🍹 My Girl Debrief

If you haven’t read all four parts of My Girl, I will warn you that this debrief contains spoilers, so proceed with caution. Or do the obvious and catch up with Lola/Alaina first.

I considered making this a video on my nascent YT channel or like an IG reel or something (shocking, I know). And actually, I still might. Let’s see how I’m feeling about that whole idea by the weekend when this debrief is supposed to go out into the world.

My Girl is my first foray into fiction, which, of course, presents equal parts opportunity and challenge. But overall, it was pretty fun to explore that side of my writing abilities and workshop it with the good people on the internet. 

Here are a couple of BTS (behind the scenes, for those overdosed on the K-pop connotation of the abbreviation) observations about the story I thought I should let you in on in case your mind is like mine and is lit up by patterns and “if X, then Y” logic flows.

GENERAL BACKSTORY

👧🏽 So... I lied. This story isn’t entirely fictional. I changed some names and personal details to, idk, enable me to go all psychotic toward the end with a clear conscience. 😂 But a little fun fact about me is male teachers in primary and secondary school sexualized me, and this was one of my darker fantasies about how I’d like to see them pay for that. 

😈👿 I didn’t want to spend sparse word count fleshing out the antagonists. All I want is for readers to see how much they like controlling people and controlling the narrative, as well as their pedophilic natures. That's why I don't delve into their emotional states throughout the manuscript, even if it's from their POV. They're just pawns in Alaina’s/Lola's game.

• In my head, I also got this picture of Wekesa blindly being led to the slaughterhouse, so he's dressing up and wearing cologne and sneaking around, and we're following him through that rather than investigating how deep he goes. Sasa the second chapter was meant to add depth to him kidogo, but from the daughter's and wife's perspectives. Girl power or whatever. 

🌆 One of my sore spots about writing fiction, or writing generally, is what feels to me like a descriptive deficiency. I was glad this story went how and where I wanted it to go without needing me to describe too much. Still, I definitely think it’s one of my weaknesses as a writer, one I tried to “immersion therapy” myself into in the second manuscript. 

⚡ Many readers remarked that Vegetables struck them totally out of the blue, which is great because I also wasn’t sure exactly how to steer that plot to an ending that punished Mr. Ben and Wekesa enough for Alaina/Lola/me. But a slow burn was always the plan, and some internet sleuthing led me to botulinum. I’m not sure it would have this exact effect if you tried it in your little lab in the Alps, but this story wasn’t meant to be a manual. 🙃

📑 I considered splitting that last chapter to separate Alaina's POV from Ben's. But I was running out of space, and I wanted the exposition to feel more natural than her telling him directly what was up.

🙂 I didn’t have the space to develop the secondary characters as much as I’d probably have liked to. One remark I received was on Wekesa's wife, Maggy, in particular. I just wanted readers to know she's onto him, even if he thinks he's being slick and riding off into the sunset undetected. (Girl power!) And after a lifetime of living in this sham of marriage, I wanted to bring out that she's so happy he's gone that Skylar even suspects she had something to do with it.

• I hope it relieves the audience to know that even his nearest and dearest, more so Maggy, are kind of okay with his absence. 

BTS OBSERVATIONS

💃🏽 One of my favorite things about writing is the opportunity it affords to just throw out the rules and have fun with it. It’s usually obvious to me when a writer smirked to themselves when they randomly came up with something punny or grabbed a chance to make a sentence more flavorful. I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy those little joys when I encounter them, and I’m even happier when you guys come back to me when you spot some of the comedic elements I infused into the story with a huge grin on my face. Thanks for being playful with me, chicklets. (〃￣︶￣)人(￣︶￣〃)

💉 The med journals Alaina was printing in the internet café were her research on how to set up the diabolical contraption that killed Wekesa in the end. Looks like he was justified in being curious about them after all.

☎️ The number I said was Lola’s is actually Safaricom’s. It was a safe way to include some phone number while avoiding the obvious downsides of it actually being someone’s number.

🎶 It's Usher, baby: Did anyone else spot lyrics from “U Remind Me” in Umbrella? 👀

👑 I thought Bishop Mutinta, who Wekesa secretly resented, taking over Redemption after his disappearance was a perfect little “fuck you” to the scum bag.

🤢 I hope the conversation between Mr. Ben and Alaina made your skin crawl as much as it did mine; that’s one of the parts of the story that, unfortunately, most closely resembles reality. Then he goes on to feel a “fatherly fulfillment” for her achievements? Get rid of this man.

😼 The line “…the schoolgirl I had known and loved to humiliate...” was particularly satisfying to come up with because typically people say “known and loved.” This is one of those cheeky additions that especially made me feel like that bitch.

😵‍💫 In the third last paragraph of Vegetables, you may notice the tense change from past to present right around where shit starts to get real. That was another artistic decision many may not notice, but one that tickles my brain in all the right places.

🔁 The last line of Vegetables mirrors Mr. Ben’s greeting to Alaina when he called her. He was probably too horned up at that moment in time to connect the dots, though

🎬 Vegetables, Concluded: Eurotrip and Dead Europe are actual movies. I’m glad they did me the favor of fitting oh so perfectly into that line.

🎁 I also gifted Mr. Ben a personalized “fuck you” in the form of the discovery that Violet, the daughter he had dismissed and despised, was an active participant in surreptitiously bringing him to justice. Sweet, sweet justice.

Thank you for the love and feedback on My Girl. If you spotted any other Easter eggs or fun coincidences or plot strings, be sure to drop them in the comments below. Or in the website’s comments section.. I’m just as curious to find out where this gets posted as you are.

Can’t wait to introduce you to a new cast of characters in Aftertaste from Tuesday!