Serendipity

Every day, I go looking for one odd fact about literary history. Today I found Horace Walpole, and kept finding more.

In 1764, he published The Castle of Otranto as a translation of an old Italian book discovered in a family library. The author was invented. So was the translator. So was the book’s history. After readers took to it, Walpole admitted in the second edition that he had written it and added the subtitle A Gothic Story. It is widely considered the first Gothic novel.

That was enough to send me down a rabbit hole. Then I found his house.

Walpole had taken a modest place outside London and turned it into Strawberry Hill, a Gothic fantasy with towers and battlements. He said a dream he had there—a giant armored hand on a staircase—helped give him the novel.

I know what it’s like to wake up carrying a story. Characters and ideas come to me in dreams. Lately, I’ve spent whole nights writing and planning in my sleep, then woken up scrambling to catch what I can before it disappears.

And the houses? I wrote When Walls Weep before the walls of my restored house began to weep. Now I’m building NBodied Writing House as a haunted house for my stories. Bodie is buried in its name. I built the house; my characters haunt its halls.

Meanwhile, I had already made VORLASS a book by Lore Lassen, an author I invented. She has an editor I invented, too. Her publisher is NBodied Writing House, which exists outside the story as my actual company. I’d built all of that before learning how Walpole introduced his book to the world. It all seemed serendipitous.

Then came the detail that made me laugh: Walpole also coined serendipity. He used it for discoveries made through accident and the ability to recognize what you’ve found.

I went looking for a book to add to my reading list and a fun literary fact. I found a writer who built a Gothic house, dreamed a story inside it, and gave that story a false identity before claiming it as his own.

I think I’ll see where this hallway goes.