The history of ‘Summer Heartbreak’ the novel began the same day as ‘Summer Heartbreak’ the album. I usually work like this. While making an album, I write a story based on the music, or I start making a song while writing a novel about the same thing. For me, these mediums are nothing more than tools of storytelling, meant to convey these stories. So if one does a better job than the other, it is obvious that I will use that one instead.
Since it’s like that, it’s not a bad idea to listen to the album while reading this work. (https://johnjrenns.bandcamp.com/album/17) I used excerpts from the novel as lyrics for the album, and added lyrics from the album to the prose of the novel. But the album doesn’t tell the same exact story as this novel. The chronology of events are a little jumbled. Albums, by nature, find it hard to tell a straightforward story, unless it’s a full-on musical. So I switched around the tracklist a lot while composing the songs. What is most of all important to an album is the flow of the music. In a way, the ‘novel’ of Summer Heartbreak tells the story of Sia the 17 year old, while the ‘album’ of Summer Heartbreak tells the story of Sia the adult. It’s the same story but from a different angle, in a different context. Instead of looking at the album as a musicalization of the novel or looking at the novel as a novelization of the album, it’s better to say they are the same story but created under different toolsets.
This is how I ended up creating this work. It was the summer of 2019. I was put in some ‘media creation’ club. It would only last for one month. I was tasked with creating a ‘video media’ in this class. Anything was fine as long as it was a video. A film, a vlog, a let’s play, etc. I had always wanted to make a music video using my music. So it seemed like a tall order, but I decided to create a music video. I didn’t really have a song I liked among the many I had made in the past. So I decided to write a new one for the video. That song is ‘Rock ‘n’ roll saved my life’, written on the last day of May. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuUgKQlODYE)
When I composed this song, the storyboard of the video was more or less already there in my head. But it’s not like I intended for there to be a certain story while writing the lyrics. I just wanted to express ‘the mindset of a girl heartbroken over a love not meant to be.’ At this time, the ‘you’ in the song might’ve even been a boy. I hadn’t decided yet.
But as I started drawing the storyboard for real, these two characters started to take shape. I wrote a few more tracks in the process. ‘Deep Nostalgia’ and ‘The Smith and The Cure’ were among these songs. (These were actually the first songs I wrote, which is why these are the tracks Sia writes in chapter 10.) So naturally I started writing this novel to flesh out these characters. This is the origin of Summer Heartbreak.
I was put in a tricky situation. The music video, the album, the novel - I had started working on all three at once. I shifted most of my time to making the album, which I believed I could finish the quickest. This may sound strange. Typically, people are under the impression that creating an album containing 30-40 minutes of music is quite a time-consuming project. But at that time I had already been making music by myself for more than 3 years, so it was easily where I was the most confident. I had written books for much longer than that but I hadn’t really completed anything recently, and the music video was literally my first voyage into the medium. So I focused on making the album. This was around June 17.
After 6 weeks of production, Summer Heartbreak the album was done. I self-published the album on bandcamp.com on the 9th of August. At the time the media creation class was already over and I had not finished my task in time. But the album garnered more reaction than I expected. It was the first album where I wrote the lyrics only in Korean, but my foreigner friends showed passionate responses. They were fascinated by the sound of western emo music akin to ‘weezer’ combined with the sensibilities of Japanese indie rock a la ‘Yorushika’ or ‘supercell’. (Though in actuality, while all of those were inspirations, my biggest influence was ‘Shinsei Kamattechan’.)
The album was out so I started working on the music video again. And after 1 month I completed the MV for Rock ‘n’ roll saved my life. This MV was mostly inspired by Yorushika’s MV for ‘言って(Itte)’. I think it came out better than I thought. Once I was finally done with the video I sent a mail to the teacher of that media creation class, who was quite impressed. She told me there weren’t many kids who completed something of this level. (I honestly don’t want to fill this afterword with self indulgence, but that’s what I heard.)
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The only thing left to finish was the novel. I tend to work fast with music. Give me 15 minutes and I can compose you a song, give me a day and I’ll complete the instrumental, and with one more week I can write lyrics and record vocals. I don’t really have quality standards when it comes to music so I tend to just make it and try posting it on the internet. But writing is different. I’ve written stories since I was very young but speed was never on my side. Writing a few dozen words can take weeks; and of course, even that I throw away most of the time and start writing it all over again. No matter how hard I try, it seems like writing will always just be a slow activity for me.
So after around 16 months of writing, I completed this novel. The album took 6 weeks, the music video took around 2, and this novel took about 64 weeks.
I don’t have much to add on the story itself. I just wanted to write the kind of GL/Yuri story that I like. Painful but bittersweet, and obnoxious but relatable - that’s the kind of story I wanted to tell with these two girls. But I wanted to avoid the cliche of ‘a bright cheery girl saves the depressed girl’. In fact, Song Sori never does save Lee Sia. One can’t go on hoping for other people to save you. In that situation, the best you can hope for that person is to hope they can save themselves. (This is something taken from Bakemonogatari. “ You're the one who can save yourself.”)
As I wrote this book, I wondered whether I should use a first person narrator or a third person narrator. If I had used third person, I think it would have read better. Some of the more obnoxious parts wouldn’t be there as well. But I thought Sia was this novel itself. Her thoughts, her state of mind, and her worldview - without these things, the novel would lose what made it special. It was actually very difficult to write from Lee Sia’s perspective, and that must’ve been one of the main reasons why this book took so long to write. She’s truly an unstable mind beyond the point of tolerable. The pain you felt reading it cannot compare to the pain I felt while writing it. So I thought it was important to begin and end the story from the perspective of her as an adult. No matter how lost you were as a little lesbian girl, in the end everyone grows up.
Writing the ending is also one of the reasons why this took long. Chapter 2 to chapter 9 were all plotted in my head from the moment I had finished the album. The meeting of Sia and Sori, the summer they spent together, and the day they broke up. All I had to do was just put these moments in my head to words. (Of course, the version you read is the draft created after countless revisions.) But I felt the story didn’t feel complete with just that. So I decided to open the first chapter from the perspective of Sia as an adult, making the ‘main’ story part of a frame story. But I honestly had no idea how I’d end it. I kinda think I could’ve just ended it at chapter 9. But even though I like bitter endings, I thought this was the ‘empty’ kind of bitter. It was like the storyteller wanted to stop during the middle so they made up an ending along the way. That’s why I decided to write chapter 10.
To be honest, I could write another whole novel from chapter 10. The story of adult Sia and adult Sori trying to rekindle their once innocent relationship again while they live as adult women. If I wanted this book to be a full length novel, I could’ve written that story. It would take another 16 months, of course. I still could write that story. But then it would feel like the first half only exists to prop up the second half. Not that it’s wrong to structure a story that way - but I think this story is just fine enough with 28,000 words.
Summer Heartbreak is essentially my debut novel. I’ve been writing as a hobby for over 10 years now, but under numerous accounts and pen names. And none of the stuff I wrote back then is any good. I’ve mostly released music under this JohnJRenns name, and I’ve only posted a few short stories and a serial on hiatus. (It’s a romance story called ‘Too Much’. I think I’ll one day wrap that up. Though I don’t really like it...) Summer Heartbreak is not a perfect story but I think it’s a good introductory piece to JohnJRenns as an authour. I hope you enjoyed it. And I hope to create more GL stories under this name in the future. And if you want to, please listen to my music as well. (https://johnjrenns.bandcamp.com) I seem to have more talent in music than literature, so that’s what I make most of the time. I plan to release an album every month for the year of 2021. I welcome you to look forward to that.