Write What You Know

This week's guest blog is written by Noel Meredith from the "Mariel Cove" writing team. Noel began publishing articles as a teen and graduated with a Masters in Journalism in the '90s. She has lived in 45 of the 50 United States in more cities than she can count. She became a full-time pen-for-hire when investigative journalism proved stranger than fiction and Noel realized she preferred her life less strange. Noel writes the characters Arianna, Celeste, Gabriel, Devi, Marley and others.

If you take six dykes – twenty-four to fifty-two – and tell them to write interconnected stories about lesbians like them living in an isolated almost-all-woman town, don’t expect them to get along. And never, ever tell them to “keep the drama on the page.” It’s impossible. We’re women, after all, and the queer community has changed as much as cell phones in the last three generations. Just because we’re queer, doesn’t mean we have anything else in common.

Apparently, that makes for a damn good story.

When Jennifer DiMarco (Escape to the Wind, Seasons of Fire, et al) asked me to write the central character in her serialized lesbian erotic drama called Mariel Cove, I immediately answered, “What?” Jennifer envisioned Mariel Cove as a television show in novel format. There would be a “season” of twelve weekly “episodes” and a team of writers would each control one to five characters. If characters shared a scene, we’d write together. The idea was remarkable but the mythology of the Cove was even better and Jennifer had it all charted out.

Puerto Rican and Sicilian, renowned investigative journalist Arianna Trenton would arrive in isolated Mariel Cove under false pretenses and a twenty-year-old mystery would start to unravel. Along with this character, Jennifer asked me to write Celeste, a Black transplant from New York, a twenty-something ex-bicycle messenger trying to raise her deaf, autistic brother on her own and running from... something. I shared key elements in common with these two characters and I’d rarely seen them represented in queer literature, let alone any literature. I could not pass up this job.

Every season, the characters would stay the same, but the focus and the mystery would shift, so I knew that Arianna wouldn’t always been front and center. The writing team was expected to be fluid and adjust to these changes. Not always writing the “star” didn’t bother me, but the idea of co-writing gave me a headache. Isn’t writing, after all, the perfect career for introverted, control freaks like me? Plus, what if Celeste had a scene with some white grrl who didn’t know what a fixed gear was? I dreaded signing into the private writers’ forum for days.

I fished for details about the writing team. Were the other writers all white? Were there straight writers? Were there men writing the few male characters? I shouldn't have worried. I should have looked up interviews with Jennifer in The Advocate or MTV or any queer newspaper. This woman would not launch a white-washed series. So even if the team was all twenty-something, cisgendered, peaches and cream, politically active baby dykes from suburbia, Mariel Cove was going to kick ass. Of course, the team wasn't any of those things.

Over the course of twelve weeks, the six of us -- Katie Fairchild, Kimbar Halvorsen, Skye Montague, Rowan Reynir, Neale Taylor and myself – developed and wrote about characters who were often blackmailing each other, keeping secrets, falling in and out of love, butting heads and butting into one another’s business, all under Jennifer’s guidance to keep us cohesive and on-schedule. We praised each other after each episode was done, offered honest criticism and saw our preconceptions – be they about race, kink, outing, or age – fall aside while we strove to create the most entertaining scenes possible.

No, we didn’t always get along. But we never left the project. In some ways, we were just like the women of Mariel Cove. We existed in an isolated world of our own. Sure, in one episode, Celeste rode her motorcycle up the coast to blow off steam, but she came back. We always came back. Because Mariel Cove is worth visiting, worth losing yourself in, and just maybe, worth staying for.

And after our months of writing, on April 1, 2013, we got to welcome readers into our little world. It all adds to the melting pot so... full steam ahead!