Enniskillen
15/02/24 19:45
The Key to Enniskillen evolved, as many of my stories do, from a dream.
In the dream, I had inherited a house from my grandfather on Turin Street in Kingston, Ontario. Yes, it was that specific. I have never lived in Kingston, and I have not been able to find such a street there, so my brain totally made the location up. In the dream, I was sharing my house with two friends. One day, we discovered that the locked closet door on the third floor could be opened with a skeleton key I'd found and that it opened to random destinations around the world, mostly overseas. They were completely random; we could not plan where they would open. We could walk through the doors, and then they would reopen 24 hours later in the same spot so we could return home. Some of those spots were in people's kitchens and dining rooms (much to their surprise), grocery stores, parks and dozens of other random places.
My friends and I started a business called Right There Now Inc. and began charging fellow students $500 to access these random sites as a way to have a quick break from higher learning. We were growing our business when agents from Canadian Pacific Air broke down our door and seized the closet. CPA is a defunct Canadian airline. They complained that we were hurting the airline business with our cheap travel option. In reality, CPA didn't have such agents, but it was quite exciting in the dream. I woke up shortly after and jotted the story down. I mulled it over for a few months and then began writing a somewhat more believable plot. My friend Josephine Holmes, who was pursuing a career in editing, offered to take what I was writing and mark it up with red ink as practice. Several months later, I finished a manuscript that was about 160,000 words. Next, I talked with an agent who suggested losing 60,000 words. I took her advice (I say that so simply, but it was agonizing) and then hired a local editor who had worked for a large Canadian magazine as a fiction editor, and she, too, lent her red pencil to the book.
As I hadn't yet travelled outside of North America and didn't quite feel qualified to write about places I hadn't been, I parked the book in a binder and left it untouched until the spring of 2023.
I have travelled overseas multiple times since writing the first draft and experienced the diversity of culture, history and climate that exists everywhere. After the super positive experience of publishing Medusa Gone through Raspberry Press, I felt it was time to pull Enniskillen off the shelf and breathe new life into it. It was a fun, extensive rewrite that I hope offers a few hours of escapism.
In the dream, I had inherited a house from my grandfather on Turin Street in Kingston, Ontario. Yes, it was that specific. I have never lived in Kingston, and I have not been able to find such a street there, so my brain totally made the location up. In the dream, I was sharing my house with two friends. One day, we discovered that the locked closet door on the third floor could be opened with a skeleton key I'd found and that it opened to random destinations around the world, mostly overseas. They were completely random; we could not plan where they would open. We could walk through the doors, and then they would reopen 24 hours later in the same spot so we could return home. Some of those spots were in people's kitchens and dining rooms (much to their surprise), grocery stores, parks and dozens of other random places.
My friends and I started a business called Right There Now Inc. and began charging fellow students $500 to access these random sites as a way to have a quick break from higher learning. We were growing our business when agents from Canadian Pacific Air broke down our door and seized the closet. CPA is a defunct Canadian airline. They complained that we were hurting the airline business with our cheap travel option. In reality, CPA didn't have such agents, but it was quite exciting in the dream. I woke up shortly after and jotted the story down. I mulled it over for a few months and then began writing a somewhat more believable plot. My friend Josephine Holmes, who was pursuing a career in editing, offered to take what I was writing and mark it up with red ink as practice. Several months later, I finished a manuscript that was about 160,000 words. Next, I talked with an agent who suggested losing 60,000 words. I took her advice (I say that so simply, but it was agonizing) and then hired a local editor who had worked for a large Canadian magazine as a fiction editor, and she, too, lent her red pencil to the book.
As I hadn't yet travelled outside of North America and didn't quite feel qualified to write about places I hadn't been, I parked the book in a binder and left it untouched until the spring of 2023.
I have travelled overseas multiple times since writing the first draft and experienced the diversity of culture, history and climate that exists everywhere. After the super positive experience of publishing Medusa Gone through Raspberry Press, I felt it was time to pull Enniskillen off the shelf and breathe new life into it. It was a fun, extensive rewrite that I hope offers a few hours of escapism.
