Full Circle is a very old story I wrote in 2002 during the time I was writing the
Conover Saga, so it's not at this forum. You can find it here:
http://denisefelt.weebly.com/full-circle.html But today I finally wrote the Author's Notes for this story. Here they are.
Behind the Scenes of
Full Circle by Denise Felt 2012
Yes, this review of my story is ten years overdue. This was a very emotional story for me to write, forcing me to delve into feelings I would have much rather not brought back to the surface. Because of that, it took me a long time before I could even write this story once I had the idea. And as you can see, it’s taken me even longer to talk about the writing of it.
This story was inspired by Dragon, who (as I have stated often and loudly!) always gets the best ideas first! Fortunately for the rest of us, she is quite willing to allow others to tackle her plots and make them their own. You gotta love a generous soul like that! She wrote a story where Mary looks back on her marriage years later and realizes a few things of importance. Dragon never took the story where I wanted it to go. She has her own mind about those things, and so she should. But when I asked her if I could try her basic plot idea and go somewhere new with it, she was all for it. Even with her okay, it still took a while before I felt comfortable enough with my own past to write this story the way it needed to be written.
Chapter 1: We begin the story with a woman who has just received a promotion. We don’t know who she is yet, but by and by we begin to get some clues. She’s a recent widow, and her husband’s name was Philip. And there are hints that she has suffered greatly in her past. She mentions a first marriage so that we know that Philip was her second husband. Hopefully the reader is wondering about now who her first husband was because of that tantalizing glimpse into their marriage: “an intense fire she still carried the scorchmarks from.” We get one clue when she mentions that it was a bitter divorce. Fans of the series should have a fairly good idea from those words who our woman is now. And finally we learn her name, confirming our suspicions. She’s Mary.
Fans of UFO are widely divided in their feelings about Mary. They either hate her guts or they feel sorry for her. But there is no middle ground. I was always in the camp who hated her, finding no sympathy whatsoever for a woman who clung to her husband so tightly that he couldn’t breathe, then railed at him for needing some air. However, Dragon’s story about her was the first glimpse I got into a Mary who had grown past that childishness into a mature woman who could stand on her own feet. And I was intrigued enough to want to explore that growth.
Since this story takes place in the late 80's, I have brought in the technology of the day. So Mary has a computer on her desk and access to the Internet. 1:And who does she check up on? Guess! In her inner musings about her ex-husband we find out that, although she was not very mature when she was married to him, her feelings for him went very deep. And she is still haunted by the failure of that marriage, wondering if any of it had been real at all?
I play with reality often in my stories. It’s a theme I enjoy exploring. I suppose as a writer I spend so much of my time weaving tales out of thin air that it almost makes me question where reality ends and fantasy begins. So in my stories I do just that: question it. It satisfies a need in me to ask the question, and my readers have never seemed to mind how many times I ask it.
These heart-searchings of Mary were the hardest part of the story for me to write, because they required me to dig deep and bring back to my mind those feelings I dealt with after my divorce. In this age of ‘easy come, easy go’ marriages, it’s possible to think that no one really suffers any fallout when they fail. But that’s not true. You can’t get that close to someone without them leaving a mark on you, and once they’re gone you’re left with so many self-doubts and what-ifs that you can go mad if you don’t deal with them. But it takes time to distance yourself from the pain before you can look at things objectively and begin to heal. And since many go from one relationship right into the next, they never give themselves a chance to heal. But Mary’s second marriage is over now too, although not through divorce this time, and she’s finally had the distance necessary to look at her life in a better perspective.
And she has some unanswered questions. The most important being: had Straker ever really loved her? The reader knows he did – and still does. And hopefully, whether they are Mary-haters or Mary-pityers, the reader is wondering how long it will be before Mary finds this out. But while she’s asking herself these questions and searching for answers, she finds out a few odd things about her ex-husband. I never tell you what she suspects, but it should be obvious. I mean, what would
you think?
Then we cut to the studio, where Straker is having to deal with a stubborn actress who has broken her contract. And Alec has even worse news to pile onto that trouble. Poor Straker! He never gets a break, does he? He’s worried of course, and he admits later that it was always a constant worry during his marriage. But for now he refuses to take any action, hoping no doubt that it was an isolated incident and Security doesn’t ever need to know.
A note about his ID code. I don’t know how things are done in other countries, but in the US, if you know someone’s social security number, you can access most documents about them. Our military operates this way as well, so as long as Mary knew Straker’s SSN (which she would as his wife) she wouldn’t have any trouble accessing his military file (at least the unclassified parts.)
We return to Mary in her new office as a coworker tries to hit on her. She puts him in his place without difficulty, but then asks him to check his own military records for her. Obviously, she hadn’t yet managed to come up with a scenario that made sense if she was still digging. But what she learns only confirms her questions in her mind, and she goes back to Straker’s military file to double check.
Uh oh.
We find out (as if we were ever in any doubt) how the commander feels about his exwife during his talk with Alec about the security breach. We see Straker’s own pain as he admits that he hasn’t spoken to her since their son died. And the chapter ends with him determined to find a solution to their security problem without involving Security. Wanna lay odds on whether he can do it? *grin*
Chapter 2: In the series the various writers seemed to try to pair Straker with every female in the senior staff at one time or another. Although none of the pairings ever ‘took,’ it gave the overall impression that the women at SHADO all adored their commander. There may have been a great deal of truth to that, but probably not to the extent the series made it seem. However, when I was writing this story in 2002, I went with that image and had all the Moonbase girls have a crush on Straker.
Lt. Joan Harrington has always been my favorite Moonbase girl. Gay was too cool and Nina too much an unknown for me to find any common ground with them. But Joan occasionally showed us how ornery she really was under her professional surface [see
Conflict and
The Dalotek Affair], and that quality I could relate to and appreciate. So in this story I give her the chance to show just what a fun character she was.
We return to Mary to find her worrying about opening her home to a lodger. And we learn a bit about her relationship with her mother, who we only got glimpses of by Mary’s replies during their phone conversations in the series. But it was enough, wasn’t it, to tell us what kind of woman she was. Then Mary meets Joan, who is a photographer. I ran a small town photography studio for seven years and loved every minute of it. So this was a good field to have Joan be in, since it didn’t require me to do any extra research. I’ve also learned over the years that some people definitely are not good photographers, so I was able to play on that for this story and use it to further their friendship and the plotline.
Joan finds out very quickly that Mary has a locked room in her house! Wonder what’s inside? The chapter ends without her finding out, but I hope the question she asks herself about whether she will like Mary when she knows her better makes the reader wonder as well.
Chapter 3: Mary and Joan hit it off well together, but later we find Joan meeting a man at the local pub at lunchtime. Gee, I wonder who that could be? *grin* I had a lot of fun with this initial conversation and report between them, because it gave me the chance to show how Straker was feeling about this ‘project’ as well as Joan’s reaction to certain details that her boss shares with her.
Back at the house, Joan picks the lock on the locked room and finds that it’s a bedroom. The reader should know right away just whose room it is, if they hadn’t already had a good idea, but Joan finds out slowly, mostly through the pictures hung everywhere. I love photography. With pictures, you can capture a moment in time that will never happen again. Freeze forever a special feeling or look on someone’s face. And when you look back years later, it’s almost like time travel to revisit that moment. Joan gets to do that when she finds the two photos of Straker with John and Mary with John. And she’s shocked at the difference in Mary’s countenance from the past to now. But she’s even more shocked by the change in her commander’s countenance.
This story borrows heavily from the episodes
Confetti Check A-OK and
A Question of Priorities, since those are the only times we get to see into Straker’s marriage in the series. So I had Mary reading a travelogue on Athens, where she was supposed to have gone on her honeymoon with Straker. Joan, on the other hand, reads smut novels.
I thoroughly enjoy a good ‘smut’ novel, as they are called. For me, when they’re well-written they have nothing to do with smut and everything to do with passionate love. And I’m such a sucker for romance! I suppose that’s why my stories all end up as romances, even the ones that didn’t start out that way. But finding a good romance writer isn’t as easy as it sounds, so I’ve waded through a lot of wild and crazy stories on my way to building a library of the best. Some of those improbable scenarios are really hilarious if you think about them, so I had Joan telling Mary all about them.
Then Mary tells her that one of those scenarios wasn’t really all that improbable. I could just imagine Joan’s eyes bugging out when Mary lets this tidbit fall, and even more so when she realizes that Mary is talking about the commander! But the humor quickly dissipates as Mary reveals her shame over her first husband’s infidelities and leaves the room.
I had a friend who didn’t understand why this information would upset Joan. But I hope most readers get it. It’s not easy for any of us to realize our heroes have feet of clay, and with Straker such a rigidly moral leader, it has to be especially mind-blowing for Joan to hear such news about him. It would shake up her world.
Chapter 4: Unlike their last meeting at the inn, this time emotions run high between the commander and Joan as each struggles to deal with painful new information. And Straker finally loses it. I’m very moral myself, so a slur against those principles that I hold dear would be difficult for me to swallow without comment. For the commander, who is beyond exhaustion and worry over this powder keg he’s sitting on, there had to come a moment when he simply couldn’t take such a slur in silence. To Joan at least he could defend himself, since she was in the know of his true occupation. But she’s shocked that this was what broke up his marriage and miserable at the prospect of leaving things this way.
The next while is a little lighter as Mary and Joan continue getting to know each other. Joan learns that Mary is alone in the world now that her parents, her son, and her second husband are dead. And she (and hopefully the reader) begin to understand what sparked this search of Mary’s for the truth.
Joan shares that information at her and Straker’s next meeting, but the commander can’t worry about such things with the greater concern of protecting Mary from Security hanging over him. So Joan checks out Mary’s bedroom, where the reader learns an interesting tidbit about Mary’s choice of bedspread. Do you think Philip ever noticed? *grin*
Later Joan gives Mary the celebration she deserved for her promotion and they talk about reality and fantasy. One of the most devastating things about divorce is the feeling of helplessness that accompanies a failed marriage. Especially if you did everything you could to make it work. It takes years to get past such feelings of inadequacy and we can see here that Mary hasn’t yet gotten that far. She’s certain that her husband turned to other women because she wasn’t pretty enough to hold his interest. This is so far from the truth that Joan can’t take it and follows her to her room in defiance of her orders from the commander.
Two things I hope the reader notices about how Mary perceives her two marriages from this scene, even though neither one is expressly said. Her photos from her marriage to Philip are loose in the box under the bed along with the damning photos of Straker with other women. But her photos from her first marriage are in an album hidden in the bottom of her lingerie drawer in her dresser. I wonder which marriage was more important to her?
Mary – when forced to look at the photos objectively – realizes that her wild thoughts a few nights before could actually be true. Which of course leads to a reexamination of the situation when John died. Joan doesn’t know what she’s talking about when she brings up the medicine, but hopefully the reader remembers. I love it that she wastes no time feeling sorry for herself, but decides to act on this information. She finally knows what to do to confirm whether it’s true or not. Do you know what she’s going to do?
Chapter 5: She goes to see him at the studio under the pretext of taking him some of his things. I have to say that bringing his old Air Force hat into it makes me get a lump in my throat every time (and I wrote it!) It brings back so easily their wedding day where she wears his hat as they head to the hotel. Today their conversation is stilted; Mary – cordial but looking for clues how he really feels and Ed – wary and unsure what she wants from him.
Later we find out that she learned the one thing she needed to know – that he still loves her! And what a change it makes in her whole outlook on life! Joan is pleased enough by this reaction that she tells the commander what it was all about. Naturally, he isn’t pleased because he knows this means Mary knows too much to be out of danger. But Joan is confident that Mary can figure out a way to make it work. Her faith is more in Mary’s determination than her commander’s panic, but is she right?
Chapter 6: I never explain the conversation on the phone that Joan overhears the next day, but my readers are smart, so hopefully they understand what it’s all about. From the name change at the hospital and Mary’s comments to Straker after John dies, it’s pretty obvious (at least to me) that she buried her son with Rutland’s surname. I don’t know all the legalities involved in doing such a thing, especially in England, but since other writers have always assumed the same thing, I felt free to use it in this story. It’s not canon exactly, but it is one of those areas where most fans agree without any concrete evidence. And if she was going to put things right, then she needed to fix that headstone, didn’t she?
Alec wouldn’t leave his friend in torment long, so of course he had to stick his oar in to try and diffuse the situation. When I wrote this scene, I wasn’t sure how Mary was going to take it. But when I wrote the part where she looks at the newspaper photo, I knew immediately how she would react. And I was proud of her!
Again when Mary takes off on Sunday with some flowers and is gone quite a while, Joan doesn’t know where she went. But I hope the reader had no trouble figuring it out. She made peace with her son for giving him the wrong surname all these years.
Mary’s showdown with Straker is one of my favorite scenes in this story. She’s no longer the clinging newlywed, unsure of her husband’s love and of herself. She’s a woman who has garnered success in the business world through her abilities, and she knows what she’s good at doing. Since it’s an area where Straker had always complimented her in the past, she is confident when she presents her proposal to him.
One of the ways in which sci-fi makes fun of the military is by taking note of the ridiculous expenditures cited in their fiscal reports. As if any of that were believable! So it was a pure delight for me to do the same by giving Mary this way of helping her ex-husband’s secret military outpost. Alec’s reaction was all it should be, and Mary is hired as an accountant for the ‘studio.’
A couple things about Straker’s laugh when Mary admits that her office is bigger than his. First of all, I never see Straker as a vain man (except in his tailoring, which is different), so I don’t think it would bother him at all that she had a bigger office. In fact, I think it would make him proud of her for her accomplishments. And second, he had just managed (with her help) to get rid of the entire security problem that had been hanging over him, and in fact, had sent Alec to put a bug in Security’s ear about their fiscal reports. He had to be feeling such enormous relief after the gut-wrenching past few weeks! And third, his heart had to be lightened considerably to have her finally – after all these years – in the know about his job. No matter where their relationship goes from here, at least he will never again have to worry about her falling into Security’s clutches. And fourth, most of the times we see the commander laugh in the series are during his marriage to Mary. (The only other times are with their son.) It was the most carefree time of his life, in spite of all the problems that cropped up. She was good for him. Maybe not completely at that time, since she was too young and unsure of herself to handle all that their marriage demanded of her. But even so, she was good for him.
And since I was a former Mary-hater, that was the greatest surprise to me of all.
He shows her around HQ, and eventually has to come clean about Joan’s involvement. But Mary takes that in stride, mostly I’m sure because Joan is just so cheeky about it. And we see what having a good friend has done for Mary. She’s come out of her shell. And if Joan has her way, she’ll never go back into it!
Epilogue: The story winds down with the commander going on a date with his exwife. Alec teases him mercilessly, while Joan assures Mary that her dress will knock Straker’s socks off! The only somber note in these fun scenes is when Alec asks his friend if he can really let the past – with all its hurts – go? And Straker shows his true nobility of character when he tells him that he can.
I wanted to take care of any lingering doubts Mary might have had about her ex-husband’s ‘actresses’ before they took their newfound friendship any further. And that ridiculous zebra skin rug some prop man put in Straker’s apartment finally has a reason for being there. To make him tell her the realities of filming as compared to what we see onscreen. The story ends with a kiss, but it’s to be hoped that the reader has no difficulty continuing it on in their imagination.
And maybe – like me – when they rewatch those episodes that feature Mary, they’ll look on her with a kinder eye.
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