Tomorrow will mark an odd milestone for me: It’s the last day I will own strangeorder.com.
The domain name is an abbreviated version of a longer title, Heroes of a Strange Order. It’s the first creative project of any length into which I ever invested my time and energy. When I started it was going to be a novel about a city where murder had become legal. There was nanotechnology and a lady with red hair and scars, and a prison rape in her backstory, which I recognize now, two decades later, is a bad choice for a lot of reasons.
HoaSO lay fallow for long periods, but it never entirely disappeared. Around 2012, I found a new approach to the core of the story that excited me – I’d set it in Newfoundland, but a Newfoundland with an arcology that is jam-packed with people. I’d been to Egypt in 2009, and the sheer scale and density of Cairo, with its endless red-brick buildings and 20 million inhabitants – combined with a burning hatred for the continuing policy of resettlement that has plagued Newfoundland for a century – made me want to write about a future where the province was overstuffed with people from all kinds of backgrounds.
Somewhere in there it became a graphic novel. I knew I wanted to include Newfoundland itself in the story, and one of the best ways to do that was with visuals that are particular to this place. It also let me play with the vibrant images of people of hundreds of different cultures crammed together in a tiny, closed community. I even drew a few pages, and it reignited my desire to learn to draw and make art in general.
I’d also matured enough as a writer by 2012 to do a reasonable job of researching the elements I wanted to play with. That included the cultures of Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus, all of whom I wanted to play a major role in the story. I learned a lot, and I was really excited about the entire thing for a stretch.
There were so many things that I could tap into, both visually and thematically: Hindu funeral rites! Sikh body philosophy! Turbans! Abayas! Hijabs!
But here’s the thing: in the years that I’ve worked on these and other ideas, I’ve also come to realize that building this kind of story and world can be an inherently shitty act. The core of the story posited a terrorist unleashing a race-selective sterility plague, which is both trauma not that far removed from the rape that I’d originally included and also an implicit validation of racist dogma about race itself, which is an incredibly fragile and ephemeral construct in a biological sense.
Moreover, I believe that people are right when they say that writing someone else’s story is usually a bad idea. If HoaSO was my only idea, maybe I’d still follow through and hope to get it right, but it’s not, and so I don’t think I will.
So I put HoaSO in the drawer, and tomorrow, I think, it will go on the fire. I don’t know how to write that story, and I don’t have creative friends and partners with the background necessary to write it, and I think that writing it would feel, to me, like a violation of my own values.
It doesn’t feel great – there’s a reason the old line refers to “Murder(ing) your darlings” – but I hope I’ll be glad about it someday.