Jarzaberwoky

It was almost midnight. The Castle was quiet, but through the open windows she could hear the breeze rustling the leaves and flowers in the garden below her bedroom terrace; the smell of roses and lilacs rushed inside upon those same soft winds and wrapped itself around her neck like a scarf. Up in the sky, the aurora danced; the incandescent whorls of green-blue light usually lifted her spirits, but tonight they gave her a melancholy feeling. For days she’d been on high alert for ill omens, signs of impending disaster, something that would tell her definitively that she was making the wrong choice, heading down an unsafe path. She wasn’t normally so superstitious, but anxiety buzzed beneath her skin like a fly trapped against a pane of glass, and she wondered if, maybe, the universe might intervene in some unforeseen way on her behalf and make everything clear, for once. But here she was, in the eleventh hour, and no clarity had come. She was truly on her own, with nothing and no one to guide her. The door was closing on her fate.

He had entered this universe through a door that wasn’t there. No one saw him do it; night had fallen several hours ago, and the small, quiet stretch of South Kenwood that ran along Bixler Park was empty. His entry was undisturbed; only a small tremor that rattled the swings on the playground even signified that he’d arrived at all. He’d taken up his position behind the thick trunk of an oak tree and waited for his analog to appear. He didn’t have to wait long. At nine forty nine PM, Grant Davis left a restaurant on 57^th Street with a small group of friend, three guys dressed in hooded sweatshirts and jeans. Thomas watched as Grant said goodbye to them and separated from the group. He shoved his hands into his pockets and half-jogged across the street. He was on his way.

I’m doing the first pass pages for The Opposite of Hallelujah right now, and they’re surprisingly clean (not a lot of notes from the copy editor/my editor), but every once in a while there’s an interesting little thing I never knew. Like it turns out that this

Finally,
Mom would open the door, or if Hanna had locked it,
she would threaten to have my dad take it off the hinges,
which usually got Hannah’s attention.

is called a “punctuation ladder”, which the copy editor noted needs to be fixed. (The text won’t really look weird like that in the book, I’m just right-justifying to show you how the commas stack on top of each other, forming the “ladder”.)