The Salt-Black Tree releases tomorrow, and I am very nervous. Release days are always difficult, and I like to have a heavy workload whenever one comes around. Focusing on something else is a good distraction.
Writing Nat’s story was almost an exorcism. I knew precisely where the ending scene was, and anticipated it feverishly as I drew near the end of the tale. As soon as Spring clambered onto the bus for the very final leg of her journey home only one song would do–Kathleen Edwards’s Goodnight, California, which I listened to on repeat while writing the conversation at the garden gate.
The song is a rarity in that it expresses two characters–the young Drozdova and Dima Konets. Sometimes it’s a conversation between them; most often it’s what’s left achingly unsaid. Both of them change through the duology, though it’s Nat who changes the most. Which means it’s her story, through and through.
I typed finis on the zero draft while the song played, and promptly burst into tears. The last line of Salt-Black had been living in my head for the better part of two years, and a lot of pandemic stress got poured into the writing of the whole arc. I slithered from my office chair and lay on the floor, listening to Edwards sing and the low moan of a harmonica, and the release of tension undid me. I don’t always end writing a book by sobbing on the floor, true.
But it happens more than one might suspect.
Anyway, I’m braced for tomorrow’s release. It’s weird because I’m already four books past this particular one, but somewhere in the umber-and-bloody thiefways an engine is still revving.
And somewhere, amid green hills with an unstained moon hanging in the sky, Spring is on her way.