When someone advises you to make a major change to your manuscript, how do you know if it’s the right decision or not?
In my case, it’s simply a question of time. Time to try to implement it. Time to process the changes that brings to the manuscript as a whole. Time to decide whether or not I like it.
I added chapter 39 in November, after the book was well into the publication process. I was prompted by a cousin who remarked (without having read the book) that I shouldn’t have just one handwritten chapter.
I considered this out loud with her. I don’t remember the entire exchange, exactly, but I remember considering transposing Deric’s note to be its own chapter, then discarding the idea for some reason. It seemed important that the writing belong to Stelle, bookending the story with her writings.
Well, it’s no spoiler to tell you that that messes with the otherwise linear timeline of the book. Stelle’s first handwritten chapter is chapter 2; Gwen feels the effects of her death in chapter 3, which we then see in chapter 4. Thus, chapter 39, which is again Stelle’s writing, takes place in the timeline after chapter 2 and before chapter 3.
It also creates this morose, dreamy atmosphere that outlines and makes explicit much of what I feel was already there in the text or between the lines by chapter 38.
In terms of atmosphere, perhaps this is preferable to the cut-and-dry tone with which I otherwise portray grief throughout this book, I thought—yet at my core, I don’t like it. I never have. I like the descriptions of grief cut and dry.
In an earlier draft of this book, much more of the focus was on the grieving process. There’s a reason why I cut most of that out. The grieving process is very personal, and it’s hard for a reader to empathize with page after page of description of a grieving process that doesn’t match their own. This is why, though in my mind, Gwen’s grieving process is much the same as it was in that draft, the text is a lot subtler. It’s there, at times even explicitly, but hopefully now it’s been tempered enough to mitigate the barrier of personality.
Chapter 39 is a letter that Stelle wrote to her sisters while delirious with fever. It has some details about her life at the Crossing that this book would otherwise not mention, but mostly it’s a letter of love and regret. If ever anyone thought that Stelle carried the anger with her ever since leaving Castle Dio, chapter 39 dispels that.
And yet.
The more time passes, I don’t think it’s all that important. That Stelle’s anger has long been cold is there in the text of chapter 4.
I don’t like that there’s an entire chapter dwelling on her past regrets and pain—because, in the end, she isn’t truly past the anger. It may have gone cold, yes, but as we see in chapter 4, it’s easily ignited again. Stelle has only left her anger and pain behind—she hasn’t worked through them, or overcome them.
It took me 2 months to reach this conclusion. There’s been a lot of back-and-forth of “Should I take it out?” and “Should I leave it in?” While I was swaying back and forth, my book was published.
I don’t regret it: in a strange way, it makes me feel better about the over a dozen typos I’ve found in the published book. Because those typos exist, I feel better about asking to change an entire chapter, since I’m requesting all these other changes. But because chapter 39 will change, I don’t feel as bad about the typos: because now, there’s some reason for these books to exist. They may have a lot of typos, but they’re also going to be the only ones with this chapter.
So, if you disagree with me, and feel the book is better with Stelle’s chapter 39—it’s out there, and I can’t completely take it back.
(But the year is also wrong. It ought to have been 451 A.D. — so there you have it, yet another typo.)
Kai Raine is the author of the high fantasy series What Words Have Torn Apart, beginning with These Lies That Live Between Us.
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