Publisher: Create Space (April 16, 2014)
ISBN: 978-1497532731
Category: Fantasy, Magic, Fairytale
Tour Date: October, 2014
Available in: Print & ebook, 180 Pages
Synopsis
“When you die, your spirit wakes in the north, in the City of the
Dead. There, you wander the cold until one of your living loved ones
finds you, says “Goodbye,” and Sends you to the next world.
After her parents die, 12-year-old Sophie refuses to release their
spirits. Instead, she resolves to travel to the City of the Dead to
bring her mother and father’s spirits back home with her.
Taking the long pilgrimage north with her gruff & distant
grandmother—by train, by foot, by boat; over ruined mountains and plains
and oceans—Sophie struggles to return what death stole from her. Yet
the journey offers her many hard, unexpected lessons—what to hold on to,
when to let go, and who she must truly bring back to life.”
Craig Staufenberg is a writer and filmmaker living in NYC.
Website: http://craigstaufenberg.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/YouMakeArtDumb
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com
/YouMakeArtDumb
Google+: https://plus.google.com
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Guest Post:
Where does the inspiration for a story come
from? In particular, where did the inspiration for my most recent story—The Girl Who Came Back to
Life—come from?
The answer to both is the same— I don’t
know.
I’m not playing up the “aloof, mysterious
author” angle here. I really don’t know where the inspiration for this story
came from, nor do I know where the inspiration for ANYTHING I’ve written came
from. I’m envious of those people who read an article in the newspaper and
transform it into a book. They have a clear answer to this question.
And yet, even with no clue where my inspiration comes from, I can tell you what helped me receive that inspiration— music.
I know, I know… that’s vague and obnoxious.
I’ll explain further.
Before I write a story, I first sit down
and find some music for it. Sometimes I’m ambitious and work out a proper
soundtrack and assemble a bunch of different songs that fit the mood of the
piece. But usually I just find the one right song, or the one right band, or
the one right album, and then I listen to it constantly— early in the morning
as I walk to the coffee shop where I’m going to write, while I’m writing, and throughout
the rest of the day and night, as I let the story wander abound inside me.
Now, with all this repetition I’m not
trying to get the song stuck in my head. I’m trying to get it stuck in my
heart. As I said: I look for music with the same emotional tone as the piece I’m writing, so when I listen to that
music over and over again, I am able to:
1. Sink into the piece’s emotional world easier than if I sat by
myself and tried to will the feelings into being.
2. Stay in that emotional world as I write.
3. Keep those feelings active in the background as I go about the
rest of my non-writing day. (This helps with all that daydreaming about the
story that’s so essential.)
I’m sure there are complicated theories
about why music works so well facilitating all this emotional stuff. In fact, here’s
one— in film they say music carries the emotion of the film. OK, you got me… That
wasn’t really a “complicated theory” but rather corroborating evidence. I’d
rather leave it up to other people to find the scientific explanation for why
music is so good at evoking emotions. Though when they do, I probably won’t
read it, or give it much mind. Those theories change every couple years, and
I’m not so interested in things that change quite so quickly.
Instead, I mostly just care about what
works. And when it comes to finding “inspiration”, listening to the right music
works for me, every time.
(For those wondering… while writing The Girl Who Came Back to
Life I primarily listened to the
band The Naked and the Famous. Mostly “Passive Me Aggressive You”, but also “In
Rolling Waves” towards the end of the process.)
Excerpt:
-->
LESSONS OF
LOSS
Sophie proved a quick study and, under
her grandmother’s expert
guidance, she took to the cards
swiftly. She played constantly, learning
new skills during those long, slow
days, and sharpening her tactics
during those quiet moments at night
when the moon poured in through the
cabin’s open windows and provided
enough silver to illuminate a silent game
with whichever woman found sleep
elusive.
When the train stopped, Sophie began to
divide her time between playing
cards and running circuits. Those runs
now sustained themselves without her,
the children finding their legs on their own. A
few of the men began to join
the running children, immediately taking those
light jogs too seriously and
soon devolving them into races, after
which the winner exalted and the loser
sulked in shame.
The children mimicked the men and began
to hold their own races among
themselves. After her many runs, and with her
fiery heart bursting through her
legs, Sophie ran far too fast for any of the
children to catch her and she joined
the men’s competitions instead. She offered a
true challenge to the grown men,
and the threat of being outrun by small
and scrawny Sophie goaded the boastful
men into believing their petty races
meant something resembling life and death.
The men heightened their competitions
and they began to bet on their
races, though only small amounts, as no
one had much of anything to wager, aside from pride. When a man occasionally
bet too much his women scolded
the winner and retrieved their family’s
losses.
The train’s women understood wagering
better than the men. They
gambled at their cards from the start,
though always with small sums. Sophie
didn’t understand the parity of this
sort of wagering, and she occasionally
pushed too far and won too much,
excited by her skills and unaware of the
discomfort it caused her circle of card
players. When Sophie won too much,
her grandmother told her to spend her
newfound wealth on food to share with
the others, to keep the peace among the
women.
During these games the old woman taught
her more and more about the
subtleties of wagering, the way even a
small bet dramatically changed the
game. She showed her granddaughter the
delusions people paint over their
own eyes to avoid the devastation of
loss, of all loss, of any loss, especially
those small hits that wound the pride
more than the purse. The old woman
taught Sophie how to keep her face
straight, how to eliminate the tics and tells
threatening to give away her true
intentions, and to never wager anything she
wasn’t prepared to lose.
Sophie learned the cards so quickly and
so deeply that those lazy matches
turned into bouts between grandmother
and granddaughter. By late spring,
the other women split the games in two:
one ruled by the old woman, the
other by Sophie.
CHAPTER 21
THEIR TRUE
HEARTS
As the sun hung longer in the sky with
each passing day, the farmland
rose into higher hills and the looming
mountains pulled Sophie’s
train closer and closer.
During their card games, the train’s
women discussed how they would pass
through the mountains. They said
walking from one side of those peaks to the
other was too difficult to consider. The
mountain’s paths wound and cut too hard,
and the mountain’s towns and base towns
stood too far apart. The only ones who
walked the mountains were the roving
bands of the truly lost, those with no other
means, and those whose buses broke down
without hope of repair.
The women admitted those buses, as
uncertain and unpredictable as they
were, offered the best chance at crossing the
mountains quickly. They resigned
themselves to the reality that they
might have to wait days, if not weeks, to
find an open space on one of those puttering,
wavering carriages, a delay that
was clearly preferable to crossing the mountains
by foot.
The closer they got to the mountains,
the more the women appeared
troubled, anxious and concerned over
their chances of making it to the other
side in one piece.
They bolstered their resolve by
speaking of the loved ones they were
traveling to Send, laying down their
memories like a thick balm over the talk
of the hardships they all knew
stretched ahead.
Some of the women spoke of lost
husbands, others of friends and family.
Some spoke of their parents and others
of children half gone from this world,
waiting in the north to finish their journey to
the next. Each of the women
spoke of their passed loved ones intimately, as
if they had just seen the dead the
other day. When they spoke of Sending,
they spoke as if their pilgrimage was
just another in a long line of favors they
provided their loved ones, conducted
more from necessity than love.
The old woman said little during those
discussions. Sophie remained silent.
She never said a word of her desire to
bring her parents back to life. She felt
unwilling to lose the warmth of the
camaraderie she found on the train. As
the conversations floated over her card games,
she buried, deeper and deeper
in her heart, her desires to regain
what had been. To stay close with those
women, Sophie pretended she was
traveling north to release her parents and
Send them to the next world. If the
other passengers doubted her intentions,
or if they had their own desire to
return the dead to life, they hid their hearts
as thoroughly and as skillfully as
Sophie shrouded her own.
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