State of the Project: Mercy

I have been taking advantage of unemployment from teaching this summer to do a slew of writing on my current sci-fi novel, Mercy. (Pausing for a moment of gratitude at the socioeconomic privilege that allows me to take this time to write instead of looking for a summer job.) I am presently about 3/4 through a pretty solid first draft and moving quickly, looking forward to doing a preliminary manuscript critique swap with my friend and YA author Camille Picott in a few months.

At one point, I almost changed the title of Mercy to Villains, which would be a pretty apt descriptor. The book's basic argument is that we all do cruel things to each other sometimes because, being human, we get hurt and we lash out. The most mustache-twirling villain is nothing more than someone who's been hurt enough to lash out with irrational rage and deep psychological imbalance. I've thought about this a lot, while writing Mercy and even while reading kids' superhero books to my son, where Batman fights the Joker, or what-have-you. I find myself paying less attention to the hero or the plot than the villain's psychology (even when he's cardboard and has none). In one book, I was positively surprised when Batman carted the villain off to jail and the story ended without our ever finding out why the villain was so obsessed with turning Gotham into an arctic deep freeze. "Isn't this missing the point?" thought I.

Anyway, that's the point of Mercy. Its protagonist is a basically good woman, if anything a highly moral, self-exacting woman, grappling with the recent loss of a very important friend in the fallout from cruel things she had said in a time of personal pain a few years before. She'd behaved as a villain—and got her comeuppance, as villains generally do. Still in the first flush of the shock at her friend's desertion, she is thrust into a sci-fi road story mystery, marooned with some other folks on a planet and trying to figure out why/how. The book centers on her unpacking of motive: who would want to strand them? Why? What's emotionally at stake? What pain has pushed someone(s) to play the villain in deserting them in this place? It's my hope that her personal struggles will resonate with the broader question of the role of pain and revenge in human doings (personal to international).

So why is it called Mercy? Because we can't atone. We can't heal all the wounds we gouge. We can't undo the words that scar the memory of others. We can only hope for forgiveness, hope to forgive others, hope to forgive ourselves in the light of truly coming to know ourselves better. We can hope for mercy.