The Story of Codetta

Late Summer is a weird time. Even when you’ve left school years long behind the pattern that Summer break ingrains in one’s yearly routine sticks with you through most of adulthood (and begins anew entirely should one have children of their own). I never knew what the phrase “dog days of summer” really meant, so when I was still in high school I coined my own name for this time of year: “the desperate days of summer” - desperate because time is running out, the Summer sun is setting, but are are still just enough days left to squeeze in one last adventure before the Autumn breeze pulls our hearts in a different direction.

I’ve always liked Fall the most, and I’m pretty fine with Summer as well, at least when I get enough ocean time. So the desperate days of Summer haven’t felt very desperate in some time, though there are still traces of leftover school day memories, when one can catch faint hints of September in the air, where I still find a particularly notable break between the two seasons. It’s a time of reflection, the lull between major projects, an act break if you will.

Anyway, this preamble has gone on slightly long, and doesn’t have terribly much to do with the main topic of this month’s post - though it does serve to set the stage of my own mental landscape at present. Now with the mood established, let me get into the update:

In my last post I referenced that I was going on a much needed vacation. As with every year, I was able to find ample time between the expected haze of Gulf Coast debauchery to reflect on my creative pursuits. This time I found myself thinking more in the macro sense, such as how can I actually become the writer that I’ve been gesturing at becoming for a few years now, as opposed to simply ruminating on specific projects. Honing Codetta into a professional quality, worthy of being shopped around, is still my next big project to tackle. However, since it’s been a couple weeks since I was in the swing of writing, I decided to spend the remainder of August instead working on a shortstory (connected to the Codetta universe, but that’s neither here nor there). That said, I only recently finished said short, so now I turn focus to Codetta again.

This was why I chose this month to write about my first novel. I want to soak in all those old feelings from that world, gather myself and be ready for the task at hand. After all, the story of Codetta is shaped so much by the Fall season, the timing couldn’t be better.

All of my favorite creatives dabble so much in vulnerability. They let the audience for their work not only into their world, but into their process. This is a value that strongly resonates with me, and so in turn I’ve tried to incorporate that as one of the reoccurring themes of this blog. Sometimes I worry that talking too much about what I want to do, or what I mean to do, gets in the way of making the thing happen, or worse, in some way damages the value of the thing itself. Regardless of whether or not these anxieties hold weight, the impulse is still there, and that’s why, at the risk of losing mystique or marketability, I want to talk about my first novel, what it means to me, how it has so far come to be, and ultimately where I want it to go.

Codetta is an old story. It is one of my oldest stories, and one that is intrinsically tied into my own DNA. To sum it up succinctly, Codetta is the distillation of my kinda fucked up teen years into a sentimental, yet melancholic narrative about overcoming mental illness. Nothing groundbreaking there. Though the story was always important to me, obviously, I grew to frame and compartmentalize that feeling. Codetta was my angst, and it needed to be put onto paper so I could exorcise those thoughts, ideas, and emotions, lest I be wading in that mire for the entirety of my creative life. It was always meant to simply be a first book, an awkward stepping stone that would lead to something more.

So this is the why of Codetta’s existence, to purge and grow. But getting to the when of the book is trickier - do I go all the way back to being fifteen, when the real life events that would inspire the main plot of the book began to take place? Or do I jump slightly ahead to my late teens and my first attempt at writing what would later become Codetta during my senior year of high school? Or perhaps instead, just to a mere four years back to NaNoWriMo 2015, where I shat out seventy-five thousand words of existential angst in the guise of a YA horror novel, my very first completed draft of anything substantial, that would shortly after be shaped into something resembling a book? All possible starting places, all equally embarrassing.

Perhaps simply showing the key moments, as I have just done, will give you a strong idea of how long I’ve had the ingredients for this novel rolling around in my mind. While Codetta isn’t my oldest story (that would actually be Shelle’s Island, a story I first conceived of as a small child after a very particular dream, and then somehow forged into a manuscript in the Summer of 2016 - but that’s for another entry entirely), it is a story that I’ve put so much work into at so many different parts of my life, so please understand how ready I am to let go of it, despite my difficulties in doing so. If the essence of the story didn’t linger with me like it does, I would have carried on already.

Both the plot and the theme are intimately tied to my own teenage years. Without going too much into it, my younger years were affected greatly by mental illness. I had an unstable home life and a dire lack of support. Somehow, many years down the line (and more recent than I’d like to admit), I began to overcome all that and find rare rewards from having endured the experience. That said, it still took too damn long and I was at risk for a long, long while, relying on music, movies, book and video games for guidance. I would like to take all that mess and distill it into a form that could be used by kids in a similar situation to maybe make it easier in some way, just knowing what its like to fall through the cracks and that countless others like themselves have muddled through to better time. You’re not alone… essentially.

For the story itself, well, let me just come right out and say that the events are a heavily dramatized and abstracted version of something that actually happened. While no character is explicitly based on any single individual from my life, the main plot hook of losing a friend when so few are to be found, was lifted from my teen years. First, let me clarify that the real life person in question is alive and well today, but also, I was never as close to this person as the characters in my books are to each other. We were friendly acquaintances at best, but I believe we resonated with each other enough to become passing friends due to how much we had in common. I think we both sensed that the other had survived a difficult childhood as well, and that we were both simply looking to survive high school in turn. That’s why when this same person suddenly moved away to a boarding school mid-semester, leaving nothing but rumors (including a very cruel and mean-spirited rumor about suicide that I never believed but couldn’t verify as false at the time) I was affected greatly and regretted the fact that we had never been as close as we might have been, given enough time.

Typing it out like this definitely diminishes the importance of the event to an extent - which I suppose is why I turned it into a novel. It’s not a world-shifting story, but rather one that is a great framing device for the places I come from as a writer, my relationship to my work, and what I’m trying to do with the craft. And yet just as truthfully, I’m entirely too sentimental, and perhaps I simply find it too hard to let go even when I want to.

There’s more to it than that, but I’m sure that much is obvious. Hopefully, I’ve illuminated the major points just enough to explain why turning Codetta, currently in its 5th or so draft (depending on how you look at such things), into a good novel is so important to me - and why at the same time I cringe at myself for my devotion to it. It’s silly, but I keep returning to it because it’s authentic to me. Feel free to fill in the details and form your own opinion at will, I’m just glad to hopefully have someone playing along.

Wish me luck this Fall, because this will likely be the last time I re-draft it before I either let the old book go for good, or instead send it out into the wide world. I’ll keep you updated. Thanks as always, friend, for reading.