I keep a five-year journal, which is basically two
composition books where each page =a day and I divide it into five sections and
record a couple of lines about what happened on that day in a given year. I am
on year four, so I’ve got quite a bit of history to look at every day when I
sit down to make my notes.
A year ago yesterday, I was devastated. My top-choice editor
had passed on the project most dear to my heart since Ballads of Suburbia. (I don’t know if anything will ever be dearer
to me than Ballads…) It was my “grief
book,” if regular blog readers remember me talking about it and it had been
out on sub for a year at that point—I know because I revisited the hopeful “It’s
going out on sub!” entry from 2013 a couple of weeks ago. My hope had already
been hanging on by a thread. This editor was one of the only remaining from the
first round (Yes, sometimes it REALLY takes that long. They are just THAT
busy.) and since she’d told my agent she was still considering, I’d taken that
as a good, hopeful sign. Or I tried to. Honestly I spent most days pretty
depressed about my career then. Honestly, most of the journal, which starts in
2012 and thereby covers two full manuscripts and two partials/proposals going on submission is REALLY fucking
depressing on the career front. I mean, during that time period I went back to
therapy because I was so depressed and I moved across the country to try to reclaim
my life (both things were hugely successful—those are the brightest spots in
the journal).
Anyway, so back to May 19, 2014. I was devastated. I believe
I ate only a chocolate cupcake for lunch (though that might have been May 23rd,
2014, when we got the rejection from another editor who was really high on my
list) and according to my journal I cried for two hours. I noted that my agent
was insistent that I should NOT be so upset. The rejection was one of those “positive”
rejections. The editor insisting that she loved my work and would love to work
with me, but something in this particular project was just throwing her—that’s
why she’d sat with it for so long. My agent told me that she’d used the
rejection to start a conversation with the editor, to pitch her my next project
and she was SO excited about it.
I would not be consoled though. This was now 4 years and 3
projects of rejection and I just felt like I was at the end of the line. This
next project, the one that my agent and this editor were so excited about, I
told myself it was the last one. If it didn’t sell, I was done. And dammit, I really meant it this time.
A year ago today, I Skyped with a friend of mine who did an
Angel Card reading for me. I’ve been a long time believer in Tarot, horoscopes
and the like, and I desperately DESPERATELY
wanted some good news. My friend really wanted to give me some, but the
cards did not show what I wanted to hear. She saw a lot of strife and heartache
with the “grief book”—in fact, the card that represented it had an image with a
heart and five knives going through it! More than one editor had told me there
was too much going on and I might have to rip it apart to fix it and I COULD
NOT see how, but the Angel Cards seemed to be saying the same thing. “I think
you’ll sell it eventually, but not for at least another year and not without a
lot of changes. I do think you will sell something else first, though,” my
friend told me. And she repeated this a bunch of time as we went over the
details of the cards. I did not like this. I did not want to hear it. Selling something wasn’t good enough right then.
I wanted my “grief book” which I’d put so much of my own grief from the past
few years’ failures into, to succeed, to vindicate me.
One image that showed up in more than one of the cards
though, was dark horse, who seemed to be pulling me forward in one image and
watching over me in another. “Do you know someone with dark hair?” my friend
asked. “Because it seems like they are really looking out for you and fighting
for your success.”
“My agent has dark hair,” I said.
“Trust her,” my friend insisted.
I did. She’d stood by my side through many, many rejections.
She’d sent me a copy of The Little Engine
That Could when I was blocked. I sent a few more morose and despondent
emails (esp after rejection from the other editor I really wanted to work with)
and told myself to believe, one more time.
In the second week of last June, my agent sent my new book
proposal out. I haven’t looked at those journal entries yet, but I vaguely
remember writing them and there wasn’t as much hope or fanfare as there had
been with the previous three submissions, even though my agent was telling me
that she really had a good feeling about this one. So good it scared her, she
admitted at one point, but I figured she was still trying to cheer me up.
Then, just a week later, a
gorilla rang my doorbell, and after dancing to “Celebration” by Kool &
the Gang, informed me that I needed to call my agent.
I would have been shocked even without the gorilla. We’d
sold the new book, my Young Adult memoir, to Julie Strauss-Gabel. She’d taken a
year to reject my last manuscript (and please be aware that she’d also rejected
a manuscript before that) and a week to offer on the new one. In the span of a
month, I went from one of the darkest places in my writing life to the absolute
most triumphant.
There are two reasons this happened. 1. I kept writing. Even
when I didn’t want to. Even when I was so certain nothing would ever come of it
again. 2. I had a really good agent. One who saw opportunity where I couldn’t:
in that “positive” rejection.
Also, that Angel Card reading was right—maybe it was a
higher power, or maybe it was my deepest gut feelings and fears that I shared
with my friend and she interpreted—the “grief book” wasn’t ready. It needed to
be ripped apart. Recently, I’ve figured out how and I’ve been toying with it
while I wait for Julie’s
notoriously tough revisions on my memoir. I can’t say now if it will ultimately sell as my friend, but
dissecting the book is going to teach me a hell of a lot about craft, and given
the
current learning kick I’m on, that is all I can ask for.
I post this today to remind any writers who are struggling
with rejection—whether you are published or not—that if you keep writing and
keep reaching, you’ll get there.
I also post this because I’m feeling lost and trapped in
other parts of my life right now and I’m hoping that similarly, a few weeks or a
month from now, I will experience the same triumph.
Just keep swimming, my friends.
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