Rewrite Whispers.
After the sweep of my summer–those hours at my desk facing west, the late nights of typing, revising, drafting–my expectations are now skewed. I’d forgotten the give and take of writing, the crippling anxiety of a blank page, the ache akin to the moment before a panic attack.
This summer was a beast. I was a riding on a wave of adrenaline, of a schedule so full I didn’t have time to question my actions. I just wrote. I wrote every night and day until that draft of AFOT was done. (The title’s acronym is no longer AFOT, but for the sake of consistency and, as a nod to what the book once was, I shall keep referring to it as AFOT.)
It’s December and I graduate in May and senior year is nearly half way over and, SURPRISE, I intend to rewrite AFOT (again) between now and April, when my thesis–new (and perhaps improved) AFOT–is due. I promised one of my instructors that this will be my last go at it, that after this rewrite, I’ll move onto the book that’s been waiting so patiently for the last few years.
After April, unless extreme circumstances arise, AFOT will go into the drawer for a minimum of five (three?) years and my attention will be given to my fourth book.
This fact stresses me out. It always hurts to walk away, even if only for a short time.
The thing is, it won’t be the first time. An earlier version, the version I penned at thirteen, was in the drawer (well, mostly in the drawer, it slipped out a few times) for 2008 and 2009. During those years, I wrote another book. It was decent. It gained significant interest, but that interest fell flat. I was sixteen, then seventeen, and it was urban fantasy and I couldn’t get my mind to fill in plot holes, and then emotional cracks formed in my real life, and as a means of escape, I needed to return to Audrey, to AFOT, needed to retell Audrey’s story because she was whispering in my ear at night and I finally understood a bit more.
So I did a heavy revision of AFOT in late 2009. Again, an agent was interested, she’d requested the revision. Naturally, she disappeared, literally was removed from her management website, and that was that. I needed a break. I moved to Colorado Springs, and then to Humboldt County, and in Humboldt County, in spring 2011, Audrey whispered firefirefire, and I needed to know, was desperate to know. But at that point, for all of that year, I was sprinting to get into Colorado College–unable to produce much outside of coursework and applications essays and silly poetry and ranting blogs. So it wasn’t until summer 2012–after a sinus surgery that left me couch-bound for longer than I anticipated–that I was able to retell the story and bring in the fire. I wrote that draft in a month, then returned to school, where the Block Plan is such a beast that weeks often drip in one heave.
The heave of my junior year led to this summer. A challenge was sparked in June and I rewrote AFOT again–this time in present tense, at the suggestion of Ellen Hopkins–and I came closer to comprehending what happened that autumn, what Audrey did and didn’t do, what she said and didn’t say. But the fire remained elusive, smoke prevented clarity. I tried, I wrote until I couldn’t sit or type because of the physical pain, I took the book to the highest place it’s ever been. Yet I knew it still wasn’t there.
This September, I planned on letting AFOT brew for awhile. I slipped it into drawer-land with every intention of turning to my Mormon Book.
But, of course, in November, I was sitting in bed, wishing I was asleep because I had to wake for Astronomy in five hours, yet for whatever reason was staring at the weather app on my phone–scrutinizing Colorado Springs’s highs and lows with Eugene’s and Seattle’s and Fairbanks’s and Trabuco Canyon’s–when a wave hit. It sounds so fucking cheesy, so absurd and trite, my character whispering, elements of the story smacking at random, but that’s how it works for me. I can’t plot. I sometimes have a to do list of things that might/should happen, but I can’t plot. I write for the same reason I read: to understand, to get to end, to know what the hell happened.
So I was obsessing over the weather, and the absurdest truth of AFOT glared into focus. A truth that requires, basically, a total reshaping of the original plot. A main character’s age changes by four years. A significant subplot disappears. Someone who died now lives. A relationship is reformed and dimmed, just a bit. A house burns. More secrets twist into view.
Right then, I changed my plans. Mormon Book, I promise, I’ll give you my time so very soon (somehow), but until spring, until the last May snow melts, AFOT deserves my attention. For a decade, I’ve been mishearing, blinded by a lie of a subplot, and not seeing the true stakes of the story. And now, now I’m more intrigued by the fire than ever before, more enraptured by its allure.
I still don’t quite know what happened. What spark fed the initial flame. But that’s good. It means I’ll have to write to find out. So give me the will to find summer’s momentum, to turn off the anxiety, to treat my carpal tunnel and accept my exhaustion but write anyway. I need to tell this story. For me. Me now, at twenty-two, and me at thirteen, who listened to Audrey’s first lie.
On another note, last week was much colder than I anticipated (-14 at one point, still snowing now), as emphasized by the images of the snow I’ve posted as I wrote of summer and writing and total rubbish. Cold. Cold. Cold.
I’m officially prepared for Alaska.
I officially need to go to bed.
Sometimes I lie on a roof of a lodge beneath a bruised November sky at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains and I check my email on my phone and my inbox holds something I really rather wish I hadn’t received. Sometimes I’m bundled in my hideous pouffy lime green coat with a faux fur lined hoodie and I’m watching snow clouds form but still the direct sun is warm and the cheap red wine that I’m gulping from a water glass is cold and there may be marijuana smoke–smoke I can’t inhale because my blood is too thin–that weighs heavy in the air, because it’s Colorado, and didn’t you hear about Colorado last year? And sometimes, lying on said roof, I check my email on my phone because I check my email on my phone when I’m unable to be still, which happens admittedly more than I’d prefer. I check my email and I have a new email and I’m lying on a roof and hiding my face in my lime green hoodie and deep breath deep breathe deep breath and I cry for thirty-two seconds as fellow roof-dwellers hop-skotch and hoola-hoop and talk physics and the stars. Sometimes I lie on a roof and remember: no worries, this is okay, get up, get up, get up. It’s a good day. 
Sometimes I listen to myself. Sometimes I get up from the cold roof tiles and return inside and carry myself down the two sets of stairs and outside. I walk. I walk into the dry late autumn grass, baby cacti pricking my feet through the canvas of my Vans, the high desert wind scalding my skin red. I walk until the lodge is out of view, until I find a fallen tree and sit on the tree and cry. Sometimes I am allowed to cry. I cry and maybe I sob and it’s what I anticipated, the email, so maybe I should have listed to my mom and read The Power of Now or something. But no. That’s shit. I’m proud of what I did. I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. I’m proud of how far I’ve gotten. I’m not proud of my unintentional rhymes. But regardless, sometimes, things work out as they should. It’s just another plot twist. It’s just another turn in the path I’ll continue to follow. Sometimes I’m too cheesy. Oh, well, so it goes. 
Sometimes, I cry on a fallen tree on an early November late morning the day before snow in Crestone, CO and then I stop crying. It was more of a forced cry anyway–a “cry now because you should cry because, you know, it’s a moment to cry, cry now so you can pick yourself up and carry on” cry. I stop crying and I stomp around the brittle weeds and I kick a baby cacti bud and it hurts like hell and then I stomp back to the lodge and grab my laptop and my notebook and I write an email, I write two, and then I write just to write and I recognize how fucking lucky I am to be able to lie on a roof beneath such a stellar sky in such a stellar place and receive an email that makes me cry, but also makes me so wonderfully inspired in the same light. 
Sometimes too, I return to Colorado Springs three days earlier than planned, because sometimes my blood doesn’t agree with my standing at 8000 feet above the sea and sometimes I do hurt (and not only because of glorious emails) and need my own room, my own bed, my own place to be, and sometimes my sinuses feel near explosion and sometimes a friend is sick too. So we return to Colorado Springs, and we return soon enough for writing workshop, still meeting weekly after second block’s end, and after the two days of raw wind and rooftop email reading and forced sobbing on fallen trees, it’s glorious to be reunited with my something-of-a-writing family. And sometimes after only two glasses of wine, after two anemic, kind of sad, kind of glorious days, I appear far more intoxicated than I really am. Maybe it’s my pose (we were told to pose silly), or maybe it’s my posing beneath Drew’s lifted whiskey bottle. Or maybe it’s simply my elation. I like these people, fellow writers, fellow readers. I think they may kind of understand me. I think I may kind of understand them. I sometimes adore these people. I hope they sometimes adore me too. Usually though, more than sometimes, I suspect they mean more to me than I to them, but I think that’s okay. 
You wake up for a grisly exam and you do okay–better than you thought you would, given the circumstances–but still it’s the GRE, and you don’t even know if you even intend to go to grad school at this point and you woke at six-twenty on a Saturday, so it’s kind of a bleak morning. And then you go to work and the only thing your interviewee can talk about is your dining hall’s incredible bacon. You’ve never tried the bacon. But, yes, you agree, your dining hall is fabulous. Still, no reflective questions work. And so it somehow ends up that the highlight of your day is the trip to Walmart to pick up the snow tires you ordered online, because who the hell knows where your snow tires from 2010 wound up and EVERY SINGLE Colorado native you know won’t shut up about the disastrous winter to come and you no longer have the luxury of walking to school because you live in the westside now, which is lovely, but requires an often-precarious (even without ice) drive down Uintah. 
