The Midnight Dance — Behind the Scenes: Chapters 17 - 19
Chapter 17
In this chapter, Elam enjoys his new life and Charles makes sure Elam eats. This culminates an a very romantic not-a-date.
Even though the summary of Elam’s daily life at the start of this chapter is so short, it took days and days of research since I knew nothing about ballet. In fact, in the first version of this chapter I had Elam mending toe shoes! I didn’t even know that men never wear pointe shoes.
Since I’d already started building in Swan Lake analogies, I wanted the pair to actually watch Swan Lake.
“That’s Jacopo Tissi. Isn’t he beautiful?”
I chose this particular production because Tissi is an Italian with dark hair and angular features like Charles. Charles is, of course, jealous when Elam says how beautiful Tissi is, not realising the similarity. The whole production is actually available on YouTube (though not embeddable) and you can watch it here. They tune in at about 26 minutes in. I did cheat a little though and used other choreography for the prince’s entrance, because in this production the Sujet is played before the entrance not during it, so the choreography is far less interesting to describe.
“Why is he dancing with a bird?”
Charles is me, as a six-year-old, going to the ballet for the first time. My mom loved the ballet and wanted to raise me to be a lover of ballet. The problem with Swan Lake as an intro to the art form is that the story is pretty simple and the dancing between each plot beat goes on for aaaages. And then you get the whole dancing with her while she’s a bird but cursed thing.
It took me until 2020 lockdown, when various ballets were being streamed to develop an appreciation!
And it was really Elam who educated me, too, because I had no interest in learning about ballet before I wrote him. I think ballet is awesome now.
Aside from providing some ballet appreciation for Elam and building on the analogy of the black and white swans, this scene was marked in my notes as “The Romantic Tension Scene”. I needed them to do something where they were touching but not in an intimate way and it wouldn’t lead to anything intimate, but they’d both want it desperately. The fact that Swan Lake is so long and difficult to understand, but also easily recognisable by most people, made it the perfect foil. What’s happening with the ballet isn’t actually important, it’s the foot rub that’s happening at the same time, and how Elam starts falling for Charles in the 20 or so minutes this scene takes.
“Maybe he senses who she is beneath the spell”
Elam pointing to the duality again. He’s realised that Mr. Grumpy isn’t Charles’s true form, that it’s armor. The thing about spells is that you can break them. He sees there’s hope for Charles and maybe he’s not such a bad bet for his heart after all.
Chapter 18
After the Romantic Tension Scene, I needed to force some distance to build the tension, so I inserted a little Cynthia’s salon interlude. In this scene we meet Patricia. We actually met her in Spindle’s Curse as a “retired Broadway actress” but Brian didn’t mention her name because he probably didn’t remember it (hello ADHD).
I imagined her playing Norma in Sunset Boulevard when the show opened (Glen Close was the actual Norma) which was about 1995. Elam was born in 2000.
It was also a nice chance to check in with our boy, Brian, and see how things are going for him.
Tarot time
I really enjoyed giving everyone Tarot readings. Since I am the all-knowing power that is in this universe, I could give them some little clues.
Brian draws The Lovers — This foreshadows the events of The Christmas Wishes.
Cynthia draws the Four of Wands — I wanted to show the card that Elam wanted to draw before the one he actually drew. The Four of Wands represents all of his desires. It represents “hard work with good results” and “harmony and positive feelings”. For Cynthia it means enjoying her retirement.
Patricia draws Seven of Pentacles — I wanted her card to foreshadow the opportunity she gives Elam at the end.
Elam draws The Tower first, which is generally considered the worst card because it means big upheaval or sudden destructive change or catastrophe. It obviously it foreshadows the broken leg. However, no card is really bad and The Tower also represents liberation and the freedom that can come from drastic life change, which is exactly what Elam finds with Charles.
In a previous draft, Cynthia made Elam draw an alternative card. However, I cut that because I liked how it linked into the next scene with Tresa. She gives Elam a false sense of closure — he accepts that this is the Tower and not Charles or any other calamity.
Waltz of the flowers
This is the dance Elam’s doing when Charles walks in:
Chapter 19
We start this chapter with Charles having lunch with Missy. I was initially a little annoyed that this ended up being a Sunday on my grand Timetable of Events, because it made it less likely that he was just having lunch with his secretary, but it worked out better in the end because Elam wouldn’t have expected him to be home on a weekday. Having it be a weekend added a nice bit of extra tension.
The restaurant they’re at is The River Cafe in Brooklyn. Charles is a fine dining kind of man and I wanted his favorite spot to be somewhere with a good view of his condo. I liked the idea of him looking at Elam without knowing that he was doing so.
Basing it at a real place meant I got to choose items off the actual menu for them to eat and for Missy to comment on. I love adding this degree of realism whenever I can.
I had a few things I wanted to establish with this chapter. The first, obviously, being that Charles was not on a date. The second was that Missy was doing an excellent job in her more senior position. I also wanted to lay the groundwork for the dynamic between them that becomes so important later on. This is the first time they’re together as something other than asshole boss and secretary. But another thing I wanted to explain in this scene is exactly how funding for Hedgemoney worked and how Charles can be so rich and so young. Again, this is me trying to add as much realism as possible. Hedgemoney brought in a ton of cash before it was profitable through venture capital, because this Southerman guy saw potential in it. However, now it’s been around for a few years the pressure is on because he wants to see return on his investment.
Venture capitalists tend to invest in a bunch of businesses in hopes that one or two of them become the next big thing and the amount of funding you secure is really just down to how much they believe in your idea. When we started the story, Charles was all but convinced that Southerman had been mistaken in investing in Hedgemoney and it was going to go belly-up like so many startups in the first three years. This scene is actually the turning point of his business, where the app is introduced that will become what he’s known for.
This is also the first on-page appearance of Jared, or “little red”, a future protagonist. We meet him in person briefly later in this book and discover he’s an influencer. I thought it made sense that the influencer would be the one to suggest the app.