Do Ya, Steampunk?
I thought I was lucky. I had an expansive idea for a series of five books and was deeply, madly in love with the world, the pride of themes, the stampede of words, bound shard by shard. I knew that I wanted to write a Chicanx steampunk romp replete with apple seeds and talking orbs and clockwork cobras and portals and vindictive angels and angel hunters.
I was so wrong!
If Project Guernica was akin to yanking out teeth with a rusted pair of pliers, I thought, perhaps arrogantly, that Project Platelet (my wee alias for book two) would be a smooth flower of river, the rounded pebbles feeling sweet beneath my feet. There are five books in this world, and I have plotted out books three, four, and five. Book two, Project Platelet, remains a mystery. It peeks out at me from corners before sauntering out of my grasp. Is it more ghost than book at this point?
How can I not recall the first time I had ever heard of steampunk? What I do recall is my mother taking me to a shop in Santa Fe. The name of the shop is long gone to me, but the owner, a steampunk devotee, opened the doors on a day that was normally closed just to show me around. It was devoted to neo-Victorian fashion made with everyday objects. I was mesmerized — this was what I would write. Steampunk, my darling subgenre.
As I plow forward in the books, the world of steampunk is something that I am trying to build with subtlety and nuance and (fingers crossed) some ingenuity. The music that I am writing as the “soundtrack” for the books is mariachi meets industrial. Characters speak Spanglish, Mexican and New Mexican folktales hold sway, and all of it needs to zip together.
These days, I utilize the library more than ever, including fishing out a book on Latin American legends and myths. I aim to consume steampunk books like a fish inhaling water, this thing that gives me my narrative shape. I want to write, and I want to write about corsets and air ships. But I also want to write about La Llorona and acequias and all the things that my mother spooned to me. My mother was the one who gave Kailee and me baby Shakespeare books and read to us. She introduced me to Joseph Campbell and The Divine Comedy. And, in her way, she introduced me to steampunk, too. I think of this when I peruse the stacks of the library.
Here’s the thing: I have the passion to write this story. I lit some candles. I kept rerouting Bijou and her furry tail away from those candles. My pen sweeps over my journal pages, the army of index cards. Don’t give up, don’t give up! The first book is with a literary agent whom I would be honored to work with. I rehearse my elevator speech. I love the way my typing on the keyboard sounds. I think on the treadmill, in the shower, as I make my tea. The great, bloody story. That great, bloody, steampunk story that calls out in gritos and whistles.
And it is worth saying that this book series has consumed so much in its path. It gobbled ideas for short stories. It is a mathematical machine, and it is hungry. Sometimes, as the long-suffering writer, I cling to the machine as it roams up and down the imaginary maps in my head, the wind flapping me about like a flag. I have worked out every detail of this world. What the clocks look like and what they’re cleaned with. How each character relates to the others. How each book relates to the others. What they eat. What they smell. What the currency looks like.
It is enough to remind myself that it is important to have quality over quantity when it comes to worldbuilding, and I always pivot back to that goal that I had when I stood in that steampunk fashion store so many years ago: It is about ideas and ingenuity and the ability to take a cheese grater and see a steampunk hat out of it. There is so much in the ordinary world to inform the extraordinary. Even as I write this out, I feel like I am restoring my levelheadedness. It is breathing in and breathing out, it is refocusing my attentions on the task ahead. Listen to Arcane as you draft. Listen to Selena.
Just keep going.
