Momentum on the Leyline Express

         This is another of those personal posts about what I’m working on and struggling with and excited about these days.  But first I have to go back and review The Story So Far…  The prologue to this saga is that I published my last novel (The Extraordinary Book of Doors) in 2014.  At that time I had another novel in progress, plus I plunged right into ideas for a sequel to Doors, and I was raring to go on both projects.  But then… I sputtered out.

        Chapter 1 of today's story sees me full of ideas and enthusiasm, but somehow not making much progress.  Every time I sit down to write I can’t seem to make any headway.  It’s beyond frustrating, right on into infuriating and heartbreaking.

        In Chapter 2, however, I decide to make a little book out of my series of block prints celebrating the “hours” of the day, so I take a tangent to pull together a small anthology of poetry excerpts and block prints, This Holy Day, which came out in 2017.  Meanwhile, I’m still desolate with my inability to get much of anywhere on my own writing.  However, throughout this period I’ve been getting more and more serious about a pipe dream that had been floating around in my heart for ages: a lavishly-illustrated book of magical creatures inspired by medieval bestiaries.

        Chapter 3 is the triumphant birth of On the Virtues of Beasts of the Realms of Imagination, in which I launch a Kickstarter campaign simply in order to discover whether there’s anyone else in the world with the slightest interest in my weird niche idea - and find, to my astonishment and delight, that lots of people actually love it.  It was deeply satisfying to be able to create this book, even if I still couldn’t write the novels.  Virtues was published at the end of 2019, just a few months before covid hit the scene and left us all sitting at home all day… with lots of time to write novels, right?

        Chapter 4: Turns Out, No.  Or at least, I had the time for writing, but it still felt as impossible as wading through molasses in a lead coat.  Thank goodness I still had block printing to keep me creatively engaged!  But then finally in 2021 I began to write short stories and poems.  You can read more about this breakthrough in my post What’s New (and Some Old) in the Studio.  Now, I’d written loads of short stories and poems long long ago, but that had fallen by the wayside when I started writing novels, so it took me a while to polish off the rust and pick up steam.  The satisfaction of being able to write these shorter pieces, however, finally prompted me to make the connection about the toll stress was taking on the world.  You can read all about my diagnosis of my writing progress at my post Bite-Sized Writing.

        Chapter 5: In Which I Get Serious About Short Form Writing.  At the end of 2021 I started submitting short stories to magazines, and after a little while longer I started submitting poetry, as well.  The handful of acceptances, and larger list of really positive feedback (including lots of Glowing Rejections) encouraged me to think about putting together a collection…  Bittersweetness & Light came out in 2025, and Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns in 2026, and I continue to write (and submit) lots and lots of short stories and poems, all of which feels fabulous!

        And now, finally, we reach the climax of today’s story.  Nearly two years ago I wrote a short story set in a version of Earth in which magic flows through the world in ley lines.  The story was a mystery set on the Leyline Express in the 1890s, and it ended up somewhat too long to submit to most short story markets.  This is partly because it was written in an 1890s style, when short stories ran much longer than today, and partly because when you write a mystery in a world that involves magic you have to include not only all the normal clues and red herrings, but also enough information that readers can reasonably understand what is or isn’t possible in this universe.  In fact, the feedback I got from one of the few places I did submit the story was that, although they liked it a lot, they didn’t think the reader could quite know the rules of the magic.  I had tried cutting the story shorter so I could submit it more places, but last fall I decided to go the other way and write out all the incidents and details that would build the world more fully.  By the time I stopped, my short story was about 11,300 words long, which isn’t quite a novella, but is a novelette: the longest single piece I’d written since 2019.  It felt like a real personal victory - even if there’s really nowhere much to publish a novelette!

        But the story continues.  I really love the world I’ve been building and I began a second story set in the same time and place, but with different characters.  That, too, stalled out for a little while as I worked on other things, but in the last couple weeks I’ve pulled it back out and made huge progress.  So huge, in fact, that it, too, is now a novelette.  It’s about 12,600 words so far, and still needs the final chapter.  I feel like a runner who’s finally been allowed back off the bench after a long injury.  (Meanwhile I have an actual foot injury keeping me on the literal bench, but that’s another story.)

        I’m sure in the future I’ll be sharing more information about the world of the Leyline Express and the stories therein, but this post is just a crow of triumph about my ability to make genuine progress on a sustained, larger project.  Does this mean I’m no longer stressed?  Alas, no.  In many ways my stress about the world just gets worse and worse with every passing news item, but perhaps my brain is finally learning to loosen itself from perpetual fight/flight/freeze mode and dig into the creativity.  Who knows?  I do know that I’m very grateful for this respite, and I do hope that someday I’ll be able to share the Leyline Express with you!  To be continued...

[Pictures: Porter, color relief print by Percy Cruikshank from The Railway ABC, 1877-85, (Image from University of Washington);

Office, Station, Tunnel, hand-colored wood block prints from Cousin Chatterbox’s Railway Alphabet, 1850 (Images from University of Washington).

You can see more from each of these Railway Alphabets at my prior post Ribbans Railway.]