There’s a feeling I experience after finishing a draft, that’s something along the lines of a travel hangover, or waking up from cryogenic sleep. I’m here again in the same place I’d left seven weeks ago, but here feels different. And here on this side of deadline, the time I’d spent in suspended fictional space doesn’t even register. Feels like it never happened. Though I know it did.
I have fragments of memories and they become a small obsession. My thoughts swirl around these rocks in the creek, these nagging elements sometimes as small as a throwaway line or detail. I don’t choose to remember them; they are remembered for me. Why these? I wonder.
One answer: They signal what will legitimately need to be addressed in the next go-around, the hunches my editors will confirm when I hear back.
Another answer: They point to my anxieties about new material i.e. Will this thing I added work? Was that one part I changed a step too far? Was this totally crazy??
As I wait for feedback I am equal parts, excitement, anticipation, and dread. But I wouldn’t want it any other way.
The weather’s changing here in Detroit. For real this time. It’s almost consistently warm and sunny enough to go outside in a t-shirt, though the weekend’s been quite rainy. There’s a dome-shaped bush outside my bedroom window and within a span of two days, it sprouted leaves and small pink flowers. And my upstairs neighbors just got a puppy, a boxer named Yoshi, who when they throw his squeaky ball around in the yard and tell him to fetch, doesn’t fetch.