There is something happening in my head and I have to write. I have a lot of work to do, so I might be doing that, but that is grunt work. Run on sentences and passive voice weeding. Collapse this character. Change this point of view.
But our fucking minds are flaming and the surrounding land is catching and that kind of filing and regurgitating will not do. My head has become a war zone as he fights mediocrity to create. Those of us in here can only cower and seek refuge. Right now a song is blaring in my ears. It is causing my body to tremble and my chest to quake. I have not heard music like this in a while and I am waking up. I feel our Artist’s wings beating the air. I can feel his breath rushing into his lungs. He is about to scream and the waiting is killing me. All winds are rising to his body as he prepares for his keen, and I am seeing things.
He is showing me images. The walls of my office are lined with crawling flames that seem to flow like liquid across the ceiling. The desk I sit at has turned to ash. The lizard in the cage next to me has sprouted black, purple, and red wings and he is clawing at the glass of his aquarium. As I type this, I can see smoke rising from my keyboard.
Artist is working!
It started when I went to my sister-in-law’s to help her move a dining room table into the house she is moving into. As I was leaving, this song came onto the radio. It filled the van, and the windows swelled and pulsed with it. The radio couldn’t be turned up loud enough and I began to cry. I lost my place in the car. I was moving in my body but I was not in control of it. I begged my mind to break off and let me drive but Artist was beating the air, he was beginning to speak, and I could not peel my eyes from him.
I got home and talked to Bekah as if everything was on par. I didn’t want to pull her away and fill her head with the things that were happening in mine. Not right before she laid down to steal some precious sleep. I needed to deal with this alone. Needed time to let him build. Now I am in the dark listening to his song and staring in awe at the things he is showing me. Scenes from the book are surfacing to float in front of my eyes for seconds before they flame up, brilliant and bright for a moment, and turn to ash to drift down to the keyboard.
A king assassinated. The blind man and the man of fate drawing blades against one another in a fight that can’t be won or lost. A soothsayer begging to be heard by the man that can stop the coming war from being lost. And the man that murders that soothsayer to silence him. The love of the wizard princess and the child of nature and war. The innocent of the war and those that will protect them. The walking, fighting, sculpture and the woman that falls in love with it. The coming of the father’s vengeance. The children of the monster rising against him, raising armies to fight him.
The whole book is playing out in front of my face and all I can do is stare and feel the flood of raw emotion coming off Artist as he creates. I wish I could carry you all into my mind. I wish you could see it as I can see it. I wish I could give this to one of you. If I could keep you safe while you were here.
The song is still raging and he is raging with it. Battlefields of passionate hating men crash against one another. The landscape is left choking on blood and screaming under fire. Wizards battle in the skies above as the armies crash below.
I can’t get these images out of my head. I can’t catch my breath. I don’t really want to. I don’t want to leave this place. Watching all of this humbles me. It scares me. But at this moment, I am so alive. I feel so beautiful and powerful.
I hope you guys like the book when I write it.
—Shade
Jesse Teller 