In 2022, when I got to record Saint Death’s Daughter the audiobook, I realized it was my moment to celebrate. Twelve years of writing that thing. Twelve drafts. The great agent hunt. My late twenties. All of my thirties. All those other works I wrote while writing it, each of them making that work better. All of the headaches. The teeth-on-concrete feeling of “this will never end, and it’s still not good.”
Whatever the book ended up being–big, weird, flawed–it was done. And it was mine.
All these celebrations were in the making, all these reviews and blurbs were coming in, but I didn’t quite know how to feel about it. My feelings rocketed around, wouldn’t settle. It was hard to feel like it was all real.
But my friend Mike Allen–the Mythic Delirium publisher who helped me make Bone Swans, and Dark Breakers, and The Twice-Drowned Saint a reality–taught me this phrase: “I stand by the work.”
Those two weeks in the studio, recording Saint Death’s Daughter, were my time to step back from a decade (plus) of doubt and despair and struggle–with this thing that I always loved but often didn’t like. Now was the time to look at work and say, “Thank you. I stand by you. Here, I pledge my voice on it.”
There’s some hoopla attending a book launch. Some press. A launch. A few signings if you’re lucky. You also get a lot of, “I always knew you’d do it,” or “I always had faith” or “it was obvious to me you’d be a success.”
It’s very sweet. It’s also… as if all those moments where I very nearly did not do it, all those fragile threads on the verge of tearing, somehow didn’t count. Were somehow, I don’t know, rendered negligible in the face of an inevitability.
What that book did not feel like was inevitable. But at some point, about midway through the 12-year process, I looked at all the years I’d already spent on it, and I thought, “If I don’t finish, what a waste of my own resources. Of my time and energy.” It would have been perfectly fine for me to trunk that manuscript. I’d trunked several others, juvenilia that I was (and am) still quite fond of). I had other books in me.
But for this one, even though I was still years away from publication, I couldn’t bear the idea of waste.
Anyway. 12 years of this kind of thinking, this back and forth, and I could finally rest. The book was being published! INCONCEIVABLE.
In early 2022, I was just only starting to recover from my deep internal fatigue since turning in the final galley proofs for Saint Death’s Daughter. What I wanted then was a celebration more intentional, more private, and much longer-lasting than a book launch and a few readings. Readers, after all–for whom I wrote this book to begin with!—could read, in a few days, what had taken me years and years to write. And then ask for the next one.
So, when I went into the studio to start recording the audiobook, I did my best to elevate the experience. My dad talks about the difference between “feast days” and “mundane days.” On a feast day, a holiday, how do you know it’s different than any other day? You dress up. Not just yourself–you decorate the space around you. For example: there’s regular dinner. And then there’s the table you spread for a holiday dinner: you use a different tablecloth. Cloth napkins. Maybe a candelabra or a bouquet of flowers or fancier dinnerware. You dress up in your best. Special shoes. Maybe you put a hat on. You make the day different. You endow it with meaning.
That’s what I did to record that week. I thought about the chapters I’d be recording that day, and I dressed to match. Now, no one looking at me would know that was what I was doing. After all, I still had to wear quiet clothes. (I call them my “ninja clothes,” but another audiobook narrator took one look at me and accused me of wearing pajamas).
But I’d put on a piece of “endowed” jewelry (Carlos got me bone jewelry to celebrate my book about necromancers), or wear a perfume oil that had a citrus note as its base (since citrus is the smell of the god of death). Every day as I walked to the studio, I’d reflect on how I was so grateful to be doing this. That I couldn’t have imagined the privilege of recording this audiobook, even though I read countless drafts of it to countless friends and family.
Today, in a few minutes, I’ll get ready to go to work. I’m recording the audiobook of Saint Death’s Herald. Funny, it doesn’t feel like it’s three years since Saint Death’s Daughter came out. But at least it wasn’t TWELVE.
The studio I’m recording Saint Death’s Herald in is in Times Square–not the one I normally go to in Elmhurst. My commute will feel different. I picked out my clothes. I’ll wear felted tiger rug earrings that Caitlyn Paxson made me, based on the character of Stripes, and a bronze raven pendant that Carlos recently got for me at Boskone. There aren’t many blackbirds in the sequel, but the shadow of the Blackbird Bride is ever with Lanie. If I get to write book 3, she’s a major player there. My shirt will be orange: one of the colors of necromancy.
It’s raining today. In the first chapter of Herald, it’s also raining. Solidarity with my protagonist… though I shan’t be raising any sweet yearling does from the dead today. Well, I will. But only with my voice, all alone in a little black box. Talking to myself. Tell future-you a story that past-me wrote for you.
It’s pretty badass.
There’s a lot of text. I have six days to do it. I’m going to be very tired by the end of the week, but I’ll have the weekend to recover and finish up next week. Wish me luck.
I’m so happy. And I’m so nervous. And so happy.
As things get darker outside the landscape of my own head, I want to share some of the things I’ve been reading:
Rebecca Solnit’s Meditations in an Emergency.
Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American
Jessica Craven’s Chop Wood, Carry Water
Anand Giridharadas’s The Ink
Robert Hubbell’s Today’s Edition Newsletter
C.S.E. Cooney 