INSIDE TWICE - Steam Heat

SUBSCRIBER NOTES FOR EPISODE SIXTY ONE:

Hello again, intrepid subscribers! And welcome to this week’s post about the ins and outs of creating this week’s episode of TWICE!

Steam Heat is a transitional episode—meaning that its primary purpose was to move the story from where it’s been focused to some new area of focus and content. Matt’s Tale episodes to this point have been largely about Matt’s life among Piper’s kind in what he’s come to think of loosely as ‘Fairy.’ Now these episodes have started focusing on his introduction to life as a ‘street urchin,’ where they will remain focused for a while more yet. Such transitions not only want a palpable shift of focus, but require some attention to any important business from the previous story phase that’s been left dangling and incomplete. Looking at Matt’s Tale so far, I began to realize that there were lots of important things that needed to be ‘cleaned or cleared up’ before Matt’s Tale moves on.

The first of these was simply a momentary clarification of basic timeline! Having already covered TWENTY-THREE episodes just of Matt’s Tale, distributed over the course of a year in OUR lives, among sixty-two episodes over all (counting the prologue), I myself am occasionally surprised to remember that Matt’s whole tale to date has actually covered only two to two and half weeks of actual time in his life since the night his former self was changed into his current condition. It’s unclear—both to him and to us—how much time, exactly, was lost during his ‘psychotic breakdown’ after the change. But the time elapsed in his life since emerging from that ‘lost state’ and stumbling into his discovery of ‘the others’ responsible for his new condition is actually only SIX DAYS! Most of what you’ve read—and I’ve written—about Matt’s adventure so far has happened in less than a week of his time. …Doesn’t feel that way, does it? So, in this episode, I wanted to put us all back in touch with that temporal fact for a number of reasons, one of which is a better feel for and understanding of what has and hasn’t happened to and for him yet—one of which was the second piece of ‘dangling business’ that seemed overdue for addressing before his tale just blithely moves on: namely, his experience of, and attention to, being physically young again.

Upon waking in that alleyway the night after Matt’s former self ‘died,' Matt certainly noticed his new body, and even enjoyed it some as he was running from the hospital. And his attention returned in a very brief but intensely focused way to this transformation and its impacts during that awkwardly enjoyable moment in The Lady’s guest cottage bathtub. But otherwise, neither he nor we readers have yet heard much about, or paid much attention to, what it is like for a guy used to the body of a fifty-year-old man to suddenly inhabit a teenage body again. Not a small change—and one that would seem to merit a GREAT deal of attention.

This fact did not just catch my attention as I sat down this week to rework the original version of this episode. I have been more and more and more uncomfortably aware of it for months now. I keep thinking as I work on these scenes, ‘His physical state really should be a bigger deal for him—shouldn’t it?’ But every time it’s come up for me, and I’ve really thought about it, the answer keeps turning out to be, ‘Not right here, or right now.’ The problem is, WHEN during the events of these past twenty-three episodes would the fact that he is impossibly smaller and healthier and more ‘comfortable’ now have been MORE surprising or important to him than the rest of whatever he’s confronted with at the moment? The answer keeps being the same: almost never.

First of all, he spent a week or more in a semi-psychotic state dealing with his new condition mentally and emotionally. So, in a way, that astonishing change has already been—at least to some degree—considered and absorbed—before any of the rest of his tale so far even got started. The ‘surprise’ of it had been dealt with—intensively. So, as all these other new impossible surprises—and threats to his well-being—and worldview-shifting encounters occur, I can’t see that he might even remember, much less think much about, how different it is to be himself physically now.

Second, while he is physically decades younger than he was, the guy inside that body is still the same—a fact that is going to become more and more obvious and problematic for him now that he is back among his own kind, with no way to explain the discrepancy they are going to sense between what he ‘appears’ to be, and what he ‘feels’ like to talk or deal with. He is physically young, but NOT, in fact, a kid now—so he hasn’t and doesn’t really act like one.

Third, this whole tale is not something even Matt himself is actually experiencing as we readers hear about it. It is something he is writing from recollections many years later. So—in a weirdly ‘meta’ way—Matt’s problem is the same as my own: I am a writer, writing a writer, writing about himself. Matt’s account is going to focus not on everything he experienced—or even found important—at the time. It’s going to focus in a very edited and selective way on what matters to him and his audience years later—which in virtually none of these scenes so far was the sensual experience of his new body itself.

SO, week after week for the past year, I have been aware of his physical experience and found no convincing reason to include that in the content of these episodes, even though it would likely have been the most immediately distracting issue for him on a far more frequent basis than indicated here. But this week—FINALLY—Matt’s life was not defined by earth-shattering discoveries and threats on a literally hour by hour basis, and so both he and I finally had some time to ‘notice’ what it feels like to be him now—and to celebrate—and suffer—that fact more consciously.

All of which is to say that this week’s episode was a pause for some important housekeeping before we plunge into the next big nest of important narrative content issues in his story. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And either way, don’t worry. Matt’s life won’t remain placid for very long. …I mean, really…how could it? :D

Thanks again for your company on this journey! I hope you are safe and well, and as much at peace as one can be during such interesting times. I look forward to touching base with you all again next week—and hope that week’s a great one for each of you. :]