She made the final cut. But the story didn’t end. When a marked-up copy of her long-unpublished novel appears at her door, editor Meri Varela is shaken. Deleted scenes and characters have been restored, return with marginal notes written in a style uncannily like her own. At the center is a character she cut early on. Now he’s stepping off the page, echoing lines she never meant to keep. As fiction bleeds into reality, Meri must face what she tried to forget: some stories don’t stay buried. They write themselves back.
The Redactor's Draft is a haunting literary mystery about authorship, memory, and the characters we can’t erase.
She thought the red ink had dried until the pages came back, rewritten.
The Redactor's Draft, a literary mystery novel by Rosemarie Tejada-Gonzalez, invites readers into a world where authorship, memory, and erased characters collide.
Meri Varela has built her career as a developmental editor who knows what a story needs and what must be cut. But when a marked-up copy of her own long-unpublished novel appears on her doorstep, she is shaken to find deleted scenes and characters meticulously restored. The margins are lined with notes: precise, personal, and eerily in her own editorial style.
At the center of these reworked pages is a character she had cut early on. Now he seems to be taking over the story. And when this deleted character begins appearing in her real life, echoing lines she never meant to keep, Meri’s understanding of authorship begins to unravel.
As the lines between fiction and reality blur, Meri must face the possibility that some stories don’t stay silent. They rewrite themselves.
Read an excerpt or order The Redactor's Draft on Amazon to step into the margins yourself.
Rosemarie Tejada-Gonzalez is a lawyer based in the Philippines with an executive day job in a private company. Now and then, while inching through traffic jams in Metro Manila, a fragment of fiction drifts in and stays. Then, on an otherwise ordinary day, a sudden burst of inspiration compelled her to finally write them down. What had once been fleeting concepts took shape as a complete story. She’s drawn to narratives that fold into themselves, where memory and truth twist through layered realities. The Redactor's Draft, her debut novel, explores the intersections of memory, identity, and creativity in a quiet storm of red ink, erased lines, and the spaces between what’s written and what’s lost.
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