Chasing Magical Moments
My toes curled over the pier and gripped the underside of the platform. The wind rippled along my dorsal fin. This was it. If I retrieved the Pearl of Onakai from the Cave of Tears, I would be queen. Assuming I survived the Gauntlet of Terrors first. My knees wobbled. My fingers gripped my mother’s knife. My second stomach churned, but my brain whispered, “Dive in.”
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When I finally published my first book, I wondered when was the moment it became a real book, and I became a real fiction author.
I got my proof copies of my book, The Flight of The Starling, A Fairy Tale, in the mail yesterday. I don’t know why I ordered 5 of them, the max bookstores with a real product to pitch than an ephemeral web link.
I keep picking the book up. Stroking the cover. Flipping it over to confirm the presence of my photo on the back. Feeling its weight. Opening to a random page and reading till something makes me laugh. There are so many little jokes in it that I have forgotten.
I want to sleep with it under my pillow. I want to wear it inside my shirt over my heart.
Every time I got through a new gate, over a new hurdle, in this publishing journey, I would say to myself, “It’s starting to look like a real book.” The cover. The pre-sale listing. The author web page. “It’s almost like a real book.”
So today as I hold the book, I think, “Is it a real book yet? When is the moment it becomes a real book? When I get the final print? When I see it on a shelf in a store? When a stranger buys and reads it? Is there one moment?”
I am Pinocchio. I am the Velveteen Rabbit. I am waiting to be loved enough to become real.
It feels oddly similar to how I felt before giving birth. I remember being 5 or 6 months pregnant with my first child when I got my first gift of baby clothes. I held up the onesie, sized for a 7-pound newborn human. Tiny for clothes, but huge it seemed to me, with the baby still part of my body. I also had certain, specific expectations of how I would feel when giving birth, and was disappointed when the experience delivered something else. Something more complicated than those glossy narratives of new motherhood.
So I’m trying not to manage my expectations too much. I want to feel however I feel about publishing my first book without telling myself a story of how I should be feeling at this or that milestone. I don’t want to create a story of what my experience will be, because I know now that can set up its own kind of disappointment. I’ve loved this book a long time and it is so scary to think of people possibly hating it. Not getting it. Thinking it doesn’t work or isn’t worth the effort. If there is a point where it becomes a “real” book, does that armor me against the opinions of people who don’t think it should be?
I don’t know. I think it was a real book long ago. I’ve just been waiting to finally put it into newborn clothes.
Snow on the ground this morning, the first of the season. And not a little snow – 2 or 3 inches. An impressive amount for October in southern Wisconsin.
I’d gone to bed in a foul mood after an up and down day. I got the first proof copies of my book, The Flight of The Starling, in the mail, which was thrilling, but I also spent half the day fighting with Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat over an embedded fonts problem. A stupid technical glitch that I have to fix in order to publish this book. So close and yet so far.
Plus the kids didn’t want to get out of bed, and for some reason, my son, who’s ten, decided that snow was the worst thing that could’ve happened to him. Oh what a hassle. We’ll have to find all our snow gear. (Nevermind that I did that while they ate breakfast.) Why oh why does the school make us put on snow pants to play outside? On and on. His grumpiness infected me. By the time I was driving them to school – late out the door, plus extra minutes scraping the car – I was as pissed at the October snow as he was.
When I got back home, I realized I needed to reset. First snows are magical, and that is my quest: to seek out the magical aspects of life, to acknowledge that awe can be found every day if only we look. More troubleshooting is still ahead of me today, and I didn’t want to give in to the dark clouds so early in the day. I decided I would try my best to appreciate the first snow, to look with new eyes and see the wonder in it, dammit.
All it took was a walk around my block. The first thing I noticed was the sounds, a shushing and a plopping as the trees threw snowballs with their leaves. (Yes, I got hit, once. Yes, I shrieked.)
The neighbors’ potted plant, long leaves thickened with snow, became a tentacled monster. Halloween decorations turned cartoonish, plastic skeletons grinning at their foolishness in the extra bright light. A huge rope spiderweb tied to porch rails sparkled with frost.
The trees dropped spontaneous snow-showers, flash flurries that glittered in the morning sun, silver and gold. The orange and red leaves on the sidewalk stood out more sharply, a last flame of fall before the black and white of winter.
It wasn’t just the snow itself that seemed beautiful – it was the autumn snow. The October snow. And of course, bare black trees outlined in clinging white are pretty hard to growl at. My cheeks grew pleasantly chilled in one block, and the warmth inside my front door was welcoming and soft.
The hardest part of finding the magic was deciding that I could.
I live in Wisconsin, in one of the many small towns that ring Madison by about ten miles. I figure it’s the distance a horse could ride in a day and that’s why all these towns sprung up, like a fairy ring of mushrooms. In my book, The Flight of The Starling, one of the two fairies is named Beloit. Beloit and his sister meet Princess Lily and convince her Prince Alexander is a horrible guy who likes to cut wings off fairies who annoy him, which makes the princess determined to rescue them.
Beloit, Wisconsin, is about an hour away from my house. I drive past it to visit my friends in Chicago. I’ve never spent any time there. I’ve never had any reason to.
So why is an important character in my novel named Beloit?
Simple: Frank Zappa. And my mother.
I grew up in the Midwest, and once on a road trip to Wisconsin, my mom recalled a funny quote when we passed Beloit. It wasn’t till years later that I learned it was something Zappa said in a concert in Wisconsin: “I can never hear the name ‘Beloit’ without thinking of the sound of a marble being dropped into a toilet bowl. Beloit!”
I’m probably butchering the quote, and I could not find an official reference to it. But my brother and I were in grade school at the time and we knew comedy gold when we heard it. A family running joke was born. We could never hear of Beloit without saying this, and sometimes we would just intone the word – low on the “bell” with a long L, a lilt and emphasis on the “oi” – and bust out laughing.
I don’t know why my brain picked Beloit as the name for a fairy. Marzipan’s name came first – a light and crunchy confection somewhere between candy and cookie. She’s Beloit’s sister, the other fairy in the fairy tale, and she is distinctly more salty than sweet. But she means well and would never try to hurt anyone with her mischief. Beloit is less practical than Marzipan, more silly, but together they make a perfect pair of pixies, finishing each other’s sentences and schemes.
“Marzipan and Beloit” had a nice ring to it. I was definitely thinking of the marble in the toilet bowl when I named him. To
It was the snow that made the apples irresistible. The icy glaze obscured any hint of discoloring poison, and heightened the longing for the last sweets before true winter gripped the forest. Now a sprinkle of magic to make the crabapples grow. There. Three of them in an old woman’s basket. White as her skin, red as her lips indeed. The girl would never suspect a gift so perfect, so like her fable.
Visit my store at society6.com/ellaarrow to find art prints, canvases, and other cool stuff made from my art.
The spider watched the fog catching in her web, each bright bead another dying breath of the misty September morning. Frankly, she preferred dragonflies, but at least it made one thing clear: sometimes you cannot admire your creation until you stop working.
Visit my store at society6.com/ellaarrow to find art prints, canvases, and other cool stuff made from my art.
Visit my store at society6.com/ellaarrow to find art prints, canvases, and other cool stuff made from my art.
Curling rainbow round
Exponential spiral steps
Infinity’s ease
Visit my store at society6.com/ellaarrow to find art prints, canvases, and other cool stuff made from my art.
His skin hummed as the great engine thrummed to life. Then light burst through the spider web at the top of the warp silo. No matter how many times he flew the ship, the moment he loved best was lift off.
Visit my store at society6.com/ellaarrow to find art prints, canvases, and other cool stuff made from my art.
As I get ready to release my book, The Flight of The Starling, A Fairy Tale, I find myself reminiscing about when I wrote it. The book cover looks so real, the website seems like a real author’s page, and the idea of actually putting this story I have loved so long out into the world is exhilarating, but scary. Times like these I feel like going back to the beginning of things.
So I brewed some Strawberry Sunset tea. A whiff of hibiscus, lemongrass, and strawberry works a sort of magic. Smell is the sense of memory. Suddenly I’m in the kitchen of that awful pink rental house in Missoula, the one I shared with my husband when we got married. My black and white cat, Fox, is meowing at my feet. Once the summery scents are spiraling up from my mug, I take it to the window seat in the back bedroom. I settle in among every throw pillow in the house, a princess without a pea, and draw the lace curtain. It isn’t much but this cordons off my writing nook from the rest of the house, and my writing time in a sacred bubble where I won’t let myself be disturbed.
I take up my pen and my fairy tale notebook – real actual paper from trees. I didn’t write the whole book longhand, but in the beginning, this was deliberate. I wanted to strip away all the trappings of literary pretension I had picked up as an English major. Just me, my words, and my pen. Slow and careful, writing it like a journal helped in my quest for authenticity, for writing intimately. Stephen King called this “writing with the door closed” in his book, Recipe for a Fairy Tale
A passionate princess, in a castle. Fairies who are charming and mischievous. A magical Book. A journey to a distant land. Princes, dragons, and a ball. Last but not least, the myth of Persephone and Hades, a narrator I hoped The Princess Bride book” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>The Princess Bride
Ritual is meant to bring us to a certain state of mind. I’m over a thousand miles away and many years past that house, that nook, that time. Fox is long gone, but my golden cat, Topaz, is my writing companion now. I still have the fairy tale notebook, somewhere on my library shelves, but now I carry a digital copy of the book in my pocket on my phone. Butterfly Herbs still makes Strawberry Sunset tea, and whenever I drink it, I time-travel to when I first wrote about Princess Lily, Marzipan, Beloit, and all the rest.
What magical elixir takes you instantly back to another time and place? Do you ever travel back on purpose?
All the best.
The Flight of The Starling, A Fairy Tale, is available for pre-order on Amazon and IngramSpark now, for release on November 1.
Read the first chapter of The Flight of The Starling.