Many of you have expressed interest in my second book, Ten Thousand Lines. I am over halfway through writing it (at least I think I am…you can never be sure!), so I feel confident enough to divulge a little more information. When a book is in its infancy, it’s a little scary to talk too much about it because so many things can change or transform–characters, plot, even the ending can radically shift. Ten Thousand Lines is no longer in its infancy. It is 157 pages old. I think it’s about time to reveal a little more:
The Idea:
Some of you have noticed the tiny print in the back of my first book, Elmer Left, that says “Coming soon from Kate Leibfried: Ten Thousand Lines, A dysyopian novel inspired by the lyrics of Ben Cooper.” Allow me to demystify.
Ben Cooper is a musician based out of Florida who dabbles in several different projects (solo and otherwise). The albums that I know and love best were recorded under the names Radical Face and Electric President (please check them out! Absolutely amazing artistry). His music has an ethereal, almost ghostly feel and it captivated me from the get-go.
When I decided to move back home from Portland, OR in fall of 2009, I had many long stretches where I would do nothing but listen to music and sing my lungs out. Somewhere in the mountains of western Idaho, I flipped my mp3 player to the self-titled Electric President album. I listened; I paid attention. A story began to form in my brain. Certain words from his songs leapt out at me and created a chain of images I could not ignore. They cohered together. They fit. I began to imagine one main character walking through the songs–a man who lived in a gray, oppressive world and had wires under his skin.
I knew I was onto something amazing. I listened to the album again and the idea grew stronger. The details and images in Cooper’s music seemed to be a part of something larger. I had to tell their story.
When I arrived at my hotel on the eastern edge of Idaho, I wasted no time. I whipped out my laptop, opened Word, and starting furiously typing. In about fifteen minutes, I had sketched out the general idea of the book I knew I was going to write. Three years later, I started writing it in earnest.
The Plot:
I don’t want to give too much away, so here are the basics:
The time is about two hundred years in the future; the place is planet earth. Various chains of events have led to a sharp division between the wealthy elite (the Superbanites) and the vast lower class (the Workers). The Superbanites live safely in an enclosed dome away from the Workers and only interact with them when they are acting as their superiors on the factory floor/corn field/coal mine. Workers are bred and raised to do one thing: work. They live in a drug-induced haze that allows them to tirelessly harvest fields, assemble door frames, or do whatever menial task they have been assigned to do for their entire lives. They live and work in huge domes called Hives. The Hives feed Superbia.
This futuristic world hangs in a delicate balance. Most Superbanites don’t worry about the balance; they are too busy enjoying themselves inside their plexiglass bubble. But some Superbanites worry. Some Superbanites understand how fragile their world actually is.
Ten Thousand Lines begins with a disruption to the delicate balance. A Worker is somehow awake.
The Excerpt:
On the glass, I trace the sun with my thumb. It sinks into the ground. Nightfall. Nightfall and everyone is asleep. They sleep as if yesterday had not happened, as if yesterday was a dream. I am pretty sure it was not.
I hold my thumb to the glass as if it is soaking up lingering rays, feeding them into my gray organs, tanning my gray skin. It’s no use. My skin will remain gray. It was designed to be that way: gray and UV resistant. Convenient, practical skin.
I slide my thumb slowly down the window pane and listen to the sqreeeee on the glass. It isn’t a loud noise, but the sound cuts through the silent air like the midday factory whistles: shrill and pervasive. I instantly regret making the noise and freeze my hand, mid-slide. My shoulders tense and I keep corpse-still, listening for footsteps at my back, waiting to be caught. The footsteps never come and the air around me continues to be saturated with a hundred sets of breathing lungs, a hundred shifting bodies, a thousand buzzing wires. I relax and lower my hand to my thigh.
They are asleep. Just like any ordinary, quiet night, they are asleep. I am not. I am awake. For the first time in my life, I am awake.
I sit on the metallic ledge of the window, watching the horizon turn from dusty tan to brown to charcoal-gray. I have never before watched the sunset. I have never had the chance. Or the interest. When it was bedtime, I went to bed. Everyone did. Why shouldn’t I? It was routine. It was practical. We all had to recharge for the next day’s work. Bedtime was practical; it was routine. Everyone did it. Why shouldn’t I?
Any trace of light is gone now. I have never seen the sky so dark. The dark is mesmerizing. It looks clean and immense. I am used to shades of gray, not black. Never anything so black and deep. It keeps going, going. And then the stars are blinking, like kids who are staring into the wind. I look at the stars; I think of the kids blinking. I have seen this image once—kids blinking, flying their kites as wind whipped around their faces. I laughed at the time, not understanding wind, not understanding children. I didn’t bother much with the image then; it didn’t trouble me. It was just another image passing along the Screen. Just another silly image to make the time pass. To be honest, I still don’t understand them fully—the wind and the kite and the kids, that is. They don’t make sense in my world. They are foreign bodies, outsiders. Like gravel in your shoe. I am familiar with that. It happened to me once when I was on the outskirts of the Hive.
At the time, I didn’t know gravel existed inside the Hive. I was sent to its edge one time—to retrieve a shipment of minerals, I believe—and as I heard the train coming, I stepped away from the tracks, into bits of tiny rocks that framed the railway. I remember tripping, crying out. The Overseer ran towards me, picked me up, asked me if I was ok. I said yes. He asked if I knew what I had just stepped on. I said no. He said gravel, my Worker. Those bits of rock are called gravel.
“Why would anyone make a surface so uneven?” I asked.
“That’s what they did in the old days,” he replied. “We are better now. We don’t have to deal with inconvenient things like gravel and uneven surfaces.”
“That is good,” I replied and carried on with my day. I might not have remembered the incident at all if bits of rock hadn’t fallen out of my shoe at bedtime.
“What is that?” the Worker in bed 24D asked.
“It is gravel,” I replied. “Overseer said so.”
“Oh,” said the Worker in bed 24D and climbed into bed.
I climbed into bed as well.
But tonight I don’t sleep—I can’t take my eyes off the depth of the night sky and the blinking stars. I can’t sleep because I am awake for the first time, aware of the stars and the dark, dark sky. I sit on the ledge for a long time, not sleeping, just watching and listening. The rhythm of the breathing bodies, the whir and chug of the recharge machines should lull me to sleep, but they do not. I can’t think of sleeping when there is so much to see, so much to watch and listen to and absorb.
In our Hive—Hive 14—there is no light during the late hours. There is no need for light. Nobody is awake; nobody is walking down the streets. It would be pointless to have light. No one would use it. But this night, the night of the blinking stars, I would have made good use of light. I would have lighted a path at my feet so that I could walk down the even, straight roads of Hive 14 and wander into empty buildings and see the factory when it is shut down for the night. Perhaps it looks the same as it does in the daytime, but if I saw it I would know for sure.
As I think of these things—the darkness and factory at night and the lack of light during the late hours—I begin to wonder why I haven’t thought of them before. And then I begin to wonder why I had been asleep before yesterday—asleep in a sense. Clearly, I was functioning every day with my eyelids open and my body vertical, but I was seeing nothing. And then yesterday happened and everything changed. I will not go back to sleep again.
Thank you for reading. Your feedback is welcome.
-Kate
Kate Bitters is a Minneapolis-based author and freelance writer. She is the author of Elmer Left, Ten Thousand Lines, and He Found Me. One of her proudest/nerdiest moments was when Neil Gaiman read one of her short stories on stage at the Fitzgerald Theater.
Well, I'm hooked now! Can't wait to read the whole book.