Fiction, Flesh, and Finding My Way Back

Day 3 & 4 of #1000wordsofsummer

**Content Warning: Injury & Medical Stuff in this Section** Please skip to the next section if this isn’t your vibe.

Let’s get this part done early, so you can skip it if needed. I found out yesterday that I need a knee replacement. Yeah, at 41, and not because I’ve been skydiving or spelunking or even doing something exciting like chasing ghosts through abandoned warehouses…though, let’s be real, that’s more my speed than sports ever were.

Nope. It dates back to my 8th-grade gym class: basketball. I went up for a layup, which I missed, and came down so wrong that I dislocated my kneecap.

The rest? Hazy and surreal. I remember putting my own kneecap back in place, then hopping the full length of the gym on one leg, down a set of brick steps, flanked by my mom and the gym teacher. The gym teacher told me I was bad at hopping. I remember that part clearly. Like the shame could outweigh the pain.

So, for 30 years, I’ve been walking around with a joint that’s been slowly falling apart. Cartilage gone. Bone grinding on bone. And now, my body has officially filed the complaint. It wants a rebuild.

I’ll get through it. But right now, what’s saving me is the work. The story. The ritual of sitting down with fictional people and letting them feel things I don’t always have the words for myself.

Chapter 2 Progress Report: The House Woke Up

Chapter Two is coming alive in that delicious, haunted, lavender-scented way that makes me want to write through dinner and sleep. If Chapter One brought Nicola home like a ghost, then Chapter Two breathes her into the bones of the house. I wanted the space to feel like Morgan’s memory was stitched into the walls, and I think that came through.

A few lines I’m especially proud of:

“She approached the front door with the kind of wariness reserved for old friends and older gods.”

That line crept up on me and refused to leave. It tells you everything about the house, and Nicola, in one breath.

“The house watched them rise and was still around them like it was listening. Like it recognized the offering; salt and iron, grief and skin. That’s how old places remember you. Not by name, but by the wound.”

When I wrote this, I paused and just stared at the screen. Because of that? That’s the voice I’ve been trying to reclaim.

“The scent of lavender still lingered in the wood, like a ghost who hadn’t quite figured out how to leave.”

Morgan’s still there. Not just emotionally. Not metaphorically. The house knows her. I’ve also been deepening the emotional currents between Nicola and Del. They aren’t just old friends. They’re complicated, bruised by time, grief, and what wasn’t said. There’s this moment:

“Del swallowed hard. ‘It’s like she’s still here in every corner, every whisper. And I don’t know if I’m ready to be in her shadow.’”

Oof. Del’s grief isn’t lesser than Nicola’s, it’s just differently shaped. I’m still working on where their lines overlap and where they can’t.

Letting Go of the Academic Voice

I’ve spent over twenty years weaving in and out of college classrooms. I started in 2001. I earned my doctorate in 2022. It’s a long story, one I’ll tell sometime, but the short version is this:

I’ve been trained to write with citations, arguments, peer-reviewed sources, and a ruthless eye for clarity and logic. But fiction? Fiction asks for faith. For shadow and breath and the courage to leave the edges unpolished. And honestly? Nonfiction is still too real right now. I don’t want to defend a thesis. I want to conjure a haunted house that breathes when you bleed on the threshold. But the academic voice? It sneaks in. Sometimes in rhythm. Sometimes in the density of a phrase.

And I’m letting that be part of the texture. A line like: “You bled on her doorstep,” Del said, almost reverent. “No wonder she woke up.” It still carries the weight of years spent learning how to name a thing carefully. I’m trying not to kill that instinct. Just let it hum beneath the skin.

A Question for You, Reader of the Margins

Let’s talk shop.

How do you keep the thrill of fiction alive through hard seasons?

When your body hurts or your soul’s got nothing but static, what do you do to keep the candle lit?

Is it routine? Is it community? Do you run away from the page for a while and trust the words will come back?