My story “Harmonies for Cadence” was published by The Voyage YA Journal in February 2021. This story is set in my Phoenix universe, along with my story “Dissonance” and my poem “A World in Seven Flames.” This page discusses how I came up with the idea for “Harmonies for Cadence” and my writing process for the story, so definitely go read the story before you keep reading here.
In November, 2014, I was living in Italy. I had been in Italy for only a month, and I had been teaching for just a couple weeks. I was definitely still struggling with culture shock, especially given how I was being treated as a blind person, and I felt like I was still getting my feet under me.
Then a friend back in the States asked if I wanted to join a small group that would set writing goals during November and communicate our progress over email. As many of you know, November is National Novel Writing Month, a time when writers all over the world sit down and try to write fifty thousand words in a month on a novel. I had done NaNoWriMo in the past, with varying degrees of success (I got the words but the words were mostly terrible). But this November I didn’t think I had it in me to crank out 1667 words a day for thirty days. On the other hand, 2014 was the last year I would be eligible to submit to the Dell Award, so I wanted to have as many short stories ready to submit to that as I could. So I decided to join my friend’s little group and try to write a new short story each week of November.
At this point, I’m not sure how many short stories I actually wrote during that month, or even exactly which short stories they were. I know there are a couple that I ended up completely scrapping later on, or saving for potential novels. There are also a couple that I’m still really proud of and hope will find a home someday soon. None of these stories placed in the Dell Award. (My story “Naming Angelo” was the second runner-up that year, but I actually wrote that before I graduated college). But the first draft of “Harmonies for Cadence” was one of these November 2014 short stories, and I’m so glad it’s now been published in Voyage.
Now back in 2014, “Dissonance,” my first ever Phoenix story, hadn’t been published yet or even accepted for publication, but I was receiving a lot of positive feedback from editors on it, and I was really proud of the story. So when I was brainstorming ideas for stories to write that November, I decided to try for another story in the same universe.
When I’m writing this page, it’s been about seven years since I first drafted this story (time is not real), so a lot of the details on how I came up with the idea are fuzzy, but lucky for all of us, my year in Italy was the one and only time in my life that I’ve successfully kept a journal, and I talked a lot about what I was writing in that journal.
I wanted to write a story that was different from “Dissonance,” a story that could be read independently from “Dissonance” but could also inform “Dissonance.” “Dissonance” was about a girl who appeared not to have a Harmony, and yes, I admit it, I had recently read the Divergent books not once, but several times over the summer and again that first month in Italy (I don’t know why but they were taking up a lot of space in my head), so I decided to write this new Phoenix story about a girl who had more than one Harmony.
This story is actually one of the few short stories I wrote an outline for, because I was dealing with both a past and present storyline. I wrote the outline out as a check list in my journal that year, and wrote the dates I finished each scene, so I can also say this was the first story I wrote where I wrote out of order. I wrote the flashback scenes first so they would inform the present. Up to this point, I wrote pretty religiously in order, and I still do that for novels, but for some short stories, especially short stories that are moving around a lot in time, I’ll write out of order, and I learned to do this writing “Harmonies for Cadence.”
All in all, this was a really fun story to write. It was one of those stories that just poured out of me, and working on it definitely inspired me to write even more Phoenix stories. I hope you enjoyed reading it, and I hope I’ll have more Phoenix stuff to share soon.
One more thing: I did have a specific song in mind while writing this story, and since the story is actually representative of the composition Kenzie starts writing at the end, this song is also what I imagine her composition to be. It’s “Overture for Woodwinds” by Philip Sparke. I actually played this in the woodwind choir when I got into Allstate in my senior year of high school. You can listen to a recording (not the one I’m in) here.