The evolution of a monster

Gray Song is about a cloud that follows a woman. It's a malevolent storm cloud, the antagonist, a real cloud in the sky instead of a icon or figure of speech. That's my hook. I carve my place in the endless sea of romance-mystery-SciFi-literary-horror books out there. But what this cloud is, just what it means, has changed over time. I finally got it right.

It's a story that has been with me for twenty years. I’m not kidding. It started as a screenplay in an online screenplay course around the time Caroline was born. It was a jumbled mess. No one understood it. It had a big reveal at the end that I didn’t set up enough at all, had something about forgiveness and reconciliation, but ultimately it was nothing more than a cutesy contrived melodrama with a love triangle. Then I turned it into a book to explore this more, the end result being the same cutesy contrived melodrama with a love triangle but with many more words. I felt at the time that it was necessary to share it with anyone who wanted to read it. Unfortunately to this day my family (Janet included) only remembers that first terrible version whenever I mention it. “It’s better now I promise!” “Mmmkay Sean.”

But throughout it all, it was about Tucker and Mary and their love for each other as they tried to escape an environment that trapped them. That environment was stormy in the beginning, like an actual storm, to provide a dark ambiance of where they were in life. You know, like in every TV show and movie around the end of the second act, the low point, and suddenly it’s night and windy and rainy with lightning and thunder? I wanted a story full of contrasts: darkness and light, desert verses ocean, hot verses cold, dry verses wet, motion verses stillness... As my way to explore the ambivalence of something gray, of a gray thing. I pitched this original manuscript to agents and publishers. Only one responded with a note: “Too disjointed. I don’t understand the connections. Keep at it!”

Into the drawer it went.

Around 2011 I got back at it and rewrote the whole thing. No more love triangles. No more curses and witchcraft and gratuitous violence and sex scenes. No more trying for the big reveal at the end because big reveals are stupid and nothing will ever be as great as “No, I am your father” so why even try it. This was a love story dammit! We want to root for the heroes. Why not make it about getting them back together? Why not? I’m a sucker for love. I’ve seen couples, albeit rare, who are perfect for each other and I wanted Tucker and Mary to have that same kind of bond. We catch them right after tragedy ripped apart their marriage. I imagined the worst kind of tragedy possible – the death of a child. To this day I struggle with writing about this since it has never happened to me. The fuck do I know about that kind of loss? I feel guilty treading these waters but kept it in the book (Part IV Faith) because I consider these passages in Gray Song as some of my finest writing. Tucker and Mary are apart in the beginning of the book because of their painful history, the chaos. We learn about this painful history as we go, and the story brings them back together as we approach the end. But all the way together? We’ll see. In a good way? Bad way? We'll see. Can love defeat history? Sure it can… of course it can... maybe… sometimes… I don’t know… You'll just have to find out!

The cloud. The idea for a real-cloud-that-follows-a-person came from the book Wicked. (It just occurred to me that I should have mentioned Wicked in my Acknowledgement section.) Not the musical, but the original book where Gregory Maguire explored a notion that was all too familiar in pop culture, the Wicked Witch of the West, and dove deep into the nature of evil, turning this familiar story on its head. I can’t tell you how many times I lowered that book and just thought, Wow. The witch wasn’t as wicked as we thought. She was a victim. She had a disability (allergic to water). Tucker’s mother isn't this vengeful conjurer who controlled the weather to exact revenge. The weather, a cloud over her head, controlled her. She's just trying to survive and protect her family.

Then came the Bible. I’m not an avid Bible reader, but I read Chapter 12, “The Woman and the Dragon” in Revelation. Lightbulb. Tucker’s mother became the Woman and the cloud was the Dragon, following and tormenting her and her offspring with rain and wind instead of fire and brimstone. It's so obvious to me in Revelation that this is a thunderstorm. Her actions and choices were all about battling this misty demon and keeping it away from her family, from her only son. That became the plot, the ticking bomb. And the only way to defeat it wasn’t a spell or a reversal of a curse or magic. She needed to honorably sacrifice herself to end the cloud. I also introduced religious undertones, divine intervention. This was the 2012 version. Again, more agent pitches and query letters. Again, not much interest.

In the drawer it went again.

I pulled it out again in 2016 and this time I self-published it on Amazon as Gray Song: Love and the Gloomy Burden. I buried the dragon thing and seven bowls of the apocalypse and swashbuckling heroics and drew out what it meant for a parent to pass on their burdens to their kids. Or I should say, how our parents fight tooth and nail NOT to pass on their burdens to us despite the fact that we love them and can handle it. I also dove deeper into chaos theory (“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas?”) The butterfly in this case is Emily’s spirit, pure love, who flutters and rises above the chaos that is orchestrated by the cloud. I felt this version really captured the depth I was looking for, but alas, it was not meant to be. I sold seven copies over a two-year span. Amazon KDP is an amazing tool to get your own book published and out there, but it only goes so far if no one knows about it or wants to read it.

In the drawer!

Then last year I dove into it yet AGAIN to write it as a screenplay. This was always meant to be a film. One thing led to another and I combed through it again, discovering all the typos, misspellings, comma errors, spacing, redundancies, disjoints, dated dialogue, and other crap that screamed “self-published hack!” from like the first chapter! Ugh. No wonder no one bought it. I took a trip out to the island, visited the bluffs and Southeast Light, and pretty much said goodbye to Tucker, Mary, Emily, Uncle, Toronto Jim, Catharina, Cochise, Tecumseh, Mike, Olin, and Jo. This dream was dead. I needed to work on something different. But in the fall I found Coverfly, a facilitator website where I could easily keep my different projects (manuscript, screenplay, stage play, kids book) and click click click to enter various contests. Way too easy. It’s only money. Gray Song struck a chord in the ScreenCraft Cinematic Book contest and ended as a top 13 finalist out of 950-something entrants. Full book manuscript contests are rare. Usually they only want the first 5000 words or so. This was a sign! Get at it Sean! Do this!

Okay fine. One last rewrite. The Woman got a name, Catharina, after I read about the shipwrecks and about Princess Augusta of the famed Palatine Light ghost story and about Short Kate and Long Kate, how they stayed on the island afterwards and were probably named “Catharina.” Such a great name. The change really personalized the story rather than mysteriously calling her the Woman the whole time. And Catharina saw the future, not cast spells, another change for the better. I also did away with blaming the island for Catharina’s misfortune. The island is good, just a little haunted by the shipwreck ghosts who sing the gray song. I added the epilogue to assure my readers that Block Island bounced back in the end better than ever. I also dove deeper into the notion of Mary as a gatekeeper, much like how Galilee is the gatekeeper to the island.

So while this evil-cloud-who-follows-a-person-for-real was originally a cool plot device, a raging monster that our hero fights and battles and tries to slay, it is really a metaphor for depression and despair, the manifestation a character’s pain into the physical. The “gray song” is that intoxicating melody in our minds that draws out our weaknesses. It sings to us. It lures us. It wants us to follow it, to dance to it, to take its path and choose the fork that leads to it, to use it as a means to an end, to rationalize within ourselves when we believe the only recourse is to remove ourselves from the world and take our own lives. We battle the gray song with a powerful weapon, the music of life, and this music of life wins out most times, right? But there are times when the gray song permeates and infiltrates and corrupts. Depression isn’t a choice. It’s not a switch. It’s not something to be cured, rectified, reversed, or conquered. We simply treat it, maybe hold it at bay, but it’s always there. It remains overhead. It moves when we move and the only control we have over it, really, is by keeping it away from the ones we love.

This is the true monster. This is the battle between the gray song and the music of life, between Catharina and her burden, between the Woman and the Dragon, between the painful history of young lovers and new possibilities. "Defeat the dragon, this must be. For you, my love. Be free... be free... be free..."

Find Gray Song by Sean Cady Johnson on Amazon.