🕯️ The Eighth Day: Resurrection Begins in the Margins

What if the eighth day wasn’t rest, but resistance?

What if resurrection looked like ink, not glory?

What if the divine bled quietly, in gray and burnt orange?

The Project Begins:

This is the introduction. The unmasking. The first breath of a novel that has kept me up at night like a ghost tapping the windowpane.

The Eighth Day is historical advocacy fiction set in 1891 France, a time when the Church still whispered behind scalpel masks and called it salvation. When the state and the sanctuary were indistinguishable, and both punished those who blurred the binary.

It’s not a memoir. But it was born of my marrow.

It follows Séraphin, an intersex former seminarian turned underground theologian, and Camille, a scarred midwife turned forger and protector. Together, they build a sanctuary from an abandoned monastery’s crypt—printing resistance tracts in a world that punishes ambiguity.

Why This Story, Now?

Some stories still aren’t safe to tell, even now.

Intersex bodies are still pathologized. History books don’t write us in. Because when we’re written out, we write ourselves back in ink, in blood, in breath.

This story is for those who were altered before they could speak.

For those who prayed and were punished.

For those who survived the church and its scalpels.

This is not a polished novel. This is the ember.

A Glimpse Into the World:

Setting: France, 1891 — post-revolution, post-religion, still bleeding.

Themes:

• Faith turned inward: the divine reframed through the intersex body

• Language and erasure: medical Latin vs handwritten prayers

• Bodies as cathedrals: scars as scripture, flesh as sanctuary

• Resistance as holy ritual: truth forged on an underground press

My Pledge as the Writer:

I won’t sanitize this. I won’t make it palatable.

This is not trauma porn. It’s trauma reclaimed.

It’s survival wrapped in metaphor, fury veiled in fiction.

I will tell it poetically. Brutally. With tenderness and teeth.

Coming Next...

This is only the first post in a series where I reveal the guts of this novel’s creation:

• Post 2: Meet Séraphin, Camille, and Archbishop Vaillant

• Post 3: Supporting characters and the coded resistance network

• Post 4: Development notes, myth, and historical threads

• Post 5+: Tract excerpts, early chapters, and reader invitations

If You’re Still Reading This…

You’re already part of this story.

You are the reader I wrote this for.

Stay with me. Let the resurrection begin.

🕊️— S.L. James