Perhaps the biggest enigma presented here is Sylvia's liaison with Genise. You can assume they were highschool sweethearts of a sort, but there is still plenty of emotion between them. But I don't want to spoil what happens next with too much information, so I'll stop here.
Just one more comment about background material, though. I've peppered these scenes with references of music we were listening to at the time. Can you guess what they were? The first person to post all of them correctly in a comment will be eligible for a complimentary copy of the premium comicbook, when it is done.
I had to go back and look, but it made me smile when I did. I only found two, but, my my my, were those songs of that time. :-)
ReplyDeleteHint: The album covers are also references...
ReplyDeleteHa, is this from experience? I do love the close up of the finger prints, nice touch.
ReplyDeleteWell, yes...but I am inspired by Jerry Mills "Poppers" from the early eighties. He features a talking "comic" crab lice which is a little precious and I feel detracts from how serious an epidemic like this can be. I wanted to use the same story, but point up the real horror of discovering something live crawling on your privates. My own experience has shown how poorly informed people are about parasites, and how shame is often used as a justification for denial. Too often I've had friendships end, when a good dose of an anti-parasite remedy would have quickly fixed things!
ReplyDeleteLoren of course over-reacts, suspecting the worst of Geof. This is not how I've reacted in most cases during my life, partly because I understand there are lots of innocent places one can pick up such unwanted travelers. But my first experience was horrific. I was accused by someone I'd just met with being slutty and filthy, which was overstating things quite a bit.
In my rewrite, I think I may take some time to illustrate the attitude of my one boyfriend who handled this type of situation with intelligence and compassion. He didn't accuse me of sleeping around on him when he discovered the deplorable critters. He just asked me enough questions to determine I'd picked them up from a dormitory mattress. Then he asked me to shower and use a bottle of remedy he kept in his medicine closet for just the situation.