We are ghosts waiting to be ghosts.
This book concerns a girl who becomes conscious with no memory of her past. The world of this story is where the cavernous brutality of Veronica Roth's Divergent crashes over the parapet and into the stranding pa...
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First of all, I'd like to thank you for reading my book. This has been a labour of love beyond anything that I have ever written. Jane and Rist have become my two favourite people throughout the adventure of this story. I love the love that they have found.
The girl from the mire is an epilogue of an epilogue. It is a "what if" of a "what was." It is a resurrection of what I hold dear in literature and film. It is the heroine in all of her horrific loss and sad landscape grief becoming unexpectedly found and profoundly loved. And though Jane thinks in circles, she is a caesura. For me, she is the quiet contemplation that becomes louder than sounds. She finds the gap in the eternal recurrence.
I've looked to many works of art to create a post-structure-structure of my own liking. The likes of Adrianne Lenker and Ian Curtis haunt my work. So too does Diego Velazquez, Jackson Pollack, John Atkinson Grimshaw, Edgar Allen Poe, John W Campbell, John Carpenter, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Jack London, JD Salinger, Cormac McCarthy, JG Ballard, Italo Calvino, Haruki Murakami, Kobo Abe, Dino Buzzati, Chuck Palahniuk, John Green, Lois Lowry, Veronica Roth, Susan Collins, Jean Baudrillard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Immanuel Kant, Emil Cioran, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek and of course, above all, the philosopher rock star himself, Michel Foucault.
It is through Foucault that the idea for the crackling record voice monster comes about. "The soul is the prison of the body" from Discipline and Punish. The answer to Plato. What if the body wanted out of such a relationship? Like a canvas that's had enough of its terrible artist. The body is finite and literally has no time for inklings of immortality. And so the horror comes out, since we are bodies and our mind is a part of our body, do we think with our bodies? And how would we know if what we view as ourself is actually doing the feeling and the thinking? What if our body and therefore our mind didn't want us to know certain things? Ask yourself. How much don't you know about your own body? So what are we? A soul? A panopticon? How would we ever know of our own captivity? And on the opposite side, the vertical watching the horizontal, how would our body be able to survive without us? Perhaps this whole story can be a metaphor for society. Perhaps it's the narcissism of pragmatism that settles for the idea that society must be defended. If the body and the soul hate each other, is there still a compromise for the so called greater good? In Jane's case, certainly. The monster protects her and destroys her at the same time. Society protects us and destroys us at the same time.
Maybe all that we are is a flowing pivot, noticing one thought to the next. How much quality and quantity of agency are we lacking or unaware of? We are ghosts waiting to be ghosts.
I enjoyed writing this story, which is my first book. And though a certain story has ended, another part of it has begun its own epilogue of an epilogue. Judith's Shadow is part two of the girl from the mire.
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