From Salamanca with Love
Leaving behind my first novel was a challenge that I had not anticipated. I had felt that it would be akin to having an elderly pet pass away, so going out to the pound for a puppy. Instead, small tendrils of the story wove around my fingers and lungs, and I struggled to stop reading it, to stop correcting it in my head. The gateway between the two novels was not clearly defined in that sense.
Today is the first day that I am moving on to Project Novocaine. I am aiming for this novel to be between 70,000 to 80,000 words, something smaller and more flexible and more tight than Canis Major. I want it to be potent as a slash, for the story to strike and recoil before the reader has a chance to be lulled in. I’ve been reading Anais Nin, allowing her words to wash over me, to give me the language I need to parry and whittle away at the story.
The particulars of character names and plot can change so dramatically from the beginning of a novel to the end. I have three protagonists with names that hang off of them like a soiled bandage. The constant thus far has been that the story is set in Salamanca in the late 1930s. With Canis Major, I had a large white, polka dotted box filled with worldbuilding notes, histories, drafts of chapters, a teeming pond of words. With this book, I want to carefully pick out the descriptors that I want to apply to it: Magical realism. Atmospheric. Horror. Feminist. Pacifistic.
On magical realism: Everything that I write has some speculative element. I enjoy the ability to manipulate the machine that is life and reality. In this sense, being a magical realist writer is a powerful thing. One can gamble with the bonds that hold up and hold together truth, physical existence. I’ll be reading lots of Spanish and Latin American literature as a sort of color exercise, things to light my way like the reflective strips on an airplane.
But at the end of the day, I feel enthusiastic, like I have met someone wonderful. I need to save up for a trip to Spain to visit the University of Salamanca in its rich glory, will need to keep that passport close by to satisfy my wanderlust (this will be its own post, however).
There is a lot to consider when one is starting a new project with this much scope. I have been having a conversation with my uncle — a writer and artist himself — regarding the nature of being a writer. Like my mother before him, he has encouraged me to devote myself to literature and the page, and that is what I am going to indulge in for Project Novocaine. I have mounds of research to complete as I draft. But this brings me meaning, brings me a certain sense of achieving something in this brief spin around the sun.
Finally, my goal is to have enough Spanish under my belt that I will be able to translate it myself. I love the act of learning languages even in isolation — I’m not motivated to learn to use it in social situations, but rather because I love grammar, the flute-like body of a single language with all its nouns and verbs and structures — but I am interested in wedding the creative with scientific for Project Novocaine.
It sounds like a lot — the studying, the writing, the translating — but I have the affection in my heart, all of it, threading through my veins now. I have two notebooks, one for each perspective that build upon each other. I have my trusty fountain pen. I have my cat, perching on top of the paper, stubbornly refusing to budge until I feed her dinner. And I have my mother’s blessing, because this was her favorite work of mine.
Let’s get to work!
