As Pride month comes to an end (in fact, Toronto’s Pride Parade is today), I’m thinking about a pair of characters in Another Glass of Tea who were a surprise to me. I intentionally set out to ensure that my secondary and tertiary characters reflected the wide variety of backgrounds and experiences I see in people around me, and in cities near me. That means that Fiona has a group of friends in Toronto with a variety of heritages.
Different writers have different processes. For me, I knew there were certain markers along the way, and definite scenes and moments that would have to happen, in order to carry the story forward. But I took great joy in writing the in-between moments, and I sometimes found the narrative taking me places I didn’t expect.
Because my novel focuses on relationships – between friends, between lovers, between family members and between siblings – I wanted to at least pay a passing glance to a LGBTQ2+ relationship. After all, love is love is love, right?
When I started, that’s all it was going to be. Fiona’s brother-in-law would quietly just happen to be gay, would happen to have a partner, and we wouldn’t mention it again. And yet the wickedly smart, and highly emotional lawyer Adam and his partner, Max, a gruff but creative fine-furniture maker with a thriving workshop, kept showing up for Fiona and her family in ways I could never have imagined before my brain and my typing fingers connected over the keyboard. While I don’t claim to be an expert, and would never try to write that relationship in depth, these men became more central to a large chunk of the story, and I like to think the novel is fuller because of it.
Not all my meanderings away from the main milestones made it into the final draft. Left on the editing room floor was an entire flirtation between – funnily enough – a writer named Metin and his own editor, that I loved and thought was well-crafted, adding a bit of extra tension as fun flirting threatened to turn into something else. At the end of the day though, in a manuscript that was already getting a bit long, it just wasn’t required. Maybe it will turn up in another novel another day.
Interest in learning more? Check out Another Glass of Tea.
