Revisiting The Shadow

I am a writer of vignettes who shaped an odd novel

Sacrifice sounds religious, like burning a goat, but that’s a gloomy way to look at it. It is more accurately a ritual in which matter is transmuted back into spirit, from whence it came. I had spent thousands of hours typing out the stories, but I wasn’t finishing a novel, I was writing vignettes, and trying to connect them into a novel.

One day Linda asked if I had anything long enough to rework as a novel. I had several series of new vignettes. They were not a linear plot line, but related vignettes. One of them did have a rough plot line and, word count, 60k. Perfect length. I’ll just give it a rewrite.

I can’t blame my being high for the word count mistake, though it was likely involved. I was counting two versions of the same set of vignettes, so I had only 30k words, and was on a deadline of a week or two. This excited me. It took me back to when the newspaper had to be finished and to the printer on time, every time. I felt like a man wearing blue and white striped suspenders and smelling of gin. Linda was watching me put it together and I wanted to finish it simply because it seemed impossible.

The first half of the book had started out as being the whole thing, and that was going to be my focus for editing and reworking, but now I had to expand the story one hundred percent. The way I would do that would be to write a transition and fill with completed vignettes in other series. I had a ton of them.

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