Grimby’s Gratitude – Multiple Mutable Me

the E-Newsletter of Goldeen Ogawa • Issue 16, March 2019

Originally posted for Patrons on March 1 on Patreon

What have I done?

Cleanups for “The Last Voyage of the Odyssean” (Odd 3.6)
Edits for “Free Man Running” and “Follow the Dark” (Arcana 2.6 and 2.7).
Read-through of Lucena in the House of Madgrin.
Interior illustrations for The Aubergine Spellbook (Felpz Volume III).

What am I doing?

Cleanups on “All the King’s Mages” (The Camilliad, Book 2)
Edits for “Paving the Road to Hell” (Arcana 2.8).
Final read-through revisions for Lucena.
Interior illustrations for The Aubergine Spellbook and 3 personal pieces!

Where am I going?

This month I’ll be attending Emerald City ComicCon as an assistant of Kikidoodle, selling Purrmaids at her booth! Come on by and say hi. If you have anything of mine you’d like signed, bring it and I’ll sign it!

Multiple Mutable Me

The novel that I’m currently finishing, Lucena in the House of Madgrin, will as of March 29th, have been in the works for twelve years. This would have come as a shock to 2007-me, who was astonished to learn that Susanna Clarke took ten years to write Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. How can writing a novel—even a 300,000 word novel—take ten years?

Well, I do not know how it took Clarke that long, all I know is that with Lucena it has taken me three rewrites and two rounds of edits and multiple detours to write every other book I’ve published since 2012—and several more I haven’t yet. So although Lucena has been under construction for twelve years, it is not the only thing I’ve been working on in that time.

But why let myself be distracted? Why take two years off to make Year of the God-Fox? Why jump on board with Jill Hamilton and Professor Odd? Why keep opening up new stories instead of finishing this one?

Ultimately, why finish it at all?

Lucena is both the first proper novel I will publish—the rest having been omnibus volumes or collections of serial stories—and the last novel I wrote as a beginning writer. Prior to starting Lucena I had already written four novels which will likely never see the light of publication. Lucena was the culmination of the skills and experience I acquired during the writing of those first four. And writing Lucena enabled me to go on and write Bouragner Felpz and Professor Odd and Driving Arcana (and The Camilliad and The Queens of Azo and Star Walker, which you haven’t read yet).

Though Lucena’s story has not changed dramatically from the first draft I wrote over the course of 2007 and 2008, I was still in a stage of rapid growth as a writer, with the result being that the end of the book was exponentially stronger than the beginning. One reason for the high (for me) number of rewrites was trying to bring the beginning up to par. Then in March of 2014, while writing the second volume of Bouragner Felpz stories, I discovered a link to Lucena which made both stories stronger—and required another pass at the Lucena manuscript. That took another year, and was folded in beside writing three other serial stories. Furthermore, for each of these rewrites the manuscript went back to WoMo for (much needed) edits.

So here we are twelve years on, at last with the finish line in sight. And after all this, and with how much I have grown as a writer in those twelve years, it could look like stubborn vanity getting this thing into print at last.

But it’s not about that at all. It’s about honoring the me of 2007, who no longer exists. Though I’ve been pecking and prodding at the story for twelve years, and even now, in the final pass, correcting things with the impatience of a mother cutting cookies for her toddler, the fact remains that I could not write this book today. I could try, but it would come out as something else. I’ve moved on as a person and as a writer, but that doesn’t mean where I was was worthless.

Who we are and where we are in our lives has an effect on the art we create. Maybe not an obvious or predictable one, but still. Just as I could not have written Lucena before writing those first four intrepid novels, now with ten times the experience I could not write it today. It has a value in being what it is that can never be recreated.

It works the other way, too. I wrote the first chapter of the first book of the Camilliad in 2009 and then stopped because I recognized I was not yet the person I needed to be in order to write the story I wanted to write. It took six more years and writing over a dozen other books before I was able to write the stories I wanted to tell. Which changed in the writing of themselves, but only as all stories do as a process of their realization.

But doing all this has only strengthened my belief in myself as a young writer with the determination that her story should be unleashed upon the world, and that it will be good.

What’s coming in March?

Patrons can look forward to:

Saturday updates to the Sparks Gallery
Sunday updates to “Travels in Valdelluna”
AND exclusive sneak peeks at upcoming projects!

ProTip

If you have an email address that is difficult to spell out loud it helps to write it down on a post-it note in the NATO phonetic alphabet and stick it to your work station. That way when doing business over the phone you can spell it out for the person on the other end with less worry about them mistaking the D for B or the N for an M or what have you.

This post has been generously sponsored by my Fellow Traveler patrons. Come join the party!