Magic Takes Time
In the moment we sow seeds of magic that we harvest many years later when we write about them. In between, sure starts wither and surprising sprouts germinate. Weeds, too, bloom into flowers.
I’m writing a book! Ostensibly, it’s about my days launching, and later landing, rockets at a certain well-known aerospace company before looking for a new path back home in Alaska. It started years ago as handwritten journal entries; just a way to try to make sense of the tangle of events that made up much of my first three decades on the planet.
But as I’ve progressed, the project has evolved, as have I. Yet no matter what direction it took, I found myself returning over and over to a note I made in the margins of an old journal years before:
“If this happened in a cardboard box factory, it should be just as interesting.
In other words, I shouldn’t rely on the perceived coolness of launching rockets to hold up a thin story. As I learned in Mary Karr’s brilliant The Art of Memoir, for whatever reasons someone starts a memoir, no one finishes it without surviving a knockdown, drag out fight with themselves. But in doing so, we have a chance to unearth the truth, discover the real story, and find the magic.
Since those early journaling days, the book project has grown. In fact, as of this morning it’s up to a considerable 96,500 words with a couple chapters still to draft. I look at that number, which for years hovered around 20,000 while I fervently hoped it might somehow get to 60,000, and chuckle nervously like Homer standing on the scale, trying to get to 300 pounds before rushing past. Something that felt impossible is now starting to feel inevitable.
In fact, the tumbleweeds blowing around this Substack are almost entirely due to the fact that I wrote over seventy thousand words and performed two comprehensive edits on the manuscript in 2022; all during the wee hours of the morning or late into the night, those small cracks between work and precious family time.
I think, based on the reviews of a handful of kind friends (and one very patient wife, Jennie) who have generously read bits and pieces this year, I’m starting to draw the magic out. The thing that surprises me most is that it’s almost never where I expect it to be.
Section II of the book is called The Children’s Crusade, Kurt Vonnegut’s alternate name for Slaughterhouse-Five and a promise to not glorify battle. It covers two years as a group of mostly 20-something’s transformed a rotten old launch pad on California’s central coast and conducted our first launch.
Here’s a quick “how it started” and “how it’s going” side-by-side to help paint the picture of the monumental task:
Other than the name of the satellite we launched, Cassiope, I can’t tell you a single thing about it without consulting Wikipedia. When I sat down to draft those stories, I knew it didn’t matter. Instead, I set out to tell all about the strange machine we built, one that sprawled across the hillside, and which moved a rocket from its nest inside a large hangar to its date with destiny on the launch pad. I wrote drafts that delved into our painful iteration of design, build, test as our small team labored over endless months; how we scraped by with tiny budgets, how we fought impossible timelines, and how, finally, we began to see the heartbeat of the pad as it came to life on our data plots.
“Too technical,” Jennie said after her first reading.
“Would anyone care if it was a box factory?” the margin reminded me.
No, probably not. I wanted them to marvel at the complex machine we’d made, but unless you were an aerospace diehard it probably wasn’t too interesting. Even I had to admit that the biographies I’d read of heroes from the Apollo days mostly bored me. They spent too much time on the big things and not enough time on the small stuff, the interfaces where people and moments meet, the uncomfortable places where our collective “why” emerges.
I dove back in. I knew why we’d all signed up for the job — because it seemed cool and would impress friends, family, and potential partners all while satisfying our ego. What became more interesting, as I wrote, was why any of us would stay after enduring endlessly long workdays and longer work weeks. For instance, on multiple occasions I stayed more than 26 hours straight, generally averaged 17 hours per day during the height of the campaign, and went months without a day off. This is not a brag, it’s a lament, trust me.
But why?
The result is a chapter called “Every Day is Wednesday” which is an account of the mundane, groundhog day we all woke up in; positioned in the middle of a never-ending work week on an endless hump day. Through it, it becomes clear why we’d stay and the seeds of the magic between us are sown.
Beyond the hours, there was also demands of perfection, the sheer scale of the task at hand, the mounting doubt as my confidence yielded to reality, and constant fights with other type-A psychopaths on the team. We didn’t stick around because of some mission, let alone some mission statement. We stayed because we each lacked a unique something, some defect in ourselves and our worth, that we pursued through endless work, the medium most lionized as the Western fount of purpose and joy.
That became “The Magician Warriors.” And though there were many days when I looked for my limits by exercising (and exorcising) my internal struggles in the external world, it was my comrades, also fumbling through the dark, that caught me when I fell. Those relationships are what matters and, as the years begin to stretch on, are all that really stick with me. Those are the places where I learned that it's the means, there are no ends.
That all feels like a long time ago, though it’s only been a few years. Still, revisiting the garden after some time shows me what is growing and what is withering. The friendships are strong, the feats that felt historic wither. Among them, scattered here and there, are the weeds. Thorny, twisted, and gnarled I ignored them for a long time and, too weak to even cull them, tried to harvest around them.
But they, too, are part of the garden, and if tended might create the most beautiful blooms. Like Mary Karr said, it’s a street fight with oneself and everything is on the table. A story thats only sweetness is not filling, I know that, but I’m not ready to talk yet about the weeds, though I am finally working with them — spreading them across the page, editing, scribbling, shucking husks, and, occasionally, circling some germ. But as I iterate, often painfully over months, I’ve begun to detect familiar feel of magic even there.
Magic takes time to develop, it can’t be rushed. We need context, the gift of letting things we think we understand mellow, and the unwavering courage to dive into darker places to see what lies beneath. If nothing else, the book project has been a trip inside and a fantastic way to process, and let go of, old stories. I hope though, that someday it’ll become something more.
A Request for Help:
My book is an early work-in-progress, but I am beginning to recruit readers! If you’re interested in reading a section, or even an early release of the whole thing, sign up by clicking here. I might even buy you a coffee. And if you want to see magic appear in the day to day, check out my previous post “Night Flight” here on this blog.