Voices from the Cynosure

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/04/22/the-big-idea-heather-tracy-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55399

Any author can tell you that events in their own life can have an impact on their fiction. As we learn in Heather Tracy’s Big Idea for Only a Chapter, sometimes those events have a bigger impact than we might have expected.

HEATHER TRACY:

When I began writing what would become Only a Chapter back in 2015, the working title I had then was “Faceless Man.” I knew I wasn’t going to call the book that, but I couldn’t come up with anything better. I still have several drafts of the original version saved with that name on my computer.

The big idea for the original version of the book came from dreams I had in high school through college of a faceless man who would do huge romantic things like fly me on a private jet to New York City to see Phantom of the Opera on Broadway with the original cast, then he proposed. The dreams were always very vivid, and I could always tell the man was wearing a tuxedo, but I could never see his face. Sometime after dating my now-husband for a while, I realized that when he and I originally met at my senior prom, he was wearing a tux. In different ways, a lot of the things in my dreams did happen, but much less sensationally. For instance, before he proposed, he took me to see a local production of A Chorus Line.

In “Faceless Man,” Clare had these dreams, they pointed her to this dream guy, and that was about it. The story was fun, but pretty flat. There wasn’t enough heart. There wasn’t enough tension. I put the book to the side for almost nine years.

Then, after completing breast cancer treatment in early 2023, big idea number two hit me (seriously, I can never have just one big idea for these things): What would happen if Clare had breast cancer, but also, what would happen if she didn’t? What if the story had two timelines with the ways her life could go if that dreaded phone call went two different ways? I had obviously been contemplating this scenario in my own life and thought it would be therapeutic to work it out through my fiction.

The final version of the book still has the faceless-person dreams, but this time, they’re different depending on the timeline. Clare’s bisexual, and in one timeline the dreams start pointing her toward a male, and in the other a female. In the timeline where she has breast cancer, the cancer diagnosis and story are my own, though fictionalized slightly to work within the confines of the narrative.

Oh, and the title? When I announced on social media that I had breast cancer back in 2022, I said on social media that “Cancer is only going to be a chapter in my life, and not the whole story.” Thus, Only a Chapter was born.

Only a Chapter: Amazon|Space Wizard

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https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/04/22/the-big-idea-heather-tracy-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55399

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/04/21/the-worlds-hectic-have-a-dog-picture/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55388

See, isn’t that nice? Lowers your blood pressure all the way down, it does. We could all use that right about now.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/04/21/the-worlds-hectic-have-a-dog-picture/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55388