Andrea MacPherson

I’ve been working on my third novel for the last few weeks (which I won’t give details about, if nothing else, I am superstitious) and have found myself in a strange, hazy place.  I started the novel in early 2005, but it was lurking around in my head long before that, as far back as 2000 when I first visited Ireland and stood in a blue bedroom with a dead crow on the floor. 

 It felt like something lost, something written by a strange hand, something foreign to me.  I knew the story.  I knew I had written it.  But I had no actual memory of the act of writing it – late at night?  rainy afternoons? – or of creating the language that stared back at me from the white page.  And so I wondered, is there some kind of fugue that comes with the writing of a novel?  Is it such a grand undertaking that if we, as authors, really remembered the process, we would never attempt it again?  Or, rather, do we work in a heightened state that becomes only a distant possibility after the fact?

 I haven’t decided yet.

What I do know is that now, I am a different person, living a different life, and a different writer.  Our voices are similar – there’s always those words that slip in too often, ‘enough’ and ‘imagine’ and, in this novel, ‘cerulean’ for some reason - but now the challenge is to blend these voices together and really see the novel.

So I’ll be rereading it.  And writing.  And finding myself in that lovely fugue again.