Project Guernica, Where are You?

I get up. I light a candle. I drink my tea. I hit the gym. I pace to and fro. But I struggle to break into the firm ground of Project Guernica. Once you work with a story for some time, the soil becomes soft and moves with you arms as you till the dirt. But I have not hit that suppleness yet. Instead I circle the hole I am attempting to dig, survey it from all angles, then pounce.

Project Guernica was my mother’s favorite thing that I have written and am planning to write. I want this book to be slimmer than Canis Major — perhaps around 80,000 to 90,000 words. It is a fast machine, bounding across the page. Sometimes I struggle to keep up with it, like watching a hare sashay at top speed out of my watery vision. I think I am tussling with myself, trying to get control of this careening train, trying to get to the cockpit.

I have a new box. It is a clear and plastic box, and it only has three items in it. I got so accustomed to the massive worldbuilding of Canis Major, with all its journals and character diaries, that the new box feels sparse and humble. There are two writing journals and a legal pad (I always fill out the Proust Questionnaire for my characters on a legal pad). It will take time for the box to feel lived in, for Project Guernica to decorate its walls and ease into its corners, to stretch out, languid.

The thing is, I feel still bound to Canis Major, as though the cord stretching between us is fashioned from iron links. Part of this attachment is certainly the fact that I am still querying it. If I am being truthful, I have to say this here: I have a feeling I will be querying Project Guernica. It is a painful realization, the fact that I probably will have to start again when this new project is put to bed. Let me say that querying is a pendulum. Sometimes, I want to say, “It is a good book! Someone give it a chance!” Today, I am somewhat despairing, somewhat heartbroken.

I like to keep my issues steeped strongly because it is easier to write that way. I will take that despair about querying and write chapter ten of Project Guernica. There is a Stephen King quote that I saved to my phone: The nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and kept on writing.

One does not write because she wants a massive advance or a bestseller. She writes because it is the thing that brings her meaning, the thing that proves to her that she lived a life worth living. I am circling the world like a bird of prey as I attempt to break into Project Guernica, I get the feeling that I would rather write something good than something commercial. This book features, among other things: Murder, war, hell, and redemption. It is a feminist book. It asks what we blame women for, how we have branded women with a flaming spear.

This hasn’t been the most poetic blog, but it is what I am feeling now, a person who wants to put stories and words in people’s hands. The challenge of starting something new, of getting published, well, it is certainly sadder than I anticipated. But I want to do as Rumi said: I want to sing like the birds sing, not caring who listens or what they think.