We learn craft and practice our skills to get better at this.įor myself, for many reasons and in many ways, I will always need reminding that my pen-and my heart-will never fail me. You may not know how to tell it just yet, but don’t ever believe that you don’t know how to tell it period. So for writers everywhere, never give up on a story that you want to tell. I think one has my history notes from high school and plans to go to a party in my freshman year of college in the margins.Īnd now you’re reading this in the back of a published novel. I mean, the first draft was handwritten across two composition notebooks.
It took me fourteen more years to learn how to tell her story the way it needed to be told-and I can’t even express how many false starts and dead novels lie strewn in the wake of this final version. I wrote the first draft of Shalia’s story when I was sixteen. This is my fight song.Īnd yet, there’s so much more to the story of this book, and this series. But in writing my acknowledgements, I somehow need to acknowledge what this book really became for me-it wasn’t escapism.
It’s virtually impossible to, in a few public paragraphs, explain what a dark time that was for me, and the kinds of fear and depression I wrestled with. Thinking constantly about this book, primed for the day I could raise my head-ready for the chance to heal. I worked on edits while I was face down, making notes on post-its since I couldn’t even use a computer because of the angle of the screen. Let me repeat-I looked at the floor for a month.Īnd all this while desperately trying to get my diabetes under control, and deal with an insidious sense of my own guilt and shame- I had done this to myself. I spent a month not lifting my head because to do so would be to disrupt a gas bubble that was keeping my retina attached. I spent almost a year with extremely compromised vision, getting laser treatments, injections and surgeries in both eyes-I spent a year not knowing if I would be completely blind within a few years (I guess I still don’t really know that, so keep your fingers crossed). So this book sold in March of 2015 April 1st of the same year, I found out that because of a long and tumultuous history with diabetes, my retinas were bleeding into my vitreous fluid and blocking my vision. Excerpt from Acknowledgements from Reign the Earth This is my fight song.
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