Good January Light
I measure my life in light — starlight, moonlight, and the way the light falls in January, gentle and pristine in its ragged edges. This time of year, the branches are still shorn of their leaves, the breeze whickers and whinnies. I love January not because of its promise for a new year, a new life, but for its unique light. My new apartment overlooks a yellow staircase and a firepit. The entire complex has good January light; I think I can write here.
I write with the knowledge that I failed, and that is a difficult thing to swallow, even as the light comforts. Since May 2024, I’ve queried my novel, which is my throbbing heart bled into a book. It’s received rejection on a massive scale. This is okay. I’ve had my sobbing fit; VIcki walked me through it. I will continue to write its twin, Project Platelet. But I will do so with a sore chest, one still smarting from the act of carving out my ventricles and chambers to fling them on a page. I know that this is just publishing, but it still saddens the marrow that is left within me.
Back in September, at around 6:30 in the morning, as I was wiping sleep crusts from my eyes, I had a vision of a new novel. It plopped down on my mind while I sat at my desk, getting ready for the day. A magical island. A brilliant protagonist with a tendency to fury. Siblings on the run from something greater than themselves. Intergenerational family sagas. Jaguars. Grief. Surrealism. Psychedelic, gothic vibes. I pitched it to my journal as The Count of Monte Cristo meets Richard Brautigan, a combo that I am enthused by personally.
The time to start on this project that still lacks a codename is now, in the January light that coats everything. The light now is graceful, fragile, like a face spent of fresh tears, the way one’s eyes are slightly bruised after that good cry. I made my resolutions, and one of them is to write this new book in all the ink and blood it promises. Sometimes, I open my front door just to feel the slight chill nip at my shoulders. When this happens, Bijou lifts her head, blinks at me slowly, puts her head back down on the worn chair. Yes, I want to learn how to read Hindi, how to drive, and how to play “Rhiannon” on the guitar. But more importantly, I want to exist in that January light. I look forward to it every year, this time for watching the sun meander and the moon call to it early on in the evening.
January light.
I’ve already picked out a few journals to hold this new project. I have three, one of which was a Christmas gift from Dean and Letty. I have my fountain pens ready. I use turquoise or dark blue because they are like gifts from the lights around me. Little chains of rainbows twirling around my wrists and fingers as I type and draft and pause to look out the big window in my new living room.
I am trying not to think of this new project as a thing that will go out into the world someday, because it could fail, too. There are so many stones that one walks, tenderly, around in the pursuit of being a Real Writer, and who knows, maybe no one will like this book, too. What if they don’t like my book set in the 1980s US-Mexico borderlands? What if they don’t like my children’s book with Southern gothic strains infecting it? What if they don’t like my essay collection on women’s literature? My short story about a haunting, disembodied head?
It is so easy — in fact, too easy — to ease into sublime despair like it’s a bathtub full of lukewarm water waiting to surround your flesh. One can become submerged without even thinking about it. Even as I sit here, having spent the day sending out emails to researchers, looking to forge scientific connections, I think, “How can my career as a linguist be stretching out after a deep sleep while my attempted career as a writer can flounder so?” I think that there is a sort of naivete in querying; you think that your love will carry you through. It didn’t, and for some time, I’ve been toggling back and forth between wondering if what I feel every time I hit send on a pitch is hope — or denial?
What if it will never happen for me?
I used to have a thought experiment. I called it the White Box. One day, I awake in a small, pale cell. The walls are white brickwork. There is nothing but a slab of a mattress on the corner. I cannot leave here, not ever. I will be caged in for the rest of my life. But I have an unlimited supply of paper and ink. Will I make it to the end of my years?
Yes, I thought. Because I could endure this tepid , bland Siberia as long as I had my language. How could it fail me?
I’m aware that my novel was a weird book. It’s a portal fantasy, but it spends most of its time meditating on character transgressions and hopes. It is about fascism and colonialism and grown up theater kids. There are doppelgangers, angels and their quirky sidekicks running around in mayhem, heartbroken forests, talking orbs, Chicanx steampunk, and an ungodly amount of apple seeds. It was a behemoth, and it gobbled up lots of other stories that fell in its path. I grew up with the story, quite literally. One must get hung up thinking, again, “How could it fail me?” Or did I fail it?
I feel afraid that I will never recreate that love, that experience of purest rapture in writing a story again. This new project is borne of January light, though. Surely that is enough. I will write it, threading between homework for Corpus Methods, between trips to the gym and sips of tea. I don’t really have a choice; I am in the White Box now.
The love of language will always guide me. I’m a professional fan of language now. There will be a degree with my name looped onto it: Linguistics. And I am glad that there is a world where Januaries exist as I make my way through the halls of academia, my footsteps echoing as I advance, feeling lonely. I just really wish that it had found a literary agent. Now, I have to look at the light outside in the mornings, as I pack my bag for work and prepare to catch the shuttle to the university. One gets up again because one really has no other option: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
What should I call the new novel?
