The Healer of Stonebarrow is a story I sweated over more than any of the others I’ve had published so far. I worried more, perhaps because my first four novellas were well received, and I was gambling by not immediately writing a sequel to one of those stories.

As it turns out, I realized that I’m writing what I think is interesting and hoping that other people will find it interesting as well. They don’t have to think everything I write is interesting, but I hope that somebody out there does. I am working on sequels and prequels and completely unconnected stories as I go forward, and eventually the right stories will reach the right readers if I’m lucky and keep at it.

With that in mind, I let go and kept the story purposely a little vague about who the Healer is. Is it Queen Mirela? She certainly did a lot of hurting and could stand to do a lot of healing, both of herself and others. What about Gaic Ko? He’s come back from the dead to see justice done, or something that looks like justice if you squint your eyes just right.

Can one person make another person choose to be better?

Can you ever really change another person?

Do you even have the right to try?

I let the story brush up against those questions, and then I decided to leave it to the reader to decide what the answers are. Somewhere in the back of my mind, maybe I was healing myself as a writer. That sounds a little corny as I write it, but I’m going to leave it there. If I had an infirmity, it was indecision and doubt. For now, I choose to believe the positive reviews, the thoughtful comments, and the praise of people who know me in person and joke about me being a “famous writer.” I’m not, but if I am to a couple dozen people I know? That’s all the medicine I need.

I spend a lot of time sitting in a chair with a fountain pen and a notebook. There is something comforting to me about the scritch-scratch sound the nib makes as it glides across the paper. Sometimes the morning sunlight glares directly into my writing space and onto my page, and I can see the wet trail of water-based ink as it disappears into the thirsty surface of the paper. I might be working with green ink, but the feathering of the pigments makes ten shades of emerald as I work, instead of one constant hue, and time stretches.

Some days this summer I got down four thousand words in a notebook; on others, the kids came tumbling into the room and I abandoned the page with only a sentence or two to show. Either way, the words added a layer of time over my day that hadn’t been there before. As I accessed the part of my head where the words come from, the days stretched and stretched, sometimes feeling like two days in one, the day I was writing and the day I was living.

Later, when I go back to those words to transcribe them, I will see the choppy parts where I couldn’t get my head on straight, or the change of ink color, perhaps from cosmic cobalt to orange crush, indicating that I had stopped on one day and returned the next to keep going. So outside of the story, I have a sense of the present, the past, the potential of the words in the future.

When I have a block of uninterrupted hours, I time-travel up and down my stories, from page one to page thirty, then back to six and forward to fifty-two. I notice a character who should have been back in chapter three so I travel back there and put him in. I see in chapter four another character who seems lost and does something that makes no sense, so I travel forward and give her a reason that clears everything up in chapter nine. I didn’t see that coming, but I can time travel again and again and again until the whole thing makes sense. What a gift.

In the end, I’ll have traveled across my story dozens of times or more, forward, back, forward, and back. It took me a long time to realize one thing: writers seldom sit down and write a brilliant novel. What they do instead is write a crummy novel and then they time-travel back and forth, ahead and reverse, until they finish with a novel that’s been worked on by fifty authors, a different one for every time they journeyed.