Having finished my chapbook (!) I have this intoxicating feeling I could finish my entire Evernostian project–although it will likely take me years! And the process of creating this skinny little chapbook makes it so much more real to me. I am ready to pour a lot more love and time into the larger work now that I’ve seen how this came out (and now that a coworker mentioned she thought something like this could work as a graphic novel even though I don’t want it to look at all like a comic. Whoa! A potential marketing category!).
So I printed out everything I could find that I’d written on Evernost (I’ve since remembered a few bits and pieces I missed, but still). I’d estimate I had at least 150,000 words (taking out bits duplicated from attempt to attempt; leaving them in, it’s more like 170,000). So–one very hefty adult fantasy tome or a couple YA books. However…I’m pretty sure only scraps will remain of this in the final product–and also that it will have to shrink quite a lot for images to play the large role I intend them to. Unless it becomes simply monstrous in length and takes me the rest of my life…a possibility I’m not discounting right now.
I’m at a particularly heady point in the process right now: I get to determine the direction of the whole thing. I know some of what I want it to include and a lot of what I want it to do. What I don’t know yet is how. So I’m going to be frantically taking notes and outlining for the next few weeks, at least, I suspect.
(Details: I’m thinking of breaking Of Evernost into twelve short volumes, one for every month of the year, as a way of feeling like the work is manageable, and then combining them at the end before I look for a publisher or a printer. Not sure, though.)
More than that, I’m realizing that I love this book! It’s one of the most exciting, strange, and beautiful things I’ve ever done in my life, and it’s hard to express how much it means to me at this point to make something of it that other people can enjoy (whether a lot of other people or a few doesn’t really mean that much to me at this point).
I call this my William Blake project–not just because it’s text and images together, but because there’s a good chance that it will be, like Blake’s work, a weird self-published book no one will buy. I will consider myself quite adequately successful if it manages to be smart and interesting to a few random people who share my obsessions, though I dream bigger than that.
Unfortunately (perhaps), this makes me more reluctant to work on everything else–YA books, collaborations, and sadly my blog, though I mean to keep working on it as well as I can make myself.
Of Elsewhere 