Video of a Novel: Revision 1a

Here we go!

This week, I’ll be sharing my revision process to all the subscribers on this list, including those with a free subscription, just so you all can see what this process will be like and to see if it’s something you’re interested in following. Beginning next week, you’ll only see the Revision posts if you are a paying subscriber (only $7 / month!), which you can become by clicking the Subscribe button below.

So, here we go! Today I’m sharing the rough draft of Chapter 1 of my work-in-progress (WIP). Tomorrow, Tuesday, I’ll share a video and list of the weaknesses I see in the chapter and the things I’d like to revise. Hopefully by Friday, I’ll have a revised chapter to share with you, but once we’re deep in this process, it might not be quite as scheduled as I might like (in other words, I’ll try to stick to those days, but we’ll see).

Some of you might be wondering what I mean by a first or rough draft. The chapters I’ll share with you on Mondays are certainly not right-out-of-the-pen first drafts—I’ve been through them a few times, fiddling with this or that, but this will be the first major revision of any of these chapters. I’ve also learned a lot about the story since writing these chapters, so a few will need major overhauls.

Anyway, feel free to drop any questions you have in the comments below. Without further ado (gulp!), here is Chapter One:

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Alan sat on the front porch of his ramshackle cottage, an old man holding a steaming mug of black coffee in both weathered hands. The porcelain had small spiderweb cracks under the glaze, and there was a tooth-sized chip in the lip, but it was opposite the side he drank from. The teak rocking chair on which he sat had once been well-oiled, a cinnamon brown, but in recent years, perhaps because Alan knew the end was in sight, the chair had been left to face the world on its own and had faded to a granite gray. The porch floor bore similar signs of abandonment, mostly in a wavering line to the front door—all other areas were untouched.

Alan braced his elbows on the arms of the old chair and held the mug up in front of his face, so that the rising steam clouded his bushy beard and gray-blue eyes, much like the mist that rose over the morning fields in front of him. His favorite smell. His favorite view. The valley stretched out under a swift sunrise, the still fields lined with groves of trees and the neighbors’ distant bright white horse fences. Behind him, on the opposite side of his cottage, the entire Ranian estate stretched up the hillside: first, the barns and sheds, crumbling and fading in a beautiful and orderly fashion; next, the immense mapped out gardens with their paths, hedgerows, fountains, and the labyrinth he had walked a thousand times; beyond that, towards the top of the hill, Lion’s Head, the manor house, all stone and ivy and glinting glass and iron mullions; last of all, cresting the hill above Lion’s Head, the wild forest, stretching on for miles.

When Alan had first moved into the cottage, he had wondered why the designer had built the front porch facing away from the manor, but he soon realized the architect must have also been some previous gardener of the estate. That person had known what they were doing: how nice it was at the end of a long day to sit on the porch and stare out over the valley, facing away from his daily concerns.

For there were many concerns on the mind of a gardener such as Alan: the lambs and ewes, the trimming and replanting, the cleaning and repairing. He had never, in all his years there, unearthed the end of his to-do list, a list that would never expire, or at least not until he did. But on that morning, as the western sky took on a light blue and the sun threatened to rise above the tree-lined lane behind his cottage, there was only one thought at the forefront of Alan’s mind.

This day has finally arrived.

That particular morning, June 18th, 2015, had always been arriving. Some would argue the long and meandering chain of events that led to that moment, with Alan drinking his steaming mug of coffee on the front porch of his small cottage, had begun when the Old Woman of the manor had been born on the other side of the Atlantic, back in 1928, before the war. Others who knew the situation would say, no, it had all truly sprung to life in 1940, when she was shipped off to the countryside, or perhaps in 1949, when she lost her family. Or perhaps in 1955, when she married Charles. Or thirty-five years later, in 1990, when her daughter Lucy died giving birth to the Old Woman’s granddaughter Jaida.

He took a deep breath and stood, his old muscles and bones creaking and popping, and he walked back through the soundless door, into the kitchen, where he deliberately washed out his mug and placed it upside down in the drying rack. He took another moment to stare westward through the kitchen window, out over the valley, and while he could not see the rising sun on the other side of the house, he knew it was there by the way the grass in the fields slowly changed shades, from purple to lilac to gray to green. The far grove of trees caught the light, and the clouds took on a pinkish hue.

Thunderclouds, those were, off in the distance. Towering. There would be no beautiful sunset. A storm was coming.

Alan walked back outside, around the house, and down the stone lane, the morning growing warmer, sweat gathering under his buttoned-down work shirt. He had never worn a t-shirt a day in his life, not on the job, not even on scorching August days when the shirt clung to his shoulder blades and stuck to the flesh at his sides. And never shorts—always tan work pants that reached down to the ankles of his hiking boots, trousers that could shed thorns or poison ivy or burrs, discourage ticks and wasps.

The hedgerows lining that section of the drive rose high on either side of him, higher than a man could see over, but just beyond them to the left, up the hill a bit, he could hear the lambs bleating and playing and stumbling. Beyond the hedgerow, he slipped into the dark sheep barn and stood there for a time, his hands on the smooth top of the gate, looking at the sheep as they slowly woke up and began eating, their jaws rotating, lambs butting their heads up under their mothers’ bellies, pumping their heads, short tails spinning at light speed.

The morning eased into light. At around half past five that morning he left the barn and continued on further down the lane to where two cottages sat side by side, small houses that had not been occupied by renters in at least nine years, since Charles had died. The Old Woman’s husband. He had always seen to things like that, or, more likely, put other men in charge of seeing to those things—renting and charging and collecting. The Old Woman had no interest in such things, and so after Charles was gone, she stopped renting out the cottages, perhaps even forgetting the two small buildings existed. But Alan maintained the old places of the estate, including #1 and #2 Lion’s Head.

Where the barns ended and the cottages began there was a small entry, barely wide enough for a car to drive through, and it led into a courtyard surrounded by more barns, mostly for storage. Alan entered the courtyard, walked into one of the dark doorways, and stood there, waiting patiently, and he was not disappointed.

  A white Mercedes rolled up the lane—Alan could hear the crackling of its tires on stone before he could see it, and it was a relief to him, her arrival. He thought it could probably all go on without her, but he wasn’t certain. Here it was. The beginning of the end. And she might have her own role to play even yet.

A beautiful young woman stood up out of the sleek car and stretched, taking some minutes to look around, but not closely enough to notice the old man standing in the dark doorway. He smiled. She was older, but she had not changed.

He whispered to himself, “Lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.”

The young woman left her car in the courtyard and walked back the lane, in the direction of Alan’s cottage, but beyond the barns, before she got to his place at the very end, she turned right and went up the hill towards Lion’s Head. He followed to the corner of the barn and looked up the hill, watched her move in and out of view, behind hedges and along pathways, stopping a few times to take in the flowers. Maybe she had changed. Maybe she noticed things now.

He watched her all the way to the manor, all those hundreds of feet up the hill until she was a tiny figure against the great gray stone of the house and the dark backdrop of the forest above it. He could just about feel her breathlessness, both at the long uphill walk and also at finding herself at the base of that three-story, stone manor, feeling so small.

He sighed and went back to his cottage, stopping at the corner and drawing a small, narrow pruner from his pocket. He squatted down beside a tiny rose bush, a solitary plant growing alone in an unfinished bed that lined the side of his house. There were thirty-seven rose bushes in the gardens on the hillside, the official Lion’s Head gardens, and when they were all in bloom, the Old Woman would stand at the back patio doors and stare at them. But of all the rose bushes on Lion’s Head, it was this lonesome plant bearing one unopened rose bud that captured Alan’s attention, his devotion.

He reached forward and clipped off a bit of dead, brown stem rising close to the ground. Then he reached forward and, with his calloused index finger, gently felt one of the thorns.

“Ubi amor, ibi dolor,” he whispered to himself. Where there is love, there is pain.