Last updated on 02/06/2026
I’ve thrown away about thirty thousand words of this book. Well… thrown away isn’t true. They’re still there, on the drive, in a folder titled “abortive drafts”. Let’s put on ‘Brick’, shed a single tear, and talk about why draft isn’t really the right word, and what those words were actually doing.
I’ve been writing a book. Have I told you that I’ve been writing a book? Well, it is a thing that is true, and I have been informed by people that matter :tm: that If am writing a book and want people to read that book I need to talk about the fact that I am writing a book until someone screams that it is annoying. These ‘abortive drafts’ were part of that process, but drafts is the wrong word. False starts might be closer, but it’s still wrong. They’re not drafts or outlines or pitches, they were me fumbling around in the dark trying to find the shape of a thing be cutting myself on all the sharp edges.
The core idea, such as it was, had been fixed from the start. I wanted to tell a story about a TTRPG character and the person who plays her, and god help me, those two were going to fall impossibly, hopelessly in love. They were also both trans from before the first page, because, well, I want more books about people like me. This is early on in the first attempt:
“Are you not lonely?”
My head snapped away from the book and I grimaced. She hadn’t meant to, but she’d hurt me all the same. I must have looked awful, because she barely took a breath before, “Oh Tabitha…. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean”
I felt guilty, and suddenly my mouth was in motion before the rest of me, “Not like you’re not here or anything… this has actually helped me a lot,” I turned away to try and hide the blush.
The softness is there. The mutual care, the question of whether Jess is even real. I had my barbies out, and I was pretty sure I was going to mash them together and make them kiss. The issue was the stage. I wrote that first version pretty angry, because well, I was pretty angry, and what is writing if not a distillation of the self? :
It wasn’t even a remarkably bad day, and yet not kicking off my night by suck-starting a shotgun felt like an achievement. One worth celebrating. I looked down at the joint in my hand, the curl of white rising up, rolling and tumbling lazily in the oppressive August heat.
That’s flowery, but from a sad, angry place, and it bled over into how I displayed the trans experience on the page:
“You know… I barely feel anything. The…the confessing is worse…”
“Damn it Jess, I said I was sorry… I can’t…” he looked away from his work, and then at me. “Look, I’m sorry you didn’t get a chance to tell us yourself. In your own time. I’m sorry that got taken from you.”
“…(hic) (hic) I’m a f…f….f…freak…”
Bsky is currently “having discourse” about how much of the trans experience in literature is straight up torture porn. And well, there I am, torturing poor Jess, and the thing she’s mad about is that her coming out was taken from her as part of a counter-torture training exercise. Rage and pain on the page is, like, really germane to the trans experience (I loved Kay F Atkinson’s ‘A Quiet Universe‘, for example) but I wanted to tell a happier story than that. I wanted the romance to be in charge, and to succeed despite impracticality and reason.
And so, a happier story, I thought, included friends. Someone for Tabitha to confide in and cry on. Someone who could support her, so she wasn’t so alone, sure, but also something she could choose to leave. That was the real issue with how sad my characters were. Things were so bad that there was nothing they could give up to make the relationship real. I wanted to talk about choices and decisions, and so they needed something to sacrifice and someone to reflect back the insanity of the situation and looming decision:
“Come on Tabby Cat, you haven’t been this upset in… well, in a while at any rate. Something awful happened, and you disappeared into something trying to avoid it. That didn’t work, it never fucking does by the way, and now you need a shoulder to cry on and someone to help you work through it. So let’s skip the damned foreplay and get to the external processing, yeah? It’s late and I’ve got a morning shift tomorrow.”
That was Brandon, a sort of proto-Kelly. He’s there to say the true things she won’t say to herself, so she has someone to fight other than her own head. I only found out I needed that by stumbling around in the dark and hurting myself on his absence. He’s still raw here though. Look at the voice. It’s so close to Tabitha, and friends are often that way, but it’s too close. Early on, you couldn’t tell who was talking:
“Alright, you got me. You fucking got me Tabby. For the last three months you’ve been a ghost to your very real, very good, and might I mention very fucking flesh and blood friends for a romantic interest from our campaign setting? What in the actual fuck?”
Strip the “Tabby” out of that and it’s Tabitha yelling at herself in the mirror, which is exactly the problem. That’s not something I’d be able to see in a character sketch or an outline, but once I’m reading dialogue, it sticks out like a sore thumb, or I guess I should say bruised shin if I want to land the metaphor in a couple paragraphs.
The discarded stuff is full of ideas I still love and still won’t use. I wanted to talk about consent too (hey, you should go read Sophia Turner’s Machines of Consent by the way; it’s pretty good!). I had this idea about mages who might will someone into loving them without meaning to. Automatic writing as the channel between the leads, two pens in one pair of hands, the whole book an epistolary seance. Incidentally, original character ideas, don’t steal, but I think both are really fucking cool.
They’re just both also not this story. I know that because I wrote far enough in to feel how much those ideas didn’t work. The autowriting died on something I couldn’t see until I hit it: I had no way to get Jess and Tabitha into a room, awkward and quiet and present, if all they could do was pass notes. I’m sure a better writer might have seen it coming, or might be able to write around it, but I wanted physical blocking and awkward silences because presence of someone you care about and the terror of being known by them is a big part of how I experience love.
I found her there, in her room, ensconced in her menagerie. She almost looked like one of them, covered head to toe in richly colored fabrics that looked softer than soft to the touch. She was faced away from me, feet kicking back and forth like a child, shuffling a deck of cards. I should have spoken up, announced my presence. That would have been the noble thing to do, but hovering there, in her room, seeing her at ease in her element. Something inside kept me from disturbing her peace.
That’s the thing all the wrong drafts were reaching for. Two people in a room, not talking, and it mattering. The world had to be nicer, and the way they were together had to allow for asymmetry, but I didn’t know that until the other things didn’t work no matter how much I beat my head on the wall.
So. People plot, people pants, I (and one assumes others) do whatever the hell this is. I think the question of “Which sort of writer are you” sucks up too much time that would be better spent on stumbling through a field of rakes, discovering what the shape of a thing is by painfully learning what it is not. So, you know, go do the thing. Accept that it won’t be perfect. Learn something. Or don’t. Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, and all that.
What I learned in my stumbling was that if I wrote too angry, the romance never got to win. There was nothing for the characters to give up, and reaching for the impossible thing cost them nothing. If the whole relationship was notes passed in the dark, I lost the only part of love I actually wanted on the page: the awkward silence, the desire to say a thing, and the simultaneous fear of both rejection and recognition that stays your tongue.