And a 24-Hour Sprint
Hello, hello, hello,
I’ve spent the last few weeks submerged in two different worlds that are beginning to bleed into one another in ways I didn’t entirely expect. If you’ve been following along, you know I have a soft spot for dusty basements and things that shouldn’t be there. These two new projects have both in spades.
In one corner: Shadow Pine Lodge
Meet Vera. She’s a librarian who prefers the five-in-the-morning silence of a library basement—a place that “belongs to you completely” before the world wakes up. Vera is meticulous, cautious, and has been “careful” for about three hundred years. She carries a silver amulet that allows her to move through the daylight unnoticed, but a newly discovered journal from 1749 New Orleans is about to make her quiet life a lot more complicated.
In the other corner: The Museum of Ephemeral Arts
Then there’s Mel. Mel has been filling notebooks with a language nobody else speaks since she was nine years old. Now, she’s working at a museum that specializes in the temporary—aroma archives and “signals” in the walls. But the Museum has collected more than just exhibits over the last century; it’s collected people, too. And something is surfacing through the floorboards of the East Corridor that even Mel’s forty-four volumes of notes haven’t quite prepared her for.
The Intersection
The most exciting part of this process has been watching these two women—one who hides from time and one who tracks its echoes, finally cross paths. When a “Casket of Echoes” is discovered in the museum’s basement, it turns out that a certain librarian with an 18th, century ledger might be the only person who knows what they’re actually dealing with.
The Big Push: 24 Hours of Writing
To get these two worlds fully onto the page, I’m doing something slightly mid century madness: I’m joining the London Writers’ Salon for their annual 24 Hour Writing Sprint this Friday, April 24th.
It’s exactly what it sounds like, writers chasing the 8:00 AM hour across every time zone from Tokyo to London to Los Angeles. I’ll be caffeinated, probably slightly delirious by hour eighteen, and determined to see exactly how Vera and Mel handle the “Casket of Echoes.”
I’m currently deep in the “rigorous probablys” of the editing phase, as Mel would say, I’m building the picture first.
I’d love to hear from you: Are you more drawn to the quiet, centuries old secrets of a library archive, or the flickering, high tech hauntings of a modern museum? Let me know in the comments while I go stock up on espresso.
More soon,
Harlo
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