Abigail C. Edwards's Blog: Books & Bread

Overcaffeinated and ready to fight is the name of this chapter. As a naturally rageful person I enjoy any opportunity to throw fists (in a psychological/emotional/spiritual sense). It’s rarely in defense of myself, because everyone in the whole world (including perfect strangers) except me deserves to be defended with this extreme category of fervor. Debate is an extreme sport; casual manipulation is a combat activity. This level of aggressive nonchalance is achieved through a decade of studied social behavior and practiced body language from my perch—precarious—high on the wall, near the intricate crown molding. (Like a fly. Get it? Get it?)

The willingness to fight is a fun hobby. The overcaffeination is a sort of practiced religion, the daily reception of multiple doses of sweet sweet espresso in various embittered forms. This makes the brain scream and the body move. I do work and I internally scream and my heart tells me I’m gonna die. Then I crash and I inhale another dose. Then I go home and I try to reorganize the horrific jigsaw of my thoughts into words on paper, words on a screen, a blinking cursor, a blank page, an ink spill as my pen hovers over the empty page in a blank notebook. I’ve a cheap version of a calligraphy pen I purchased on Amazon. The ink often clogs and runs dry.

I am writing. Let me be clear: I’m writing. But it’s less of a casual activity than it is a fevered obsession. All the rituals add up into weirdness: candles burnt down to puddles, and that one fleece flung across my desk chair; the scattered sketches and strange internet research open in a dozen tabs across the top of the browser window. Fifteen-thousand playlists on my Spotify, all with silly names that only make sense to me and maybe one other person. My brain is full of words and people that have never been spoken and never existed, my tongue is tripping over itself to make something real—and by extension, my fingers cannot type fast enough, my thoughts vomit onto paper. They take the form of something that only makes sense to me and maybe one other person.

I am not lonely, but sometimes the aloneness is loud. I want to be by myself, but sometimes I want to prove I have feelings and sometimes the words only make sense in written form. I can pretend my personality is one fit for society, but it does get caught in the bottleneck. I wander home and spill my brain on a notebook page. I feel lighter after that. Sometimes the words don’t make sense (not to me, not to even to one other person) unless I write them down. Then they don’t have to make sense, because they’re gone. They’re someone else’s problem now. They’re fodder for a diagnosis I’ll realize five years down the road.

If I were a villain, this is how it would look: I’d wear black (obviously), I’d wear a lot more eyeliner (Batman-like), and I’d leave all my weapons and sharp little gadgets at home (in an ominous tower, maybe). They wouldn’t see me coming. There would just be a sense of wrongness in the air, a taste like a storm coming—charged, building. A distinctive lack of aloneness. And a whisper from someplace unseen:

“I’ll put you in a story.”

What the fuck?

“Yeah, it’ll happen like ten years from now and you won’t even realize it’s you, but I’ll know. And I’ll finally be over this. And I won’t think about you anymore after that.”

That’s the end of my thoughts on this matter. In conclusion, I am often angry but I don’t do anything about it unless someone else is being slightly inconvenienced; then I’ll throw fists. But mostly I let revenge go unpleasantly cold before it’s served, and it’s usually not on a serving dish; Tupperware is easier to store. And usually it’ll be a dish you didn’t even order so it’ll get sent back to the kitchen untasted and unhated. I’ll try again next year.

Thanks for reading my overcaffeinated ramble. Tell all your friends. I’m here all night.

Here are the red velvet curtains, and here is the hand drawing them back. The auditorium is dark; we don’t have a spotlights budget. But we managed to work fog machines into the monthly requisitions and they’re all on full power, right now, filling the space with a water vapor you can’t even see. There are other seats around yours—you assume—and they’re all empty; you only know this because the room is terribly cold and quiet, the only sound your slow breaths and the nervous squeaking of your folding chair, the gentle hum of the fog machines. You’re alone. It’s just you, and me, and a whole lot of fog machines.

This is theater.

I’d call it a one-woman play but it’s the two of us here, and audience participation is mandatory. You bought a ticket, after all. You read the fine print. Oh, you didn’t read the fine print? Why does no one read the fine print?

It’s just the two of us and you haven’t got a script. I do. I have the script sitting right on my lap, though it’s too dark to read. I know everything that’s about to happen. I know the fog machines are about to cut off. I know the water vapor will clear, and the lights simply will never come on, and as the hum of the fog machines dies and the auditorium plunges into silence—you thought it couldn’t get any quieter? Think again, bucko—speakers near the ceiling will crackle to life, and a voice from nightmares and perfume ads will flood the darkness with syrup-sweet threats:

“No flash photography. The performers are easily frightened. Do not feed the things crawling in the aisles—but if you do, feed them with a flat palm. They’ll still bite you. It will just be funnier this way. Concessions is only serving cucumber slices today. Finally”—a dull thud, the sound of a microphone clobbering against a skull—you know the sound—and a moment of shuffling and staticky grunts before a breathy voice takes over the speaker system:

“Hi.” It sounds more human, this voice. Not totally human. But more so than the last. “Sorry,” it says, “disregard all that. There’s been a bit of a, em, revolt of sorts in the writers’ room.” An awkward cough. “We’re changing the script. Entirely. It just isn’t very good, you know? And we’re not satisfied and I don’t think we can put it out there in its current form. Morally. As artists. It just wouldn’t be right.”

The air is dusty and humid; breathing shouldn’t be this difficult. Your lungs shouldn’t feel this wet. Movement whispers along the carpeted aisle, and you squirm in your seat.

“Anyway, we’ve changed things around. And the office is closed so we can’t print the new script. Sorry for any and all inconveniences. The gist is: the audience is now the stage and the stage is the audience? If that makes sense? Anyway, have fun with that. Ciao.”

The speakers go silent. We stare into the darkness and settling fog, approximately at one another.

There is no script. Rather, there is, but you don’t have it. You’ve forgotten lines you only just learned you’re supposed to have. Your chair squeaks, you exhale shallowly.

You’re not even getting paid for this. Did you volunteer? Why don’t you read the fine print? I’m sitting on this platform pretending to watch, pretending to enjoy the show, but I don’t understand it much either. It’s performance, dear. This is theater.

The fog machines click and whir and hum back to the life. You crunch on a cucumber slice.

Hi! Hello. I’m Abigail Edwards, I’m 23, and this is my audition tape for the role of “young mentorless writer in agony”. Thank you!

Scene: dark bedroom, lit by a draping trail of white fairy lights and singular candle balanced on the edge of a desk. The desk is an atlas of highways and intersections marked in India ink and cat scratches. The candle smells like smoke, intentionally (it’s called Cigar Lounge). The unfortunate subject of the scene: pajamas and fluffy socks, a glass of limoncello on ice, blue-light glasses and wet hair, tired eyes glued to a low-glowing laptop screen.

The screen is a blank document. The cursor flickers.

Empty document. Empty mind.

Give up and try again tomorrow. Or wait for that jolt of inspiration that comes at the exact moment your body is ready to go to sleep. Sleep windows exist, but we don’t particularly care about them in this moment. Crank up the sea shanties or Hozier or Tamino on your headphones. You don’t hear the cat churring at the door or the moths bumping up against the window, just the dulcet tones of Indigo Night.

Hold out for a moment just beyond your reach. Grasp it. Squeeze your eyes shut and slip back into yourself, buried in an avalanche of fictitious imagery. Here’s the smell on the breeze: salt-soaked wind and sun-baked wood. Here’s the feel of that same sun and salt burning into your skin, the tickle of light turning the hair on your arm to gold. Callused fingertips. The buck of a deck beneath your feet. The slosh of sea and the scream of birds and the groan of old timbers straining beneath the weight of living things.

Don’t turn around. Don’t blink.

In Slavic folklore, the narrator often employs formulaic phrases speckled throughout the story to disconnect the reader from their surroundings and immerse them in the tale: “In a certain tsardom, in a certain country….” We are in that certain country.

At least, we were. We’re not on a boat anymore, are we? You can’t smell the sea. We’re sitting at a dim-lit desk with a watery limoncello, paging through a reference book about Russian folklore and its motifs. This is a lesson now, you messed it all up.

Laptop is shut. Fairy lights go dark. You crawl into bed and under a duvet too warm for the summer temperatures. You shut your eyes and pray for nothing—to see nothing, to think nothing till dawn.

You missed your sleep window. You’ll lay there and listen to the bouncing of pale-winged moths against glass while disjointed stories and senses ricochet in your skull (like moths). Eventually, blessed sleep will claim you (too late; you’ll be tired tomorrow, but you aways are). Maybe you’ll slide back into that space you found before, that gentle scene with the warm sunlight and the rhythmic churning of waves. Wouldn’t that be nice?

In Slavic folklore, the narrator will often employ a phrase to lend authenticity to their tale. My favorite is this: “I was there, too. I drank beer and mead; they flowed down my beard but did not go into my mouth.”

Of course I was there. You were, too, for however short a time.

The lights come up as suddenly as they dimmed. Blinding light, yellow light, fierce stage lights and a sweaty sheen on my forehead. My cheeks hurt from smiling. I nervously dodge the onslaught of rotting fruit and veg.

This has been my audition tape! Thanks for your consideration! Don’t forget to tip your waitress!

Good morning and welcome to my inaugural blog post.

If you’re here, it’s already too late. You’re reading this. I have readers. I’m an everlasting opening act, a juggler who keeps dropping flaming torches into the audience, but the doors are locked and the lights are dimmed, so you might as well go along with it. Better to happily suffer the inevitable.

Anyway! It’s been a long, difficult road to get here (think: Louisiana roads) but The Time Walker is published and I’m now the painfully self-conscious creator of two novels buried within unpopular genre. My little brother is currently halfway through reading one of the many proof copies I have on hand, and I caught him chuckling to himself yesterday, which is the highest praise I could have ever hoped for. If this books flops, at least I will have achieved this: impressing a teenage boy with my wit.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve gotten your hands on The Time Walker. If you’ve done that, chances are that you’ve read the author’s note, and you already know where the story came from and a bit about the Louisiana-quality road I walked to the anticlimactic finishing line of self-publication. Cheers.

I wrote that note over a pint of Inch’s cider at a little pub called the Machair in Glasgow. I had just finished baking school, and I was staying with my older sister for a few weeks between work placements in Cardiff and Edinburgh. It was 5:00 PM and the Machair was mostly-empty. We sat in a booth with our laptops and irreparably threw off the vibe of the whole establishment. This was the week before Easter Sunday. It was also three days before I hopped a train to East Lothian for a job interview.

Here’s everything that’s happened since I wrote that.

———

If you didn’t know this before, I’m a baker. In my books (hahaha) there are two kinds of bakers: 1) cupcakes & powdered sugar & bake sales & bad piping skills, and 2) blood, sweat, tears, & bread. I think once I was the former, but I’ve grown to detest the moment of tension when I am forced to admit my profession and the person who has the misfortunate to converse with me says something to the tune of “Oh, my friend’s a baker—she has a cupcake decor business”. Excuse me while I dash out my brains with this dowel. It’s akin to mistaking a violist for a violinist (God forbid).

Even if I once engaged in gloopy buttercream and Betty Crocker, I am now the latter of the two baking types. I went to baking school, where the three food groups were bread, bread, and Stichelton cheese. I spent 6+ months on a rural estate in the East Midlands of England, somewhere near Sheffield. Welbeck is a sprawling property on the edge of the Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire. It’s home to pheasant, miles of secret tunnels, and the School of Artisan Food. The baking diploma program takes 18 students per year. That’s a dangerously small group to spend 6+ months together.

I lived in a stone cottage called Grotto. When we weren’t baking, we were walking around the woods and exploring secluded trails near the white stag farm on the estate. We drank yeasty beers at the Welbeck Brewery next-door and beat paths to the Cresswell Crags, where a mining site was converted into a cave-painting tourist attraction which has been reduced to a grand title for a dog-walking path.

17 students (one wasn’t able to make it), all different nationalities (Canadian, Korean, Ecuadorean) and ages (20-70), in close proximity for 6+ months. What could go wrong?

This sounds like the buildup to a novel. Don’t worry, I’m very aware of that. I said it multiple times. To be exact, I announced several times that this setting and the Z-list actors cast in this particular season of my life seemed like food for a murder mystery. Word got around. By mid-year, a few people knew I was a writer, but most didn’t know I’d actually published anything. Regardless, we started changing people’s names and deciding who got offed in my imaginary best-seller.

The Welbeck Murder Mystery is actually half-written. Is it any good? No. But it’s got enough material for whenever I feel it’s time to finish the story: material gathered along mossy winter paths walled with gnarled roots and craggy stone; standing in the middle of a pitch-black tunnel textured with bulbous sea urchin carvings; sitting at my desk in a bedroom scarcely the size of a closet, staring into the backyard at packs of posh, protected pheasant crowding the Forbidden Road to the Welbeck Abbey.

I’ve got it in my back pocket. Don’t worry, I’m perfectly aware that this is writing material.

———

People I haven’t seen in months or years greet me with “You just got back from culinary school in London, right?”

You’ll understand that I don’t correct them. The truth is a bit more difficult to explain.

Following a final assessment (8 hours of solo baking resulting in about 40kg-worth of 5 different breads), I set out for Wales for a 2-week placement at a bakery outside Cardiff. I stayed in an Airbnb in a mining town. The Airbnb title was “Luxury Cabin — Actually Just a Shed in the Garden”. I am not making that up.

I stayed in this converted hot-tub shed for 2 weeks, battling a large, grumpy turkey the hosts called their pet. The turkey’s name was Humphrey. We did not get along. During this time I followed the bakery owners on a fantastic tour of what southern Wales had to offer: hiking and rain and a day-trip to Bristol bakeries.

From Cardiff I traveled to Glasgow with my entire life in suitcases and tote bags. I stayed with my older sister for a few weeks, before my next slew of placements began. (If you don’t know Claudia: my older sister lives and works in Scotland, where she earned her Master’s in Traditional Music from the school where David Tennant and Colin Morgan studied acting. This is her claim to fame.)

During this time, we went to the Machair. I wrote the author’s note for The Time Walker. The manuscript was in the hands of beta readers, and I was anxious and aimless waiting for the feedback.

During this time, I also had a job interview and trial shift scheduled. I wanted to stay in the UK, preferably in Scotland near my sister. On a Wednesday at 6:00 AM, I hopped a train to Edinburgh, and then a long, bumpy bus to East Linton. The interview went well. I loved the bakery. Three days later, I got the job.

I was still anxious.

I migrated to Edinburgh—my favorite city in the world—and stayed with some friends of my sister’s for 2 weeks while I staged with an insufferable French baker, and then with one of the loveliest groups of bakery people I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet. I walked a lot and consumed a lot of Meal Deals, read in the Royal Botanical Gardens and beat a trail through the Old Town.

I went back to Glasgow and awaited my flight back to Tallahassee. I’d accepted the bakery job, but I needed to wade through the visa process, and I needed to do that from the other side of the Atlantic.

So I went home.

———

Beta reader comments came back. Amidst jet-lag and a part-time baking job, I finished editing The Time Walker, jumped on formatting, and started ordering proof copies.

I guess you know the rest.

As of now, I’m still in the middle of the visa process. It’s taking a bit longer than any of us anticipated, but I’ve got a job waiting for me back in Scotland. I’ve got a copy of my second novel in my hands. It’s a lot of words and a lot of milky white pages that probably should have been off-white or cream, but it’s the story that brought me home to the gentle place that is my writing reverie; characters and dialogue and snippets of plot that have clung to me across the years, the foreign cities, and all the strangers I’ve wrestled into friend-shaped boxes (or, alternatively, the friend-shaped boxes I’ve stubbornly bent into the shape of inevitably temporary acquaintances).

On June 27th, the day The Time Walker was released, I sat down and reopened a document from months prior. The story needs some work. It rambles. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it’s got much direction, and the fickle god who crafted these chapters seems like she was sleep-deprived or chaotically emotional when she wrote that one line.

Welcome to the show. The program was crafted by idiots. They forgot to tell you that this act—the first act—the opener—is in fact the only act. My torches have gone out. I take a bow (I’ve burnt off some of my own hair, see?). The audience sparkles with anxious sweat and claps out relieved applause into a dank theater.

Thanks for coming to the show! Don’t forget to tip your waitress.