Living with Ghosts

On writing, preciousness, and completion

Nine years ago, I became possessed by a story while living in a haunted apartment building in Venice Beach. The story— a tale of love and death, displacement, trauma, falling in love with ghosts, and writing an equation to transcend spacetime—tore itself into existence in the wee hours of the night while a thankless job swallowed my days. I wrote in a fury of heartache and metaphysical confusion, wrote myself through a chaotic reality freefall. The story became my wings, and I beat those wings until they took me somewhere; Seattle as it turned out, and a job that was far more inspiring and exhausting. At some point, I stopped writing the ghost story, I don’t remember when. Possibly when I moved out of that apartment. Over the years I would dip in to edit this, scribble out that. At one point, I became convinced it wanted to mate another story of mine, and the partial joining and succeeding extraction took up a few years. 

Work work work, more secure efforts took the place of finishing that story. Security in knowing they’d be of benefit to the common good, security in knowing they’d support my thrifty, hoopdee driving, paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle. What I didn’t have any sense of security or trust in was that story of love and death, or the many other stories of love and death that began piling up behind it. Since I failed to see the value to myself or others in my writing, I made it a very low priority, and that ghost story passed from hard drive to hard drive, festering. 

But that’s not the whole of it. Do you know the adage “write from scars, not wounds?” I’ve always taken it quite seriously. I see storytelling as a great responsibility, and I am always in conversation with myself and others about how that looks and informs my work. 

You see, I didn’t know how to end this story of love and death, because I had not made it there yet. There being a metaphysical expression of the me who could unearth and see this story in its entirety. That is, in a way that would bring light into the world, rather than suck the world into its darkness. I could sit down and see Laila (my main character)’s world; when I opened the document, her friends batted their eyelashes at me, and the seagulls swooped in the ocean breeze. But then my character’s madness always ran me into a wall, and everything went black. I had no idea what it would take to get Laila and I there; I just kept writing. Another fifty pages? Another ten years? Had this story even began? 

It struck me as no small irony that this story started at the end. It always had.  And yet, somehow, that ending continued to evade me. 

Fast forward to this summer, 2024, when that manuscript started whispering in my ear again. I’d been writing another piece about Love & Death you see, and it was mad jealous. It clawed at me in the still times, begging me to return. Tired of so many art splinters festering under my skin and wanting them to be OUT and gone, I did abide its siren song, and when I opened that document and stepped back into that world; good god. It was like coming home.

Laila rubbed the grit out of her silver eyes and stretched her cat-like body in the dawn light. Early 2010s Los Angeles threw down a starched red carpet and a king tide swept me out and in. Laila opened the door to that haunted apartment to allow me and the water to gush on in, and then she did something totally unexpected. She led me to the end of the story. It was so clear, like it had always been there, waiting to be cleansed by the water. Waiting for me to remember. One short scene later, and the story had come full circle. It had begun. It was over. We were there. 

But what about everything in between the beginning and the end? I put on my editor’s hat, and began to map out my scenes. As I was doing this, scanning through the document, I realized something odd: I couldn’t recall the last time I’d read the manuscript end-to-end. The first half I’d slicked and polished like a river over stone, but the rest? I wasn’t even sure what was there. Again—this story begins at the end, and ends at the beginning, so knowing one or the other did not mean knowing what lay between. 

So I printed out the whole manuscript, just like in the old days when I was a book editor. 

As I read it through, things kept getting more odd. Past those finely polished first pages, the scenes were terribly out of order. Since this is a book about a woman trying to transcend spacetime, it made sense that it was non-linear; it was created to be somewhat beyond time. But that doesn’t mean one could just toss the manuscript up in the air and read it however it landed. It was written to be bound, and not like this. It just felt wrong. The fever took me, and I took to the manuscript with a pair of scissors and some tape, cutting it up and rearranging it in an increasing fury that bore an uncanny resemblance to the climatic madness of my beloved Laila, writing her Equation to transcend space and time. Purple-marked pages covered the floor, the cat attacked the in-process manuscript and added her own thoughts on order, and my partner smiled fondly at my authoral possession. 

When I’d moved the last errant chapter, and the manuscript lay in a neat if not somewhat ragged pile, I sat bewildered. I felt a lightness, as if a dam had been removed from the river of my spirit. The manuscript sat beside me, marked, torn, and apparently complete. 

“Jim,” I said to my partner. “I think that I finished my book.”  

I took a few clearing breath days, then dove into applying my physical changes to the computer document. The changes flew, the story shook out its dust. A few key paragraphs near the end seemed missing in an “oops” kind of way, so I did the detective thing, and opened up an ancient version of the manuscript—circa 2013, just a few months after I began writing the thing. And you know what I discovered? 

It was all there. The story, the middle, the beginning, everything except that final scene. It was all there, it had always been there. I’d written this entire story, except for that short final chapter, ten years ago, and it had just been sitting on a harddrive, waiting for me to commit to it, waiting for me to commit to me. Waiting for us to make it there.

I want to end on a word about preciousness. In the time between when I started this ghost story, and when I finished it, it transformed from a mostly neglected word document, into some sort of grandiose possibility. My First Sci-Fi Novel. In letting it take up so much space, yet refusing to give it the attention if desired, it blocked all sorts of other creative beings that wanted to come through me. What I had to acknowledge, as I put together those final, messy, snipped-up pages, is that there is no shortage of worthy stories to be told. But if I don’t let my creations go, if I cling to them with perfectionism and fear of exposure or failure, they will just start backing up inside me. They will fight and rot and it won’t be pretty. They will haunt me like ghosts.

This sweet little book is done cooking. It’s ready to move on to the next stage. It has work to do! I just need to believe that it is of value, give it a hug, and let it go, in all its perfect imperfection. Then, I can begin freeing the other ghosts. I can keep writing, keep creating. There are many more stories to be told. 

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