So much of publishing is just waiting.

I’ve finished my latest WIP, which for now I’ll call Project Soft Animals. They say the second book you write after you partner with a literary agent is the hardest book you’ll ever write, and they ain’t wrong.

While drafting WEM had its tough moments, it felt largely like a good long exhale. I innately connected with the characters, the mood, and the setting is still vivid and clear to me. I spent that draft pressed up against that drowning city, that grief-stricken populace trying to move forward into anything that might make sense.

Soft Animals was honestly a lot like pulling teeth. Scenes would come to me clearly. I felt the characters viscerally at times, but perhaps it was just too close and connected to our current world. WEM, after all, starts forty years after the death of what we call normal. Soft Animals shows the whole gritty demise, but from a step back. The characters — through luck and happenstance — start the day the world ends in an isolated garden.

One of the pivotal questions in WEM is “Can you survive losing everything?”

Soft Animals, on the other hand, asks, “What does it mean to never go home again?” The book follows the five stages of grief, but like, for that. For losing your home.

Why is losing your home so much tougher for me to write than losing literally everything you know?

In a way it does make sense. I spend a lot of time watching YouTube crack science videos, hobby astrophysicists dropping bombs about Fermi Paradox and super-massive black holes. In-depth retellings of Bonobo Wars; anthropologists telling individual stories from Pompeii.

When they go into disaster territory, it’s hard to truly feel the “What if the Earth ended all at once” situations. Because what if it did? I certainly wouldn’t be alive to mind.

Worse are the ones about plagues wiping out half the population in one foul swoop. The hypotheticals that leave some of us behind, alone and with all the memories and the loss. The situations where we all die are like Schrodinger’s Grief — is it there? Is it not? If it’s all just over, how can it be either? Both?

I hate that cat thing, I really do. Not as much as the tree falling in the forest that no one hears, but you get it.

While drafting Soft Animals, I scored a literary agent. I went on submission. The literary agent had a family emergency and had to leave agenting. I partnered with a new literary agent. And now I’m awaiting an edit letter that’ll bring me back to WEM, the book I started this with, and I don’t feel much more than relief that I don’t have to edit Soft Animals quite so soon. It’s too raw, there. It’s full of people left behind.

I’ll wait a bit to go back to it.