jenn is begging him to stay home because she knows how dangerous a quest this is going to be, but he goes anyway, leaving her standing, in tears, in the doorway of their house. As I was writing it I kept closing my eyes and seeing Rhett walking away while Scarlett cried for him to return, so I thought, "Hey, if ever there was an appropriate moment for a Gone With the Wind reference, it's here." So I wrote, "Jenn watched him, feeling a bit like Scarlett O'Hara watching Rhett Butler disappear into the mist. All for the sake of someone named Ashley."

In Tears Now

I don't know why, but writing that line made me cry. I guess it's because I'm already feeling all the tension between Damian and Jenn, so as she watches him leave I'm crying along with her. And maybe it's partly from some element of nostalgia for all those lazy afternoons spent with my mom watching her favorite film. Maybe it's because it is such a powerful scene from such a classic movie. I don't know. All I know is that it has reduced me to tears and has made me fall even more deeply in love with my characters than I already was.