ieva melgalve

Today, for the first time in a long long while, I got the kicks out of writing. Finally (after 7K words), I led my protagonist to really really hate me. Well, not me, but the people and the culture I created.
She is, it seems, very resistant to pressure. She can take it, for a long long while, not telling anything, not complaining, just accepting things that are happening to her even if she knows that they are wrong and somehow flawed. Then, for quite a while, she tries to keep her eyes squeezed shut in hopes that if she doesn’t see the problem it will just go away.

This is when she finally broke, when she said, that no, this is not right, this is not how it should work, and to hell with all the people who are saying that this is how it goes.

Yes, it’s just a small village resisting the change, resisting an opportunity of growth and the risks that go along with that. But for her, this village is the whole world–even the people from the next village are alien to her, they’re “others”. And still she broke, and she burst out, and she said no to everything she’d learned as true and right, and good.
We don’t get this sort of conflict in modern world–I can safely piss off all the people in my country and still I’ll find somebody to talk to, somebody who doesn’t give a damn about what those Latvians think of me. But in a world without Internet, without literacy even, this is not possible. Your neighbour, your mother’s sister, your village elders–they’re the whole world. You don’t get another chance of communication, normally.

Except that I think she will.