From Cover to Cover: Diary of Knives

Looking for Cover: The Dive into Writing

My first complete short story (that I can remember) was called, “Diary of Knives.” It was not my first attempt at writing on my own, as opposed to school assignments and the like. Most of the stuff before that was in fits and starts. There was some dreadful poetry, lots of notes about various novels I’d like to write, a handful of abandoned short fictions, and whole fantasy epics I wanted to plan out and craft.

Numerous works I’ve created or planned over the years started with a phrase, often poetic, that popped into my head for one reason or another. If you peruse my stories posted to Vocal, you’ll see what I mean: “Reading on a Nightless Evening,” “Tricks of the Flight,” and “Iron Rookery” all started from their titles. In these examples, something about the phrase tickled at the back of my mind. I was compelled to delve into it, to tease out, some buried truth or just to explore whatever association I got from the idea.

In other examples like “Diary of Knives,” I was trying to describe a phenomenon. A person’s diary of knives is made up of the scars on their back. Just as we have expressions like, ‘put your back into it,’ we have a need or a tradition of responding to life, based on what we’ve lived so far. Like a diary, that tradition grows over time. There’s also a hard reality that anything worth doing leaves a mark.

I quickly found that one of the tensions of reading and writing is the desire to have relief from reality while also appealing to its true nature.

Title Page: The Name of the Game

I’d picked up from English classes, even in elementary school, that every work of literature combined a plethora of symbols, themes, associations, messages, techniques, and so on. Every single one. So when I set out to unpack the title of “Diary of Knives,” crafting a story that carried my voice and spoke to my experience, I wanted to do many things at once.

In addition to getting into philosophical stuff about how our losses and scars make us part of who we are, I wanted to explore on-the-fly language play. My original story had a whole motif about hands, what they do with knives, and the Hamburger Helper mascot (a being that literally is a hand). I wanted to explore magic and fantastical ideas, so I had this whole thing about a familiar. For this I chose the ladybug because it’s basically a living, marked-up back.

The ladybug was the familiar of a doctor, and I had this whole symbolic throughline about doctors being like wizards. He kept the ladybug in a terrarium on his desk. He had a staff. Much of his power came from mysterious words (the things surgeons say in an OR, which were meaningless to a teenager before the days of the Internet). Doctors even had distinct robes, specialisations (schools of magic), long years of study, and the power to perform incredible feats like defying death or changing someone’s appearance.

The short story ended up a tangled mess.

The Thick of Things: Is Writing My Thing?

I had some struggles with my first effort, but I was proud of it. I especially had difficulty with characters. The whole idea of making up a person was daunting, and I was already drawn to reading and writing because it helped me process people. So I tended to only have one character in a story, or only see other characters through what the protagonist saw, heard, thought, or felt.

My real difficulties came from outside the text, however. Growing up in a small town, there weren’t a lot of options to network my writing. The Internet was beginning to take form, and that was easier than trying to find a group by, or for, young writers in town. Especially as a shy, awkward teenager. Online, however, I didn’t know where to begin. This was before Google. I’d go to the public library to get access to a computer, find a search engine like Dogpile, Yahoo!, or WebCrawler, and search for any phrase that came to mind. It was all I knew to do.

Only one person was willing to give my story a look. He tore it to shreds. Not a single word of encouragement. He absolutely ripped into how it didn’t make sense, it was boring, and the “family thing” (he meant familiar) was stupid. Until university, my only other foray into public writing was online fanfiction. Under a pseudonym. Without telling anyone in my life about it.

Left Unintentionally Blank: Acceptance

I did well in university. My social sphere expanded massively (by the standards of a wallflower). After a year or two of study and getting comfortable in my own skin, I started poking at creative writing courses or even talking about my writing dreams with my friends. I submitted to a few magazines or competitions.

Something about “Diary of Knives” was still mentally itchy. So I dug it out, gave it a thorough update and rethink, and submitted it to a new magazine in my province. Early on, I knew science fiction and fantasy was my home, so when I came across NewFoundSpecFic, I took the chance.

They accepted my short story!

…then they crumbled before their first release and returned my rights to the story.

Don’t fault them for that. Getting a new publication off the ground is more challenging than many people realise. Keeping it on its feet, infinitely more so. Yes, I was disappointed people wouldn’t be seeing my story in print. To be honest, I was also disappointed not to get a chance to be smug about it with my first reader. But still, I’d gotten an acceptance.

As my education progressed, it took priority over my writing. While I had one or two minor successes, none of them were paid opportunities. There were notes and plans, more false starts, and abandoned projects. When I graduated and my career ambitions didn’t pan out, depression took hold. I wrote little for nearly half a decade.

An Unconventional Recovery: Nerd Conventions

I’ve had the privilege to explore and experience the local scene for nerdy events like Avalon Expo. This was not the only facet of my recovery from the difficult post-grad years, but I want to concentrate on the journey of “Diary of Knives.”

These conventions were a dream come true for an introverted nerd like me. There were booths and stalls for all manner of swag, conversation, display, or experience. I was in my glee. Some of these booths sold books and even hosted publishers. One of them was Engen Books.

They invited me to submit to their upcoming anthology of short stories called Sci Fi from the Rock. The Rock, for those of you unfamiliar, is the local nickname for the island of Newfoundland.

A Fresh Page: Engen-eering

I went on to be something of a series regular in their …from the Rock collections. They invited me to write in their shared setting, the Engen Universe. Many discussions followed so I could get a feel for the world they’ve crafted: its history, characters, and supernatural powers.

These talks resulted in – among other things – the creation of my character Thatcher and the adoption of Engen’s character Iseult. “Irony of Glass” was another story I wrote, for the purpose of introducing Thatcher. It had a similar journey to “Diary of Knives,” but this one was inspired by a road trip to Moncton, New Brunswick, when I was 16. You can find it in my anthology, Interstitches.

End of Book I: The Beginning of a Series

“Irony of Glass” was intended as an introduction and lead-in for Diary of Knives, which became something very different by the time I released it.

Now set in the Engen Universe, I dispensed with the notions of magic and wizardry. Even the whole concept behind the title changed. Instead of the teenage angst of tracing scars, it became about identity and formation. Think of it like a log being carved into a wooden statue. There was no statue magically sitting fully-formed inside the log, just waiting to be “unlocked” by carving, whittling, and other such skills. It had to be formed by the removal of wood.

All that wood which was shorn off, all the splinters and leavings; the sawdust, bark, and tools damaged in the process. This is what makes a diary of knives. Implied in this is a network of choices, though not necessarily loss or sacrifice. Breaking up with a lover is a choice, and the cutting away of that relationship is part of your diary of knives. It informs who you’ve become. It’s not a part of the partner’s diary of knives, however, because they didn’t choose this. If they choose to not be friends with you afterward, then that is part of their diary of knives. This is what I meant by identity and formation.

When I’m ready, I plan to use this concept – along with several others – to develop my own style and strategy for writing my own work and interpreting the works of others.

My own diary of knives has included some difficult choices. My education, for example, did not enable me to skip the “starving” part of starving artist. It’s easy to fall prey to the sunk-cost fallacy and attempt to force something more of it into my life. But the fact is that, as my needs, goals, identity, and life in general have changed, so too have the paths forward. I’ve let go of that education, at least in terms of the job search. Obviously, the things I learned in those years will always be part of who I am, but the important thing now is to make advances in my writing career. Not change day jobs.

I’ve also largely cut out the need for my books to show up in an English course curriculum. To be “important,” whether that’s through awards or being celebrated by snobs or whatever, is just not as appealing as it used to be. I look for joy now, and for a certain amount of raw art. See my article Two-Person Book Club: Southern Reach Trilogy to get more on what I mean by that.

Instead of the constant struggle to make every single word a stroke of genius, I aim to enjoy what I do. I hope some of that enjoyment will come across to my readers. That they will learn from it. That you’ll enjoy my stories. Certainly, I still have much to juggle; adult life, making a living, multiple writing projects, and all the rest.

But Diary of Knives is available now as a completed work. The sequel, Red Ocean Strategy, is on the way. I’m happy with what I’ve created. It’s been a major journey, and I hope some of you will enjoy following Thatcher, Iseult, and the other characters of my Knives of Engen series. I wouldn’t have tried out Vocal had I not grown from the experience of this story’s journey. I wouldn’t have believed in myself.

The novel now has been published some 20 years after I first crafted that short story. It survived hopelessness, doubt, a lack of support, low confidence, and the travails of life. Your stories can, too. More to the point, I found most of who I am by cutting away the parts that came from trauma or outside pressure. My diary of knives has kept the writer, but not the scholar. The one who wants to help, but not the people-pleaser. The one who wants to create, but who is less concerned with achievement.