Mar 13, 2016

Hey there Inter-neighbors! Rose here, just found the "Update Readers" button so now I can share behind-the-scenes goodies right here.

Let’s talk about Dusting, a collaborative disease

On the mainpage for The Janitors, my sister Emily had this to say about the primary protagonist: 

We created our heroine, Xan, wanting a highly skilled young woman with the sort of disadvantage that causes people around her to discount her. For her, it’s an illness that she will carry with her all her life and is likely to kill her at a young age. 

This comes pretty close to being word-for-word what Emily has among her notes for the initial dramatis personae, the list of characters responsible for the momentum of the story. She’s super into using the Royal “We,” and why not? We are writing this thing together. 

In working on this project, Emily and I have pretty much split the work so that she is responsible for character development and story structure while I get busy with the world-building and fleshing out the story. We’re playing to our strengths: she studied Writing for Film & Television in college which honed her abilities in foundation work (every director and actor you love make their jobs easier by going after great scripts/foundations); and, I studied acting and poetry and storytelling (and whatever else I happen to be in the mood to study at any given time) which gives me a pool of knowledge both experiential and academic that I layer on to whatever she gives me to create draft one of a given chapter/story. 

Now, regarding the quote above, Emily made it known to me she wanted Xan to have some sort of disease and that I should invent something. This is just one of many things that cross-over into both our terrains. 

WARNING: THIS DOES GET GRUESOME 

Why Emily Wants Xan to be Sick as a Dog 

The disease forced Xan into a lesser job than that for which she trained, putting her on the whole “humble beginnings” path. As noted in the chapter: 

Nobody wants a corpse defending their freedom. 

This line is a variation of a note Emily gave me in the outline for Chapter One. In requesting that I invent a disease for our protagonist, Emily had the condition that the disease be incurable because having it would put Xan in the position of people writing her off as already being dead. 

Emily wanted this so that later — probably Chapter Two if someone would finish the outline and send it to me to flesh out — a compelling case of parallels might be used to convince Xan to join the Janitors. 

What Xan’s Disease Is and Why I Love It 

Dusting. Dusting is a respiratory disease most commonly affecting those who live and work on mining planets rich in the element Desiccan, particularly those underfunded without enough proper masks to go around. The disease has only been thus far proven to be contracted in the mine atmosphere when particles of pure desiccan are breathed in as they are released from the walls of a given mine. 

The particles collect in the lungs dehydrating the moist inner tissue. Because the moisture in lungs is due mostly to mucus, and because the dust is absorbent but not spongy, the particles react to their new surroundings and — seemingly — grow. Desiccan particles are similar to salt particles in that they are primarily cube-shaped, or at the very least always have corners. 

When the mucus dries inside lungs, the desiccan particles — due to everyday movements on the part of the host body — move within the lungs, chipping the dried mucus so that lungs slowly fill with dust. As the desiccan particles “grow” they can weigh down the lungs and the weight will eventually tear into the walls of the lungs so that the Rattler (as some advanced Dusting patients are called) drowns in their own fluids. 

With Dusting, you either drown in dust or blood. This fact to those in the know — which now includes you — adds a little more severity to this line that comes near the end of the first chapter: 

Xan saw before her a transfer worse than Cano; a fate worse than the dust rattling in her lungs. 

What’s great about this disease (phrases I never thought I’d write) is how this affects everything in Xan’s daily life, but she is forced by her dream life to act as though it doesn’t which only exacerbates the illness. If she avoids foods that increase mucus production to keep her lungs from dehydrating she avoids the risk of that mucus becoming more dust; but, then she risks questions about her diet which raises awareness of her health status, plus she increases her chance of becoming a full-on Rattler. Take this sentence from earlier in the chapter: 

She drew her breath in too quickly and she felt the sting of dust rattling in her lungs. 

The “dust” and the “sting” position her so that she has not yet chosen whether her eventual death will be by dust or by blood, but the “rattling” suggests which of the two is worse and yet still better than being sent back to her home-world: 

She wouldn’t be anywhere near this farm station, or Bel, if it weren’t for her lungs and the mines she had been trying to escape in the first place. 

Moving forward in the story, there are still more decisions to be made about how her health affects her actions, including kissing. I’m still all over the place trying to decide whether or not Dusting will be a kind of Kissing Disease.