marching orders

Everyone who's organized and talked with Grace Lee Boggs over the last several decades has remarked about how, when things are uncertain or when the times have reached a crisis, Grace is thinking clear, giving marching orders to those in need of them.

And even though I really don't have the time right now and have been panicky ever since I got the news, it seems I have marching orders now too, namely: Get to fucken work and start birthing a book already, because it's going to get published.

I gotta say, it works. The whole shift from things are fuzzy to things are startlingly clear. Cuz I got a whole hour or so to celebrate, and now I understand that was all prelims, and the real celebration comes after working harder and for a longer time than I think I ever have.

The other guys in the research collective have already warned me. Hell, all they did was compile an on-line journal, which is so much less intensive than a book, and it very nearly drove them into the ground, how many letters and emails they had to write, how much waiting for the goddamn phone to ring, how much money, it nearly drove them into the ground. Or more accurate: it did drive them into the ground, and they're still in the process of digging themselves out when this new shit lands.

Sis wrote with congratulations and told me it was well-deserved. But then I think of how recently I joined this collective and how narrowly I missed getting burned by their last (or what they thought was their last) behemoth project, and I feel less deserving and more lucky, which is probably fucked up to think that way, but hey.

I feel very...excited and unprepared. I always conceived of publishing a book as some far-distant, when I'm 10 years older, reward after so much toil kind of thing. Now, I'm a co-editor of Uses of a Whirlwind: Something Something Subtitle (this is how prepared I am), with a league of four other co-editors (two of whom I haven't even met yet), and the hell that's erupted over our conference calls has already got my stomach blanched about what the next year will involve. And I'm contributing an essay which needs one big fucken makeover before I'm anywhere close to happy with it. And the interview with Grace Lee Boggs is also going in, and I know I will carry some immense disappointment with me if that ends up as anything less than great.

I am not prepared for this! But I have my orders now. What can you do, after all? You deal.

Tonight I celebrate a friend's birthday at the Muddy Pig, cook up a nummy and fast pasta dish and write a letter to a dear loved one up in Menogyn. Priorities.