Twixt Series Author Dawn Metcalf Discusses Defining Moments and What It Is to Be Human

I had a bug’s leg removed from my eyeball when I was seven.
I’d been riding my bike downhill, wind whipping my hair, standing lock-kneed over my seat, pedals level to the ground, when something hit my face out of nowhere. I swerved, skidding in the grass to a sloppy stop. It was alive, squirming and buzzing in my eye. I rubbed it hard, smearing tears. It hurt! It wouldn’t stop. I walked my bike home with one eye squinched shut.
The ER doctors told me that a bug’s hind leg had lodged in my eyeball like a fishhook—the serrated edge sawed deep into my cornea. They used numbing drops and florescent drops that glowed under black light. My mother told me I looked like the Incredible Hulk. My world became bright green with laser flashes and I didn’t feel a thing. I remember the humming color. I remember the odd spliced light. I had to wear a patch over my eye until the cut healed over and my eyelid stopped flipping open the wound.
This might be considered a defining memory.

Reading this, you may have experienced a chill of sympathy or a slight mental twinge, maybe winced or rubbed your own eye. That’s because you know (or can at least imagine) what this sort of pain feels like. We all know what it feels like to be hurt, to feel vulnerable. We all have vivid childhood memories, those defining moments that linger. These experiences are at the heart of what I most like to write—not necessarily the gross-out parts (although those are fun!)—I’m fascinated by those moments that make us feel something, linking us together as human beings.
“What does it mean to be human?” is almost as interesting as the greatest question: “What if…?” Writing about people who aren’t human or who are not-quite-human, especially those who long to be human, is probably my favorite sort of story. I love learning about what people have in common as well as what makes every person different, but we all know what it feels like to laugh out loud or splash in a puddle, to want something so badly it keeps us up at night, or to have our hearts broken for the very first time. When we remember what that feels like, we understand one another. We’re there.
Does your eye feel better yet?
The Twixt series—Indelible and Invisible, so far, with Insidious coming in July—was born out of a rant more than anything else: Why did all the immortal hotties always fall in love with a 16-year-old girl, then show her how to love? So I asked myself a bunch of “What ifs?” What if the immortal hottie hadn’t a clue about love? What if the 16-year-old girl didn’t want the immortal hottie, anyway? What if they had to fake it? What if those feelings became real? What if she had to be the one to show him the way to love for a change? And what if that wasn’t the real story—what if it was about being human?
My answers came from old memories: movies starring Peter Pan and Edward Scissorhands, fairy tales by Andrew Lang and the Brothers Grimm, books by Neil Gaiman, Spider Robinson, and Holly Black, figure skating and martial arts, misadventures in the kitchen, being a sister, a daughter, a clueless best friend. I tapped into those moments, remembering how they felt, and gave them all to Ink and Joy, Inq and Kurt, Monica, Graus Claude, Filly and Stef. I made up new defining moments, but I was there. It’s all there.
And that unexpected, stabbing pain of being sliced in the eye? That’s in there, too.
The first two books in the Twixt series, Indelible and Invisible, are available now.