Melode Speaks
A month ago, I picked up Strange Saint for the first time in probably seven years. Now, putting a piece of work aside for extended periods has always been part of my writing process; there comes a point when that’s the only way to clear my head so that I can the story as a whole. But this was different; entire passages, or even characters, seemed as new to me as though they’d been written by someone else. It was a new, and exciting, experience to plunge into the world of the book after so long away from it. For the first time I could enjoy it as a reader rather than a writer.
But what I mostly felt was guilt. Not guilt for having been away from the book–life is short, and there are a hell of a lot of books I should be spending my time reading before coming back to my own. I felt guilty for having abandoned Melode.
When I first started writing Strange Saint, I was working with the bones of a true story recounted in Farley Mowat’s Sea of Slaughter: during the early colonial period, a young woman was marooned on a subarctic island, where she survived for more than a year. Mowat found the story interesting because of the polar bears on the island (the island was far to the south of the bears’ current range, which suggested that their designation as “polar” was due to their having been hunted out of warmer climes).
But I was fascinated by the woman: who she was, what she wanted, why her companions left her behind. Months into my writing, Melode started to talk–I can’t think of a better way to say it–and when she did, she had the answers to those questions and more. I spent better than a year with her, until finally sending her out into the world in Strange Saint.
My sense of guilt came from my deep attachment to Melode, and my sense that I’d allowed her to languish. This might seem silly (we’re talking about a fictional character, after all), but the truth is that even typing “fictional character” doesn’t feel true. Sure, Melode exists only in the pages of Strange Saint. But she’s real to me, and I felt an immediate compulsion to let her out once more.
So on March 30th, I’ll be releasing Strange Saint in a revised, ebook edition titled The Windcatcher. Prepping the book has been both challenging and enormously exciting; the indie publishing revolution has given authors a previously-unimaginable–and sometimes daunting–amount of control over their work, and working on this revision has made me even more grateful for everyone who worked so hard on the previous, traditional release. It feels like the first step on a whole new journey, one that I’ll be continuing with a new ebook edition of The Sin Eaters, the all-new historical fantasy novel The Big South Country, an as-yet-untitled novel about the orphan who helped to create the idea of a truly American cuisine, and more.
It’s all because of Melode. As she reminded me when I opened Strange Saint after so long, she’s never been one to stay quiet, or still; now she’s not going to have to.