What I've Been Working On This Month
By Ceci Ellis
This month split pretty evenly between finishing something old and starting something new, which is about as normal as my desk ever gets.
A Ghost Like Me went back to my editor, Ryan, after I'd let it sit untouched for about six months. That distance turned out to be the best editing tool I didn't know I had. I'd read a paragraph and think, wow, I wrote that 🥰, and two paragraphs later, wow, I wrote THAT? 🤢🤮. The big structural task was shifting the entire manuscript's tense, which forced me to read every single sentence instead of skimming past the ones I already knew by heart. In the process I found a pet word I'd used more than seventy times and managed to whittle it down to nineteen. I also found several spots where I'd apparently typed a colon instead of a closing quotation mark. My pinky, it turns out, gets lazy around page 200. I spent an afternoon double-checking release dates on songs and products mentioned in the book, because nothing pulls a reader out of a story faster than an anachronism nobody asked for.
While Ghost was out with Ryan, I started building out Based on a True Story, a suspense novel told from multiple points of view across two different timelines. This one's got more scaffolding than anything I've written before — a full character bible, a chapter-by-chapter outline, and beat sheets breaking down what needs to happen scene by scene. I'm not usually this buttoned-up before I start drafting; normally I let characters surprise me more than this. But a book that jumps between perspectives and time periods needs a map, or I'll lose track of who knows what and when. I'm seven chapters in, and so far the map is holding.
Ones story set in Guanajuato, Mexico
I also finished two short stories this month, which felt like a nice palate cleanser between the heavier lifting. The first, A Rainy Day, is done and out looking for a home — it's about a practical Phoenix divorcée who starts waking up to photos of herself at places she's never been: the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Maasai Mara. It's a story about a woman who stopped going anywhere, and what it costs her to finally buy the ticket. You can read the opening pages under the Ceci Ellis project spotlight on this site.
Another story set in Phoenix, AZ, but travels the world.
The second, What the Ground Remembers, took me by surprise. It follows a boy in Guanajuato who watches something happen in his family's living room that no one will explain to him, and who doesn't get the real words for it until he's a grown man standing in a cemetery decades later. It's steeped in Día de los Muertos, in marigolds and copal smoke, in the particular way a family can decide, without ever discussing it, what a five-year-old is and isn't allowed to know. I wasn't planning to write it. It showed up in the middle of outlining the suspense novel and wouldn't leave me alone until I finished it.
Right now my desktop has three different worlds pinned open in separate tabs — a Phoenix apartment complex, a graveyard in Guanajuato, and a Loveland, Colorado house where Based on a True Story is currently set. I close my computer most nights not entirely sure which world I was actually standing in.
