Long before I penned rough drafts by hand or typed them into online word processors, I used a simple offline version of Microsoft Word. Like most of us who once wrote without the benefit of programs that save your work as you go, I experienced the daily harrowing fear of losing hundreds or thousands of words before I remembered to hit “save,” not to mention the dread of losing everything due to the untimely death of one’s computer.

To circumvent this, I established the habit of emailing myself each day’s work, usually with a brief note on what I accomplished, what I struggled with, what hindered or inspired me. This is how I managed to capture my process and progress writing What Was Never There. My story collection was published this week, and although it includes a handful of pieces written pre-2015, the heart of the collection was dreamed up in April of that year, during an intensive session of Camp NaNoWriMo. 

In that month, I outlined and then drafted several stories whose main characters were haunted in some way by a memory. That memory—sometimes distant, sometimes near—threaded its way through all others, becoming foundational to the character’s reality. It’s a common theme in my work; I’ve always found it unsettling how our world is shaped by memories that are so often false, misremembered, or incomplete. 

Maybe this is why I journal so faithfully. And although I write by hand now or draft in Google Docs, where I feel secure in never losing a work-in-progress, I’ve continued to record my process and experiences throughout each project. Still, those journal entries are in long-running documents, not attached to snapshots of my work the way they were back then. It’s intriguing to re-open old emails and see exactly what I wrote on any given day. 

It’s how I know the first three sentences I typed on April 1st of 2015, while drafting the title story, remain now exactly as they were written then—a perfect beginning to a story that falls somewhere in the middle of this strange and melancholy collection, like the fragment of a dream.

The moonlight saved us. A distant, cold illumination that softened at our feet, cast shadows on the path. The moonlight saved us, but it also cast shadows.

Click here to purchase a copy of What Was Never There.