Tracks

Sometimes, when I'm feeling blue, I remind myself that Jupiter is out there in the dark, and it's full of amazing and endless storms and it's beautiful, and I feel better.

This is not to say it's always that easy! The weekend, without question, sucked. I made a bad judgment call at work and had to clean up a mess, but once that mess was sorted? Monday was a revelation. I guess this thing had been hanging over my head -- I knew it was coming, I could just feel it, and once it DID come, and was handled, and passed... Whew. It was like a long exhale. (Hey, waiting to exhale -- such a thing.)

And now, we're back on track, I've got awesome people who're eager to work on this project, and it's going to be amazing. We're doing good work. And I'll know better next time. It's important to know who can you depend on, who is going to buckle down and do the work.

The flip side of that is, being delighted when someone you trusted to do the work really hits it out of the park. So if I was disappointed on the one hand, I was happily astonished on the other. I love working with good and talented people.

Progress continues on the next book, Anubis #6. I'm working in small chunks for a few reasons, I think.

First, it's the last planned book and well, approaching the end of a thing is kinda crappy. I'll be sad to say goodbye, even if I later return to this universe. It's also terrifying, right, because that means the next book is totally new and different and filled with people we don't know as well as we know these people and maybe it's the book that helps me finally (finally dear god) land an agent and maybe it's the book that finally (finally) does something and breaks out and is not everything I've written up to this point which has vanished in a lukewarm bog of shrugs.

HEY. Wow, that's some uncertainty and pressure there. Ha ha Next Book, you gotta do it ALL. And the next book runs away in terror, see.

But that uncertainty sits there while I contemplate this next book and it chatters and yeah. I'm not where I wanted to be at this point in my "writing career." I work hard, really hard, and maybe it will turn out I'm not a novelist and I'll be sad about that, and... Yeah, not sure what comes after that "and," really.

Jordan Peele talked about writing Get Out:

"I stopped writing this movie about 20 times because I thought it was impossible. I thought it wasn't going to work. I thought no one would ever make this movie. But I kept coming back to it because I knew if someone let me make this movie, that people would hear it and people would see it."

We talk about perseverance a lot, but I'm not sure if we know exactly what that looks like. We come to the desk, or the table, or the notebook, or the Sunken Place every day, we sit down, we do the work. Over and over and over and over and sometimes, we still don't make it. And so we try again. And again? It's the journey not the destination?

Someone once told me my most valuable trait was that I kept showing up. I am always here, doing the work. The work doesn't always pay off. But I'm still here.

Just like Jupiter.