narrownights

001.	universe	002.	edge	003.	cleave	004.	distance	005.	away
006.	home	007.	key	008.	star	009.	dust	010.	shadows
011.	old	012.	new	013.	borrowed	014.	blue	015.	promise
016.	dishonour	017.	wreck	018.	fix	019.	crack	020.	discover
021.	fiddle	022.	fire	023.	water	024.	waves	025.	salt
026.	balm	027.	fear	028.	wear	029.	mask	030.	truth
031.	courage	032.	hope	033.	raised	034.	fall	035.	spring
036.	birth	037.	morning	038.	welcome	039.	belong	040.	share
041.	count	042.	mean	043.	teasing	044.	fantasy	045.	game
046.	work	047.	bed	048.	turn	049.	swing	050.	kitchen
051.	cull	052.	quell	053.	arrested	054.	inside	055.	chance
056.	alive	057.	sleeping	058.	late	059.	rain	060.	bottle
061.	steal	062.	brilliant	063.	theory	064.	practice	065.	war
066.	storm	067.	voyage	068.	swim	069.	wallow	070.	settle
071.	ground	072.	space	073.	silence	074.	screech	075.	snap
076.	scratch	077.	bug	078.	lighting	079.	faded	080.	ghost
081.	history	082.	time	083.	mirror	084.	drawing	085.	trailed
086.	way	087.	run	088.	here	089.	heart	090.	perfection
091.	right	092.	sanction	093.	can	094.	collection	095.	crowd
096.	oversight	097.	graduate	098.	laughing	099.	unless	100.	final

I've definitely hopped through 100 Fandoms in my time. This should be fun!

 I want to take a moment to discuss my first BIG project that spiraled out of control -- and why it will never come to fruition. Here, because I don't think anyone else in my life is going to really 'get' it. Certainly not my family, who don't understand there is a difference between building a skill and creating a finished, profitable project. I think the notion that this series, which I've spent the last decade working on, is never going to be on the NYT Bestseller list would take them out.

Ghostly was originally titled Mother Monster, and it was supposed to be a project for "The Creative Process", a university course I took in my third year of post-secondary school, and the only one I spent at Dalhousie University. My mental health had been in a downward spiral since high school, and when I began having serious panic attacks in my second year of uni, I decided to try to outrun myself by moving across the country. 

(Not to spoil the ending, but it was a mistake. It turns out that I follow myself wherever I go.)

The point of the class was to listen to speakers in creative fields, choose a creative project of your own, and then, using all you learned from them as well as your own creative self, finish that project. It should've been in an easy A, and if it had gone according to plan, I would've ended that year with a finished novella (Mother Monster) and only two semesters left to finish my BA in English Literature. 

Mother Monster was going to be a simple Novella. The protagonist, Hailey, is a fourteen year old girl living in the country with her family when everything goes awry. Her father leaves them to move in with his mistress. Her older brother moves out to begin attending university in the city. Hailey is left in the big country house to pick up the pieces, but her heart broken mother begins acting strange, and Hailey realizes that thing she's living with is a monster who has taken her mom's place. She calls out for help, but no one is listening, and ultimately has to survive the monster in the house. (Spoiler, she survives, but childhood has been stripped away.)

Super simple, and grappling with a lot of feelings I had towards my own family when I was aging out of my teens.

I never wrote this novella. I thought about it a lot. I had a brief outline drawn up. Nightmares about the thing in Hailey's house plagued me for weeks. 

I became borderline agoraphobic. I could sit and stare at a piece of paper for hours without writing a single thing. I stopped completing assignments in my other classes, even ones I had originally been acing. Then I stopped going to those classes, because I decided everyone hated me. I dropped out, moved home, and got a job at the gas station in my little town. 

I supposed it makes sense; Hailey had been begging for someone to help her while I quietly suffered and posted selfies in my room.

When I finally saw my doctor about my mental health, I resolved to finish Mother Monster, but it no longer seemed to 'fit' me. I realized I didn't want to write a literary piece, or a novella at all. I wanted something commercial, something I could release online in installments before self-publishing down the line.

So Ghostly evolved. It still held the theme of lost family and the stripping away of childhood, but Hailey got a new best friend, Vincent, and a love interest, Ghost. Hailey got a little older, sixteen. In this iteration, Hailey discovers early on that her mother is not her mother at all but a monster. The discovery happens in the car and causes an accident that kills the monster.  She calls for help and learns that her entire family is missing. Her investigation leads her to another world, where she learns her best friend is actually a runaway prince and she was drawn in as bait to get him to come home. It was messy, and didn't really make a lot of sense. Why take her family and not just her? Why play around with a monster in the house at all, when there's so much going on beyond the veil? How do you wrap that mess up in a way that doesn't feel trivial?

I wrote that version in its entirety and it is a hot mess stretched between two notebooks. I rewrote it on my computer, but couldn't iron out the kinks.

I tried to eliminate her family all together by putting Hailey in college, but that didn't work out.

I set it in the 90s. Then in 2000. I wrote and rewrote the beginning and wrote it again.

Then the idea really took off.

In my last iteration of the novel, Hailey is seventeen. She helps her brother move into his dorm but is a real jerk about it. She's quietly coming to terms with the fact that she's queer and makes the mistake of trusting a random college student who, it turns out, wants to feed her to a monster in another world. Ghost rescues her, but when she returns home she realizes she left her cell phone behind. The people she escaped from come looking for her. They take her family. When she tries to save them, she and Ghost wind up trapped together on the other side of the wall, where the government is on the verge of collapse and the people are filled with a terrifying hunger. The light of this world is flickering out, cities disappearing overnight with no survivors. Hailey has to overthrow the corrupt government to save her family, but there is no going home.

This version of Ghostly isn't even about Hailey. She's just the vehicle who gets us to the other world so we can peer in at the more interesting people. It would have been a series, focusing on the various families of the other world. 

So, yes, at this point Ghostly is dead. (Pun not intended.) It isn't the story I want to tell. It's survived too much. I've clung to it like a child clinging to their first teddy bear, and like Hailey in that original version of Mother Monster, I need to grow up.

(I've had other abandoned projects as well, of course; a romantasy I wrote last year about a marine biologist who falls in love with the fallen king of the merpeople, a romantasy I started about an artist who uses the last of her money to rent a cabin in the woods that's rumoured to make anyone who stays there into a creative genius, an outline and a few chapters about a prisoner on board a dysfunctional pirate ship, a rewrite of my high school novel that features a princess who learns she is really a dragon.)

I get it. It's tiring to heard about "the next project" when none ever materialize. But I have always had to learn my lessons the hard way, and now I can definitively say what I know not to do when writing a novel. And spending a decade working on one idea, changing the very foundation of it every few years as my life circumstances evolve, trying to squish more and more into an expired idea until it doesn't even resemble its own foundation, that needs to end now.  

RIP Ghostly. You carried me through a rough ten years, and struggling with you has left me a better writer.

I read this book the other day. It wasn't good. It wasn't bad. I had never heard of the author, or the book before. It was a discount book from the bargain table at an Indigo, and it sat on my shelf for six months before I picked it up on a whim and read it in one night. I didn't read the summary. I didn't post it anywhere.

I did a brief workout, plucked it from our shelves without looking at it, laid on my bed, and fell asleep with it in my hands. I woke up at 3a.m and I finished it before drifting back to sleep.

It transported me. Not to another world, but to my own past. We went to the library often I was a child. There were four of us, and my mom took us to the library at least once every two weeks. I had my own library card. The local library was two floors. The top floor held magazines, box computers, and two rows of Adult novels that were very thick and very uninteresting. Downstairs was where it was really at. To the left were picture books for the kids to choose from. The Bernstein Bears, Little Critter, Franklin, and the much coveted Robert Musch were always prominently displayed. 

To the right was a single row of middle grade novels that ran perpendicular to the graphic novels and manga followed by two rows of young adult fiction. This was my  playground. I would pull books down at random, barely glance at the descriptions, never look for an author name or a review. Ever. I would stack them in a pile so high my mom would desperately try to impose limits of four or five (seven was usually my magic number). She would push the stroller full of books and children back to our house three blocks away and I would disappear upstairs to build a fort with crocheted blankets that let just enough light in through the holes, and devour them as quickly as possible. 

They were consumed, loved, and stacked in a trophy pile until we returned to the library, where I promptly forgot all about them. I had no idea what 'good' writing was. Popular books were the ones other kids at school talked about, the ones we fought over in classrooms (Where's Waldo, I Spy, the collection of Beanie Babies).

That was the purest I think reading could ever be. No pretension. No weeping over beautiful prose or trying to find a perfect star rating. No comparison between this story or that story, or looking for sprayed edges or gilded titles. Little me picked the book up, read it all the way through, then put it in a pile and loved the next one. Over and over, tirelessly. 

I have reached a point in my life where I can admit to myself that my degree was a mistake. Not only because I dropped out with two semesters to go, not only because it threw me into depression and agoraphobia, or because it created a debt so deep I may never crawl out of it, but because it taught me to be a critic instead of a creator, a reviewer instead of a reader. 

But this book, read in one night with my critic brain struggling to keep up in the background, brought me back to that feeling of huddling in my fort with dappled crocheted sunlight spots falling on worn books from the library. And I was happy.