Three books. Ten years. The Coldmaker Saga has been an adventure for me in every sense of the word. How does one end such a journey, such a transformation, with grace and poise?
I dreaded writing this section. Perhaps more so than any other section in any of the books. I’d known it was coming for a while, with months to get it done and still I had trouble finding not only the right words, but any words at all. I’d never been affected by writer’s block in the traditional sense before, but for once I found myself truly afraid of my keyboard, paralyzed at the thought of bringing this part of my life to a close.
Right now I’m sitting in my favourite place in Austin, Texas, a place called ‘Mayfield Park’. It means more to me than anywhere else in the city. Here are sprawling gardens with coy ponds, peacocks, and a woody trail I’ve wandered countless times while waiting for inspiration to strike, or for chapters to come. I even have a special bench, and special rock, where I come when I’m feeling particularly sentimental – as I am right now.
When I was in my early twenties, I suffered a mental breakdown and ended up in a psych ward on suicide watch. Three years prior I had been put on a very powerful prescription drug for insomnia issues, and after being hollowed out by meds I was too young to understand, I had decided to go cold turkey, unsupervised. I refused any and all drugs that the ward psychiatrist tried to put me on, and so I was released fairly quickly.
It took me about nine months to return to any semblance of sanity. I had been diagnosed with depersonalization disorder— I won’t go into the details of my condition here, but will describe it as hellish. As a last-ditch attempt at healing before doing something permanently destructive, I went to, and was saved by, an Israeli acupuncturist who looked into my eyes and understood both my pain and what had happened to my central nervous system. He stuck me full of needles and left me alone in a dark room, and after fifteen minutes I felt myself return, just for moment, just slightly, to my body. It was the upswing that all lasting hope demands.
I did not believe in acupuncture then. I do now.
After that, I moved from New York to Austin to get away from my demons. I went cold turkey from the entirety of my past self. My life was split down the middle, shattered by mental illness, and for the longest time I didn’t even have access to memories on the other side of the Great Divide. It is still the deepest wound I harbor, and had not yet scarred over when, out of the blue, a young boy wandered across my imagination fully formed.
He trekked across sand dunes, strapped into shoes that looked like tennis rackets, holding a mysterious golden machine. Somehow I knew that this machine could make life (Cold) in a world that had been diagnosed as terminal.
This boy and his machine became my entire life. For ten years, I did everything humanly possible to put his story together. The work was tiresome, maddening, and endless, a Sisyphean effort, but it gave me direction. It gave me meaning. It was my fourth novel, but it felt so much bigger and more visceral than anything I’d ever attempted. It made me feel like I’d never done any real writing before, which I guess is what you want from each progressive book as a writer.
In the four years of grueling effort it took to create the original iteration of the story—a book called ‘The Inventor in the Sands’—something unexpected happened.
Dan the person, not just Dan the writer, began to take shape once again.
I started a band and recorded two albums. I made some of the best friends I could ever hope for. I fell madly, deeply, perilously in romantic love (I was pulled kicking and screaming out of that very same love soon after). I experienced other, calmer types of love. I travelled. I hid when I needed to. I met people who cared about me when I could not. I learned to care about myself when others could not. I discovered books that spoke to my tender soul, telling me it was okay to come out of my cave and smile from time to time.
In essence, I started to heal.
Very recently, after handing in Coldmyth to my wonderful editor Vicky, I took a trip back home to New York. To the house I had grown up in. I’d returned a handful of times in the ten years after leaving, but I was only ever there physically, and did not bring anything deeper along. I was driving in to the city with my father (who in many ways is Abb-like) and when we got to the border of my hometown, something unexpected happened. I began weeping uncontrollably, sobs wracked from a well long forgotten.
But the crying was not of pain or sorrow.
I was crying because I once again could remember my past life.
I recognized all the landmarks that I had known as a child (the baseball field where I hit my first and only home run, the hobby shop where I had my first job cutting boxes and cleaning Super Nintendos, my old high school where I relatively kept to myself and played lots of saxophone, etc.) and I could feel the kid inside me speaking up, wanting to play. Wanting to get to know me. Wanting to remind me how to love again, in all the forms that love can take back when we’re younger and unbroken.
When we got to the house I collapsed on the floor and started looking at everything through the eyes of my childhood self, staring wide eyed and blubbering. My father, bless him, sat close by and held my hand quietly, letting me take it all in.
After a while he looked me in the eyes and said:
‘Me and your mother knew you had to go away for a while. Sometimes you have to go away, and that’s okay, but I’m glad you’re here now. Welcome back.’
He wasn’t speaking of my physical self. He had looked into my eyes and saw my pain, and knew what had happened to my spirit, or soul, or Meesh-dahm.
In many ways Micah’s story parallels my own, albeit my story is a lot less grand. But still: a young boy is cast out of the life he knows, forced to struggled with faith and identity, and a bit of madness. That boy tries to make something he believes in, to heal, and in doing so has to go away for a while. After many adventures, after loses and loves and trial and error, he finally finds his way home thanks to the help of so many people. Thanks to his family.
And so, as a conclusion to this part of my own story, hopefully leaving this section of my life with a sense of grace and poise, I want to give a special thanks to my friends and family (you’ll probably recognize many as character names from the story, go figure) who were most closely associated with the books, and who stayed with me in some way or the other until the very last page.
My father. My mother. Jardin Telling. Sara Hahn. Stephanie Radzik. Danielle Zigner. Matt (Matty) MacDonald. Moses (Moussa) Elias. Ben Barr. Jake McNally. Josh Klaus. Rachel Cohen/Klaus. Daniel Fears. Natasha Bardon. Vicky Leech. Lily Cooper. Thomas Judd. Jack Renninson. My Waking Fable people. My Bad Bonsai people. My House Wine people. My Firehouse people. My extended biological family. The authors who showed me the way: Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss, Ted Chiang, Theodore Sturgeon, William Goldman, David Eagleman, Pierce Brown, Sherman Alexie, Neil Gaiman, and so many others.
And of course, you, the reader.
Thank you coming with me on this most unexpected, yet wondrous adventure back home.
Daniel Cohen
December 10, 2019