And No Rivers Can Put the Fire Out
As it turns out, I don’t know when to quit.
Perhaps this means that I do not know what is good for me, but I have been returning to the story that has meant so much to me my entire life, despite the fact that it sunk to the depths of the bog in the querying journey. That’s all right. I have manifested the realization that I will be fine if every agent turns it down because this is the story that I want to tell — and this is the story that is the gem of truth nestled deep in my knotted, breathlessly beating heart. All of this is to say that I’m working on the second book in the sort-of series (it’s a bit complicated) and am working on the teleplay for the first. Am I beating a dead horse? Probably, but this is the story that brings me the most Joseph Campbell-like bliss, a state of being like floating through the cosmos.
I’m not sure what prompted my return. Maybe it was reading “To the Garden the World” again: “Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber.” Every now and then, I admit that I can be prone to melancholy and self-pity, an ugly side of my personality that I tinker with because that is not the person I want to be. The thing is, I have always eventually stood back up: I went to graduate school, I applied for jobs, I tried to learn, to write, to be a good person because my mother wanted Kailee and I to leave this world a better place than how we found it. You must shake off the sediment that coats you when you’ve been too dormant.
And after I made this decision to keep writing a ghost, I felt freer and more cheerful. Yes, a huge mountain awaits me. Yes, I will write other stories. But this story is my heart and soul in a book, and I will cultivate it even if I do so alone. It’s like a flower blooming in my stomach. I can only marvel at it.
The teleplay: I’m thinking it will be five or six episodes. Each episode may be just under an hour. The beat sheet is weaving together like it is a stitch in my flesh reuniting the skin. And I have ideas for the background music, which I consider to be just as much a part of the writing process as the words that spackle the page.
Writing scripts makes me feel closer to my mother, because I used to fantasize about her writing this teleplay. She in turn fantasized about something she wrote being picked up by Netflix, of getting a badge to drive into their studios here in Albuquerque. I wish she were here. I think the entire querying process would have been less acutely painful were she here saying, “We’ll keep trying.” She used to phrase it with the first person plural; I knew we were in this together, and I loved that.
The second book: I’ve spoken a bit on Project Platelet here before, how it starts and stops, but I love being in this world, so every time it stalls, I glide back to the beginning, sigh, and go again. What will I do when I finally run out of this story? I would like to think that I’ll remember it fondly and try to forge the level of love that I have for this in other works, too. For the time being, I have my box of materials — my legal pads with character biographies, worldbuilding, the myths and stories of this portal fantasy.
As I said above, I am probably being foolish by curling up next to the corpse of my book, and yet I still nestle down into this exquisite body because there is warmth in it yet. In spite of everything, I’ve never known how to just…quit. I am the stirring spirit that haunts the page, the blood that soaks every one of the walls in my book. I know that it’s a strange book. There is not a traditional quest for the central protagonist; it is more psychological. And there is no romance; it is about unrequited love. Still there are quirky angels and their even quirkier sidekicks. It’s character, not plot, driven. Day of the Dead mingles with steampunk.
I keep tossing out metaphors, but when one realizes that, to quote Florence Welch, a thousand armies couldn’t keep me out of this book, I feel like a lit flame. Maybe it will never be published, but it will live in the blaze that I guzzle because I, Van, don’t know when to leave well enough alone. I wouldn’t change that for anything. Who wants to be sensible anyway?
