Tessa Gratton Newsletter #35: hot writer summer
It’s the kind of hot that makes me forget what it’s like to be cold.
We reach this point in Kansas every summer, usually in June. It took longer this year, not reaching us until the second week of July. The temperatures reach the nineties or above a hundred, and never drop below seventy-five overnight. Heat index spiking up to 118. But it isn’t the sun and heat alone that make me forget: it’s the humidity. The wall of damp warmth that clings to everything, like a permeable wall, an ocean made of the air. That sticky pervasiveness is what erases January from my body.
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I used to claim that I wrote best in the wintertime, when everything was dead and there was so much room for me and my imagination. I could expand into the frosty cracks of naked trees, slip along their dangerous silhouettes into the hard night sky. The moon was bigger and brighter, more cutting, and I needed those quick wounds to bleed out my stories.
I still find a lot of inspiration in cold winter nights, in the stark color saturation and biting wind, the glitter of frost hanging in the air—a freezing desert of the sky, dry enough I can’t even touch my own skin without longing for humidity.
But maybe I’m mischaracterizing it, because that cold is all in my head now, all a loose memory, a vague once up on a time, surely I’ve been cold before, but I don’t remember because right now it’s hot outside.
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There are a lot of reasons I write in the summer now, more efficiently and effectively than during the cold months. Partly it’s because I’ve been a full-time writer since 2010 and I have no choice about when I write. Partly it’s scheduling, the patterns of how deadlines pile up, and there’s no six weeks of holiday season to use as an excuse. Partly it’s because the days are longer and I’m awake at 4:45am to enjoy my coffee with the pre-dawn and get out into the world for exercise before it’s too hot to live.
It’s also because as I’ve gotten older so much of my hard internal work has paid off and I don’t hate my body as much as I used to, so instead of letting the winter cut me open to bleed my stories, the summer can strip me down and those stories grow out of my sun-baked skin from seedling to sapling to scarlet-blossoming tree.
When I was younger I couldn’t bear tank-tops or shorts or swimsuits because my skin reminded me the body wearing it was too girly, too soft, too awful, too misshapen, too femme too too too much of everything I didn’t want or understand. The skin begged to be cut, to be bled, to be stripped away and it was a struggle not to pick up a knife some times. In the worst times.
But that is a story for another newsletter. This one is about how I forgot I knew how to write.
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Since I drafted Moon Dark Smile in 2020 I haven’t drafted a book with only myself. The seven books I’ve written since then have been collaborative in some way, or in all ways, in worlds I didn’t create, with characters I didn’t create, or that I co-created. It’s been hard, it’s been fun, it’s been challenging and it’s made me a better writer. I’m not going to stop writing my collaborative works. But beginning in August, my focus is on drafting the sequel to The Mercy Makers. By myself. For the past five months I’ve been terrified.
I started writing The Mercy Makers in 2015, and finished the first full draft in early 2019. I revised it a few times over the course of four years and we sold it late summer of last year. I’ve had three revision rounds in the past six months and as of July 1st it’s off to copy edits!
Of course I’ve always known vaguely what the second book was about, because this story has always been a trilogy. I know the characters, I know the world. I know the sort-of starting point. The big plot points, the change that has to happen in the climax and finale. What I’ve never known was the first line. The structure. The rhythm and shape of it. The emotional climax.
I worked hard to clear my schedule from June 2024 through December 2024 to give myself ample time to draft the sequel and nothing but the sequel. Of course that isn’t how it worked out, thanks to that whole being a full-time writer thing and the addictive, dangerous cycle of always saying yes to Star Wars and exciting projects with my friends. In April I accepted a contract for secret book that absolutely had to be written right away, cutting three months out of my sequel drafting time. I’m nearly finished with it, but of course I’m toying with accepting something else, and panicking constantly about how I’m going to get my Mercy Makers sequel written without all those months, when I don’t even know how to write a book by myself anymore!
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I’m rather loathe to admit this, but in retrospect I think part of me was glad to be able to push off writing the sequel because I was afraid writing it would be just as bad as my fears were promising. If I keep taking other work I can delay having to face the inevitable failure until it’s such a crisis it won’t matter if I’m writing anything good. Self-sabotage!
Because while revising The Mercy Makers I kept coming across paragraphs or lines of dialogue and stopping to stare as I realized I had no idea how I’d done it. I clearly had done it, the evidence was right there, but I couldn’t retrace the mental pathways that brought me to a certain detail or revelation or twist. I don’t know how to do this anymore I thought again and again, followed by, but I have to! Because the sequel (and book three) have to feel like the same story. It has to be the same kind of intricate and lush, the same kind of sexy and tense, even as the story unfolds and changes and shifts and whatever! I can’t just…leave it to chance. But I don’t remember how to be deliberate about it when I’m on my own.
I brainstormed for miles of nature paths and angsted with very specific music, I read in circles, holding on to one thing and reading a million stories about it in a weird kind of obsession. Meanwhile I revised and I drafted Star Wars and promoted Blood & Fury and I recorded a million podcast interviews and I tried to remember.
In my mind, I knew: one word at a time. That’s how you do it.
But in my body I was drifting.
I used to be a winter writer bleeding from tiny cuts, and now I’m a summer monster with vines curling my hair. I write through every season, I draft in every season, but just like every year, writing comes in seasons, too. Drafting, revising, collaboration, solo, famine and failure, plenty and rest. Offers and rejections, clustered together for ephemeral no-good reasons that make us feel like it’s our fault when the abyss opens up and swallows all our work or the creekbed runs dry and we can’t water our flowers without borrowing against ourselves. The flood always comes out of nowhere, if it comes at all.
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I finished the third round of developmental/line edits on The Mercy Makers on July 1st, and do you know what happened?
As soon as I confirmed the last line of the last chapter, and sat back, I felt finished. I thought, this is it. This is the book.
Then I immediately thought of the first line of book two.
It rang in my mind. Turning over and over, repeating like a clarion. I let my attention turn in its direction and the next beat and the next spooled out, the entire shape of act one spilling before me as if that thought, this is it, this is the book broke a dam.
I sent The Mercy Makers to my editor and drifted around my house with a feeling I’d also forgotten: completion. The book was done because I knew it was. Because I decided. Me, alone. And I didn’t know in my head, I knew in my body. The body I’ve cultivated as a professional artist for years and years. Instincts and muscles I’ve specifically honed, bent, broken, fed, moisturized since 2005.
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When it’s this hot outside and I forget what it’s like to be cold, I still understand that winter exists. Even if I don’t remember in my viscera, I know I’ll experience that biting cold again. In January, shivering, I long for the summer. Though I don’t remember the exact prickle of humid fingers teasing at the hairs on the back of my neck, I know them enough to describe them. I trust I’ll be warm again.
Just like now when I wake up in the middle of the night anxious about my schedule, about how I’m going to get it all done and how I’m going to make the sequel to The Mercy Makers even better than anything I’ve written before, when I also know I’ll keep up the self-sabotage, that’s when I breathe and touch base with what my body is doing: hot or cold, oppressed by cat butt, am I covering up my fingers or my spine? Because that’s where the story starts. Not in my mind but growing out of my shoulder-blades like wings, curling over my neck in tumbling vines to grasp at my clavicle. It makes a cocoon for my heart. An external lung that breathes as I breathe, sitting up straight on my porch or striding down the nature path or supine in bed or perched on this wobbly stool in my office made to keep my abs engaged.
When my body knows the story, the words can blossom from the little earthen furrows of my knuckles.
It’s ok if I forget exactly how they drink and grow. I just have to trust that I seeded them, and reseed constantly with every thought and moment of beauty and book read and sunrise witnessed and fury swallowed. I tuck things under that skin to wait, fallow, for my body to remember.
Next week I’ll be at San Diego Comicon!
I have a signing Saturday, July 27th from 5-545pm at the PRH booth, and on Thursday, July 25th a really exciting panel:
Come see me if you’ll be at the con!
NEW BOOK ALERT!
In September I have a story in a new anthology out! My story is called “Birch Kiss” and it’s about two genderqueer kids so desperate to find the third of their sort-of thruple they summon a fairy prince to make a deal to get her back.
FAERIES NEVER LIE arrives September 24th and is available for preorder everywhere!
That’s it for me! I hope you’re all staying cool this summer, unless you like it hot.
Thanks for reading!
Tessa
