Query Quest
Writing Project Platelet has opened up a lot of feelings about the heartbreaking act of querying. I am preparing to start my graduate work in linguistics with the eye on being an academic. It is all so exciting, with the new novel and its ease of language, and then my work with language on a scientific level. But I have to consider the possibility of failure, of having spent so much of my life toiling away, fashioning a ladder that may have been built to not only the wrong wall, but may come to rest at nothing at all but the abyss. I write this at the library as I pen the opening chapters of Project Platelet, and this process is so, so hard.
2025 is an important year. This is ten years since I first went to the hospital and began my arduous climb back to the world, to life. This is ten years of working on this book to do nothing more than reclaim my mind. This is years of thinking about what I would do to celebrate if I got a book deal, and it was ten years of thinking that my mother would be with me in that moment, that we would celebrate together over New Mexican food and book shopping. I understand; this is publishing, and I will always be a writer, regardless of whether or not my book is viable. I will have to write another book, and I can do that.
When I was in high school, one of my history teachers called a meeting with me and another history teacher. They sat me down in a chair and said to me, quite frankly: “Your writing is substandard. You cannot write.” As you can imagine, this has always been a memory that demands to be acknowledged like a small splinter that refuses to budge from my flesh, leaving me sore and flushed. I remember feeling so confused and embarrassed and heartsick because this was, and always has been, my central identity in life. Someone who feels fused to language. And when someone feels fused to language in this way, two people telling you that it eludes you…it smacks you quite hard because it is like half of your flesh has been yanked away at the sutures. Regardless of whether I think I can write or not, it was a moment where I went completely quiet.
Since then, I’ve had a better education and fonder memories of time spent in that quiet and silence. I’ve walked mazes in Santa Fe with my mother. I’ve completed a Master’s degree. I’ve made writerly friends and had great tea and saw an exhibition on the Titanic and attended a wedding where the rains took out the cake and I’ve worked so incredibly hard on the writing that compels me. I get up at five in the morning and work all day, trying to improve. It’s almost like one seeks to be defiant after she is told that she cannot write but there is always some withering fear that those two teachers were right. What if I have spent years writing a book that isn’t good?
I’m writing this not to whine because I will always write, even if I have to throw everything I’ve got into Project Guernica. I am writing this because I want to document the difficulties of this process. It can be agonizing. But I am a hopeful person. I read a tea tag that said, “What belongs to you shall come to you.” Call it weird, but I collect these inspirational tags. Querying is a maze, like the ones I trotted around with my mother, and sometimes finding one’s way out can be difficult. I wouldn’t have it any other way, though. Maybe I should approach this with the thought that every word is a step closer to writing what I am meant to write, for a reader who is meant to read it.
It feels good to exercise these thoughts, especially because I just found out that I did not get a job I applied for and was so desperate for. I have so many stories tumbling about inside me that I am hopeful that one person will read it someday and like it, or that it will change their life for the better. Yes, the rejections pile up, but so does the little heartbeat that stubbornly rises with the tides.
The big thing is to not give into any self-pity. I wrote the best story that I could and that matters. It is a candle of warmth to get me through the tough times in life. I love this book, and I always will. I’ll be okay, just as I always have been. For now, let us end this wee blog and go to a coffee shop and get some tea. I always stand up.
