Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Almost twenty years ago, I had an idea about a hero who could surround himself with an impermeable shell. I tried to write about it, but I couldn’t find the focus while I was in college, so it never got beyond a short prologue. That prologue may exist somewhere, but I haven’t seen it in years. Certain elements of the prologue resemble parts of the present draft’s first chapter, but it is mostly re-imagined.

I made another attempt in 2020, just before the covid pandemic began. You would think that would have been an ideal time to press on, but my anxiety got the better of me. A chapter or two may exist in a Google doc; I haven’t looked for them for a while, and I don’t remember how they go. I think the story is probably better for my not incorporating them.

In the fall of 2023 I wrote the bulk of the first chapter; parts of chapter two came in the following spring. I worried that I was going to let the story get away from me once again, but in the summer I made the determination that I could write seriously if I wanted to. It got harder to focus when the school year began again and I returned to tutoring, but I didn’t give up.

Over the years I imagined characters and scenes to fill out the story. Some of these did indeed make it into the present draft, at important points in the plot. Most of these were altered in some form or another, however, and probably seventy* percent of the plot was devised since I began writing in earnest last summer. I answered questions about tone and characters and motivations that I’d never been able to settle in years of musing upon the story; I discovered themes that appealed to me and used them to carry the narrative forward.

On March 24th, 2025, I finished the first draft of the novel, which since the previous July I had begun to call The Ghost of Canard University. It ran to nearly 99,000 words; when I started writing I had no idea how long it was going to be, but something I read told me it had to be at least 40,000 to “count,” so that had been my unofficial target. I exported the file to PDF, and marked it complete. For the first time, the story I had been developing mostly in isolation existed as a sequence of words, complete from beginning to end.

Prior to that date, the only person beside myself who had read any of these words (apart from a poem that I included in a blog post last year) was my wife Ariele, who read a few select chapters at my request in order to reassure me that I was not absolutely out of my mind. I thought I would find it hard to work if anybody was reading the book before it was finished; now at least five people have possession of the PDF, and I await their feedback with bated breath.

I am already aware of at least three** major issues that need revision in the next draft, but I also believe that large swaths of it are likely fine almost exactly as they are. That’s the optimism in me, a trait that dwells uncomfortably alongside my depressive tendencies and my recurrent imposter syndrome. But having reread various sections since sending off the PDF to be reviewed, I can’t help but feel that the novel is good. I’d read something like this, if somebody else had written it. I’d probably give it a pretty good review, if the author found himself a wise editor first (the eternal cop-out, but what can I say except that it needs editing).

Incidentally, I’m trying to find one of those (a wise editor, that is) right now. I also may need a literary agent, as well as a clue for how to turn PDFs into the kind of things people buy off the shelves of a book store. Having finally produced the kind of work that can allow me at last to claim the mantle of “author,” even “novelist,” I must admit that I still have not shed that of “neophyte.” But one thing at a time—I wrote a novel, folks. Every one who ever accused me of doing just that whenever I took more than the length of a tweet to explain what I really thought or how I really felt about something can finally rest assured that there was some justice in their words.

Except that now that it’s out in the world, even in this limited way, I can’t help but think that it isn’t quite finished. When draft two is completed, it’s going to have at least one substantial addition: an epilogue. It occurred to me as I lay in bed the other night that one character, the aspiring poet Sybil Johnson, had allowed her own story to resolve without any acknowledgement of her own literary ambitions. She will have the last word, and she will have it in verse. This means of course that I have to actually write the poem, and while I feel I know her well enough by now and have enough confidence in my own chops as a poet that I’m sure I can succeed at this task, it’s not the sort of thing I can just dash off on the spot. It is, however, something I can probably cook up while my first readers wend their way through the draft, and I imagine they’ll agree with me that it adds something that was sorely missing.

So that’s the state of the novel. As for the state of the novelist, I’m still suffering from various levels of disbelief, and anxiety over how my novel will be received by people who haven’t spent ages thinking through its various aspects. But I also have a mug of tea, an afternoon in which to play Secret of Mana, and great plans for the future of this project.

*As always, when I throw around numbers like this they should be understood as feelings and approximations; I haven’t actually counted anything.

**Ditto.