Tourist | Postmortem

Content warning for discussion of depression and suicide.

Two nights ago, I decided I would arbitrarily pick a day to celebrate finishing Tourist. So, tonight, I am going to celebrate exactly that, even if I technically posted the final chapter a couple weeks ago. I don’t know if I’m happy with the serial as a whole, but finishing any decently-sized project is worth celebration. We all need to be proud of the things we do achieve.

Tourist began with a thought: how would another person experience depression and asexuality if they were to suddenly find themselves in my brain and body? I had lived with depression for so long that I had grown used to it. I’d forgotten how much all of us with mental illness fight to exist every day. That realization hit me hard as I showered in my best friend’s bathroom, staring up at the bright blue sky through a skylight.

I wasn’t exactly looking for a new serial project after finishing Mountain Sound, Tourist just kind of came to me. A very different sort of story to Mountain Sound, which had been something I’d been thinking about for a few years before starting. Tourist would be first person, have a bigger cast, a more complex mystery, and would be leaning more YA. I knew from the start how the story would resolve and very quickly figured out an outline with key events and brief descriptions for characters: the AI, the Original, the Best Friend, the Girlfriend, the Sister, the Sad Girl, and the Douche. Audrey came in a little later as a character, so she never ended up with a nickname.

I was like, “Oh yeah, this is easy, I can churn this out with no problems.” Haha, oh, how naive we all are when we begin a new project! My outline for Tourist was finished very early 2016. I finally posted the final chapter (the epilogue) in October 2018. What happened? What went wrong? How the hell could I screw up my own plans so terribly?

Four things contributed to my struggle with Tourist. Four things that I could not predict or plan for. Four things I had to work through to finally finish this story.

Thing the First

Writing something based on your own emotions is hard, turns out. I know it’s a whole thing with creatives that they pour their souls into their works, but I’ve never really been a person to express my feelings and experiences through my writing. Tourist was never intended to be a personal outlet, but since its premise was based on my own bad brain, how could it not end up as a personal story?

I was a fool to think that shaping a story with my own emotions and struggles would be easy. A FOOL. Especially since I was so determined to be someone who didn’t express personal stuff in her own stories, for some reason. It felt hard to distinguish between “these emotions are based on real emotions” and “this story is not about my life in any way”, so instead I chose to say “no part of me is in this story.” A blatant untruth.

Once I got over that particular hang-up, writing did become easier. Unfortunately, it took most of Tourist for me to get there.

Thing the Second

My depression got better. And then it got worse.

Mental illness does not make someone a better creator. My depression made me less productive and motivated, not more. Yet, it had one thing going for it: having depression made it much easier to write a character in a depressed headspace. While I was depressed, writing Allegra and Lissa came somewhat naturally. I understood their thoughts and their actions, until I suddenly didn’t.

Capturing the tone of living with depression was inherently an important part of Tourist for me. The story was so deeply about living with a broken brain and wishing every day to be neurotypical. When my depression lifted for a while, I found myself at a loss. What had felt natural to write now felt stilted and untrue. I pushed through regardless, and looking back now I can’t really pinpoint which bits I wrote while feeling better. So maybe it didn’t affect my writing as much as I’d thought at the time.

But then my brain got worse. Over the past… well, nearly a year now, I’ve been going through a pretty bad depressive episode. I didn’t even realize how bad it was until a couple months ago. I lost all motivation to write, almost all motivation to even live. It feels somewhat ironic that I finally fell into a headspace closer to Lissa’s and therefore couldn’t write her and Allegra’s story. Depression is no joke, y’all.

Which leads nicely into the next stumbling block…

Thing the Third

I burned out. Hard. Burnout, like depression, is no joke. I’ve been paying that burnout debt this whole year, and only in the last month have I started to feel like myself again. While being burned out I moved house, worked different contracts, traveled internationally for work at least four times, broke my knee, had surgery, shipped a couple games, and had my relationship status change. This has been a big, weird, exhausting year, and that took a toll on my own writing.

There’s not much I can say about burnout except look after yourself. I put too much pressure on myself and ignored the warning signs my body was blaring at me to slow down and take a break. Tourist was, unfortunately, low on my priority list while recovering because it was a personal side project.

But here I am now, finishing it regardless. Suck it, burnout.

Thing the Fourth

Okay, this thing is weird and quite personal. Remember how I said that I finished the rough outline in early 2016? None of the events in this serial were in any way based on my real life at that time. But—and okay, bear with me on this—some events in my life played out too similarly to Tourist events. I haven’t really talked about any of this publicly, but I’ll touch on it lightly now.

Allegra’s experience with Chase was entirely fictional when I planned the story, but by the time I wrote that chapter I had gone through what I’m still understanding as a sexual assault that felt far, far, too similar to what I had planned to write. Good news! It made understanding Allegra’s emotions in the scene easier.

Bad news: it meant I went through some real bullshit. Writing that bullshit into my own story felt extremely raw and painful, especially because that scene had never been intended to reflect my real life.

That wasn’t the only thing, though. IF ONLY LIFE WERE THAT EASY.

One thing that was pulled from my personal life was the experience of having someone close to me die by suicide. I lost my mum, a family friend, and almost someone who was close to me at the time. I spent a lot of time in therapy while writing Tourist dealing with those particular traumas. This serial was in part a way to work through the complex emotions of guilt, anger, sorrow, loss, relief, and everything else that comes with losing someone to depression.

Apologies for getting real dark and serious here, but know I write this in perfectly good spirits as I get into this next bit.

When my mum died, nobody actually told me the cause. I’d guessed what had happened, but never had it confirmed. At the time, I assume nobody wanted to sit a 13-year-old down and have that conversation, and then at some point everyone assumed someone else had done it.

I found out late last year exactly how my mum died, and it was far too similar to what I had planned for Lissa. Knowing what had happened to my mum helped me with my grieving process, but suddenly facing Tourist felt far, far too daunting. I was on the last chapter at the time, I think, and I couldn’t bring myself to write the ending. This is why the last chapter became the hardest for me to write.

As you can see, I eventually faced that chapter down. I cried a little, but it was entirely cathartic. Looking back at where I was when I started Tourist compared to where I am now upon finishing it is a little surreal. I’ve gotten a hell of a lot better since then. Goes to show what therapy, medication, and actually letting yourself feel your emotions can do. Which is kind of the lesson of Tourist, funnily enough.

Also, quick shout out to the cider that gave me the courage to ask about my mum. That was some good cider.

Life is Complicated; So is Writing

Long story short, Tourist was meant to be a fun, easy little side-project which ended up being a big outlet for a lot of trauma I’ve experienced in my life. Again: none of it was intended to be about me, but a lot of me ended up in it anyway. Moreso than anything else I’ve ever written. Maybe that’s why I have such mixed feelings about it in the end.

I learned a lot about writing mysteries, balancing my creative work with my personal life, and overcoming the guilt of falling behind on self-decided deadlines. Tourist may not be my favourite work in the world, but it has become a big part of who I am today. Maybe every big project does that in its own way.

Have I learned anything that I’ll carry forward onto future projects? Yeah: don’t burn out.

But also that I need to be more understanding of my own journey. Writing isn’t just a skill, it’s intertwined with my life and who I am as a person. Whether or not I intended Tourist to be personal, it was always going to have bits of me woven into it. Just like Mountain Sound, just like Bloom, just like every personal thing I may write in the future.

Finally: A Shoutout

Danny Pirtle of future Encyclopodia fame, a good and patient friend, edited Tourist for me. He was the editor on Mountain Sound, too, and I am so, so, SO incredibly thankful to have had his eyes on both of these projects. They are all the better for his input. Nothing brightened my day more than reading through his editing notes and seeing the little things he wrote about these stories.

Go listen to his podcast. It’s very good. Danny is just very good in general. Having had his help on both of my serials has been a huge privilege.

That’s it on Tourist for now. I’ve just uploaded an ebook version on itch.io if you’re interested in reading all the way through, and that means it’s time for me to let Allegra and Lissa go. I hope anyone who has read Tourist enjoyed it, and I hope the same for anyone who may read it in the future.

∞

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<— Epilogue |