angles and attitudes

The husband and I sometimes come at the same thing from different angles and it gets us in trouble. I know what you're thinking, but I mean in the literal sense, as in we might both send the same email but on different days or I'll go to return something only to find he has. We have a family member on the receiving end of a recent such snafu--to their everlasting delight, I'm sure, because this particular family member loves to read Weighty Issues in such things. No Weighty Issues, I assure you, just a lack of communication. Seriously, after 18 years, we hardly look at each other some days, much less talk.

Point is, I have characters doing the same thing right now, coming at problems from different directions. Of course they're all going to crash in the middle. And of course Trinidad, our hero ((dreamy sigh, why are all the hot ones gay?)) is behind a few steps. And of course such a snafu must have Weighty Issues behind it because this is Literature and like my kid's teacher said last night, you don't win the Newberry unless at least one parent dies. (YES, I like him already. He's big into teaching writing. We're gonna get along fine.)

Anyhoo, I've been struggling with when and how and why someone would drop an emotional bombshell on our Trinidad((sigh)) and came up with it this morning at O-dark-thirty. I read somewhere that the threshold between wake and sleep is a great time for such ideas. It's one of the acknowledged states of Liminality, a major theme for Trin. ((sigh))

So when do they drop this bomb? The worst possible time, of course, when anger is ramped, when he's got no weapons or emotional defenses, when supernatural things are wreaking havoc behind the scenes, and he's still trying to do the right damn thing, in the way only Trinidad ((sigh)) can do. That's when.

Now I have to just go write the thing.