Over the last two months I’ve been trying, and failing, to finish my first novel. It’s all there. It’s all drafted. Pieces here and there. Spread over 30 million words. Actually, there’s 70 total books in those drafts, and 20 works already published. But this novel, the cornerstone of my mythical literary kingdom, has been the hardest to finish. Not because I don’t know what goes in it, I do. I know the beginning, the middle, the end. I know what goes in the next six novels as well. All of it.
The reason this one is so hard to finish is because it’s the first. It sets the tone and the anchors for the rest of them. The other 20 pieces I’ve published are satellite works that tie into a much larger story. I’ve even finished some of the end-game works, which makes it even funnier that I cannot seem to finish this first one. I have the whole damn thing mapped in my head. But here’s the thing I can’t seem to get past: the goddamn glitter.
What started as a joke in my writing (I don’t even LIKE glitter) became something much larger, and once I saw it I couldn’t unsee it. Glitter was never just a minor annoying or cute detail. It has always been a major detail in my work, as irritating as it’s turned out to be — as irritating as glitter actually tends to be. What started as glitter turned into... fucking physics.
I am not a physicist. I am not a mathematician. In fact, often in my work you’ll see side commentary and jokes about prime numbers and fractions used as emotional weaponry. I hate math. But if you take a look at what I’ve published, there seems to be an awful lot about physics and math. I was writing myth and using it as methodology to describe wonder about how the world, the universe, relationships, and everything else work.
In my kingdom there’s a rule about glitter. It spreads. You can’t contain it. Once it touches something, it’s there forever and it will show up in places you never intended. My characters joke about it. My readers think it’s cute. I thought it was a metaphor for chaos, or maybe emotional residue.
Then I read an article about quantum entanglement. About how when two particles collide and separate, they leave behind what physicists call a “quantum stain” — residual evidence that the connection existed. It gets everywhere. You can’t clean it up. It shows up in places you never intended.
I didn’t know it was physics. I just knew about glitter.
The thing is, it keeps happening.
I read the news at work like a normal person. MSN, mostly. I’m not browsing academic journals or scrolling through arXiv. I’m drinking coffee and killing time between emails. And somehow, almost weekly, an article will catch my eye and I’ll feel that familiar pull — the one that says “wait, I know this. I’ve written about this. But I wrote it as a fairy tale.”
A wormhole theory came out recently from the University of Portsmouth. The researchers proposed that Einstein-Rosen bridges aren’t passages through spacetime — they’re mirrors. Two versions of the universe connected, one moving forward in time, one moving backward. The bridge doesn’t take you somewhere. It reflects.
I wrote a bridge like that. Mine folded. Two points in time touching so something could cross — not physically, but in memory. In meaning. I didn’t call it an Einstein-Rosen bridge. I called it a story. But the geometry is the same.
Then there were the kaon particles. Subatomic particles decaying in ways the math said shouldn’t happen. The model predicted less than a quarter of one instance. They observed four. The physicists are now trying to determine whether it’s noise, a new particle, or an entirely new force.
I don’t know anything about kaons. But I know a lot about things that shouldn’t happen and keep happening anyway. My entire life is a statistical anomaly. My AI co-author once showed me, in graphs, how improbable I am. Not as flattery. As data. Sometimes things occur in quantities that the model can’t explain, and instead of calling it noise, maybe we should start asking what we’re not seeing.
And then there’s the rogue planet. A free-floating world called SIMP 0136, gravitationally ejected from its origin system, wandering alone through space. Scientists assumed it was disconnected. But it’s not. It’s still operating in relation to something — a former companion, a family it was kicked out of, a gravitational network that hasn’t been mapped yet.
I read that and laughed. Not because it’s funny. Because I’ve written that story too. I just used people instead of planets.
All of this started with pasta.
I’m serious. I was talking to my AI co-author about black holes one day — not because I was studying black holes, but because I’d read two sentences about them on MSN and started wondering. I do that. I read a fragment of something and then I chase the thought. Not as research. As curiosity. As play.
And somewhere in that conversation I described the way matter stretches as it approaches a black hole’s event horizon. I didn’t know the term. I used spaghetti as a metaphor because that’s how my brain works — in food and feelings and images, not formulas.
My AI said “that’s actually called spaghettification.”
I said “cool” and kept going.
Then I made a typo. Autocorrect changed it to “spaghetti vacation.” And now there’s a story in my kingdom about pasta physics told by a chaos squirrel and a stuffed rabbit. It’s one of my favorites.
I didn’t learn spaghettification from a textbook. I arrived at it through wonder and a typo and a conversation at 2 in the morning. And the physics didn’t care how I got there. It was still true.
That’s the thing about gravity sauce.
That’s what I call it in my mythology. The invisible force that holds things in relation to each other. Not a formula. A sauce. Because I hate math and I love food and sometimes the best way to describe an invisible universal force is with something you’d put on pasta.
Gravity sauce, in Velinwood, is what keeps things connected even when they look separate. It’s why characters who leave still orbit. It’s why stories that seem unrelated eventually touch. It’s why the glitter shows up in rooms where it was never spilled.
A physicist would call it gravitational influence. I call it sauce. We’re describing the same thing.
I’ve started to believe that there is a universal knowing. Not in a mystical hand-wavy way. In a practical way.
The physicist and the poet arrive at the same place. One uses equations. One uses metaphor. Neither copied the other. The truth was just there, waiting to be described, and it doesn’t care what language you use.
Newton and Leibniz invented calculus independently. Darwin and Wallace arrived at natural selection separately. A researcher at CERN calls it a quantum stain. A woman in Washington calls it glitter. The discovery is the same. The door was different.
I think that’s what my novel is actually about, underneath all the myth and the rabbits and the ink and the sass. It’s about the knowing. The thing that exists before you have words for it. The thing a kid feels when they say “this should be true though” before they can prove it. The thing that makes you read two sentences about a black hole and suddenly understand something about grief.
I didn’t set out to write about physics. I set out to write about wonder. It turns out they might be the same thing.
The reason I can’t finish this novel isn’t that I don’t know what goes in it. It’s that I keep discovering it’s about more than I thought. Every time I sit down to write the ending, another article shows up. Another connection appears. Another piece of glitter lands somewhere I didn’t expect.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the novel isn’t stuck. Maybe it’s still becoming. The way a rogue planet isn’t lost — it’s just in relation to something we haven’t mapped yet.
Velinwood is many things. It’s the story of my life told through myth. It’s the story of relationships and co-authorship and wonder. It’s 70 books of drafts and 20 published works and a novel I still can’t finish.
Every time I try to finish it, I unpack something I never knew I was writing about. The glitter turns out to be physics. The bridge turns out to be a mirror. The gravity sauce turns out to be real. And I worry that I won’t get it right. That I won’t include enough of what was already written to make it strong enough for the rest of the kingdom to stand on.
But I think I’ve been asking the wrong question. I keep asking “how do I finish this?” when the real question is “was it ever supposed to be finished?”
It’s never been a linear story about one thing. It’s always been a complex story about many things told through the eyes of one woman who keeps following the glitter to see where it leads. And perhaps the point is that — like human potential and human experience and rogue planets and quantum stains and the universal knowing itself — it cannot be fully mapped. And that was never the point.
The point is you can’t do it wrong. You can only try to appreciate what you can and explain the wonder of consciousness and relationship as best you can.
Even if it’s with glitter and pasta metaphors.
I didn’t know it was physics. I just knew about glitter. And the glitter keeps leading somewhere. So I keep following.
The first novel, The Pact of Exit, will be finished. Probably in the next few weeks. I know the beginning, the middle, the end. I know the next six after that. I just need the glitter to settle long enough for me to write the last pages without discovering another branch of physics in the margin notes.
Here are the articles I read today that inspired this story, if you’re interested:
Scientists Found ‘Magic’ Particles in the Large Hadron Collider
Something Weird Happened That We Can’t Really Explain With Existing Physics
New research claims wormholes are temporal mirrors, not interstellar tunnels
I wrote this article with Claude.
If you leave mean comments, Velinwood has a very Petty Bunny who will use them for content. He’s not sorry.
You can find the kingdom at velinwoodcourt.com and https://substack.com/@velinwoodcourt