Healing Miranda

When I first conceived the idea of a character arrested for chronocide, or the act of killing time, I was relatively new to my writing journey. I had the idea that a good idea sufficed, and the rest was a combination of craft and brutal workshopping. I didn’t realize that writing fiction was more akin to discovering one’s own Dorian Gray portrait in the attic of one’s brain. Not that I suppose everyone’s journey is like that, given the varying depths of popular and literary fiction.

But my journey began with a Miranda who was too much like Alice in Wonderland, a trait I shared. Miranda was an innocent wandering around while bizarre things happened all around her, and she had little to no control or agency in those events. Anyone who has read my blog is aware of the decade of narcissistic abuse I endured. Miranda’s character issue was a severe case of dissociation. It was mine too. The fundamental problem was that I couldn’t see it in myself, and so couldn’t see it in her. Turns out that brutal workshopping brings up issues beyond merely telling a story well.

When other writers complained that Miranda seemed detached from her reality, it surprised me. And when my therapist told me I recounted my history of domestic violence as if it happened to someone else, it shocked me. But I eventually made the connection. The problem is that writing about dissociation from a fictional perspective is challenging. I was told that readers want a heroine who charges in to rescue people. From my standpoint, that just looked like codependence. But I saw their point. It is easy to fall into the trap of random storytelling. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, ad infinitum. A story needs to be driven by its characters.

The real world operates on the principle of cause and effect, as well as action and consequence. So I navigated more carefully through Miranda’s world, teaching her to interact with her world while understanding that feelings were big and scary. But then I hit another snag. I was told I needed an enemy, a villain. I struggled with this a lot. A mean old boss character would be easy to add, but here is where my story converged with Miranda’s. My ex-husband, villainous as he is, was not the most brutal monster I fought in my battle for freedom against intimate terrorism. It was my own fear.

I present to you a story that doesn’t follow the formulas handed out at conferences. Does it move forward to a thrilling ending? I hope so. To be honest, I feel that the Holy Spirit guided me into the climax in a way that makes me weep every time I think of it. And that is the real journey of writing Miranda’s story. Looking back, I see that an invisible hand guided me over the thirty years it took to tell her story. It won’t take as long to write another, but even if this compendium of wordplay, inner healing, and adventures sells just a few copies, I am grateful. Miranda’s journey into reality taught me a lot. I owe her a lot.

I would love to share her with you…

Twelve-year-old Miranda Winklesworth is furious that she didn’t get more time with her terminally ill mother before she died. And she never imagined she’d be arrested for attempted chronocide when her angry outburst broke the family’s old grandfather clock—an act which would turn her life upside down and send her spiraling through time…and time again.

Killing Time is a mind-bending fantasy that pits Miranda against Time itself and her anti-Miranda until she must face her own personal black hole. Along the way, she encounters a feisty watch and some virtual realities that defy her wildest imaginations.

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Alice Mills, the daughter of a physicist and an English professor, grew up in a home where the mysteries of time and space were served at every family dinner. As a child, she learned to ask big questions and play with both language and astrophysics. A professor of Creative Writing for thirty years, Alice also serves as the Director of Narrative at TruPlay Games, a Christian mobile game company. Her website and blog, poemachronicles.com, serve tens of thousands of readers.