Julia Dvorin                                          (Solipsistic Storyteller)

I recently found out that a big hairy audacious dream of mine just moved one huge important step farther towards reality: my novel Ice Will Reveal has been accepted for publication by Hadley Rille Books, with a tentative publishing date of early 2013. I am, how can I put this...oh hell, why not: verklempt. It’s actually kind of hard to describe exactly what it feels like, but I kind of want to, which is why it’s taken me a week to actually blog the good news. I know...metaphors to the rescue! Ok, then: my feelings about finally becoming a published author are a spicy, complex goulash: there’s a good solid base of lots of “squee! I’m gonna be a REAL author!” type excitement, of course, and a decent amount of pride; but also a good splash of anxiety (will anyone buy my book? will anyone like it? will anyone even read it?) and a generous dollop of trepidation around all the new things I’ll have to learn (marketing, self-promotion, blablabla). Spicing it up further are a sprinkle of validation and relief that the next phase of this long journey has finally been achieved, mixed with a pinch of amazement and a bit of self-chastisement at how long the process has taken so far and how much longer it will yet take before the book is printed and in a bookstore or library (or someone’s e-reader). And I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that there’s also a zest there of nervousness about going the independent small press route instead of continuing to try to break down the doors (or glass ceilings, or whatever) of the big publishing houses.

But enough about goulash, let’s switch metaphors, shall we? (It’s my blog, I can do what I want to!) It’s been such a long and winding road to get to this critical juncture of “yay, someone wants to publish the novel I wrote”, and it feels important to take a look backwards and see how I got from “writer” to “author”. So let me lay out some of the journey, both as a hopefully useful reminder for myself and in the vague hope that perhaps it might be useful to other people for whom this kind of project doesn’t go quickly or easily either. (I know I suffered at first, and still do in my more gloomy moments, from the “I must not be very good at this if it’s so hard and it takes so long” syndrome. It’s a sucky syndrome. Try to avoid it.)

Ice Will Reveal (which used to be called something else entirely until it was pointed out to me that I’d unintentionally used a double entendre as my title—doh!) is my first novel-length work. In fact it’s so long, it’s practically two novels, but that’s a whole other blog post. It’s my newbie novel, my MFA equivalent: it’s the project with which I learned how to elevate my craft from “unconsciously incompetent with the occasional flash of competence” to “conscious incompetence with slightly more frequent flashes of competence”. I started writing it sometime around the end of 2003, triggered by a series of entertaining emails back and forth with a friend of mine where we each recounted the ever more epically heroic and over-embellished achievements of our individual characters from a D&D game we were playing (yes, yes, I’m THAT kind of geek...but in all fairness I can say that this novel bears only the very smallest resemblance to either D&D or to that long-ago game). At that stage in my life, I had a fairly absorbing day job as a Licensing Manager for a calendar company and was the mother of a young preschooler. I didn’t write very often or very much at a time, but I was determined to try to produce a longer piece of work. I had always been interested in and good at writing (in fact, I started out as a Creative Writing major in college before getting wildly distracted by academia for oh, roughly a decade), but I’d never written anything as big as a novel before (though I’d read a half a zillion of them already.) In what I used to sarcastically refer to as “my copious spare time”, I started reading books about writing and participating in online critique groups. Eventually I found myself some in-person writing buddies too, all of which helped a lot.

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Once we bid farewell to the sunrise and the playa, we came down from the DJ booth and dragged ourselves back to camp and to the flurry of final camp breakdown and packing the car. I was exhausted by the time I finished packing everything back up again, but Isis really wanted to leave by 8am Sunday morning to beat the crazy exodus traffic. So we powered through, bolstered by a cool random hot air balloon sighting right above our camp and a final stop at Center Camp for coffee for Isis. Then we began the slow crawl out through Black Rock City and the dead zone between BRC and the highway.

We got out without too much trouble (Isis had been right), and stopped in the closest town (Gerlach) to get a preliminary carwash. As we headed back towards highway 80 and Reno, the euphoria of the previous night and the adrenaline of packing and leaving ebbed away and I started falling asleep at the wheel—so we pulled over in one of the other small towns en route and found a shady place to park and nap for a little bit. We slept for maybe an hour, and then roused ourselves to get back on the road.

The rest of the trip home was long and tiring but relatively uneventful. We stopped in Truckee for gas and lunch (we had sushi in an air conditioned mall restaurant, which was a bizarre contrast to what we'd just been living), and I think a couple of other stops to pee and stretch, and eventually made it back home around 8 o’clock at night. I unloaded Isis’ stuff for her at her house, and then quickly unloaded most of my stuff into a pile to deal with in the morning. The boys and Josh were away at a gaming con until the following day, so I had a lovely, quiet and relatively clean house all to myself, which was great. I took a long hot bubble bath (which I dozed off in briefly), then I finally got to go to bed in nice clean sheets in my very own comfy bed and even though I missed being at Burning Man, that made it a glorious homecoming.

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Saturday was really our last day at Burning Man, since we were going to try to leave really early on Sunday morning, so there was lots to choose from to do. I chose to go off on a bike ride on my own in the relatively cool morning hours, leaving Isis to go do her own thing for a while. I biked around the playa for a while and saw some more art, but found myself really drawn back to the Temple, so I biked over there. (Side note: It was at this point I decided to name my bike “Shifty”, since it had the temperamental habit of randomly shifting into a new gear without provocation. But since everything there was so flat, I didn’t really mind, and in fact found it kind of entertaining.) I found a bench on one of the walkways connecting the main temple to one of the smaller outbuildings and sat there for a while, hanging out and being quiet with myself, trying to process some of the things that had come up over the last few days. I wrote in my journal, and eventually on the Temple itself. This time I wrote on the Temple “WE ARE ALL CONNECTED” along with a little drawing, and “NO ONE CAN MAKE ME FEEL INFERIOR WITHOUT MY CONSENT...AND I DO NOT CONSENT”. I wanted those concepts to burn up and send opposite messages to the universe—one was a wish for something that would come into being (the communal realization that we are all connected) and one was a wish for release (from the hold that others’ expectations have had over me). I also tucked one of my little freak flag cards into a crack in the wall, so that it would come into being in a big and hot and flame-tastic kind of way.

After that I came back to camp and shifted into work mode—we broke down and packed up as much of our camp as we could, and organized things for a quick getaway in the morning (put things in the car, moved our car, made sure the way was clear, etc.) That took most of the afternoon, though of course we took chillout breaks. Then we had dinner and got dressed in our final costumes (Isis was dressed as Isis with beautiful gold wings, and I was the Silver Supernova with my fabulous silver cape and silver sequin-and-fringe skirt). Then we headed out to go see the Man burn—the one big event that the whole city was built around, and that (most) everyone was excited about.

As we headed to the Man, I looked around and saw a really cool effect—practically the whole city was heading towards the Man, and since everyone was lit up in some way (both pedestrians and bikes, in addition to the art cars of course) there was this interesting kind of arterial pulsing effect, where from all sides rushes of light and movement were moving together, converging on the same point. There was a palpable feeling of excitement and anticipation but generally everyone seemed pretty peaceful and calm about the whole thing. Isis and I found a spot to spread out a blanket and sit down to watch, and though we chatted a bit with our neighbors, we mostly spent the pre-burn time appreciating each other (I feel like we have a super close and supportive bond now that we never would have had if it weren’t for Burning Man) and appreciating the transformational week we’d had so far, and talking about what we wanted to release and burn away (fear, anxiety, safety, smallness, expectations, and other stuff I don’t remember) along with the Man.

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