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Who did you love before?
Who did they love before you?
—Better Than Ezra, “In the Blood”
Dearest Squad,
I promise to write this essay in the vaguest way possible so as not to spoil anything…but I want to talk about it because I am so in love with this chapter. This might be my favorite chapter in the whole book. I have been building up to this chapter for over a decade.
I am a collage artist. But first I was a poet.
This chapter is collage art in word form.
This chapter is a poem.
I’m sure there are academic words I don’t know to describe this kind of exposition depending on the media: callbacks, circular storytelling, etc. I don’t know these words because I was raised in math and science. I learned literature on the side. In secret.
Defiantly.
One of the most interesting things to me about this chapter is that I always knew it was going to happen in this way, and why, but my mind had never tied it all back to my siren mythology until I stepped inside Hawk’s noisy head and started writing.
Hawk was always fascinated by sirens.
And now that I’ve tied it all back to the beginning, it looks like I was brilliant and did all of that on purpose! Hmm. Maybe I was brilliant all along and was just too much inside my own head to realize it.
Ah, the magic of storytelling.
I’ve said before that this novel revealed itself to me in layers — this chapter is the mille-feuille. It’s the rug that pulls the room together.
To me, this chapter is better than tiramisu.
I still remember the day that the history of “a thousand years of Faerie” sprang into my head, fully formed. I walk around with this knowledge every day, like the Memory Stone from “The Unicorn Hunter.” The past and present of the world of Arilland is there inside my head, everything everywhere all at once, as fresh as it needs to be. It knows no timeline. Every time I sit down and flesh out one of its stories, I feel like I’m not inventing it, just remembering it clearer. And it all fits together like magic.
When I arrived at Deborah Blake’s house in NY for a writing retreat (the first of two last fall—BLESS YOU, DEBORAH), I thought I was halfway through the book. I had about 40,000 words and figured I’d get to about 80k or so (the first three Woodcutter books were 70-75k). I did a TON of writing while I was there, mostly making notes for the rest of the book.
Slowly—SO SLOWLY—one by one, I turned each of those notes into a readable chapter. Some of them ended up being so long that I broke them into two chapters. Or more.
Those notes covered a lot.
Ask Nisi Shawl sometime about just how long I had “only seven chapters left.” Every time I finished a chapter I would say, “And now I only have…seven chapters left!” This went on for a while. They enjoyed teasing me about it, which made the writing a lot less aggravating and a lot more fun in the end. As long as I kept writing, I knew I would get to that perfect last line. Eventually.
Even if the only one who sees the beauty in this chapter is me, it will have been worth the time I spent writing it…and writing the entire rest of the book that this chapter could not exist without.
xox
Princess Alethea
PS: “In the Blood” kept going through my head while I wrote this chapter. It was always my favorite Better Than Ezra song.
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