Every November is National Novel Writing Novel Month, or NaNoWrMo. The goal of the event is to write a 50,000 word novel in four weeks. I feel like I just completed the opposite of that, which was to cut 77,000 words from my novel in five weeks. Using the strategies I wrote about last month was effective, and I got the novel to under 100,000 words. That makes it a 350 page manuscript, double-spaced in Word in Times New Roman font.

Now I am headed back into sending the novel to agents and waiting to hear what they think. This is perhaps the hardest part of the writing game for me. Writing new material sometime comes easily, but even when it doesn’t, it is an active process. Cutting the novel back so substantially involved questioning every chapter, scene, page, sentence, and word I’ve written over the last ten years, and that was challenging. But it was focused and tangible. Waiting, on the other hand, involves letting things go, letting them be, and admitting that I have no more control over the outcome. 

I think this is a tricky practice for all of us, no matter the specific application. We apply for jobs and then have to wait. We go to medical appointments and get labs drawn and then have to wait. We send that email or text, make that phone call, leave that message, and then have to wait. We schedule that vacation and then have to wait. And waiting can feel like slowly going mad, if we keep thinking about the potential results. 

So, what I’m trying to figure out is how to let waiting be a process of becoming, of drawing inward and trying to recommit to the present moment. I am working on a second novel, and though the brainstorming and planning is slower than I would like, I am curious to see where it takes me. I am trying to let it show me the way into it. 

I am riding my horse in the indoor arena at the barn where I keep her and waiting for spring, trying to concentrate each time on the exercises we practice, to see how much progress we can make during this fallow period rather than longing for rides in the hills. I am smelling woodsmoke on the wind and trying to appreciate the taste of cold on my tongue instead of counting the days until a true thaw. 

So it feels right to me, then, to be sending my first novel to agents at this time of year, when we can almost imagine that winter will indeed end but before we can feel spring in our bones. What comes next is a new season.