Miscellaneous Press receives regular unsolicited submissions, pitches, and examples of illustrator art and portfolios. These are generally made with careful attention paid to professionalism and courtesy. An exception to this is an email I received last month which said, ‘I see you haven’t published anything in over a year. Why so slow? Are you even operating anymore?’
This shouldn’t have annoyed me as much as it did. After all, the question is legitimate (though perhaps could have been less blunt). It followed questions coming both from my real life and online friends who know that I’m ‘a writer’ and are curious to know ‘what’s happening next?’
I believe there are two general tenets of thought that writers fall into when discussing works-in-progress: you either do or don’t.
I talked about Surprise! during the publishing process, but leading up to that point I was tight-lipped. I don’t generally talk about what what I’m working on for a number of considerations: sometimes a piece doesn’t work out, sometimes it gets accepted and I keep quiet until contracts are exchanged, sometimes it gets rejected and I privately nurse that wound.
But today I will mention what’s going on.
I’m writing another children’s picture book. This will be for an older age group than Surprise! and is darker, deeper. It has a female protagonist. I’m currently trying to strike a balance in the language that is sophisticated – dare I say poetic – and engaging. I’m trying to write it without formulating in my mind visions of what I’d like the artwork to look like – however I don’t know if that’s actually hindering the process (for formulating ideas of what characters physically look like can only help in developing their characters internally, yes?)
(Perhaps, but it can be distracting – I’ll just answer my own question!)
Before now, I’ve been giving vague answers to my friends because I simply haven’t been ready for the barrage of further questioning: Who will illustrate it? Will you publish it yourself again? When will it come out?
As some of you will know, these are practically unanswerable. Even for me, who’s done it before. Even if I was just hypothesising, without first taking dozens of factors into consideration.
So now if you ask, I can smile and say, yes, I am working on something. I’ve reached that point. We’ll just have to see what time has in store.
