Trivia from PATRICIA
This is a post I first published on the original blog, which I’ve removed. I decided to polish it up a bit, make a few changes and re-publish it here.
Here I felt like plunking down a little bit of trivia, things that you probably didn’t know about my first novel, PATRICIA.
But now you’re getting them straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak hehe.
Warning: Contains SPOILERS!!
If you have not yet read my first novel, PATRICIA, don’t continue on until you do read it. If you would like to read it, links are at the end.
The skeleton key: When I was writing the novel I didn’t plan AT ALL for Carrie Anne to find the skeleton key in her pocket. And that is such an important part of the plotline, and I didn’t even plan it. I actually wrote the scene where she was taunting the girls with their skeleton key, when she had them locked up, because I remembered that Patricia had thrown her skeleton key to the floor in disgust. So I thought it would be neat if Carrie Anne picked it up and taunted the girls with it.
Then she put it into her pocket because it was the most convenient place to put it. Then both she and I forgot all about the skeleton key.
Later when I was trying to figure out how she was going to get out of the cage, all of a sudden I just had a BRAINSTORM and all of a sudden I remembered she’d put the skeleton key into her pocket! I had forgotten all about it!
So you can see, I didn’t plan that amazing and fortuitous and miraculous piece of luck for Carrie Anne AT ALL. It just happened!
In fact, for that matter, even the existence of a skeleton key at all is totally fortuitous and unplanned for. I had the idea that I wanted some boys to be sneaking in at night, and it occurred to me that the best way for them to sneak in would be if someone possessed a skeleton key. That’s how the skeleton key was born. But if I hadn’t had that idea, I would have thought of some other way for the boys to sneak in, and then the skeleton key would never have existed.
I also didn’t plan for Patricia to throw the skeleton key to the ground and then for Carrie Anne to pick it up. It just happened.
Miss Bray and her homemade bombs: Although all the characters are made up and as far as I’m aware, none of them was inspired by anyone I knew (although you never know, the subconscious always weaves out some pretty weird things…….), my chemistry teacher in high school was really called Miss Bray.
In her case, Janet Bray, not Joyce Bray as in the novel. She taught us how we could make a real bomb in our own homes (or garages). I was impressed that a high school student could make a bomb.
Setting: I set the story in New York, even though I’m not American and I’ve never lived in the States (although I enjoyed frequent visits there in my youth), because I figured this was the sort of story that I just simply couldn’t imagine ever occurring in Canada, where everything is so staid and everyone is so quiet and predictable. I just couldn’t conceive of something like this happening in Canada not even in a hundred years.
Bellina: As I was inventing the character Bellina, I asked myself what her name was. And her name popped into my head, along with her whole backstory, about where her name came from.
Madame Zubie: Madame Zubie was a real “character” used by a popular columnist of the daily newspaper Montreal Star, that I used to skim through and pretend to read when I was a child. Unfortunately at the time this column was running I was too young to understand the jokes. Pity. I read one of these Madame Zubie jokes recently on the internet and it really was funny.
Madame Zubie was fictitious, but this columnist used her to crack all sorts of jokes at the end of every post of his.
Carola Hochmeister: The word “Hochmeister” doesn’t exist, although turns out it’s a fairly common German last name. Nonetheless you might have guessed, if you know a bit of German, that it roughly means “high master” or, if you wish to translate it loosely, headmaster in German. (Although it’s not the actual word for headmaster in German.) As to where Carrie Anne got the idea for this name from — I haven’t the faintest idea!
I simply woke up one morning with the entire story in my head, from start to finish. Even the names of some of the characters, like Carrie Anne Houghton, Carola Hochmeister and Miss Havisham. The one name I had to sweat out for myself was……. the title character’s, Patricia!
Fedora: I also tip my hat to Thomas Tryon’s magnificent and original novella FEDORA, his tragic tale about a young girl who impersonates her elderly mother, a faded film star, for many years. In PATRICIA, Carrie Anne dons a fedora and white gloves to hide her youthful hands, like the young girl in FEDORA.
Sequels: I left many questions unanswered at the end of PATRICIA. I didn’t leave these questions unanswered because I wanted to prepare a sequel, originally I left them unanswered because that is the way real life is. In real life there are many things that you never know or find the answers to, even though you want to. Life is full of mysteries and incognitos that you will never solve. So I wanted to leave the novel the same way too.
But of course when you do that, then you naturally want to find out what happened next for yourself! Hence the sequels.
Romance: I actually got the idea of including Jamie Barrett from a novel I was critiquing at the time for my critique partner, Netta Newbound. I’m not much into romance, but I thought that touch of romance in my critique partner’s thriller was really nice and made it a lot more interesting. The original story had Carrie Anne running around the school all alone and feeling lonely and wishing she had a friend. So I got the idea that a male employee that Carrie Anne falls in love with was the perfect solution.
Makeup: Someone commented to me whether it’s possible for Carrie Anne to make herself up so effectively that no one could recognize her. I used to work as an actor, and I learnt theatrical and stage makeup (because this myth that actors have pro makeup artists making them up is just that: a myth, unless you are a Hollywood actor, otherwise actors have to do their own makeup) and believe me, it is possible to do most ANYTHING with theatrical and stage makeup.
People have also wondered how it was possible that Patricia didn’t recognize Carrie Anne. Well, as you saw in the end, actually Patricia DID figure out who she was haha. I’m not too sure HOW she did it…….
The Havisham mansion: The seventeenth-century mansion setting of Miss Havisham’s Exclusive Boarding School for Respectable Young Ladies was inspired by the mansion in the Bonnie Tyler video mentioned below (the mansion in the video, by the way, was really constructed in the late nineteenth century……. but we can always take artistic liberties, right?).
Songs I listened to for inspiration for this story:
Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse of the Heart
Cher – Strong Enough
Nightwish – Sleeping Sun
Nightwish – Nemo
Nightwish – Sleeping Sun (instrumental video montage by PhantomSeventy)(has since been removed from YouTube I believe)
If you didn’t heed my warning at the beginning of this post and you read on through all these spoilers anyway, and you haven’t read PATRICIA yet, I highly recommend you pick up your very own copy here:
