June 2024: Alone with a Pirate on Mendicor
This year has proven to be more fortuitous than I expected. In January, Hobart published a short story of mine, and in March, The Literary Times Magazine published another one. Today, orangepeel lit mag published an excerpt from a novel I've been working on for a long time, a story that has largely lived in the shadow of the rest of my life. Today, thanks to the lovely people at orangepeel, I get to peel back the curtain and show some of what I've been working on.
You can read Alone with a Pirate on Mendicor here.
The rest of this may get a little woo-woo for some readers.
In June of 2020, I was living in Flatbush, Brooklyn. I was recently unemployed, and I was coming to terms with the fact that I did not want to work in the industry in which I'd gotten my degree. I was reading more books than ever, and I was thinking about how to re-orient my life, having had the goalposts moved by the pandemic.
I had been living with a partner for three months, at that point. Brooklyn, and America with it, was about to be inundated with protests following the murder of George Floyd. Three hundred miles away, my dad was packing up and moving out of my childhood home. I had just celebrated my first Mother's Day without my mom. Having been forcibly inside for months by that point, every ray of sunlight felt like a wild escape, every walk through the park felt time stolen back from death himself.
A writing challenge presented itself to me: write 1000 words a day for two weeks. Simple, I thought, hard to fail. I thought about what I wanted to put out into the world, what story I had to tell. On day 3 of my first 1000 Words of Summer challenge, I thought about a pilot and her adventures. Four years and multiple 1000 Words challenges have passed, and I've been thinking about that pilot every day since.
A month after I started writing the story, we left New York for the first time since Covid-19 started, and I dreamed I was my protagonist. I now know I was somewhere in the middle of the third chapter, and that I was, as I am in many dreams, inexplicably pantsless. (That detail did not make it into the book, but many others did.) It felt like something reached out of my subconscious to reaffirm the importance of the work I was doing, the work no one else was seeing.
If you can believe it, I used to be afraid of outer space. I remember seeing documentaries about black holes and supernovae, the wild unknown of the stars and planets I'd never get to see, but which constantly surround us. I remember worrying about some minuscule cosmic shift happening lightyears away that would somehow affect my life, and how inferior I felt in concert with it all. I remember panic attacks during movies like Alien and The Europa Project, while witnessing the demise of humans like me amid the void.
Then, at some point, the void started to interest me.
Instead of fretting about my insignificance, I considered why I mattered, and what I had to offer to the world around me. I had no control over the cosmos - still don't! - but, much like the unknown happenings among faraway galaxies, I noticed countless unknowns on my own planet, in my own arena. I began to relinquish control, and to love the idea that there are spaces where all things are possible, on earth and elsewhere. Allowing for the possibility that the universe had something bigger going on made it possible for me to love the world I lived in just a little bit more, and to love all the worlds I'd never get to see instead of fearing their potential.
I hadn't written much science fiction before I started this story. Truth be told, I hadn't, and still haven't, read very much in the genre. It's a unique, if uninformed, place to write from - and I'd be lying if I said I weren't afraid of showing this to die-hard genre fiction readers, like the one I'm dating - but I think it's allowed me perspective and distance from the rest of the projects I've worked on.
Most importantly, it's a space I have for myself. As I've come to know more writers since June 2020 (including the folks who've read pieces of this book, all of whom I love), I've learned that a story's sense of belonging shifts throughout its life cycle. For years, this story has been mine, and only now am I starting to allow for it to belong to other people. I finished the first draft in October and have been hedging my bets about getting back into it - all the same old fears I’ve written about before. The end goal is for this story to not belong to me anymore, for these words to be something fully of the world.
I want to see the novel published. I have dreams about the cover, about seeing the spine on a public library shelf. For now, these are dreams. And yet, knowing that this one excerpt (which is also about dreams, and writing) has edged its way into the world, I have this inkling that they won't be dreams for long.
This year’s 1000 Words of Summer starts tomorrow. I’m excited to revive my love for this craft which has kept me alive, this skill which I use to talk about the world around me. I’m diving back into this novel draft with both hands, and I can’t wait to see what I uncover.
x
E
(Before you ask, no, the book is not done, lol)