Goodbye to Emma

After more than a decade of work, I'm writing the last big scene in my novel, Death Over Easy. The last first draft is almost done.

In 1997 I picked out Emma's car, which later changed. Sometime around the turn of the century I came up with a few characters who were in a book club together. I wrote fifty weak pages and dropped the story. Most of the characters didn't survive. The book club didn't even survive. My first first draft was like the Wicked Witch of the West―no substance, only style.

From that mess I rescued Emma, who was called Carly then, and LaRue Fusticola, who was always LaRue. I wrote a few scenes with them and with some new characters who had more personality than the old bunch. Then three pilots, who were Emma's uncles, walked into the dining room, and I took a hiatus from the novel to learn to fly.

Inez, office manager at Able Editing

Somewhere around 2005 or 2006 I tried again, getting farther with this first draft than I had before. It still didn't gel. I had a clear beginning, which I rewrote a gazillion times to make "perfect," and a clear ending, which I thought I'd never reach. And nothing in the middle. But I had Inez Lipschitz and Pete Zahn and Pearl and Egon and Ronk and the Lizard and a whole bunch of others who were wriggling around impatiently, waiting to get on stage.


Still, it took me until this year, 2010, to write it in earnest. I started from the beginning and revised what I had, which was about 50 pages. As I worked my way into the story, I realized that much of it had to be changed, or at least that other scenes had to be introduced within those pages. I wrote them. I started this blog in March and declared to the world that I was writing my novel. It was too late to go back. It was time to push on. I lost some sleep for a couple days, but I started writing, and I felt better.

Little by little I got into the flow, and the scenes went faster and faster. After a month, I found that I was already warmed up when I started the day's work, so I didn't have to stoke the fires and get the steam going and the wheels turning. The train was already chugging along. Another month, and I had to make a running start and leap onto that train. Another month or two, and I was no longer getting off the train at all. I was on it night and day.

I was literally living with Emma and all of them, looking into their refrigerators, their closets, seeing what they kept in the glove compartments of their cars. They talked constantly, nudging me with ideas, trying to upstage one another, intruding on my carefully planned plot path. They all had back stories, some really amazing, and touching, and very real. I worried about them.

I especially worried about Emma as I got toward the end of the last first draft. Life was getting much more dangerous for her. She was taking chances I'd never take in a million years. And I always knew what kind of trouble was around the corner. Sometimes I joked about her to my friends―"Better her than me"―but when it got down to the wire, I was truly anxious. I had to keep telling myself it was fiction. Not only was it fiction, but it was my fiction.

And now I'm on the penultimate scene. The scene just before the wrap-up. I started this scene before I went to Kidlit Con, and then I didn't get back to it. Partly it was because I got sick, and partly because life happened. But a good part of the difficulty of getting back to it is that I know that this is goodbye.

Most of the characters have finished their scenes in the book. They still whisper to me, but they know they can't come back onstage. And when I finish what's left of the story, and I write those words, "The End," the door will close. They will all go away.

Emma will go away.

I'm dreading that goodbye. It's going to be a very sad day.