Veronica Guido

As I consider the next step in my debut novel, and work on my second book, I’m feeling as though the thin balance beam beneath me is shrinking in size.

Perhaps it was naïve of me to think I could navigate the scary world of publishing for the first time with my *hopefully* debut novel, The Rose of Ravenna, while working on my *hopefully* second novel, The Fall of the House of Sforza. Is this a good idea? Should I simply focus on getting novel one out the prverbial door and into the world? But then I would be dismissing my innate desire to keep writing. To write new. To be creative. But is that splitting my focus and energy?

Alas, here we are, querying and considering a publishing offer while simultaneously writing my second novel feverously. Both are exciting. Both are terrifying. Both make me feel different kinds of ways.

It may sound odd, but when I switch my focus from querying to writing, I feel as though I am forgetting about the characters I so deeply love and cherish from my first novel, cheating on them, almost, with the new, fresh characters who are so demanding of my attention in novel #2. And when I leave those new, fresh thoughts to focus on the ones I have put to bed, kissed on the forehead, and told “you are as perfect as you can be”, I feel as though I am stifling the creative juices so to speak which could be flowing into novel 2. How can I speak of novel 2 when novel 1 is still floating in the limbo that is accept this offer or wait for a maybe better one?

But both are so important to me. Both demand my attention at different times and for different reasons. They are both my babies. How can I love one more than the other?

The feelings are often overwhelming. When I focus on publishing options and what in the world should I be accepting or pursing at the end of the day, I can feel the “newness” of novel 2 tugging at me. Begging me to finish that scene I started a few days ago. And oh! what about that new character development that came to you on your commute to work just the other week – ever going to write that out? No. Well, yes. Just not now.

And then, when I do, when I become engrossed in the gorgeous chaos that is free writing novel 2 and all its newness and freshness and unknown twists and turns, I can feel the roots of the plants from novel 1, the roots I spent years developing and nurturing and making so unique and beautiful and twisted, pulling at me. Saying, what about us? we came first. we were done first. you want us out in the world first.

So, I open my laptop and do not know where to go first: my query list or my manuscript. Old or new. Unknown and out of my control or unknown and in my control. I often chose the latter, to then succumb to guilt. Is this what mothers feel, in some off-shoot, niche way? Perhaps. I wish I could ask Dante what he thinks. Though, I feel he would say to focus on the old, for he is the inspiration of it after all.

When I finished The Rose of Ravenna and started querying, I never thought a publishing offer coming my way would make me stop and consider if I should even take it so much. That’s where I am right now, and I think it’s part of my crisis of muses. Do I take it, despite it not being all I dreamt of my whole life? Do I hold out, waiting for the offer of my dreams to come (which I am aware likely does not exist)? Do I say the hell with it all (or, the Inferno with it all) and self-publish? Do I stop this all together and just keep writing The Fall of the House of Sforza and have The Rose of Ravenna be my second book should the chance ever arise?

Woe is me, I want to say, though I try not to, for I also recognize so many never get to this stage of having such a decision in front of them. Every day I feel like a different answer is the right one. Every day I feel further from whatever the truth of my fate actually is. So I often choose write: perhaps it is escapism, or my subconscious, or just my desire to write forever taking hold. Because that is what I want at the end of this all: to write. To be read. To be on someone’s shelves and someone’s mind. To have my words in the lap of a stranger. To call myself an author. To simply write.

And so, the beam is thin beneath my feet and I feel as though I am stuck somewhere in the middle, not sure which end to run to, each hesitant step shrinking the surface area supporting me.