003—On Writing a Novel
One Thursday last October I sat at a low wooden table in Jackrabbit Studios’ main house living room, shifting my weight on a wide, plush pillow atop a woven rug. I was comfortable but I moved around because I was mesmerized by the desert light flowing like water through windows, doors, me. My head swiveled slowly, my lips slightly parted, my blinks a little heavy. I sat there for longer than I realized; my only clue of time passing was the shift in tone and intensity of the sunlight. I’d been editing photos for a few hours and, at the same time, observing how I felt settling into Jackrabbit Studios, Landers, the high desert. I’d been there for nearly 48 hours and that was my first full day at Jackie as a resident artist, adventuring on property and spending time alone—or by myself, I should say.
This, like many experiences I’ve had over the last seven years or so, has melded into my being and my writing in ways that I don’t think I can ever fully understand, let alone explain. I stayed at Jackrabbit Studios in part to work on my debut novel, Julia’s Orchids, though I didn’t yet know how exactly. I didn’t yet know what the experience would give me, what would stick, what would fit. I just tried to stay fully awake to it all, to feeling everything—grasping with my eyes, tasting with my lungs, feeling with my ears, listening with my soul and heart. To just be in it. It was only later, I realized, how this awareness, this awakeness, seeped into my writing like tendrils of water curving down a prism of soil, or like ants marching one by one like in those ant farms from my third-grade classroom. Both flow and discipline being necessary for writing, just as it is for ant farms.
In 2016 I was living in Miami with my parents, having recently moved back to my hometown from the Washington, DC, area, and I was working at a local university reporting on new climate and environment research (nature forever <3). One day after work, I rode my bike through the tree-lined suburban streets and came across a sprawling house tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was June, I think, because there were dozens of mangoes sitting on top of the concrete wall lining the property, having fallen en masse, as they do here in South Florida, from a nearby mango tree. The house was shrouded in foliage—overgrown trees and grass and plants and shrubs and flowers—and some plastic buckets and scrap metal and containers. And thus was born the very first nugget of an idea for Julia’s Orchids. From this little scene, I imagined the character that lived in that house—later named Caleb—a recluse who is obsessed with flowers and plants and trees, and who deals in the black market for orchids.
Over the years, a few more details about the story came to me—how and why he got into this underground trade, some more plot points, some character and location traits (at one point, an adult video store was prominent in the story)—but I had never written more than a few paragraphs of a synopsis or a few lines of a very rough, broad character sketch for Caleb. I hadn’t even told anyone about the story idea until late in 2017, when I told a guy I went on a blind date with; he was working on his own book—a fascinating graphic novel about a young boy, a giant cat, and spiritual enlightenment. With each passing year, the seal now broken, I’d tell one or two more people about the idea, thinking that if I told enough people I was a writer, an author, it’d be true (it’s true whether I tell anyone or not). Again, I’d tell them not much more than a seedling of an idea, because that’s all I had written down and had written in my head. That guy from the blind date from 2017, he was cool and nice, but the connection was more of a friendship, and I didn’t see him again.
Then, last summer, around the time I registered for an online NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) class with UCLA Extension, I had the day off from work and took a 2pm yoga class. I usually went to the evening classes, once to a 7am class (I’m not a morning person lol), and never to a weekday 2pm class. And I bumped into that same guy, that blind date. I hadn’t seen him since that drink in Midtown all those years ago, but I would never forget him—he is the first person I ever told about Julia’s Orchids. I took it as a sign—a nudge from the Universe: get back to Julia! She’s calling you, Jessica, answer! The beauty about the NaNoWriMo challenge, especially for an overthinker like me, is that the only thing that matters is writing at least 1,667 words per day so that you can reach the goal of writing a 50,000-word book at the end of the 30 days (which was the month of November). There’s no worrying about editing, typos, or grammar. There’s just no time for that. The guideline, aside from needing to have some sort of beginning, middle, and end (not just stream of consciousness), is to write a story that “doesn’t make you want to throw up when you read it.”
So, I sank all the way into the challenge. No editing, no thinking, just feeling into the story, letting it flow. I started to notice that characters and traits and experiences and scenes showed up that I wasn’t at all expecting. In writing without thinking, a scene appears in my head and in walks a character that feels logical for that scene. And maybe they look like this one guy I met years ago while road tripping across the US, or they have this cool hobby like this woman I worked with once, or talk like this one person I met on my travels through Japan or Jordan. I also started to realize that I couldn’t have written the story in 2016, or even in 2021. It had to be that November 2022. I needed to gain all those experiences, meet all those people, feel all those feelings, read all those random Vice and Atlas Obscura and The Marginalian articles, and those Ann Patchett and Brian Weiss and writing-craft books, and visit all those corners of the world. And it had to be right after my week-long residency at Jackrabbit Studios in the California high desert.
There are some pretty pivotal scenes in Julia’s Orchids—pivotal to the story overall, not just this book, which is the first in a series—that take place at Jackie and the high desert. I absolutely would not have been able to write those scenes had it not been for my experience there in late October. And, because I relish in kismet, the very first words of the novel were written at Jen Azlant’s (Jackrabbit Studios owner and stewardess) kitchen table in Los Angeles while I was house and kitty sitting after residency-ing in the desert. The opening words and scene of the novel came to me in the shower a few weeks prior, while still in Miami, but I didn’t write anything down because I am a stickler for some rules, namely logical, ethical, non-arbitrary ones. I just kept repeating the words in my head so that I could write all 52,202 words of the first draft completely in the 30 days of November.
I don’t know if you believe in coincidences and synchronicities; I most certainly do. Maybe that’s why I see and experience them so much, I seek them out because I know they’re there. Like the songs of the swifts that perch atop Jackie’s pinyon pines, or the evening whoosh of its resident great horned owl, or the watercolor pinks, blues and purples of the desert sun slipping over the other side of the horizon. I look for these little treats because I know I’ll find them. In late March, when I was finalizing the revision of Julia’s Orchids, it was very intense energetically. It was the Spring Equinox. A new moon. I learned some information about someone I used to know and love, and I cried, finally feeling closure and relief that that era of my life with him was done (at that point he was only haunting my dreams, but still). I could subconsciously finally move on. I also kept seeing a lot of orange butterflies and saw two dead birds in one day. One of my aunts was dealing with a massive beehive in her yard and, a couple days later, I found a two-foot hive in my own building’s yard, swarming up and around 20 feet in the air with hundreds of bees, which I later found out means they’ve chosen a new queen. A new era for them, too.
I also had very vivid dreams that week (more vivid and numerous than usual—I dream a lot). I dreamt that I saw a live time-lapse of a hybrid (total/annular) solar eclipse scooting merrily across the starry night sky (I didn’t know at the time that we were to have that same eclipse in late April). I dreamt of scenes from Julia’s Orchids, with the novel’s living, breathing, real characters. I dreamt with my late Colombian maternal great-grandmother, La Nonna, whom I’ve felt closer to since she passed when I was in high school. She was fiercely loyal and protective of her family, ethical, and above all disciplined. (After starting to work at age 12 in a cigar shop, named La Cubana—kismet: my dad’s family is Cuban—in a small, rural mountain town, she eventually opened up her own tobacco business with a factory and packaging and distribution center.) These little signs and symbols in my dreams and waking life, so clumped together as they were, it was all out-of-the-ordinary for me. Google and my intuition told me these meant a forthcoming rapid transformation, cycles of death and life, endings and beginnings. (Astrologically, and non-coincidentally, these themes are culminating today, May 5, with the Full Moon lunar eclipse in Scorpio.)
That week I also finished reading Julia (kismet) Cameron’s seminal book The Artist’s Way and was a couple weeks into her famously suggested ‘morning pages’ (can’t recommend this enough). One thing she discusses in the book is what she calls ‘creative U-turns’ where, as an artist, you can sometimes self-sabotage when you get very close to a creative goal or breakthrough. I absolutely faced a creative U-turn that week. Just 50 pages away from finishing the revision, I found myself falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes on the Lost Generation, expats living in Paris in the 1920s, and James Joyce; and berating myself, wanting to give up writing the book and writing altogether because I felt it would never be as good as Joyce’s Ulysses so why bother, what’s the point? (LOL.) I climbed out of the hole and continued revising, slower than the 30 or so pages a day I’d been averaging, but still up and out.
The next day, Thursday, I planned to finish the revision and send it off to my trusted readers before focusing on researching literary agents and cold-pitching them on my novel. I switched gears a little bit that morning, wanting to take care of some non-writing housekeeping items like financial planning and investment stuff and reordering a driver’s license and figuring out what was the delay on my renewed NatGeo magazine subscription. I chatted with my mom on the phone for a bit, absorbing her sage advice to “ponerte a su numero,” a phrase she says in Spanish to mean ‘just get it done.’ Stop trying to make it perfect, she said, because agents and editors and publishers will change it more anyways so just submit it as it is now and get their initial reaction. She’s right (of course).
As I got back to revising the novel that afternoon, I saw an email come in from the one agent I know, promoting one of her courses. I was planning on reaching out to her anyway—eventually—once I received and incorporated feedback from my (blessed) trusted readers, and copyedited the manuscript once or twice more (who knows how long this would take). I hadn’t received a direct, personal email from her before and, having received this one as I was just about to finish a major revision of my novel, I took it as a sign from the Universe and decided to shoot my shot. I won’t be able to take the course now, unfortunately, I said, but, coincidentally, I have a solid second draft of my debut novel and was planning to email you soon and would it be ok if I sent you my manuscript? My anxious body told me to go for a nice long walk to soften the ball of nerves I felt. A block away from my apartment, what do you know, she replied a few minutes later saying, yes, please send! I floated on my walk. And in my head I kept randomly hearing the words ‘big changes are afoot.’ I didn’t feel ready to send it to an agent, not yet, not fully, but the Universe said, uh uh, you’re ready. Send it. I sent her the manuscript that night with a little prayer of gratitude and trust.
It was an exciting week.
Julia’s Orchids is a speculative fiction novel set in the near future, taking the reader on an adventure tale to save the world's last remaining orchids where climate change has made the flowers all but extinct. Here is a little excerpt of Julia’s Orchids, from my soul to yours:
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California, 2031
Sunday, at around mid-morning, Julia, Ursula, Freddi, and Amadou approach the property, turning onto Jackrabbit Road from Landers Lane, and Ursula’s electric Volvo crossover SUV gets stuck in the unpaved sand road. It gives Julia a mini heart attack but then Ursula switches the gear to power mode and gives the gas her all. They get unstuck, the sand splashing onto a faded yellow fire hydrant that is half-submerged in a desert blanket, almost like quicksand. They continue on their way, turning left onto the five-acre property half a block down the road. There are lots of bird houses and Joshua Trees and yucca plants and twiggy brambles and cacti, short and tall, and owls and swifts and even hummingbirds whose chirping they hear swaying through the car’s open windows. Julia’s heart does a little dance to their song of love, always remembering Claudine.
The owner and proprietor of Jackrabbit Studios, Naomi, who is part sage, part poet, part entrepreneur, part mover, part shaker and all spritely linchpin, greets them as they pull up. She normally stays in her neighboring property when she’s out in the high desert but was here this morning tending to the tree trimmers who finally showed up and helped clear the trimmings from the pool (“Stephanie!” she cursed and shook her fist up in the air). The property was built in the early 1960s by Caroline, a welder, potter, and painter who noticed the dearth of artist spaces for women, so she built one herself. She owned and ran the space for all manner of artists until she sold the property to Edith, another woman artist, a dancer, weaver, and violinist, who made some renovations to the space before selling the property in the pandemic to be closer to her ailing parents in Maine. The sprawling artist residency and retreat space now includes a recording studio for podcasters and flute musicians and Lady Smith Black Mambazo recordings, plus a saltwater pool and Finnish sauna, a stargazing tower and wine cellar. The original main house (the Casona) still stands, along with the Casita, and studio space that holds, among other pieces, dozens of Ursula’s paintings in all shades of blue, on small, medium, and large canvases and long, wide strips of tarp. The darkroom, where she’s been dipping into tintype, is in the back corner of the white wooden, high-ceilinged four-room garage workshop.
Julia stays in the Casita for the week. In the Casona stay Ursula and her artist and musician friends, some of whom visit and create here with her regularly. Others are visiting from all over the world to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. This surprise is organized by her partner, Alexandra, who is originally from Johannesburg. They met at a surf hostel in Nicaragua in 2016. Part of the birthday surprise includes indigenous shamans from the Brazilian Amazon who were flown out to the high desert for a traditional San Pedro ceremony at The Integratron, which they’ve rented out for the evening—sundown to sunup.
Ursula, sitting cross-legged on the plush ivory velvet sofa in the front main living room, is wearing a burgundy linen maxi dress with her dreadlocked hair in a wide bun on the top of her head, a couple of loose strands framing her face. She’s explaining more about the ceremony to Julia, who is sitting on two wide, thick pillows at the center low wooden coffee table topped with books about desert wildflowers and snakes and coyotes, and a two-foot wooden sculpture of two lovers standing intertwined so that it’s impossible to see where one ends and the other begins, like an ouroboros. Patchouli incense is burning nearby, sudden wafts floating through the air whenever a breeze from the open window swims in. Julia is imagining the juxtaposition of indigenous Amazonian shamans in the Palm Springs airport when Alexandra enters the front room from the kitchen, having heard their conversation.
“Would you like to join?” Alexandra says, sitting down next to Ursula on the sofa before taking a sip from her glass of lemonade, squeezed fresh from the lemon tree out back, and carrying a handful of pistachios from Esther’s Farm.
Two days later, Julia is laying on a single-person foam mattress alongside Ursula, Alexandra, Naomi, Freddi, Amadou, and six of their friends who have gathered here from all over—from Eureka, Mexico City, Bali, Stockholm, Montevideo and London—to celebrate fifty years of Ursula in this special ceremony.
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The next step is solidifying an agent to help me get this bad girl published! It’s all a process, huh? Good thing I’m disciplined like La Nonna. And patient.
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This week I’ve been:
Reading: Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway. Helpfully right now, I’m reading about characterization, including making characters more complex, convincing and conflicted.
Writing: I’ve (very incredibly gratefully) received feedback from three of my trusted readers on Julia’s Orchids (BLESS x infinity) and I’ve been incorporating this feedback into the next draft of the novel. As a note, sometimes ‘writing’ for me means thinking and letting things simmer in my mind, alternating between thinking actively about how to make the needed changes, and not actively thinking about it. Not watching the pot boil, so to speak.
Watching: The NBA playoffs! My fave team, the Miami Heat, is in it! After an uneven regular season, they pulled it out of the bag with that surprise comeback, especially the win against the Bucks. (We are big basketball fans in my family.) I also finally finished the first season of The Last of Us. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I’m not a huge fan! I like apocalypse stories, but maybe because I’m subconsciously comparing it to Station Eleven, which is one of my all-time favorite books with a great corresponding television series, I feel like, so far, The Last of Us seems like just another apocalypse story I’ve heard before. And (potential spoiler alert) there was one scene in the last couple episodes that was about 7-10 seconds too long re: gratuitous violence. If there’s going to be violence, let it contribute to the story, not distract or subtract! And make it subtle!
Photographing/Photo Editing: I finished editing the photos for baby Ruby’s baptism and photographed my cousin Isabella’s college (!) graduation from FIU before she heads off to change the world, going to journalism grad school at Georgetown in DC.
Listening to: Sit Around the Fire by Ram Dass and East Forest. And to recordings from last November from a session I had with Justine, who is a straight-talking, swearing, heavy-smoking grandma psychic from South Africa living in the UK. I also started listening to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ new podcast Wiser Than Me, thanks to my friend Jen’s recommendation (always on point with the recs!) and especially loved Julia’s (kismet yet again!) interview with Isabel Allende. I hadn’t heard Allende’s interviews before and, man, oh man, I think she is one of my real-life contemporary spirit guides. <3
Some more little moments of zen throughout my past week:
xo,
Jessica ♾️
yes yes yesssss! Jessica & Julia--we can’t wait to see what lies ahead <3