Dance is not my thing.

It is SO not my thing. Never has been. And especially not as a teenager. Like, a whole discipline involving expressing yourself in a physical, visible way? In performance? Are you kidding? Not only did I basically flunk out of gymnastics after kinder gym – I am about the least flexible individual you are ever likely to meet – I even got reprimanded for my blank zombie face while singing in choir. I have exactly two memories of school dances before discovering alcohol in university; both are pretty mortifying.

“Relax,” I remember my sort-of-a-date urging me with a smile.

Easy for him to say.

So what possessed me (...ha) to make dance – ballet, specifically – a critical piece of background in my debut novel?

I had originally included ballet in THE DARK BENEATH THE ICE as a passing reference, something our heroine, Marianne, used to do. Just background colour. Partly as a nod to Aronofsky’s gorgeous movie BLACK SWAN, which was part of what emboldened me to take a real stab at the idea that had been kicking around in my head since 2006.

But Lana, my brilliant agent, snagged that passing reference and pulled it up into the light. What’s this? she asked. What happened here? There’s more to this. LET’S SEE IT.

Digging into that turned out to be a really interesting exercise. Partly because I had to speak authoritatively about an art form I’d never attempted, which was a challenge. And partly because when you think about it there’s a whole vocabulary of tropes involved in ballet in the popular imagination, and they played really nicely into what I wanted to do with the story.

I mean, ballerinas are right up there with princesses in our canon of the ideal feminine. Right? They're what little girls grow up yearning to be. Ballerinas are skinny. They’re graceful. They’re delicate. They wear fabulous costumes involving full skirts and special shoes. In short, they’re pretty.

But though performing this particular species of pretty requires massive physical strength, total control, and constant practice, pushing one’s body and one’s feet past their limits, it’s supposed to look effortless. Completely natural. The hard work should be invisible. And it requires total devotion from a young age. An article I read about BLACK SWAN pointed out that the breaking-in-the-pointe-shoes scene, apparently de rigueur for a dance movie, has sinister resonance this way: in order to get the best performance out of these unique and beautiful handmade shoes, you have to purposefully destroy them.

Hmmm.

And then you can add Andersen’s “fairy tales” into the mix, with their really quite fucked up ideas about femininity and their connection to dance. The little mermaid, a tragic figure, dances willingly for her prince, though it feels like treading on sharp knives. Karen, who has the temerity to be vain of her red shoes, is cursed to dance in them until she’s ready to maim herself to be rid of them. “Pride must suffer pain,” as the little mermaid’s grandmother tells her. Pride, vanity, love, desire: for falling prey to the allure of these wicked, impossible things, you’re condemned to torment. And you’re required to suffer it in penitent silence.

There’s something about ballet, imagined this way, that really strikes to the heart of the contradictions involved in our idea of what it takes to be a girl. The performativity of it: this is an act for an audience. The impossible push-pull of effortless perfection, the intense physicality of being ethereal: don’t look like you’re trying. The demand for suffering and sacrifice: don’t enjoy it too much. Don’t lose control.

You’re balanced on knife points. If you relax, you will fall.

I always liked to think that I didn’t fall for those bullshit cultural messages. But in hindsight, most of my refusal to perform femininity was fear: I didn’t know how, so it was safer not to try. I ended up on knife points of my own anyway, doing my best not to look like I cared.

This story brought me face to face with some of those old anxieties in ways that surprised me, and ballet – or this conception of it, anyway – gave me a really useful set of ideas to articulate them with. If I managed to use them to make the book a little scarier, I’ll consider them well exorcised.

I'm mentoring YA in PitchWars 2017!  
Please note that my cackling is perfectly innocent and in no way expressive of evil glee. 

It’s coming up to PitchWars time again, and this year I’m on the other side of the curtain as a mentor! Deborah has generously volunteered her query for the zombie workshop so I can provide an example of my critique style. Stay tuned for my wish list post on July 19…or, for after the contest, check out my editing services at www.amelindaberube.com.

A couple of preliminary notes:

• The text in bold would usually be in comment boxes. Alas, web formatting makes this critique look a lot messier than it would in Word.
• Text that's underlined should be in strikethrough (alas, my poor blog does not have strikethrough as a formatting option)
• In a few places I’ve suggested possible rephrasings that may turn out not to fit the bill at all. I offer them as examples for clarity and as a jumping-off point for brainstorming. These are of course the author’s to mess around with, use whole hog, or disregard entirely as she sees fit.

QUERY

Forced by her parents’ divorce to move to her grandmother’s California vineyard, sixteen-year-old Wren Newmann is convinced she will die a shriveled, wine-country virgin. Ha, I love the voice here. Though I’m not sure why a California vineyard dooms her to this fate? Is it just isolated? Does she have trouble meeting new people? Maybe you could use a different transition in the next paragraph to make this clear…instead of “the only things she has going for her,” you could start with a few words of explanation, e.g. “Wren’s anxiety makes meeting people an ordeal, and there aren’t exactly plenty of fish in the sea in a town of 500/when the nearest town is 100 miles away. [Something about her crush on Jay, who doesn’t know she exists?] Her only consolations are Panayis, the cute Greek farm hand…”

The only things she has going for her are Panayis, the cute Greek farm hand insistent on being her friend, and her diet plan, a purging routine she uses to keep her weight down and the parental demons at bay. “Parental demons” meaning expectations she’s internalized from her parents? What are they? Can you rephrase to add clarity, more details, or more voice? How would she describe them? But her dating prospects improve when Jay, her country crush, notices her. As their relationship heats up, the pressure of life with the party crowd creates cracks in her social armor. Ooh, nice conflicting fears and desires here between her wanting to fit in and her purging and anxiety. Can you be more specific about her social armor? What form do these cracks take exactly? If this refers to the secret purging mentioned below, maybe move this sentence to the beginning of the next paragraph.

Wren’s increased need for secret purging sessions to alleviate her social anxiety distances her from everyone, except Panayis. This phrasing strikes me as a little detached or clinical. Again, how would she describe what she’s doing and why? Does it make her feel more in control, more worthy of love, and therefore less anxious? He's the only one who likes her as she is, I think you can omit the previous sentence; you repeat this idea more evocatively below. But she doesn't want to be attracted to an outcast like him What makes him an outcast? when the catch of the school not sure about this turn of phrase. Is there another way to put this? says he loves her. She wonders But if Panayis is such a nobody, why is he the one that makes her true self feel seen? I had to read this last phrase a couple times. Maybe something like “…why does it feel like he’s the only one who sees her true self?”

Still, Wren insists Jay is everything she could ask for in a boyfriend until he forces her into a physical relationship she’s not ready for, leaving her alone and hollow. This feels like something that belongs more in a synopsis than a query; it seems to tip the scales in favour of Panayis. I think you can omit it.

When her grandmother unexpectedly dies, As much as I like that we pull back to the wider scope of her life, again, this feels like a plot point best left to the synopsis; feels like it comes out of left field when her grandmother is mentioned so briefly above. Wren must step up to the plate and decide if the illusion of being loved is worth sacrificing the people who truly do love her, including herself. I think I’d like to be closer to Wren’s perspective here…like, if Wren knew she was sacrificing the people who truly loved her for an illusion, it wouldn’t be a difficult choice. What is she afraid to lose? One way you could put the last two paragraphs together might be something along the lines of “Jay is pressuring her to give more than she’s ready for, but to be with Panayis, not only would she have to go back to being an outcast herself, she’d have to face the [something about parental demons and eating disorder here]. Wren must decide what to sacrifice—and how far she’s willing to go.”

WITHIN AND WITHOUT is a coming of age YA love story, You could probably call this a YA contemporary novel for greater clarity; there are coming of age and love stories across genres. complete at 63,000 words. It will appeal to teens who have enjoyed Courtney C. Stevens’ FAKING NORMAL and Jay Asher’s THIRTEEN REASONS WHY (but miss the happy ever after). I agree that 13 Reasons Why is probably not a great comp given the problems with the Netflix series. Maybe it would help to articulate what it is about that book – or the alternatives you’re considering – that reminded you of yours? (I haven’t read your comp titles, but like...“my book combines the unconventional structure and emotional heft of TITLE X with the lyrical prose and unreliable narrator of TITLE Y”)

As a literature and composition teacher, I have personally observed teens living in untenable circumstances. This project is the culmination of ten years of working with my target audience as a literature and composition teacher. I think you could use the second sentence alone; it strikes me as the stronger of the two. I hold a B.A and M.A in English, am a Master Educator and Mentor teacher for Aspire Public Schools, and teach writing at San Joaquin Delta College. My work has appeared in Artifact Nouveau.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

----

I think you have a solid structure here with all the pieces in the right place and some nice, intense, personal stakes. Overall, I’d encourage you to be as specific as you can, especially about the choices she’s facing, and to try to incorporate her voice in your sentences. Not meaning first person, of course, just her vocabulary or turns of phrase. Even a couple of these can go a long way.

Thanks for sharing this with me – please feel free to get in touch to ask follow-up questions or kick ideas around!

​My first deck of tarot cards was a present from my best friend when I was 12 or 14: Karen Kuykendall’s Tarot of the Cat People, reflecting our shared affinity for felines and SFF.

​After more than 20 years, this deck and I know each other pretty well. And I tend to feel like the cards reflect some of the boldness and confidence I had as a teenager back to my much more cautious and doubtful adult self, especially when I’m asking about my creative life. They’ve always egged me on to take that leap, throw that hat, do the thing.
 
Interestingly, they don’t work particularly well for me when it comes to brainstorming for fiction. There’s something about them that’s kind of…straightforward? Simplistic? I find they don’t give me much to go on for these purposes, although I’ve always liked the descriptions in their book and the nuanced array of key words and phrases supplied, and they've always served me well for the real world and my own life. Maybe I'm just too accustomed to that context for them.
 
Though the Tarot of the Cat People was where I learned the meanings of the cards, for a tarot spread appearing in scene in a book, I chose to use the Rider-Waite Tarot, since that’s the “classic” tarot imagery.

​I still need to pick up a copy of this deck at some point. It feels sort of neutral or impersonal to me – like, I don’t know, a dictionary – which is maybe why I haven’t gotten to it yet. Hard to shell out for reference material, as comprehensive and useful as it may be.
 
I didn’t, however, hesitate to shell out for a copy of the Mary-El Tarot. After my friend Amazon used it to do a story-related reading for me, I knew I'd found my fiction deck.

 Part of what fascinated me was the illustrations: vivid, splashy, surreal, dramatic. There’s an emotional heft to them, to their weird, lush symbolism. And the book that came with, while kind of rambly and, well, “woo” for my taste, puts a fresh spin on the traditional meanings of the cards that’s been very helpful.
 
And the ethos of the deck just plain appeals to me. From the introduction:
 
“Nietzsche said, ‘Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’ Thus he expresses the innate fear we have of the abyss, that even to brush against it, no matter how good our intentions, we will be tainted by it. The abyss is most simply, but not only, introspection – looking within yourself. At first that sounds easy to do, but like the abyss, the calm surface is deceptive and in truth it is a bottomless pit that contains many demons and monsters. But, it also contains your own true will: everything you ever wanted to know, and your salvation, but you must be willing to dive, or be foolish enough to stumble.”
 
I LOVE this. It says so much to me about what kind of project spooky fiction really is. I don’t know – I feel like these cards get me, even if I haven’t totally wrapped my head around them yet. I feel like they give me permission to be emo and dramatic and tell self-consciousness to back the fuck off for a while.

Reader, tell me about your favourite decks! What draws you to them? What speaks to you about them? Any particularly useful for writing, and if so, how so?

​In the 20-odd years I’ve owned tarot cards, I’ve mostly read them for myself, seeking clarity when I can’t hear myself think or reassurance when my life feels out of control. They’re a great tool for cutting through all the clutter and noise that obscures your own heart; sometimes you need someone else to tell you something before you can really hear it. I’ve looked at a rosy-looking spread and thought “ah, they’re just telling me what I want to hear” – but sometimes identifying what it was I wanted to hear was actually in itself an insight I really needed. Sometimes “it’s going to be okay” is a message you can’t accept from yourself.

It’s only recently that it's occurred to me to apply the cards to fiction. Probably not coincidentally, it’s also only recently that I’ve been using fiction for a similar once-removed-and-through-a-glass-darkly kind of self-reflection.

They’re too general to be much use for plotting, except in the broadest outlines. I’ve found they speak just the right language, though, for elaborating on themes and suggesting directions for character arcs: the ways people change, the things they need to learn, the things that shaped them, the broad forces pushing and pulling at them.

Three ways I’ve used them to date:

1. Make up a reading for a character. The tarot reading in The Dark Beneath the Ice is entirely directed by me – no coincidences there. I didn’t put the cards in question in any kind of formal spread, either. Framing the situation in tarot symbolism still turned out to be a helpful exercise, though, because of the constellation of meaning that goes with each card; it suggested emotional dimensions to explore that I hadn’t previously thought through and gave me handy symbols to anchor those threads of the story in my head.
2. Actually do a reading for a character. My lovely friend Amazon did a formal ten-card spread for Skye, the main character in my monstery story, that was downright uncanny. Part of it was that the symbolism of the new deck she was testing out was incredibly well-suited to the story I was trying to tell; part of it was that she knew the story pretty well already, given how often I’d been bending her ear about it. I knew the story pretty well myself by that point, but seeing it all laid out like that – and in startling, evocative imagery, which brought a freshness to the ideas as well as new perspective on them – was incredibly exciting and inspiring. 
3. Use them for brainstorming. In the being chased by zombies through the fog stage of collecting ideas for the still-embryonic radio story, they’ve been a great way to cast about for and pin down the way I want things to evolve. I did a couple of ten-card spreads and an “okay, cards, tell me about this character” one-card draw. I looked for visual images that jumped out at me and why – what feeling did I get from this card? How did that relate to/contrast with/emerge from the feelings I was building the story around? I looked for suggestive patterns, contrasts, tensions. And I basically just scanned through my various booklets and online sources and looked for keywords or phrases that jumped out at me. I jotted everything down and circled things and drew arrows – guided free association, basically. And moving a pen around, as a beloved English teacher insisted, gets neurons firing.

MOAR TAROT BLOGGING to come - next up: beloved and spooky tarot decks!

​It’s been a very long time since I watched David Lynch’s Lost Highway, and I don’t remember much about it beyond its nightmarish, vaguely coherent weirdness. THIS SCENE, however, stands out, and because it’s on YouTube, I can foist it on you, hapless reader, so as to share my squee.
​

The Mystery Man is so damn scary it’s a delight to watch. Let me count the ways!

He stands out right away. It's not that he's dressed all in black; most of the party guests seem to be wearing black and white. It’s his pale face that catches your eye, his deliberate approach. His attention is fixed on our everyman, to whom nobody else is paying any attention. And nobody else notices the mystery man either.

He never blinks. Once he makes eye contact – at which point the background music fades into a cone of silence that feels downright oppressive – he never once looks away until he leaves. In fact, he barely moves at all, and he's shown in this tight closeup that makes the stare even more unsettling. AND there’s a light reflected in his eyes, so in addition to being uncomfortably intense, his stare has a manic edge to it that’s only sharpened by the way he never quite stops smiling. If you can call it a smile. Despite the gleeful absurdity of the scene, the mystery man does not look like he’s joking. The expression is pure threat. Utterly predatory.

He speaks heavily, deliberately, without emotion. He leaves long silences before answering a question. He doesn’t use one word more than necessary, and gives a suggestive, leaden weight to some of them – I’m there right now. At your house. Ask me.

And WHILE being uncanny and threatening, he’s also pulling an inexplicable stunt that involves invading our everyman’s home – everyman doesn’t seem particularly disturbed by this exchange until he actually hears the mystery man’s voice on the phone and realizes he’s really there. The mystery man doesn’t explain himself at all, except for that one line: You invited me. It is not my custom to go where I am not wanted. Which has ALL the sinister mythopoeic undertones, especially when his only response to “Who are you?” is a fucking terrifying laugh made EVEN SCARIER by the echo on the phone.

I don’t even recall whether he ever shows up again in the rest of the movie. I think maybe briefly? Just long enough to imply some sort of connection or continuity; I don’t think he even speaks. You certainly don’t ever find out who he is or how he’s involved with the freakiness that follows. The movie has the same nightmare-like quality as the first Silent Hill - it makes just enough sense to imply that there is in fact some sort of internal logic at work, but not enough that you can sort out what’s actually going on.
​
Regardless: I love this scene all on its own. It is downright iconic.

I’ve mentioned here before that I like my horror thinky. I’ll leave it to next year’s readers to judge whether I’ve succeeded in making The Dark Beneath the Ice a thinky ghost story (you can add it to your Goodreads TBR if you want to be one of them!) but I was certainly thinking a lot about certain themes while I was writing it. So – omitting a few items that would be spoilery! – here’s some thinky background material that I loved, snippets of things that either served as inspiration or articulated something thematic so well they made me bounce up and down in my chair going OMG YES EXACTLY.
​
My initial mission was to write a ghost story. Something with Canadian roots, for preference – ideally, something I could set in my own neighbourhood, which at the time was Britannia Village, a little peninsula sticking out into the Ottawa river. It’s spooky there at night: very quiet, except for the distant sound of the river.

So at the library, I picked up a little volume of true ghost stories – now a series – called Haunted Canada. While fun to read, most of the stories in that book didn’t really catch my attention for writing purposes. They had a flat, sort of shiny traditional feel; either there wasn’t much to them or they were so neatly tied up with an explanation that there wasn’t really anything else to do with them. No dirt to dig into and mess around in.

The exception was the story of Esther Cox.

What stood out to me was the vicious, inexplicable hostility of the ghost, which slapped Esther, poked her with pins, threatened to kill her, and even stabbed her once: whatever it was, it hated her. And it was never entirely clear exactly what it was, what caused it, or what finally made it go away, although commenters on the case had plenty of theories.

I didn’t come across this book until I was two or three drafts into my own, but one fantastic recent take on the so-called “Great Amherst Mystery” – and the only one I saw from women – is Haunted Girl by Laurie Glenn Norris and Barbara Thompson. It gives a detailed account of the full story, quotes lots of contemporary responses to it, and paints a vivid picture of the time and place. Of the reading I did, it was the only book that pointed out the gender dynamics of the mystery and the conspicuous absence of Esther’s own account of what happened:

It is, moreover, the voices of men that are heard throughout this case, whether in Hubbell’s pompous, self-congratulatory tone or in the quasi-scientific musing of local editorials. Esther herself is silent. Her only apparent words are heard through the filter of the Reverend Robert Temple and her brother-in-law…but she was never totally without power, nor without the desire and ability to use it.

Reading up on poltergeists, I discovered that the people they plague are most often teenaged girls, which puts a whole different creepy angle on the varyingly Freudian explanations from male supernaturalists. And my god, some of their comments about Esther Cox were downright obnoxious, sniping about her shoddy housekeeping and her “sullen” demeanor when asked years later about the haunting.

Interestingly, though, when you read poltergeist stories, you never seem to hear from the person being haunted. It’s all accounts from witnesses and investigators. I think the narrative purpose behind that might be to retain some mystery about whether the person in question is somehow doing it themselves.

That silence was the start of The Dark Beneath the Ice: what’s it like, being at the epicentre of something like that?

During revisions, as dance became more significant in the story, I got to thinking about a fairy tale I’d heard of several times but had never actually read. My recollection was that it had something to do with a girl with enchanted red shoes who danced herself to death. “The Red Shoes,” Hans Christian Andersen’s actual story, turned out to be fascinatingly horrible – and still relevant in a weird, inverted way, which makes it even worse.

She was terribly frightened, and tried to take off her shoes. She tore off her stockings, but the shoes had grown fast to her feet. And dance she did, for dance she must, over fields and valleys, in the rain and in the sun, by day and night. It was most dreadful by night….And when she danced toward the open doors of the church, she saw it guarded by an angel with long white robes and wings that reached from his shoulders down to the ground. His face was grave and stern, and in his hand he held a broad, shining sword.

"Dance you shall!" he told her. "Dance in your red shoes until you are pale and cold, and your flesh shrivels down to the skeleton. Dance you shall from door to door, and wherever there are children proud and vain you must knock at the door till they hear you, and are afraid of you. Dance you shall. Dance always."

Andersen puts dance and torment together in “The Little Mermaid,” too, where the heroine amazes her prince and his court with her graceful dancing despite every step feeling like she’s treading on knives – and there's something about that expressed frighteningly, rivetingly well in this video of literal dancing on knives that my amazing sibling sent me.

Andersen’s message to young women seems to be, to quote the mermaid’s grandmother, “pride must suffer pain.” Jess Zimmerman’s essay “Hunger Makes Me” cuts so close to the heart of a whole constellation of related cultural messages that it’s kind of scary to read.

The attention whore is every low-maintenance woman’s dark mirror: the void of hunger we fear is hiding beneath our calculated restraint. It doesn’t take much to be considered an attention whore; any manifestation of that deeply natural need to be noticed and attended to is enough. You don’t have to be secretly needy to worry. You just have to be secretly human....

Fearing hunger, fearing the loss of control that tips hunger into voraciousness, means fearing asking for anything: nourishment, attention, kindness, consideration, respect. Love, of course, and the manifestations of love. It means being so unwilling to seem “high-maintenance” that we pretend we do not need to be maintained. And eventually, it means losing the ability to recognize what it takes to maintain a self, a heart, a life.
 
And, on the flip side, a girl who throws off that restraint, who gives in to voraciousness, is a monster.

​When you can pause for a moment between waves of stomach-churning heebie-jeebies, you realize that not only are these women sympathetic characters, but they're all the more terrifying because they have every bit of anger that makes living women sources of fear, but none of the societal restriction.

​Almost exactly ten years ago, I was sitting on the tiny tiled floor of somebody’s apartment kitchen with my dear friend Amazon, clutching a screwdriver or fuzzy navel – some orange mixed drink – and explaining this story idea I had about a girl who’s haunted by a poltergeist.
 
We were at a party to launch National Novel Writing Month, which I was determined to try after watching enviously from the sidelines for the previous year or two. I had a setting, a beginning, an idea of the end, nothing in between and barely any characters, but in the NaNo spirit: NO PROBLEM. I soldiered dutifully ahead for about a week, churning through a handful of loosely connected scenes and about 30 handwritten pages before running aground in bafflement and exhaustion.
 
Almost exactly three years ago, I was curled on the living room loveseat, scowling into the computer with those old 30 pages sitting next to me while one or both of my kids screamed upstairs. I knew I was never going to get through the NaNo goal of 50,000 words in a month; if I hadn’t managed it in 2006, I sure as hell wouldn’t be doing it in 2013. But I’d written my Master’s thesis at a rate of two pages a day, and that seemed like an achievable goal for fiction. After all, nobody was ever going to read it and it was never going to go anywhere. But by god, I was going to write it.
 
And now, after spending the intervening time hauling that little ghost story in and out of zombie surgery, most recently with the help of literary agent and narrative necromancer Lana Popovic: IT LIIIIIIIIIVES.

​So if you’re up to your elbows in that new November project and the words aren’t flowing and nothing’s clear and you’re pretty sure this is never going anywhere? PERSEVERE. Cheat shamelessly by throwing the 50K goal out the window, if you have to, and just hang onto the camaraderie. You have the company of countless other evil geniuses and a marvellously equipped laboratory, and nobody minds if you can only make it up the tower for a couple of hours a day.
 
Strap on your goggles and keep throwing the zombie guts at the wall. Your lightning strike is waiting.

SO while I was in California for the workshop, I took the opportunity to go on a field trip to the most excellently spooky Winchester Mystery House! And what better opportunity to report back on it over a pint of cider than the Midnight Society's #SpookyAllYear?

The Winchester Mystery House is the rambling, deeply bizarre turn-of-the-century mansion built over 40 years by Sarah Winchester, widowed heiress to the fortune resulting from the Winchester rifle. She had an architect for all of one day, apparently, before firing him and taking over the job herself. The result was a famously sinister and incoherent mishmash of 160 rooms – more before the 1906 earthquake damaged an additional three storeys beyond repair and they had to be torn down – full of breathtakingly opulent stained glass, lavish materials and Arts and Crafts details. It’s widely reputed to be cursed and/or haunted.

Today its first impression screams tacky tourist trap. Enter through the gift shop, get your picture taken with replica Winchester rifles (um, no thanks), get a computerized fortune told by a machine with an animatronic witch whose eyes light up. An intercom system in the courtyard announces when your tour is leaving (every 20 minutes, for the low, low price of $30-something a head). The house is full of other murmuring voices as various groups wind their way through it. Our guide was a theatrical teenager who projected her spiel at merciless volume, complete with dramatic gestures.

But for all that, it was genuinely creepy.

It was a cumulative creepiness, one that sneaks up on you without you even noticing. At first the details are just eccentric (spiderweb motifs in the stained glass) or accidents or mistakes (the most expensive window in the house never gets direct sunlight) or understandable, if uncomfortable, accommodations (the claustrophobically narrow stairways with the bizarrely shallow steps were apparently easier on Mrs.  Winchester’s arthritic joints).

But there’s only so many times you can say WTF before it starts to wear on you. The room with five fireplaces. The room with three ways in and only one way out. The staircase that ends at the ceiling. The door that opens onto lath and plaster. The stairs that go down seven steps and then, three feet later, go up eleven more, so that you end up only three feet higher than you started. The windows in the floor. The windows into other rooms. The cupboards that open onto hallways.

You’re constantly coming across features you’ve seen before from another angle, or windows you’ve been on the other side of, or glimpses of rooms you were just in a few minutes ago. But it’s always a surprise, because you’ve lost all sense of where you are in relation to anyplace you’ve been. And while natural light penetrates surprisingly far into the house, given all the plunging window wells and connected spaces, a lot of it is dark, lamplit, and the opulent details quickly become oppressive.

I’d never given much thought to the logical, intuitive layout of a house. You find your way around a house so easily that its common sense is invisible. But by the end of an hour, its absence was becoming actively unpleasant. The effect reminded me of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, whose walls just don’t meet at the right angle somehow, whose every room is subtly offensive to the senses.

And then there’s the earthquake-damaged section. I recall this coming in the middle of the tour, although I could be misremembering. During the 1906 quake, fireplaces collapsed and the walls shifted, making a door impossible to open, and Mrs. Winchester was trapped in a single room until the servants came to pry it open. She ordered the whole section of the house boarded up, and it was never repaired. I’m thinking PTSD is probably a better explanation for that than the “curse” our guide said she may have feared to call down by finishing her renovations, but either way, that part of the house is crumbling: the plaster is cracked, coming down in chunks, the ceiling a patchy mess.

I’ve had nightmares about an opulent house that dissolves into something less and less houselike – and more and more horrible – the further in you go. Peak creepiness in the whole tour was the moment I turned to look down a dark, roped-off corridor up there and a cold draft sighed down towards me, smelling powerfully of old wood and decaying paper.

​You can look up the story about the “curse” on the house. I don’t care for it. It’s one of those sort of flat, shiny, moral stories that ties up every mystery and doesn’t leave any interesting questions hanging. But the house has a spookiness that endures; it defies the attempt at an explanation.

Let me say one thing – the most important thing – right up front. People considering this workshop or some other opportunity to work with Nova Ren Suma: DO IT. Risk it. Take the leap of faith. You will never regret it.

I spent March 6 to 12 in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains in California at a writing workshop hosted by the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. The experience reminds me of nothing so much as The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. What struck me most about that movie was how much I identified with its portrait of Bilbo. He’s comfortable, complacent, a risk-averse homebody – but deep down he’s longing for adventure, for something new and different and exciting. It’s something he doesn’t quite have the courage to go looking for, but all it takes is the nudge out the door to send him running after it.

I’ve had an adventure or two in my time, but when I saw that movie in 2012, they felt like an awfully long time ago. I remember saying to my husband, as we grabbed a hurried bite at a diner after the movie before heading home to the kids, that I didn’t know what adventure would even look like for me now. And if somehow it presented itself on my doorstep, how could I possibly answer its call?

Last summer I watched enviously as people tweeted about Nova Ren Suma’s Books with Bite workshop with the Highlights foundation. If this ever comes up again, I vowed, I am SO THERE. So when Nova’s newsletter mentioned an upcoming YA workshop at Djerassi – and that she’d be teaching less after this, given her new position at VCFA – I applied. I hemmed and hawed and read tarot cards and made anxious social media posts and spent about 24 hours panicking afterwards, but still, in the end, I applied.

And I was accepted.

My friend and critique partner Amazon responded to one of my nervous night-before-the-workshop posts with her usual keen insight: “Amazing and a little scary: That's the definition of adventure, right? You're going on an adventure!”

​Getting to Djerassi is a little like stepping into a portal fantasy. Something like Spirited Away. We drove up the mountain, through mysterious, shaggy woods and on hair-raisingly winding roads, to finally arrive here, about 45 minutes from the airport.

You could tell you were in a whole new world from the second you stepped out of the car. The air smelled different in a way that struck me every time I stepped outside all week: pine forest with a faint, zingy freshness underneath, like spearmint. It was spring-chilly and green and foggy, threatening to rain.
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I was staying in the bewilderingly gorgeous choreographer’s studio, whose vast expanse of hardwood floor ended at a wall of windows facing into the woods; a staircase led up to a loft bedroom.

My first impulse, having escaped the deep freeze in Ottawa, was to snatch my notebook and run outside to the listening bench, a seat carved out of a tree stump looking out towards the ocean. I sat there and wrote until my fingers went numb and then retreated to my fancy studio to keep scribbling until dinner.

I was feeling a little shy and nervous about the hanging out with people part, but I could not have asked for a warmer, kinder, or more open crew to spend a week on the mountain with. I’ve mentioned here before how I’d long been missing the sense of connection and community with other writers, and this was the brightest that wonderful spark has been for me since attending workshops as a teenager. We were all writing YA, despite our vastly different projects; we were all fans of Nova’s, so we were all interested in fiction with a magical twist; and we were all thrilled and a little terrified to find ourselves there among our people.

Most days I was the first one up, thanks to the jump between time zones. I was showered and ensconced in one of the comfy couches overlooking the sunrise with a cup of tea and a ridiculously healthy breakfast by 6:30 or 7 every morning, and our two-hour workshop wasn’t even until 10.
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​There was so much time. There was acres of time. And all for writing. Everything else was taken care of: there was plenty of food in the cupboard, a sumptuous gourmet dinner every night, no chores to do beyond 15 minutes of after-dinner washing up. It rained most of the week, so even the gorgeous outdoors was a backdrop and never a distraction. Nothing to do but wrap up cozily in a blanket, keep the hot tea flowing, and pour my brain out onto the page, surrounded by people who were busy doing the same, with occasional breaks to chat and some prompt-writing sessions to shake things up and get you thinking in new directions. One big long epic productivity party, complete with occasional wine. I got as much done this week as I would usually expect to produce over the course of a productive month.

​And then there was the workshop. Imagine spending an hour talking intensely about your work with ten brilliant people whose work you admire and whose opinion you trust, all of whom love your vision and want to see you succeed. You could take a deep breath and share the work of your heart and – as a classmate put it – trust the group to catch you. The same dynamic was at work in the evening readings. Reading aloud is hard for me when it involves an audience other than my kids, but I knew I could do it here. There was laughing and crying and cheering. And there was even a dance class, courtesy of the boundless energy and generosity of one of our classmates. It was magical.

Our leader was every bit as wise, supportive, and judicious as her previous students have enthused, always open to questions and discussions, thoughtfully guiding workshop critiques, and offering generous, in-depth comments on the pages we submitted. She was so enthusiastic and encouraging. I came out of my private conference with her feeling more optimistic and more legit as a writer than I think I ever have before. And we got to share and celebrate a bit of her success as well when she hit #1 on the NYT bestseller lists in the middle of the week!

It was so hard to leave. I’m not totally sure how to settle back into the groove of the day to day grind, but I am so very grateful for the opportunity to recharge the creative batteries. It was the best kind of break. Instead of burnt out and exhausted I feel energized, excited, and eager to keep writing. I cannot tell you how liberating and inspiring this week has been and how thoroughly, subtly different the landscape looks on the other side of it.
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I’ve been on my adventure, and now I’m heading back again. And everything has changed.