Islands
Okay, so welcome to this. I thought for a short while on what this month’s topic should be and every time I mused on it, the vibe spoke to me that something easy and light would be most ideal for our very first quarantine post. It just so happens that I had something a little lighter than last month’s topic at the forefront of my mind already, so I’m more than happy to go with the chillest option, please just overlook it if this entry seems a little more self-soothy than normal, I assume we’re all muddling through the best we can anyway. You get it.
As with every entry, allow me to begin with the monthly progress update. I really can’t say if social-distancing has been beneficial or detrimental to my writing thus far. Adjusting to this new way of life has been surreal, time has felt meaningless at some points, but luckily I’ve managed to complete the first leg of my most recent project, a complete rewrite of an older manuscript, just before things got too weird. As of the other day (I’m guessing), I’ve completed a read-through and an updated re-outline of the previous draft and will next be more or less rewriting the entire piece from page one as soon as this blog entry’s been published. I know, I know, sometimes it’s best to move on from an old project towards newer things, and I really have come to learn the value of that firsthand; however this current project has been living in my imagination longer than any other other story I’ve put to paper and I’m no stranger to this pattern of refreshing older work - which brings me to the topic at hand.
I’ve written before in this very blog on the dangers of getting hung up on older projects for too long - art must be abandoned and forward momentum maintained, and so on. But I’ve also shared my thoughts on writing authentically and the idea that writers are drawn to pursue the craft largely because of specific focuses (or hang-ups if you will) - and that exploring these impulses is often the first part of the long journey to something approaching greatness. As a writer of YA, it should be obvious that there are reasons why I’m returning to stories about young people originally conceived while I myself was in the same age as the demographic - and that’s not to imply that YA writers in general have hangups on their own younger years, but then again, maybe it’s unavoidable that people select their genre and audience for specific reasons that are unique to them and their personal experiences, regardless of the point in life, and that’s more than fine.
Once upon a time I felt self-conscious about writing YA, but that was before I knew anything about anything. I think writing for a younger audience tends to arise from a place of wanting to write the sort of thing that you personally needed to read at a specific time, and I don’t think there’s anything more earnest and authentic than that. I’m excited about expanding into other genres and target audiences in the future, but being able to give life to those old stories I’ve been lugging around in the “one day I’ll write this” trunk has been rather symbolic of my development as a fiction novelist, as I’m likewise able to reflect on my growth as a conceiver of ideas. Both Codetta and Shelle’s Island, manuscripts one and two in terms of when they were originally written into something resembling a near-complete form, are stories that were conjured up when I was much younger and have been iterated on at various points in my life up until the present, where I’ve begun taking serious shots as professional-level novel writing. Likewise, both stories can be traced to particular points in my young life when I myself would have been in need of a particular type of story to relate to, if you follow. And so with this little defensive admission of guilt, I’d now like to next talk about the joys I’ve thus far experienced with writing and revising Shelle’s Island and touch briefly on what the story has meant to me past, present, and future.
While Codetta is the main story held over from my troubled teen years, Shelle’s Island is a story carried over from childhood, though one that slightly predates the worst of my childhood turbulence, or at least the initial conception. This is a little embarrassing to admit, but Shelle’s Island was the product of a childhood spent largely with the company movies, video games, and mostly just myself with few occasions to the contrary. I’ve mentioned in this blog how much I love the beach, but I’m not certain if I’ve ever elaborated on my special connection to the Gulf Coast and how my family had many trips there every spring and summer - besides holidays, these vacations were the good times of my childhood. I’ll always associate those memories not only with playing in the surf and enjoying twilight sunsets from beautiful white sands, but also with retro NES games from the 80’s, the tacky glitz of the PCB strip (which to a child can be quite magical, at least back in the early 90’s), and of course all sorts of music - all elements that continue to show up throughout my body of creative work to this day. It was around the time that such memories were cementing in my psyche, that I began to have a particular series of dreams, the first of which occurred when I was six or seven, or so I believe. As with any dream, the images and concepts were vague, but the feelings were there, and it was up to me to make sense of them and compose them into a story, as I was so compelled to do - I can’t say why that first dream stuck with me so much, but the story of Shelle’s Island began there, in a simple dream about exploring a magical island. In a few weeks or so, I had another dream that I was able to fit into the same canon I’d already begun developing, and then a third and a fourth at some point eventually; working on this little story of mine became a running interest, one that carried throughout my childhood, into my teenage years (until Codetta and the surrounding works came along when I was around 15 years old), and then returned again in my early twenties. I still have memories of how the versions and my own intent differed throughout the various revisits to the story throughout my youth, until at last, I composed Shelle’s Island for the first time ever in the warmer months after I finished writing Codetta for NaNoWriMo 2015.
Why am I telling you all this? Dunno - it’s just what I’ve been working on the past month and I guess I want to put the word out there that sometimes carrying a single story with you and evolving it throughout your life can be a formative experience for any storyteller. Parts of me wonder if it’s better to never put stories like this one into ink at all, and instead just let them continue to grow and shift in one’s mind for as long as it will - yet I think there comes a time where you have to let everything go eventually, especially when considering that the love for the story may fade over time, and all minds must eventually cease to function at some point. If a story is worth nurturing for so many years, then it’s worth bringing to life in your chosen medium, even if it doesn’t sell, even if it’s just a little cringey.
Speaking of cringe, if I’d been born just a little later and had access to the internet a little bit earlier, I probably wouldn’t have the issue I’m currently facing of not being able to locate the old illustrations I did for Shelle’s Island throughout my younger years, as they likely would’ve already been posted on some online account that I would now be too embarrassed to ever consider thinking about again. Sometimes I wonder if blogging itself, nay, my whole choice in pursuing creative writing as a profession, is itself just a holdover of something from somewhere - but ultimately I’m trying to get better at challenging my inner critic and I think acknowledging certain vulnerable aspects of the experience here for the public to read helps defang my self-doubts and insecurities as a novelist reaching that strange point in the journey of querying and networking… If that makes any sense.
Anyway, I think I’m going to write a bit more about Shelle’s Island in the future, and my idea for next month’s post, assuming this quarantine is still happening, will be a little bit different to further help distract from this whole reality. For now, I’m going to get back to work on the rewrite of Shelle’s Island, which I’m excited to commence in earnest because I’m holding strong that this novel will have absolutely no prologue, and it’s the little things like that we need to keep looking forward to. Keep an eye out for updates on that in the next few decades or so. For now, thank you for reading! Stay moving, stay sane!
