1) Will you be sending a blog every
week?
It depends on how much spare brainpower
I have. As (hopefully) explained in Dear Miss Landau (DML), my major
autistic disability is a massive deficit in information-processing
ability. In brief, it’s as if a modern computer was powered by a
twenty-year-old processor, so I have to nurse this faulty part along
quite gently. If I get too tired, I can’t write. In fact, I can’t
even think or speak all that well. Thankfully, my old brain has a
form of back-up hardware which keeps me going, which is how I managed
first time in Vegas after I’d been on a Greyhound bus for twelve
hours. This is explained in more detail in chapter 37 of DML.
Luckily– in some ways, anyway - I am
an unpaid external contractor, so within reason I can blog whenever I
like.
2) How did you get the job?
Since Dear Miss Landau was published in
March, Chaplin Books and myself have been exploring every single
marketing possibility we can think of. In this case, Amanda Field
(managing director of Chaplin) noticed the UK version of the
Huffington Posthad bloggers writing for it and asked them if they
wanted a real-life Asperger blogging for them. They said “cool,”
I supplied a couple of possible blogs, the deal was done and that was
that.
Or perhaps there was a bit more to it
than that. If life is a race towards redemption and Allah really does
weave men’s destinies into many strange tapestries (a quote at the
start of DML), perhaps another strand really was woven into the
tapestry of my life. I had a short and inglorious period as a
journalism trainee at a ghastly newspaper twenty-two years ago. I did
not then know I was autistic and their idea of training was to put
trainees under tremendous stress and try to make us do six things at
once while also attending lectures in the badly mistaken assumption
that this would make us “thrive” under pressure. For an Asperger,
this was living hell. Ironically, I was the one they’d been
counting on to come up with ideas, but their approach lost them all
the potential they might have reaped, turned me against them for life
and completely destroyed my self-esteem.
It was a very, very long, hard road
back. I kept quiet about what had happened because whining about it
would have sounded like the worst case of sour grapes in the world.
The only way to redeem myself was, I felt, legitimately to make it
into print. Specifically, I wanted to see the words--The moral right of James Christie to be
identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988--on the flyleaf of my book. One simple
sentence, but the hardest thing in the world to do. Nor would I
accept a compromise. The possibility of vanity publishing was always
out there and self-publishing via Amazon is becoming easier and
easier. When neuro-typicals started talking about such options, I
just said no. I did wonder if I was being a bit black and white about
it, but in the end the gold seal of authenticity can only be awarded
when a professional publisher accepts your work on merit.
I am naturally eternally grateful to
Amanda Field for doing so, but in some ways publication of Dear Miss
Landau was the end of a long road, not its beginning.
Nevertheless, events did continue to
take place, so I was quite pleased also to become a sort of feature
article writer for the Huffington Post (UK), which was what I’d
originally perceived myself to be when I was writing on the road in
Australia. One does wonder what might have been if I’d been
properly supported in the first place, though. Both the newspaper
that nearly wrecked me and many other organisations go on and on
about getting “passionate and talented”people and then seem
hellbent on beating that very talent out of them...
Maybe that will work in some cases, but
perhaps the fact that I proved I really had talent by coming back
from a personal pit of hell and pulling off the near-impossible means
these organisations don’t always know as much as they think they
do.
3) Are you given an assigned subject,
or do you decide what to write about?
Basically the latter. The Huffington
Post’s advice is that “the first thought is usually the best
thought,”but although I am defined as a blogger that doesn’t mean
I will then dash off a biased article without thinking. I’d say it
is vital to have some idea of media law, to be able to verify my
sources and/or to be willing to swear on oath that I was an
eyewitness to an event depicted. If necessary, I would even consult a
lawyer. In fact, I did all of these things when I wrote my second
blog, and knew perfectly well that it still might not get past the UK
blog team. Blogging may sound totally new and cutting-edge, but the
same old rules of journalism still apply.
Well, my publisher once said to me that
most first-time novelists sell an average of 15 copies. Dear Miss
Landau is now pushing 2,000 and except for one lady who couldn’t
stand it, has had superlative reviews. As I had to beat tremendous
odds just to be published, and as the prospect of a second printing
was a far-distant dream on the horizon not too long ago, I am pretty
satisfied, but I do feel there are further dreams which should become
reality...
5) What about the readers? What have
they said about it?
Tim Coates said on Radio 4’s A Good
Read that Dear Miss Landau was:
“the best book
I’ve read for ten years.”
And this was combined with presenter
Harriett Gilbert’s highly perceptive comment that seeing the world
through my eyes was “really riveting.”This was because she felt
that, unlike books such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-time, my autism was the real thing, not merely a novelist’s
‘device’- and unlike many memoirs which purported to be accurate
but turn out not to be so - “what you’re getting with Dear MissLandau is the truth.”
I considered the “device” comment
very complimentary, and based on that wonder if Dear Miss Landau is
the first true autistic adventure story ever written?
I’m not sure. Seven Pillars of
Wisdommight have a prior claim, although Lawrence of Arabia was never
formally diagnosed with Aspergers…
Another reviewer on Goodreads.com said
that:
I read this constantly thinking “is
this for real?” An autistic Scottish man in his 40s has an
obsession with a character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and writes a
250,000 word novel based on the character and ends up travelling to
Hollywood and meeting the actress who plays her. You couldn’t make
it up.
I think that review sums up the whole
thing rather well. If the tale of Dear Miss Landau had been a
fictional screenplay set for a Hollywood pitch, it might have seemed
over-plotted and unrealistic, but it all really happened and proves,
I suppose, that truth sometimes really is stranger than fiction.
I wasn’t sure how I’d react to a
bad review, but in the event it didn’t bother me at all. In some
ways the book others read is for me only a reflection of the life I
lived, and I can say with authority that it described and recounted
real events very closely. Plot holes weren’t plot holes – they
were things I genuinely got wrong or forgot to do! And if one day
scholars of literature could travel back in time and observe events
as they actually unfolded, then they really would (metaphorically
speaking) see a lanky bloke stealing the Enterprise for his Helen of
Troy that first day in March 2010. They could sit at another table in
that Starbucks Drive-Thru in Barstow on the 12th, watch me make
contact on Juliet the Notebook while coming in on a wing and a
prayer, or wait a little way from me on Sunset Boulevard, where I met
my dear Miss Landau one Sunday morning not so long ago.
6) Is blogging
tougher than writing a book?
In all honesty, it’s probably a bit
easier. To gain the ability to write Dear Miss Landau, I had to
practice for two decades, get myself traumatized at work, go through
a near-nervous breakdown, rebuild myself and send myself across the
world to a once-in-a-lifetime meeting on Sunset Boulevard.
In the case of blogging, all I have to
do is utilize some of that ability to write about five hundred words
about what’s pissing me off that week. Without deadlines to worry
about, I’m not under excessive pressure, so it’s not too
stressful.
I’ve also had five or six years
blogging experience thrashing my former“profession” of
librarianship on Tim Coates’ Good Library Blog. Tim, I’d better
explain, is the former CEO of the UK bookstores/retailers WH Smith
and Waterstones, a library campaigner, and founder of the e-book
store Bilbary. I am also writing my own thread entitled Dear Miss
Landau on SlayAlive’s fan website.
7) Are you hoping to
write another book, and if so, any ideas on what it could be about?
That may be the million-dollar
question, and for the answer – to really give an answer worthy of
the question and which might unlock a few of the mysteries around
Dear Miss Landau (like how in God’s name it came to be at all!) -
it’s best to go back to that moment on the train travelling up the
West Highland Railway when I first started writing Drusilla’s
Roses, the predecessor and companion to Dear Miss Landau:
I did not then hear Drusilla’s song,
but perhaps she sang to both of us in those early days. First to
Juliet Landau, who had just begun to write a two-part Drusilla story
for IDW Publishing’s Angelcomic book series, and then to me.
Miss Landau later said she was “drawn
into Dru’s rich, dark world”,and so was I. In fact, I was
positively yanked. The 08.12 to Mallaig, sitting at one end of the
West Highland Railway in Glasgow’s Queen Street Station, might have
seemed a long way from Los Angeles, but both places saw Drusilla’s
rebirth and both were as real as real could be.
It was January 31 2009. I was going up
to the West Highland town of Glenfinnan for the annual general
meeting of the Friends of Glenfinnan Station Museum. For no
particularly well-thought-out reason, I’d bought a green Pukka Pad
jotter with me to make notes and perhaps to do some writing...
I opened the jotter, put pen to paper,
and Dru grabbed me by the throat.
I’ve known bad writers and worse
film-makers who reach for a cliché at every turn, but real life can
often put fiction to shame. If I must label my experience a
thunderclap high above the hills which let vitality and creativity
run like fire through my veins, if I must say my pen began to shoot
across the page as if it had a mind of its own, that I completely
ignored the views of Loch Long, Ben Lomond and Rannoch Moor, nearly
forgot to get off the train at Glenfinnan and wandered through the
meeting half-aware, thinking only of getting back on the train to
Glasgow afterwards and writing some more, then that is what I shall
do, and without apology, for that is what really happened that day. I
began to move away from the drab and vicious life I had known, to
open the door into what would become a glimpse of heaven at Sunset.
And if that is cliché, I only wish I
could live every day of my life that way.
(Dear Miss Landau, chapter 14)
This is one reason why Dear Miss
Landau might sound a bit over-dramatic if pitched to a Hollywood
player, but that’s the way it happened, and right from the start it
felt less like I’d planned anything out and far more as if I’d
gone on a:
...complete creative bender. I wrote, I
would say, not astory about Dru, but thestory which should have been
written for her at the time of Buffy but wasn’t.
In my opinion, the character of
Drusilla had not been developed as fully as the other members of her
vampire family – Spike, Angel and Darla– had been. It was as if
Dru herself chose me to finish the job. I know how strange that
sounds, but that’s how it felt at the time. There are any number of
technically proficient writers around, but she needed someone who
also loved her passionately, with all his heart and soul, and would
fight to the last drop of his blood to bring her back.
She needed her noble knight, and she
found him...
... I broke every rule in the book
writing Drusilla’s Roses while Dru looked happily over my shoulder.
I had no plan, did not do that many drafts, and most of the time had
no idea what I was going to do next. The primal beast got out, it was
like Rocky Balboa going after Ivan Drago, and it was the greatest
creative experience of my life.
(Chaplin interview, March 2012)
Then, of course, it got even stranger.
I titled the original story Drusilla’s Roses without the slightest
idea Rose was Juliet’s middle name, was amazed to be contacted by
Juliet after I’d sent her the tale, took the trip across the US to
meet her, and on the way across something strange happened just
outside Somerset, Pennsylvania:
I also remember something else, way up
in the Alleghenies on the Interstate, thinking, musing and looking
back down a long valley spruced up with pines. Seeing a great white
church in the distance, boxy and stark.
To pass the long hours, travellers
sometimes fall into a contemplative state. The mind seems to empty
and truths become apparent. I don’t know how it works.
All I do know is that a single thought
came to me, and though I am loath to believe in fate, I cannot forget
its words:
I’m going to my destiny.
(Dear Miss Landau, chapter 34)
At the time, I said nothing of this to
Juliet. I was extremely sensitive about any accusation of stalking,
and back then there was no Chaplin Books, no Dear Miss Landau, and no
sequels to Roses. Juliet and I hadn’t even met, and there was no
guarantee we would.
A subconscious voice telling me
straight-up that I was going to my destiny therefore sounded more
than a little presumptuous and quite odd, so I shut up about it.
But those little questions of why I was
there and how well-fitted I actually was for the role I seemed to be
fulfilling kept surfacing. Several months after the first trip, I
sent a writer’s commentary on Rosesto Juliet, and at one point
said:
Analogy that lately occurred to me: A
bit macho and clichéd to an outside observer but very real to me.
The advice Rocky got from his trainer before he went out for the 15th
round against Ivan Drago in Rocky IV:
“All your power! All your strength! Everything you’ve got! Punch until you can’t punch no more! This is your whole life here! Now go out there and do it!”
I’ve heard Joss considers a life a fight [shown at the end of Angel], and I can’t dispute his philosophy much. Maybe that’s why I got the job of writing Roses. It needed someone willing to give everything they had, and that’s certainly what happened, although it wasn’t exactly a fight. Dru wasn’t my opponent. She was quiet, placid and supportive. I liked having her around.
On a purely scientific basis, I was also in the right place at the right time. I read a fascinating article in New Scientist in 2006 which basically made the point that, in addition to talent, it takes 15-20 years practise to develop extraordinary mastery of a subject. Well, I’d done my time, and when Drusilla grabbed me, I was more ready than I knew. I kept the article, by the way, and could scan and send it to you if you were interested.
What else? I’ve tried to answer every question you asked in March to the best of my ability, but even I sometimes struggle for an explanation. I’m professionally loath to just place everything at the doorstep of fate and destiny, but I personally rather like the idea and, as Sherlock Holmes once said: “take away the impossible and whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.” I can’t escape the improbably logical conclusion that I was meant to do this and am fulfilling my allotted role. Well, best just to keep my feet firmly on the ground and go out there and do it. Dru IV is gelling nicely in my head and I’m looking forward to starting it, even if this may be Dru’s last dance.
But then again, who knows?
(Drusilla’s Roses, writer’s
commentary, 2010)
So it really did seem (as mentioned in
Dear Miss Landau’s foreword) as if Allah the Merciful, the
Compassionate was, quite literally, weaving the threads of my destiny
into a very strange tapestry. By now I’d successfully completed the
first trip across America and met Juliet Landau on Sunset Boulevard,
Drusilla’s Redemption had been delivered to her about two weeks
before I set out that first day in March, and in conversation in
Hollywood I’d explained my intent to write a second sequel –
Drusilla Revenant– the story of which would be wrapped around
Juliet’s own tale of Drusilla in Angel 24-25.
I’m really not sure if that has ever
been done before. The unofficial tale wrapped around the official
tale with the keeper of the flame’s knowledge… Drusilla’s
Roseshad ended like a classic love story, with Xander taking his
newly-ensouled lady back to the house on Candlewood Drive. Drusilla’s
Redemption managed to capture lightning in a bottle and take the story
on, developing Drusilla’s personal history, forcing her to mature
and cope with a relationship and sending her to Africa to
(indirectly) fight for her soul much as Spike had done.
Redemption also tied up vampire creation myth (Cain and Lilith) with
early Buffyverse history (the Old Ones, the Shadowmen and the first
Slayer) and located it in the Great Rift Valley – essentially tying
up loose plot strands from Buffyverse canon and relating it to Dru’s
personal journey:
Drusilla sat up straight with the good
posture of the well-bred Victorian girl, clasped her hands demurely
and began to recite.
“First there were the Old Ones, demons of power and thunder who made this earth a hell of fire and sulphur for aeons without end. Then they faded away from this transitory plane like mist on a February morn, and out of Africa came mortal Man.”
“Which part of Africa?”asked Xander suspiciously.
Drusilla cocked her head towards the
ceiling, as if listening to the stars.
“From the abyss. The rift. The great valley of the ancients, so Solomon says.”
“The Great Rift Valley, you mean?” said the sister, fascinated.
“Where’s that?” asked Xander, wishing he’d paid more attention in history class.
“About six hundred miles east of here,” the sister replied.
“Before he ascended,” Dru intoned, “the last pure demon fed upon a woman called Lilith who dwelt in the Rift Valley. He possessed her, infecting her human body with the essence of a demon.”
“So this Lilith became the first vampire?” said Xander.
Drusilla smiled brightly. “Yes, dear.
You might say I am a daughter of Lilith.”
“There is mention of a Lilith in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Talmud,” the sister mused, “and the Kabbalah says Lilith’s soul was lodged in the depths of a great abyss. The abyss could have been the Great Rift Valley. It’s also said that Lilith was created to be Adam’s first wife, but she ran away. After he slew Abel, Adam’s son Cain found her and lived with her in a land to the east of Eden”
“Lilith dwelt with Cain in the Rift Valley, east of this Eden,” Dru said in agreement. “Together they sired a race of vampires. Half-breed demons. Pariahs. Welcome in neither the house of the human nor the demon,” she finished glumly.
Xander’s head was spinning. Adam’s
first wife had been turned, set up home with his son in Africa and
created a vampire race who wandered about like a bunch of stateless
refugees?
He kept his mouth tightly shut, but
felt a certain blasphemous relief that at least he and Dru weren’t
the first human and vampire to try living together. In fact, Cain and
Lilith set a pretty big precedent.
Drusilla’s eyes swivelled towards his
and he realised she’d read his mind. She gave him a quick, private
smile and went on.
“Pockets of the Old Ones’ demonic
power still lingered in and around the Rift Valley. So sorcerors
called Shadowmen chained a girl up in a cave near the Rift, infused
her with the Old Ones’power in order to fight the vampires, and
created the first slayer.”
“I get it,” said Xander. “And
this particular pocket – the well of the slayers’ power - isn’t
just in Africa. It’s right next door to us in Africa.”
“Yes,” said Drusilla, sanely and
soberly. “And it’s very easily affronted. First, it was angered
by the spell the Scoobies cast to defeat Adam. Then it was infuriated
by the activation of all the potential slayers. Now, the presence of
this slayer and of one of the Scoobies who originally angered it has
roused it to white-hot fury. It won’t show any mercy. Not to the
slayer. Not to the children. And not to us.”
“You have come right back to your
beginnings,” the sister said quietly to Drusilla. “To your garden
of Eden. And this is where it ends.”
(Drusilla’s Redemption, 2010)
Out on Catalina in March 2010 I
researched locations for Drusilla Revenant and started work on it a
few weeks after I got back.
As stated on the last page of Dear Miss
Landau, Revenant contains the possible conclusion to the unfinished
story arc I believe I saw in a Buffyepisode a week after I finished
Redemption. The word revenant itself means “one returned from the
dead or from exile” and this fitted the story so perfectly it
wasn’t true.
And the odd thing is, I don’t know
where I got the word from. I was originally going to rather
reluctantly call it Drusilla Returns, but then this eight-letter
conundrum just waltzed out of the back of my mind. The right word, in
the right place, at the right time…
So perhaps that’s how the incredible
story reached, if nothing else, the end of the beginning. Because, to
toy with cliché, the story didn’t end with the last page of Dear
Miss Landau, it went on, both in real-life and in fiction. Juliet and
I continued to correspond. I wrote Revenant, finding it surprisingly
easy to merge the two storylines and the official and unofficial
Drusillas. I even gave her sisters names, but when I finished
RevenantI did not release it to any fan-fiction websites.
There was a chance the now complete
Drusilla trilogy could be published, but it wouldn’t be a very good
idea to expect a publisher to try and sell copies for cash if I’d
already given away the remaining text for free, so Drusilla Revenant–
complete with the dramatic twist which could turn the Buffyverse
upside down – is still sitting on my bookshelf like the Lost Ark of
Buffy’s Covenant and I truly wish the fans would mount a campaign
for its release, for I’d truly love to turn it over to them…
Once Revenant was finished, I went
straight into the first draft of Dear Miss Landau, but this was not
with the confidence of a writer secure in the knowledge that his
signed and sealed publishing contract was safely filed. One
autism-friendly publisher the NAS thought was a sure thing had (as is
often the case) said it wasn’t quite right for them, so it was a
choice between hawking my wares round the few publishers who would
even look at an unsolicited manuscript from an untried author without
an agent, or just writing the thing before I forgot too much of the
trip to be able to. I decided to do the latter as I’d have no wares
to hawk if I didn’t.
So that’s how Dear Miss Landau began,
as a draft written in hopelessness in an old stone house deep down
amidst the Scottish Borders, only a few months after I’d stolen the
Enterprisefor my Helen of Troy. The ship be calmed once again in a
deathless Sargasso Sea and foolish hope being quietly beaten to
death, but the hands refusing to accept the inevitable or impossible,
forging the words honed from a lifetime of experience and refusing to
knuckle under to realism.
The winter of my dreams set in but the
pages started to pile up all the same. In a literary sense I was on
another journey, but in this case I thought I was facing the absolute
certainty of failure. There was no lady ahead for me this time and no
harbour for the ship.
Forty-six years old. No track record,
no agent and no contacts.
Hopeless.
Do it anyway.
I remember finishing the first draft
early in 2011. It hadn’t been that difficult a job. I’d been able
to paste in several of the blogs from the actual trip and selected a
few emails which could (with Juliet’s permission) be used. I think
it was about 1.00 a.m. one Saturday morning.
Now, remember Tim Coates’ Good
Library Blog which I’d used to merrily thrash my former
“profession” for six years? We’d just got broadband at
Roberton, so I turned on Juliet the Notebook and put one simple,
fateful message onto the Blog:
Anyone know a publisher?
That was all. Nothing else.
I spent the weekend in unutterable
depression, quite sure that was the end. That, to paraphrase Bridget
Jones, I’d die a sad lonely old man talking to his own colostomy
bag and be found three weeks later half-eaten by Alsations. The
manuscript would then be found and I’d be a posthumous success…
Apart from the bit about the Alsations,
that is an accurate description of that long weekend, and of the next
thirty or forty years as I expected to live them.
On Monday morning, I got an expression
of verbal interest from Chaplin Books.
Amanda Field, managing editor of
Chaplin, had been a fellow blogger, and she’d been reading me the
whole time.
If that doesn’t seem incredible
enough (and Chris, the owner of Biggar’s local bookshop,
Atkinson-Pryce, later agreed the odds against publication were about
five million to one), the date I received the expression of interest
was 14thMarch, 2011.
A year to the day since I’d met Miss
Landau on Sunset Boulevard.
I think I sent her an email that day,
metaphorically throwing up my hands and saying I believed in fate and
destiny…
Well, the verbal interest was confirmed
in writing, five test chapters were accepted, Dear Miss Landau was
quietly written in a Glasgow flat and a small town in the Scottish
borderlands over the next few months while all the public hue and cry
followed Whit Anderson’s doomed attempt to reboot Buffy. Whit’s
script crashed and burned while Dear Miss Landau, which I’d
originally conceived as a screenplay, was published to rave reviews
in March 2012 (almost exactly fifteen years to the day after
Buffy first aired) and there’s been a long struggle since then to
get media attention and publicity.
At present, there is the possibility of
an audiobook version of Dear Miss Landau, but that, I think, is not
the full picture:
It was highly unlikely that a person
with autism could gain enough empathy to write Drusilla accurately,
but somehow I did.
It was, as John Plowman mentioned on A
Good Read, extremely difficult even for someone with connections to
contact a Hollywood celebrity. I succeeded in doing so without
connections, and with a one-time only long shot (the text of
Drusilla’s Roses and a covering letter addressed to a certain Dear
Miss Landau) which I never expected to hear of again.
It was extremely unlikely that Juliet
Landau and I would enter into an online correspondence, but we did.
It was very unlikely that a person with
autism would find it within himself to cross a continent for his film
star, but I did.
As stated, the odds against an untried,
traumatised, autistic, forty-six year old writer without an agent
being published were astronomical, but it happened.
There have been other coincidences.
Overall, and although I’m neither
gambler nor statistician, I’d say the odds against all of this
happening were so high that chance cannot fully explain it.
Perhaps that thought I had in Somerset,
Pennsylvania, was right all along.
In my opinion, then, the full tapestry
(and possible future history) of events is still to unfold. It’s
been perfectly clear in my mind for two or three years. I respect
Miss Landau’s right to choose which path through life she wishes to
take, and Amanda Field has been understandably preoccupied with
publishing and promoting Dear Miss Landau, so funnily enough I guess
that leaves me as the only person with a full working knowledge of
what I’ll christen this tripartite path I appear to have been
yanked onto.
So here’s the truest answer I can
give to question seven:
a) Dear Miss Landau, with its melding
of fiction and reality, was published in March 2012. I originally
conceived the idea as a screenplay while walking down the hill from
Candlewood Drive, and it can easily be turned into one.
b) The next book should be the Drusilla
trilogy – Roses, Redemption and Revenant. The three novellas which
would make up this book would give it a nice, neat length of about
100,000 words – and the novellas are already, written, proofed and
edited! They’re all done! One signed set is sitting in my
bookshelves in Glasgow, (I just got Drusilla Revenant signed at the
Vampires Ball at Heathrow) and Revenant is waiting to be read. Chaplin
and I are having trouble getting this to the attention of Simon Pulse
(a division of Simon and Schuster) and we need help from the
Buffy fanbase to do so.
c) Dear Miss Landau should be optioned
as a film. During two trips across America, virtually everyone I met
either had a friend or relative with autism, or knew of Buffy the
Vampire Slayer– sometimes both. I’ve no doubt there is a large
potential audience out there. The film version (with Juliet Landau’s
permission) would differ quite a bit from the book and is probably
the only possible means in existence today by which some of the
original cast of Buffy could return (albeit briefly) to their roles…
Again, Chaplin and I need help to achieve this.
Incidentally, I’m also working on a
fourth Dru tale, recently renamed Spike and Dru: the Graveyard of
Empires, which should (I sincerely hope) be the romantic tale of love
and bullets which James Marsters apparently always hoped would
reunite the deadly duo.
It is also intriguing to consider the
fact that at the Vampires Ball this year, I described to James
Marsters the way I gained a sudden connection with Drusilla in 2009
(Dear Miss Landau, chapter 14) and asked him how it compared with the
acting chemistry which sprang up between himself and Juliet Landau
when he was being cast.
Exactly the same, I understand.
So that’s it. One possible future for
the Buffyverse is sitting on a bookshelf in Glasgow like the Lost Ark
of the Covenant, just itching to be revealed. A unique book which
would make a unique film is waiting to be noticed.
It will be a great pity if such
potential never fully saw the light of day, but I should accept the
cast and fans’ right to exercise their own free will.
On the other hand, I do have a theory
about whyall this has happened.
As most fans will know, the 2009 Star
Trek reboot featured a plot line wherein a bad guy from the
24th century came back in time and knocked the tapestry of Kirk and
crew’s 23rd century destinies askew.
As Spock put it:
“Whatever our lives might have been,
if the time continuum was disrupted, our destinies have changed.”
Being both an Asperger and a bit of a
geek, I’m quite au fait with the concepts of Schrödinger’s Cat,
possible futures and alternate timelines. Amazingly, there wasa
pivotal moment in October 2009 where I found Juliet’s “lost”email
and had to decide whether or not to answer it (Dear Miss Landau,
chapter 25). If I had not done so, it is highly probable that the
time line in which you, the reader, are now living and reading this
article, would not exist.
There would probably have been no enduring correspondence between the Hollywood star and the Rain Man from Partick, no sequels to Rosesand no Dear Miss Landau. The two trips across America would never have taken place, Juliet Landau and I would not have met that day on Sunset Boulevard, the possible unfinished story arc would never have been spotted by me and so on.
This is what happened:
Late on a stygian Friday evening early
in October, I took a look at my obsolete account.
I scrolled down through the 75 or so
emails stagnating in the inbox, deleting some, not really
concentrating on the job but still doing it with autistic precision.
Then I saw something.
An email from Juliet Landau, dated
August 15 2009.
The 15th?
The 15th!
Two weeks before I’d emailed her!
With the care of a librarian handling
the Book of Kells, I opened the email:
From:Juliet Landau Sent:15 August 2009
03:57 To:James Christie Subject:Your Story
Dear James
I just finished your story. I thought
it was great. I really enjoyed it. You managed to catch Drusilla’s
voice and behavior so beautifully. The sad, lost, haunted feeling of
Dru was there. I myself have just written a comic about Dru as part
of season 6 of“Angel.” Please check it out if you’d like.
I sat there for a full five minutes,
deciding what to do.
Take the advice and hold back, or take
a shot in the dark and reply?
Sometimes there are signs.
I felt a quite a lot like Marty McFly
at the Enchantment Under The Seadancein the time-travel film Back to
the Future Part II. He and I, both at a turning point between two
alternate futures and not sure which road to take.
Reply. Something might happen.
Hold back. Nothing will happen.
In the end, I came to a simple
decision.
Juliet Landau had been kind enough to
email me. It would be impolite not to at least reply.
So, with the click of a mouse, I
summoned the future…
(Dear Miss Landau, p. 94)
Boy, those guys in The Big Bang
Theory would love this…
I even wrote an article on the subject
in April 2012:
Why, then, has it turned out this way
instead?
Well, to turn to Star Trek again,
although Nero’s incursion altered the timeline, Kirk and his crew
still had destinies they were meant to fulfil: Kirk to command the
Enterprise, Spock to be science officer and so on; and despite the
damage to the timeline it seemed as if they were all, by accident or
design, slotting themselves back into their proper historical
settings.
In the case of myself, Juliet Landau
and Drusilla, the disruption – if indeed there even was one – was
not quite that dramatic.
I mean, given the literary metaphors in Dear Miss Landau, I wouldn’t mind taking command of the
Enterprise and fighting Nero to the death, but I don’t think that’s
quite what’s required here.
It’s as if, a few years ago,
something went wrong. Maybe not a big thing. An opportunity was
missed, a story arc unfinished, a character and a person’s
potential perhaps slightly overlooked. Even a small glitch can cause
major alterations in a timeline. This is known as a ripple effect.
Something which should have happened,
but didn’t. Events and destinies not unfolding quite the way they
should have. This concept was most recently explored in the 2008
Doctor Who episode Turn Left where Donna Noble’s decision to turn
right instead of left at a junction led to massive temporal changes
and millions of deaths, including the Doctor…
Over the past three years, it has often
seemed to me that the tripartite path detailed here is the one that
should be taken. It has already enabled me to change my life and
redeem myself by becoming a published author. It also, frankly,
helped me regain my faith in women, which had taken quite a
battering. I’ve had to take a highly conservative position
regarding this up until recently, but I’m now as sure as I can be
that this is the way to go and that there is more to be done.
It feels like somebody up there is
trying to do a repair job, and it’s not finished yet.
To be clear but partisan about it, ever
since Dear Miss Landau was published I’ve been able to say that if
it all ended tomorrow, I would have nothing to complain about.
But I think fate, sometimes subtly,
sometimes blatantly, has thrown us all a curve ball; and if we don’t
run with it, don’t look for that sunlit city on the hill, we’ll
regret it to our dying day.
James Christie
21st December 2012
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