So for those who have been following the saga of the book I wrote last year, well– it’s finished. As in, it’s about as polished as I think I’m going to get it. Now I’ve reached the hard part, which is submitting queries to agents and publishers. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And getting rejection letters.

Adjusting to this process and train of thought has been a difficult thing to do. Welcome to a world where you, as a writer, are another brick in a wall. Where the highly personal and creative process that was writing your book has to make way for marketing and pigeonholing and making sure you meet a certain standard so the High and Mighty Publishers might possibly bother to glance in your direction.

(Who me, bitter?)

That’s how it works, though, and you have to live with it. Coming to grips with this was extremely difficult for me to do and I spent a lot of time dwelling on the whole inherent… well, “wrongness of it all” is a strong phrase, but there you go. It best describes my feelings, I suppose. I remember one day at work at the pet store, I was staring into the cricket bin and suddenly I felt a weird kinship with the insects that I was selling as lizard food. Crickets, often glorified in fable as being special by way of possessing the glorious gift of song– here they were, thousands of them in a bin, being sold for quite literally a dime a dozen, with no one giving them a second glance. Suddenly I realized that I knew what it felt like to “be a cricket”.

So one fitful night a few days later I couldn’t sleep for some reason. I would fall asleep for a few moments and then wake up tossing and turning, only to have the process repeat itself. It was a pretty terrible night all around. Something unusual was happening, though: every time I woke up I’d enter that bizarre phase between wakefulness and sleep where your thoughts and dreams all sort of tumble into one big ball of hallucinations, and every time that happened more and more of a new story would vividly appear to me. A new story that took the cricket metaphor and everything else I was feeling at the time and wrapped it up into a neat little package.

I woke up the next morning and after letting the previous night percolate in my brain a little, I went over to my computer and in twenty minutes I’d typed up a complete outline to what is going to be NaNo 2010. The entire story and its themes were, quite honestly, something I’d dreamed up, and yet the whole thing was surprisingly consistent. The things your unconscious self will come up with if you let it, huh?

Since then I’ve polished the story up and added more themes– visiting the Washington coast seemed to add a whole new layer of inspiration– and now I am really excited to write this up. This is a very personal and very quirky story– think Pixar meets Tim Burton meets Where the Wild Things Are– but every time I think about I just start counting down the days til November because gosh, I need to write this story.

Inspiration, it would seem, sometimes comes from the most difficult circumstances and the lowliest critters.

(Just look at his little face!)