It’s All Portals
My mind is open wide
and now I’m ready to start.
Arcade Fire
Draft five of the novel commences, and I am armed with incense and a pen. For the first time in my small career, I printed my novel out professionally, which involved my bombarding the print shop with requests for updates on my dear paper child. Another first: I am involving spreadsheets on Excel to keep track of the word count spread across chapters. One character has historically been embroiled in fewer but longer chapters, but lately I have been retooling her story to have shorter but more frequent presence. I am aging up the characters, adding a prologue, and cutting some perspectives, and yet the most significant change of all: It’s going all in on a love of the portal fantasy.
Yes, I am well aware that the portal fantasy is not en vogue. Seen as cheesy, predictable, cliched, and juvenile, the portal has been sort of cast aside, and when I first started querying, I did read that one should downplay the portal if there is such a beast in one’s manuscript. Sometimes, I get arrogant and think, “I want to do something revolutionary for my corner of the genre.” But the truth goes beyond this, and stands simply that portal fantasies are unabashed in their love of what they are. Rather than being cheeky or flashy, the portal in my book is something intricately tied to grief. Throughout draft five, let’s lean into that grief, because, Lord knows, this is something I have buckets of.
I had great conversations with friends yesterday. Vicki called me to talk me through the character Louisa’s new role in the story; Anna kindly left voice messages that held brilliant little gems to be counted. I have two characters, Louisa and Evelyn, who are growing in ways that I had not considered but am excited to see — if they don’t run wild over the manuscript.
The thing is, I have renewed hope for this book for reasons that I will not discuss yet. What I will say is that I have a singular, giddy purpose for getting up in the mornings, for staying up late, for working through lunch breaks. I have piled up books to read to inform this story, have renamed characters, and have been infused with a burst of life to keep going to the finish line, that thing of winged beauty that is finally in sight.
In other words, I’m passing through the portal.
A few weeks ago, I was talking to one of the consultants with whom my job collaborates for curriculum purposes. For those of you who don’t know (because I have gathered that there are a few of you now), I work with Navajo, and our lab in turn works with native speakers. One consultant asked me what my novel was about, and I said, “Portals.”
He seemed to chew on this, then said, “There are portals everywhere.”
I must have stared at him with a strange look on my face, but I was so deeply moved by this one statement, because it is how I see the world, too. Perhaps sometimes we meet people who just articulate it better than we ourselves do. This is in much the same way as Vicki and Anna were able to articulate Louisa’s motivations. Writing is, thus, an active of silly, stubborn community. There are portals, yes, and they are not just in the books that we read, but in the days that we live. Portals like candles that fuel the mysterious soul as it flits around the lungs.
Maybe my book really is a love letter to portals. In other lines of thought, it’s also about: Americana fantasy, Chicanx steampunk, poetry, found families, doppelgangers, magic mirrors, and a helluva ton of apple seeds. It’s my flesh made ink, my threadbare stars drooping from my eyes onto a small ream of paper. I have until September 30th to finish these edits, and my soul feels free. As I write this post, Fable and Bijou have curled up on my sofa, I am about to make some tea, and I am going to go and be at peace with my own words, these things that have crossed portals of their own to come back to me with the aid of a good antipsychotic. I am very happy to be alive these day
Maybe this weekend, I’ll put together a bookcase. Maybe I’ll finish reading some good fantasies. But it is certain that I will be dancing to a ceaseless tune called a portal fantasy in so many languages, in so many words, becuase I love them. I love what phantasmas the mind is capable of hallucinating. And maybe, just maybe, someone will read my own little umbras in the future.
