Things That Look Meaningless

Yesterday I gave myself a problem.

Lore Lassen wrote Vorlass.

Except she didn't.

I did.

In the real world, I am writing a novel about an author who doesn't exist, containing a manuscript she didn't actually write, documenting a disappearance or death that didn't actually happen.

Easy enough.

Except inside the story, Lore wrote it.

These are her words. Her drafts. Her notebooks. Her files. Her Vorlass.

So how exactly am I supposed to put Nikki Bodie on the cover of something I'm asking you to believe belongs to Lore Lassen?

I don't want to break the illusion every time you look at the copyright page.

Which sent me into research on estates, literary property, publishers, editors, executors, archives, and what actually happens to a writer's work when the writer is no longer there to manage it.

Eventually I found my way through.

Lore needs a publisher.

Conveniently, I own one.

NBodied Writing House.

So, inside Lore's world, NBodied Writing House will be her publisher.

And Lore will leave control of her literary estate to her publisher.

Which is NBodied Writing House.

Which is effectively me.

That means Lore Lassen is the author. NBodied Writing House is the publisher. Nikki Bodie can be the editor responsible for assembling and presenting what Lore left behind.

Problem solved.

Except not remotely.

Because now I am writing an author while simultaneously becoming the person responsible for deciding what happens to that author's work when she is no longer available to object.

I get to decide which files matter. Which drafts belong. Which crossed-out sentences stay crossed out. Which notes get published. Which private things become public. Which version counts.

I created her, so obviously I know what she intended.

Except the entire point is that the reader shouldn't.

And that's when the manuscript got more complicated.

I'd also been reading about Beatrix Potter, which tossed me down another rabbit hole.

Potter kept a private journal in code for years. No key survived. After her death, Leslie Linder spent six years deciphering it.

Six years.

And apparently Potter's interest in coded writing was influenced by Samuel Pepys's famous diary, which he wrote largely in shorthand.

Pepys made some of the more private passages even harder to read by mixing other languages into them.

That stopped me for two completely different reasons.

First, I'm already doing that.

Vorlass. Nachlass. Bestand.

I've somehow wandered into German without even getting to the cipher yet. And I've already been considering French elsewhere in the story.

What if Lore doesn't have a code?

What if she layers them?

Shorthand. Substitution. Different languages. Literary references. Marginalia. One system telling you how to read another.

Now we're getting somewhere.

But Pepys's shorthand stopped me for another reason too.

My Granny Louese knew shorthand.

She had an old shorthand book when I was growing up, and I always wanted to learn it. She wanted me to learn it too.

After she died, that was one of the things I specifically asked for.

I don't have it.

My mom is looking for it now, so I'm still holding out hope, but I think it may have been thrown away because nobody thought anyone would want the books.

Which is heartbreaking for more reasons than one.

There were children's books there too. Books Granny Louese read to me when I was little. I desperately want those now.

And suddenly I'm back at the same question I've apparently been asking all week.

Who decides what is worth keeping?

Dickinson's poems survived because Lavinia opened a drawer and decided they mattered.

Kafka's manuscripts survived because Brod decided Kafka's instructions didn't.

Potter's coded journal survived even though nobody could read it.

And somewhere there may or may not still be a shorthand book that mattered enormously to one little girl nobody thought to ask.

So Lore is leaving files.

Some of them are going to be unreadable.

An encrypted notebook. Coded files. Puzzles inside the manuscript. Things in her marginalia that look meaningless until they don't. Information that unlocks other information.

And unlike Potter, maybe Lore does leave a key.

Just not one anyone recognizes as a key.

Which means I don't just get to write Lore's manuscript.

I get to build the evidence around it.

And that creates another problem.

Lore needs fans.

Of course she does.

She's a bestselling author.

She has readers. People who know her books. People who have theories. People who care enough about an unfinished manuscript to pick through her notes, decode her files, argue over her marginalia, and try to figure out what happened to her.

Except she doesn't.

She doesn't exist.

So apparently I need to give my fictional bestselling author a fandom.

This is where the manifesting gets ambitious.

Because I don't have fans to give her yet.

I'm currently building my author website and writing manuscripts in the hope that eventually people will actually read them.

It would be pretty awesome if someday I had readers I could lend to Lore.

It would also be pretty awesome if I finished a manuscript.

Which brings me to perhaps the funniest part of this entire idea.

I have decided, on purpose, to write an unfinished novel.

I currently have somewhere around twenty unfinished manuscripts.

Apparently those don't count.

No, no. Those are unfinished because I'm still writing them.

This one will be unfinished artistically.

Completely different.

The jokes really do write themselves.

Unfortunately, they do not appear to finish manuscripts.

But maybe that's part of why this idea appeals to me.

I'm building Lore a career I don't have yet. Published books. Bestsellers. Readers. A fandom. People invested enough in her work to care what happens to an unfinished sentence.

Maybe I'm manifesting a little.

Fine.

Lore can go first.

And if someday I actually do have readers, maybe I don't have to invent hers.

Maybe my readers become Lore's readers.

Maybe the people reading Vorlass become the people trying to decipher it.

I can hand them the files. The encrypted notebook. The manuscript. The marginalia. The things we can open and the things we can't.

They can follow clues. Unlock files. Argue about what Lore meant. Get things wrong. Maybe get things right.

And maybe some of what real readers do with Lore's unfinished work becomes part of what happens next to that work.

Which means I am designing a book partly around the behavior of readers I do not have yet.

Manifesting.

Structurally.

So now I am the author writing the author. The editor editing the author. The publisher publishing the author. The estate controlling the author's property.

And someday, maybe, the person introducing one author's readers to another author who doesn't exist.

That is not at all philosophically dangerous.

Anyway.

I think I'm going to need a lot of files.