Positive Tests and Real Deadlines

Hello World.

My name is Daniel.  My wife Paola and I are writing and illustrating twenty-four English/Spanish storybooks collectively known as The Book of the Wolves.  I shall be giving updates on the progress of our endeavor every week in this blog.  And, while I'm here, I'll seize the opportunity to ramble on to the entire digitized world about whatever is on my mind.

Just a week ago this blog was to have a very different purpose.  I was up until 2 am one night, facing down my chronic anxiety about choosing whether or not to go to grad school.  As I was brainstorming I lapsed unexpectedly into automatic writing, something I have done many times before but not at all recently.  Automatic writing, in my experience, is when your own hands start typing a letter to you from your Higher Consciousness/God/the Universe.  (Choose whatever term suits you; I make no distinction anymore.)  It sounds weird, and it is weird, but it is also extremely nice to get some straight talk from someone who knows exactly what you are thinking, even if that someone might just be a repressed part of your own mind.

Am I crazy?  Well, yeah.  Everyone is.  Some people are aware that they are crazy, and some aren't.  I greatly prefer the former.

Functionally though, I'm quite sane.  I am currently twenty-three years old, which means that the first few years of my adult life have been characterized by economic recession and an ever more pervasive sense of our culture's decline.  Yet, I've managed to be employed full-time throughout the entire recession, and despite my society's increasing uncertainty about itself, I have moved out on my own, graduated from college, and gotten married to the girl of my dreams.

Man, I make myself sound good.

Well, the truth is that I have fought through several legions of my own insecurities to get to this point, and that battle is by no means finished.  Hence, I found myself one week ago looking at grad schools online, trying to figure what to do to dispel this haunting sense of inadequacy that lives in the back of my mind.  I got to thinking (and writing) that I ought to just take my own education by the horns and study whatever I want to, designing my own curriculum and putting in the same amount of effort as I would at a grad school at a fraction of the cost.  I suppose I should clarify one important point: my Bachelor's degree was in Humanities, and my Master's, if I pursued one, would be in something like History or Creative Writing.  It was something of a miracle that within a few months of attaining my Humanities degree I was hired by Scribe, a publishing services company and one of the few companies left in this economy which actually seeks out those intrepid few people who are stubborn and foolish enough to brand themselves as "Literary," and therefore "Useless" to most normal employers.

So, given my interests and my refusal to even consider being someone like a pharmacist or a middle manager, you can see how deciding to eschew grad school for a self-directed course of study might not be completely insane.  Plus, my plan was not simply to read a lot.  I was also going to start a blog, a grandiose chronicle of my exploration into history, futurism, and spirituality.  I figured that if I kept at it long enough, my  knowledge would expand and my writing skill would sharpen, and eventually I would have enough internet cred to make some kind of a difference in the world (or at least attract a publisher).

So that was the nebulous idea bouncing around my mind for the past week.  And then, on Friday morning, my wife and I passed three pregnancy tests.

After having spent the last three months trying to conceive, we spent the weekend kind of stunned that we had actually done it.  The enormity of it sank in bit by bit as we gave the news to more and more people.  I won't lie; the financial implications, which we had admittedly not given much thought to, are frightening.  But our reasons for wanting a child have not changed, and even as we have realized what realities we are facing, we have also seen just how much unconditional support both my family and Pao's family have pledged to us, and we feel unfathomably blessed.

Pao and I have been married for two and a half years.  From the beginning, we knew we both wanted children, and we knew we both wanted to wait a few years.  Indeed, we would have waited a little longer, but back in December we realized that the Year of the Dragon was upon us.  It was either conceive now or wait until the stars came back around in 2024.  I am a dragon myself, born in 1988, and Pao was instantly enchanted by the idea of our first-born possessing the same intensity that I have.

When I told my father the news, he said that "real life begins now."  I am beginning to understand how true that is.  For one thing, The Book of the Wolves has a much more concrete deadline for completion.  We mean for it to be finished by the time our first child is starting to read.  That gives us a few years, of course, but since we're working on it only a few hours a week, a few years is probably what we'll need.

Currently the English text is all done.  We have translated two of the books into Spanish already.  The bulk of the work will be the illustrations, of which there will be over four hundred when all is said and done.  We both have some talent and skill in visual arts, but we have no experience in illustration, so we're going to have to teach ourselves quite a bit before we can really even begin.

This project is important to us, however, and we are certainly not in it for the money.  That is why it will succeed.

A few years back I finished a gargantuan epic historical fantasy novel called Dead In All Wars.  I tried to get it published for over a year.  A few agents actually did ask for the first chapter, but none were interested after that.  The failure crippled me for a long time.  I started many other books, but I never had the motivation to finish them.  I began to think that I might be broken as an artist, that I simply did not possess the requisite toughness.

In fact, six months ago I was 150 pages into a fantasy series when I abruptly decided to start writing children's books.  I realized that writing for my own children would mean infinitely more to me than playing the lottery of mass market fiction.  And Pao has become just as inspired by the project as I have.  We will try to get The Book of the Wolves published when we are good and ready, but because we want to, not because we need to.

And so, I have refocused this blog on our gift to our children.  Hopefully it will generate some publicity for us down the road.  I will still chronicle my exploration into history, futurism, and spirituality, but I suspect that our adventure in becoming parents will prove much more interesting.

This post is very long.  I guess I should save some for next week.  And the hundreds of weeks after that.

Cheers,
Daniel