Decades ago, Stephen King wrote a book called The Dark Tower. I have written of it in before on this blog, because it was a very important book to me when I was a boy. A good amigo showed it to me and I thought it was one of the best books I ever read. One major reason I loved it so much (especially the first one, The Gunslinger) was because it mixed our world with the world of fiction. I'll never forget the first time I followed Roland Deschain, a gunslinger cowboy, stroll into a Wild West saloon in some dusty desert..only to hear someone whistling the Beatles song "Hey Jude". It blew my childhood mind wide open, and it very much still blows my mind to this day. I have not seen the recent film adaptation with Idras Elba yet, but if the song is in there, that's amazing.....
Anyways, why am I talking about The Dark Tower? It's because I was thinking about the story in relation to the last post I made, where I went on about colors for awhile, and how our World still seems to be pretty obsessed with dark colors, instead of bright ones. Throughout this entire book series, Roland Deschain is pretty much trapped in a very dark world...and he's also chasing a very dark tower at the end of it. But what if we decided to flip this entire plot on its head, and find a new story in its intestines? What if we decided to do something seemingly so simple, like change the Dark Tower to a Pink Tower, or a Purple Tower? What if we decided, for example, that the whole story would start out in a dark miserable world full of war, but that the goal of the main character --- a man--would be to find this Pink Tower, and transform into a woman...? He does not know this at first though. He has no idea what the Pink Tower is, just like Roland never knew what the Dark Tower was. Roland was just blindly chasing it, as well as blindly running from the Man in Black. It will be the same for our fellow here.
Another idea: What if we actually just made women ... not even at all present in the fictional world? Until, of course, one of them accidentally gets sucked in through a portal that the main character accidentally discovers, just like what happens in The Dark Tower, when the kid Eddie, from 1980s New York City, gets sucked into Mid-World.
So essentially the first striking part of the plot would be our main character -- let's call him Harley "the Night Rider" Sharpe --- suddenly meets the literal first woman of his entire existence, through this weird portal. He has never seen one before, not in dreams, not in stories, not in some TV (they don't exist for him), no where. What the hell would that be like, really? Would it be hard to write? And how would he feel when this woman starts telling him that she knows about the Pink Tower too, because she's heard about it in her own world, our world. Is it confusing? It probably is. But I could probably make it work,if I was a good enough writer, and it could probably be a pretty good story. We could give the girl a name like Nina...sort of exotic.. and she can be from the 21st century of course, 2012 or so. She will also be very feminine the moment she drops through the portal, extremely feminine. She will be like Eddy was in King's book, urban, from New York, but she'll be a bonified chica.
As in, we are going to basically try to take someone whose biggest idol is Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and get her sucked into a portal and thrown into the most masculine world of all time.. What will Harley Sharpe do to her? Would he rape her? I suppose some 'femnazis' would say of course he would. But they would have to remember: Harley Sharpe is living in a world where women were never even present. He, therefore, can be written as not even knowing what rape is. Harley Sharpe has no idea what a vagina is, for that matter. He's from ... "Middle World", or "Wittle World" ... "West World"...whatever the hell we can think to call it. It is a world with only men. It is a world where birth is explained, even to adults, like it is explained to children in our own: A magic stork came and dropped you off in an egg, and the egg cracked, and then you were born. In "Witt World", this is actually a fact. Harley Sharpe was born of an egg. Not of a vagina. He has never had sex with a woman, nor has he had sex with a man. Sex is not something Harley Sharpe needs to have (though we will give him the ability!). So what will he do when he finds little 5 foot 5 Nina , dressed in a pink fur coat (pink is a color he will have never seen!) bursting through this portal? What will he do? Kill her....?? Of course not. For God's sakes of course not. He is going to take care of her is what he's going to do. He's going to get ...influenced by her. To the point where she will eventually lead him to the Pink Tower, where he himself will turn into a woman! Un mujere!
All of this will be hard to write of course, extremely hard to write. Characters who are from such different worlds are always incredibly challenging to combine with the other, which is why we rarely see this happen in most fiction, as I wrote in another essay. Alas, this is the exact reason why Stephen Kings book series about Roland Deschain was so powerful: All of us readers felt like Eddy, getting a chance to meet our bad ass Wild Western gun slingin' grandad from the past. How would all this feel with a woman as Eddy instead? With Nina Glass. Yes. There's a name and a half aint it?? Nina Glass. An upper lower class New York City resident from Staten Island, or Brooklyn, 2012. A massive Lil Kim fan. A poster of Paris Hilton above her childhood bed. A Britney Spears CD in her car the moment it crashes and the glass windows shatter and she wakes up underneath the black murder skies of Witt World, with the vicious gunslinger Harley Sharpe the only one to see her appear......
----N0TES
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