Novel Ideas

Hello all, happy Saturday.

Updates you just HAVE to know: I made croissants from scratch and I signed up for a cardio kickboxing class. I finished crocheting an awesome star blanket!

Imagine if that was the whole post, lol.

This week has been a bit of an exercise in frustration---or rather, the past 12 days. A novella project I considered finished had to be resuscitated due to a page count limit (a Press Who Shall Not Be Named who almost took a shorter version last year imposed a limit that wasn't there last year,) and I generated around 9,200 more words to bring the page count up to par. I am not a patient person by nature (which makes this whole writing thing, where you wait an average of 3-8 months for responses to your submission packets a...choice...profession for yours truly.) I wouldn't want to do anything else in the world, but one must admit a certain kind of grouchiness at the enterprise. So, the novella, version 3, came to be and has since been sent off to said publisher. Now we do the aforementioned and Herculean task: we wait.

In the meantime, I've begun to go a bit stir-crazy, as is my custom when a project has been completed. Well, stir-crazy and exhausted, which makes for a dynamite (read, incredibly tiring and demoralizing) combo. Having learned behaviors akin to living in a creative pressure cooker, when I don't have things to immediately work on, I tend to think of myself as aimless. I have a 15 year plan I update with frequency. However, I am not so ignorant of my defects to realize that, to a certain extent, these behaviors are a team effort: not just how I was raised and my educational ambition, but also a certain amount of fear, almost pathological fear on my part. Everything orbits the concept of failure: if I fail to publish, if I fail to remain relevant in the public eye, if, if, if, then everyone will pass me by.

This, I've come to realize, is complete and total bullshit. However, you can lead a horse to water, or you can give it a bucket. Sometimes you have to slow down and let the world come to you, as hard as it may be. A friend of mine, after having listened to me spiral from a hypoglycemic episode combined with this fear, likened me to a plant: did I expect a plant to survive without light, water, and soil? No? Why was I any different? Something something pouring into your own cup before pouring into others something something. Genuinely sage advice. And later, after a cup of manjos sprinkled with tajin and a samsa from Tashkent Supermarket, I messaged that friend sheepishly, confirming I did in fact feel better with the whole plant mentality. This friend was gracious and merely told me they were happy to hear that.

So yesterday, I took the day off, to clean, to recharge, to go out for dim sum with said friend and walk by the water. You can see the Statue of Liberty from that part of the river walk, and we drank ice-cold Mexican Coke and blood-orange Jarritos before heading indoors. I'd never been to that part of Brooklyn before, despite living laughingly close to the river, and, released from my own expectations of writing the next thing, I was finally able to unclench the fist I'd made of my body.

And that simple act of recharging, if only for a day, allowed my mind to reset a bit. Even just one day without writing, or making myself write, made me wake up this morning with a brand new short story idea, and not just a new short story idea, a funny one. Well, a funny, sad one. I can't stray too far from my brand, after all. But I woke up excited to write, not just forced to because I feel compelled by some pathological need to be relevant at all times or that it's just something I must do. To that end, independent of my doing so consciously, I've loosely begun turning existing concepts in my 15 year plan into actionable items. Most of these stories already have openings gestating in my google docs, waiting for their next words. One of these projects climbed up to 58,000 words before a particularly mean peer of mine harpooned it and made me stick it in a drawer for two-ish straight years. But it's started. It's something with a foundation, I can build on it. That's something to be incredibly grateful for.

OOOH. A bit of housekeeping: my publisher, Riot in Your Throat, is having a Sealey Challenge sale, and I'd be thrilled to see BAD ANIMAL in your Sealey stack! Snag it for $10 on their website today.

This week, I hope you've taken time to relax yourselves. Read a book. Touch grass. Walk by the water with someone you care about and let everything else rock. I promise you you can get back on the boat anytime.

xo

Kat