It’s hard (I mean EXCITING) to be rewriting the first half of the book I’ve slaved over for intense periods during the last five years. Not that I’m bitter, exactly, it’s just that I thought I knew how the story was supposed to go four years ago. (Hey, I think Adrift… turned five this week!)

Okay, that rant’s behind me. On to the new thing I’ve learned in the last few weeks.

The ghosts knew a lot and were telling it as flashbacks. Now I’m dramatizing those scenes and the story is changing. I’m seeing options.

Look back at your first love affair. You think “He and I were in love from the first moment.” But were you? What about the first time he farted…were you so in love with him then?

And don’t you remember all the miscommunications that happened? The arm stretch that you thought was going to be the first hug but it really was just an arm stretch? Or when he turned to you and said, “I’d really like to…(long, loving gaze)…watch the football game tonight.”

So I have an opportunity to be evil. To not make the path of romance so true. (Okay, so maybe it never was that true in this circuitous book.) I can throw a monkey wrench into the works on its first rotation, so that although Sylvia may remember she was in love with Cort from the first time she saw him and that love never waivered, we know that he passed a little gas along the way.

This post was originally written February 7, 2008 for the private blog of my writing group, Novel-ties.

I’ve been hacking a big swath through my book. Even the title changed from a lush Adrift on the Dark Sea of Memory to the economical but evocative Twilight. The number of ghosts is still hovering at three but their musings are much more focused. This is now firmly Cort’s story, not Gillian’s. I wonder what my characters think of all these changes. Well, I don’t have long to wait.

Last night in my dreams I found myself visiting my grandparents (Thelma and Bart Bishop, who in the book I’ve broadly fictionalized as Sylvia and Cort Dillard).

There was their little house on the corner of 12th and Wayland in Sioux Falls and me turning into the long gravel drive on a motorcycle(!), and both of them there, blessedly, as they haven’t been since I was eight.

They are older now than they ever became—at least in their 80s—and Grandma, who was always petite, fits into my anxious arms like my seven-year-old niece. I cradle her head against my chest and inhale the smell of her that has been gone from my life for nearly 30 years. She leads me through her tiny kitchen into the room that used to be the dining and living rooms combined. The table is gone and the furnishings are modern.

And there is Grandpa! No bald head or dimness in the eyes from the brain cancer (how strongly those changes in him impressed themselves on me, even though I was only eight when he died). He is a little wobbly on his feet, grasping a cane to rise and greet me. He is not as hale as Cort, but he loves me as much and his eyes are as blue and twinkle as lively.

I comment on how the room seems smaller, and Grandma shows me the porch they made from half of the living room. A part of my dreaming brain marvels that their life has gone on without me while another part wonders: Why didn’t they ask me to add a porch to their house?

I ask Grandpa about his garden, and he admits his kneeling days are over. They’ve just sold the strip on the other side of the driveway to a young man a few blocks away who wanted a flower garden. Grandpa is free to wander through the young man’s paradise but can leave the weeding to the stronger back. It’s a match made in heaven, he says, and I wonder: Why didn’t I buy the land or just give them some money? I leave the connection with them for a minute to berate myself for how long I’ve been gone from them and how poor of care I’ve taken of them.

Then Grandma’s hand comes over mine, as real and warm as the sun, and I remember this is a dream and to give myself a break. Grandma says, “We love what you’re writing.” And I wake up.

Today, I can hardly breathe I am so happy.

This post was originally written January 15, 2008 for the private blog of my writing group, Novel-ties.

It’s like balm, hearing the world of my book (Adrift on the Dark Sea of Memory). Yet it’s also the edge of a dangerous cliff. Until I have the time for full immersion, I allow myself only that one sense. To see or smell or touch or taste anything would risk a tumble that I don’t have time for this exact minute.

And so I listen to the chair in Sylvia’s childhood bedroom. It’s creaking as her father rocks Cort to sleep that first night. I hear the boy’s waning hiccup of grief, the crack of the floorboards when the father’s weight comes forward in the chair, the low hum the man makes by habit now that he’s been rocking children every night for a year since his own wife died.

Slowly he rises, hoping not to jostle the boy out of the forgetfulness of sleep. There’s the rustle of the covers as he slides them slowly back, the indrawn breath of Sylvia (who’s only a delicate-boned four—but wait, that’s peeking) and the slow squeak of the bedsprings while he lays Cort down between his daughter and son.

The man sorrows. His tears will fall nearly soundlessly when he’s safe in the private loneliness of his room. Tomorrow the sun will rise and he will flip pancakes for his children and this new motherless boy who has crawled into him in a way he fears. He will whistle and sing because they need him to show the way out of grief.

I keep my eyes open as I listen to Cort’s even breathing, look out at the holiday lights of downtown Saint Paul as they brighten in the gathering dark, resist the urge to fall past this world into that other—into the touch of its velvet grasses and its silky puddings puddling on my tongue. I can resist the boy if I only hear him sniffle but show me the arm Sylvia throws around him in their innocent sleep and I will crumble.

This post was originally written December 4, 2007 for the private blog of my writing group, Novel-ties.