Listen Closely: The Things You Missed on the Page

Listen Closely: The Things You Missed on the Page

The first time you read Moons and Shadows, I’m asking a lot of you. You’re learning a world. You’re learning its history. You’re meeting its people. You’re discovering the rules, the relationships, the places, the things characters know, and the things they very purposely aren’t telling you yet.

It’s a little like sitting down for coffee at a very large table filled with people you’ve never met. The first time around, you’re trying to remember everyone’s names and how they know each other. You’re figuring out who talks too much, who hardly talks at all, who is watching everyone else, who makes you laugh, and who you’re not entirely sure you trust yet.

The second time you sit down at that table, you already know them.

That’s when you start noticing things.

A hesitation means something now. Silence feels different when you know what happens later. A joke you barely noticed the first time might suddenly tell you something important about the person making it. A line that sounded simple on the page can carry an entirely different emotion when you hear the breath before it or the change in someone’s voice as they say it.

That is one of the things I love about experiencing Moons and Shadows through audio. The story hasn’t changed, but your experience of it can.

If you’ve already read the physical or eBook version, I encourage you to go back through the Special Edition audiobook and let yourself live in the story differently this time. Bring your physical book with you if you have one. Tab it. Write in the margins. Keep a journal beside you. Mark the moments that suddenly mean something different because now you know these people.

Some of my Moonlighters have taken this far beyond anything I could have imagined. I’ve had readers buy multiple copies and use them differently. They’re tabbing things. They’re making notes. They’re journaling through chapters. They’re creating artwork inspired by what they’re reading. They’re going back through the story and finding new ways to interact with it rather than treating a book as something that has to remain pristine on a shelf.

I love that because I think somewhere along the way, many of us were taught out of creativity.

Maybe that’s the teacher in me coming out again, but I think education can sometimes accidentally teach us that there is a correct way to interact with something creative. Find the theme. Answer the question. Identify the metaphor. Write the response. Get the grade. Move on.

Then we grow up and forget that we’re allowed to play with stories.

I had to relearn that myself. When I started seriously writing again, creativity felt like an atrophied muscle. It had been there, but I hadn’t used it this way in a long time. It took time. It took practice. It took allowing myself to follow strange ideas without immediately demanding that they justify themselves.

So I want you to do that with this world, too.

Don’t worry about reading it “correctly.” Live in it. Draw something. Journal about a character. Put fifteen tabs on one page because something happened that you need to discuss with somebody immediately. Send the book to a friend and tell them to call you when they reach that part.

Better yet, make something out of it together. Take the audiobook on a road trip. Plan a girls’/guys’ weekend and listen together. Pour a glass of wine/whiskey, sit near a fireplace, eat good food, and argue about your theories. Meet online once a week and work through a chapter together. Laugh about the ridiculous moments. Talk about the painful ones. Compare what each of you noticed.

Because this story was never meant to live only with me, and I don’t think it’s meant to live only with you, either. Stories build community when we bring them to the table and allow other people to bring their experiences alongside ours.

The first time through Moons and Shadows, you’re meeting everyone.

The next time, you’re returning to people you know.

And you’ll be amazed at what they were telling you before you knew how to listen.

Read it once. Listen to it again. You may discover something you didn’t hear the first time.