A Long 10,000 Days Journey Into Night Mirrors

WRITING

7/2/20263 min read

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Andie Chambers. She and her three sisters lived in a house of horrors that felt like an eternal prison sentence, but at some point, each girl managed to escape. After wandering for years, as all spiritual orphans do, Andie wound up with her very own Prince Charming and two children. She prepared to live a happily-ever-after life in a small bungalow with a long front porch and a rose garden that Prince Charming lovingly tended. He also took care of all the maintenance for her car. But grown-up Andie was no Princess. She was often manipulative and sometimes lied. Driven by the need for secrecy and control, she soon found herself plotting to keep a long-hidden death involving a family member from coming to light. Our "not-a-Princess" was convinced she couldn’t find happiness until she completed this quest on her own. She allowed no one to help her.

By the time I was middle-aged, Andie and her sisters had lived in my head and heart for years; they wanted me to write their story, but I couldn't find the shape of it. I knew its heart, and I knew its beginning, but I could see neither the middle nor the end of what I'd been tasked to write. So, I lived with those four little girls in my head; many nights they sat on the bed with me, keeping watch and spinning their tales through my long bouts of insomnia. Some stories they told were of our own family, some were of little girls I’d known or read about in books and newspapers, and some plot lines just magically began to appear in my head as they whispered me to sleep.

In 1995 I sat down to write their--though mostly Andie’s--story. I was juggling a demanding job as a systems analyst with raising children, wrangling obligations to my birth family, my extended family, and church, along with the attendant drama of all those things and more.

I was 43. I felt my life had already passed me by and I’d barely had a chance to touch it. I’d disappeared into a world of obligations and to-do lists. Not much writing happened, even when I had the time to do so.

Two years later we moved to a new city and a new life; I found myself working in Silicon Valley at yet another demanding job, this one 60 miles from our new home. I did more juggling of remote work, some endless commuting, lots of brainstorming and outlining, but almost no writing until the internet bubble burst in 2002. Finally, I had time to write. Those days, my pockets were always stuffed with little scraps of paper holding notes about characters and scenes and plot points. Suddenly I'd completed eight chapters and had partially written four more. And just as suddenly, my story had no place to go. Flying by the seat of my pants turned into a very dangerous plan, at least for me. I found another job and stopped writing. Each successive year began with a burst of writing that ended when I invited more responsibility and busyness into my life. Lather, rinse, repeat.

(cont'd...)

I wandered more years than Ulysses in my war against myself. Each of those years was filled with writing and not writing, dreams deferred and dreams denied, and more self-sabotage than I care to admit. Our daughters grew up and met their own lives; we moved again, this time to Oklahoma; I lost friends to cancer and a beloved niece to murder; we cared for my mom when she became an invalid with frontotemporal dementia until she died in our home in April of 2008.

The rest of this long road was much the same. But over the last three years something changed. I finally retired. (Ironically, I’d been working as a writer for years, but that's another story.) I found plotting tools, inspiration, and an accountability partner; as each day passed, my word count grew. The little girls picked up the raw fibers of their story and whispered to me as I spun out the yarn that would ultimately weave everything together.

As it turned out, like Odysseus’ Penelope, I also had to pull apart my threads over and over again to bring this tale to its true end.

In October of 2025, my weaving was done. Nightmirrors was complete. It had taken almost 3 decades. I could grieve for the time wasted while I was at war with myself, but that is simply wasting more time; at 74, that would be a mistake. Instead, I'm on to my next novel as I work to publish Nightmirrors. If you take one thing from this blog entry, please let it be this: if you are a writer, never stop writing.

I'm still writing, and you can be too. Saddle up and meet me at the crossroads. We write at dawn.

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