Day 1, Feeling Fun

On a very busy day, I'm glad that I managed to finish my writing by 4:15 p.m.! I would have liked to have changed the header of my blog to indicate that this is my seventh novel, but after a few seconds of effort I did not succeed. That should give you a glimpse into the amount of work I plan on putting into novelling this year. My book is about two sisters, Isla and Abigail Martin. Isla works at a bed and breakfast in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and Abigail is one of the writers on the Dawson's Creek reboot that I invented. Here is a glimpse into Abigail's story. 

LEERY FAMILY KITCHEN 

Dawson Leery and Jenny Leery sitting at kitchen table, looking uncomfortable 

DAWSON LEERY 

Brushes his long, centre-parted hair to the side dramatically, rolls up the sleeves on his plaid button-down I thought that I would have a couple more years before I had to give you the sex talk, Jenny! 

JENNY LEERY 

Jenny rolls her eyes while pushing herself away from the table 

DAD! I’m sixteen years old! Were you planning on giving me the sex talk when I’m twenty? That’s really sexist. 

DAWSON LEERY 

You’re right, and I’m sorry for that. I can’t say that I had a good model for sex-positivity growing up. When my dad finally gave me the talk, he just said “No hat, no glove.” Which is why I always wear a hat and gloves in bed, just to be sure. 

JENNY LEERY 

Stands up from table, with a disgusted look on her face 

Oh my god, dad! Gross! 

DAWSON LEERY 

Dawson stands up and touches Jenny’s shoulder lovingly.  

But in all seriousness, I named you after my childhood friend Jennifer Lindley, who this town—myself included!— endlessly slut-shamed for no good reason other than our own small-mindedness. She was then killed off for even less of a reason. 

JENNY LEERY 

Killed off? I thought she died of cancer? 

DAWSON LEERY 

Yes, you’re right. 

Darts eyes back and forth suspiciously 

She was killed off. By god. 

JENNY LEERY 

I don’t think you could have come up with a weirder way of describing your friend’s death. And I was hoping that our discussion of sex could have less, I don’t know, death in it? 

DAWSON LEERY 

Looks at camera, shaking his head 

This really couldn’t be going worse. 

Abigail thought the same thing to herself as she closed her laptop. She really had no idea what this sex-positive father-daughter conversation was supposed to look like, so she was apparently just filling it with jokes instead. 

Abigail Martin was the lead writer on what might have been described as the “sex episode” of the Dawson’s Creek reboot, titled Dawson’s Creek: Legacy, if the entire show wasn’t a bunch of teens talking about and sometimes even having sex. The show centres on Dawson Leery’s daughter Jenny and the much more diverse cast of characters that had come to Capeside since the 1990s. In this episode, Dawson realizes that his daughter has been sleeping with the Capeside bad boy, Peter Chen. 

 She was trying to perfectly balance nostalgia for the original material while also acknowledging that the world has changed a lot since Dawson’s Creek featured the first gay kiss on a U.S. TV network. People don’t just want to watch a bunch of white kids navel-gaze about Spielberg and their virginity anymore. Hopefully as two separate topics. But, for Dawson, they were “inextricably intertwined,” as he liked to always put it in his needlessly wordy way. 

And, here is a little more about how Abigail got the job, and my personal anger about the death of a character on Dawson's Creek. 

When her agent had told her about the Dawson’s Creek reboot, shooting in Toronto and Niagara-on-the-Lake (for tax reasons), she immediately talked herself out of applying. She assumed that the Hollywood television insiders had already decided who was going to be hired (read: their friends), and that if they even happened to see it, that they would laugh at her Hallmark Channel resumé. Isla had convinced her to apply by reminding her that mediocre white men everywhere were applying for the same job with much worse qualifications. “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Isla had said, raising her index finger didactically, “that an underqualified white guy is in want of a job he doesn’t deserve.” 

She was sure that her sister was right. Abigail was exactly the kind of person who loved the original show enough to do it justice, while also having ideas for how to introduce just the right amount of social justice and diversity into the show that the network would allow. And then a little more. 

When she had gotten an interview, she thought she had totally bombed it after she spent several minutes ranting about how the original show had killed off Dawson’s beloved patriarch, Mitch Leery. Mitch, the original DILF, had deserved so much better than dying in a car accident because he had dropped his ice cream cone. The audience had deserved a lot better, too. So had the ice cream cone. 

She just couldn’t help herself. She had always told herself that if she was in a position to let important people know how she felt about this injustice, she would. So, she did. 

Somehow, improbably, this had impressed the producers. Or, at least, one producer. Abigail had a feeling that James van der Beek had harboured considerable anger about the untimely demise of his screen father, too, and had decided then and there to hire her. Soon after, she found out that John Wesley Shipp was to reprise his role as Dawson’s father and Jenny’s grandfather, and they were going to pretend that whole ice cream car accident fiasco had never happened. If only more things were that easy.