The Word of Godbey

There’s a piece of writing advice you hear so often it almost fades into the background: write what you know. It didn’t really land for me until it suddenly did. Writers like Stephen King returning again and again to a fictionalized version of Maine, or Celeste Ng grounding her stories in Ohio—you’ve seen it before. Familiar places, reshaped just enough to serve the story while still carrying the weight of something real. For me, that place was West Virginia. More specifically, the Kanawha Valley. And if I’m being honest, I hesitated. There was a voice in the back of my mind—one I even ended up echoing through a fictional conversation in Beyond That Starry Sky —that said something along the lines of: no one is going to want to read a novel set in West Virginia unless it involves Mothman or the Flatwoods Monster. But I did it anyway. Because the truth is, that place isn’t just a setting to me. It’s where I grew up. It’s where a lot of life happened—the kind of moments that shape you in ...

When I returned to long-form fiction after so many years away, I did so with more excitement than hesitation. I’ve lived over half a century now, gathered enough experience to feel like I finally had something worth saying, and when I sat down to write, the pages came quickly. My niche felt clear. My stories followed. From the beginning, I’ve always been my own first editor. I write freely, then go back with a critical eye—trimming, reshaping, asking myself a simple question: If I were the reader, what version of this would I respect the most? Somewhere along the way, I added a new step to that process. I started using ChatGPT. At first, it was nothing more than a proofreader. I’d feed it pages and ask for a report—grammar, clarity, consistency. I’d already done my own pass, of course, but it offered a second set of eyes that didn’t get tired and didn’t miss much. More importantly, it could be guided. It could be told that voice mattered more than rigid adherence to rules. Sometimes a ...

I thought Beyond That Starry Sky was the first novel I ever finished. It isn’t. It’s just the first one that matters. I’ve been writing stories since elementary school—page after page of adventures, fan-fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy. Groups of heroes on urgent missions, racing to stop some catastrophe or right a great wrong. That was always the pattern. Recently, a question was put to me: What stories did you think of as a child? Back then, it was all spacefaring adventures starring thinly veiled versions of my friends and me. I even self-published a short-lived (and, in my mid, wildly successful) comic series—run off on a Xerox machine and sold to classmates for a quarter—that spoofed Star Trek: The Next Generation. But the first full novel I ever completed was something else entirely: a fantasy epic I wrote when I was thirteen. I don’t remember the title anymore, but I remember the shape of it. An evil sorcerer kidnaps a princess—because, let’s be honest, that’s what evil sorcerers d...

Easter is almost here, which means—like so many of us—I found myself outside tending to the small, ordinary tasks that come with preparing for it. The lawn needed attention, especially if there’s to be an Easter egg hunt. So I went through the routine: trimming, clearing, straightening edges. The kind of work you don’t think too much about. Until I reached the gate. Toward the back of the yard is a small, fenced-in space we call Joe’s Garden. It’s where our first family cat, Crosseyed Joe, rests. Over time, it’s become a quiet place of memory for others too—our sweet Twitchy, our old friend Floof. But Joe was the first. He made it sacred. I pushed open the stiff metal gate and got to work like I always do—cutting back the grass, pulling weeds, setting things right again. And then, as predictably as the seasons themselves, I reached the headstones. And the tears came. Every. Single. Time. It’s been nearly a decade, and still, nothing about that moment has dulled. For a long time, I thou...