a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought

So as I try to navigate my way through book promotion and the huge task of attracting readers, I made the decision to go back and start writing another book. Well, start is not the correct verb. I have a half dozen unpolished manuscripts on the hard drive and decided my imagination is too taxed to come up with something brand new. So I blew off some dust and set myself another birthday goal.

This one is old. Well, I say old because it has been kicking around my brain for over half my life. I started this in high school. Forgot about it. Picked it up again. Dropped it. Picked it up another couple times… and then lost it. I wonder if it is better suited for the dustbin of good but impractical intentions… but… well, then I started reading and gave myself permission for detached gutting… and now, ladies and gentlemen, I have another novel… or five.

More about that later. What prompts me to write is… the history of this writing. I have a story I created at age fifteen after multiple viewings of Christian Slater as Will Scarlet and Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham. The initial scenario was inspired by the lovelorn pinings of my friends and myself at the time… so faded into the woodwork of my life that I can’t actually remember the reality, just that the fantasy is some distant variation. I wrote this minor opus throughout my junior and senior year. It was my reward for struggling through American history essays and Calculus equations. The hour I granted myself at the end of every evening to visit this imaginary kingdom was my reward… and maybe the touchstone of sanity at the end of high school. I wrote the entire manuscript on computer (pre-mouse days), but didn’t save it. I still have the printed pages, collecting mildew somewhere… and I imagine that, more than any diary, would be an interesting insight to my teenaged self.

The story has evolved with each revisit. The first was in college when I started to grasp the visceral power of writing. I remember taking a particular scene to a writing class and being told it was the best first kiss someone ever read. Then I worked at Higgins and inserted a whole bunch of esoteric historical details. Then I went to London and inserted a lot of scenes in ivy covered forests. Then I went to Ireland and decided there needed to be rocky cliffs and caves. And… all the while my character grew as I grew. So even though her age stayed somewhere between 15 and 20 in the book, her mental age altered over the course of fifteen years.

Which is why I found myself debating whether or not I should pick this thing up again. How legitimate a perspective can I lend her if I am writing a teenager with the jaded sensibility of a 35 year old? Indeed, my 35 year old self has less patience for fantastic fairy stories than I had even three years ago… but then again, I just wrote a vampire novel. Isn’t fantasy the name of my game?

I spent a lot of my holiday weekend reading through the first section/book. I gained some insight into my 30 year old self, the last time I gave this thing serious pause. I saw how I’ve grown as a writer… and how there are some scenes that just don’t deserve to stay forever buried in the recesses of my computer memory. There is really one helluva first kiss.

I’m certain I will write more about the evolved themes and structure of this story. There is one that is eerily relevant to stories cropping up in the news… but maybe, maybe that just shows that this is the time to release this piece of fiction to the world. It does, however, really illustrate to me how a person can change her perspective throughout her life. Certainly writing has helped sharpen the focus much of the time. I think one of the most significant lessons I’ve learned from the process of writing is that setting words a piece of paper (or screen) does not make them immutable or sacred. Or compel me to stay current with them.

Words can change.  Thoughts evolve.  And the story can actually get better if one decides to let that happen.