CALVIN

goodbye (for now)

First of all, F's in the chat because my laptop broke a while ago and I had to write and update the last 20 chapters via cellphone. You've never known pain like this. But also I'm confident I can now beat anyone at a game of Thumb War.

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About the Book (because I'm narcissistic and want to talk about it)

It was a fun book that wasn't supposed to mean much to me (and ended up meaning a lot). I went into it wanting two things: to poke fun at the boarding school I was attending at the time and to have a laugh.

Then I wanted more out of it. To experiment with minimal, dialogue-driven writing. To really dive into all the thoughts and feelings I had about my strange and uncomfortable school, things like not belonging and elitism and, practically, estrangement.

And it became more still. Therapy. A coping mechanism. A place to look at mental health and tragedy. Reflect that back onto myself. See what I could discover by writing things down, the way Elias sees them. And I feel like even though, to me, it was still a "fun" book, I discovered a lot while writing it. Not just about the craft of writing (which I think I'll always be minorly hopeless at), but about Elias, and myself, and how teenagers understand and react to the world.

There were a lot of fine lines I had to walk while writing it. I wanted it to depict life as it is but not be offensive. I wanted to discuss heavy topics in a real way but without assuming too much. I wanted sex to be a big theme without anything being sexy, because the characters are young. Then, of course, it's from the perspective of Elias, so how do you avoid him seeing something like a shirtless Calvin as sexy? You don't. But I guess I wanted the topic of sex to be liberated without being exploitative. I think that's important.

(To go off on a tangent): it's redundant to deny teenagers of their sexuality. But harmful to exploit it.

I do think this book was a catalyst for a lot of growth. I think my characters grew, but also my perception of ideas and people and words grew. My understanding of the world I was put into at 15 (the boarding school world) grew. The writing within the book changed, from being dialogue-driven to being still minimal but fuller and more introspective. I like to think that's a reflection of how Elias grows as a character but also how I believed the work grew into something that needed more than quippy dialogue.

And it was cathartic. Being so honest in the book. Having the space to literally cover whatever topic I wanted (because nothing was planned out, and this was a "wing it" scenario). Letting the characters be good but also bad, and bad but also good. Early on in the book Calvin discusses this paragraph in the book Kokoro. About how men are neither good nor bad. It was Calvin's way of hinting what his dad is like and why he can't fully condemn him. It was also my way of setting up the theme of ying and yang, how it's impossible to put people in boxes.

Someone in the comments (I can't find it anymore rip) wondered if I had written the heavier events in the book to reflect how Elias experiences them: without processing them, but merely existing through them and then suffocating the memory. That's exactly what I wanted to do. To capture how a sixteen year old with a steadily declining mental health might cope with these huge issues: by simply not really engaging with them. It's definitely how I coped when I was sixteen. That's why a lot of the "big stuff", especially in the part of the book before the end, seems almost skimmed over or unacknowledged. Because that's just how Elias dealt with them.

(He was also high a lot).

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Final thoughts

I'm developing a sequel from Calvin's perspective. It'll be shorter than this one (kudos for flicking through 55 chapters). The story will pick up at the start of 12th grade, in Calvin's new (all-boys) boarding school in England. He'll have to navigate new characters, new problems, and new systematic corruption. But the needle threading through the entire story is his struggle to trace his way back to Germany and Elias.

Greedily, I still felt like I couldn't be happy finishing this universe without knowing more about Schneider. So I'm also developing a short-story spin-off from his perspective, following his life between September and his date of death in December.

Thank you to everyone who's read, commented, voted, and put up with my flakey uploading tendencies. That shit just warms my heart. :')

...x