What happened when I re-read my own novel.
Adjusting my hat to slant sideways, I skewer it with a hat pin. My white gloves are going to be miserable in this heat, but I pull them on to complete the illusion of a cultured young lady. I hardly recognize myself. I certainly don’t look like anyone capable of keeping the peace in a family of competing men.
I’m playing all sorts of roles today: sister welcoming brother home, beautiful woman on a picnic as though I go out every day, and detective solving a hundred-year-old mystery to report back to two other time travelers. The last terrifies me, but if I make it into a game like I’m part of a book, I can keep my head about me. I hope. - Clara Castle, Across the Distance
Like Clara Castle in Across the Distance, I - Lindsey - have been wearing multiple hats lately and on my own bit of time-travel adventuring lately. Though I can't actually travel back to 2015 when I published this book (or 2004 when I actually started working on it) I have been revisiting a plethora of memory’s around this book. Since it was necessary to update all of the social media and website links in the back of my novels as I restart Ever Ink Press, I am reformatting the eBook and physical copy for Across the Distance.
As I have been rereading the text to make sure all the intricacies of formatting such a book are correct, it's been almost like reading it for the first time. I first drafted Across the Distance as a time-travel novel. I rewrote it as Distance Song, eliminating the time-travel storyline and focusing on the lives and romance of Clara Castle and Andrew Callaghan. This included keeping a handwritten journal for Clara and a handwritten novel for Andrew which I then combined into a manuscript. That manuscript was never released because of a small uproar among my readers who had read the first version and wanted the time-travel. In fact, unfortunately, I can no longer find any version of that manuscript, either printed or on the computer.
So in the end, I rewrote the entire manuscript for the unknownth time and combined Clara's expanded storyline with the time-travel version. The result was a few months of intensive labor, publishing, and a book that I no longer remembered which scenes did or did not make the final cut.
I have to admit, I was a little scared to read it. It's always scary to go back and re-read your earlier work. But you know what? I still love Across the Distance as much as I did when I wrote it. Though the storyline is completely fabricated, the setting for the book is woven into my own past. I lived in the house where the story takes place, a house my 2nd-great-grandfather built in 1902 while I rewrote the book. Many places in the book are real places, including the Luther Hotel where Andrew works as a violinist which has recently been rescued from an impending demolition. The bookstore where Scarlet meets Keith is still open for business, the restaurant/lumberyard still stands though it is currently up for sale. A railroad car currently marks the place where Vincent would have returned home from school on Galveston, Island. The pavilion is gone but the pier is still there. Even the changes in the town since the time I wrote the book has reminded me of how special the places that intersect with our history are and how quickly they can vanish.
On a more personal note, the chest that Scarlet finds the music box that allows her to travel from 2012 to 1912 is based on a real chest that contained my great-uncle's personal items as they were sent back from Hawaii after his death in the 1940s. The same chest that my siblings and I explored as young children that held curiosities such as shoe brushes and old Christmas cards. The same chest I sat next to in my 20s while writing the scene where Clara, her father, and her servant share mint tea on the hallway floor during a storm. We also recreated several scenes inside the house when we were attempting to make a book trailer. It was never released because my little computer wasn’t powerful enough to handle the footage we had gained, but we had so much fun the weekend we filmed it, even if I didn’t know exactly what I was doing when it came to creating film.
I even spent a month while writing one of the versions, living in the same house using as little electricity as possible and recreating what I could of the life that Clara (and my great-grandmother, Bertha) would have experience. All of those memories came back to me this week as I worked my way through the book. And you know what I found?
I still love the book as much as I did while I was writing it. I’m contemplating releasing a few of the original chapters that were cut from the file, or parts of the journal/manuscript here on the site. If that’s something you’d like to see, be sure to leave a comment and let me know! And if you’re interested in following the restoration of a historical hotel, you can sign up for the newsletters here.
Across the Distance
Dragged from New York to Texas by her newly-divorced father, Scarlet Beldon braces for a lonely summer in a Victorian house that allows only the faintest of wifi signals. A stack of letters dated 1910 introduces her to the house's former occupant, Clara Castle, who lives with a strict and paranoid father and develops a friendship with a quiet, Irish violinist. When a music box connects the girls' worlds, their friendship turns into a mad scramble to unlock the secrets of Clara's future and alter history itself.
