Friday 8/9/24
A letter.
***
Hello. It is rather early in the morning. I have a lot to do today, but I wanted to send along a few words about words that are to follow.
I've mentioned that the heavy artillery will be coming. Things like "Friendship Bracelet," "The Ghost and the Flame," "Finder of Views." It's very difficult for me to single out works, even when I want to, because it ends up being unfair to the other works. If I was someone else and had somehow written "Finder of Views," and it was this exact story--which is not done yet, and will require great amounts of effort and care still--I could write this letter at four in the morning saying it was the best thing ever composed, which would require everything else I had composed not being what all of it actually is.
So I can't really say, "This is the..." I have things that I feel a certain way about and regard a certain way. As with the above three, "The Bird," "Fitty," "Best Present Ever," "Big Bob and Little Bob."
This note is about these two stories that are soon to come about which I also feel the same way. The reason I'm writing about them in advance like this, and in tandem, is because of how they were composed. Neither is done yet. I'm still working, but it won't be long.
One morning, I wrote a story and it wasn't done and I knew what it was wasn't going to be what it was, if that makes sense. Everything is written differently. Even when it's a matter of that "differently" playing out internally. That is, I create the document, I write from first to last, and there's me done--but what would have happened internally, as to the methods, would have been different than what had ever happened previously.
Each work is unique. The creation of each work is unique. The characters are unique. Each of them has different things to tell me. It is their story, not mine. They tell me the story. I do not impose a narrative upon them. It's their show. Their beach, their ocean. And until that time, I don't know them, we haven't met. So I have no idea what they're going to relay to me when we do meet. Who they are, what they're about. They will make it known to me.
I knew that I was going to move on from that text I had created but that I would use it. Almost like a chunk of marble. I copied the text, pasted it into a new document, and I began a new story, writing up, writing down, writing backwards--and forwards; removing, erasing, creating new words in the now-cleared spaces. Much was added, even as the size of the thing as a whole--word count-wise--got shorter.
This was something that I knew was special. Again, see my comments above. I can't really single anything out. Right now, I'm just speaking about this story. It's told in the first person by a mother about a visit to a place, having entered that place with another, and subsequently leaving it alone. It's called "May Showers."
Time went on. And as it did, I thought about how there was also something potentially very special in that earlier block of text. I began working on it. And working. And working. This story is told by someone--a man, a woman, we don't know--who is listening to the rain against a single window of the room they're in. The rain makes no sound against the other windows. And this rain seems to be in dialogue with the door in the jamb, which is making its own sounds.
There is a family of birds outside the window, behind the shade, who are soundless, despite--or because of--what is happening against that window. The narrator imagines a giant in the street, a god aboard a ship that whose hull is breached, and the god has pulled into this cove for repairs, before taking once again to its mysterious seas. The story is a ghost story. And if I had to say it was about one thing, that one thing--and I mean this completely seriously, for I think it is accurate, and I know what I have achieved here--is the meaning of life itself. This story is called "If Storm It Was."
There are phrases--and even lines--that overlap between the two stories which have nothing to do with each other. There aren't many that overlap, and what those words mean in the one, they don't mean at all in the other. So that's just a heads up. When you read them, you won't have needed me to tell you that they're not different versions of the same thing, because they're completely unrelated. This is just a bit of background as to how they came to be written.
It's likely--though not for certain--that "May Showers" will be added to There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, which, as you may know, has been changing (the revised version of "Dead Thomas" will also be with you soon), and that "If Storm It Was," will be in The Ghost Grew Legs: Stories of the Dead for the More or Less Living or the subsequent volume of unique ghost stories, which is called, How to Scare a Ghost: Human Stories.
A good day to all.
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