In classic colonization-type stories, explorers or soldiers would gather around the campfire as night fell over the jungle or taiga or prairie or mountainside or wherever they happened to be. Nervous glances would be exchanged.
“Quiet,” one would mutter.
“Yeah. Too quiet.”
That’s how it has felt around my desk for the last week or so. I have projects out there, and none of my editors or illustrators are getting back to me about them. The silence feels threatening. When will they strike?
There is an upside. Waiting to be overwhelmed by the volume of edits and rewrites and suggestions – the literary equivalent of arrows and assegais - I’ve had a chance to go through my ‘One of these days’ work folder. This is full of stuff I started and discarded months or years ago.
It’s mostly dreck or dreck-adjacent, but some of it is better than I remember. The literary marketplace has changed. Parameters have shifted. Fewer colonizing hero stories, more real history. Less humorous description of body parts, more fantastic metaphysics. Something that was too short for a straight novel may be just the right length for a graphic. Something that was too wacky then may be just wacky enough now.
Yesterday I opened a too-long picture book I wrote a few years ago. A kid whose family was crushed by a giant is befriended by a ghost who got run over by a car.
Can I stretch the story into a quirky superhero comic? Why not?
I work away, forgetting for now how quiet it is beyond the firelight.
Comments