Evernost

In high school I joked that I related to writing projects the way other people related to romantic love:

“Oh! Oh! This is the one!” I would say. And then, a week or a month later, “Eh, I am bored and disillusioned, and I can’t go on this way. Bye.”

I started many projects then and finished only one, Dear Angus. Recently I’ve managed a couple major passes of revision and am hoping that I will be able to sell it to someone someday.

I’ve more or less resigned myself to serial monogamy where books are concerned; I can’t seem to focus on one from beginning to end, and I can’t seem to multitask. My saving grace seems to be that I come back to things. A novel that can’t be completed in a month (I write fast, but usually not that fast) can totally be completed in a number of month-long sessions.

Be all that as it may, for the past few years, I’ve been pretty sure that the love of my life is a novel (or collection of five novellas) tentatively titled Of Evernost. It is (in my hopes, at least) dark, poetic, rich, morally complex literary fantasy. Some or all of it might even be poetry. Elements of it come from elementary school; elements of it come from fairy tales; elements of it come from critical theory (not in that it is “a story about the power of story”; that is, I grant, a fair amount for a book to be about, but still–I dearly hope Of Evernost is about a lot more than that). And I want to illustrate it–richly, on every page, with images that will add to the text and complicate it.

Fortunately, I still plan to write other things–manageable projects that might be done someday, with standards of quality that are reachable, that someone might someday want to publish.

And yet, mixed in among musings and info on Dear Angus and Pet and whatever else I wind up working on, you’ll get Evernostian art and bits of Evernostian writing.

In other news, I’m preparing presentations on Russian poetry for some adult classes a friend is putting together, so I may write a bit about that–and I’m rereading a section of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism to inspire me on Evernost (how it’s inspiring I may explain next week).