From a WIP

I cannot sweat.
I am one with the searing heat:
the sucking furnace of nomadic environs.
The water has been drained from me,
my tongue fattened with expectation.
And my skin is hardened with denial and brittle with promise.

I've started a new project: a book that will be a departure for me. It's a different sort of story than any I've yet written.

I'm wrestling with the concept, testing where my voice fits in the genre, fleshing out the characters, deciding on the macro themes that I hope I can hang the story on. In my opinion, this is the most exciting part of writing a book. The first few chapters, when the prose begins to flow, the characters work themselves out, and the stylistic elements (especially the ones that you're trying out for the first time) start to work for you instead of against you; these are the things that I most enjoy about writing.

And they're the things that I will remember when I'm in the middle and feeling bogged down, or at the end and fretting that things are not coming together as I'd like them to. If I can look back on the excitement I felt when starting a project, I know that I can see it through.

The little piece at the top of this post is another reason I am so enamored with the process. When I wrote it for this new book, I felt good about it. I think it flows well, has some nice imagery, and it complements the prose before and after it. I'm happy with it. More that that: I'm proud of it. And that's knowing that by the time the book is done, that small portion will doubtless have been rewritten so that it is unrecognizable, or will have been dropped completely. It's not important. What does matter is that I'm excited about laying down the prose, about the possibilities.

Who knows, those six lines may find themselves in the finished product unchanged. And maybe the book will be stronger because of them. Whatever happens is OK because right now I am just happy to be at the start of things again.

And maybe in a few months I'll need to come back to this post and reread it to remind myself what it feels like to love something that can be so difficult.