She’ll get you hot and then stand you up. She’ll empty your soul and your wallet, and then kick you for having nothing left to give. She will turn you against your friends, make you lie to them and say you’re busy so you can spend every single minute of every single weekend with her.
And then it will suck. She will hurt you. She will make you cry.
But you will always forgive her. You will always come back for more. You will whisper her name to yourself like a mantra for the duration of any odious activity that removes her from your sight.
That name, her name, is Writing.
And she has good reason to hate me, we spent some time apart. In fact–true confession–it was my bad, not hers. You see, I did the unthinkable: after she’d deigned to choose me, to pay attention to me, to spend some time with me (when, as she likes to remind me, she could have been spending it with pretty much anyone else, she can totally have her pick) I forsook Writing. For fifteen years. Parked her in god-forsaken Albuquerque (after she’d left Manhattan for me, Manhattan), at the bleak little door to the Tenure-Track Black Hole (no one gives you tenure in an Art History department for writing novels, whether they get published or not). Then I turned my back, shut the door, and left her standing there. She called for a while, a lot. But I didn’t pick up. If there’s anything she hates, it’s being ignored.
Which I proceeded to do, for good long while.
It took a good while longer, but I did eventually regret it. Big time. And she did take me back, finally, but she humiliated me and made me beg first.
And pay. Oh, yeah, that.
On Tuesday, BIRDS OF WONDER was released, my debut novel, my tender little birdies, flying straight (or mostly…there are some distributor issues but those are being worked out, ehem: the perils of Indie publishing) into the hands, into the maws, of their readers. Possibly cruel ones. Readers who want to be pleased, who want to be thrilled, who want a certain thing, or set of things, from any book they pick up, and my birdies, my beloved little ones, might or might not deliver. To some, they inevitably will not. No book is for everyone, how many times I have said it, and heard it. And I do believe it. Except, of course, when it comes to mine.
I do not have children (by choice), and I have never given birth (for sure by choice). The closest I come to motherhood is my tenderness toward animals—rescued rabbits, to be specific; I even let them lounge on my bed. I feel as though my heart is being hacked from my chest with a dull axe when, inevitably, one of them must leave me (a rabbit’s lifespan is a decade at best, though in my experience the average is actually closer to half that). I don’t, though, have any direct experience, not really, of motherhood.
But I’d be willing to bet the entirety of my tax return–its hefty size is owed in no small part to the bleeding-out of my resources undertaken by that relentless bitch, Writing, over the last twelve months—that the feelings I have toward my newly hatched BIRDIES are not wildly dissimilar in quality and intensity to the fierce protectiveness a new mother feels for the warm, hungry, needy little bundle in her arms.
Mine was a hard pregnancy. A long one, and a complicated one: I began writing BIRDS OF WONDER in 2011. As I said, Writing and I had parted company a decade and a half earlier, possibly not on the best of terms. At first, she wasn’t in all that big a hurry to return my calls.
Then, one by one, people and opportunities began dropping into my life, seemingly randomly, and then too frequently and too numerous for their presence to be owed entirely to chance. Together the message they whispered was, it’s time to try this. If you don’t do it now—I was on the threshold of turning fifty—you never will.
So I tried. And things did happen.
Find perfect editor/mentor/trusted reader/writer/friend: check.
At her suggestion, try your hand at writing short fiction, which had never occurred to you before: check.
Get said short fiction published: check, check, check and check. Sure, I have enough rejections to paper the proverbial wall, but, all in all, I have been incredibly fortunate in getting a ton of stories published in record time, and this after having let the writerly muscles atrophy into cellulite-pocked flab. An argument could definitely be made that I was and am undeserving of my luck in the short fiction department.
Miraculously land top-flight agent. Check. Some days I wake up and remember that THAT PERSON is my agent and have to pinch myself all over again.
But—Writing Truth—a top-flight agent does not guarantee the sale of a manuscript. Aspiring writers, I’m sure you don’t believe me, and why should you, maybe it will be different for you. Hope so, but the odds are stacked against it.
The troubles started, in the fall of 2014, when we began to shop the novel out to editors. Six submissions, six rejections. Boom, boom and boom, it was all over in record time, less than two months.
That hurts, by the way. Six people telling you, in quick succession, all the reasons why they don’t want your baby. Some in kinder terms than others. It hurts, a lot.
After the dust settled a bit, Perfect Editor/Mentor/Friend, etc., offered herself up (along with her shoulder) for a coffee date. During which—via a long, protracted, meandering, tearful, and self-recriminatory conversation, you’re lucky you weren’t there—we decided it was time to kill a darling. That’s right, a character. He was charming and he was well-written and we loved him, but he was not helping the story get told. So out he would come, and his voice—one of the six through which the narrative of BIRDS unfolds—would be replaced by another. That of a character who would move the story along, because he was already an integral part of it. But whose voice had to be created from scratch.
The process took a year.
At times, it seemed like twice that, but the new manuscript passed agent-, agent-assistant, and agent-outside-reader muster, and by the following fall we were ready to go out again.
Then followed another year of heartbreaking near-misses with big-name publishing houses. Some very-very big, and one very-very near. Which would likely have hurt less—like ripping off a Band-Aid—if they’d happened all at once, and quickly. But they did not.
And then, as though to drive the message home, external circumstances conspired to further complicate things: this is not your moment. Writing, whisper-shouting: been trying to tell you for two effing years. Get it now? Not. Your. Moment. NOT.
So we made the gut-wrenching decision: we’d put BIRDIES on ice, in a drawer, choose your metaphor, and I would get on with a new novel I’d been working on. Writing Truth: there is no scenario in which doing that feels good.
But Writing, bitch though she was, was right. It was not the novel’s time. Because the novel was not done. I had not finished the digging, had not reached the bedrock. The problem was, had always been, Jes, my main character. She was too close to me, and I was protecting her, and I had to stop doing that (details on what I was protecting Jes from can be found in my post from two weeks ago, two prior to this one, entitled “Girls in Fields”).
Once I’d peeled all the layers away and found—or allowed myself to see—the kernel of truth, what That Bitch Writing had been bitching about for three solid years, what BIRDS was all about in the first place, Writing relented. She took the stiletto off my neck—she’d been happily walking up and down my spine in her heels for so long I’d pretty much forgotten how bad it hurt—and said, okay. Okay, yeah, now you can stand up. You can even have a publisher.
What? You think the work’s over because you found a publisher? Because I let you find one? Get real, honey. Unless your last name’s Tartt–by the way, she met me in college and she’s never tried to dump me–pull out that wallet and roll up those sleeves. You’re about to work your lazy ass off. You have never worked the way you’re about to. Are we clear?
Yes, mistress.
And you will like it, understand me? You will bend over, you will like it, and you will ask me for more.
My perfect writer/mentor/editrix friend has a saying: Writing is an inherently inefficient process. A wasteful one, even. Better get used to that.
Truer words were never articulated. I’d even take it a step further: gleefully inefficient. Wantonly wasteful. And capricious. Don’t forget capricious.
Yes, mistress. I like it. More please. Thank you.