Sometimes a character grabs you by the throat and demands his own story. SUGAR DADDY is about one of those characters.
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Cover photo by Christian Buehner @christianbuehner unsplash.com, with thanks.
Three key things about SUGAR DADDY:
The main characters are Paul Rosenberg, a 55-year-old property developer, and Jan de Witt, a 30-year-old aspiring jeweler;
The action takes place between New Year’s Day 2000 and New Year’s Day 2001, with a coda set in 2013;
Paul lost the previous love of his life to HIV/AIDS; Jan* is a near-perfect doppelganger for that man.
*that’s pronounced Yahn, by the way.
I wrote SUGAR DADDY between April 19 and April 25, 2020, making only minor tweaks since then. Sometimes they come that way. It’s a 31,500-word novella with a happy ending.
In the above key points, I’ve mentioned a fairly significant content alert. Paul Rosenberg lost his first love years ago, but he’s still grieving when the story opens. The entire novella deals with that. There’s some trauma on Jan’s side, too: he grew up in South Africa, and his father (foreman of a diamond mine) was violently killed there.
There were a few reasons to set this story in 2000. Same-sex registered domestic partnerships, for one: these became legal in California in 1999.
Another reason was that the story was specifically going to be about Paul, a character I created for an early novel. I knew a lot about him already (including, of course, his age) and if I wanted to give him a later-in-life second love it needed to be early enough in his life that he and his new partner still had many good years ahead. Being 55 myself, I know it’s not too old.
The story hinged on a look-alike, right from the start. It’s a pretty well-documented (thanks to the internet) phenomenon: every human being is unique, but many human beings have a counterpart somewhere. Another person who looks sufficiently like them, even though unrelated and half a world away, that they could be mistaken for each other.
So the precipitating question was, what if an older man encountered, in the flesh, a man who very strongly resembled his first love? What if this new man had character traits and talents in common with that first love? What if this new man was also drawn to Paul?
Paul has been conditioned to want a man like Jan, but he’s determined not to make a move. He’s twenty-five years older and very well-off; the perceived power inequality bothers him a lot.
Meanwhile Jan is faced with someone who’s very much his type: older, shorter, darkly handsome. Someone who’s offering the resources Jan needs to launch the career he always wanted. Someone who is determined not to turn this into a personal relationship.
Jan respects that. He learns about Paul’s first love, and understands the Why Not. But as anyone who’s been in love knows, there may come a time when the consequences of moving forward separately are worse than the consequences of trying to move forward together.