{"id":61033,"date":"2025-05-16T08:42:17","date_gmt":"2025-05-16T12:42:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=61033"},"modified":"2025-05-16T08:42:17","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T12:42:17","slug":"jessica-levai-five-things-i-learned-writing-the-glass-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2025\/05\/16\/jessica-levai-five-things-i-learned-writing-the-glass-garden\/","title":{"rendered":"Jessica Levai: Five Things I Learned Writing The Glass Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Dr. Therese Blake is a homebody archaeologist devoted to the history of planet Earth. But when her sister Lissy makes a stunning discovery near an abandoned colony on a distant exoplanet, the sisters team up to discover its secrets.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eerie, luminescent images cover the walls of an underground cavern. The glass garden looks like a payday to Lissy, who\u2019s been struggling to turn a profit to keep her salvage crew fed and paid. Therese, however, insists on careful academic procedure. She can\u2019t figure it out: Is the anomaly an artificial creation\u2013or a living organism?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the anomaly\u2019s mystery draws the sisters into an obsessive orbit, it turns out neither greed nor science can offer protection from its relentless gravity.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

I can totally write a long-form story in 500 words a day.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I started this book, all I really had was the image of the stained-glass window and the idea that it did something bad. I didn\u2019t know what, or why, or to whom. I certainly didn\u2019t know how it was going to end. As someone who likes her outlines, this was worrisome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I decided I would try to write by the headlights, as that quote from E.L. Doctorow explains. I made up some characters, put them on a spaceship because why not, and took it from there. I found myself focusing on descriptions\u2014kind of unusual for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That first draft is interesting to me now. Plot points and whole characters are introduced and slowly disappear from the narrative as I learned what was necessary and what wasn\u2019t. The story consumed them, which is fitting, but the draft preserves their ghosts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anything can be inspiration.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Especially if you\u2019re going slowly, which makes this a corollary to my first point. Did I mine my background as an Egyptologist and former professor, stuff which just happened to be lying around on the floor of my brain, as fodder for this story? Absolutely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I also learned to appreciate things I found my path. Literally. I make reference to a poor bunny rabbit on the sidewalk one summer afternoon, its inner workings on display between ministrations from the local birds. People ahead of me were clearly disgusted. I was fascinated. I mean, how often do you get to see a wild animal so closely? I went home and wrote a description of what I\u2019d seen, which led my brain to make a connection, then another, and now that bunny lives on in my novella, where he is of course still quite dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research is important, but confidence in what you\u2019ve made up is key.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of my characters is a scientist. Another is a starship engineer. I am neither of those things, though I did intern at an engineering firm in college. This helped me know where to go when the scientist needed a panoply of gear to do his job. I read up on various sensors and added them to his cart, like how it used to be my job to collate and send press releases for new products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The engineer was a little trickier, so I did that writer thing where I make stuff up. Grounded in my own frustrations with tech, of course. I have no idea if the engine room I created lines up with those of real interstellar ships (and at this point in technology, no one does) but it was important to me writing the story that I not care. This was my ship, and my character, and together we knew all we needed to know. The best compliment I got when sharing these scenes with my writer friends was when the engineer among them told me, \u201cThe engineering feels real.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You put ship names in italics.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a grammar and punctuation nerd, I\u2019m a little embarrassed that I didn\u2019t know this rule. A ship\u2019s name is treated like the title of a long-form work. That makes perfect sense. A ship is a big story, after all, with a beginning, middle, and end. Absolutely crammed with details. It deserves the italics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a horror writer.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In soliciting blurbs for this book I received an ancillary comment that stuck with me: \u201cYou write some messed-up stuff, Jessica, gotta say.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn\u2019t the first time I\u2019ve heard something like this. A beloved professor reacted to my first published short story with \u201cEWWWW!\u201d But I never considered myself a writer of \u201cew,\u201d or \u201cmessed-up.\u201d I never considered myself a writer of horror. Dark fantasy, sure. The occasional twisted fairy tale. Is a cannibal wedding really \u201cew?\u201d I hadn\u2019t thought so. There\u2019s a chance I was just too close to the idea; I remember Tim Gunn telling a designer, who used human hair as fringe, that the designer had been in the monkey house at the zoo for too long and didn\u2019t notice what was obvious to newcomers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe my hesitation to take on the moniker is left over from my childhood. I can recall in great detail the pieces of media that sent me out of the TV room to cower. Even today, I come to a lot of horror through summaries on Wikipedia, and go no further. I don\u2019t like being scared. I\u2019m the weenie Emily C. Hughes is writing for. The idea that I create horror seemed counterintuitive. Sure, I wrote a vampire novella, but it was a tragic love story and composed in sonnets, for cryin\u2019 out loud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the more I think of it, horror is a vast, varied genre, and I do love it. I love beautiful horror. I love elegant monsters in human form, non-human form, and transformations between. I love dark spaces and magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I write it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Jessica L\u00e9vai has loved stories and storytellers her whole life. After a double major in history and mathematics, a PhD in Egyptology, and eight years of the adjunct shuffle, she devoted herself to writing full-time. You can find her work at Strange Horizons, Cossmass Infinities, and Reactor Magazine. Her first novella, The Night Library of Sternendach: A Vampire Opera in Verse, won the Lord Ruthven Award for Fiction. She dreams of one day collaborating on a graphic novel, and meeting Stephen Colbert. Check out her website, JessicaLevai.com<\/a>, for links and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Glass Garden<\/strong>: Bookshop.org<\/a> | Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Therese Blake is a homebody archaeologist devoted to the history of planet Earth. But when her sister Lissy makes a stunning discovery near an abandoned colony on a distant exoplanet, the sisters team up to discover its secrets. Eerie, luminescent images cover the walls of an underground cavern. The glass garden looks like a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-61033","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-fSp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61033"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61035,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61033\/revisions\/61035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}