For those of you who have no idea what that title means, Dodi Li is a short story that I started this summer and that I’m rewriting before National Novel Writing Month starts in two weeks. It means “my darling” or “my beloved” in Hebrew and should not be confused with a popular Jewish song that is sung sometimes on Friday nights by Jews everywhere.
Dodi Li features a succubus, a demoness who visits men at night as a beautiful woman and steals their sperm in order to create demonic children or steal pieces of their soul through fornication, depending on what myths you believe. However my succubus, who I’ve named Umuruk (sounds like a name a succubus would have, right?) is not the antagonist of the story. Instead, she struggles to protect the other protagonist, a male she’s fallen in love with. Succubi have fallen in love with humans before, according to the folklore and stories I found by people who say they’ve had experiences with succubi (it’s on the Internet, so I can’t be sure if the writers are crazy or not, but I try to keep an open mind), and I decided to tap into that for this story.
The first draft was very plot-oriented, and sucked immensely. I decided to leave it alone until I could think of a way to make it better, and if I couldn’t, then it’d make a great learning experience. But yesterday in creative writing class, my teacher gave me an idea on how I could improve the story. So I went back and started to completely rewrite it, going until half-past ten last night, and then resuming for a little while this morning before class.
As I was heading to class, I realized something about my story: the main character, whose nine years old, and the antagonist, a 40-something with some mental issues, are the only male characters. All the rest are female: the doctor, the head nurse, the head of neurology, a possible detective character, and of course the succubus Umuruk, are all women, and all are women in positions of power that they use to help people.
I started to wonder if that might mean something, if my psyche was trying to tell me something through my writing. If it’s that I respect women in positions of power and that I think there should be more of them, that doesn’t surprise me at all; I grew up in a house full of women, my mom’s a rabbi, my boss is a woman, her boss is a woman, and I took a Women’s Studies course my first year at Ohio State, which I did very well in. So no surprise that powerful women show up in my story.
However, if it has something to do with the fact that Umuruk is able to help the main character more than these women, then I wonder what that might be saying. Perhaps even if women are educated and in positions of power, if they don’t occasionally open their minds to the impossible, then a mentally unbalanced man will hurt an innocent nine-year-old? That’s also a possibility.
In any case, once I finish the story I might understand more, and if I manage to get it published, you might be able to read it and give me some suggestions on what my Muse is trying to tell me.
Anyway, I’ve got some homework to do before I go to work, so I better get that taken care of right now. Have a nice day.
Oh, before I forget, something funny I have to tell you: I was talking to my history teacher after class today, and we had a really great discussion on the way out the building. You see, at the beginning of the semester, my teacher, whose focus is African History, told us that if any of us intentionally failed his class, he’d used magic he learned from tribal priests to enter our dreams and scare the heck out of us. Ever since then I’ve been trying on and off to get him to agree to teach me how to enter people’s dreams (can you blame me?).
At some point during our conversation, my teacher revealed he’d been joking, but I thought he’d been serious because he said it in such a serious way. This led to a discussion on witchcraft in different cultures, which led to a discussion on using magic and summoning stuff. That led to a discussion on spirits and possessions, and in the end, I ended up recommending my teacher to go see The Possession, which I reviewed back in September. Turns out, he agreed to see it. How about that?
Anyway, I think it’s funny, I have no idea what you think.
Rami Ungar The Writer 