Every Story Has a Prelude. Today, Hers Begins. (Part 2 of 3)

Do It Afraid: The hour when The Prelude Girl chose itself

Capri Art Café & Gallery — August 30, 2025.

By the second half-hour of the launch, the room had settled into that rare mix of warmth and candor that makes a Q&A feel less like a format and more like a circle. The questions no longer hovered at the edges of craft; they drifted toward the braver center: work, doubt, names, and what it costs to write a past you’ve already survived.

The Catalyst

“What made you say, this is it?” came a voice from the back—Glen from Davao, a travel blogger who had flown north for the event. The room went quiet the way rooms do when they sense a threshold. Marjorie didn’t dramatize the answer. She simply told the truth: she had started a novel late last year, stalled midyear, and couldn’t justify the plot to herself. Then her work contract ended. Suddenly, there was time, and with it, a frustration that nothing—neither the job hunt nor the novel—was moving. “I wanted something I could finish,” she said. So she reached for the manuscript she could guide to shore: the old poetry draft once called Discontinued Thoughts. She would make a book she could be proud of this year. She would complete something.

It wasn’t just an artistic decision; it was a survival choice made in the dead air of unanswered applications and “ghost listings.” If the world wasn’t opening a door, she would build one she could walk through—line by line, edit by edit. “Why not use this time,” she told herself, “to just finish it.”

The Part You Don’t See

Pat, a traveller and professional, asked the question that most writers avoid in public because it requires a certain re-opened tenderness: “What was the least favorite part of the process?” 

“Not revising,” Marjorie said. Not the line-level work. The worst part was going back—having to remember the nights and words behind certain pieces, to stand again in rooms she had already left. 

“Even when you’ve moved on,” she said, “the body remembers.” 

The recollection brought with it the old adjuncts: irritation, the impulse to blame yourself for letting something happen, the small shame of feeling what you no longer believe. That was the hard part: to remember accurately without returning emotionally.

When the Box Arrives

If the process was a long interior labor, the moment the book landed was startlingly simple. Agnes, one of Marjorie’s online connections from decades ago, asked what she felt the night the author copies finally arrived. 

Relief, mostly. “Like you’d been holding your breath and you finally can.” (The packages came late, with the kind of travel mishaps that turn into family lore; books, like people, have their own itineraries.) 

But behind the relief was a decision: this chapter is done. Anyone’s reaction—exes, ex-friends, relatives—was not going to deter her. “They didn’t care when they hurt me,” she said plainly. “So why should I care what they think?” 

The book is her account, and in some pages, others’ actions are simply part of the record.

Which Name Tells the Truth?

Kathy Miranda, a renowned licensed aesthetician, businesswoman, and big-time beauty influencer, raised the kind of question only someone close can ask and only a launch can accommodate: “Why publish under Marjorie Gavan, the legal name, when many know her as Mara or Marge?” 

The answer had two edges. First, this is a debut, and Marjorie wanted her real name on her first book—a way of standing up in full view. Second, the choice was an act of independence from how others might read themselves into the work. “I’m not afraid of what they’ll think,” she said. “This is my life, my book.” Besides, she added, the story isn’t unique; many live through versions of almost-love. The point is not to indict; it’s to reach the ones who need to hear they’re not alone.

That reach mattered to her more than any individual’s response. What she wanted was for someone in the thick of it—the person whose friends are tired of the loop, who feels “the only one”—to find a page and feel accompanied.

Procrastination, Named Out Loud

From the family row, Vannie, the younger sister, asked the question siblings ask best—pointed, practical, and loving: “Why did it take so long? Was the delay simple procrastination, or was it fear?” 

Marjorie didn’t flinch. Procrastination, she said, can feel like a disease—the mind hunting for dopamine while the hard work waits. Part of the resistance was exactly what Pat had raised earlier: she didn’t want to face those memories. Part of it, too, was the ordinary human instinct to avoid pain and choose the easier scroll. 

And yes, she admitted, there was fear: being judged, being misread, being bashed online. But at some point, you choose to step past it. “Everybody gets judged,” Marjorie said, “right or wrong.” We only get one life.: 

In your forties, you feel this more sharply: the years you don’t want to keep delaying on the shelf. So she let the book be finished.

How to Love Yourself (When the Cultural Script Says Otherwise)

Later, Eldritch, a listener with careful notes, threaded two themes into one question: “How did you [the author] gather two decades of fragments into a finished book, and how does one actually love oneself after being the one not chosen?”

Marjorie’s answer was equal parts unsentimental and kind. First, she gave those early, raw pieces grace—they were what she could write at the time. Then she reframed the rejection: someone else’s choice does not diminish you; it only shows what they were looking for. The stages of grief will still come—the bargaining, the “Lord, let him come back,” the forensic “What did I do wrong?”—but the work is to stop minimizing yourself for the sake of being picked. “You don’t need to be chosen by others to be whole,” she said. Choose yourself first; the rest is a bonus.

It was the same ethic that underwrote the book’s title. Prelude is not less. It is a form that exists before something else without being defined by it. 

The poems do not ask for closure as payment; they practice clarity as a form of self-respect.

The Invisible Architecture

Randy, Production Head of RedInk.Creatives.Prints, asked the craft question many readers feel but seldom phrase: “Which part of building the book was hardest, and what would she say to aspiring writers?”

Answering the first, Marjorie surprised some in the room. Not writing, not line edits—the hardest part was ordering the poems so their emotional logic held. Twenty-six pieces can be twenty-six moods; the work was to arrange them so a reader wouldn’t feel whiplash. She reread everything, chased chronology where it made sense, moved pieces like furniture until the room made a single impression: a life that moves from ache to agency without pretending the ache wasn’t real.

As for advice, she refused to perform hypocrisy. “Don’t procrastinate,” she joked, would be dishonest coming from her. What she offered instead was clean and durable: just do it. Write the story you have. Keep the drafts even if they’re partial. Your audience will find you; you will find them. 

And if you’re afraid? “Do it afraid.” The phrase landed with the small, collective exhale of a room recognizing its instruction.

Finding the Reader

Threaded through the questions was an ongoing conversation about audience—how to introduce a poet whose lines tilt cryptic rather than confessional, how to make space online for a book that needs quiet. Some in the room compared the poems’ intensity to listening to Adele—they make you remember your non-existent lover. 

The consensus was practical and hopeful: Find the niche that recognizes the language, then widen it, reader by reader. Awareness begins with one person who feels spoken to and tells another.

A Different Kind of Closure

While others prize the viral confession and the neatly packaged healing arc, The Prelude Girl refuses to flatten the story. It lets memory be as inconvenient as it is, lets the speaker be as contradictory as she was, and then makes a different promise: that self-respect can be as lyrical as love, and that ending a chapter is not the same thing as erasing it. When the author's copy finally arrived—late, delayed, real—Marjorie’s first response was not triumph but breath. The book existed; the chapter closed; the person who wrote it could now go on.

There will be more—novels that learned from this season’s honesty, poems that look outward to the social and psychological. For now, the debut has its own gravity. It doesn’t ask you to share its history; it asks you to recognize your own and to stop minimizing it for the privilege of being picked.

Part 3 will look outward: how the cover became a small icon, how readers have begun to carry lines into their own days, and what it means for a local launch to travel across timelines.

Get the Book

The Prelude Girl is available in paperback and Kindle; a special hardcover includes four bonus poems.

If you were there, thank you for creating a space where poems could flourish. If you weren’t, the lines will meet you where you are, and they will not lie to you.