Act 3 of my novella rewrite
If you've been reading, I've resumed my work on my novella. The biggest working problem with my manuscript that caused me to turn away from it for months was that the relationship had advanced too quickly. The will-they-won't-they resolved in a way I didn't find satisfying. I've so far made it through what remained of the second act, which was mostly about the main couple navigating their new relationship. Now, it's been replaced with more anxiety and yearning.
But I've now reached the third act. This is when the non-romantic plots began to come to the forefront, taking focus away from the central relationship. There was less time spent in romantic scenes. I have less rewriting to do here, but those little snippets are going to be replaced with more romantic tension. But reaching the third act is frustrating in current America.
It was a few years ago in a school board meeting at the district I taught at. A parent read from a book that was part of a curriculum about dating violence. The passage the parent read from was an explicit (but non-pornographic) description of a non-consensual act. This incensed local parents in the rural district, all orchestrated through Facebook groups with names that included words like liberty or patriot. These parent groups pressured the district into removing books from the library. Some of these were questionable for student access (I believe A Court of Thorns and Roses was one of them), but also many books from LGBT+ perspectives, and voices of color. The book in question was approved by TEA.
It was a common occurrence across the Texas and much of the Deep South. English teachers had to purge their personal libraries. School libraries were purged. Some of these district fully removed their libraries. Much of my school's library and several of the curriculum book materials were packaged onto pallets. My classroom was right at the end of a hallway almost no one went down, so the pallets were set outside of my classroom until they were to be destroyed.
I quietly took a few of them home. I have been mulling over setting up one of those little library houses for the books somewhere. I just didn't want them to get destroyed. I know a couple of those books were stolen by my GT students at the time. I may have lingered in my classroom a little longer than I should have before going out into the hallway, for plausible deniability.
Act 3 of my story deals with a very similar scenario. A book in the library is called out by parents at a school board meeting, with all the outrage occurring on a Facebook page called Patriot Moms Of Baydale County (a fictional satellite of Austin in the southeast region of the conservative Piney Woods). Griffin and Claire co-teach an 8th grade English Language Arts class, and so are hit especially hard.
To add more tension, there is a hotly contested school board election is coming up, with three seats on the ballot - enough to sweep the school board hard right.
The conflict becomes how the characters navigate a system that is slowly broken down and attacked by the very community it serves, and how it tears apart and turns a small town against each other. But the scene I am in right now is an after school meeting, so familiar to the one I was in years ago, where the superintendent was speaking to us campus to campus to brace us for the storm that was coming.
We're still in it - there was a swath of wins against the religious right in school board elections across the south, including in my own. Schools all around me are struggling to stay operating, with state funding being stagnant for years as Greg Abbott pulled political strings to cram vouchers down the throat of Texans after it had already been defeated in a referendum previously.
School districts across Texas have growing excess lists - People whose positions need to be cut. Layoffs of auxiliary staff. Increasing the temperature on campuses. Increasing class sizes. Increasing the amount a student has to walk before they can get a bus.
Greg Abbott plans to allow voters to abolish Texas' school property taxes, which fund much of our schools. Allegedly, the funding would be paid for by other streams, but would they? Would it be enough? Or would we shift toward more performance-based pay as more schools failed, or pseudo-privatization of education via the charter school system to backdoor segregate schools?
I can't say I'm optimistic as the Republican party takes every opportunity it can to fuck public education over the decades of its rule over the Texas legislature.
Either way, it's good to get back to my writing again.
Thanks for reading~