Here I sit at my desk, working hard to complete the latest draft of my novel, Seeds of the Pomegranate. It’s winter in the Adirondacks and I feel like I’m deep underground, like a seed germinating. Unseen. Quiet.
This is my seventh draft of the story. I’ve written thousands of pages, worked and reworked the plot. I finally found my protagonist in the quiet Mimi Inglese, lost to history, but found in these pages. She guides me through the story. I feel her moving towards the end and I move with her. I rise before dawn and sit at my desk in the still darkened basement. With only my computer screen for light, I put down word after word. Then sentence after sentence. The pages accumulate. The story unwinds.
2022. One hundred years after the fire that killed the “real” Mimi. One hundred years since my grandfather suffered his terrible burns. The year I finished the working draft of Seeds, the story that broke me, then healed me. Mimi may have perished in that fire. But she lives on in this story.
