De-Aging Rosemary and Time

… I guess that’s what you’d call it. Whatever the case, the long process of moving Rosemary and Time out of the boundary zone between middle-grade fiction and teen novel to firm middle-grade territory has begun. I’ve started to rewrite the first chapter, removing all references to high school and age and trying to make the characters sound younger. To my surprise, the only reference to Rosemary being 14 or being in high school comes in a single sentence referring to grade nines and tens in snowball fights. That and Rosemary can no longer be reading The Mayor of Casterbridge as part of her curriculum.

Noelle, Erin’s friend and our window on the publishing industry, was kind enough to give me a number of strong suggestions on how to improve Rosemary and Time, some of these quite apart from just lowering the characters ages. Here’s a paragraph in her suggestion letter that I found especially useful:

I have another thought about being a loner for Rosemary. You allude to her older brother Theo having had a breakdown — but Theo was also cast as Rosemary’s protector. Could the breakdown have caused Rosemary to suffer more from teasing? Is everybody waiting for her to go ‘crazy’ like her brother? Could that make her really wary of trusting anyone her own age? Also, could her brother’s breakdown make her wary of help at all? Did she idolize him, and then he crumbled and became someone to pity? As well as being horrified at the recent developments, could she be angry that Theo is acting weird again and getting everyone upset and getting all the attention? These are normal reactions for an 11 year old, particularly a precocious one.

Well, Rosemary is going to be 12, not 11, but Noelle has a very good point. Rosemary accepts Peter’s help very readily. Should she? And if not, why not? And, yes, I did mention Theo’s breakdown in the second chapter, but the matter gets glossed over. Could we connect these elements and use one to complicate the dynamic of the other?

Here’s the original draft of a scene in chapter two. A few paragraphs beforehand, Rosemary was attacked by the fictional character Marjorie. Peter comes to the rescue:

When Rosemary’s vision cleared, she saw Peter kneeling over her. “Peter!” She grabbed his arm.

“Rosemary! What?”

“There was this girl.” She was talking much too fast. “She — she — she was looking at me through the bookcase, glaring. She grabbed my wrist. She tried to pull me through!”

“You’re bleeding.”

He took her left arm and looked at her wrist. His eyes widened.

Where the girl had grabbed her, her wrist was covered in thin red cuts, two dozen or more. They weren’t bleeding much, but they hurt.

“These look like paper cuts,” said Peter. “This girl cut you?”

Rosemary shook her head. “No, she just grabbed and pulled.” “Where did she go?”

“She just disappeared!”

“Disappeared?!”

“I saw her yesterday, at the school library. She disappeared there, too. She just turned and… and… vanished. Peter, what’s happening to me?”

Peter looked at the front doors. He listened hard.

“Peter?”

“Shh.” He listened for a minute. “This library’s empty.”

“Mrs. McDougall’s in the back.”

“Nobody’s in front. We’re the only ones here.”

“Peter…” Rosemary’s voice quavered. “You believe me, right?”

He picked up the book that had hit her on the head. It was a thick volume of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. He felt through her hair and she winced when he found a developing goose egg on the top of her head. There was a bruise by her right temple, where she had hit the bookshelf.

Rosemary gulped. “Peter? Do you believe me?”

He stared at her wrist. The cuts made the shape of a hand and clawing fingers.

He looked up with a gaze that was the most serious she had ever seen. “Yes, I believe you.”

The feeling of relief made Rosemary giggle. “God, Peter, I feel like such an idiot!” In the new version of this scene, Rosemary launches into the story before thinking through the consequences. When she realizes what she’s said, and how it sounds, she’s horrified:

When Rosemary’s vision cleared, she saw Peter kneeling over her. “Peter!” She grabbed his arm.

“Rosemary! What?”

“There was this girl.” She was talking much too fast. “She — she — she was looking at me through the bookcase, glaring. She grabbed my wrist. She tried to pull me through!”

“Where did she go?”

“She disappeared.”

“Disappeared?!”

“I saw her yesterday, at the school library. She disappeared there too.” She stopped suddenly, staring up at Peter in horror. “You don’t believe me.”

He blinked at her.

“Of course you don’t believe me. Disappearing girls. It’s crazy talk, and you know, coming from me, it was just a matter of time.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play dumb! You heard the stories about Theo and his breakdown! You have to have heard, everybody was talking about it. Everybody’s waiting for me to go crazy too. Of course you don’t believe me; I don’t believe me!”

He looked at her with a gaze that was the most serious she had ever seen. “I believe you.”

Rosemary stared at him. “How? Why?”

He nodded at her wrist. “You’re bleeding.”

Where the girl had grabbed her, her wrist was covered in thin red cuts, two dozen or more. The cuts made the shape of a hand and clawing fingers. They weren’t bleeding much, but they hurt.

“These look like paper cuts,” said Peter.

“You believe me.” The feeling of relief made Rosemary giggle. “God, Peter, I feel like such an idiot!”

There you have it. It helps that the new section cuts a number of words out of the manuscript and makes the whole thing read faster. So, Rosemary doubts not only the people around her, but herself; good tension there. And Peter reaffirms that what she’s seeing is real, which helps bring them closer together. But what is Peter’s motivation in all of this? Why is he there? Why is he willing to stick with Rosemary through something like this? Hmm…

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