To follow pleasure instead of shame. To feel the fear, to do it anyway.
I wrote this as part of my commitments to 2025, and it has been an echo and a tether running across my writing, across the various projects and ideas and strings of thought. This past week, I’ve been courting the pleasure again as I wrote through Leatherbound Hands. I’m at a point in the story where, finally, Éomer encounters more of Lothiriel’s writing, and finds out that the woman he had been corresponding with has certain special abilities that he could not have anticipated. I was stalled when it came to writing his meeting with Astoreth — an original character I dreamt up to be Lothiriel’s kinswoman and friend, who rode to Minas Tirith to bring her husband, Dirhael, home to Dol Amroth. I hadn’t written her since a previous chapter, so stepping back into her character was akin to figuring out how an outfit fit on my body, where the armholes were, if I enjoyed the texture of the fabric. This retrial was something I encountered as I began to write Imrahil again — I had to remember how I wrote him, what was important to him, and why, in this story, he proposed Lothiriel’s marriage with Éomer in the first place.
Full of Grace is harder to find. In all my past imaginings, the story had become hollowed out somewhat and full of arbitrary rules. As I went back to outlining, I went back to consciously simplify: what do I want to write about? What is pleasurable and pleasing for me to think about, like a puzzle? In writing two longer, sustained works together, I realize that my way of working through a story enlarges it from the inside out and so the ideas I set out to explore, the characters, the setting — these become wider and more complicated the longer I write them out for myself. It is part creative, part exploration of a thing that is nascent, not quite there but somehow already following rules of its own. Full of Grace is/will be about women: how we talk to each other, how we support each other, how lonely we feel. And what gives me pleasure to think about is survival. How do we survive with each other?
