Sometimes you promise that a monthly newsletter will come out on the 10th of every month, and then it’s 11:30pm on the 9th of the month and you’ve been writing literally nonstop all week and you realize that there won’t be a pitchfork mob DEMANDING a silly newsletter and so you just . . . decide not to write it.
But I’m back now! If I were to classify how I spent my time in April, it would look like this:
5% Monthly Quarter-Life Crisis
5% Unsuccessfully Avoiding Anti-Trans Legislation News
10% Trying to Go Back to School (and getting stymied by in-state tuition requirements which feel more stringent than trying to join the freaking CIA)
50% Rewriting More Than Half of NAMES FOR THE DAWN from Scratch (I wish this was an exaggeration -- it’s not)
20% Legal Name Change (Special shoutout to the energy company for being like ‘sure whatever I’ll just change it’ and meanwhile my REI membership made me send them the literal court order)
5% Glad I Had Top Surgery
3% Vacuuming My Partner’s Hair
2% Cleaning Up Chicken Poop (you may think spending 14.4 hours on this is an exaggeration but let me assure you -- if anything, the percentage should have been higher)
But hey, I’m surviving. You’re surviving. Our chickens Michelle, Roxanne, and Fern are all surviving. And I feel lucky to be here.
To Rewrite? Or Not to Rewrite?
As mentioned above, I recently rewrote a gigantic portion of my upcoming queer Ranger romance NAMES FOR THE DAWN. This started after a phone call with my editor which basically went like this:
Editor: I feel like we might be pretty much done with major edits!
Me: That’s so exciting! I’ve been editing and working on this manuscript for years, and now I’ve finally gotten it to its final form! Only proofreading and simple cuts are left!
Editor: But like, hear me out. What if . . . instead of Nikhil Roy’s backstory and character motivation being A, B, C . . . what if it was . . . X, Y, Z instead?
Me: . . . .
Editor: ???
Me: That’s an unfairly brilliant idea and I’m an idiot for not thinking of that before. How have I been writing this story for this long and never thought of that?
*cue “You Ruined Everything You Stupid Bitch” song from Crazy Ex Girlfriend, directed at myself*
Editor: Which would mean that the primary facets of his personality would be 8, 9, 10 instead of 1, 2, 3 because he would have This Memory and These Wants and Fears instead of That Memory and Those Wants and Fears.
Me: That’s fucking genius. Tell me more.
*this continues for 2 more hours*
*I fill 22 pages of a Word document with notes for new scenes*
Editor: Wow, he feels so much more alive now, and by extension, so do all the other characters around him. I liked him before, now I really love him.
Me: Same. This is the most productive writing conversation I’ve ever had.
Editor: Yay!
Me: But this means . . . this means that every single line of dialogue in the book will need to be rewritten. And I’ll need to cut these 10 chapters and replace them with these 10 brand new chapters. And the last fourth of the book will need to be restructured and rewritten from scratch.
Editor: . . . . . Yeah.
Me: . . . . . Yeah.
Now, this was hard, because the draft before these changes wasn’t necessarily *bad*, per se. And I felt so close to the light at the end of the tunnel . . . But I recognized a good idea when I heard one. So, I went back to chapter one. And I went to town.
I held a mini funeral every time I came to a chapter that had to be deleted in its entirety. So many of these were scenes that I’d daydreamed about and edited for years, and they felt so intrinsically part of the story I couldn’t imagine it without them. But there was also something really freeing in being able to just . . . demolish thousands of words at a time. I had an editor that I trusted, and I had a miraculous 2ish-month window of time where I could devote 8 hours a day to writing, and so I allowed myself to go for it.
And now, after years and literally hundreds of hours, I feel like I’ve just witnessed the emergence of a brand new book. It made me reflect on where I’ve come with writing as a whole, a sort of nostalgia for older stories that feel embarrassing to me now, coupled with the knowledge that one day, this current ‘perfect’ draft of this story will probably feel embarrassing too. So in honor of that, I dug around and found the VERY first version of Chapter 1 of this book (if you know, you know). And while Ch. 1 doesn’t have any of the massive character and plot changes that come later, I thought it was fun to compare the two and see how this story ‘grew up’ with me.
And so, without further ado . . .
DAWN Chapter 1 - Then and Now
THEN:
It was the first day of April, and the cold sky was clear, and the mountain was calling my name.
I turned the key in the rusted lock of my winter cabin for the last time, reaching out to pat her log side like an old horse before running my fingers through my too-long hair.
It had been a harsh winter. Chattering bones and barely enough firewood and one particularly bad week when I was left eating cold canned soup in the dark when my generator died, and the walls of snow were too damn high to get my mobile the seven miles into Talkeetna for extra supplies.
It had been long hours hauling water through hip-deep snow, fixing leaks in the old roof, and hiding away in the never-ending darkness until the flashlight batteries wore out and the pages on the book in my hands grew brittle with the cold.
It had been exactly the same as every other winter for the nine years that came before it.
My mobile took me straight into Talkeetna, long blankets of white stretched as far as the eye could see. I looked back once at the cabin before turning the final bend, watching it disappear into the sea of green trees. I wanted to feel anxious about leaving the quiet, but I could feel Denali at my back like a siren’s call piercing the sky. Everything I owned besides the bare bones of the cabin was packed in the two canvas bags strapped to the sled.
I picked up a cheap coffee in town, knocking the thick snow from my boots outside the door and doing small talk with the woman behind the counter who I only ever saw four times a year – once on the first day of the season, once on the last day of the season, and twice during the winter for my main supply runs. She didn’t know my name, and I didn’t know hers.
“Gonna be a good season for ya,” she said, like she said every year.
I nodded over the coffee steam. “Hope so.”
“Rangers on the radio said you’ve got some big shot researchers coming out,” she said. “Something ‘bout the wolves.” She was missing her front teeth, and I couldn’t remember whether they had been there before.
I shrugged. “Guess so,” I said. “Last year it was the caribou. Must be going up the food chain.”
She didn’t laugh at my bad joke. She told me the same thing she told me every year on the first day of April as the shop door swung behind me. “Say hi to them bears. Don’t get killed.”
My Ford was parked exactly where I left it six months before. After nearly an hour of shoveling off snow and jumping the engine, my two bags were slung in the back, and the windows were rolled down, and I was speeding down Highway 3 towards the vast northern horizon, with the mountain peaks cradling me high on my left and the vast open land to the right. I stopped in Cantwell for another coffee – that one even worse. The Athabaskan woman behind the counter rolled her eyes. I knew her name.
“So, you survived another winter,” Chena said, handing me my change. “You know I gotta brew three times as much coffee the first week of April than normal. All you Rangers coming back from your winter hideouts, and your hair’s too long.”
I tipped my faded baseball cap at her – the one I always wore during that first drive back, with the faded stitched-on image of a jumping King Salmon, “Nushagak River” written on the front. “Just getting you ready for all the tourists. Practice run.”
She huffed. “No tourist busses make a stop here in Cantwell. Unless someone’s gotta pee so badly they can’t make it to your neck of the woods in Talkeetna, or on to Anchorage.”
I looked out the faded window at the one-lane dirt road dotted with snow. “Talkeetna’s bathrooms are state of the art,” I said to her. “You should see them these days. They even got real toilet paper.”
Chena threw a wadded-up ball of receipt paper at the back of my head as I walked out. “Say hi to them bears, Ranger,” she said. “Hope one of ‘em gets ya.”
By the time the outline of the buildings of McKinley Park came into view, my lungs were nearly aching for a breath of the fresh air. My eyes kept scanning to my left like they always did, praying to catch a glimpse of the mountain through the fog. As if I didn’t know it was nearly impossible to see a clear view of Denali in the beginning of April.
My hands were shaking when I drove through the abandoned park entrance, making my way down roads I could navigate with my eyes closed until I made it to the center of C-Camp. I nearly moaned out loud when I jumped down from my truck, and the Denali gravel crackled under my boots for the first time in half a year. My breath was a perfect cloud of fog.
The place was empty – I was always one of the first ones to arrive. I dumped my stuff down on the bunk in one of the temporary rooms and made my way over to the offices, taking my time to walk down the roadside trail and letting the icy air slap against the bare skin of my neck above my coat. I meant to go into the offices and check-in with the year-round Rangers – see how the winter patrols went, and whether the new sled teams had been fully trained, and what I would be expected to do for this year’s training as one of the few GS-9’s on staff – whether there were any new Law Enforcement Rangers posted out in Toklat I’d need to train.
Instead my feet crunched through the fresh snow farther down the lone road, until the achingly familiar sight of the sled dog kennels came into view. I stepped over the metal gate and pulled off my gloves with my teeth, and at the sound of my soft whistle twenty furry heads poked out of their sleeping huts. The dense air filled with barks and happy yips, and a part of me that always dimmed during the long winters came back to life.
I made my way past each dog in their fenced yards, stopping to give a quick pat and get a lick on the hand. I knelt when I came to the last wooden hut in the line, sticking out my hand so the little nose could catch my scent.
A part of my chest clenched when a familiar pair of cloudy grey eyes emerged from the hut, nose sniffing madly at the air. The old dog stepped out of the warm shadows on shaking legs, limping a bit towards my hand before pressing his face fiercely into my chest.
He was crying, whimpering and wriggling in my arms, and I gripped his fir tightly in my fingers. “Hey there, Lugnut,” I whispered . . .
VERSUS NOW:
It was like my dad always said, squinting at the endless, golden fields stretching to the horizon: “You catch them Sandhill cranes singing overhead, following the crick up north, then you know it’s spring.”
I’d only seen a single flock since the ice started to crack and melt on the river, their white bellies obscured by fog, red eyes like flying rubies, but I wasn’t fooled. And I wasn’t jumping the gun yet, either. I knew those woods and that slice of Alaskan sky more than I knew how to eat. The cranes had never yet lied to me.
I slipped my cabin key in my inner pocket—the only time all year I ever locked the door—and gave a pat to the weathered log sides in farewell. They’d done right by me, stood firm in the snow and storms for another long winter, and now a pristine blanket of fresh snowfall beckoned me forward, daring me to ruin the white silk with my boot.
And none too soon. It had been a harsh season: chattering bones and howling winds tearing at the pine, clawing it to frozen splinters as if in mockery of every nail I’d driven, every log I’d cut down by hand. It had been long hours hauling in buckets of snow to melt for water; fixing leaks in the old roof I should have patched up three seasons ago; checking traps on hunting patrols. It had been exactly the same as each of the nine winters that came before it.
And now, without any fanfare at all, it was over and done with. My snowmobile would take me the twelve miles back into Talkeetna, the roaring engine startling sleeping ptarmigan from their nests, and that was that. I wouldn’t be completely alone again until the full flush of fall. Near everything I owned was packed in the two canvas bags strapped to the trailing sled, cutting fresh scars into the snow, a pathetic plea to remember me when I was gone. In a way, it made my snowmobile my only home on earth for the two hour trip, and it gave me a dark thrill—people died in that backcountry, generations of bones buried under the ice, crying out with their last breath for someone to find them.
And there I was: glad to be alone. Only the cranes watching. No help in sight no matter how loud I screamed. I looked back at my cabin before it disappeared in the black spruce and icy shadows, forlorn now without my winter-long stream of smoke curling from the chimney, or my snowshoes on the front steps; the hide of my latest kill hanging out to dry. Like the land had been humoring me, six months of mirage—
My mobile hit a hidden tree root and lurched. I pitched sideways, the engine revving in a long scream as I fought to regain control, cursing under my breath. I’d just resigned myself to landing ass-first in the snowdrift when I thudded back to the proper trail on all fours, my belongings still miraculously strapped to the sled, knots holding firm. I paused to catch my breath; it was the most unpredictable action I’d seen in weeks, small as it was. And there was also the unmistakable sensation of something out of place at the very top of my thigh. I quickly reached for the front of my snow pants with glove-fattened fingers, readjusting until I was certain everything was secure. I had to shift my mindset; remind myself that people could see me again, that people could know.
“Know what?” I sometimes asked myself, pretending I could be naive for a moment. Challenging the silence to muster up an answer back: “Ain’t nothing to know, Ranger. Nothing out of the ordinary.” But you couldn’t survive ten winters in the Alaskan backcountry being naive. And if I hadn’t done anything else, at least I’d survived.
I stopped in town for a coffee, more to thaw out my insides than because I wanted to choke down the muddy brew, passing small talk with the woman behind the general store counter who I only ever saw four times a year—once on the first day of the season, once on the last day of the season, and twice during the winter for my main supply runs. She didn’t know my name, and I didn’t know hers.
“Gonna be a good season for ya,” she said.
I nodded over weak coffee steam in a styrofoam cup; prepared to say my first words to another soul in weeks. “Hope so.”
“Talk on the radio’s that you got some big shot wolf counters coming out. They better not fly them tracking planes too low. Scares my dogs.” She was missing her front teeth; I couldn’t remember whether they had been there before.
“Last year it was the caribou,” I said. “Must be working their way up the food chain, huh?”
She didn’t laugh. She told me the same thing she said every year on the first day of April as the door swung behind me: “Say hi to them bears, Ranger!”
My Ford was parked exactly where I’d left it last fall. After an hour spent shoveling off snow and warming the engine, my bags were slung in the back, the windows were rolled down, and I was speeding north up Highway 3 in a private reunion. The Alaska Range cradled me high on my left, and snow-covered plains surged to infinity on my right; only stark, lonely trees brave enough to pierce the blinding white. I could have named them all by now, after ten years of driving that stretch of highway. Could’ve named every last twig. I tapped my thumb to a song I didn’t think had been on the radio since I was a kid.
When I reached McKinley Park, the little village surrounding Denali’s official entrance, I started glancing to the left, praying to catch my first glimpse of the mountain through the fog, as if I didn’t know it was nearly impossible to get a clear view of Denali in the beginning of April. But I’d checked that first drive north ten Aprils ago, and so I checked again. Kept checking as I drove through the abandoned Park Entrance, found a plowed spot to park, and jumped down to the crunch of Denali gravel under my boots, my sigh forming a perfect white cloud of steam. Protocol said I should greet the handful of year-round Rangers—see how winter patrols went, find out if there were any new Law Enforcement Rangers posted out at Toklat for me to take under my wing.
But tradition had me zip straight past the offices to the sled dog kennels; climb over the metal gate and pull off my gloves with my teeth. At my whistle, twenty furry heads popped up in unison, and the crisp air filled with a chorus of barks and happy yips. It was the sound of summertime, of life and energy, melting the last bits of ice from my bones.
I made my way down the noisy row, getting a good lick on the hand from each pup. Then I came to the end, the last little wooden hut, and I knelt.
“Lugnut,” I whispered . . .
(I know I promised another preview of my wildland firefighting draft, but that’s been put on the back burner - lol - due to this massive rewrite. I’ll return to it eventually!)
Announcements:
Way back in December, THE SEA AIN’T MINE ALONE made this Best of 2020 List, and I’m still riding the high! We also made it to 140 reviews on Amazon - just 10 more to reach my goal of 150!
Are you a writer? My publisher Carnation Books is calling for new Holiday-themed short stories! Check out their call for submission - they want all things wintry, queer, and delightfully tropey. Deadline for submissions is June 30, 2021.
(I may or may not have something fun in the works for this . . . more details to come! )
This month, here’s what I’m . . .
Watching:
I fell head-first into this supreme indulgence of lavish Indian weddings and I have no regrets. It’s over-the-top, it’s absurd (in the best way), it’s gorgeous, it’s beautifully sweet, and there’s even a queer couple!
Reading:
When I wasn’t reading my own writing until my eyes fell out of my head for editing purposes . . . I did find a few hours to re-read my favorite bits of Cat Sebastian’s Turner Series. I’m a huge sucker for a series with overlapping characters where each book dives into a different relationship. So-and-so’s brother dates so-and-so whose childhood best friend is so-and-so’s secretary and meets so-and-so who is just home from war, etc. You get the picture. Highly recommend!
Listening to:
I am LIVING for the “Even the Rich” series called IN GOD WE LUST on Jerry Falwell Jr. If you know what Liberty University is, or have any experience in the Evangelical world, you know exactly who I’m talking about (and exactly what delicious scandal this podcast is covering). If you don’t already know . . . hoo boy. Buckle up. It’s hypocrisy at its *sips champagne with my pinky extended* finest.
Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already!