Author's Note
This note has no bearing on the upcoming story. Skipping it will not have a negative impact (or any impact) on your reading experience.
Abracadabra was first developed in 2011 with the collaboration of my friend, Courtney Rae Canavan. Over the next couple years, we outlined, drafted, played around with an AU, and crafted over 500,000 words together in hopes to make something worth publishing some day. It was a passion project full of late-night messaging until the sun rose, giggling over inside jokes we would sneak passages in for one another, and playing around with prose.
In 2013, though, Courtney was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and we put a pause on our project so she could focus on trying to get better. Ultimately, on Saint Patrick’s Day in 2014, she passed away.
(In an added twinge of irony, the last scene we wrote together was set on Saint Patrick’s Day because we wanted to write about our mutually favorite holiday. It’s obviously not my favorite anymore.)
Over the years, I’ve found some comfort in drafting and playing with the world we did write together as a way of connecting with her and expressing the message we wanted to tell. As a compromise for not being able to publish with Courtney, I’ve put the story on the Internet in various forms. I haven’t progressed past where Courtney and I paused, though. Re-telling the same thing over and over again without changing much more than just the words didn’t bring her back to have her help me finish the story--a difficult lesson that took me a long time to learn.
So for this final iteration of Abracadabra, I’ve relied more on what Courtney inspired me to write rather than attempting to regurgitate what she left behind.
This iteration of the story is a conglomeration of everything we planned together almost ten years ago into one: The research, the alternative plotlines and scenes, the changes we saved for future drafts. It will never be what we could have made together, but if I can offer a crayon-on-a-napkin version, that’s better for the world than hiding away what we were so proud of.
If you’ve seen an old version of this story floating around the Internet, this one will be quite different, and I hope you enjoy it, in any case.
Past versions may have been made with help from Courtney, but this time I’m writing itforCourtney.
