looking back, moving forward

Yesterday I got serious about The Return. I’ve been working on this novella, off and on, for 3 years! I hired a cover artist, I’ve got another artist finishing the last interior illustration, and I’ve written about 20K words. I just need to make one final push to finish it by mid-June, and that means not getting distracted by other projects. I’ve got speaking gigs for the next 3 weeks but then my summer opens up…once I finish The Return, I can focus on my other novella North/South. Part of me wonders whether these projects could be sold to a traditional publisher and part of me just wants to go ahead and do my own thing. Having 4 full-color illustrations hikes the price of this follow-up to The Deep. Would you pay $20 for a paperback book? My comics friends tell me that’s the standard rate for a graphic novel, but this is a hybrid…CreateSpace charges as if you’re putting color on every page so that’s what jacks the price up–and that’s why I need to write less rather than more. Well, the task this week is to finish 3 of these 10 half-written chapters. Yesterday I drafted a new outline and printed it out so I can make notes as I work; I formatted the book twice, comparing font sizes; I inserted the four illustrations to see how they look; and I revisited the blog posts I wrote while I was in Dakar in 2014. Yesterday Facebook pulled up photos from my trip to Ghana in 2013 and I was reminded how that trip to Elmina Castle really inspired The Return. I felt angry at Elmina but visiting the House of Slaves at Goree Island the following year was a very different experience. I want this novella to balance the rage, sorrow, and longing one experiences when visiting a slave fort. For me, it hurt, but it affects everyone differently. This is reflected in my cast of characters and I hope readers can relate to them.

After binge-watching The Last Kingdom this past weekend (research for my Viking novel), I wrote a poem for a forthcoming anthology designed to help kids survive the Trump era. I’m sticking to my vegan diet and getting my steps in…next week I meet with my Random House editor, and Skype into the Los Angeles classroom where I passed out last month…I feel like I’m closing some of the many tabs that have been open for a while. Unstructured time can be tricky, but I’m learning to budget my time and feel optimistic about the summer. It’s time to close some doors so that others can open…