I had kind of a bad week the week before last as far as how I felt about my writing. One author in a writers’ group I am in posted the story behind her book deal. I am trying to be charitable and think that she was just posting encouragement. She talked about how long she had been writing in her spare time and how she’d always wanted to write a book, and she got laid off at her job. She decided to take the plunge and try to do a book on a volunteer passion project of hers.
She consulted with another person in this writers’ group, and together they crafted a nonfiction book proposal. Within a month, she had a literary agent. Within six months, she sold the book at auction for a six-figure advance to a Big Five publisher. She hasn’t even written the book yet; she asked for encouragement going forward.
I am trying so hard to be joyful for her and not think of myself.
But it’s so hard to.
I have been kicking Hurricane Baby around for almost twenty years. I got an agent fairly rapidly, and I tried the big New York presses first. No dice. Now I have refined it several times over and am trying to work with the small presses. So far the query letter got some hits, but I’ve collected polite rejections after that. I still have about twenty possibilities for it, but I’m starting to think that maybe it’s just not going to happen for me–a feeling that reading this story intensified.
But as Anne Lamott says, I am comparing my insides to someone else’s outsides. It probably wasn’t as easy as it seems for this person. On social media, you only see the end result. In this blog, I’m trying to counter the myth of the “overnight success” by being transparent about what this process is like. I believe in telling all like it is. And right now, it’s uncomfortable to sit with the idea that Hurricane Baby might never be all I want it to be.
But all I can do for myself is press forward. And press forward I will. It was hard to pick myself back up and send the book off to yet another press this week. But I did it. And I will wait and see what happens with it. Wish me well. And I will take heart in the fact that I have my own tribe cheering me on, here and elsewhere.
Persist. That the word of the month for me. I hope it can be yours as well.
Julie Liddell Whitehead 